Raven – Facebook – Analytics

The excerpt below is from an seo tools review on SEOBook which is a recent and detailed look at the nuts and bolts of Raven Internet Marketing Tools. It provides an interesting perspective on using Raven with Facebook and Analytics:

Here are some of the features offered within Raven’s Facebook Tool:

• Deep Google Analytics integration
• White label reporting of Facebook metrics
• Automatic wall post scheduling
• Fan tracking, customizable by date range
• Monitor posts, comments, and likes

What I really like about the Facebook tool in Raven is that you can really synch up your analytics information and truly get a handle on what’s working and not working over defined periods of time.
The reason why I’m a big fan of the integration here is due to the fact that you are likely going to be using either Twitter or Facebook (or both) in your internet marketing campaign(s). So to have this data in one place and integrated, as well as using the deep metrics that the tools provide, amount to a set of game changing features with respect to Facebook campaign management.
Sometimes with all in one toolsets you see features like this get added and they are kind of watered down. This is not the case here, it’s one of the stronger Facebook management tools out there. If you are going to allocate resources to search and social then you need a way to accurately track the ROI of your campaigns and that’s exactly what you get with this tool. See the complete SEOBook article here about Raven Tools here

If you want to get search engine ranking profiles on all your competitors, on similar sites, and on your own site and to do it for FREE, take advantage of Raven Tools thirty day trial.

Raven SEO Tools Review: SEOBook is a post from: Your Online Business

Supercharge your internet marketing

Keyword Research

Using Raven to supercharge the keyword-content-keyword loop

Keyword research is the bedrock of effective search engine marketing, and is pretty much the first thing you do when setting up an internet marketing strategy. This article explains how you can use Raven’s keyword research management and ranking metrics to supercharge your marketing.

Raven has some useful keyword research tools, and the keyword manager really helps with the ongoing management of keywords but where it really excels is with the side-by-side comparison of search engine rankings for your site with any number of similar or competitor sites. This last feature is gold, and helps make Raven a top internet marketing tool. Use it properly, and watch your site climb up the rankings!

Before we go in to this, let’s get the basics in place.

Keyword Research Basics

SEO tools like Raven are just that – tools. They help with research and management, but they don’t do the strategic stuff. That’s up to you.

Here’s what we are trying to achieve with keyword research:

• Identify keywords that relate to our products and services, brands and locations.
• Obtain approximate ideas of competition levels and search frequency
• Develop keyword-driven content, search engine optimisation and marketing programs.

An Improved Strategy

But if we stopped and many do – we would be short-changing our whole strategy. If we just created a few pages on our website, and then focused all our attention on getting traffic to those pages, we are missing out on a major opportunity.

The trick is to set up a keyword-content-keyword loop, so that when create new content we then follow up with analytics and search engine ranking data to identify both our strengths and new marketing opportunities. We can then reinforce our strengths and pursue those opportunities through further appropriate content generation.

Raven Keyword Research Tools

Raven includes the following keyword tools in its arsenal:

• Research assistant
• SEMRush
• AdWords
• Wordtracker

Research assistant pulls data from SEMRush, SEOMoz, Google Adwords, and OpenCalais Alchemy API. It is the most comprehensive of the four tools, providing estimates of the number of results pages, search volume, cost per click and competition for a keyword.

If you were researching keywords for an existing website,you would also look at the web server logs, or Google Analytics, if installed, for the site. From here you can compile a list of non-branded keywords from organic search. This serves a number of functions:

• Determine which keywords the site might already rank for, and which should be included in your keyword list
• High converting keywords
• Provides base-line data for measuring the effectiveness of SEO. (We are trying to increase the number of non-branded keyword searches.)

Keyword Manager

This is global repository for all the keywords you have derived from the keyword research tools or from analysis of websites. Apart from showing the search volume for the keyword, it gives a running indication of advertiser competition, and keeps track of any links that use that keyword as anchor text.

The other thing you can do from the keyword manager is to allocate keywords to the SERP Tracker.

SERP Tracker

(SERP is short for search engine results pages)

SERP tracker show rankings for keywords on search engines and geographic locations you have selected. A really cool feature is ability to monitor rankings for the same keywords on competitors and high-ranking similar sites.

The results can be displayed side-by-side as below:

With SERP monitoring, we can identify opportunities and measure the effects of various seo initiatives.

So now you have an excellent base from which to kick off your business marketing strategy:

• A list of keywords in Keyword Manager and the ability to manage backlinks using those keywords as anchor text.
• Constant monitoring of search engine rankings across engines and websites of interest.

Supercharge with The Loop

Now that we have researched our keywords, and set up SERP monitoring, we can identify opportunities and measure the effects of various seo initiatives. For example if we were at position 12 for a particular keyword on Google, and that keyword has a high probability of good ROI and a high search frequency, we might decide to do a bit of work – perhaps just a few backlinks – just to push it onto page 1 of the SERPS.

Other opportunities might include a keyword that is ranking well in local but not in global search. This implies the site is already well optimised for the word, and once again, a little bit of focus could push this onto page 1 of global search.

The real power of The Loop is that you get reasonably quick feedback on your seo efforts, can focus on the productive areas, and watch your organic traffic go through the roof!

Related:
See also our Raven overview here Raven Tools Review

Raven Tools Review: Part 1 – Keyword Research is a post from: Your Online Business

Follow this checklist and swim in a bigger pond!

Planning Your Website

This is about setting your site up properly so that you can:

• Maximise your online profile
• Generate high converting  traffic
• Measure and tune your traffic and website for optimal sales

I am going to try and keep this as brief as possible, creating a simple checklist of the major areas you and your site designer should be aware of.

Your Business Website: 10 Point Checklist and Resources is a post from: Your Online Business

Feed on Your Competitors? Well maybe not literally, but you can leverage a lot of their hard work.

Feed on Your Competitors?

Well maybe not literally, but the right platform will put you at a competitive advantage!

Raven Tools are promoted as “A Powerful Internet Marketing Platform” and claim they’ll “help you work faster and smarter”.

In this series of posts, I will look in some detail at what Raven actually deliver and hopefully answer your questions such as:

• Do Raven Tools deliver value for money?
• Are they appropriate for your business?

I will also look at how you can use Raven Tools to gain a march on your competitors, and leverage all  their hard  work.

And yes. I am an affiliate for Raven Tools, but I feel comfortable promoting >them as use them myself. (I also feel comfortable pointing out their limitations.)

Value for Money?

I first started to really notice Raven a year or so ago. They were advertising heavily on webmasterradio.fm, and I was driving a tractor round in circles mowing the front block and listening to a few downloads. I guess their advertising worked, because I decided to give them a go!

This is a bit unusual for me as I don’t invest much in tools. I use spread sheets a fair bit to organise my SEO and PPC work, and many of the most important tools are free.

A good example is keyword research. Why spend money on keyword research when Google’s Keyword Tool is free? Same deal with traffic and conversion analysis and Google Analytics.

So do Raven Tools deliver value for money? What type of online business are they
appropriate for?  Do they add value in particular areas or do they just aggregate the data?

Here’s a list of the main functional areas Raven is designed  to help with:

• Keyword Research
• Competitor Research
• Assessing Website Quality and Design from an SEO perspective
• Content Management
• Link Research and Management
• Aggregating Social Media Management
• Monitoring Search Rankings
• Reporting, with white label option

The main idea is to provide a user interface that integrates these functions, so as to save time and keep everything organised.

Raven Tools workflow. If you work from left to right in the main menu items, and from left to right in the submenus, you get to tick the boxes on most areas of an Internet Marketing campaign.

I have some issues with the reporting side of things – at least as Raven promotes it – but I do think Raven Tools deliver real value.

There are plenty of tools available for the online business entrepreneur or consultant, and plenty of ways to spend money. So how do Raven Tools deliver value for money?

In short:

Raven provides a framework for your Internet marketing efforts.

Running effective marketing campaigns is hard. It requires an understanding of key areas such as market and competitor analysis, how to implement the right strategy and tactics for the market, how to keep up a consistent effort , and how to keep track of everything including links, content, social media, competitors etc etc.

Failure to manage your marketing effectively is as likely to cause the failure of an online business as poor selection of a product, or service.

Rather than trying to manage campaigns using a range of disparate tools and spread sheets, a set of integrated tools like Raven will help you move forward promoting your business online.

Most online businesses fail, so anything that keeps your business out of the failed side of the ledger has to be worth something.

Is Raven appropriate for your business?

Raven Tools provide two plans – Pro at $99 per month for indivduals and smaller agencies to Agency at $249 per month.

My personal view is that if you are serious about your business, then these sorts of prices are pretty small relative to other costs.

Even if you only have a single site to manage, having some serious intel on your competitors, the ongoing saga of managing links, keeping track of social media and your search rankings, all add up to major job.

Anything that can stream line all this and actually help make it happen has got to be worth serious consideration.

Raven Tools Limitations

Internet marketing is not just about tools, but it is how you use those tools that really counts

Raven Tools don’t do everything. There are parts of their reports that don’t add value to the way I work, and there is more to keyword research than just generating a whole bunch of lists.

One area I found to be weak was the report generator. Although the individual reports in each section of the Raven workflow were invaluable, the main reporting module – much touted as a white label solution for agencies – has limitations.

For example, if you were to do some analysis for a new client and simply print out the relevant report modules you would end up with a lot of data, and very little scope for summarising or editing the information. There is a WYSIWYG summary editor you can use prior to export in PDF mode, but this is pretty useless except for brief summaries.

Clients want you to provide insight and summary data – an overview – not just produce reams of canned data. I prefer to export the data in csv format, edit and summarise  where appropriate, and compile the report in my own report template.

Other Benefits

Another benefit from subscribing to a marketing framework like Raven, is that they have to do the work in establishing  an up-to-date view of the SEO and Internet Marketing world, which to some extent relieves YOU of the need to worry about it.

I would not overstate this, there are some significant areas – of keyword research and analytics for example –which are not really covered by Raven in much depth.

You still need to be learning about Internet Marketing, but I guess if you just follow the workflow implied by the Raven interface you will achieve a great deal in terms of marketing your business. And those who are new to the science will also learn a lot.

Summary

Raven Tools provide a great framework for managing the online marketing , imposing discipline and saving time.

Free trial

Check it out further

See also – Raven Tools for Keyword Research.

Raven Internet Marketing Tools is a post from: Your Online Business

Farm Beach, near Coffin Bay In SA. On the limits of mobile communications.

Lifestyle is a big motivation for many business owners.

For many, this means getting out in the sticks, where communications can be a challenge.

I know that for myself it means time at the beach at Coffin Bay, or sailing, or maybe heading up to Innamincka and the Channel Country. But, if it hits the fan, you need to be available, and I personally don’t feel comfortable if I’m offline for too long. The laptop always goes on holidays.

Having a wireless Internet connection helps a lot, but reception can be patchy, and it’s not helped by the dicky little antennas on those dicky little USB modems! They might be alright at the local cafe but they’re pretty useless in the bush.

Convenient - except where signal strength is poor.

Extend the range of your NextG phone and wireless Internet

I don’t have any affiliation with Telstra, but I reckon their wireless coverage for phone and data is the probably the best. This does not mean it’s in any way complete.

If you keep an eye on the coverage maps you can stay connected in some fairly out of the way places. For example, on the way to Innamincka in the north-east corner of SA, you can pick up Telstra’s mobile coverage near Moomba. But even relatively close to mobile phone towers, the topography can make for a weak signal. In fact, in regional Australia, if we look at the geograhic distribution of coverage, rather than population based, poor or non-existent mobile reception is the rule.

How would you like good wireless Internet coverage over 100km from the nearest mobile tower?
How about in areas where your hand-held mobile is scraping to pick up a single bar! Or maybe even zero bars!

For a major improvement in reception, use a Yagi antenna

The Yagi AY9-12 antenna pictured above is equipped with a mobile phone adapter. (Click above for larger image.)

A Yagi antenna is a type of high gain directional antenna. One of these will greatly improve NextG mobile and wireless Internet reception in areas where signal strength is very weak, or even non-existent at ground level. There are highly portable and relatively cheap versions that you can take on trips.

One that I have found that works very well is the AY9-12 supplied by RFshop. Its only about 40cm long and is very convenient on holidays. This antenna will work with your NextG mobile (if it has an antenna plug) and your NextG wireless Internet (if you use a BigPond Network gateway modem NOT a USB stick modem.) For the technically minded it has a gain of 11dB and a frequency range of 800 -960MHz. NextG is 850 MHz.

Most people don’t know about this type of external antenna, and it’s not well promoted by Telstra. Usually if you ask Telstra about an external antenna they talk about some pathetic little desktop item with a magnetic base! (Even though they do now seem to supply and support Yagi antennas to an extent.)

Yagi versus an Omni-directional antenna

Being directional, the Yagi produces around twice the gain. Great for weak signals. It also means that you can use a much longer coaxial cable, and get the antenna higher.

What you will need

You will need the following, in addition to your Telstra Mobile Broadband account:

1. A Yagi antenna such as the AY9-12 from RFShop with cable
2. An adapter to connect the  cable to the modem. *If you buy the AY9-12, you will also need  an AD-A3FME3  adapter.
3. Bigpond’s Network Gateway modem.

*SMA Plug (Male pin) to FME Plug (Male pin)

Here are the links for the antenna and adapter at RFShop. (I am not an affiliate of RFShop – but I will be asking them for a backlink!)

Here is the link for the Antenna

Here is the link for the Adapter

Setting up

I was going to call this section Installation but that’s probably too grandiose a term if you are camped out in the bush, with your Yagi up a tree!
All you have to do is connect the Yagi antenna cable to the Network Gateway using the adapter. You simply unscrew the small stick antenna marked Main on the modem, and connect the adapter here.

Network Gateway modem connected to the Yagi cable.

The antenna is installed horizontally and may be clamped to any structure.

You then need to get the Yagi roughly pointed at the nearest mobile tower and you’re away. If you need some elevation here are some options:

• Clamp it to an existing TV antenna support or other roof structure
• Clamp it to the roof rack of your Fourby (only when stationary in camp)
• Lash it to a branch of a convenient tree!
• etc

You can adjust the direction the Yagi is pointed in until you get maximum signal strength. If you don’t know the direction of the nearest tower, just point it (horizontally) through 360 degrees until you get a signal.

The Yagi will work well enough even if not accurately aligned.

On the beach near Point Sir Isaac. Amy likes to stay in touch when she's on holidays.

Costs and Practicality

The Yagi and adapter will set you back about $100. You may well have the BigPond Network Gateway modem/router already. If not you will have to get one from Telstra with a hard coded id unique to your account. You may also get it ‘free’ bundled with your wireless broadband account.

If you take the antenna on holidays you will have the additional modem and antenna to pack. The AY9-12 Yagi shown in this article is only about 40 cm long and doesn’t take up much space.

Installation is not particularly critical. I have often used one just lying on the table, or inside the cabin of a boat.

You will need a power supply for the modem. It is either 240V – from a standard power source or inverter – or you may be able to wire up a DC input (12V – 1.5A). (Don’t know much about the DC side – there is probably a right way and a wrong way to do this.)

Other Applications

I found out about the Yagi when I got sick of the latency issues with the satellite broadband that we used to have. We live outside the ADSL service area, and I figured that NextG broadband might work even though the signal was very weak outside, and non-existent inside my office.

Set up the antenna, and it worked like a charm. Full signal strength.

Anyone who uses wireless broadband at home or in the office and has reception problems should look at this option. Buildings – particularly those with with metal cladding – will attenuate your wireless communications. In this situation you will definitely benefit from installing an antenna like this.

BigPond Wireless Internet: How to Extend Your Range is a post from: Your Online Business

• The cost of ongoing development
• Speed and security
• Technical support
• Ability to keep up with a changing Internet landscape e.g. rise of social media, cloud computing, new services
• Your ability to directly manage the site and generate new content

In this article I will try to use some simple logic to reach conclusions about a preferred CMS (Content Management System), rather than getting too hung up over features and technical issues. I believe that technical decisions should be driven by business requirements rather than the other way around.

There are quite a few different CMSs out there, but simple business logic says to go with the main-stream ones that are well supported by active communities, have the largest installed base, and are under active development. This means WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

What are the main differentiating features of each of the three CMSs?

Until relatively recently WordPress was regarded as primarily a blogging platform, and mainly suited to the development of fairly simple websites. This is no longer the case. The development of sophisticated themes, and a vast array of plugins for SEO, social networking, PHP integration and just about anything else, mean that WordPress is now easily customizable right down to page or post level.

Importantly the latest version is also extremely easy to keep up to date, just click on the ‘Upgrade’ button that appears on the top of the dashboard whenever a new revision becomes available. (Backup first!)

Drupal is regarded as the best CMS for community style, membership sites. It is more complicated than WordPress, but easier to customize than Joomla. Like Joomla and WordPress there are hundreds of plugins and themes.

Joomla has an extensive list of plugins and themes, and a great support community.

Now here’s the point. WordPress has now leapt ahead of Drupal and Joomla in a number of significant areas. These are:

• Ease of upgrade, one click, this also helps with security
• Absolute ease of adding plugins and changing themes
• Rapid AGILE development
• Huge installed base means significant development momentum
• Previous difficulties with customization are no longer relevant owing to extensive plugins, sophisticated themes and PHP integration
• Very easy to add and maintain content

I would choose WordPress unless there are very specific reasons not to, if only for the additional security, huge support base, and ease of content management.

Ask your web developer which CMS they intend to use. It it’s not one of the ‘big three’ ask why. Web designers/developers sometimes go for lesser optioned CMSs to ‘keep it simple’ for their customers. If you are the customer, it is easy enough to learn how to manage content in WordPress, and you may as well have all the power of a mainstream CMS.

WordPress versus Drupal versus Joomla: and What You Should Ask Your Web Developer is a post from: Your Online Business

The short answer is no, but there is a strategy that will deliver quick traffic at reasonable cost and now is the best time to start. What’s more this strategy is totally complementary to your ongoing SEO. It will provide valuable insights into the most productive areas for content generation and back-linking.

More…

First, some background

SEO is a complex subject. Website rankings on SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) are affected by a wide variety of things, such as number and relevance of back-links, ranking of sites providing back-links, age of the domain, semantic structure of the site, metadata, download time, page content and more, but essentially these can be broken down into two areas; on-site SEO, and external SEO.

On-site SEO refers to things we can fix on the website. External SEO is mainly about providing back-links. On-site SEO has many elements that can be fixed quite quickly, such as correcting metadata and developing content that is well structured and relevant. External SEO involves the time consuming mid to long term process of developing back-links.

For this reason SEO is no quick fix. Even if we develop back-links quickly, search engines such as Google are not likely to deliver ‘credit’ in terms of higher SERPS rankings for sites that have obtained links ‘too quickly’. Google likes to see sites mature in popularity naturally.

Before we turn to our ‘quick fix’ traffic solution, there is one more issue we need to address.

SEO, For What?

When people promote SEO services for your website, do they actually understand your market? Do they know what search terms your site should be optimised for?  The short answer is almost certainly no.

Spending a bunch of money or time on SEO without knowing what to optimise for, is a waste. It is also counter-productive in that potentially lucrative areas can be missed.

But what about keyword research?

Tools like Wordtracker, or Google’s keyword tool are a great starting point for getting lists of keywords and getting an approximate idea of likely traffic levels. What they won’t tell you accurately, is which search terms (keywords) are most likely to convert into profitable traffic for your content niche and to sell your products or services.

The only way to find out the most profitable areas is to test.

Keyword research is a crucial starting point for developing an SEO strategy, but it needs to be further refined by real-world testing. Arguably the easiest and most cost-effective way to perform this testing, is to use pay-per-click. In Australia this means Google Adwords and/or Yahoo Search Marketing.

A properly structured pay-per-click campaign, combined with analytics such as Google Analytics, will provide accurate data including:

• Actual search frequencies on relevant keywords
• Conversion rates on keywords
• Competition
• Return on Investment

All of this will be invaluable in determining exactly which search terms will be the most productive for SEO.

And, you might even make a profit out if this testing!

So here is the sequence we recommend

In a nutshell:

1)     Do the keyword research

2)     Create initial website content and perform preliminary optimisation of metadata etc according to ‘best guess’

3)     Install Pay-per-Click campaigns and analytics

4)     Start basic back-link creation and social networking

5)     Tune on-site SEO according to results from pay-per-click

6)     Refine back-link creation focus according to high converting search terms

7)     Ongoing content creation and social networking

A major opportunity

In the past, search engine marketers tended to focus on Google Adwords rather than Bing and Yahoo Search Marketing. Managing pay-per-click campaigns can be time consuming, particularly where many different products or services are sold from the same site. When Yahoo and Bing were separate they did not contribute enough traffic to warrant the time.

But this is changing. Yahoo and Bing are merging globally. In Australia, a pay-per-click campaign with Yahoo Search Marketing is automatically run on Bing as well. While this is the case, Google Adwords has become progressively more expensive.

The fact is, Yahoo Search Marketing in Australia will deliver traffic considerably more cheaply than Google Adwords. This cheaper traffic can be invaluable for someone launching a new online business.

Need help?

If you would like help with implementing a strategy like this for your online business, please call or email us.  If we are not available immediately we will promise to get back to you promptly.

SEO and Quick Traffic? is a post from: Your Online Business

Blog based CMS systems are very popular, secure, fast and easy to manage and keep up-to-date. WordPress easily leads the pack with it’s huge installed base, , and this means that if you use WordPress for your site you will have not trouble at all in getting technical support, and a very wide range of plug-ins.

The Need for a Content Management System (CMS)

I have been building websites or project managing site development since 1995, and for most of this time the sites were all hand-coded. There were good reasons for this. HTML editors tend to create a lot of messy code, and were hopeless for complex tasks.

The other issue was content management. Once the site was developed the customers – particularly the less technically savvy – had big issues keeping their sites up to date.  ‘Web developer’ also seemed to mean ‘content manager’.  In an attempt to get around this, we built our own content management system (CMS). It was not unusual for web design firms to do this in the 90’s.

This labour intensive approach caused problems. It could take months to put together a large project. It was a struggle to meet deadlines, and costs could blow out. There were  issues with sites not being compatible with different browsers. Once the site was up, it was difficult for the customer to manage their own content. And so on.

The latest generation of CMS

What is needed is a solution that enables projects to go ahead quickly and cleanly. Developer and designer dollars should be spent on meeting the business needs of the customer, and coding specialised requirements that add value. Not grappling with technical issues. In addition, the customer should truly be able to manage their own content using a simple web interface.

In the last few years two or three CMS (Content Management Systems) have come to the fore. They are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. They are all open source, and they are all free. They all represent 1000’s of hours of community development and have numerous plug-ins and attachments.

So why WordPress?

Well Word Press started as a blogging platform, not a full-blown website management system. This means it is easy to use. Easy to post content, without having to worry about a whole lot of templating and other issues when creating a new post or page. It’s also naturally a great platform for discussion and social networking.

Now WordPress has grown way beyond its blogging ancestry. With a huge user base, large number of plug-ins, and some great templates – called Themes – more and more people are using it for full-blown site development.

You may prefer to use Drupal or Joomla for your site. That’s fine there are probably situations where they will be a better solution – such as complex magazine style layouts. But WordPress is easy to use and quick to develop with. It is well supported and easy to integrate with complex PHP applications.

Keeping it simple

In any case online business should be about business processes, not technology. The technology should be in the background. Open source solutions work and are well supported.

Tony Pfitzner

Why WordPress? is a post from: Your Online Business

And it’s easy to see why. Why spend  $1000’s when a decently configured search engine marketing campaign can deliver the goods at a fraction of the cost? You can combine some pay-per-click advertising with a few pages of well written, optimised, content for decent organic search rankings and achieve the same results. No top-heavy directory services required.

This doesn’t mean that the Yellow Pages should be completely discounted. There are still quite a few people who use the Big Yellow Door Stops, and some who use sensis.com.au, which includes Yellow Pages, White Pages, City Search etc.
A business should grab all the inbound website traffic it can.

It is just a question of price.

Thanks Jan – you forgot the Yellow Pages! is a post from: Your Online Business

See Part 1
6. Not split testing ads

One of the brilliant things about Adwords is our ability to get hard data on traffic from different keywords, including click-thru-rates and customer conversions. So why wouldn’t we try different ads on the same keywords to see which ones give the best results?

A lot of people don’t do this, so I guess they simply don’t understand the importance of the ad copy in achieving click-thrus and conversions. You could write a book on designing and writing good ads, but the very first and most important step is to have two ads in each ad group and to compare their relative performance. These differences could be minor differences of spelling, punctuation or capitalization. Or they could be major differences in the actual offer being made.

Two sets of ads - but with minor differences that could produce significantly different conversion rates.

So what’s split-testing?

To split-test two ads we simply let them run in competition with each other. Before we can do this we must set the campaign Ad serving setting to Rotate in Advanced Options. The default setting is Optimise. What this means is that Google will show the ads with the higher click thru rates more often. This might seem like common sense, but if you are trying to work out which ad is the best, it is quicker to run them both in rotation for a while until we get a winner. Then we drop the poorer performing ad, and create another one in competition with it. Possibly a clone, but with a minor modification. Just like natural selection.

How do we know which is the better ad?

We need to get enough clicks on each ad so that we can apply a test to see whether the differences in clicks are statistically significant. Sounds technical but it’s actually very easy.

All we need is the CTR (click-thru-rate) and number of clicks on two ads to compare them.

Take this data and use splittester.com to see if one ad is really better than the other.

7. Not having an appropriate landing page

It’s one thing getting traffic to our site, but another to get good conversions. These conversions could be actual sale, or sales leads though to our sales department, or sign-ups to a mailing list. Whatever they are, we will only get enough of them if our website is doing it’s job.

One common mistake is for people to dump all their traffic at their home page. This is equivalent to saying to the user “Here you are – go search.” But they thought they were doing at when they put their keywords into the search engine. Now they are into gratification, and you’d better provide it fast, or they’ll press the back button on the browser and you’ll lose them.

Ads should link to landing pages that closely match the ad content.

If the website has only one or two product or service offerings, then landing pages should be set up for each one. The landing pages should reflect as closely as possible the implicit offer in the ad.

It is also desirable to test different landing pages. This can be simple experimentation with placement of product images or it could be more complex multivariate testing. Google supports this with its Website Optimiser tool.

The big message here is that traffic is useless if your site won’t convert. When it comes to improving advertising ROI, start with the website. Get it right, and then start buying more traffic.

8. Not optimising bid prices.

Number one is the best position for my ad isn’t it?

Well maybe not.

To answer thus question we need to look at ROI – return on investment again. The real issue is that it can be disproportionately expensive to be number one. If we were to graph up the costs per click versus position

It would look something like this:

As an ad drops down the page, click costs drop disproportionately.

On top of this we find that although the rate of click – thrus will drop away as we drop down from the number one position, it does not do this in proportion to the bid price. Further, the conversion rate per click-thru actually is higher as we drop down the rankings.

This is probably because people who click on an ad further down the list have actually read the ad, rather than just click on the first thing they saw.

The upshot of all this is that it does not pay to be number one, unless you are in a market where you have lots of margin and the cost of Adwords is largely irrelevant to you.

Often a sweet spot exists around position 4 or 5. Here you are on the front page – this is highly desirable – but still reasonably close to the top. You’ll probably being paying about half as much for your clicks, and have traffic that will convert well.

9. Failure to set up separate campaigns for separate geographic areas.

If you are selling the same products and/or services into, say, Australia and the US, set up separate campaigns. There are many reasons for this including:

The US market is a lot bigger, and clicks will be differently priced.

Your competiton will be different, and you may use different ad copy.

Spelling may have minor differences.

You may even have different domain names. Americans are more likely to feel comfortable with a ‘.com’ domain than a ‘.au’.

They operate in different time zones, and you may choose to use day-parting i.e. bidding differently on keywords at different times of the day.

10. Using campaign budget to determine your total spend.

What Google suggests you do if you have a limited budget (and who doesn’t) is to control your total spend by setting a daily budget for each of your campaigns.

Sounds reasonable – but not the best strategy.

A better way to control your spend is to actually reduce your keyword bid prices .

This will mean your ad will drop down the page. You will get fewer clicks. But these things will also happen:

• Your ads will run all day, not just until the campaign budget is exceeded.
• Your traffic is more likely to convert, as people will have actually read your ad, rather than just ‘donkey clicking’ on the first link on the page.
• Conversion costs will drop.

It is important to understand that that there is a non-linear relationship between an ads rank on the search engine results page and the click-thru cost. (Explained in 8. above)

The only time when you need a number one ranking for your ad is when:

• There is little competition
• You have a high value product in a market you want to dominate, and the click-thru cost is of lower importance.

10 Common Adwords Mistakes – Part 2 is a post from: Your Online Business