Just a recap on the last meeting. Roughtly 20-25 people showed up and enjoyed a social night of Webmaster related talk. This is a good opportunity to meet others in your industry and make some industry contacts. Don’t be shy, you don’t need a tie. Come along and have some fun!

What: Irish Webmaster Meet Up

When: Saturday the 9th of August 2008

Where: Harbourmaster Dublin

Time: 7pm - 8pm (however this is still subject to change) - check back.

Here is the thread on the Irish Webmaster Forums so you can follow up on the progress and discussion. If your not a member yet. Sign up its a great little community.

What is Hittail?

Well to quote their website.

“HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as writing suggestions that, when used as the topic of new site content or blog posts, can boost the natural search results of your site. It’s that simple.”

Perhaps a more clear explanation would be, that Hittail helps you discover unique search queries that are generally less competitive, but almost always more targeted to your product or service. This is important because less competitive terms are far cheaper to bid on from a Pay Per Click perspective, but also easier to rank highly for in terms of search engine optimisation.

What are long tail keywords?

The main difference between normal keywords and long tail keywords is that long tail often appears more like a sentance. Here are some examples of long tail keywords:

1. Where to buy sunglasses in Dublin?
2. What are the bus times in New York?
3. Cool places to visit in Dubai
4. Are long tail keywords cheaper to bid on?

As you can see they are quite long, but they are often in the form of a question. Obviously people like to ask Google questions as if it were a oracle of knowledge (which it is, lets face it).

How are these different from normal keywords?

Well if you haven’t done any search engine marketing before, most people often try to achieve top status in the search engines for terms that are one, two or three words long at most. This is because there is often a larger amount of traffic to be obtained from these sources. The problem is, most of your competitors are often seeking to be found under the same term making it harder to achieve a top 10 ranking on the desired search engine.

How do I discover long tail keywords?

There are a few ways you can do this. Traditionally many scoure their Analytics (like Google Analytics) package for unique keywords. Often this involves a manual process of exporting these keywords and then reimporting them into your Google Adwords account.

Hittail, helps make the transition easier by allowing you to directly import them from your Hittail account, directly into your Adwords account. This can help you reduce duplicated keywords in your account. Which is important as this can cause issues with relation to your ranking and visibility.

How do I use Hittail?

Just like any analytics package you need to install a small Javascript snippet at the bottom of your HTML page source. Unlike an analytics package however, the weight (or size in kb) of the file is quite small so it shouldn’t be an issue from a page load time performance perspective.

Full instructions can be found on their website, so I won’t go into that here.

Another nice feature I found was the ability to easily see what keywords you were found for and from what search engine. If you are bidding on terms internationally, say in different countries this could be really useful. In the attached screen shot you can see google with different domain GTLD (Global Top Level Domains).

You can also see the long list of keywords obtained over a short period of time in this view.

Summary

In summary, Hittail is probably most useful for those in the search engine marketing industry. Particularly those in the Adwords management field as this will save you a load of time discovering and optimising accounts. If anything, I have discovered that many people are searching for travel related phrases, which has inspired me to continue blogging about my travel and I have also found a lot of people arrived on my site, while searching for content management system related questions. Again something else I’ll try and focus on in future.

So if your looking to expand your keyword list or find more targeted traffic to drive to your website. Hittail could be a useful tool for you. Anything that can save you a few dollars in online advertising spend is a good thing to me.

First of all if you are currently not using web analytics on your website I strongly suggest you do, as it will help you understand more about your website visitors and what they are doing and perhaps not doing on your website. What if your not selling online? That’s fine, because not all conversions are strictly an online transaction.

You can get Google Analytics for Free here.

What are Goals?

In their simplest form a goal is a desirable outcome on your website. It can be a simple objective such as the view of a key page, or it can be a more complex one such as making it to your “thank you for your purchase page” after completing a series of other tasks in your checkout process (a funnel, which we will get to later).

Why should I use Goals?

Goals can tell you a lot about where your visitors have been and what they were doing before they reached the desired outcome on your website. You can see what pages they were looking at before or what sequence of pages lead to a conversion / goal. You could also determine what keyword’s they typed into a search engine such as Google, before reaching your goal page. There are many reasons, but possibly the most important reason to use goals is to monitor and improve. You can’t know if you are improving your website with design changes, or with online or offline marketing activities if you haven’t set any goals.

A Preview Of Goals

Looking at the graph above, you will note a couple of things. First of all there is not dollar value associated with this goal. In the case of the website these stats are from, this is fine as its a hobby site for enthusiasts of a certain make and model car. It is not a profit driven website. I unfortunately do not know of a dynamic way to set a goal value in analytics. By dynamic, I mean setting a value automatically, if this was a shopping cart “thank you” page, you would want to insert the total sale value as your goal value. As far as I know you cannot do this with Analytics, it is a fixed value. You can however do this with Google Adwords conversion tracking code (another topic for another day).

If you wish to set a goal value, I would suggest doing so using an average sale value or a conservative value. Don’t use the most expensive product on your site’s value if you care about accurate figures.

Conversion Rates, Low, High, Bad, Good?

The second thing you will notice in the graph above is your conversion rate. In this case its a low and sad value of 0.25%. Many in the industry may balk and say, that’s extremely low. They may be right, but before you judge conversion rates, remember certain industries will have higher conversion rates.

Likewise different products, goals or outcomes on your website will have different conversion rates. If you run an electronics website you may find Ipod’s have a high conversion rate, while flat screen TV’s have a low conversion rate. Reasons for this could include:

• The description and information on each product.
• The number of detailed photo’s you have included (how well do products with no photo’s convert?)
• The price of the item, have you compared it to your competitor sites?
• Your return policy on TV’s as oppose to an Ipod
• Postage costs
• Other Customer Reviews of that product

What influences conversions? What days are best for conversions?

From the graph above you can also see a daily snapshot over the last 30 days of Goals. You can see one one day I had up to 4 goals reached. Did I do anything special on this day? Digging into the report further I could probably determine if they came from the same source. I might find that someone mentioned my website on another forum or discussion board on that particular day. As a result users of that particular site decided to join up to my website also. As I’m working with relatively low numbers its hard to show any patterns, but perhaps on another site with more traffic and more conversions we might see some important patterns emerge.

As a final note on this graph, the goal I’m measuring is user registrations.

Learning from my existing Goals

So now I have an understanding of my goals, how do I learn more about them and find the interesting bits? I’m glad you asked, lets dig further. First lets look at a simple way to filter my website visitors.
Geographically:

As you can see a majority of my visits are in Australia. Not surprising given that its an Australian based website. However I do have a large portion of visits perhaps 1/4 of which are from other regions around the globe. They are less likely to register on the site, but they are still free to do so. This could be one reason why conversion rates are low.

Lets learn some more.

Reverse Goal Path

Reversing goal path, allows us to see what page the user was on before they carried out the desired action (goal). Its a little more complex to understand, but stay with me here.

If you look at the image above you will note two >> greater than symbols. In the case of the above you will see 7 conversions during this period when people previously viewed the / or home page of my site. That’s not surprising really given that there is a register button my site on the home page. What is interesting though is that many registered after viewing some articles I put together on members cars. What I found surprising though was that quite a few originated from my About Us and Contact Us pages. This has prompted me to consider making some changes to these pages and possibly including a couple of links on those pages to the registration page of the site. (I’ll cover improving conversions at the end of this article.)

Keywords from Search That Resulted in a Goal

Perhaps the most juicy bit of information is finding out what keywords convert best. That is keywords or terms users put into a search engine that resulted in them registering on my site. For the record my site does not use Google Adwords for traffic as it is a non-profit website and relies heavily on search traffic and third party referrals.

If I was to run a Google Adwords campaign, these are the keywords I would most likely use in my campaign.

Top Referring Websites and Goals

Now I’ll learn who were the best referring websites for Goals or user registrations on my website. This is good because you will learn who your friends on the internet are.

Looking at the graph you can see a couple of websites sent visitors who registered. One is a website I submitted my website to a long time ago, in order to build up links and page rank to the site. The added benefit is that it helped to increase my registered users. On some sites you may have a huge number of goals reached by a referrer, this could be an ideal opportunity to get in contact with the owner of that website and further improve your conversions, by either placing an advertising banner on that site, or perhaps asking to be featured in a more prominent position of that site, like the home page for example.

How would I improve my Goal conversions?

If I wanted to improve my goals, in my case it would be user registrations there are several things I could do. I want to stress again this is a hobby site and only part time attended to, so these changes may not happen for a while, if all all.
Checklist for improving goals / conversions

• User Feedback
• Usability and User Testing
• Accessibility
• Website Design

User Feedback is Powerful

I have received several emails from users asking how to join my car club / website. They often expect a membership fee or don’t know that they can register on the forum. To rectify this I could place a more prominent feature on the home page, or I could write something on the about us page to try and explain the registration process.

Usability Testing

Usability testing can help you unlock potential problems users are having on your website. A common problem with owning a website is that you become used to it and some of the quirks involved. You might know how to achieve certain outcomes on your site, but new users could be lost. User testing is important. Accessibility can also form part of usability.

Web Design

Your design can often have a big impact on desired action of your website. A good way to see what stands out on your page or goal page is to step back about 2 meters from the screen and look at your website. Look for the parts that stand out or are easy to read at a distance. Chances are this is what alot of first time users see (only!).

Current Design

Here is the current design of the site. You can see the register button is highlighted by a blue circle around it in the top left side.

Revised Design

Here is a suggested change to the registration process. To perhaps improve conversion rates. You can see I mentioned the magic word FREE. I also put a nice large button on the page so you can clearly see it. It stands out more than before.

Summary

In summary a goal or multiple goals can provide you with the information you need to help improve your website. You can see just from looking at the data I’ve acquired at the high level, I have already come up with a design change that could help improve conversion rates. I also know what are the best keywords that have resulted in user sign up’s and I can also see the best referring websites for conversion rates.

Setting up goals are quite easy, once you have Analytics installed. If you haven’t defined goals on your website yet. Consider doing it sooner than later, you never know what you’ll discover.

Recently on the Irish web master forums there was a question regarding web browser usage in Ireland. After having looked for data and not being able to find much, (except for this article, which is a few years old) I decided to share some data provided by some major Irish websites. You could assume that other markets will provide this information, however as we will see different markets can vary greatly.

This can be due to the demographic market, technology in the region and technology adaptation rates. As an example the W3C Schools Browser Statistics shows a high market share for Firefox, however as mentioned in the foot notes of the page, this is more than likely due to the demographic visiting the W3C pages. It is relatively safe to assume that Internet Explorer has a large stake of browser share for users on most websites.

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of web design is screen resolution. Currently this is only been tracked on one of the websites I got these results from, however its a relatively simple metric that shouldn’t vary too much across websites.

Screen resolution

1. 1024×768 41.60%
2. 1280×800 25.40%
3. 1280×1024 13.40%
4. 1440×900 5.40%
5. 800×600 3.30%
6. Rest 10.50%

So lets take a look at some of the user stats in Ireland, first we will look at a Dublin event guide website which receives a decent amount of traffic on a daily basis.

www.indublin.ie - Accepts Cookies

• Accepts Cookies - 93%
• Not Accepting Cookies - 7%

www.menupages.ie - Accepts Cookies

• Accepts Cookies - 90.8%
• Not Accepting Cookies - 9.2%

www.cbg.ie - Accepts Cookies

• Accepts Cookies - 94.7%
• Not Accepting Cookies - 5.3%

www.modifiedmotors.ie - Accepts Cookies

• Accepts Cookies - 97%
• Not Accepting Cookies - 3%

www.indublin.ie - Javascript On / Off

• Javascript On - 96.8%
• Javascript Off - 3.2%

www.menupages.ie - Javascript On / Off

• Javascript On - 95.1%
• Javascript Off - 4.9%

www.cbg.ie - Javascript On / Off

• Javascript On - 91.8%
• Javascript Off - 8.2%

www.modifiedmotors.ie - Javascript On / Off

• Javascript On - 99.3%
• Javascript Off - 0.7%

www.indublin.ie - Browser By Version

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 38.30%
2. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 33.70%
3. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 14.50%
4. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.13 2.70%
5. Mozilla 1.8.1.11 1.40%
6. Rest 9.40%

www.menupages.ie - Browser By Version

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 42.30%
2. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 36.40%
3. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 10.80%
4. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.13 2.10%
5. Safari 5.23.12.2 1.20%
6. Rest 7.10%

www.cbg.ie - Browser By Version

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 48.60%
2. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 33.40%
3. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 9.90%
4. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.13 1.70%
5. Netscape 4.0 0.70%
6. Rest 5.70%

www.modifiedmotors.ie - Browser By Version

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 54.00%
2. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 29.10%
3. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 9.20%
4. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.13 2.00%
5. Opera 8.01 0.90%
6. Rest 4.80%

Summary

What’s interesting here is that Netscape 4.0 still appeared in the top 5 of browsers used on Car Buyers Guide. I thought this browser was well and truly dead, but it seems like that’s not the case. So perhaps hiding styles from Netscape 4 is still a good idea if you are targeting the largest audience possible.

In terms of demographics I believe the websites above cover a majority of them. Modified Motors for example covers the younger age group. Generally 16-30 year old males, however the site also attracts young females interested in modelling work. MenuPages appeals to everyone interested in Dining out, however it does have a strong 50/50 male / female userbase. Generally I’d say it wouldn’t appeal too much among younger users, as fast food is generally part of their diet :). (Hey I was young and naive once too).

Car Buyers Guide appeals to anyone looking to buy or sell a car, which would generally be anyone over the legal age to acquire a license. Not being from Ireland I’m not sure of the legal age?

What’s also slightly varied across the sites is the use of Javascript and Cookies. If you plan to implement AJAX based user functionality. You should plan to implement a fall back mechanism to handle those users who don’t have javascript enabled. Its a pain (I know), but it should be done as part of any web development project.

Cookie adoptation rates can also affect your tracking or web analytics package. Generally a cookie is used to track a user throughout your website. This can have an affect on your order tracking and conversion tracking. Generally 3rd party cookies are rejected more frequently and many web stats packages use these. Just something to keep in mind.

Finally although the data above indicates a major share of browser market by Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0, its important to keep in mind that many visitors originated from other standards compliant devices and in some cases blackberry devices and other portable browsers. Standards based design is the best way to ensure your message reaches all users, regardless of browser or operating system. Many designers who comply to these standards will display a W3C logo.

I hope you enjoyed the article and as always feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try and respond as soon as possible.

So you have established you want to get more involved online. You may already have a website, you may not. Don’t worry if you haven’t because sometimes its best to get search engine marketing advice on a website concept, before its built. In fact it usually works out cheaper this way, this is because the website is structured correctly the first time around, not the second! So who do you seek for advice?

Search / Website Marketing Agency Pro’s

1. Experience Across A Diverse Selection of Websites and Industries
2. Generally cheaper than hiring an in house Search Engine Marketing Person
3. Usually works within a team of other knowledgeable experts
4. Will usually have access to industry tools (some of them expensive) that help with your marketing efforts
5. Agencies usually have people who can also manage Pay Per Click Campaigns and Experts with Web Analytics

Search / Website Marketing Agency Con’s

1. Usually has more than 1 client to look after and work with
2. Generally pays most attention to the loudest client or client with the most money
3. Is somtimes limited as to what they can do for your website. (They may not have direct access to it) or they might only offer consulting and cannot implement changes on your website.
4. Depending on your budget - An agency might not be able to provide you with a full solution - rather a cut down version

Ok so that last point is a little moot, but it does happen. Sometimes its just not possible to provide a complete solution because a client just doesn’t have the budget for one. Of course if this is the case, you probably are not looking for a full time person to take care of your online marketing anyway.

In House Search / Website Marketing Pro’s

1. Full time dedicated to your website(s)
2. Can sometimes have more influence over changes made to your website
3. Can be more cost effective if you run large marketing campaigns
4. Alway accessible to discuss issues / reports and other website activity

In House Search / Website Marketing Con’s

1. Can be more expensive than hiring an external agency
2. May not be experiences with large websites with lots of content
3. May not be experienced with search engine marketing in your industry or niche
4. Might lack expensive tools and may not be up to date with latest industry trends - due to keeping busy on your project

As you can see there are several pro’s and con’s to each. Are you still confused as to what may suit you? That’s ok consider the following issues with an in house seo

• Paying a Salary of € 40,000 + in the Irish Market (I think this is the minimum good seo’s should be on in Ireland)
• Sick and Holiday Leave
• Any additional hidden costs with hiring someone
• The cost of hiring someone who isn’t up to scratch (rehiring later)
• How many websites do you manage or want them to manage?

From what I wrote above you may be thinking I’m against hiring an in house search marketing person. That’s not quite true. It really depends on your website and what its worth to you. It also depends on if you have multiple sites you need managed. It can also depend on the individual and their qualifications.

In house professional check list

1. Experience optimising websites - Get them to show you results for previous clients or websites
2. Understanding of Pay Per Click Marketing using Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or other engines
3. An understanding of web analytics - Will help with your efforts online in general
4. An understanding of marketing in general
5. Understands basic XHTML and CSS (Very Important!)
6. Some programming knowledge either php / aspx / perl / cold fusion / ruby on rails etc..
7. Experience using ethical search engine marketing techniques

Its an extensive list, but not one out of reach for those in the industry for a couple of years. A good interview question would be:
What do you look at when optimising a website?
If they have difficulty explaining that one, they probably won’t be that great at search engine marketing.

Selecting an Agency Checklist

1. Can you list some previous clients you obtained good results for?
2. Check their ranking for terms such as “Online Marketing” , ” search engine optimisation” etc.. If they are not ranking for those terms, ask them which ones they appear highest for or which ones they are doing well for that are competitive terms. Shorter terms are harder to rank for: “Website Marketing” is harder to rank for than ” Website Marketing Dublin, Ireland”
3. Ask them about what methods they will use to help you rank higher. If they are particularly secretive if might be best to give them a miss. In particular ask them how they will get more incoming links to your website.
4. Ask them why you should choose them over their competitors. What is their selling point?

Summary

To summarize, selecting an agency is probably a better idea if you are just starting out in online marketing. Its a great way to test the waters and get your toes wet so to speak. If you see potential in your industry and are getting good results, but your agency can’t help you expand further, either due to budget or time constraints. It might be good to look at a full time search engine marketing expert. Really serious campaigns require great care and nurture and involve ALOT of hard work. Regular reporting and tracking your campaigns will become extremely important to help determine what is and is not working. You may find an agency can’t dedicate the time you need spent on your websites. If that’s the case it might pay to start looking to hire someone.

I hope that helps some of you confused out there. As always feel free to contact me, should you have any questions and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible.

To start with the website is currently running wordpress. Which is an extremely good blogging platform and relatively easy to customise its looks and feel. I say relatively because you need to be able to get your head around some php code. If you have designed a template for a CMS system before it might not be too hard. I was lucky enough to have already created a template or two for Joomla, which is probably somewhat more difficult to do than wordpress.

The wordpress documentation for creating a layout is quite good, but in all honesty I actually found it alot simpler to follow the wordpress designer’s tutorial. If you are somewhat more technically inclined it may appear a bit basic at the beginning, this for me is no big deal because it gets to the core of the task pretty quickly. Its always nice when someone explains something in layman’s terms.

I deviated slightly from the tutorial myself and went with XHTML strict instead of transitional. Since wordpress is extremely standards friendly you can pretty much avoid all tables being used for layouts. Let me just say that many people think tables are not XHTML friendly, but in fact this is not the case. Tables can be used for tabular data on a website (such as race results at the local track), they should not be used for layout and design if you use the XHTML strict markup.

I am also considering releasing the template for gavindoolan.com to the public, obviously slightly varied with a different logo, but if you are interested in the design or would like to have a copy of the theme, please leave a comment and I’ll try and get back to you. If there is enough demand I’ll release a similar version for public use.

Finally feel free to run the website through the w3c validation service, it should validate perfectly to XHTML strict. Also the CSS validates perfectly too :).

Primarily after reading the article you will know:

• What it is
• Why you should use pay per click marketing
• How it works
• How to begin using Adwords
• How to measure results
• What the Google Adwords learning centre is
• How to avoid common mistakes made by new users

What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

Essentially as it sounds pay per click advertising is where you pay X amount of money for each visitor (click) through to your website. In an ideal situation you can get visitors for as low as $0.01 cent and the upper limit really is the sky. Your listing will appear when and where you chose. These days there is a great level of control you can have over when and where your listings appear, but for the sake of brevity and keeping it simple we won’t go into that here.

As you can see the ads are in the areas highlighted in red. These are also known as sponsored links. You have no doubt seen this several times viewing websites on the web. This is important for several reasons, but primarily its important because it shows you can appear on the first page of results. The results pages are often referred to by those in the industry as SERPS or search engine results pages.

There have been many independent research studies that show a majority of visits to websites are generated by links appearing in the top 10 results or on the first page. This brings us to our next topic.

Why should I use Pay Per Click Marketing?

Using Pay Per Click marketing is an excellent way to start bringing more visitors to your website, in fact it can be almost instant. This is particularly useful if your website is relatively new or if you are not showing in the first couple of pages of results (search engine results). If you are selling your products online this is a great way to start making sales from your website.

Perhaps one of the most important things to remember here is that unlike traditional media advertising such as television, radio, leaflets or free giveaways, all of which are often referred to as push marketing techniques. Pay per click advertising also known as pull marketing targets people who are actively seeking your product and or service.

This way you don’t waste money trying to target people who are not interested in your product or service. In fact there are many techniques to ensure you only appeal to those who are your target market. You can for example exclude certain visitors depending on the time of day, or you can exclude people looking for Free products or services.

You can customise your message!

You can customise the message users see in Google’s results page. This is good because you can provide users with a call to action (give them a goal to reach before visiting your site). A call to action could be &quote; buy it now! ” or &quote; learn more! ” or “contact us”. You can pre-program your visitors to carry out specific actions when they get to your site. You can also give users a reason to visit you over your competitors.

Use your bragging rights such as:

• Cheapest rates in town!
• In business since 1920
• Dublin’s Oldest Hostel

So how does pay per click marketing work?

Explaining all the ins and outs of pay per click marketing here would be beyond the scope of an introduction. In fact as you will see later on there is an entire learning centre dedicated to helping you with running a pay per click campaign.

At the simplest level you research keywords and keyphrases that you feel relate to your website. A keyword /keyphrase is a word or two or more words put together to form a search query. Lets say you are looking for &quote;cheap accommodation in dublin” that search query is your keyphrase. You can select as many or little as you like.

You can also select the type of match you wish to associate with a keyword / keyphrase. This is extremely important because sometimes we might only want to visitors to come to our website for combinations of words we assume will result in sales, inquiries or whatever the goal of your business is.

Lets take a quick look at the various match types available.

1. Broad Match
2. “Phrase Match”
3. [Exact Match]
4. -Negative Match
5. There is one more for the record -[Embedded Match] but we can ignore this for now.

Lets look at the term dublin accommodation and see how it applies with the following match options.

Broad Match

Your listing will display for many combinations including reversing the order of the words. Here is a short list of possibilities. Remember there are many more combinations.

1. accommodation dublin
2. accommodation county dublin
3. budget accommodation in dublin
4. low price accommodation in and around dublin
5. hostel accommodation dublin

Basically you can appear with any term or search query that uses the words “dublin” and “accommodation”.

Phrase Match

Phrase match means you will only appear if the words are typed in a specific order and with no other words in between them. Here are some examples.

1. dublin accommodation
2. cheap dublin accommodation
3. dublin accommodation near temple bar

Exact Match

An exact match means your listing will only appear if a word or words are typed into a search engine query in a specific order and only those words. That means nothing before or after can be included in the term. This is a good way to exclude visitors you do not want. Say those looking for free or cheap related specifics.

1. dublin accommodation

Negative Match

Negative match is another way to exclude certain visitors without having to include every combination of exact match you can find. Another words you may wish to use a broad match for dublin accommodation, but you may wish to still exclude the cheap, budget and free related visitors.
To do this you just include a hyphen in front of the term or terms.

1. -cheap
2. -budget
3. -free

Embedded Match

As I mentioned above we need not worry too much about this one. I myself have used it a total of 1 time when managing accounts for many clients. To keep it simple we can ignore it for now, its good to know it exists though. You can read more about match types here in the learning centre.

How do I get started?

Getting started is relatively easy. First you will need a Google account, if you already have a gmail account you won’t need to stat a new one. If you don’t you can sign up here Google Adwords Sign Up. You can use two payment options (as of this writing). Direct debit and Credit Card. I would recommend credit card as direct debit can take a few days to clear which means your ads won’t run if you run out of money. This is no good if you are making sales and want your listing appearing every day and every hour.

Google makes it relatively simple to get started. You can create a couple of different account types. You can create a starter account or standard account. The problem with a starter account however is that you can only see limited functions. It is intended to not overwhelm you with too much at once. The limited functionality though can mean you don’t get the performance you were after before starting. For this reason I’d recommend going through the learning centre basics before getting started.

Note: You should be prepared to spend at least 30 mins a day looking at your account and monitoring its performance. It is also a good idea to view the account throughout the day, this will let you see when and where your money is getting spent.

How do I measure results from Pay Per Click Marketing?

This is a very good question and unfortunately many businesses jump right in and do not measure results. It is important to monitor your websites visitors and how they use your website. This can be done by using what’s known as Web Analytics. Several years ago these were prohibitively expensive for most small businesses but luckily Google now provides us with a free webstats program called Google Analytics. Installation can require some assistance from your web master / designer or whoever looks after your website.

You can set up some really great features using Web Analytics, but that is another topic for another time. For now you should try and keep track of sales, inquiries, user activity on your website. Compare this with when you are not running your Pay Per Click campaigns to see the difference. Remember to start small with your account and as you increase the size of your account and spend see if the results continue to improve.

There are many forms of measurement you can implement but this is a more advanced topic for another post. For now just remember you can measure almost anything if you do the right research and spent time setting it up.

What is the Google Adwords Learning Centre?

The Google Adwords learning centre is an excellent resource for understanding the concepts behind Pay Per Click marketing and more specifically how it applies to Google. All topics are explained in detail and you can take mini quiz’s as you go to ensure you are understanding the concepts. Once you have covered all the material and feel you have a good understanding of the material. You can apply to sit the Google Adwords exam.

This will assist you with obtaining Google Adwords Qualified Status. You will also need to meet a minimum spend requirement as set by Google and this amount will depend on your locality.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

To summarise our brief introduction, I’ll leave you with some dot points to help you avoid common mistakes made by Google Adwords beginners.

1. Start Small - Test the waters first. Don’t spend large amounts of money straight up. Get a feel for how the system works.
2. Measure from the start - Measure your campaign from the beginning. This is really really important. This will let you know how and where you are spending your money, as well as what’s working now and what needs more work to work better in future.
3. Use the Adwords learning centre. It might not be the most exciting stuff to begin with and it might looks like a lot to go through, but if you don’t have the time to cover the basics, you probably don’t have the time to properly manage an account. If this is the case you can get someone else to manage it for you. Someone with experience. You could always contact me contact me - a shameless plug.
4. Compare your results against established existing measurements. Eg: Compare you sales results before and after using Adwords.
5. Avoid very generic terms like that can be interpreted multiple ways. Eg: If you were selling cars don’t use the term cars as a broad match. Think about the cars you sell (if you sell cars). A better term might be &quote; used honda’s “
6. Test different messages - Google Adwords and other Pay Per Click search engines allow you to test the effectiveness of different messages to users. Test these and see which works best. This will be covered in future posts in more detail.

Final Word

So how did I do? Did I answer all your questions? Have I left you more confused than ever? Is there more you would like to know?
Feel free to respond to this post, or you can contact me directly. I will try and respond within 24 - 48 hours.

There must be a better way I thought and there was, but back then I knew alot less about content on the web. So I decided to get out of my static HTML comfort zone which drove the non-forum pages of my site. I started to explore content management systems. I came across many opinions and many websites containing discussions based on what was best.

That was then, and this is now. I’ve certainly learnt alot about what makes a good cms and what doesn’t cut the mustard, so to speak! The purpose of this article is to give you the reader a heads up on what to look for and hopefully make the right decision for your requirements. Because that’s exactly what’s important here, is that you pick the right system that suits your needs. Of course you can’t always plan correctly for the future and your needs may change as your site grows.

Unfortunately that can mean trying to extract data from one content management system’s database schema into another, not an easy process for someone unfamiliar with sql. It can also cost you a bit if you need to hire a database developer / expert. The message here is try to pick the best system now as it will cost you later if you don’t!

Although mind you my blog is only new to the world and there’s not a whole lot of traffic here, but who knows it might spark someone’s interest or at least let one person know about the event. If that’s all it achieves I guess it was worthwhile.

I’ll definately be attending unless I’m suddenly stuck down by a mysterious tropical disease. Cross my fingers and hope not.

If you decide to come, please feel free to come up to me and say hi. Not sure if I’ll have any business cards yet but it would be great to meet some locals in the industry.

Details of venue and time are listed below:

Date: Saturday February 9

Time: 7.30PM till whenever

Venue: Harbour Master, IFSC

Different Advertising Methods

First lets look at the various web advertising options you have.

• Banner Advertising
• Text Links and Text Link Ads
• Pop Up’s and Pop Under’s
• Google Adsense / Yahoo! Publisher Network
• Affiliate Marketing or Referrals
• Video Advertising / Flash / Roll Overs

With so many options at your finger tips, many website owners can and do get carried away. Hitting their website visitors with every form of advert and in some cases they hit their users with advertising before giving them what they are after, your websites quality content.

Bad Advertising Practice, How do you spot it?

One of the biggest mistakes website owners tend to make is that they mislead their visitors, visitors to your website are your customers. They are the life blood of your website. Misleading them only ensures they won’t return frequently Some examples of bad advertising practice could include one or all of the following:

• Placing Ads Where Navigation Items Often Appear
• Saturating pages with advertising - too many banners - often seizure triggering
• Using pop up windows and pop under advertising
• Using large banners that demand high bandwidth connections (excessive flash / images / video)
• Tricking users into clicking on advertising by disguising advertising

Forcing users to click on advertising just sends them away from your website to the advertiser. If a user does not full fill their goals using your website they will loose trust and more than likely not return. This brings us to one of the first ways you can measure success. Returning visitors, the higher the percentage of returning visitors you have to your website the better.

How do I tell if my visitors are new or returning?

The answer is use a web analytics program. There are various options available and if your budget isn’t prepared for a commercial solution. Google can help with their Free Google Analytics program. The program requires you include a small Javascript snippet at the bottom of each page you wish to track. Other packages may vary but work on the same principles. You’ll also need to sign up for an account, if you don’t already have a Google Account such as Gmail or Adwords / Adsense

Since Google Analytics is Free all screenshots and instructions will be based upon this system. However since most analytics packages work in the same way, we will use it as our example. First sign into your Google Analytics account, now you should be able to see some navigation items on your left hand menu. We want to follow this path:

Visitors >> New Vs Returning

The stats are for a relatively busy site of mine. As you can see however the majority of my visitors are returning. Because it s a community site this isn’t unexpected but it is a good sign. If you run an e-commerce site, chances are your return visitor rate will be lower, however you should try and aim for as many returns as possible. Returning customers are always a good sign.

Bounce Rates, Your Other Best Friend

Another great way of seeing how effective your website is by looking at bounce rates. A bounce is a visit that lasts for only one page or less than 5 seconds. High bounce rates can be a good indication that a user is put off or isn’t finding what they are looking for on your site. Generally you want to try and achieve a bounce rate of lower than 50% and ideally lower than 30%. Low bounce rates mean users are at least viewing a couple of pages on your site.

Time On Site - Longer the Better

If users spend a lot of time on your website, surely that’s a good thing right? In general yes, but it can depend on the type of site you run. E-commerce sites are should usually geared toward making a quick sale so if users are spending too long it could mean problems with your site’s checkout process. Its more likely though that customers will leave if they can’t achieve their goals. There is no ideal time on site, but generally if your average time is high this is a good sign. Don’t be fooled though, check to see how many visitors fit into to lower quartile range for time on site. It could reveal interesting trends about your visitors.

At the end of the day, web analytics can reveal some interesting information, but you the webmaster will need to decide how much is too much advertising. New websites should refrain from being too heavy on advertising and focus on quality content. Once you have established a good user, you can probably afford to add a bit more advertising. I am of the opinion that the less advertising space you have the the more valuable the advertising space becomes.

If page load times are being slowed due to heavy advertising, its a good idea to cut out the biggest bandwidth eaters.

Clearly Label Your Advertising

I have always clearly labeled advertising on my Users understand they are clicking on an ad and they aren’t being tricked into anything. This means they are more likely to purchase, subscribe or view goal pages on advertisers sites. A higher return on investment that advertisers receive from placing ads on my site means they will be willing to spend more with my site in future.

Treat Visitors How You Want To Be Treated

From a user perspective think about what you dislike most. If you can’t stand constant advertising pop-ups or flashing banners, misleading text or anything else like it, chances are you shouldn’t do it on your own website. Just because it makes you a few dollars now doesn’t mean it will last forever. Be patient, focus on creating a good website and you will reap the rewards.