SEM & Digital Marketing Advice New Orleans, Louisiana | WSI

The Google AdWords program is the centerpiece of Google’s internet marketing product line.  Free to use and easy to setup, it affords advertisers anywhere in the world to generate targeted traffic to any web property they designate.

One of the main features that people like about AdWords is that it’s free.  But that’s also one of the pitfalls.  Since anyone can setup an account, and you don’t have to know what you are doing, it is very easy to throw away money with pay per click at an astonishingly fast pace.  So this begs the real question, what is the real value of Google AdWords?

Benefit #1 – Instant Visibility

AdWords offers website owners the chance to establish true validity, along with online awareness and marketability. Let’s say you just launched a new website and wanted to have it show up in front of potential customers immediately, AdWords is the single best tool for accomplishing this.  Advertisers also use pay per click to gain visibility for things like new products, announcements, special sales or offers, and similar items that they may not rank well for in organic listings.

Sample PPC (Pay Per Click) Ad

Benefit #2 – Traffic & Leads

The sexiest benefit of Google AdWords is that is can generate immediate traffic, which can potentially increase the number of leads your business is getting.  It’s not unusual for advertisers to earn good, valid business leads within a few hours of launching a campaign.

Benefit #3 – Benchmarking

Savvy marketers use AdWords to create performance benchmarks for their website.  Because you control your bids, you can monitor the performance of keywords and use that data to create long term SEO strategies that can turn your paid keywords into natural rankings.   As a form of pay-per-click advertising, Google AdWords is a vital component of any search engine-marketing endeavor.

Drawback #1 – Buyer Beware

As stated earlier, Google AdWords can be scary because while it looks simple, being good at it takes time and practice.  After all, why do you think they created a Google AdWords Certified Professional program in the first place?

For instance, the simple act of bidding and placement is more complex that it appears.  If you bid higher than the competition, logic tells you there is a good chance you will earn higher placement for ads and keywords. But this is not always the case, as Google has a “Quality Score” which is generated based on how well your keywords, ad and landing page perform.

Drawback #2 – Long Term Sustainability

The other issue with buying visibility is that once your budget runs out, your ads stop appearing.  So over the long term, it is very important to figure out the key metrics from AdWords to determine your actual ROI so you don’t keep paying for advertising that isn’t producing the results you need.

The secret to determining “real value” – Google Analytics

In order to determine the real cost of Google AdWords, you have to base your decision on the actual results and performance.  And the best way to do this is via Google Analytics.

With any successful online marketing campaign, web analytics plays a pivotal role. These statistics allow you to monitor daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly web traffic rates. At the same time, it displays the number of hits that were generated via precise keyword and key-phrase searches and links.

If a particular set of keywords is not attracting web visitors that are converting into customers, subscribers or whatever goals you set, it is time to make changes to the campaign settings. You also have to concentrate on the keywords that are working well, while generating several variations and synonyms as well.

You can learn more about Google Analytics in one of our previous posts.

You Determine the Real Value

According to Avinash Kaushik, who wrote the popular book, “Web Analytics”, Google AdWords is a cost-effective solution to online marketing. Along with strategic SEO and advertising techniques, companies can effectively showcase their brands and products to mass audiences.

The real cost of Google AdWords, however, depends on your situation.  If being on the first page of Google for targeted phrases is of value, than you should have no problem coming to your own conclusion!

The Google Analytics dashboard is one of the serious website owner’s most valuable tools.  Full of useful information and is hands down the best way to keep tabs on your internet marketing efforts.  This blog post will give you a first glance at the dashboard and consists of a step-by-step wizard that instructs you on how to begin analyzing traffic data on your website.

Getting Started – Sign Up

The first step that you will see, after logging into your Google Account, is the “sign up for Google Analytics” link. When you create your Google Analytics website dashboard within your Google account, you add the functions and services to your existing Google login. There is no charge for either a Google account or the Google Analytics service.

Step 2 – Install the Tracking Codes

The second step is to get and install the tracking code for your website(s). Google will ask you to enter your website data (URL, etc.), and will create a “tracking code” from that. This code should be placed within the <HEAD> </HEAD> section of your webpage. The code is invisible to visitors, but it places a “cookie” within the visitor’s browser that keeps track of your visitor’s activity while on your website.

If you are not sure about how to do this bit of programming, ask about our special offer to install Google Analytics for you.

Step 3 – Getting Familiar with the Dashboard

The third and final step in the Google Analytics process is to learn about your visitor’s browsing habits. After placing the code within your website’s header tag, the guest’s browsing activity while on your website will be recorded.  A few things you can learn include:

• The amount of time spent on the site
• Links visited within the site
• How many pages they looked at
• How they found your site

These are just a few of the important pieces of data you can learn from your dashboard, and will help you to gain a general understanding of a “trend” with user activity on your website. For example, if most of the visitors exit your website on a particular page within your site, you can analyze that particular page to see if there is a reason as to why the visitors leave your site after visiting that page.

Analyzing where customers leave before a purchase of a product on any retail site will show the store/website owner what they need to change on their website in order to keep the customers from leaving without purchasing their product.

Most Important Elements of Your Dashboard

While there are volumes of great materials written about the ins and outs of Google Analytics, I would like to point out what I believe are the most important, and practical aspects of the dashboard:

Traffic Sources

Your dashboard will tell you where your website traffic is coming from.  This is very important to understand how much of your traffic comes from each source, and how much (if at all) it changes over time.  The 3 major traffic sources are:

• Direct Traffic
• Traffic from Referring Sites
• Traffic from Search Engines (including keywords)

Visitor Info

Learning where your visitors come from, what they do on your site is vitally important.  A few things you can learn from this section are:

• The locality of web visitors
• How frequently they visit your site
• What type of browser (and mobile device) they used to find your site.

Goals

At the end of the day, having measurement in place to evaluate your website is critically important.  As such, you should configure goals for your website that you can track.  Potential goals include:

• Sign ups for newsletters or special offers
• Completed contact forms
• Purchase of online items
• Amount of time spent on the site

Regular Use of the Dashboard

After completing the initial steps, you will then login straight to your Google Analytics website dashboard from then on. Your website(s) will be displayed by URL, and you can click on that particular URL to see the traffic trends that have occurred on your site since your last visit to your Analytics account.

Analyzing the pages that your visitors enter your website and which pages that they leave your website are again, the most important sections of the dashboard. By looking at what page is the most popular entry page, you are able to tell that this page is more than likely the most SEO friendly, the most linked-to page from external sources, and also what the customer is looking for the most while visiting your website. For example, if most customers enter your website on the contact page, they are looking for a way to contact you more than anything else. If they were to enter on the products page, they are obviously looking for a product that your website sells, etc.

Glancing at the traffic trends for your website will tell you specific days of the week that your website has more visitors than others, the source of the visitor (how the visitor found your website), and how many visitors are repeat visitors/customers.

Overall, the Google Analytics website dashboard is more than likely the most simple, yet advanced, website analytics software to date. There are others such as AWStats, etc. – but Google Analytics is both platform-independent and free – which is always a plus.