Web Analytics: Usage Analysis Leads to Improved Customer Relations

Knowing how your target audience uses your website is integral to increasing visitor conversions and improving customer relations. Various retail stores around the world spend millions of dollars on researching how their customers browse their brick and mortar stores. They use this data to arrange the store in the most efficient manner, even engaging in testing to increase purchases by the customer.

Your internet marketing campaign should adopt a similar approach. Focusing on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) within your web analytics solution can provide insights into how your target audience is using the website. The KPIs can bring troublesome drop-off points within your goal conversion funnels to your attention so you can make the required changes to the design of the page or its content to increase conversions. Perhaps certain landing pages have a consistently high bounce rate. Or perhaps the pageviews-per-visit or average time on site are down. This could indicate that the content on the page is not relevant or targeted enough for the consumer.

Customer relations are not only managed in brick and mortar stores, over the phone, or in emails. Implementing web analytics into your internet marketing approach can provide an integral avenue of improvement to customer relations and conversion rate.

PPC Advertising > Keywords + Ad Copy; Don’t Forget about the Landing Pages

Testing is a crucial part of improving your PPC advertising efforts. You test Keywords to enhance targeting and increase relevant traffic to your site. You test Negative Keywords to prevent irrelevant clicks and lower cost. Testing Ad Copy is to find out what appeals best to your clientele. However, testing should not stop there. Your Landing Page is a critical component of obtaining conversions, and not just clicks.

If you have tested and found great Keywords and have excellent Ad Copy, then there is no doubt that, you are getting clicks and driving relevant traffic to your site. However, what is happening after that still has a huge impact on the success of your PPC efforts. Your Landing Page is the first experience a potential customer has with your website. It needs to aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, and a good starting point for your conversion funnel.

In order to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your Landing Pages, you will need to integrate your Analytical Solution with you PPC Platform. Once you have the Analytics in place, you can begin testing your Landing Pages with tools, like Web Optimizer. Test various wording, layouts, pictures and more to discover what works best for you and your clientele, and watch your ROI increase.

6 Tips to Consider Before Implementing Your Email Marketing Strategy

Most businesses utilize email marketing as a marketing tactic to cross sell new business or for retention purposes. It is pretty rare for an organization to develop a comprehensive email marketing strategy to increase subscription, cross sell, etc that goes beyond email marketing and the basic email metrics. Some email marketing solutions even provide industry averages for those metrics.

The email marketing strategy should go well beyond simple open rates, click through rates, and industry averages. The content of the emails and promotional materials should have a consistent look and feel as well as being customer centric. By customizing the message to the different types of customers or service offerings, it should improve the overall effectiveness of email marketing campaign.

6 Tips to Consider Before Implementing Your Email Marketing Strategy:

1. Segment Your Opt-in List by customer type or services offering

2. Test Your Message & Layout by segments

3. Integrate Email Solutions with Analytical Solutions

4. Implement Social Media functionality

5. Implement Triggers for Follow-ups and Tailored Materials

6. Create Effective Landing Pages to Reinforce the Marketing Message

Social SEO

We’ve all heard it, Social Media and SEO are connected but why and how are they connected. Well, in a time where technology is getting better by the second, you have to understand that this includes search engines. Every day the search engines get smarter, making it easier for searchers to find relavent information. Meanwhile, Google & Bing’s algorithms continuously advance side-by-side, on top of having the ability to know how to treat all links differently, make it more prominent to adjust your current internet marketing methods.

Those that handle marketing for their company must realize that if their brand(s) isn’t publishing content to the web they will continuously fall behind the curve. The main goal of SEO is to help achieve more targeted traffic to the brand’s site and obtain whatever is deemed a conversion. These goals reinforce the importance of being social, providing endless & fresh content, frequently updating social sites & websites, social bookmarking and encouraged sharing, which produces organic links. This all revolves around the ongoing trend that potential customers that connect to a brand socially are more likely convert as well as, in a sense, viralize their site and social efforts.

So as they “If you build it they will come”, combined with a constant push of social content you will be destined to have social success, which equals an increase in ROI.

Be Relevant to Searchers with Dynamic Text

Anyone doing PPC advertising knows that you want to incorporate your best performing keywords into your ad copy. Not only will this help your quality score and cause your ad to stand out more with bold text, but it also keeps you relevant with people searching for your products and/or services. If your keywords are very similar or even synonyms, Dynamic Text will save you many headaches.

Using Dynamic Text will automatically insert your keyword or phrase that is generating the impression into your Ad Copy. This means that you no longer have to create a new ad for each one of your keywords. Instead, save time and effort by letting the automated Dynamic Text take care of it for you.

The example of how to implement Dynamic Text below is from Microsoft adCenter, although other popular PPC platforms, like Google AdWords, provide this service as well.

As you can see, this generic Ad Copy will tailor itself according to the keyword list and the search query. Depending on the search this Ad Copy could read:

Looking for Fresh Fruits?

We have the Fresh Fruit You are looking for.

www.--------------.com/Fresh_Fruits

Looking for Apartments?

We have the Apartments You are looking for.

www.--------------------.com/Apartments

Looking for Computer Parts?

We have the Computer Parts You are looking for.

www.--------------------.com/Computer_Parts

A quick warning, before implementing dynamic text make sure that all your keywords will make sense in the Ad Copy. The keyword “rent apartments” would not work in the example above. Also, make sure that the inserted keyword does not exceed the character limit; otherwise, your ad will not be shown.

Hope this helps improve your PPC efforts and keeps you relevant to your audience.

Google Analytics: New Site Speed Report Measures Page Load Time

We all know that using web analytics is key to running successful internet marketing and search engine optimization campaigns. It is always good to know what content on the website is driving conversions and where those visitors are coming from. The quest to improve your visitors’ website experiences doesn’t end there, however. With the latest version of Google Analytics, you can now monitor the average page load time via the new Site Speed Report. This new report comes along with the latest version of Google Analytics.

So why bother monitoring your website’s load times? Here are a few reasons:

• Browser Compatibility: Ensure that your website performance is top-notch for all of the most widely-used browsers.
• Search Engine Optimization: Make sure your landing pages not only have optimized content, but are also performing to the best of their ability.
• Goal Conversions: Increase goal conversions by ensuring your visitors are receiving the best possible performance and load times from your website.

Search engine optimization and internet marketing efforts don’t stop at optimizing content and online advertising. Monitoring website performance through the Site Speed Report of Google Analytics benefits both you and your visitors, and results in higher conversion rates.

PPC advertising – More than Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter

If you are looking to run an internet advertising campaign, consider your options. Yes, Google is the search giant with the Yahoo and Bing partnership coming in second, but there are other options that may fit your advertising needs better and be just as profitable, if not more. A few of the other options include Facebook, Twitter, and Likedin. Lets take a quick look at each and what makes them different from each other and the big two, Google and Yahoo/Bing.

Facebook, one of the biggest social media sties on the web, offers a unique twist to targeting an audience for PPC advertising. Instead for the traditional keyword base targeting, Facebook opted to allow targeting through interests, groups, activities, as well as demographics and geo-targeting. If you are accustomed to keyword targeting, this may take some time to get used to, but can be very effective.

Twitter, where everyone can state what is on their mind, is currently testing a variety of PPC advertising options. Currently, promoted trends are available, but promoted accounts and promoted tweets could be coming soon. Promoted Tweets specifically, could potential have an endless reach and visibility with minimal cost. Interaction with retweets of a promoted tweet is increased reach and visibility without cost.

Linkedin, a more professional social network, provides marketers with a niche market. Targeting options for Linkedin include: Jon Title, Industry, Company Size, Company Name, and more. If you are looking to advertise specifically to businesses or business people, then you may want to take a closer look at Linkedin.

Hopefully this expanded your view on PPC beyond the search engine giants.