Archive for the ‘Search’ Category

Measuring Website Performance with Analytics

Monday, June 16th, 2008

If you are new to marketing your site on the web, then one of the most important tools that you will need is an Analytics program to gauge traffic performance to your site. Without an Analytics program, you won’t be able to know where your traffic comes from, what advertising programs are really converting at your site, or how much much your campaigns are actually costing you.

You can choose from a range of existing products on the market or you can build the analytics internally. If you don’t have the resources or cash to build your Analytics program, a fair and free alternative is Google Analytics -www.google.com/analytics Yes, you read it correctly, it’s a free product from Google, but there are some minor issues that you should be aware of, if you decide to run advertising campaigns to drive traffic from the Advertising Networks. Google does not record every ‘Unique Visitor’ to a site due to its coding language, which will not pick up. Google will under report the amount of users. Make sure to place a pixel from the Advertising Network on your homepage so you can check the Advertising Network’s reports against Google’s Analytics.

Like any other free software tool that you find on the Web, you can’t completely customize Google Analytics the way that you need, if you have a complicated eCommerce site, but for those simple marketing informational sites, it does work well. To get started, all you have to do is place the ‘pixel’ code that is given to you by Google Analytics at the end of the sign-up process into the <head> tags of each page of the site, then you’re ready to go. It’s as simple as that. It takes approximately 24 hours before the reports are populated with data.

If you do have an eCommerce website that requires a lot of analytic customization, consider Web Trends. Web Trends is a great analytics tool, but can be costly.

No matter what you choose for your Analytics program, make sure to test it against your internal logs to make sure that the traffic numbers are true numbers.

Build Your Own Email List, Don’t Buy

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Email marketing is considered the #1 way to market on the Internet, but what does that mean to you, if you don’t have a database of users yet? How do you build an email list to market your services?  Should you buy a list from one of those online services?  Don’t even think about it.  I know it’s tempting to buy a list and it is the easy way out, especially, if you are just launching a site and don’t have any customers, but don’t build your email list this way.  This is a common mistake of Entrepreneurs and less experienced Online Marketers to buy lists and to send bulk email to the list, hoping that users will click on your email or newsletter.  This is definitely the way to get ‘black-listed’ on the top mail servers. Think about how much you hate getting email from companies or people that you don’t know.  So, how do you build your email list?

The best way to build your email list is to run targeted marketing promotions that require people to offer their emails to you. Also, try running online Search marketing, Cost per Lead, Cost Per Acquisition campaigns or try offline Event Marketing programs.  It will take time to build the list, but once you do, you will have a database of users that want to hear from you and will be more receptive to your marketing offers.

The last thing you ever want to do is to market to people who never requested your information, so don’t do it. Take the time, build your list and you will have an effective email marketing campaign.

To brand advertise on Facebook or not, that is the question

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

I recently had a website owner ask me about advertising on Facebook, whether the campaign that they were running should continue. They had done some minimal testing at Facebook themselves and received a lot of impressions, but very little clicks. They thought that they should continue, since they were exposing their brand name to the members of Facebook, so it was worth it to them to let people know who they were, especially since they weren’t paying for it, since it was a CPC campaign. My simple question to them was, “What is your advertising goal?” They replied, “…to get traffic.” Well, then my answer is, stop advertising with Facebook because it is not going to help you get traffic, if you’re not getting any or low clicks. You would think that marketers would know this, but don’t assume.

Many marketers believe by running ads with no click-through helps with exposing the brand name. Be careful of those marketers because they are not looking out for your best interests. Your goal is to get traffic to your site. Remember that.

People don’t run ads on Google to only expose their brands, they want traffic to their sites, so work on the premise with any high-trafficked site…don’t just run ads on Facebook with the expectations that by exposing your brand that people are paying attention. If people are paying attention, then they will click on your ads, which will help with your brand marketing efforts. Yes, it is true, that you will receive free advertising on Facebook, but is it worth it, if no one is coming to your site? No, so why do it?

Think about your goals. If you are a web owner and want traffic to your site, go to where you will find the best click-through with the best conversions at your site. By running ads with no click-through is a waste of money and time. It does not brand your company to have no one clicking on your ads. Clicks mean that Internet users are interested in what you are offering and by the interest, helps establishes your brand.

Google is Darth Vader. So, where is Luke?

Monday, May 5th, 2008

 

Once upon a time, a long time ago, Google offered an advertising service to all types of advertisers that could advertise cheaply and effectively to reach their target markets. Advertisers could spend less than $100 per day and find quality traffic reaching their sites.

Well, as I mentioned, that was a long time ago. Now, the “Little Advertiser”, the guy that I consider to have advertising budgets that are below $5,000 per month, are having a hard time competing with advertisers with larger advertising budgets, due to Google’s attempts to “bring better quality traffic by raising the minimum cpcs to as high as $1, $5, $15, and $20 per click.” Well, how does that bring better quality traffic you ask?

The idea is, if an advertiser really values a specific keyword, they will pay anything for that keyword and thus drive out advertisers that are not willing or “can afford” that premium keyword, which gives the advertiser who bought the keyword an advantage to getting better traffic and better placement in Sponsored Advertising positions. But, the advertiser that has most likely bought this keyword has to have a larger budget than everyone else, which discourages the Little Advertiser from bidding on the keyword, thus knocking them out of the bid and creating a service that is meant only for advertisers with big budgets.

Google has forgotten that their ‘idea’ does not work for a new advertiser with a low or tight budget, since the new advertiser hasn’t had a chance to test and optimize their keywords to know which works best for them in driving quality traffic. For example, If I only have a starting budget of $500 and the cpc for my keyword is $10, then I will only get 50 clicks to my site and as you will learn, not all clicks reach our homepages and only a small percentage will convert, before being optimized correctly, hopefully. 50 clicks is not enough data to figure out which keywords worked the best. The Little Advertiser will not last long in spending money with Google or not even attempt to spend money at all, due to the high costs and little return. In essence, the Google that had created the fair, “ever good” online ad service for everyone that had created them, no longer exists. Google in its attempts to bring more money to itself, which let’s admit we are Americans so there is nothing wrong about that, but has destroyed what was so great about them…the democratization of buying online ad media.

So, what happened to that not evil Google that we all loved? They joined the dark forces of the high-price spending advertising world in order to get their marketing capitalization up. Let’s face it, the days of cheap advertising on Google is over and the ever good Google has become Darth Vader.

So, is there a Luke Skywalker out there that will save the Little Advertiser? I think so, like everything else in the Internet world, you just have to wait for the next ‘big thing’ and I believe it will be a new advertising network that will be cost-effective and driving quality traffic for an affordable price…and hopefully, without the click fraud. So hey Luke Skywalker, hurry up and launch!

What is SEO and Why Should I Do It?

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

So, what is SEO and why should I do it? Simply, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the technique on how well you optimize your site to appear in the Natural/Organic search listings on Google, which in case you didn’t know, it’s the listings that appear on the left-side of the page.

It is important to learn how and to optimize your site for SEO for a few reasons:

1. SEO helps to reduce your costs for paying for advertising in Google or in other search engines. If you are coming up for free in the natural search listings for the keywords that best describe your business or service, why would you pay for advertising?

2. SEO helps you to understand how to position your site to your intended audience. You are forced to think about what keywords are significant and to apply it to your business description.

3. If you have a low budget and you are getting positioned well in certain keyword phrases, but not others, then you can concentrate your paid online advertising on the keywords that you are not doing well in for appearing in the organic search.

A simple way to optimize your site, is pay attention to the page title. When Google or other search engines crawl your site to list it, the search engines refer to the page title to help place it in the listings. So make sure, that whatever you think are the most important keyword phrases appears in your page title.

Good luck!