The SERPzone

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you probably have heard about Social Media Marketing.  I’ve been experimenting by becoming active with lots of social groups like Digg, Sphinn, Reddit, Propeller, Facebook, and everyone’s latest rave, Twitter.

Twitter is a micro blogging platform that allows 140 character messages to be broadcast to all your followers.  It is exactly why I haven’t been blogging lately.  The ideas I’ve had for blog postings have often found their primary points condensed and published via Twitter instead of making it way here to the SERPzone.  I’ve heard from many other bloggers that there seems to be an inverse correlation to the number of Twitter messages (or “tweets”) to the amount of time spent on the full blog.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because many bloggers use it to collect data that they then use in their blogs.  I haven’t used it for that purpose much yet, but who knows what the future will bring.

The point is that I have been building a list of ideas for articles that I will be writing about in detail the next couple of weeks.  I want to thank all of you for sending in your suggestions and ideas for blog articles.  I will be getting to all of them as best as I can.

The Back to Basics series will be back in full swing in no time!  If you want to know what’s going on more often, feel free to find me on Twitter and strike up a conversation.  My Twitter handle is @doubleohd.

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Tags: Back to Basics // Add Comment »

Conversion tracking is one of the most important pieces of the PPC puzzle, because it lets you track results at the keyword level. Ideally your site is also equipped with an analytics package that lets you see your site’s performance in a lot more detail to see what happens between click and conversion, but if for some reason it isn’t, here are a couple quick ways to use engine conversion code to get a little more information.

In order to keep your original data valid, I’d recommend a test of any of these ideas in a mirrored account (not campaign).

Basic Sales Funnel: Google allows for five different conversion code names. Add conversion code to every page of your checkout process or important conversion steps, making sure a unique named code is on each page. After a desired amount of time run an account report with each of the conversion types selected, and you’ll see each page leading towards your final conversion has fewer and fewer conversions. This is a basic sales funnel. You can use the difference in numbers between each page to determine where you’re losing people, and how to optimize the page to minimizing that right now.

Landing Page Testing: If you have a new page you want to test performance on (which you should do occasionally), you can use Google’s 3rd party tracking on that page to measure conversion rate on the new page instead of your current page.  Copy an ad within an ad group and modify the destination URL, and then compare conversion rates between the two ads.

Measuring Bounce Rates In case you’re not running analytics (and why aren’t you?) you could add the conversion code to every page of a website except landing pages.  What this will do is show you how many people moved beyond the landing page to other areas of the site, vs. how many people clicked on an ad, and then left the site.  Divide the number of conversions by the number of clicks, and subtract 1, and this is your bounce rate in a percentage.

When performing any of these tests, keep in mind the difference between the number of conversions and the number of transactions.  If you run a report, make sure the “transactions” checkbox is checked, as this will tell you how many additional conversions got counted from the same person.  If a visitor comes back to your site within 30 days on Google or Yahoo, or 7 days from MSN, any other actions taken will still count as 1 conversion, but multiple transactions.

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Tags: General PPC, adwords // Add Comment »

Today I was reading an interesting article on the blog Search Insider, discussing the issues with companies and agencies have when trying to hire people for SEM work. Its number 1 requirement for people who can succeed in search is knowing the fundamentals of business and marketing. It provides what I think is the ideal metaphor for this situation:

Fundamentals are crucial; there are countless examples of less talented athletes whose success came from being grounded in fundamentally sound practices executed with discipline. Their reliance on fundamentals as their foundation is usually what creates their greatness.

That’s also one of the main reasons why I started the blog: Help people learn the fundamentals of search marketing. However, the fundamentals of this industry are still maturing, and everyone might have different definitions of what counts as a fundamental. So I’d like your help to figure out what you want to hear and learn about. Here are a couple ideas that I’m working on at the moment, but please feel free to add any to the list via the comments box. Nothing is too simple or complex.

Current Drafted Topics Include (in no particular order):

• How to fully utilize conversion tracking for different business models
• How to install Google Analytics filters
• How to setup multiple Google Analytics web profiles for individual sites (and why)
• How to analyze individual keyword trends over time
• The best Excel formulas for PPC
• Various ad agency pricing structures
• Various Tool Reviews
• Ad Copy testing: Part Deux
• Listing of blogs I read on a regular basis to keep up-to-date in the industry

Reader feedback on importance of these ideas, as well as any submitted ideas will influence in what order I publish, so please be as open and honest as you want.  So, what do you want to talk about?

Popularity: 35% [?]

Tags: Back to Basics, General PPC // 1 Comment »