Internet Marketing Blog
Google Adwords - Evaluating Advertising Performance
Now that you are tracking conversions, you can get a clearer picture as to you how well your pay-per-click advertising is doing. Are your clicks paying off? It can be exciting when you are getting a lot of attention for a particular ad that you wrote, but you have to look to see if it is converting. The same is true with keywords … if a keyword is getting a lot of clicks, it’s costing you money, if it’s making you more money, great!
The trick becomes evaluating all of your keywords and all of your ads. You hopefully started out with at least ten keywords per ad group (sometimes by design you will only have a couple if it is a very specific ad group) - so how are these words performing? Usually you can tell at a glance since Google has a Cost Per Conversion column on your Campaign Management page. It is best to look at this column in terms of the last seven days or even a longer stretch. It seems like a no-brainer that if the cost per conversion is higher than the revenue gained, you’d pause the keyword, doesn’t it? Well, it is sometimes difficult to do that when you want to show up for a particular keyword. This is one of those times when it is advantageous to have an Internet Marketing firm handle your accounts, because there is no emotional attachment, just a response to data.
It’s usually not so cut-and-dry in terms of performance. The typical scenario is that a company only has a certain amount of money allocated for their Google AdWords budget, so the goal is best bang for the buck and could mean cutting out a keyword or words that may have converted at an acceptable cost in favor or words that have converted at a lower cost. It rarely comes to this as the first rule is to cut what isn’t converting. Doing this usually cuts the spending enough.
One last note - if you are not seeing any conversions, check to make sure that your tracking code is working. You do this by running a test and then seeing if it shows up in your conversion column. It sometimes takes up to 24 hours to show up. If you have confirmed your conversion tracking, and yet there are still no conversions, you will want to test all of your links and also consider whether your ads are attracting people who are actually looking for your product/service. Finally, consider whether the problem is your website design. Once you have people to your site, you only have a few seconds to keep them there, is your site turning them on or off?
It sometimes seems like a lot to figure out and keep track of - but if you take the time to go step by step, it is very doable. If you don’t have the time, then hire it out. It is better to spend a little money so have someone in the Internet marketing business get you set up for success, than to flush money because you don’t have the time to do things right.
Mary Jo
Internet Marketing Blog
600 Boyson Road, Suite 200
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52402
Other topics of interest:
Cedar Rapids Website Design
Search Engine Optimization Iowa
December 31, 2008
Even the Large Companies use “Crowdsourcing”
The term "crowdsourcing" is used when instead of doing the task itself, with a contractor, or by outsourcing it chooses to use the target audience as the workforce. For example, I might want to know what the favored layout is for a website design I’m doing for an e-commerce site so I post my question online and see what were the layouts people favored the most. People like it when their voice is heard to impact the outcome of something they might use and therefore they are willing to donate their time helping with the project. In the end, it will make the product/service/etc. more like what the users want.
Google is the latest big name to use crowdsourcing. They are using people’s input to help focus their product ideas for their mobile services, but there is a good chance we will see them spreading this to their other services in the future. You can view the site by going to Google’s Product Ideas page.
The service they are using for this is their very own Google Moderator that they launched back in September this year. This service is available for anyone to use and can be a great resource for anyone who wants to crowdsource. Wether or not crowdsourcing would be the right thing to do depends on the situation, and there are some downfalls and drawbacks to using it over other methods. Overall, it is an interesting concept and is a good way to get people’s interest, and it is a good thing to see larger companies starting to use it.
Kurt
Internet Marketing Group
Other Topics of Interest:
Website Design Cedar Rapids
December 30, 2008
Keep Website Design Simple
The acronym KISS stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid and–in the most blunt terms–it’s quite accurate for information design and website design in general. It takes a lot of maintenance to keep an ever-evolving, information-heavy website organized, and planning out a method and site map for this maintenance is an extremely important step in the website design process.
In keeping it simple, stupid, it’s important to guide your users to what they’re looking for quickly, and funnel information accordingly. In trying to be helpful while maintaining interest, we tend to want to pack in as much fancy information as possible. In a few rare instances the user might stumble upon a stray link in all of this noise for what they’re looking for, most will ignore it completely, favoring to look through your simplest, text linked navigation instead. If what they’re looking for is buried under images or effects, statistics show that they won’t stick around to wait for the shiny navigation to load.
As we know, people now go to the Internet for information. They want well placed, relevant information without the unnecessary noise like wait time, screen flickering, and/or reloading of images. The simplest, and easiest tasks while seeming common and boring, are actually the most important because of their repetitive use by your audience.
Break up your information in to relevant chunks, and include them all in a category of main navigation. Don’t make users scroll too much or force them to sort through distantly related information for what they’re after.
Clarissa
Internet Marketing Group Blog
Other Topics of Interest:
December 29, 2008
Google AdWords - Conversion Tracking
How do you determine success in terms of your pay-per-click advertising? You could look at your click through rates. If your ad is good and you’ve selected appropriate keywords your click through rate will no doubt be impressive. So what? People clicked on your ads, then what did they do? What did you want them to do?
Determining a desired behavior for potential customers and then keeping track of how often you get that desired behavior is called conversion tracking. For example, if you decide that the goal of your ad is to get people to come to your site and fill out a request form for more information, then each time you get that request form, you’ve gotten a conversion. You could also define your conversion in terms of making a sale.
One important thing to note is that your ads can be highly effective at getting people to your site, but the design of your site will be the determining factor in terms of conversions. Your website design really has to be your first step in effective advertising and marketing. If you consistently get high click-thru’s with little or no conversions, it’s time to give your site a critical look.
Once you decide what your particular conversion looks like, you’ll want to set up conversion tracking. You could manually try to keep track of it, but why would you do that when Google will do it for free. You will need access to your website’s HTML - but the process is fairly simple. Find the Conversion Tracking link on the Campaign Management tab at the top of your AdWords account. Like everything else, you will be walked through the process.
Once you’ve enabled conversion tracking, you will be able to monitor your conversions on your campaign summary page.
Mary Jo
Internet Marketing Blog
600 Boyson Road, Suite 200
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52402
Other topics of interest:
Cedar Rapids Website Design
Search Engine Optimization Iowa
December 24, 2008
Design Uncluttered and Focused
When moving in to a new house or apartment, we usually get the couch, the table, the appliances in there, saying that’s all we need, and then gradually unpack the rest. Eventually ending up with a space that feels a bit cluttered with all that stuff we swore we wouldn’t need, unboxed, to make it feel like home again.
The same is often true for a website. We move into a new domain, with a fresh new design and we want it to feel like home. We put all of our knickknacks on the shelves, and elements intended as functional get taken down or covered up. Pretty soon among all of this good-intended house-warming, we compromise the original design and maybe even the functionality of the website. (Don’t tell me you’ve never had to sidestep that pile of books to get to the bathroom.)
With so many options to add and gadgets to play with, it’s hard to stay organized. Letting the designer know your interests and intentions, though, can help them integrate them into the design or build for expansion in an organized way to incorporate them down the road. Sometimes you just have to empty out all the drawers to organize them again, and that’s okay. A website is never finished, but keep focused on the ultimate goal of your viewers getting the information they need, and the website design will never lose clarity, impact, or detract from that information.
Having a solid understanding of what you’re come from and acknowledging the temptations that go along with it are important for both the designer and the client. So instead of accommodating the temptation and trying to work backwards to fit them in, they can be integrated into the website design without sacrificing either functionality or design. Don’t get caught up in trying to stack the books so they’ll look inconspicuous there on the floor. If you love books, build in more bookshelves.
Clarissa
Internet Marketing Group Blog
Other Topics of Interest:
Internet Marketing Group | Cedar Rapids | Iowa © 2008 | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Google Advertising Professional | 319-393-1701
Featured in the National Website Design Directory - Other Directories - Web Design Stuff
Preferred Cedar Rapids, Iowa Website Designer at WebsiteDesignersList.com | Featured in the Cedar Rapids Web Design Company Directory
