Calculate AdWords ROI with Ad Slot Position Segments
Google AdWords provides a “quick and easy” way to get visitors to your site. Setting up campaigns are fairly easy and the learning curve is small. But maximizing your ad spend takes time, patience, and planning. One of the often-overlooked methods for measuring optimal AdWords campaign success is seeing which Ad Slots tend to be the most profitable. If your CPC is high and conversions are low, it may not be the wisest thing to open the flood gates and bid with the expectation of holding the top slot.
Setting Ad Slot Position in Advanced Segments
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It’s Official: Google’s Algorithm Factors in Site Speed
While rumors have floated around that Google was now considering site speed as one its ranking factors, Google finally christened the rumor with an announcement on its Webmaster Central Blog. They also list tools for helping assist those looking to boost the speed of their sites.
Using site speed in web search ranking
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
One way I’ve always tired to simplify Google’s ranking factors for friends and clients is to have them think of Google’s business model. Google’s dominance depends on its ability to return the most relevant results to its users. If users stop believing that Google is providing them with the most relevant results for their searches, they’ll go elsewhere (essentially what happened to Yahoo! in the late 90’s). It’s not hard to imagine why/how returning sites with extremely slow load times wouldn’t be so beneficial for Google.
A Big Deal
Often times, SEOs debate over what are really minute matters, and they spend time debunking the same myths over and over that very few SEOs believe anymore. But the core of SEO never really changes: Good content, and good linking (and the second one is largely dependent on the first). Most of what SEOs debate are in regards to factors within these two. How important is article syndication? Which link directories are still worth purchasing from and how do I get new/better links? How many instances of keywords can/should I add before I start to devalue the quality of my content? What ratio should I use for top domain linking vs deep linking?
What this does is give SEO a whole new factor to consider, and it’s hardly a minute detail. No doubt, a stronger market will now exist for people who can optimize site speed and designer/developers will be pressured more than ever to code in an organized manner.
Google Annotations: Track SEO & Marketing Initiatives
Google recently added the ability to annotations to Analytics. What this means is that you can now correlate trends with campaign implementations in Google Analytics (as opposed to having to cross-reference your trends in Analytics with whatever source yo typically use to keep track of these changes). What’s more is you can also share these changes with other users in the account.
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SEO Report Card - Google Grades itself
Google recently revealed an internal SEO Report Card, wherenby it grades its own product pages (whereby Analytics, AdaWords, Product Search, Profile, etc each count as a single product). While it doesn’t reveal anything new, it does reinforce the importance of several on-page factors (ie. Images ALT text and filenames, H1 tags) that some argue are not worth taking the time to implement. 301 Redirects and the Canonical Link Rel element also make appearances. Some of the scores are amazingly low and sometimes hilarious (ie. the ALT tags). I guess that’s what happens when your brand is strong enough to get away with a lot of bad SEO.
SEO/Marketing Blogs/Articles for 2010-03-08
SEO/Marketing Blogs/Articles for 2010-03-08
- Kill Useless Web Metrics: Apply The “Three Layers Of So What” Test (Wonkish) - Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
- Google Wrap Up: Above the Fold; Gesture Search - Marketing Vox
- Don’t Be Afraid of Negative Reviews - Marketing Vox
- Social Networking SEO Tips and Techniques - SEO Chat
- Keyword Difficulty vs. Size of Domain - SEO Chat
Spring Cleaning for those Analytics Profiles!
The ability to have multiple profiles in Analytics is extremely convenient. You can flip back and forth without having to switch accounts. And the ability to create duplicate profiles for the same domain name, gives you the option of viewing a site profile with a specific filter (for example; seeing only traffic that resulted from social media networks, seeing a profile that returns keyword information with actual search engine rankings, or treating email sign ups as keyword searches so as to track email addresses that are entered).
The problem of course is that the more profiles you add, the more sifting you may have to do in your drop downs. This can be especially annoying for fellow account users who also have admin access, but have no need to see the umpteen duplicate profiles you created. Perhaps the easiest way to make this work for everyone (keeping your duplicate profiles AND not bogging down other admin access users) is to make sure the main profile comes up first. Since Analytics automatically lists them alphabetically, this means making sure your main profile is alphabetically the first. In the sample below, we have some legacy profiles that are kept for archiving purposes in case we ever need historical information.
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6 SEO/Web Spy Tools to Research your Competitors
In a previous post, SEO Keyword Research - Choosing Keywords for SEO, I mentioned the ability to spy on your competitors for SEO ideas. I’d like to expand on that in this post. Below is a list of free tools that will give you insight into a competitor’s SEO status. Seeing which keywords your competitors are ranking or bidding on may give you a few ideas for your own campaign. These tools should help you make more informed decisions regarding your search engine marketing campaigns. Not being first in the game isn’t always a bad thing. You can skip the growing pains and trial and error of the first comers and put all your time and resources into proven methods. Seeing which other sites are being visited by visitors to your website (as well as your competitor’s) can provide expanded knowledge on who your competitors are.
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Website Alerts with Google Analytics Intelligence
Anyone who logs into Google Analytics frequently knows that Google’s been adding one new beta feature after another. One of these recent additions has really made life easier for keeping track of website metrics and catching potential problems right away.
Setting up Alerts with Intelligence
Intelligence allows you to set up custom daily, weekly, or monthly alerts which can be emailed to you. This saves you from having to log in to see these metrics (the more profiles you manage, the more grateful you’ll be for this). In the example below, I am creating an alert so that will send me an email if a day’s worth revenue falls below a certain point (Intelligence allows you to choose exact numbers of percentages).
SEO Keyword Research - Choosing Keywords for SEO
SEO Keyword Research
One of the most important aspects of SEO is the initial research. Many webmasters and marketers spend their time optimizing for keywords that are either virtually unattainable, or return little/no value for the effort put forth. It’s important to know where to invest your time and resources to get the most return from your investment. Like the old adage says; work smarter, not harder. So here are 5 Steps for choosing the right keywords. They will apply slightly differently based on your situation (ie. whether it’s your own website, a client’s, or an employer’s), so use the portions that work for your situation.
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Difference between Revenue & Product Revenue - Avoid Confusion
When working in a fast-paced environment where different reports are needed, one of the common ‘discrepancies’ occur when Total Revenue and Product Revenue are used interchangeably. The differences is simple (tax and shipping is included in Total Revenue, but not in Product Revenue). As trivial as this seems, this can cause a lot of confusion when dealing with multiple reports for multiple departments.
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