I will not go though all the details, just to highlight issues like bidding, not necessarily you have to place highest bid to win 1st position, or competitors clicking on your ad to ‘eat’ your budget (what I was talking previously on this blog here), and many other issues which seems only appear because let’s call it ‘human error’ (read lack of knowledge). Not saying you all should be specialist in Google AdWords, but it’s worth it because it might save you a lot of money and bring new crowds of customers…so if you doing something, try to do it as good as you can.

Some random text from Google AdWords handbook – from first chapter.

Relevance

One of the biggest benefits AdWords offers is the ability to precisely target ads to users based on their interest, as well as a number of other factors like location, language, and demographic. The result is that the user sees highly relevant ads, which they are more likely to click on. And because ads on search engines show only in response to a user’s query, the user is also more likely to be further along in the buying cycle, and more likely to be ready to convert.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Online advertising is thoroughly measurable, making it easy to tell whether or not you’re meeting your advertising goals. Every user’s click is tied to a particular ad, keyword, and search query, all of which you can track and decide to improve whenever you like. If you spot a trend, you can create, modify, or delete keywords, ads, and campaign targeting selections within seconds. This allows you to be more responsive and more in control when it comes to improving your ROI.

Reach

Every day, Internet users conduct millions of searches on Google. When you use Google AdWords, you have the opportunity to capture any segment of that broad worldwide audience that’s actively looking for products, services, information, and websites. By giving your products or services a presence during relevant user searches, you’re ensuring that you’re visible in a crucial point in the customer’s buying cycle — when the user is actively searching for what you’re offering.

Anatomy of Google search result page – where it comes from!

Google AdWords Beginner Guide

Google AdWord Expert Pathways

Organic SEO Part 1, 2 and 3

As you know PPC type of advertising you paying for every interest (click on your ad), but how many of those leads/click are genuine interst?

Or maybe you paying for ad where your competitors are repeatedly clicking on your ad to exhaust your AdWords campaign budget?

Well business is business people might say, and even such not exactly ‘fair-play’ competition might  results that you will pay for ad and no genuine sale or interest from your ad.

Im not against PPC type of advertising, but why not think ahead and invest in organic SEO rather then PPC? I know it’s easier to register in AdWords, pay 100euro and start your campaign without any marketing and technical knowledge. And that what seems most of small and medium businesses are doing.

But why not invest time in building blog, forum, online community, social group, something what will built interest, something exciting, something useful and generate something what I like to call ‘pull down’ effect rather then ‘push out’ the ads.

Let me explain, organic SEO and PPC and so great because ads and search results are only being shown to people looking for specific word, or phrase, for example ‘psychologist’ or ‘psychologist in dublin’ etc. Now if you are psychologist and you will select right keywords, your website will be shown in organic search results, and if you setup your AdWord campaign right in sponsored links. Now as AdWords is based on bidding system, it is always possible (if there is few psychologists in dublin) that your competitor set higher bid, and it is his business which will benefit from this lead.

But this means a war…and of course there is way to avoid such situations or even track down or exclude such competitors, but can’t just give away old tricks right ? Lets leave a piece for Internet Marketers. I would rather direct you different route with your online business.

So far so good, but what seems to be common practice now competitors seeing sponsored link ad in search pages by their opponents, are clicking as many as possible times on your ad, where your AdWords campaign daily budget (if set) is exhausted they bid is next in the queue and they ad will be displayed.

So again organic search results, once set up properly, it will just require some of your time. For me personally shining example of basic mistake with online advertising appeared when I was watching TV show called dragons den. Don’t want to criticize anyone, but spending 200 000 euro on PPC ads which generated 17000 hits for your site and sales leads of 3000 euro (profiting for site only about 500-800 euro)? Well we all can do the maths. To add PPC is not generating long term search results positioning or brand awareness. It’s just there one day, and gone another. For not yet established businesses, is it good idea? I would say pay this 200 000 euro to SEO professional (proper one) and he/she will generate not 17 000 but 170 000 hits in 2 months easily with visits growing day by day, where your investment will benefit for long time with well established online presence and brand(site) awareness.

From another end, it is not impossible for ordinary person to do organic search results positioning, social media marketing and build online presence. All the tools are out there available to everyone, you can do it all with just putting yourself into it. Well and I hope my blog will come with great help to you here.

On the end, it all depends of each individual situation, targets you have, budget, brand, etc etc. Not saying stop using PPC, just saying use right tools in right time and place, that’s all.

Now in June 2010 domain extensions .xxx was approved by Internet Governance body ICANN.

“ICM Registry will now work with ICANN staff to complete the expedited due diligence on our technical and financial qualifications and to finalize the contract to run .xxx.

Our expectation is that this step will proceed smoothly and will not impede the roll-out of .xxx and we expect to go live with .xxx domains at the start of 2011, if not sooner. We have 110,000 pre-reservations and expect that number to increase now that ICANN has formally approved our application.”

Read more on ICM Registry website here and ICANN website.

Related articles:

Internet authority approves .xxx domain

For X-Rated, a Domain of Their Own

Different types of user generated content

* Discussion boards
* Blogs
* Wikis
* Social networking sites
* Customer review sites

From wide range of stats offered by Google Analytics I would like to highlight only one of them which is reflecting behavior of your site visitors. It is something what  Google named appropriately Visitor Loyalty.

Well as you might guess both are related to same subject of encouraging online customer engagement or rather related subject of measuring its KPI.

Just to add (apology for copy/paste job here) what is whole online customer engagement (CE). Online customer engagement refers to:

1. A social phenomenon enabled by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and taking off with the technical developments in connection speed (broadband) in the decade that followed. Online CE is qualitatively different from the engagement of consumers offline.

2. The behaviour of customers that engage in online communities revolving, directly or indirectly, around product categories (cycling, sailing) and other consumption topics. It details the process that leads to a customer’s positive engagement with the company or offering, as well as the behaviours associated with different degrees of customer engagement.

3. Marketing practices that aim to create, stimulate or influence CE behaviour. Although CE-marketing efforts must be consistent both online and offline, the internet is the basis of CE-marketing.(Eisenberg & Eisenberg 2006:72,81)

4. Metrics that measure the effectiveness of the marketing practices which seek to create, stimulate or influence CE behaviour.

The CE metric is useful for:
a) Planning
b) Measuring Effectiveness
Just to name few of components of a CE-metrics:
* Duration of visit
* Frequency of visit
* % repeat visits
* Recency of visit
* Depth of visit (% of site visited)
* Click-through rate
* RSS feed subscriptions
* Inquiries
* Customer reviews

As I was presenting in one of my previews publications, building online presence it’s not only build website and put it in search engines. In that publication I was trying to motivate or encourage if you would like even small and medium businesses to develop maybe not even process but habit to check those few simple but crucial points. I have proposed simple diagram (presented below) just to keep track of what you doing.

Each point of this diagram is of course separate subject which we could talk hours.  But lets just focus on point 7, as that is where Google Analytics is coming with help.

What is Google Analytics ?

Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites.

Click on the image to view full panel breakdown.

If you refer to CE metric mentioned above and options available on Google Analytics Panel you will be able to see where and for whom this is the tool most spot-on (aka accurate).

Now when we know where this numbers are relevant in development process and what is the tool you could use to measure it, we can talk examples.

I don’t want to copy and paste another samples here so I am going to support this article by stats from my own blog (this one you are reading right now, or rather very briefly according to  my numbers from G-Analytics ).

Now going into the details we can find out that our average visitor is:

from US or ireland, using most likely broadband connection with Firefox or IE browser which found my blog on images.google page and spend about 1 min reading my blog.

What is more interesting you can see actually people reading blog are from direct traffic (they typed www.gargasz.info in the address bar in their browser) with 19% of returning visitors where average each of them is spending about 7 min reading the blog. But only 11% have viewed more then 2 pages on my blog.

So you are looking on two results here, how search engine is bringing traffic to your website, and percentage of people being actually interested in your website. So two crucial points here, to get people interested in less then30 seconds of page view, easy to memorize domain name (I have parked/pointed several easy to memorize domain names to this blog)  so they can easily come back and then actual content to keep people interested.

But it would be mistake to ignore any of those numbers, of course those 11% are your fans, but don’t forget long-term off-line efects of your website or rather online presence.  Even if visitor didn’t spend much time on your site, doesn’t mean he will not come back, or talk about it maybe with his/her friends. That is why online presence is rather long-term process opposite for direct sales marketing processes. I would bravely compare it to social media, where most likely is not being used to generate direct sales, but to build brand image and product awareness. And that is why measurement of those online marketing techniques is so argumentative and so many publications can be found in this subject. Of course you can see current trends, try to predict the future based on historic data, but on the end its always experience and knowledge of human behavior which wins the gold.

Well you can always use controversy to burst some traffic right? Like the latest campaign of crisp brand in Ireland…it depends of the product image you want to create, wouldn’t be just ‘cheap’ to do such ad for high range product? I am not saying it can’t be done, of course it can, but with lets say more delicate and subliminal way without controversy targeting areas which I was talking about in Controversy and sex in advertising post.