Tighten up your PPC strategy

Many small businesses love Google’s self-serve Adwords programme. Just sign up, create an ad, choose some keywords or let Google choose them for you, get traffic, pay the invoice.

Not so fast!
That’s all nice and simple but there are a few things you could be doing to make sure you’re getting the maximum juice from the squeeze.

Google is your friend. Sort of.
Google wants you to get some traffic, Google even provide you with tools to measure that traffic optimally. They even push you to do the most you can with the traffic you’re paying for, but the last thing Google are going to do is voluntarily reduce the amount of revenue they make.

It’s all about the conversions
If you’re not paying attention to the conversions (whether that is orders or leads) that you get from your Adwords spend, you need to, right now. You can track things internally if you like – assuming your content management system’s lead forms or your e-commerce platform show you all the ways someone got to your site (for extra credit, not just last-click tracking too). If that’s not possible, Adwords provides conversion tracking for you. You set up a conversion, add a bit of javascript to the conversion page (final page of checkout or contact form sent page) and you’re done. Conversions will be tracked right down to the campaign, ad group, ad variation and keyword that brought you the sale or lead. Once you know what’s working, do more of that, and less of the keywords and ad variations that are bleeding you dry.

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What privacy? You’re all for sale

That’s the message we take from this weeks various privacy issues, from Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent comments to Facebook’s ‘new, simpler privacy settings’ where they recommend you open your Facebook status updates to the world.

The Google situation is expertly summed up in this long, all-encompassing and very brave post by Aaron Wall highlighting Google’s hypocrisy when it comes to privacy (and others intellectual property for that matter). This is immensely brave because he’s an SEO expert, he has to ‘work’ with Google all the time. As Google’s ranking parameters get broader, Aaron exposes himself to censure by the big G.

Dan York examines the Facebook privacy changes over on his Disruptive Conversations blog.

Read both of these for background, they’re the two best blog posts I’ve read all week (and I read a lot, so you don’t have to).

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Google Analytics – handle with care

I’ve just experienced a problem with Google Analytics that I think a lot of people can learn from. Here’s are some important things to bear in mind:

• Google Analytics is free.
• Google really aren’t so interested in being responsive to Analytics users (understandably, if they were, imagine the potentially enormous workload they’d face)
• You’re on your own when it comes to customising your access

This is why, when setting up a Google Analytics account for a client website, you should avoid the path of least resistance in terms of setting that account up (which would be creating a site under your own account) and do the following:

1. Create a NEW Google account, specific to this site.
2. Note those details somewhere safe, you may need them later but they’re not what you’re going to use much after step 3
3. Log in to Google Analytics with those account details, add admin users for your client’s normal Google login and your own.

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Is paid search the height of responsibility?

In response to The Irresponsible Marketer

Having just read Mitch Joel’s latest post, I was going to post this as a comment, then when I got to writing it and it grew to longer than would be polite, or even that readable, as a comment.

To paraphrase, Mitch is saying that marketers should put as much as they can into search marketing, spending “whatever is left over for your more general branding campaigns”. Now I’m sure that Mitch is trying to seed a discussion rather than truly believing that we should give up on all other kinds of marketing efforts to concentrate on the low-hanging fruit and maximising our Adwords spend and hiring SEO experts..

What about cumulative effects?

I think this is a perfect case for ‘with, not instead of’, to quote Mitch again. Paid search, and to almost the same extent, well done SEO/content marketing efforts are eminently trackable. But what drove that search? Reading this post I immediately thought of David Ogilvy’s belief that a consumer needs to see a message multiple times before they act on it (though as he was head of an ad agency, one might question the number of exposures required). Read the rest of this entry »

Is there such a thing as too much SEO?

Or is Google’s algorithm a little off?

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Whilst checking into some background info for yesterday’s blog post about the Jury’s Inns hotel chain I did the obligatory Google search for Jury’s Inns. Not sure what you’re seeing, based on Google’s penchant for showing different search results based on your location or whether you’re logged in or not.

Click the image to see the results I got. Almost the entire first page on Google for that term is either the main site or a search-engine friendly subdomain for Jury’s Inn hotel(s) in a particular city.

If I’d have searched for jurysinns.com seeing this wouldn’t have surprised me at all (and this is exactly what does come up, similar to ibm.com or allcapitals.com). If I’d have searched for Jurys’s Inn Hotels London I wouldn’t be surprised to see the custom subdomain come up first or second either.

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Case study – the sports bar – part three – summer update

Just a quick update on the website situation

Web traffic is holding steady (even though it’s off-season for their main sports).

Now number 2 result on Google.com (above the local 10-pack) for a search for “Sports Bar Prague”. Beating out sportsbar.cz

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Not performing as well on Google.cz (which Firefox defaults to when you’re in the Czech Republic) because there is no Czech version of the site. Though the Czech language version of the Facebook Fan Page that we set up does make a showing lower down the first page, compensating somewhat.

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Google Analytics to go Freemium?

That’s the conclusion I jumped to after seeing this story on Marketing Pilgrim about a piece of Forrester forecasting published today.

Assuming a shrinking use of licensed analytics (installing a copy of analytics software on your own servers) is an obvious one – ever since Google Analytics came out and effectively made one of the most expensive solutions, Urchin, free, and did away the headache of running your own analytics software, how many people have paid that much attention to their own web server logs? Sure, Urchin’s still around but have you actually tried to buy it? You have to go through an Urchin Software Authorized Consultant, and most of them don’t even say much about the product on their sites (they’re big web development/UX consultants mostly).

Predicting a 20% compound annual growth in spend on web analytics is a pretty ballsy move. So I started wondering how that might be – Google Analytics is free and all-conquering, it’s incredibly easy to set up and very powerful. Where are these other paid for hosted solutions anyway?

One thing that you’ll need to spend money on, regardless of what analytics platform you’re using, is web analytics consultants. This is by definition a growth area – there just aren’t that many people out there with the necessary skills right now. People who’ve done a bit more than read Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics an hour a day book and truly get it.

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Five Must read marketing/internet/social media blog posts from this week

I’ve had my head down working and absorbing information this week, reading books and blogs. Here are five helpful/useful/relevant and informative posts from the past week that I recommend – much more worthwhile than anything I would have written this week!

Christopher S. Penn: How powerful is your social media?
A warning not to drink too deeply from the pitcher of social media kool-aid

David Meerman Scoot: What we all really want is ATTENTION
The various ways to beg borrow, steal or earn attention

Search Engine Land: Fights In The Google Monopoly Debate Miss Key Points
Great overview of the current state of play with Google and the ways it’s claiming not to be a monopoly.

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Local listings for local people

The what, why and how of getting in the Google Local search results

Now Google are beefing up the importance of ‘local’ worldwide it’s time get serious about your listing.

Go to google.com and do a search for your business type, e.g. ‘Tackle shop’. Are you getting the ‘Local 10 pack’ (see image below)?  If you’re not getting amongst local results at the top of the page, try it with a ‘geographic modifier’ – the name of your town/city.

A local 10 pack

If you are seeing local results then Google deems those keywords indicative of a business that people are interested in local listings for and that they have results available for. Did you come up in those listings? If yes, you may still need to ‘claim your listing’ if you weren’t the person that entered it into Google Local Business Center – jump to the ‘claiming your listing’ section below. If your business doesn’t come up, search for your business name ‘Fred’s Tackle’ along with the name of your town: ‘Fred’s Tackle Brighton’ should do. If that finds you, and displays your details along with a map, then you may still need to claim your listing (and you clearly have other work to do too in optimising for keywords!)

Entering your Google Local listing, or claiming an existing one
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Google TV Ads Online – close but no cigar

A few weeks back I wrote a post around the idea that some people might actually want to watch TV ads.

On Thursday Google announced TV Ads Online. From the headline I envisaged that it would give me what I want – the ability to watch lots of ads online. Turns out it’s their TV Ad buying service, now with the ability to buy ‘webtime’ as well as airtime.

So all they’re doing is extending the reach of ads from offline/broadcast tv to online video, allowing you to buy ads in the same programmes/channels you’ve been able to buy them in offline. Just another way for advertisers to place interruption advertising.

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