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Many online marketing bloggers seem to be writing a lot recently about how “everyone” can maximize ROI this season by getting on the pay-per-click gravy train.  Although many online retailers will see significant increases in revenue compared to last year, competition is also getting much more fierce.  Be prepared to bid higher, target the long-tail, and offer attractive promotions to win your holiday share of sales.   Your analytics should show ROI quicker than normal, with the added search traffic.  Be prepared to be unique.

To say it’s been a crazy Thanksgiving long-weekend for our American brothers and sisters across the border is an understatement. First came Black Friday, a day designed by marketers to kick off the holiday shopping madness with deep “discounts” and one-day specials. The term Cyber Monday was coined back in 2005, and conceived especially for online retailers that wanted to cash in on the same revenues Black Friday promotions garnered. Last year around this time the traffic generated by sales crippled direct debit systems, did we survive this year? Maybe not…

The old adage “keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer” has never been truer when it comes to pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Search competition first reared it’s head with SEO, where everyone was scurrying to find the top ad formula that kept changing, and now it’s not all that different with PPC.  Your first weapon is knowledge, and we like to keep your arsenal stock piled.

Any search marketer will tell you that online marketing is a little like playing with hand grenades.  You’re looking to make a big impact, but accuracy isn’t always guaranteed.  Understanding point of purchase behavior does a lot to help decipher analytics because not every click through will result in an immediate conversion.  Latent clicks are a result of slow converters, and can be a significant thorn in your side.  Learn how to turn undecided visitors into ROI quicker.

An interesting debate broke out today regarding ROAS as a metric and it’s usefulness. My argument was that return on advertising spend is really only useful when looking at net revenue, because a target value of 100% ROAS rarely suits most products and services advertised online. The flip-side of the argument is that calculating true ROAS can be terribly difficult, therefore it’s more valuable to use ROAS as a relative measure of success over time. Both arguments are valid, so understanding both sides of the argument is important.

Like a kid outside a pet store, I once had eager anticipation for new releases from Omniture - my paid analytics package of choice - until recently that is. Unscheduled downtime, communication challenges, unreported “enhancements”, and so on are making my love affair bittersweet. The honeymoon is officially over because Omniture’s software has become buggier than a…

One key analytics test I wanted to address early in my blogeer (blog + career?) is the concept of time scale.   How long do you have to wait in order to notice trends in your pay-per-click campaigns?  How should you determine whether day-parting is a useful tactic for your campaigns?  Can you ever really measure the true ROI of search marketing?

The answer to all of these questions and more…

Perhaps the most important rule of online marketing is to ensure that everything you do to drive visitors to your site ends up being tracked. Even if you do not run any online marketing campaigns, you still need to track traffic on your web site to find out whether your goals for visitors are being met.

If I were to have a top-3 list of free analytics tools that are available to most website owners, it would probably go something like this: