It’s highly accessible and tempting for anyone to create a Google AdWords account and start spending some money on pay per click search engine advertising.  Unfortunately this easy access doesn’t translate to an ease in getting results.

The Details Matter
A successful Google AdWords campaign involves the right research, configuration and tracking to get you anywhere near the perceived pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

When done right, pay per click marketing produces a marketing formula of sorts, a map of numbers that lets you evaluate the investment it takes to land a conversion.  Depending on your business and website, this conversion might be an e-commerce sale, a specific download, visitors to a specific page or just getting users to your website.

While this post is just an overview, the following main items are key to a solid AdWords PPC campaign:

1. Research – You must understand your audience, the keyword terms they will be searching for.

2. Configuration – The correct set-up of an AdWords account, campaigns, settings, budgets and tracking tools are all key elements.

3. Copywriting – What your ad says matters! In many cases you will want to test different ads and text to see what performs best.

4. Landing Pages – The most overlooked item is landing pages. You need to understand that when a user clicks an ad, you have this small window to convert them. Sending your ad link to your home page is not going to cut it, take them right to the conversion point and make it easy for them to buy, download or contact you.

5. Evaluation – The ability to track and review data is one of PPC’s biggest assets. Having Google Analytics and your AdWords configured correctly to track each movement is a must. Without it, your flying blind.

6. Adjustments – The best campaigns are reviewed and assessed weekly and even daily. Just setting it up and letting it run is a bad idea.  You want evaluate and make decsions on the right adjustments to find your strongest results.

We hope this quick overview is helpful.  If you have been wanting to explore Google AdWords or have tried it the wrong way in the past, Five Technology is here to help you with the right strategy to get results.  Give us a holler!

I came across a blog post recently that stated web analytics should be called business analytics (sorry I forgot where!) and I couldn’t agree more. Yes, the tool is producing statistical information from your website, but it truly is providing stats, behaviors, strengths and weaknesses of your business.

I’m still amazed at the number of conversations where a business is asking for help in improving search engine rankings, but has no idea if they even have an analytic tool on their site measuring their current efforts. Wow. Businesses that have had a website for 10 years, but not one number to provide any measure of success or failure.

I can write on and on about how silly it is to IGNORE the valuable data a website statistic tool can put out, but let’s just look at these features and benefits if you’re on the path to correcting this for your website and business.

Analytics – Reasons & Tips to Start Now

1. There are many tools out there. Your web host likely has a basic one, Google Analytics is free and their are many forms of paid services and tools out there to get you started. Here is a big list of them.

2. Go past just the number of visitors and stop talking “hits”. Most tools have over 100 filters to begin with, but make sure you take a look at where you traffic is coming from, keywords used to reach you by search engines, the pages your users visit most, the pages users leave most and trends in click paths (what path users take moving on your site.)

3. Have more than one person tasked with viewing or reporting on your web statistics. Get it out in the open for questions and discussions with your staff. If you have a web provider, engage them in meetings on it.

4. You can advance quickly. Most analytic tools have so many features it’s unreal. Tracking just about everything you can imagine. With one of the tools we use, we can even track the  companies visiting and revisiting the website because I have tagged their IP addresses. (No , you can’t see what person, whew!)

5. You can track process. As I stated in mentioning click paths, you can see the most used routes and where users are getting lost. While this is VERY important with e-commerce sites, it also works for service oriented websites. You can build a funnel/path and track it so you can improve it.

So here is your plain English takeaway: Business Analytics are a voice, start listening to them. You obviously don’t ignore your financial data, sales data or employees performance, so don’t shut out your analytics! Listen to them, they’ll tell you great things to help your business succeed.

+ If you need help, of course we’re here for you.

The importance of having a content management system (CMS) integrated within your website has never been more important. The value of an “alive” website with fresh content, SEO value and a scalable platform are just some of the many reasons an organization seeks out a CMS they can utilize to manage and grow their website.

Content Strategy & Web Usability Sharpen The Tool
The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently was the focus of a press release by their CMS and Analytics provider citing a 50% increase in site traffic in the 6 months the tools been integrated. The story also highlighted how StarTribune.com became the top newspaper website in the country for visitor length of stay, which is very impressive.

I couldn’t help but see the true reason for the increases further into the press release though, not so much the specific tools, although the abilities they game them are a factor, it was this:

“Through the integration, editorial staff members increased interlinking within pages to Related and Most Popular stories to augment site visitor stay time. These improvements in viewership have resulted in higher ad rates and a dramatic increase in annual revenue for the StarTribune.”

The tool gave them the ability, but it was having a strategy with their content and making it more user friendly that truly drove their increase. By interlinking from story to story based on relation and popularity, StarTribune.com began to give users more of a path to follow. In turn the users went further down the path. More related information, more links, more insight into what others are reading turned into more time on their site.

So in a simple format, here are the goals and what lead to making them.

Website Goals:

• Land new visitors
• Increase repeat visitors (by making them happy)
• Increase length of stay and page views
• Increase ad impressions and ad values from above items

Web Content Strategy:

• Easy to update content with CMS
• Use analytics to understand the users and content
• Link internally to related & popular stories to keep users interested
• Increase page views & visit length (which increases ad impressions)

With educating and enabling their editors to keep visitors interested by engaging basic content strategy and usability they accomplished their goal. They stopped just adding content and started optimizing it with a strategy.

I often head down this same path with our web clients. We build all of our websites on our content management solution, the Site Management Console but the tool alone is nothing without the right content structure and strategy. Having a purpose and following the right guidelines when adding and editing content can make all the difference.

It’s a great start to have the right tools, but it’s even better to have a strategy on how best to use them.

I’ll just qualify post this as a bit of a rant right off the bat. Cheap hosting is killing small businesses by tricking them into thinking that their $5 or $10 is such a good deal, they don’t need to do anything else online. I have had meetings with numerous small businesses that basically brag on how cheap their hosting is. However, not one of them brags about how much business, leads or sales their website is bringing in. Do you see the correlation?

Hosting a website, at least the disk space and bandwidth is becoming almost free from many large providers. But only hosting your website will get you few results in today’s Internet marketplace. With millions of new pages hitting the web every day, you need additional Internet marketing services, tools and strategies to stand out online.

Here are just some of the additional website marketing services you should be looking into adding to your monthly fees of having a website:

• SEO – Organic search engine optimization can move you up the search ranks and produce traffic
• PPC – Pay-per-click advertising allows you to target terms, specific areas and even track it’s performance
• Email Marketing – Using permission based email marketing to stay in front of your customers is a must due to it’s cost effectiveness and ability to be tracked. It takes just pennies!
• Analytics – Your website can report to you just about everything going on with it. Data is king, leverage it!
• Business Blogging – Roll out new content, increase SEO, establish expertise, connect with customers and build a following.

Here at Five, we will never have a $10 monthly hosting fee or anywhere near that. We offer a monthly managed service that combines web hosting with a content management tool, web analytics (stats), support and basic SEO. From there we have further marketing services to customize what is best for our clients. It’s not our interest in hosting 10,000 websites that move little business, we’re into quality websites that make a difference to their owners.

Thanks for allowing me to rant.

Thanks to Jason in our office for sending me this link, I was made aware of Woopra. Watch the video embedded below.

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

Woopra is a new robust web-tracking & analytics tool. Currently in BETA, it’s mainly targeted for small to medium websites. Watching the video above you’ll see that it allows real-time stats in a fabulous interface, pushing some extensive data on the users visiting and moving around your site. Woopra features also include real-time chat with your visitors, visitor tagging and activity search. Small e-commerce websites should be lining up to get a version of this.

The killer part? Woopra would like to provide their service for FREE. The bad news is that while they figure out how to properly scale it, you need an invite to put it to use. A service like this will obviously spark some privacy issues, but I think that’s always a good thing for discussion sake. For those of you begging for more data and visibility into your websites performance, this seems like a winner.

I’ll keep you posted (so you should subscribe) on this web analytics tool being available to the masses for sure.