I first got involved with Internet retailing when I took a business development position out of business school with CDNow, who at that time was the second largest consumer retailer on the Internet after Amazon. It had recently gone public and was an iconic player in the early Internet retail scene. Through my biz dev dealings for CDNow, I became friends with other folks at leading eTailers...places like eToys and Reel.com. I became aware over time how bad the web-site analytics were at these major public companies, many of them trying to mine crude log files for information, and most of them doing it badly. Eventually great companies like Coremetrics and Omniture came along to address this problem, and created powerful platforms to track, measure and analyze visitor behavior on websites. But their clients have always been major online companies with lots of money to spend, and the small less-sophisticated online business still didn't have any easy and accessible solution for tracking and analyzing what went on on their websites.
Several years ago Google purchased a small web analytics firm named Urchin, and decided to make it free. Yes, free. But not only did they make it available to everybody, and with a staggeringly easy implementation, but the good folks at Google developed resources to make this free tool even better. Of all of Google's various business solutions, Analytics is the one that I have the most experience using (maybe tied with Adwords) and have used for the longest. It is simple and clean-enough for the smallest business owner with a website to use easily, as well as powerful and complex enough for a sophisticated Internet business to use. It is a fantastic tool that can really give you insight into your online business, particularly marketing, search engine optimization, and merchandising.
I'm planning on writing three specific blog pieces on Analytics coming up.
1) How Analytics Helps Your Search Engine Optimization
2) How Analytics Helps Your Marketing Efficiency
3) How Analytics Helps Your Merchandising Optimization (this is related to site design)
And did I mention that this tool is free?
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Adwords Campaign Structure
I've been hard at work setting up the Adwords campaign structure for our Native American Jewelry website, and I was reminded how critical it is to "properly" set up the structure of your campaign from the outset. For the uninitiated, you can set up multiple Campaigns in your account, and multiple Ad Groups under each campaign. In each Ad Group, you can set up multiple Ads that Google will rotate and test for you. You really need to get the structure right from the get-go or there will be a lot pain restructuring things later if you want to do things optimally. Here is Google's example for a basic structure.
It's important to think about your Adwords campaign structure along the lines of a basic classification system, with broad groupings at the campaign level (Electronics in the Google example) and more specific groupings at the Ad Group level (like VCRs, stereos, DVD players under the Electronics broad grouping). In my case with our Native American jewelry website, we have major product groups like Bracelets, Necklaces, Earrings, etc. Each is its own Campaign. Within each campaign I broke them down into sub-types for individual Ad Groups, sometimes along materials lines (like Turquoise Earrings), sometimes along style lines (like Cuff Bracelets). At these sub-type levels (each an Ad Group) is where you define your actual Ad Text. As we learned in our earlier blog from October 4th about the importance of customized Ad Text and targeted Landing Pages, being so granular and specific in your campaign structure will yield the most optimized marketing results.
There's more to talk about here, of course, but let's leave that for Comments or future musings.
It's important to think about your Adwords campaign structure along the lines of a basic classification system, with broad groupings at the campaign level (Electronics in the Google example) and more specific groupings at the Ad Group level (like VCRs, stereos, DVD players under the Electronics broad grouping). In my case with our Native American jewelry website, we have major product groups like Bracelets, Necklaces, Earrings, etc. Each is its own Campaign. Within each campaign I broke them down into sub-types for individual Ad Groups, sometimes along materials lines (like Turquoise Earrings), sometimes along style lines (like Cuff Bracelets). At these sub-type levels (each an Ad Group) is where you define your actual Ad Text. As we learned in our earlier blog from October 4th about the importance of customized Ad Text and targeted Landing Pages, being so granular and specific in your campaign structure will yield the most optimized marketing results.
There's more to talk about here, of course, but let's leave that for Comments or future musings.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Adwords Tips - Out of Google's Mouth
Last blog entry I went into detail about a couple of tips to improve your profitability with Adwords. If you are ready for some new material, here is a fantastic resource provided by Google themselves providing all sorts of great tips on how to most effectively use Adwords.
Let me know what your favorite tips from the article are in the comments below...
Let me know what your favorite tips from the article are in the comments below...
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Adwords Tip - Importance of Ad and Landing Page Copy
While I'll do a larger more in-depth treatment of Adwords shortly when we finish our own implementation for our Native American jewelry website, I was just reminded of a couple of extremely important factors in achieving Adwords success that I wanted to share with you in its own post.
Many advertisers new to Google Adwords assume that the highest ad placements goes to he who bids the most money (Price Per Click, or PPC). While the amount of your bid certainly impacts your placement, it is not the only thing, and there are a couple of things you can do to have greater success getting cost-efficient traffic out of Adwords. Both of these things impact your AdWords Quality Score which, along with the size of your PPC bid, builds the equation of where your ad will eventually be placed. While there are other things that impact your AdWords Quality Score, let's focus on these two top tips first:
1) Ad Title and Description - While it can be tedious, it is worth the effort to design custom ads for individual keyphrases. Many advertisers think that one ad is right for a whole bucket of related search terms, but this is not true. In our case for advertising for Native American jewelry, we'll create a separate ad for the search term cuff bracelets that reads something like "Cuff Bracelets" for the Ad Title and something like "Authentic Native American cuff bracelets, hand-made with high-quality silver, turquoise and other traditional gemstones" for the Ad Description. Studies have shown that ads with the searched-for keyphrase in the title have a significantly higher Click-Through Rate (CTR). One of the most important factors in building your Adwords Quality Score is your CTR, as Google would rather get $1 PPC with 5 clicks than a $2 PPC with only 2 clicks. Be careful though of "stuffing" the keyphrase too much into the Ad Description as Google does not always appreciate that (Google is very adept at punishing keyword-stuffers, whether we are talking about on-site SEO or via Adwords). So as a basic rule...stick the keyphrase into the Ad Title, but only put it again into the description if it makes sense in an organic fashion.
2) Specific Landing Pages with Original Content - Don't send all your traffic to your home-page, send traffic to specific pages that are connected to the associated keyphrases. The conversion of traffic is much higher if you can immediately get your potential customer to the content they are searching for, and they don't have to navigate through several layers of your site to find it. Google will note if people leave your site soon after arriving, since they haven't found the promised for information/product/service on the first landing page, and Google will downgrade your Quality Score as a result. Google will also note what content you have on your landing page for an ad, and if it is original content related to the keyphrase then Google will upgrade your Quality Score.
These are two basic tips to not only increase both your CTR and conversion from Google, but also to reduce your PPC at the same time as improving your ad position. Try these out, and once you've mastered these, hopefully I'll have a few more tips for you!
Many advertisers new to Google Adwords assume that the highest ad placements goes to he who bids the most money (Price Per Click, or PPC). While the amount of your bid certainly impacts your placement, it is not the only thing, and there are a couple of things you can do to have greater success getting cost-efficient traffic out of Adwords. Both of these things impact your AdWords Quality Score which, along with the size of your PPC bid, builds the equation of where your ad will eventually be placed. While there are other things that impact your AdWords Quality Score, let's focus on these two top tips first:
1) Ad Title and Description - While it can be tedious, it is worth the effort to design custom ads for individual keyphrases. Many advertisers think that one ad is right for a whole bucket of related search terms, but this is not true. In our case for advertising for Native American jewelry, we'll create a separate ad for the search term cuff bracelets that reads something like "Cuff Bracelets" for the Ad Title and something like "Authentic Native American cuff bracelets, hand-made with high-quality silver, turquoise and other traditional gemstones" for the Ad Description. Studies have shown that ads with the searched-for keyphrase in the title have a significantly higher Click-Through Rate (CTR). One of the most important factors in building your Adwords Quality Score is your CTR, as Google would rather get $1 PPC with 5 clicks than a $2 PPC with only 2 clicks. Be careful though of "stuffing" the keyphrase too much into the Ad Description as Google does not always appreciate that (Google is very adept at punishing keyword-stuffers, whether we are talking about on-site SEO or via Adwords). So as a basic rule...stick the keyphrase into the Ad Title, but only put it again into the description if it makes sense in an organic fashion.
2) Specific Landing Pages with Original Content - Don't send all your traffic to your home-page, send traffic to specific pages that are connected to the associated keyphrases. The conversion of traffic is much higher if you can immediately get your potential customer to the content they are searching for, and they don't have to navigate through several layers of your site to find it. Google will note if people leave your site soon after arriving, since they haven't found the promised for information/product/service on the first landing page, and Google will downgrade your Quality Score as a result. Google will also note what content you have on your landing page for an ad, and if it is original content related to the keyphrase then Google will upgrade your Quality Score.
These are two basic tips to not only increase both your CTR and conversion from Google, but also to reduce your PPC at the same time as improving your ad position. Try these out, and once you've mastered these, hopefully I'll have a few more tips for you!
Thursday, October 2, 2008
My Original Purpose Here
The seed idea for this blog stems from the thought that a small but savvy team (OK…me and my friend) could leverage the various web tools, services and solutions offered by Google to quickly launch and aggressively grow our web business in a streamlined cost-effective fashion. That's the business-speak of what we're doing - the simple truth is that Google now has a staggering array of online tools and services designed to help online businesses. Many of these tools and services are free of charge, and many of them enterprise-class in terms of their features and ability to give you real actionable insight into your business. We think that using and integrating these tools will give us a software and business platform that rivals those of much larger competitors, and in most cases considerably better in terms of features and cost-efficiency.
We think that Google helps the little guy both flatten out the competitive terrain and become more nimble navigating his way through it. And as the "little guy" ourselves, we plan to take full advantage of their assistance.
The format of this blog is going to be simple – it will be effectively a running diary as we integrate different Google platforms and solutions to get our site ready for launch (mid October...fingers crossed!), and then as we go through several optimization exercises once we get a significant amount of site and user behavior to analyze.
For instance, most of us are familiar with Google's powerful AdWords advertising platform that lets you get in front of staggering numbers of people looking into subjects related to your products and services. Pretty much everybody selling something on the Internet uses AdWords to reach their target customers. But does everybody know about how through using the amazing Google Analytics web traffic analysis platform, they can connect their behavior of visitors on their website to their AdWords campaigns and get further insight into what keyphrases are the most lucrative for them?
Anyway, I won't ramble here too long on how useful the different Google platforms can be…that's the point of the whole blog after all…so I'll just start off by telling you my intention is to explore them thoroughly on behalf on our own jewelry websites and to provide you with some digested thoughts on the implementation and utilization of these different tools to make for a more profitable business. Because, as we learned in that seminal Operations Management manual The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt (which I read in an Operational Management class at Wharton), the sole and final measure of operational success is profit. As such, I will constantly be trying to figure out how these different Google tools can help make you money. That is, after all, probably why you're here in the first place!
We think that Google helps the little guy both flatten out the competitive terrain and become more nimble navigating his way through it. And as the "little guy" ourselves, we plan to take full advantage of their assistance.
The format of this blog is going to be simple – it will be effectively a running diary as we integrate different Google platforms and solutions to get our site ready for launch (mid October...fingers crossed!), and then as we go through several optimization exercises once we get a significant amount of site and user behavior to analyze.
For instance, most of us are familiar with Google's powerful AdWords advertising platform that lets you get in front of staggering numbers of people looking into subjects related to your products and services. Pretty much everybody selling something on the Internet uses AdWords to reach their target customers. But does everybody know about how through using the amazing Google Analytics web traffic analysis platform, they can connect their behavior of visitors on their website to their AdWords campaigns and get further insight into what keyphrases are the most lucrative for them?
Anyway, I won't ramble here too long on how useful the different Google platforms can be…that's the point of the whole blog after all…so I'll just start off by telling you my intention is to explore them thoroughly on behalf on our own jewelry websites and to provide you with some digested thoughts on the implementation and utilization of these different tools to make for a more profitable business. Because, as we learned in that seminal Operations Management manual The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt (which I read in an Operational Management class at Wharton), the sole and final measure of operational success is profit. As such, I will constantly be trying to figure out how these different Google tools can help make you money. That is, after all, probably why you're here in the first place!
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