Internet Marketing Course BLOG

How Linking These Two Applications Can Improve Your AdWords ROI

By Dave Ingalls
Internet Marketing Consultant
November 29, 2009

Does this sound familiar? You’ve got your AdWords ads click through rate (CTR) up in the 5-15% range, and sometimes higher, but those clicks are not translating into either online sales and/or product inquiries.

Waz up with that?! Here’s a way to find out what’s going on.

FIRST, watch this short video on YouTube by Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik on why “Bounce Rate” might be the BEST metric to use to quickly understand what’s going right, and more importantly, what’s going wrong with your AdWords program:

“Google Analytics – Bounce Rate: The Simply Powerful Metric”

SECOND, if you haven’t done this already, you need to create a Google Analytics account and add the analytics code to each of your Web pages/Blog posts. (I’m assuming that you already have a Google AdWords account or else you wouldn’t be reading this article!)

THIRD, you need to link your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts together. This step can be a little tricky, so be patient and follow Google’s directions.

From Google AdWords Help:

“How do I link my Google Analytics account to my AdWords account?”

FOURTH, wait 2-3 weeks until you have some AdWords/Analytics data to analyze.

Next Steps – Please click on this link for Part II of this exercise.

Technorati Tags:Business, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

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Internet Marketing Course Blog
Dave Ingalls
August 27, 2009

Do you have a Site Search function on your Web site? If not, here’s what you’re missing!

In addition to publishing this Internet Marketing Course Blog and the accompanying Internet Marketing Course, I oversee several technical products B2B Web sites for my company. Our main Web site highlights our major product line and a smaller “micro” Web site was created to highlight a companion product line.

I recently added Site Search to the main Web site and when I looked at what visitors were searching for on THAT site, I was completely floored!

Before we get into Site Search, let’s make sure you already have a Web analytics program on your Web site(s). I use Google Analytics – it’s free, it’s simple to install, it really works, and for the products we sell, our prospective Customers use Google almost exclusively as their general search engine. How do we know that? Our Google Analytics program shows us that over 50% of our total Web traffic comes to our main Web site from Google organic (natural) searches.

Specifically, you need BOTH an analytics program and a site search program to prove the value of Site Search to YOU.

Our Google Analytics program allows us to “drill down” into the data on visitor traffic, and when we took a detailed look at the keyword phrases Google searchers were using to get to the main site, we saw a number of iterations of our company name pulling in a lot of the traffic (mainly different spellings of the company name). Sounds reasonable.

After the first few days of having Site Search installed on the main Web site, we took a look at the keywords being used to search for information on that site. To my surprise, almost ALL of the site searches on the main site were for part numbers or phrases related to the products on the micro site! And even more unsettling, when I performed those same searches on the main site, the search returned no results! Yikes!

» Continue reading “What Site Search Can Tell YOU!”

Occam’s Razor
by Avinash Kaushik

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Course Blog): Web analytics and common sense can be strange bedfellows indeed! But not for Avinash Kaushik, an expert in Web analytics. If you’re new to this topic, this blog post by Avinash is the PERFECT Place to start!

“A common theme I have noticed across many Web Analytics practitioners is that the moment they get access to the data they dive, and they dive deep.

You open the tool and they are instantly on: “how is that page doing” or “can I report on all the campaigns that are driving traffic to these six pages and measure retention” or “ I want to pull out these six pages and measure exit rates” or “can the tool email me a daily summary of all the visitors who visit my page and don’t submit” or “I have my key performance indicators (KPI’s) and I want a detailed report across all top pages on the website.”

Read the entire blog posting by clicking on the following link:

Getting Started With Web Analytics: Step One – Glean Macro Insights

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

Email to get most attention, yet supporting data analytics often ignored

Source: Alterian

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): The beat goes on! Looks like online marketing will continue to steal the lion’s share of advertising/marketing spending increases in 2007. Even direct marketers, long known for their mailers and printed catalogs, are jumping on the online marketing bandwagon in a big way, especially when it comes to email marketing. Interestingly, especially to the folks at Alterian, the data analytics portion of this move to online marketing is NOT receiving its fair share of the increased spending, especially as it relates to having an integrated view of a company’s overall online/offline marketing efforts.

“What’s the direct marketing spending priority for 2007? It’s online activities, according to Alterian’s fourth transatlantic annual survey of more than 500 direct marketers, marketing services providers and agencies. Eighty-five percent of respondents expect their online direct marketing expenditures to increase in 2007. The spending projection is the largest expected increase since the Alterian Annual Survey began in 2003. Alterian (LSE: ALN) is the leading global provider of Analytics Led Integrated Marketing software.

While online direct marketing will receive the largest investment increase, 51 percent of survey respondents also plan to boost their offline direct marketing spend in 2007. When asked about specific channel investments, 81 percent plan to increase spending on email marketing, 50 percent say they will spend more on direct mail, and 45 percent will increase their budgets for personalized landing pages. Despite the strong spending indicators for both online and offline channels, 94 percent of respondents who said they will decrease offline spending said they will increase online spending.”

Read the entire press release by clicking on the following link (Press Release no longer available):

Eighty-five Percent of Marketers and Service Providers Plan to Increase Online Spending in 2007

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

By Jason Burby
Clickz

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): The KEY concept for me from this article – “Integration is helping many clients better understand the 95 percent plus people who DON’T convert on the site.” This Web Analytics article focuses on Omniture’s new Genesis product, but be sure to checkout what WebSideStory and WebTrends are up to when it comes to integration.

“Last week I attended Omniture’s release of its new offering, Genesis. The event was very well attended. Omniture Genesis is basically automated integration (think plug and play) that allows marketers to easily integrate other data and common systems right into the tool.

This helps satisfy a longstanding frustration. I’ve written a fair amount about how Web analytics data is valuable on its own but becomes much more valuable when integrated with other insight. We often combine attitudinal and competitive data with behavioral data like Web analytics. Of equal value is the ability to truly integrate marketing drivers and other site-side tools.

Yes, people have been tracking e-mail campaigns, banner campaigns, and onsite search effectiveness through analytics tools for years, and all the vendors have the ability to do so. But the trend we’re seeing now is a much deeper integration of this data type in an even easier framework.”

Read the entire article at by clicking on the following link:

Web Analytics: The Power’s in Integration

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing