Google AdWords and Analytics – Put a Bounce (Rate) in Your Step – Part I

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How Linking These Two Applications Can Improve Your AdWords ROI By Dave Ingalls Digital Marketing Consultant 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 … Read more

AddThis to Help Your Online Content Go Viral

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By Dave Ingalls Digital Marketing Consultant You’re a small business owner who has taken the time to create some original content for your Web site to help that site be more visible to potential Customers via the major search engines, just like all the Internet Marketing experts tell you to do. But after you add … Read more

Customer Reviews Drive iPhone Sales – REAL Social Media!

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We’ve all heard the hype about online Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. And much of the hype is true. But if you’re a small/medium sized company selling your products and/or services online, take my advice about online social media, social marketing, social networking – whatever you want to call it – and start with the basics – let your Customers review your products/services on your Web site.

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What Site Search Can Tell YOU!

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Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog
Dave Ingalls

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 Digital Marketing Tutorial, 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!

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IE6 Problems-How to See Them-How to Fix Them

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Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog
Dave Ingalls

Dave’s Comments (Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog): This IMC Blog entry is a bit different. I’m going to help readers who use Joomla and/or WordPress find out if they’ve got any Internet Explorer 6.0 (“IE6”) display issues with either their Joomla Web site templates and/or WordPress blogging themes. If they do, I also outline how they can get a head start on fixing those problems by looking “under the hood” of these 2 very popular Web applications. Why am I doing this? Because I just went thru this situation myself and I thought I’d spare my readers some of the pain I went thru finding a solution!

According to Market Solutions, 2009 YTD IE6 usage still stands at 18% of all Internet browsers. IE7 (42%) and IE8 (6% and climbing rapidly) are both taking share from IE6, but at this writing, IE6 is still the THIRD most popular Web browser in terms of usage.

So why worry about high IE6 usage by Web surfers? Because IE6 is NOT the same as IE7 or IE8. Without getting into the details, let’s just say that IE7 and IE8, along with all popular versions of the Firefox Web browser, know how to correctly interpret and display the latest underlying HTML, CSS and XHTML code that most popular Joomla! (content management system) Web site templates and WordPress (blogging software) blog themes use. IE6, however, was developed before these new browser software standards were adopted by all browser manufacturers. And with almost 20% of Web browser usage, IE6 can make your Web sites and blogs look more like a Picasso painting (no offense to the master) than the beautiful sites/blogs you see in standards compliant browsers to 1 in 5 Web surfers! Not a good situation!

What did I do about this potential problem and why did I care? Because this Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog uses WordPress!

Here’s what I ended up doing after much surfing and trial/error.

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Market Like Apple – 5 Key Secrets

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Marketing Apple – 5 Secrets of the World’s Best Marketing Machine Steve Chazin Dave’s Comments (Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog): I recently came across this free ebook by Steve Chazin. Steve worked at Apple for a decade at a critical time in Apple’s history. His ebook “spills the beans” on how Apple resurrected itself. These 5 … Read more

Small Companies and Content Generation

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By Rick Burnes HubSpot Inbound Internet Marketing Blog Dave’s Comments (Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog): Great advice about how small businesses can generate content consistently AND painlessly. Another idea from the B2B world – if you distribute your product or service thru a distribution network, you may find that one or more of your distributors have … Read more

Search Marketing Spending and Trends

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Search dominated by paid placement, more SEO to come. eMarketer Dave’s Comments (Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog): The beat goes on! Nice to look at any spending projection chart these days (see full article on eMarketer) and see the numbers going UP! This article also does a nice job making the case for why SEO will … Read more

Long-Tail Searches Increasing – Good News for Niche Web Sites

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8-Word Search Queries Up 34,000% in Last 5 Years! by Andy Beal Marketing Pilgrim Dave’s Comments (Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog): A great article by Andy Beal. He combines stats on percent of search engine searches containing 1, 2, 3… up to 8 key words from 2004 with same data from Hitwise, but 5 years later! … Read more

‘Great Divide’ Separates Small Biz, Online Consumers

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MarketingVOX Dave’s Comments (Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog): This overview by MarketingVOX of how consumers find and choose local small businesses is VERY interesting, especially if you are a bricks-and-mortar small business owner! The article basically says that consumers of local small business goods and services search for those services online, preferentially contact those businesses that have … Read more