Learn how Google Website Optimizer tests can take your site to the Next Level in this New Webinar Being Hosted LIVE!

Featuring special Google guest Tom Leung!

Tom Leung is Google's Business Product Manager for Google's Website Optimizer. Previously, Tom was a Product Planner at Microsoft and has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

On Tuesday, September 11th at 2pm ET (1 pm PT) ROI Revolution is hosting a *no charge* live Webinar presentation on how to use Google Website Optimizer.

This free Google software service allows you to test various components of your website to determine what will best increase your conversion rate. Learn from Tom, the Google Website Optimizer genius, which tests can best help you gain the edge over your competition.

This 60 Minute Free Webinar on Google Website Optimizer Will Cover:

• How to overcome the odds -- continual website improvements you can do to slingshot past your competition.


• How to set up a test with Google Website Optimizer in 3 simple steps.


• 6 tests to run on your site with easy to follow example layouts.


• Key questions to ask yourself in order to use Google Website Optimizer for valuable improvements.

So register today for this *totally free* live session. Space is limited.

Many people wait too long before really delving into Negative Keyword research for their Google AdWords campaigns. This is a mistake!

Negative Keywords have more of an impact than most people realize.

Not only do Negative Keywords save you money by minimizing clicks from visitors who really are not interested in your product or service, but they increase your Clickthrough Rate (CTR) and Quality Score! This decrease in 'bad' impression will automatically give you higher quality clicks that can have a real impact on your conversion rate.

Negative Keywords can be hard to find, but the search is worth it.

Here are eight tips and tricks to getting the most out of your Negative Keyword research:

Continue reading "The Power of Negative Keywords, eight (8) tips" »

I'll be speaking about how to leverage the new Google Analytics in Chicago this Tuesday at Mary O'Brian's upcoming PPC Summit, a two day "how to" workshop designed to help folks better manage their PPC campaigns.

A PPC-only conference is long overdue.

From the PPC Summit conference description:

PPC Summits are designed as How To workshops that teach you how to better manage your PPC campaigns. The focus is solidly on advertiser education: how to spend less money, more effectively, with better results.

In these interactive, two day summits, you will be introduced to strategies and skills that are the foundation of successful pay per click marketing.

PPC Summits are designed to help you and the people at your firm become the savvy search engine advertisers you know you must be in order to maximize your pay per click opportunities, out perform your competitors, and build your business.

Mary O'Brian, the producer of the new conferences, has enjoyed a long career in the business of paid search with her work initially at Overture (later becoming Yahoo! Search Marketing) heading the training & organizational development team, then becoming Senior Director of Sales for Overture Services, next co-founding TelicMedia, and then obtaining the contract from Yahoo! to teach the one day Yahoo! Advertiser Workshops across the country.

Future locations include New York (June 21-22, 2007), London (July 10-11, 2007), Los Angeles (Sept 24-25, 2007), and San Francisco (Nov 15-16, 2007).

So you've gotten your Google Analytics account, it is all set up, and you're tracking your paid search advertising. Your results are good, but you want them to be GREAT! What's the next step?

Getting your landing pages in top form, of course! Here are 7 tips to help start you on the path of better landing pages.

1. Make sure your ad and your landing page are closely correlated. The guys over at grokdotcom.com call it a 'scent trail'. These are the same brilliant people who brought us such books as Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? and Call to Action. People need to be able to follow the scent trail and find what they are looking for.

"If we interrupt our scent trail, we leave our customer stranded. The path she was following becomes a dead end. Where's she supposed to go? Do you really want to trust that she's motivated enough to continue on her own? When it comes to scent trails, dropping the ball is one of the leading causes of site abandonment!"

2. Set a measurable goal: What do you want people to do on your landing page? Having a measurable goal will help you to quickly and easily determine how well your landing page is working. Your goal could be to have people buy something directly from the landing page, download a report, sign up for a mailing list, etc.

This way, you can track the performance of your landing page with your Google Analytics account.

Continue reading "Top 7 Landing Page Strategies" »

One of my favorite quotes that sums up online marketing is from the book Call to Action by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg:

"Trying to increase sales simply by driving more traffic to a website with a poor customer conversion rate is like trying to keep a leaky bucket full by adding more water instead of plugging the holes."

I love that! It summarizes the reality of marketing in such a great, visual way. When you put it like that, everybody can see it's such a commonsense approach. Focus on your ROI (return on investment) and conversion rate, and the rest will fall into place easily.

Continue reading "Marketing Frame of Mind" »

Finally the Yahoo! Search Marketing upgrade has brought some well-needed changes to their Sponsored Search program with its new ranking model. This revised model will help advertisers spend much less time on bidding wars, leaving time to create more relevant ads. It is replacing the current method for ad ranking which is based on bid amounts alone.

Beginning February 5, 2007 bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad's rank in the search results. What exactly determines 'ad quality'? Well, there are two factors to this new feature-one being the ad's historical performance which consists of the click-through rate in comparison to that of the competitor's and the normal click-through rate for that position.

Continue reading "Yahoo!'s New Ranking Model" »

William Cline from the Cline Group came out with a press release today that we were extremely proud to be mentioned in. Here is a quote from the press release, "William Cline, Scuba Diving Industry Consultant, Receives Google Authorized Analytics Training by ROI Revolution":

William Cline receives cutting edge training from a noted Google Authorized Training company, ROI Revolution, for website analytics applications. William says "Being trained by ROI has given me a market advantage in that very few scuba diving companies or tourism boards actually employ sophisticated website and email marketing analytics. I now have those skills to guide my clients better, but more importantly, help them deploy cutting-edge Google analytics technologies."

We're blushing over here, William!

It's incredibly satisfying be able to help companies like the Cline Group utilize Google Analytics in order to leverage the potential in their market. Thanks for the kind words, William. We're glad we could help.

Pay Per Click advertisers rejoice!

YSM's (Yahoo! Search Marketing) "Project Panama" has begun it's long awaited roll-out! I received an e-mail this morning with the headline: "The New Sponsored Search is Now Live!" I went running through the office with the news. I logged into my account awaiting the new interface, and was disappointed to find out it was not there! They are sending invitations in stages to U.S advertisers.

We received a helpful hint at a Yahoo! Advertisers Workshop that I attended a few weeks ago and blogged about. If you do not have your keywords separated into categories, do this now! If you have any unassigned keywords then Yahoo will automatically put then in categories for you once the new interface is launched. It will be much better for you to do this yourself since you have a better understanding of your business model & the categories that they need to be separated into.

The upgrade center is available for all advertisers to help make the transition smooth. There are flash tutorials & PDF guides to get you up to par with the new interface.

Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim is running a Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Contest.

I decided to give it a whirl, and came up with the following article: The (Alleged) Miracle of Pay-Per-Click Marketing.

This article discusses the tendency to lean on pay-per-click advertising just a little too heavily. Sure, it can work wonders, but there are a lot of other aspects to online advertising that all work together to create a truly great campaign.

Here's a short excerpt:

Thomas Jefferson said "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." With a little "luck" maybe you can turn that PPC campaign into a magic wand, after all.

Good luck to all the contestants! I've certainly enjoyed reading everybody's articles, and I've learned a thing or two in the process.

The ROI team recently attended a Yahoo Search Marketing(YSM!) workshop in Alexandria, VA. The conference was extremely helpful in gaining new insight on creative ways to manage and optimize campaigns. The presenter, Heather Lutze, did a fantastic job balancing Yahoo's affiliation with the workshop and relating the knowledge to all PPC campaigns.

We were ecstatic when Heather announced that after the lunch break we would get a glimpse of the new Yahoo advertising interface known as "Project Panama." As all of us know this project has taken longer than foreseen, but after the brief slide show outlining the interface I believe it is safe to say that it will be worth the wait.

Continue reading "Yahoo's Panama Project Revealed!" »

Peanut butter and jelly, a picnic and ants, a dinner and a movie... some things just go better together. Google Analytics and pay-per-click advertising are definitely on the list of things that naturally pair well!

A famous quote by John Wanamaker helps to illustrate just why they go together so well: "I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half."

Well, Google Analytics helps you to break down just how well your pay-per-click advertising is working and literally tells you where you are wasting money, and making money! Here's a run-down of some of the reports to keep handy as you optimize your pay-per-click campaigns:

Continue reading "Classic Combo: Google Analytics & PPC" »

A little over a month ago ROI Revolution's Michael Harrison posted about a new Google Analytics report: the AdWords Analysis report.

Fast forward over the last 30-some days and we've really grown to appreciate this report as one of the most useful and practical reports ever devised by the Analytics team at Google expressly for Google AdWords advertisers. Make no mistake about it, for the granularity Google advertisers need (and often crave), the new "AdWords Analysis" report is huge.

Here's why: once our clients get started on a Google AdWords program, and start really making some money, the next request we get from them is to continue ramping their CPC (cost per click) program up so that they have a larger and larger amount of profitable (ecommerce or lead gen) revenue. Why be satisfied with $10,000/month in CPC-driven revenue when $20,000/month is obtainable?

Continue reading "Profitable Content network bidding in Google AdWords using the new AdWords Analysis report" »

Earlier this week we received a really nice review of our company ROI Revolution in the current issue of Larry Chase's Web Digest for Marketers.

In the issue entitled "11 ways to increase your online response rates" managing editor Eileen Shulock details key ways to run a tighter, more cost-efficient (online) campaign.

Here's what Eileen had to say about ROI Revolution:

This is a site rich with all things Google Analytics. They offer a complimentary Webinar that will get you started with Google Analytics, which includes a Q&A session with the consultants, plus an email newsletter which publishes their consultants' tips and hints on a regular basis. And within their blog devoted to Google Analytics you will find a font of information on everything from basics to filters, tracking, reporting and a list of the other blogs you can visit to learn more about Google Analytics. All these resources and tools are gratis. How do they make money? The company is a certified Google Analytics consultancy.

Eileen also wrote a nice review of Google Analytics, Inceptor (PPC bid management tool), Optimost (advanced multivariable testing for landing/website pages), and 8 other companies/tools which help magnify your online marketing efforts.

If you have not subscribed to Larry's weekly marketing digest you should consider it today.

Very interesting article by Jill Whalen, owner of High Rankings on swearing off a single-minded focus on er, um *rankings* and measuring your true SEO success through web analytics

The rankings queen now says that rankings are not worth the SERP's (define) they're painted on:

It's time you learn that ranking reports are not your friend. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that they are closer to being meaningless drivel to everyone other than your boss's over-inflated ego.

Well, what gives? What's the new numero uno? According to Jill:

There's a new kid on the block and she's just as much fun to play with as ranking reports. In fact, she's a whole lot more fun, and not only that, she pays for herself over and over again. Her name is web analytics and she's going to be your new best friend!

Here's what Jill had to say about Google Analytics:

Continue reading "Measuring the success of your SEO campaigns" »

About a month and a half ago I made it a point to go to Atlanta, GA to attend one of the regional one day ad:Tech conferences. I did it to hear from analytics guru Jim Sterne and others about the latest and greatest practices in analytics, interactive marketing, market segmentation, and so on.

One of the unexpected benefits I obtained while at the conference was learning about local interactive marketing associations. I was thrilled to learn that there was a very strong interactive marketing association in the Raleigh-Durham, NC area (close to our offices in Raleigh). I have already joined our local association (Triangle Interactive Marketing Association).

This month's program is on Web Analytics Best Practices.

Continue reading "Google Analytics case studies to be presented" »

Update 7/12/2006: With the introduction of the Google Analytics "AdWords Analysis" report, the methodology described below is no longer necessary to track AdWords Ad Creatives using A/B Split tests. Instead, please refer to our post about using the new AdWords Analysis report (be sure to scroll closer to the bottom of the article to learn about tracking AdWords ad creatives using A/B split tests).

No matter the goal of your Google Adwords campaign one thing is always necessary; constant optimization! While Google's "Auto Tagging" option is an easy way to get basic tracking data, with just a little more effort it is possible to take your tracking to a higher level!

By adding additional tracking codes to your referral URL link and turning off auto tagging, you are able to drill down even further in Google Analytics, allowing you to make the most out of every advertising dollar.

UTM, which stands for Urchin Traffic Monitor, are tags which are added to the end of your destination URL in order to add specific data to your paid tracking within Google Analytics. These tags identify such variables as campaign, source, medium, content, and search term.

Currently with the Google AdWords "Auto Tagging" feature the utm_content variable identifies each ad by the first line of text. This can cause problems if you are trying to implement A/B split testing because Auto-Tagging simply passes the ad text headline to the utm_content variable. This makes it impossible to differentiate tracking data from two different ads that share the same headline.

Continue reading "How to Use Google Analytics to Measure Google AdWords Ad Creative using A/B Split Tests:" »

AdWords guru Perry Marshall has a really nice 8 step system for squeezing the most juice out of your website.

According to Perry:

For most businesses, the FIRST thing you should do is properly set up a Google AdWords campaign and play with your website until the traffic converts to sales profitably.

THEN... once it's working on AdWords, you take the same messages and sales process and roll out your product in this order:

1. Google AdWords
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Other PPC's like Overture and Findwhat etc etc.
4. Email promotions
5. Affiliates
6. Press Releases
7. Direct Mail
8. Print Advertising

But now that Google Analytics (formerly Urchin 6 On Demand) is free to any website owner, I must add a new "first" step to his excellently articulated step-by-step marketing path: getting Google Analytics intelligently and properly configured on your website.

Continue reading "Nine step system for powering website profits" »