Barry Hand - Google Adwords, Online Marketing & Web Analysis

Following on from the new beta graphing options, Google has also added hourly analysis of some key metrics.

The most important one being ‘Goals’, this now allows analysers to now view goal conversion rates on an hourly basis.

For those that also use Google Adwords, this is something which is hugely important, as Adwords does not show the hourly level of ‘conversions’, and makes it an no brainer to replicate the conversion process using Goals.

This option isn’t available on all metrics, but will prove very useful for doing any day parting advertising on PPC/Affiliate networks.

Last week, I was speaking at the seminar which covered Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics, one of the misconceptions that came up was that of the explanation of Organic v Paid Search.

It was black & whitely explained that websites listed organically were optimised, while paid listings were lazy & unoptimised!

Rather that the two methods competing with each other, I find they actually compliment, and I’d always recommend a PPC campaign to assist SEO.

Here’s my  5 reasons to utilise PPC & SEO

1. Wider Reach - PPC allows you to target searchers which may not be possible to do with SEO, as it’s impossible to optimise for every search term in every country.
2. Conversion Optimisation - PPC traffic allows you to control the landing page for search phrases, this is extremely useful when analysing your conversion process, you can test a page which is only available to your PPC visitors. Tools such as Googles Website Optimiser or Crazy Egg are great in this scenario, this can then feed back into your main website.
3. Brand Protection - with the recent changes to the trademark policy on Google Adwords, your competitors may be bidding on your trademarks. As you own the brand, you will most likely have a maximum quality score, with a minimum cost per click for those terms. It also allows you to correctly use the ‘Official Site‘ or Copyright / Trademark symbols in the ad text, increase click through rate and lower costs.
4. KeyWord Research - Currently the best keyword research tool for traffic in Ireland is either using googles keyword suggester, or creating an adwords campaign with exact/phrase match on a group of keywords and using reports to determine the search pattern. The keyword placement report in Adwords should should additional search terms that have triggered your ad. All this information can be used to feed back into your SEO efforts, as well as lower your PPC costs by looking closer at the long tail searches.
5. Instant Results - PPC can be turned on/off within minutes, and allows you to instantly get listed, while SEO results may take a long time, and even then may not get that coveted page 1 listing.

PPC advertising obviously isn’t for lazy websites, and in many cases is vital to creating a great web marketing strategy.

Google have responded to some feedback and have added some new graphing options.

The new Day - Week - Month trend lines make it easier to quickly see how your website is performing.

This is a godsend when producing management level reports, which are usually produced on a weekly or monthly basis, and allows top line reporting to visually indicate the site performance.

More information and screen shots available.