Want better information about where visitors to your site go, after they’ve clicked on your AdWords ads and reached your site? Google is now offering the ability to link your Google Analytics account to your AdWords account. 

The free Analytics tool is used to track website traffic. By integrating it with AdWords, a site will have access to Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit and Average Visit Duration columns right in the AdWords interface.

Disappointing Conversions?

Google notes that, even if you’re doing everything correctly — “you’re writing amazing ads, making just the right bids, and even honing in on your customers through location targeting or other advanced techniques” — and you’re getting a great clickthrough rate, you could be getting a disappointing number of purchases.

The technology giant points out that Analytics’ information can help a site owner determine at what point in the site customers are leaving, and what pages are helping to convert visitors into buying or take some other desired action.

Once Analytics is set to work with AdWords, Google suggests several ways to use the information. For instance, you can sort ad groups to find out which ones help deliver visitors who stay longer on the site — and then buy more ads like those. A site could also discover that certain ads or keywords have great engagement results but low conversion rates, and could compensate by adding coupons or discount codes or take other steps to increase the emphasis on calls-to-action.

Example Use Case

The Analytics data could also indicate which ads have badly matched landing pages for a specific ad or keyword, and a user could set up a filter to monitor that path and set up A/B testing for an alternative landing page.

To show the value of the Analytics/AdWords integration, Google gives the example use case of an online flower seller. One of his AdWords campaigns is built around birthday flowers, with one group of ads and keywords using the theme of “birthday bouquets,” and the other using “birthday flower arrangements.”

An analysis of clickthrough rates (CTR) shows that “bouquets” gets more clicks than “arrangements,” but, once the Bounce Rate column is added to the ad group report, it turns out that “bouquets” also has a higher Bounce Rate. In other words, the visitors through “bouquets” are not staying on the site to explore or buy. It turns out that “arrangements,” although its CTR is less, results in visitors who stay on the site longer.

Check out the new integration to see how it works for your company.

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Google will often release new updates to their advertiser policies, and as marketers, it’s important to stay up to date on these releases. It could mean the difference between successful paid search marketing and wasting your money.

Their newest release clarified the concept of “Advertiser Claims”.

What this policy does is prevent advertisers Continue reading →

CHICAGO, Oct. 19, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — Nine percent may not sound like much, but when tech giant Google is the company in question, a stock price decline of nine percent equals more than 20 billion dollars. That decline happened after Google accidentally released its third quarter earnings report several hours early – a report that showed a sizable falloff in revenue and profit. Wall Street being what it is, the response was immediate and profound.

The effects of this snafu will ripple beyond short-term share prices. Google will likely have to be less restrictive in its advertiser vetting process. The company may even offer incentives for previously banned advertisers to return to the platform. Prior to this latest sour earnings report, Google had been notoriously cavalier in its banning of “edgy” advertisers.

“Google has been killing businesses,” said Dave Chappelle, editor at Securebuzz.ca. “Business owners who’ve been spending thousands of dollars with Google AdWords one day receive a curt notification that their accounts have been suspended – and there’s no chance for appeal, or even explanation.”

Bestselling author and Google AdWords expert Perry Marshall (www.perrymarshall.com) sees a silver lining to all this restructuring and retooling. In a recent blog post, he explains why Google will have to reconsider its scorched-earth policy toward advertisers in health, diet and business opportunity niches.

“In the past, Google erred on the side of caution in terms of banning questionable AdWords accounts,” said Marshall. “In the wake of this smack-down from Wall Street, Google has to make tweaks to that philosophy. The system will have to be more discriminating, which means not banning every advertiser in an entire category simply because a few are bogus or fraudulent.

“Wall Street is a strange place; Google’s being punished for factors beyond its control. However, that could be good news for legitimate advertisers who have run afoul of the search giant in the past. If you’re an advertiser who has been dumped by Google, now is the time to see if you can get back on board.”

Marshall and Chappelle maintain their belief that Google AdWords is still the best platform for e-commerce and Internet advertising. The company’s lackluster earnings report is a bump in the road for Google, but for advertisers, it might just be an advantageous bump.

About Perry Marshall

Perry Marshall’s Chicago company, Perry S. Marshall Associates, consults both online and brick-and-mortar companies on generating sales leads, web traffic, and maximizing advertising results. At $1300 per hour he’s one of the world’s most expensive and sought-after marketing consultants. His top coaching groups have waiting lists, and many clients have engaged his services continuously for 10 years and more.

Marshall has published thousands of articles on sales, marketing and technology, and his works include The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords (Entrepreneur Press, 3nd Edition 2012), the world’s most popular book on Google advertising, and The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising (Entrepreneur Press, 2011). He is also author of Industrial Ethernet (ISA, 2nd Edition).

Entrepreneur Magazine says, “Perry Marshall is the #1 author and world’s most-quoted consultant on Google Advertising. He has helped over 100,000 advertisers save literally billions of dollars in AdWords stupidity tax.”

This press release was issued through eReleases

By Craig Barrett

Pay-per-click (PPC) is expensive and getting more costly by the day. So I find it surprising that many self-storage facility owners still aren’t taking advantage of remarketing in their AdWords accounts. If you’re not using remarketing, it’s time to add it into the mix. It’s as close to a “sure thing” as you are likely to get in the world of advertising.

What Is Remarketing?

Remarketing is simply the Google AdWords term for “retargeting.” In fact, you’ve probably seen this remarketed advertising already. Have you ever noticed that after looking at an item on Amazon, ads for it and similar products appear on every site you visit thereafter? It’s like being haunted by marketing ghosts! What youre seeing is retargeting, and it exists because very few purchases ever happen in the predictable, linear fashion we would like.

Consider it from your customer’s perspective. He might be looking at your website and thinking about a storage unit, but then gets distracted by a knock at the door. Or maybe he decides to wait until he’s completely packed before making a reservation. This is very frustrating for us as marketers because we spent a great deal of money on PPC, SEO efforts and other advertising to get that customer to our website in the first place.

That was a highly qualified customer, one who will probably end up renting storage because he nearly made a reservation. The worst-case scenario is you spent the PPC money, but Big Brand Storage’s familiar sign on the highway ends up getting the rental after you did all of the education.

But all is not lost! If we can find that visitor and get an ad in front of him later, on whatever website he happens to visit, then we might be able to save that rental. That’s the magic of retargeting: You get ad placements on other websites, limited to the view of a customer who already visited your website. This is the most targeted form of display advertising.

How Does It Work?

Remarketing is actually pretty simple, and thanks to Google AdWords, it’s no longer limited to companies with massive marketing budgets. Here’s how it works: When a visitor hits your website, a piece of code that you built into your website sends data to Google. This lets Google know this particular visitor was on your site. Then, later on, when Google sees this same visitor on another site where it controls ad space, it can select your ad and display it to that user. Pretty slick, huh?

In fact, depending on how sophisticated you want to get, you can actually make the advertising even more targeted. Remember how Amazon showed you the specific product you were looking at earlier? You can do the same thing if you have more than one facility. You can show the customer an ad just for the location he was viewing.

Again following rival Google’s lead, Bing Advertising is introducing the capability to specify different landing pages depending on the match type chosen.

The idea is that the change will enable more effective bid management, tracking and changes (pausing and resuming) of keywords at the match type level. This is the latest announcement Continue reading →