Tracking Email Campaigns

You can easily track email/newsletter campaigns with ecommStats, and it's generally the same process as you would do with other advertising mediums.

1. Create a Campaign
2. For all the links in your email, simply append your campaign identifier to all the links so they look something like this: http://www.yoursite.com/landingpage.html?acp=12345 where acp is the campaign id.

That's it, ecommStats will take care of the rest and allow you to report on the results of the newsletter. You will be able to see things like how many people clicked on the links, where they went on the site, etc. Give it a try when your doing your next email send out!

Who Clicks on Search Engine Ads?

I came across this blog entry yesterday and it really caught my attention. It posed the question:

Who, exactly, clicks on Google sponsored ads?

One response was:

the folks who are clicking on ads are the ones who don't realize they are ads and that, when they do, there will be hell to pay.

Meaning that Google will go down in a ball of flames if people figure out that they are clicking on ads. I don't believe this, but it got me thinking.

So when do I click on ads, knowing full well that I am clicking on an ad? Well one in particular is if I'm looking for a particular website, say ebay for example, I will put the site name into my google toolbar and since it's the first thing that shows up at the top of the page, I may click the ad even though they are the first result in the regular search results. It's a shorter distance from the toolbar down to the ad link. This is obviously bad for the advertiser. Why advertise on a keyword where you are first anyways? Most likely because they don't want you to even think about going to a competitor.

The other time I click on an ad is when I'm shopping. I will search for the product I want and check out multiple sites from regular results (organic) and sponsored results (ads) to do comparison shopping. The site that looks very professional, has a solid business, AND has a good price will get my money. This is good for the advertiser. It gives the small guy a chance to get to the top of the list and it actually works. The ROI for a retailer using adwords is significant.

So how valuable is it to non-retailers? Now that's a tough question and it makes it even tougher because it is very hard to track whether a click on an ad turned into revenue. For online retailers, this is easy, you simply setup a web analytics product like ecommStats and you start seeing this information in real-time. You see how much revenue a particular ad brings in and you know the cost of the ad, so the ROI is the revenue - the cost of the ad (it's usually a bit more complex than that, but you get the picture). A non-retail business may advertise to get leads, to build their brand, or some other reason which may turn into a sale at some point in the future, but how do you know if it's from your Google Adwords? You may be able to an adword click to the lead and follow that through to a sale, but this is a very complex task requiring integration of various systems and can only capture a small portion of what's happening.

In any case, we know that Adwords is valuable because some companies base their entire marketing budget on it and it pays off. The relevancy of search engine advertising cannot be beat in any other medium... yet.

web analytics | adwords | seo | sem | advertising

How To Get the Most Out of Adwords

Search engine advertising has become the place to advertise when doing business on the web. For those of you who don't know what it is, search engine advertising allows you to buy ads that show up in or near search results. Why has it become so popular? Because it works. It works because the ads are relevant to what the searcher is looking for. Try this link to do a search on Google and if you look on the right hand side, you'll see the Sponsored Links, those are the ads. Pretty much all the search engines have a similar system. If you want to advertise, you pick the search terms, keywords, or phrases and specify how much you want to spend on those specific terms. The more you spend, the higher you end up in the results.

Now in order to maximize the return on investment (ROI) when you are spending money on search engine ads, you have to know which ads are turning into conversions. You absolutely must have a way to track the results of your ads or you will be throwing money out the window and if you don't mind throwing money out the window, please let me know so I can stand outside your office.

There are two things to look at:

1. The search phrase that the user searched on
2. The ad copy (the wording of your ad)

A good web analytics package should give you everything you need to know about number 1, right down to how much revenue a particular phrase generated. So take that and subtract how much you spent on that phrase and you have your ROI. If it's a positive number, then you should keep advertising on that phrase. The most effective way to advertise on search engines and to make your tracking more accurate is to use exact matches or at least phrase matches, not broad searches. By using exact matching, you can be much more precise in who your ad will reach, thus reducing your cost-per-click (CPC), and increasing your ROI. Furthermore, it makes your web analytics much more useful because you can see how effective your ads are based on exactly what your customers are searching for, rather than for what you think they are searching for. If you want different variations, then add more phrases to your campaign. This can result in having a much larger list of phrases in your campaign, but why spend money advertising on "bike mountain" when what you really want is "mountain bike".

Number 2 is a bit harder because there is no specific answer, but what you can do is try out different ads over different time periods. For instance, in week 1, you try out ad copy 1, in week 2 you try out ad copy 2, then compare each weeks results. Or better yet, if your web analytics product can support it, you can append a special identifier to your ad link that your web analytics product can use to differentiate the two ads and then you can compare results over the same time period. And remember to take into account the number of impressions each ad was given to do a real comparison. For instance, if ad 1 had 500 impressions and ad 2 had 1000 impressions, you should double the results of ad 1 to make a fair comparison. So if ad 1 had 50 clicks, 5 orders and $100 revenue, you should double those values to 100 clicks, 10 orders and $200 in revenue when comparing to ad 2. Google Adwords favors the ad that has the higher click-through-rate, not necessarily the one that has the highest ROI.

web analytics | adwords | seo | sem | advertising