Be a Detective:Tracking Made Simple

Understanding what is needed to get results from an advertising campaign is a challenge that thousands of business owners now face.  Marketing professionals must track efforts online and offline to better understand how and where consumers are being reached.

These efforts go beyond just checking your website traffic.  For example if you’re running a campaign associated with a print coupon offline, the print coupon must have a call to action that will allow you to track the effectiveness of the campaign. An effective way to track the campaign is driving the consumer to a website where they must enter a promo code to receive a discount or free product.

If you are running a pay per click campaign online, tracking through a spreadsheet is an excellent way to get started especially if you have the time to dedicate to it. This is generally the most accurate way to track ROI and to determine which campaigns, ad groups and keywords generate the most revenue and have the highest ROI.

If you’re short on time, there are also services that track your conversion rate and your ROI for you automatically. Redzilla recommends Google Analytics to all it’s clients. You can easily track all internet traffic, where it originates from and which areas to focus your marketing budget.

However, be aware that the highest ROI does not necessarily mean a high profit/return. In PPC terms what this means is that you have to know the different ROIs of your keywords in their different positions and then select the optimum combination within your budget constraints. For example, making 10% profit on sales of $1,000 is better than 50% profit on sales of $10 while the ROI of the latter is higher.

Services like Redzilla.com will provide insight to better assist with your PPC campaigns and determine which keywords will yield a high ROI and high profit.

Strengthen Your Reputation With PPC

Savvy business owners take their online reputation seriously. When negative reviews come in and bad press starts popping up online, pay per click ads can be used to immediately start repairing the damage.   Here are three ways to usePPC advertising to strengthen your business’ reputation online.

1. Several search engines allow ads on brand terms related to a business. Search yours often and monitor the results for your name. If you notice competitors bidding on terms for your business, get in the game and place pay per click ads for your own terms. Those are customers you don’t want to lose to your competition.

2. In a crisis, pay per click ads are a fast and easy way to reach people seeking information. Placing a PPC ad for terms related to a developing crisis is an effective way to direct traffic to an updated source of information.

3. PPC ads help detract from negative blogs and unflattering content that comes up in search results. While you prepare and implement a plan of action to move negative content down of the first page of Google or other search engines, a PPC ad can be used to combat the bad press.

Yelp Reviews to Appear in Google Adwords?

Last week, SearchEngineLand.com came across a unique Google adwords campaign and blogged about their findings. In the screenshot that surfaced, an ad for a San Diego Auto Repair company was followed by a link to their Yelp reviews and a graphic of the business’ star rating from their Yelp reviews.

This sparked a small fleurry of google searches from bloggers and adwords followers who were trying to recreate the results.  Interestingly, it appears that few additional ads could be found to be featuring Yelp reviews. It appears that Google was conducting a very small experiment of on ads that link to external review sites.

At this time, links to yelp reviews have not come out of beta, but it will be interesting to see if this feature is rolled out for Google adwords campaigns in the near future.

Adwords Art

Sixt, a German car company with a sense of humor and some out-of-the-box thinkers, experimented withtheir online marketing strategies in 2008 and came up with some clever ASCII art to stand out from the crowd with their google adwords campaign.

The ads stood out, made a splash in the online marketing world and resulted in a 47% increase in their clickthrough rate.

Google now filters and removes this type of ad, but Sixt’s adword campaigns above are a great use of creativity to boost results.