Continuing my pre-show coverage of Search Engine Strategies Toronto, I have the privilege of introducing Janice Hatch of Google Canada. Janice is scheduled to speak on Day 2 of the conference in a session called “Campaign Performance Tracking” and was nice enough to spare some time to answer a few questions that relate to Google Adwords and the future of search marketing. Read more…
Attending the eMetrics conference this week in Toronto wasn’t necessarily a huge eye-opener for me, but several insightful discussions did arise from the show’s fundamentally significant panels and presentations. One such topic included a sore spot for all online marketers and analysts at some point in their career: campaign attribution a.k.a. who gets the final credit for a conversion.
Who gets the credit? Traditional Marketing? Online advertising? Last source of conversion? Sales? Or maybe customer service? Who gets blamed for bad leads? Someone’s gotta take the heat, right?
Picking a winner can be hard.
No doubt, an internet marketer’s toughest job is finding the right mix of advertising cost, overall brand value for ad placements, and conveying value proposition to drive conversion. We can collect all kinds of valuable information through web analytics including visitor pathways, conversion funnels, top content driving revenue, and even cool stuff like demographics and socio-economic indicators. But finding sites that can supply us with our most valuable prospects can be tough. Enter Behavioral Targeting from Google Adwords. Read more…
It’s always a nice surprise when Google releases new tools and features for free products such as Google Analytics, because it shows that they’re committed to innovation, even in a time of economic uncertainty. Today I received an automated e-mail from Mountain View informing me that one of the websites under my management was slotted for a new feature called Event Tracking. Read more…
Commiseration used to be the operative theme for many Omniture user group meetings, as many people continue to bask in a love-hate relationship that really defines the analytics suite. Don’t write this post off as negative just yet because the light at the end of the tunnel is slowly closing in. That’s right, Omniture Search Center and Site Catalyst are almost at a point where setting up and manipulating reports seems, gasp, easier! Read more…
Anyone who’s ever started a campaign using broad match keywords knows the pain of generating useless clicks on irrelevant fringe keyword combinations. For instance, if you’re targeting a broad match keyword combination like “used car” you don’t necessarily want to get clicks from people searching for “used car salesmen suck”. But how much is too much when it comes to negative keywords? Read more…
The dreaded “d-word” that many online marketers wince at hearing is “downtime”. For media buys or traditional landing pages the impact isn’t so bad, because visitors may click through to a page and either get redirected or a 404 error, but the ad serving program won’t necessarily penalize that advertiser. With pay-per-click it’s an entirely different ball game. Google Adwords algorithms penalize Quality Score for ads with high bounce rates, and if your site or landing page is down, all bets are off. Read more…
Poor conversion doesn’t have to be a life sentence, but that’s exactly what many advertisers are living with every day. Many advertisers accept status quo, mediocrity or starter campaigns as being industry-standard. Problems aren’t always obvious to beginners in the PPC game.
If your PPC campaigns don’t break even, you may have problems. As Barney Fife would say, we need to nip it in the bud. Sometimes it’s easier said than done to bring campaigns back to the wood shed, especially on high-profile campaigns that may speak more to branding efforts than strict revenue goals.
Find out where to look to determine problems in a campaign, and find out what you can do when campaigns take over. Read more…
In an interesting article named “Wasting your time with Web Analytics“, Manoj Jasra states that many analysts, business owners and marketers waste their time with poorly constructed analytics implementations, marketing campaigns, and meaningless granularity. We must be on the same thought pattern, because I’ve been thinking of writing on this subject for quite some time, except focusing on the goals of web analytics and avoiding the pitfalls – such as overdoing it. Read more…
A marketers tightest and most valued ally is their sales force. Without communicating routinely with front-line sales representatives and agents, a marketer will never identify who their true prospect targets are. Despite what some of us may think, we don’t need to optimize pages for the people that come to a site and convert regardless of content, nor the people that will never convert (ever). The people we’re trying to ultimately reach are the few that might be interested, because if we can win them, we will be maximizing conversion. Read more…
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