How to Track Your Website Performance

Hello People!

Maybe some of you know already that Google offers a great tool for measuring your website traffic success – Google Analytics. Go to www.google.com/analytics, set up an account, add a special script to the web pages you want to track and start a great adventure of monitoring your website performance.

Google Analytics gives you handy reports on the following issues:

1. Content Analysis
2. Visitors Analysis
3. Traffic Sources
4. Goal Conversion

Among these tools you will find an answer to every question regarding your website performance. I would recommend that you create monthly reports in Excel spreadsheets, for example, which will enable you to compare the results over time. I suggest that you monitor especially these criteria:

Visits
Page Views
Pages/Visit
Avg. Time on Site
Bounce Rate
% New Visits
Goal Conversions

Hope this piece helps and wish you all see the nubmers grow!

How to Get More Returning Visitors

Updated Content

To attract your first time visitors to come back and to keep coming back, you must always have what to offer: nobody will keep returning to see the same pages all the time.

Involving Your Visitors

If you want people to come more often, I would recommend involving them somehow in parts of your website: this could be an online discussion forum, blog, or just simple option to post a comment.

Create a Membership Club

Another option of involving visitors into happening on your website, is to invite them to your membership club, this could be as simple as just sending them a monthly online newsletter.

Good Navigation

Having a good navigation is also important to the indexing of your web pages. There is nothing worse than arriving at a website and having difficulty understanding where to go for the information you are seeking. Have easy to use, clearly marked navigation so that your visitors click through instead of click-away in frustration.

In-site Cross Linking

Get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines by implementing your sitemap. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s) or product (s).

Web Site Design

This is also important, if you want to get indexed. Text content should outweigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of today's leading edge browsers. Rather stay away from Frames, Flash, Javascript, Image Maps, and Dynamic URLs, search engines dislike them all a lot.

One prudent tool to use is the “alt” attribute of pictures on your site. You simply describe the pictures and these descriptions can include your keywords.

Increase Your Page Rank

Hello People,

Hope things are going well for you and that you enjoy this weeks' post.

Linking strategies to Increase Your Page Ranking

As determined by the number, quality and type of linked pages, most search engines don't even consider websites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to these sites. Links from other popular websites back to your website are one way of increasing your site's popularity. Finding websites with similar content (but not your competitors) and high link popularity, then trading links to be posted on each site, is one way of increasing your site popularity.

Is it good to submit your website to the search engines?

The answer to this question is generally positive. If you do not submit your website to the main search engines, it may take ages (literally several months) to get listed. On the other hand, some website submitting providers overdo this and it can generate negative results.

Therefore I would recommend the following proven Online Search Engine Marketing Program: http://www.submitnet.net/. After setting up an account, the program will submit your website to various search engines at once (including Google and Yahoo!, of course), and then resubmit it on a monthly basis. Apart from that, there are many useful tools which will check your meta tags, website content and compatibility for browsers. The program is even able to manage your PPC campaigns from one source, when you pay for the service.

It is essential that when using Submitnet, you have already optimised your website using the information gained from PPC and Google Analytics reports. Run Submitnet reports and update your website accordingly. The tutorial will help you with all the steps you need to take.

How to Combine SEO with Your PPC Campaigns

Hello People,

First of all, I want to show off a little - I've become a Qualified Google Advertising Professional. So if you need any help with your Google Adwords, you can contact me as a professional now and I will improve your Google Adwords account performance. Visiting 3R's website you can learn more on how to Beat Google Adwords with 3R Google Adwords Campaign Management.

For this week, the question is How to Combine SEO with Your PPC Campaigns.

Well, it is not that difficult – having run and tracked your PPC campaigns for some time, you will easily find out which keywords are performing the best for you. In the next stage, you will simply include these keywords in your website more often and try to create content more relevant to these keywords. Best performing keywords should be in your meta tags as well.

You might ask how to know whether a keyword performs well or not. There are various indicators of this and you might decide which to follow. However, we recommend using them in the following priority order:

1. The most important, something you probably want most to get from your SEO and PPC campaigns, is a high number of conversions. A conversion is when a visitor clicks on any page of your website you choose and set as a conversion goal. Usually, these pages are those which show after a visitor bought something, or signed up for your newsletter.

2. Another one successful performance indicator is click-through rate (CTR).

3. Apart from the above mentioned, you should also control your costs per click (CPC). Google Adwords campaign costs are partly based on CTR of your particular keywords – the higher CTR you achieve, the less you pay for a click. So if you want to save your budget, make sure your keywords match to your ads.

4. Impressions are another measure you can see in your PPC stats. They tell you how many times your ad has been displayed. However, when you get high impressions without sufficient number of clicks, your CTR decreases and you pay more for every click. I definitely would not recommend using impressions as a positive criterion of assessing your keyword performance.

How to Track Your Google Adwords Campaign

Track your keywords

Providing that your keywords fall below the 0.5% CTR for the first 1000 impressions, they will get disabled. That is the first reason you need to track your keywords performance and modify them regularly. Remember, change your words around, use new keyword matching options, try out different capitalisation and spelling variations, use singular or plural versions as well as different punctuation and grammar tenses…

You can decide if you want to receive daily, weekly or monthly Google Adwords reports.

Google can also create your personalised report in only five minutes. Click on the tab “Report“ => “Create a report now”. You can create a report to track the performance of your keywords, text ad, image ad, URL, ad group, campaign and account.

In order to save money, you can delete the keywords that do not convert into sales from your list. It is also recommended that you “peel” those keywords that get low CTR and “stick” them to a new campaign or ad group with an ad specifically targetting them.

To finish, don’t be obsessed by getting the first position. The first position enables you to get more clicks, but not necessarily to get a high conversion sale. Why? Because clickers who aim at purchasing something will take time to look down the page. In contrast, users who just want to take a quick tour will click on the first ad.

Track your ad

Making tiny changes to your ad can have a strong impact on your CTR. Keep changing your ads around regularly. After few weeks, you will be able to detect your best performing keywords. Use them to rework on your ads. Your ad should include your best keywords. On the same way, if you detect bad keywords, delete them from your ad.

Google gives you a separate CTR and CPC for each ad so you can track their results separately:

Track your sales conversion

Google has a built-in "conversion tracking" tool that's linked to AdWords. You put their code in the "success" page on your site and along with your CTR statistics, Google will give the percentage of visitors who opt in or buy in your weekly, monthly or daily report.

Create Your Adwords Account and Your Campaign

Hello People!

Having read the previous parts of my blog, now it is time to set up your account. Go to http://www.adwords.google.com/ and follow these steps:

1. Click the “Start Now” button and sign up the form for the “Standard Edition”. Choose your target language and location.

2. Now create your first ad. Its role is to generate traffic on your website; therefore it must attract people’s attention. You have to motivate people to click on it. You must be concise, accurate and clear for you have restricted space. Be careful, characters include spaces as well. Here is the structure of ads in Google Adwords:

Headline (max.25 characters)
Description line 1 (max. 35 characters)
Description line 2 (max. 35 characters)
Display URL (max. 35 characters)
Destination URL (max. 1024 characters)

This way of creating ads is recommended by most Google Adwords experts:
Always include your exact keywords in the title of your ad. If searchers see the keywords they entered in the title of the ad, they will likely click on it.

The first description line should contain your most important benefits to grab people’s attention and to force them to take action.
The second line should list features – what exactly people get after clicking on the ad. Moreover, I suggest to put a call to action to this line.
The display URL can be used as well – after your domain address you can put anything.
Your home page may not necessarily be the best one for all your ads so your URL destination address should mirror the content and purpose of your ad.

Before starting to write your ad and your description, just have a look on these useful tips:

1. Get inside the customer’s head. What are your customers looking for? What do they expect?


2. As you have limited text space, avoid terms like “a”, “the”, “of”, “at”…


3. Use words like “new”, “free”, “limited offer”, “discount” to attract clickers.


4. Avoid superlatives like “the best product...”, “the most wonderful …” or “the top of…” It is too basic and not pertinent.

3. Now enter the keywords list that you have created with Chapter #3 of this ebook. Notice that with Google Adwords, you have the possibility to format your keywords with the four types of keyword matching options:

Broad matching: for example => marketing consultant. Your ad appears each time users search on these keywords, whatever the order or the other search terms.

Phrase matching: for example => “marketing consultant”. Your ad appears if the keywords are all present in the right order, regardless of other search terms.

Exact matching: for example => [marketing consultant]. Your ad only appears if the keywords are all present in the right order and no other terms are searched for.

Negative matching: for example => -manufacturing (use the “minus” character). Your ad for “marketing consultant” only appears if the word “manufacturing“ does not appear in the search query together with “marketing consultant”.

By using these matching options, you should be able to produce well-targeted results. Google also gives you the possibility to block your ads showing for searches conducted by people from certain countries or people who speak a certain language.

4. Next step is to decide on your daily budget. Choose the budget which fits to your resources.

5. Place your bid as well. Your bid price is your maximum bid price, which means you will not necessarily pay that all the time. You will only pay 1 cent more that the competitor under you.

Google will suggest you a bid amount, however it is not compulsory to follow up their suggestion. Just place the bid that you can afford. To find the most relevant bid, use the traffic estimator by clicking “Estimate Search Traffic”: it will give you some idea on the amount of clicks you can expect per day, the position of your ads among the others and how much you will be spending.

I would recommend you to place higher bids at the beginning. That will help you to generate traffic on your website rapidly and therefore to figure out which ads work and which ones don’t.

6. Enter your email address and your password. Afterwards you will be sent a validation email. Log into your new Google account. You just have to enter your credit card details and your campaign will be running!

7. If you wish to add a new campaign, log into your Google account and click “Create New Campaign”. Then you will just have to follow the steps that we have just detailed below.

The good strategy is to run two ads against one another in a campaign. After few weeks, delete the one with the lower CTR and write a new one to replace it. Google will automatically alternate your ads according to their CTR.

To create a new ad, just click the link “Create ad Variation”. Enter your new ad, and then click “Save new ad”. Google will alternate your different ads throughout the day.

Repeat the keyword in both the ad title and ad description to improve your chances for a click.

Pay per Click Campaigns

Hello People!

Today I will write about an amazingly effective advertising tool where you pay only when people actually see your website. In this issue I will concentrate on Google Adwords as Google has majority in the search industry these days.

What is it all about?

To support and enhance your SEO, the three biggest search engines offer an opportunity of pay-per-click advertising. This is a special form of online campaigns where you pay just when people click on your ad so that they are directed to your webpage. Your ads will be shown always your campaign keywords are looked for in the search engine, however, you do not pay for these impressions, you pay just for the clicks your ads receive.

Google Adwords Fundamentals

Launched in 1998, the Google Adwords Program is now the leader in the pay-per-click search engine industry. Contrary to its competitors, Google doesn’t list ads by only considering your bid or Cost-Per-Click (CPC). Google also checks if your clickthrough rate (CTR) is high:

Number of clicks your ad received
CTR =
Number of times your ad is shown (impressions)

High CTR = 1/20 = 5.50 %

Low CTR = 1/2000 = 0.05 %

It means that with traditional pay-per-click search engines, you have to bid more than your competitors if you want to get ranked first. With Google, you also have to get a higher CTR as your position is determined by multiplying your CTR by your CPC: Position = CTR × CPC.

In few words, it doesn’t matter how often your ad appears and how much you pay. The key thing is that people have to click on your ad. Therefore your key phrase or keywords have to be relevant to the search. If your keywords achieve at least 1.5 % CTR, it means that they are relevant.

Google Account Structure

It is important to understand the structure of your Google Adwords account when creating particular Google Adwords campaigns. Namely there are three levels in your account, as you can see here:

Your Account - Campaign - Ad Group Ad(s) Keywords

The first one, Your Account – there you have set your email address, password and billing information. Within each Campaign, there are particular settings common for all its Ad Groups, such as the daily budget, geographic and language targetting, distribution preferences and end dates. On the third level you create ad variations and keyword groups which are stated just for that Ad Group.

Other Google Adwords fundamentals you need to know to run your campaign successfully:

1. Only the top 8 ads are shown on the first page.

2. You must achieve at least a 0.5% CRT to maintain your campaign active.