Google Content Network Defined

The Google content network comprises millions of websites, news pages, and blogs that partner with Google to display targeted AdWords ads.  Ads to the content network are targeted based on content themes rather than specific keywords as is done on the search network. Unlike a keyword search which is well defined, a content match may not display your ad on the site you had in mind resulting in clicks you prefer not to have.

Identifying the Sites that Don’t Convert

On June 1st last year, Google made available a report that tells you which sites are not converting.  You can run this report at the ad group or the campaign level for a domain or a url.  Once you run the report you can feed the results into the Site Exclusion option in the Tools section.  This will cause the domains or url-s you designate to not show your ad resulting in a better use of your ad dollars.

Further Analysis

This on the surface appeared to be an excellent opportunity for one of our clients to save a few dollars.  After running the report for all the ad groups we learned there was about $1,075 that could have been saved in June if the sites with no conversions had been excluded.  Upon further analysis we determined that some sites did not convert for some ad groups but did convert for others.  Since the Site Exclusion option does not allow exclusions at the ad group level we had to revise our plan to exclude the non performing sites at the campaign level.

Still Not Bad

The initial excitement over the potention savings abated somewhat.  Instead of the $1,075 a month savings that we had anticipated from excluding non performing content network sites, we will save about $521 a month. We have to factor in that this is just one month’s worth of data but it is still encouraging when you consider a year’s savings would equal $6,252.  Is it worth a try or is there still more analysis we should do?

One Additional Thought

The thought that one month’s worth a data is not enough to make a decision stayed on my mind. On one hand we may be paying more than we have to each day.  On the other hand we may be making decisions on incomplete data.  Thinking it through it seems logical to conclude that if a domain or url doesn’t convert then don’t spend money on it.  The only down side would be if it converts later we would miss a conversion.  But what impact would 1 or 2 conversions have when we are talking about 100 conversions a day.

An Aha Moment

Then it occured to me.  Most of the conversions orginate from a few domains or URLs, but the bulk of the conversions come from many domains or URLs.  It is the old numbers game.  In the reports there were thousands of domains and URL-s that had only 1 or 2 conversions for June.  The number of sites that had just 1 or 2 conversions were not the same domains and URL-s that had only 1 or 2 conversions in July. If I had excluded the non converting domains and URL-s that had no conversions in June we would have eliminated 100-s of conversions in July.

My Conclusion

Based upon this data I concluded that sites should not be excluded simply because they don’t have conversions.  Another criterion should be placed on top of this that is simular to the cost per acquisition (CPA) measurement.  With the CPA you assign a dollar amount to what a conversion is worth.  If it is worth $40 is get a new customer,  $40 worth of clicks to get it is acceptable. Simularly if the non converting sites are costing you a few pennies a month to keep them then it may be wise to do so.  If they are beyond a thresshold you determine to be unacceptable, then by all means exclude them.  As with a CPA, some conversions are not worth the price.

Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Analytics, Campaign Tracking,  google content network, google site targeting

Pay Per Click, Analytics | No Comments »

I didn’t come up with this title and analogy but I wish I had.  See Jim Sterne’s article of the same name posted January 18th, 2008.  In a “net shell” (pun attempted) it says, even with all your other business priorities if you don’t have good web analytics in place your Web site is burning money.  I have said this to many clients over the years but never this well. Take a few minutes and read what Jim has to say about this topic

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Online Activity
Tracking clicks to online sales is simple. Simply place the appropriate tracking code on your Thank You page and you know which search terms are and are not contributing to your sales. The same holds true for the submission of online forms, appointments, appications, chats, e-mails–pretty much anything that occurs online.

Offline Activity
Tracking clicks to offline sales is a bit more complicated. You can instruct the customer to mention a code they obtain online to claim a offline discount. Or you can have them print out a certificate or coupon with a bar code that they take to the store. You can even associate each search term with the the code or bar code on the coupon and certificate to track which keywords are performing. This could be very tedious if you are running thousands of search terms but is probably worth the effort.

In Between Online and Offline
Phone calls are not necessarily online or offline, but something in between. It is not as easy to associate a search term with a phone call in this “in between” world. The way to accomplish this is to assign an unique phone number to each search term. This could get very cost prohibitive if, like with most campaigns, you are running 1,000 to 10,000 terms. Imagine securing 1,000 or more unique phone numbers and placing them on 1,000 or more unique landing pages (actually you can avoid multiple landing pages with dynamic content) and setting up the campaign so each search term is associated with its unique phone number. The information learned from this will probably save thousands of dollars in the long term but still may not be worth the effort.

Need for a Click to Phone Call Tracking Technology
Ideally there would be a technology that automatically assigns a phone number to a search term, dynamically places that phone number on the landing page, forwards the calls to the real phone number, and tracks everything for you. Hundreds of phone numbers may still be required but let the technology handle the assignment and minimize the number of phone lines required to the absolute minimum. It seem like as much as we have done with computers we should be able to fulfil a simple requirement like this.

Technology Delivered
siteEDGE Agency clients have access to this technology. We still have to determine if the potential cost to be saved outweighs the cost of integrating the technology, but once we pass this due diligence we will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal to minimize money wasting search terms and to maximixe money making terms.

If you would like more information on this technology feel free to call Steve Thompson at 816-587-8880 x102 and we will help you determine if it is right for you.

Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Analytics, Campaign Tracking, Phone Call Tracking

siteEDGE News, Pay Per Click, Tracking, Analytics | No Comments »

Google has done it again. Free E-Mail. Free Spreadsheet Tool. Free Website Analytics. Now Free Multivariate Testing. To be honest I was, and still am somewhat skeptical. Call me paranoid but I don’t feel entirely comfortable putting so much information about us in the hands of one company. I must admit I have reluctantly signed up for Gmail and have occasions to use Google Analytics. In the case of Google Website Optimizer (beta) tool, I have nothing but gratitude.

Website Optimizer Defined

Google defines their Website Optimizer as a free multivariate testing application that helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content (text and images). Rather than sitting in a room and arguing over what will work better, you can save time and eliminate the guesswork by simply letting your visitors tell you what works best.

Sample Implementation

I will set the stage by describing a fictional company with multiple categories of product offerings. Each product offering fits neatly into ad groups that have significant search volume for the search terms contained within. The challenge is to determine which text/image or a combination of text/images contributes most towards reaching the desired conversion goals.

Lets say in our fictional company’s campaign we created ten landing (Test Pages) pages with various combinations of products, offers, graphics and text. We then use Website Optimizer to track each Page Section or Trackable Item such as a headline, image, or promotional text. Your Conversion Page (e.g. thank you page for online sale, sign-up for newsletter, etc.) is identified and associated with the applicable Page Section.

The result of all this analysis and tagging are Page Section and Analytic reports that tell you which landing page items and combinations are giving you the bang for your buck. Over time you will phase out the ones that don’t work and increase usage of the ones that do.

You could pay a vendor for usage of a tool like this and this is probably recommended if you rely headily upon Multivariate Testing for your campaigns. If you are not in this category go ahead and use Google’s tool. The benefit the tool provides probably out weighs the cost of Google gaining our information…probably?

As always let me know your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: Online Marketing, Multivariate Testing, Landing Pages, PPC Testing

Tracking, Analytics | No Comments »

John Jantsch has a great post about the best metrics that small businesses don’t measure. It’s a list that, when we put together a paid search campaign we try very hard to get our clients to use (or at least figure out).

1) Leads - where do they come from, how many, and what generated them - if you don’t know this, it’s likely you are wasting lots of money on things that are not generating leads, or potentially worse, not sticking with a great tactic.
2)Average $ - What’s average amount of business you do with a client - your existing clients want to do more business with you. It’s easy to create an average dollar number and give your attention to creating more opportunities and more profitable clients - this way you can weed out clients that fall below the number eternally.
3)Conversions - How many of those leads turn into clients - the biggest time killer of all for the small business is chasing leads that are not qualified, not educated (by you, not in life), not ready to appreciate your value. When you measure this, you have to fix it, it’s too painful otherwise.

These are especially important if you’re purchasing leads - no matter what your business, it is vital to know as precisely as possible where your customers are coming from, how much they cost to acquire, and the potential profit from them.

Technorati Tags: Small Business Marketing, Lead Generation, Paid Search, Marketing Metrics

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Would you put your entire retirement into one stock? Of course not - it’s crazy, right?!? You would consult an expert, or do a lot of pain-staking research yourself, and carefully craft a plan to optimize your returns on the money you saved, while insuring that if one company you’ve invested in fails, you won’t end up in the poor house.

If the above scenario makes perfect sense, why is it that so many very intelligent business owners are only concerned about one stream of traffic? That’s right folks - the big “G” (Google, for those of you who were wondering) is a great source of traffic and revenue. However, if you have positioned yourself to be solely reliant upon Google traffic to be successful - you’re poised on the brink of disaster.

Fortunately - it’s not too late. If you’re still planning out your Internet strategy for 2007, make diversifying your traffic portfolio one of your top priorities. If you’ve already got your ‘07 strategy done, change it to include this.

What exactly does diversifying your traffic portfolio mean?
It’s just a fancy way of saying that you’re trying to find as many good sources of relevant traffic as possible. As a general rule, I shoot for no more than 30% of traffic coming from one particular source. That way, if one gets shut off, I still have at least 70% of traffic and sales coming in, while I figure out what to do about the other 30%.

Ok, so we know we need to do it, but how do we make it happen?
This may be easier than you think. First off, you want to make a plan - bring together your strategies for online advertising, PPC, SEO, email, PR, and traditional marketing, and look for ways they can work together to help drive traffic. Here are 5 example scenarios to get you started:

1)Our SEO is suggesting link building. Maybe we should INSIST that all the link building he does come from relevant sites that we think could provide us with a reasonable traffic stream.

2)We’re running a pretty extensive PPC campaign, so maybe we should look into adding a way for visitors to sign up for our newsletter if they don’t buy immediately. That way, we can bring them back.

3)Our communications depart sends out 3 press releases a month - we should send those out online as well, and maybe create a blog on our site to talk about them.

Those are just a few ideas to get you started. If your business is over-reliant on one traffic stream and you’d like to talk - just let us know.

Technorati Tags: Google, Diversifying Traffic, Website Strategy, SEO, PPC, Online PR, Email Marketing

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The Center for Media Research reported Monday that 81% of survey respondents plan to increase 2007 spending on email marketing while 70% of respondents said they apply basic or no analysis to these campaigns.

As an Online Marketer I sometimes grumble at how offline media is not held up to the same standards as online for measurebility. I have even had a client, one of the top five US companies in telecommunications no less, say we shouldn’t hold traditional media up to the same standards as online. This was said while we were sitting down going over the details of their online campaign which reported how every dollar spent related to each conversion we achieved. The results of the online campaign weren’t bad but there was always this offline media superiority aura hovering over our heads. Since there was no way to measure the offline results it must be performing better than online.

Based upon experiences like this you would think I would be relieved to see survey responses like this. Wrong! We must go forward using the tools that are available no matter how uncomfortable they may sometimes make us. This should be done even at the cost of a decision to terminate a non performing online campaign and continuing a offline campaign where we just don’t know.

Pay Per Click, SEO, Tracking, Analytics, Offline Marketing, E-Mail Marketing | No Comments »

Seth Godin is writing about embracing irrelevant metrics - from calories to raw traffic numbers. While I would personally disagree on the calories portion of his commentary, we’re definitely on the same page with the rest of his examples.

At siteEDGE, we place a great deal of value on measurement. We’d like to think that we focus on only the most important, relevant metrics when it comes to determining the success of a campaign. So, what do we look at?

Conversion Rates - How effectively is our campaign selling your product? Is each click (that you’re paying for) likely to buy something, or become a lead? If not, how can we improve it?

Traffic Quality - This can become a point of contention, and is perhaps my own personal preference, but I like to infer that visitors that spend a little longer on your site, and go a few pages deeper (when they aren’t converting from that first page) are of higher quality. Are your visitors taking one look and clicking the back button? Do they think your site is boring or hard to use? In the same vein - is your site bringing back visitors? Do you have enough great content to make your site sticky?

Traffic Distribution - If you were to get dropped from Google’s index tomorrow, would your business survive? Have you diversified your portfolio of traffic channels enough to weather Yahoo’s next shakeup? What if your PPC budget gets cut this quarter?

The Cost Per’s - Cost per Lead, Cost per Sale, Cost per Customer, Cost per Acquistion - call it what you want, it all boils down to one thing - are you paying too much to get new business? Is your ROI positive? Better yet, is it as positive as it COULD BE?

If some of these questions leave you scratching your head - contact us to get a free initial consultation. We’ll talk through your business needs, and let you know if we can help. If you’re not in the market right now, subscribe to our feed or bookmark our site. We will provide you with enough information here to get you started on a great, comprehensive online marketing campaign.

Technorati Tags: Seth Godin, Marketing Metrics, Measuring Success, Analytics, Tracking

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siteEDGE News, Client Stories, Team Profiles, Pay Per Click, SEO, Usability, Tracking, Analytics, Offline Marketing, Public Relations, Brand Management, E-Mail Marketing, Marketing Tools, Bios, Case Studies, Whitepapers, Press | No Comments »