Search Engine Marketing Pros

This is an advanced hack for Google Analytics. Unfortunately it won’t help you hack into your competitors’ accounts ;) but will help you export more data from Google Analytics pivoted tables.

This is not the same hack as the exporting more than 500 columns of data from any report. That one was one of the most annoying things I fixed (to be read hacked) long time back.

You’ll need:

- Firefox

- Live HTTP header (http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/)

What are we hacking?

We’ll make possible for the analyst in … Continue Reading » Google Analytics Hack – More Columns for Pivot Tables

What to test

Different types of promotions on the home page

What to measure

The CTR on your promotional sections (link, banners, etc)

Test Description

If you’re selling various products or services online, why don’t you take the advantage of personalization tactics? Not all visitors are interested in your Toyota deals, or the new plasma TVs; I am researching on cameras and since I’ve already been on your website before (I even have an account) and searched for Nikon cameras in the past, why are you still showing me the deals for anything else than my previous search term? Here’s the deal: next time … Continue Reading » Personalize Your Website Content for Higher Conversion Rates

Impression share report is one of the best sources to determine the health of your AdWords PPC campaigns and take proactive actions to optimize your AdWords PPC campaigns. You can use the impression share report to determine

1.    How well your campaigns are performing overall for the keywords you are advertising
2.    If you are losing opportunities to reach target market because of ‘Low advertising budget’ or ‘Low ranking & Low quality score’

The impression share report gives data across Google search, search partners and content network. When you are creating the report choose Ad Distribution and Ad Distribution with search partners. These … Continue Reading » Tips to Optimize AdWords PPC Campaigns Using Impression Share Report

For those of you who are too busy to optimize your campaigns manually, Google offers a useful tool to help you optimize your bids to get the most conversions out of your campaigns: Conversion Optimizer

To start off, let’s just review what Conversion Optimizer is, here’s Google’s definition:

The Conversion Optimizer is an AdWords feature that uses your AdWords Conversion Tracking data to get you more conversions at a lower cost. It optimizes your placement in each ad auction to avoid unprofitable clicks and gets you as many profitable clicks as possible.

How it works:

With the Conversion Optimizer, you bid using … Continue Reading » AdWords Conversion Optimizer Tips

Test Idea

Change the content/promotions on your landing page(s) based on the user’s search engine query.

Metrics to Measure

The bounce rate on control and variation pages (on control page there will be no content matching with the search, on variation you will match the search query and content).

Test Details

The beauty of online marketing is that you can analyze and measure the performance of the traffic your website is getting. You can identify and analyze down to the granular level, the keyword. You’ll know how each traffic segment (i.e. organic versus paid) is performing.

There is one technique only a few websites are implementing, … Continue Reading » Match Search Engine’s Search Query with Landing Page Content

Those of you who heard about this tag, raise your mouse :) How many? 5% only? Don’t worry, I actually think that less than 5% of the web developers are aware of this tag and I think that, in this case, ignorance is gold.

For me it’s been 5 years since I stopped using this tag. It gave me more headaches than any other html elements and the benefits were minimal.

Some developers asked me is if the base tag is the same with rel=”canonical”. The answer is NO. There’s huge difference actually. The former specifies the default URL to be used … Continue Reading » Base Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

What to test

This is not something optional. You don’t need to test this idea, you just install the tool and start analyzing everything. Then come up with hypotheses and test.

What to measure

Everything the analytics tool can give you: visits, visitors, top content, top landing pages, bounce rate, you name it

Why installing a web analytics tool

I hope that most of you already have a web analytics tool in place. For those of you who don’t, then you need to know that this is the first step you take to optimize your website. With free tools like Google Analytics there is no excuse for … Continue Reading » Have A Web Analytics Tool Installed on Your Website

Last week I started talking about what AdWords beginners should look out for when first setting up their campaigns and mentioned that targeting both search and display network is a very bad idea. This time, I will move on to another common mistake: targeting all countries & regions using a single campaign.

It’s logical to want to expose your ads to as many regions as possible, and by all means, you should do that. But the proper way of doing it is to target each region or country with separate campaigns. For example, if your target market is North America, it’s … Continue Reading » AdWords Tips for Beginners – Part 02

There is no doubt that AdWords (pay per click) has become a very popular advertising medium over the past few years. It’s easy to setup, manage, and track your performance. This advertising model fits business of all sizes ranging from national chains such as Best Buy to small business like my local music shop. But because AdWords is so accessible to everyone, it also tricks advertisers who are new to the system to think that they can easily manage the accounts on their own without putting in too much effort.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to talk about some … Continue Reading » AdWords Tips for Beginners – Part 01

This post describes a method to identify mismatches between the number of clicks on your AdWords ads and the number of visits you get to the websites. Ideally, for each 100 clicks on your ads you should get 100 visits to the website. However, this is not the case and there are more reasons for that: multiple clicks on your ads within 30 minutes from the same person, 301 redirects and mistakes and errors in Analytics/AdWords.

If you have a campaign that gets 1000 clicks but only 600 visits to the website, it is most likely that you have a problem, … Continue Reading » Identify AdWords Mistakes with Google Analytics Visualizer