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What happens AFTER someone clicks on your paid search ads? This data can often be the make or break of your paid search campaigns. You can gain great insight into your visitor behavior and other vital information from your hosting information analysis often provided from your site hosting provider. However, this information is often lacking substance and meaning in if not connected with your paid search accounts. The information that is provided to you with your web site hosting account are not all created equal and do not often give you the data you can take back to improve your paid search campaigns.
Google Analytics is currently FREE to advertisers and can be found at http://analytics.google.com. This invaluable tool, configured correctly, can help you bridge the gab between a paid search click and what happens after the click. Great reporting, geo-graphic tracking, search engine traffic and much more. Taking the time to configure Google Analytics correctly and getting is brining in real-time data from your web site will help you successfully leverage your paid search campaigns to greater success.
Timothy Seward, CEO of ROI Revolution, was kind enough to offer his time to be interviewed on the topic of Google Analytics. His company helps businesses to properly configure Google analytics to give them the data they need and find vital to keeping track of marketing expenses on and offline. His company offers weekly webinars at http://www.roirevolution.com on Google Analytics and other advance Analytics training courses. The webinar is called “How to Kick Your Pay-Per-Click Advertising Into Overdrive in 3 Months with Google Analytics”. He is also a well known speaker at many paid search events including the Pay Per Click Summit events in 2007.
The take away I want you to get from this interview is that if you go to the effort of configuring Google Analytics, it is so important that you put into action the lessons and habits you are learning from your customers. Make sure to set your calendar or Outlook to the 1st and 15th to check your analytics data. This data will change every month depending on the seasonality of your services and product demand. When I was training for Yahoo! Search Marketing, we would often show an example of the keyword “cooking”. In December, you would see cooking terms for “Cooking Standing Rib Roast” or “Cooking Roast Turkey”. Then in January you will see search terms “Low Fat Cooking” or “Atkins Cooking”. This is a great example of why you need to pay attention to your terms and keep changing them. Another great way to get new terms is to put a search box on your web site. This is a great window into what your visitors expect to find on your web site. You can also take these terms they enter and add them to your paid search campaigns.
Please feel free to contact Timothy Seward for additional Google Analytic questions at timothy@ROIrevolution.com or 919-832-3233.