As your Campaign Analyst it is not enough that  I show you how many leads our internet marketing efforts brought you. We need to break down the traffic sources even further.  What I mean by traffic source is how did visitors find you? Was it through an organic search,a Pay Per Click ad or did they have your page bookmarked?  Through Google Analytics I can create a customized report that breaks down that information for you.

Source – what is the origin of your visitor e.g. Google Organic, Google PPC, Torontolife.com/referral

Visits – the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site.

Per Visit Value – this is a Google Analytics Return on Investment Calculation which is a set value.

The more detailed information we have the better chance we can make a more valid data driven decision to improve your marketing campaign.  Based on the information we have in the screen capture below for a renovations company, one suggestion will be to re-evaluate the Kitchen and Bathroom pages.  They have converted the least out of the four forms.  Next, we can use Google Web Optimizer to help us determine what changes will help improve conversions.

Understanding traffic sources and there relationship with conversions is probably the most powerful thing that Google Analytics can tell a marketing department or business owner in helping determine the value of your advertising dollars.  Use this report and you will be far more ahead of the game then you ever were before!

The example we are using below is a Canadian company that distributes their products worldwide with a focus on the Canadian and the US markets.

By clicking on 'Visitors' and then 'Map Overlay' we are able to geotarget where visitors are coming from.

The Broad Level Map Overlay View

Here we see there were over 2,300 visitors worldwide during the specified time period.  On the map the darker green the higher the number of visitors. With this example most of this client’s visitors are from the US followed by Canada.

Visitors By Country View

The information can then be broken down further by country and viewed in various ways depending on user preference.

In my example I used a pie chart becuase I find it easier to read this way.

Visitors by State / Province View

I can even drill down further and understand the exact states all this US based traffic is coming from! This information is useful as it helped us determine which areas we need to focus our PPC for the client campaigns.

This allowed us to geo target the areas, test lead volumes and allocate budget appropriately.

Visitors by City View

We see California has the highest number of visitors and we can breakdown by area where the visitors are coming from. The darker the orange the higher the visitor concentration.

In the city level view in this example, the highest numbers of visitors are from Los Angeles.  

We can even breakdown the traffic further by traffic source. From here we noticed most of his visitors are from the US for his PPC campaign.

How can I use this information to help his campaign? The possibilities are endless! This is just one example of how a company can use Google Analytics to help make continuous improvement on company ROI.

If you have any questions or would like me to address your question in my next Analytics tip of the week feel free to comment below!

Organic Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click marketing are two of the most popular online marketing efforts for driving relevant traffic to your site.  Many of my clients ask which one they should choose, which one will benefit them most and which would produce the most traffic.  My answer is the same for every client – I recommend you choose both.

Understanding the Difference

Although both forms of marketing are found on the search engine there are some core differences that make each work independent of the other. 

Here is the core  differences: 

What are the Benefits of SEO

• No cost per click. 
• Generally once results are achieved the overall cost per lead is the most inexpensive form of marketing you can do.
• High level of trust amongst site visitors on organic results as high results usually infer competence.

What are the Benefits of PPC

• Immediate results.
• You only pay when a visitor clicks your ad.
• Target your ads to appear by region, city, state/province, country.
• Schedule your ads to appear during times only you want them up.
• Set a budget that you want to spend and we report to you the cost per lead.
• Choose short or long tail keywords.
• Choose which page to send your traffic to for improved relevance.

Why Do I Say You Should Choose Both? 

The measurement services we offer allow myself to report to you the individual rate of return on each service.  This means that I can tell you independently the value each campaign source is bringing to your company.  I do this by measuring the leads you receive through each service and dividing this by the money spent. The result is a Cost Per Lead.

Here are the main reasons that I suggest doing both SEO and PPC

• Each service acts independently of the other and therefore offers a separate cost per lead.   If each services cost per lead is acceptable to you then why wouldn’t you continue with them both?
• Having both services ensures better screen saturation.  If you choose not to appear in PPC then your competitor will be in that place and get those clicks.
• PPC achieves immediate results, while SEO takes several months to ramp up. (but ultimately will offer a better cost per lead)
• It is proven that a company that has both Organic and Pay Per Click listings is deemed as more legitimate to people seeking to do business online. 
• If you have immediate needs to be associated with specific keywords we can make the adjustment on Pay Per Click within 24 hours and begin working towards results in Organic which may take several months.

Start Researching Keywords

If you are interested in viewing keyword volume here is a great tool offered by Google:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This keyword tool will inform you how much traffic is associated with that keyword, the cost per click and the average position.   The best feature of this tool is it gives you a list of various other related keywords and negative keywords you can use in our campaign. 

We often use this to help measure keywords we want to address in Organic as well. Since you have a history of the keywords from your PPC this data can be used to optimize for your Organic rankings. 

Where The Campaign Analyst Comes In

If you are working with an internet marketing company like ours you have someone responsible for reviewing results and reporting campaign improvements to you.

Remember – no company can rank you for every term in Organic. But with consistent review we can ensure we are on top of your campaign and can make ongoing tweaks so ensure maximum effectiveness.

If you use our WyseLabs service, we can even begin looking at how to improve your website by doing A/B testing. The service we use for this is Website Optimizer. This will allow us to make data driven decisions by letting visitors decide which site versions they like better.

Doing both SEO and PPC is a good thing!  Being seen in the Organic and PPC section will allow maximum search engine saturation and real estate on the page. Once your campaigns are tweaked you should be seeing a nice return on investment for each individual service.

You launched your PPC Campaign, you are excited by the conversions you are receiving but you keep thinking how can I do better? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see a list of exhaustive reports which answer all of the quesions you may have about what works and what doesn’t? How will we do this you may ask! The answer is easier than you think. We can use the Google AdWords Demographic, Geographic and Search Query Reports. A while back I mentioned you can use the Reporting tool in AdWords to help you analyze your results. Now we are going to drill down further on the actual reports you can use!

1. The Demographic Report shows the age and gender of the person viewing the site. Google Adwords has a new feature, demographic bidding. If the site knows the user’s age and gender you can gear or not gear your Google ads to a specific target group. The end result is you now have the power to direct your ads to a much more quality group. Yes you may have less clicks but your conversion leads will probably increase. I’ll explain another day how you can bid on a demographic group.
    
2. The Geographic Report drills down to the city/town, province/state and country of the person who visited your site. This information is based on their IP address. What’s great about this report it is a quick way to verify if your ads are being seen in the city/country that your chose in your campaign settings. Say you are not sure which city to target your ads to, why don’t you start at the national level for a month. Use the Geographic report to zone in to which cities are clicking your ads. You can adjust your campaign settings to the most converting cities!
    
3. The Search Query Report gives you the exact work or group of words used when completing a Google Search. This is my personal favourite report. In addition to the keyword used you will also view the Google Ad Text and your destination URL for each impression, click and conversion. The detailed report will let you see at a glance which keywords and ads are converting. There are times your client will ask you have a split landing page or ad. With this report you are able to determine what type of traffic From here you are able to adjust your keywords and ads for better conversions.

All the reports include the number of impressions, clicks, conversions and cost per conversion. You can choose which Campaigns and AdGroups you want as well as the time period. Don’t forget you can have the reports emailed to you either daily, weekly or monthly. The reports can be exported to an excel format which allows you to graph your results for a visual presentation.

How will you use this PPC Report information you may ask?

You will know where to put the focus on your marketing campaign. Many of our clients at our Toronto, Canada based headquarters at TechWyse Internet Marketing are requesting these specific reports. You may redesign your PPC landing page as more females visit your site than males. You may discover that your French Campaigns have more people from Ontario than Quebec searching for your product. The Geographic report is becoming a popular requested report from our clients that have National Campaigns. With these results we are able to gear our AdWords PPC Campaign through PPC Silo Mapping geographically. We know which cities we need to target our ads, which in turn gets us better conversions.

I believe the more knowledge you have the more power you have to make the necessary changes to improve your online marketing campaign. It doesn’t matter the purpose of your website the Geographic, Demographic and Search Query Report can give you the extra edge you need to move your online campaign forward.

Why do you have a website?  Do you have a website because everyone else has one?  Or do you have a proper plan and will use your website as a marketing tool to help your company deliver on one ultimate goal or purpose?  Every business operates because it has a single overall goal;  that goal in most cases should be no different then your website goal.

So lets talk about it. 

What is the purpose or goal for most business websites?

Every online entity can be categorized to have 3 distinct and separate website goals;

1.  Lead Generation – Developing leads either through phone calls or emails.  These leads then get passed on to your sales teams and the magic is up to them to convert them!>

2.  Ecommerce – You are selling a product on the internet.  You have images, enticing words and a full shopping cart which allows people to complete a transaction online.

3.  Branding - Just getting your name out there from either PPC Impressions or first page SEO ranking.  One suggestion for name branding is Facebook.  Imagine you are advertising to millions of people targeting your specific demographics without them typing a keyword.  Another great option is using the content network in Google AdWords.  You are advertising your product on a specific website.  For example advertise your Pink product for Think Pink Month on a website for women such as womansday.com

Have you decided the purpose for your site?

Now you figured out why you should have a website.  Do you know how you are going to measure whether you internet marketing campaigns are successful or not?  Here at TechWyse Internet Marketing we have a personalized Client Tool that let’s you know at a glance how many phone leads and email leads you received within a time period.  For your email leads it will track the person’s name, email address and comments.  You can then assign the leads to members on your sales team.  We also let you know what pages are converting the best.  Check out more details about our lead measurement tool here.

Which ever way you decide to go with your internet marketing (or if you decide to do any internet marketing at all!) I would highly recommend developing some sort of strategy to help you gauge the true effectiveness of your site. 

Now I’ll ask the question again – What is the purpose of your website? 

A PPC Case Study on Silo Mapping

Hey everyone.  I shared an article last week how to improve your PPC Conversions by implementing PPC Silo Mapping.  I thought I would show you all the evidence by using a real time example of this in action!  I took a campaign that wasn’t converting very well in the month of August and put my theory to test!  There is a saying that numbers cannot lie. 

So here goes!

We launched this PPC campaign and we were receiving average results. 

• For the first month we had 9 conversions at $57 per conversion. For the month our Click Through Rate (CTR) was 1.59%. 
• In the second month our cost per conversion more than tripled and our results drastically reduced. 
• This is when we decided to use PPC Silo Mapping methology as our solution.

Results after PPC Silo Mapping

As I said it is a very time consuming process however let’s look at the third month’s result. 

• After doing the mapping, we had the lowest cost per conversion, highest CTR and the highest conversions since the campaign began running.   Mapping the right keywords with the best landing page combined with great worded ads leads to higher CTR and conversions.

Here is the side by side analysis.  Notice all the nice metrics.  The biggest one being a reduction from $194 per conversion to $32 and 17 leads up from the previous month of 2!

You ask how you can obtain such awesome results?  You can do it yourself by learning about things like PPC Silo Mapping OR (nudge nudge)  you can employ an internet marketing company like ours who has a crack team of researchers and ROI specialists.  I’m looking forward to share more extraordinary Web Marketing tips with you.  PPC Girl signing out for now!

A day in the life of a PPC girl.

I am one of the people here at TechWyse that does pay per click management for our client base.  I thought I would take you all through a day in the life of what I do here.  For one particular client, I had all the appropriate keywords with great quality scores.  My positions were in the top 5 for all Google searches.  Let's not forget the awesome click through rate result I was getting.  I just was not getting the conversions I was hoping for!  This was very frustrating as I was not sure what I should do next to improve begin getting the resutls my client needed.

How did we solve it?

One of the Certified Google Analysts at TechWyse Internet Marketing informed me of the best organic URLs associated with the top searched keywords.  In other words we looked at the exact keywords that we were marketing and figured out which was the best keyphrase associated to that keyphrase on the website.  This is called PPC Silo Mapping.  We linked the keywords with the specific URLs.  It is a very time consuming process (because in one campaign you can have many URL's) however, at the end of the day it is worth it.

What was the result?

The combination of great quality score keywords and what Google Analytics recommended as the best URLs gave me the best conversion results I have seen to date for this particular client!  We had a 25% increase from the previous month on the same campaign.

In addition to what I mentioned please see http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3630641 for recommended suggestions to improve your PPC campaign.  Don't forget to periodically review your ads and keywords as what worked yesterday will not necessarily bring success tomorrow.  We always should be fine tuning our PPC campaigns.

Stay tuned for further additions to my PPC diary!   I will be posting a case study with these hard figures from silo mapping in coming weeks.

NBC will have the opportunity to convert Google AdWords advertisers into television advertisers.  Advertisers now will be able to expand their market share.  The partnership will focus on Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBS, CNBC, Sleuth and Chiller.  Working together the two companies will have a strong advertising metric where there will be more self-service buying opportunities through the Google TV ads advertising platform.  The advertisers will also have access to viewership data allowing advertisers to understand what consumers like and adjust their ad campaigns to maximize on their profits.

Now I don’t know about you but the idea of advertising on television has always seemed to me like a daunting and large task.  With this news advertising, it is now going to be easier, less expensive and more accessible for any type of business.  This is a win for advertisers and potentially a revolutionary way for television networks like NBC to bring in a new market of advertisers.

It seems Google really is taking over.  But I think that anything that makes communication and information more accessible is a good thing.  Thoughts?

How are you currently sending your Campaign Summary results? Are your manually transferring all your data from AdWords to an excel spreadsheet? Does the administrative work drive you crazy? 

1. Choose what type of report you need. Some of the choices you have are Keyword

   Performance, Ad Performance, Campaign Performance and Search Query Performance.

   I like the Search Query Performance as it tells me which Ads are converting for a variety of campaigns in one report rather than drilling down on each campaign!

2. Choose what time range you require the reporting. Do you need to see how your campaign performed daily, weekly or monthly?  After you would have to decide what the time range you will be reporting for. Is it last week’s data, last months’ data or just the previous days’ results? You can also choose which campaigns and ad groups you prefer to view.

3. Choose what type of columns you require to view. This is the feature I like best as I can drill down to exactly what I need to review and analyze.  You have the final say on how big or small your report looks!
4. Last but not least you schedule how often you need to receive the report. You have three choices either every day, every Monday or the first of the month. You can also email the information to multiple recipients. You have a choice of the report export format. Some choices include excel, .csv or html.