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Documenting the results of pay per click marketing is necessary, regardless of whether you’re part of an in-house team or an agency dealing with outsourced work. The best and most complete way of doing this is via regular reports.
According to Search Engine Watch, there is much discussion regarding the type of data that can be gained to measure PPC progress. However, there is less of an understanding of what data should actually be presented in these reports, and how it should be shown.
Here is a summarized version of some the key items that should feature in a good PPC report:
SEW state: “A good PPC report relies less on the numbers themselves, and more on why the numbers are meaningful.”
Remember to ask yourself questions such as: ‘What knowledge can be you gain from the data?’ and ‘What’s the current situation and what does it mean to the advertiser?’
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
In PPC marketing there is always an onus placed on getting the most of out of PPC campaigns.
According to an article featured on business2community.com, improving your keyword research is one of the most effective ways to increase the long-term effectiveness of PCC campaigns.
It is important to get a balance between keywords that will bring in a good level of traffic but without being so commonly sought that they’ll be too expensive to rank on.
A number of good sources to consult on good keywords include:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Despite the massive hype surrounding Google’s new social-networking venture, Google+, web analytics company, Experian Hitwise have revealed that the platform saw a drop in US visitors for the last week, according to an article published by Bloomberg.
Hitwise also stated that their statistics showed that users were spending less time on Google+.
For the week ending July 23, the total number of US visits to Google+ fell by three per cent to 1.79 million. The figure for average time spent on the site also dropped by 10 per cent, to 5 minutes and 15 seconds.
Google+ had seen a 283 per cent rise in the web traffic for the previous week (week ending July 16).
Co-founder of Google, Larry Page was positive about the site earlier in the month – despite not having yet launched it’s Brand Pages, a much-anticipated social media marketing feature.
He stated: “We are seeing over 1 billion items shared and received in a single day, so while we still have a lot of work to do, we are really excited about our progress with Google+.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Many small independent businesses are finding their SEO efforts are falling short because of poor methods offered by some consultants or web designers, according to an article on independentretailer.com.
With this in mind, the site has provided a number of warning signs that could point towards examples of poor SEO technique.
Here are just a few:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
In capitalising on the growing popularity of social media marketing, marketers are missing out on potential data analysis opportunities, according to an article by Forbes.
Facebook is the main example focused on, with the article stating that the inability for marketers to access data on, for example, where the traffic to that particular fan page is being directed from, how long people are spending there and where they’re navigating around the page.
While the social networking site has its own advertising platform, it is much harder to integrate with additional analytics services – making measuring any data extremely difficult.
Commenting on the issue, Chris Bowler, social media vice president at Razorfish, said: “We are absolutely at the disposal of Facebook regarding these metrics,” adding: “we can’t connect the dots.”
As a response to the issue, Facebook has stated it is planning to expand the tools available to owners of fan pages.
Spokesperson for Facebook, Annie Ta, said: “As we choose which metrics to prioritize, we will focus on those that allow page administrators to most effectively optimize their content for the Facebook ecosystem.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
A search demand gap analysis is an essential part of a search engine marketing audit to check how well your search engine optimisation and/or pay-per-click marketing is working for your company. It will show you the commercial opportunity available from search engine marketing and compare your current performance against this opportunity, so showing sales growth potential. It’s often completed as part of a quarterly or annual review, but due to seasonal fluctuations in search volumes and changes in Google’s ranking approaches and competitor activity it should also be completed more regularly; we suggest monthly.
Here’s an example of a gap analysis. As, you can see it’s based around the main strategic high volume generic for a particular market, in this case related to LCD TVs.
A gap analysis will show you where you are underperforming for particular keyphrases or products and you can then set goals and then brief an agency or colleagues to take actions to improve performance in these areas.
A gap analysis also has the benefit that it enables you to compare performance of your search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing. Since these channels are often treated separately, it helps bring these together in an integrated way to compare their relative performance. For example, in the example above where bounce rates are relatively high or market share is relatively low the cells are shaded in red.
A gap analysis is a comparison of the potential visits, leads or sales from searchers arriving on the site against what the company is actually achieving. It should focus on high volume phrases which are typically two to three keyword phrases including brand searches. However, a form of the analysis can also be completed for longer ‘long-tail’ keyphrases made up of more than 4 keywords.
As for the review of the performance of all traffic sources, the main measures you need to look at are traffic volume, quality and cost:
These measures are all available from your web analytics system such as Google Analytics from which data is extracted for the analysis.
You should also measure the percentage traffic gap which can be calculated by comparing the number of visits against demand indicated by a keyword research tool. We recommend using the Google Keyword Tool to review demand in a single country. It’s best to select the exact match reporting although it can be worthwhile to select phrase match for a different form of long-tail review.
Dr Dave Chaffey is Insights Director at ClickThrough Marketing. As Insights Director he’s responsible for the quality of analysis and reporting used to review and improve the performance of clients’ natural and paid search campaigns. He’s also involved in consulting on digital and search strategy for ClickThrough’s clients through analytics-based audits typically using Google Analytics for which he holds the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ).
You can also read his advice on best practice and updates on the latest developments in digital marketing at his Smart Insights Digital Marketing advice site. Dave is a recognised expert in digital marketing, listed in 2004 by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have shaped the future of Marketing. Dave is author of five best-selling business books including Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice and eMarketing eXcellence (with PR Smith). He is also author of the Econsultancy best practice guides to Search Engine Optimisation, Paid Search Marketing, Web site design and Managing Digital Channels. Dave also contributed the foreword to ClickThrough’s first two search engine marketing books.
Search engine marketers can now access far more hard data from Google Analytics after the API was opened up today. What this means to search engine marketers is being able to use the analytics data in far more creative ways, to integrate it with existing products to provide data for clients, and to create new applications or mashups that deliver data in more meaningful ways.
I think we will see a whole host of new data made available from case studies and so on over the coming months as search engine marketers exercise their coding skills to produce white label apps, dashboards and widgets.
Yahoo has announced that it will be launching a web analytics service, on a limited basis starting this week, primarily aimed at small business and e-commerce sites, but rolling out in to 2009 and beyond.
Considering Google’s ubiquity in the free web analytics space, Yahoo’s move could be seen to be brave, although they offer three reasons why their product is better than the competition.
Much more information about the service is available on the Yahoo Web Analytics beta site.
