Whether you manage paid search accounts or are an overseeing business executive, it is important to have an easily accessible way of viewing overall account performance.

Google Automated Reports are great, but often the downloading, filtering, and drilling down turns this bird's-eye-view into a 15-minute project. What you need is a completely customizable tool; one that automatically imports only the performance metrics you want, from the date range you set, instantly into tables with only the columns you require.

How do you get this flexibility in reporting without hiring a Web Analytics Engineer with Google API experience? Use the New Google Home Tab!

The Google Home Tab allows you to easily view your most profitable keywords, identify opportunities for growth based on your target CPA, find areas of unprofitability to optimize, and more. It's an easy way for management to identify core keywords, as well as review the trending of performance metrics.

All of these are the result of simple to set up filters that you are likely already using in your account. In fact, if you have saved any filters, they are already there!

Digging a little deeper

If you do a quick search on "Google Analytics Subdomain Tracking", you may have noticed that many of the top results are either woefully out of date or rather confusing. The purpose of this post is to provide my recommendations for Google Analytics subdomain tracking as of the current version of the asynchronous Google Analytics Tracking Code.

Currently there's no specific article on Google Code dedicated to Google Analytics subdomain tracking. The closest is this, which recommends the following:

//Tracking code customizations only
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.example-petstore.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

I propose that instead, for the vast majority of sites with subdomains, you should use the following:

//Tracking code customizations only
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'example-petstore.com']);
_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredRef', 'example-petstore.com']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

So what's wrong with the code recommended on Google Code? It turns out there are three issues with the code that cause unnecessary problems:

1. Turn off hashing is bad.

Turning off the hash, either by ['_setAllowHash', false] or ['_setDomainName', 'none'], is necessary for cross-domain tracking to work correctly with Google Analytics. It's an unfortunate necessity, however, because domain hashing is actually quite useful.

By default, a script cannot identify the domain of a cookie; this information isn't available unless it's part of the cookie name or value itself. Including the hash provides that information so that the Google Analytics Code can read the correct set of cookies in situations where there might be more than one set.

Turning off the hash mean the Google Analytics Tracking Code has no way to tell which set of cookies is the right set. Most of the time there is only one set of cookies, so it's not that big of a deal.

But if you were previously using Google Analytics without subdomain tracking, then you may end up with two sets of cookies for return visitors: one set created by your old code, and one created by your new code. This happens most often on subdomains, but could also happen on your main domain if you use ['_setDomainName', 'none'] instead of ['_setAllowHash', false].

It's also possible that instead of creating two sets of cookies, your new Google Analytics Tracking Code will destroy the cookies from your old Google Analytics Tracking Code because the hash codes don't match. This would typically happen on your main domain rather than on a subdomain.

Eduardo Cereto has a post that looks into this issue in more detail and provides another use case where _setAllowHash causes issues. The bottom line here is that you need _setAllowHash to track across domains, but if you're only doing subdomain tracking, it's unnecessary and may cause problems.

2. The leading period causes cookie resets.

Google Code offers the following explanation for using the leading period when using _setDomainName:

"

Google Analytics features 3 types of custom variables: page-level, session-level, and visitor-level. The official Google Code documentation on custom variables is pretty explicit about the fact that it's best not to mix types:

"Generally it is not recommended to mix the same custom variable slot with different types as it can lead to strange metric calculations."

What isn't exactly clear is what happens if you do decide to mix types. Google Code provides two cases, but surely there are additional cases. To this end, I decided to test 9 total cases:

Case 1: Page to Page
Case 2: Page to Session
Case 3: Page to Visitor
Case 4: Session to Page
Case 5: Session to Session
Case 6: Session to Visitor
Case 7: Visitor to Page
Case 8: Visitor to Session
Case 9: Visitor to Visitor

Granted, three of these cases are not mixed type, but I decided to include those cases as well since the behavior for those cases should be well defined and good benchmarks for the other cases.

It would also be good to know exactly how Google Analytics attributes conversions in these types of situations. To that end, I set up a test with 5 different pages:

Page 1: Standard Google Analytics Tracking Code
Page 2: Set first type of custom variables
Page 3: Standard Google Analytics Tracking Code
Page 4: Set second type of custom variables
Page 5: Standard Google Analytics Tracking Code

In Google Analytics, I set up 5 different goals, one for each of the above pages. The idea is to see whether or not each custom variable gets credit for a conversion on a previous page, the current page, or any successive page.

I also included a second visit, with two additional non-goal pageviews just to confirm behavior for visitor-level custom variables.

Normally you're restricted to using 5 custom variables, but it is possible to get more than this. This allowed me to run a single test with 9 custom variables at once, which looked something like the following on Page 2:

<script type="text/javascript">

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setMaxCustomVariables',9]);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'page_page_1','page_page_1',3]);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',2,'page_session_1','page_session_1',3]);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',3,'page_visitor_1','page_visitor_1',3]);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',4,'session_page_1','session_page_1',2]);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',5,'session_session_1','session_session_1',2]);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',6,'session_visitor_1','session_visitor_1',2]);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',7,'visitor_page_1','visitor_page_1',1]);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',8,'visitor_session_1','visitor_session_1',1]);
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',9,'visitor_visitor_1','visitor_visitor_1',1]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();

</script>

On page 4, I changed all the names and values from _1 to _2 and made appropriate changes to the scope of each variable (3 for page-level, 2 for session-level, 1 for visitor-level).

There are a couple interesting things to note if you ever decide to run a test like this. First, if you run your test too soon after creating a new Google Analytics profile, it's possible that the data from that test will never show up in your reports. So it may be a good idea to wait an hour or so after creating the profile before running the test to make sure that you'll see any results.

Second, certain types of information take longer than others to show up in your profiles. While you can segment by custom variable keys and values pretty much as soon as the data shows up in your reports (in well under an hour in some cases), the dedicated Custom Variables (in the old version of Google Analytics) report actually takes as many as 48 hours before any data starts showing up in your reports. So this is something to be aware of if it looks like things are missing.

The result? Take a look:

Just to be clear, when the custom variable appears with an _1, it means that the first custom variable set was reported. When the custom variable appears with an _2, then the second custom variable set was reported. For example, the entry for session_page_1 means that the session-level custom variable was reported, while the entry for session_visitor_2 means that the visitor-level custom variable was reported.

Based on the data, we can conclude the following:

1. If a visit only includes page-level custom variables, then each custom variable set will receive attribution for the page it was set on, including goal attribution if the goal was set for that page.

2. If a visit contains either a session-level or visitor-level custom variable, then the last of these set will be the only one that's reported. Furthermore, that same custom variable will be the one that receives credit for any and all goal conversions during the visit, regardless of whether those goal conversion appeared before, at the same, or after the custom variable was set.

3. A corollary to #2 is that for a visit that contains a page-level custom variable and either a session-level or visitor-level custom variable, only the session-level or visitor-level custom variable is reported.

4. Based on the custom variables that received more than one visit, a visitor-level custom variable only persists if it was the last custom variable set. For example, while the entry for visitor_page_1 indicates that the visitor-level custom variable received credit for the visit, because the page-level custom variable was set after visitor-level custom variable, the visitor-level custom variable was not reported on the subsequent visit, as indicated by the fact that there was only 1 visit for this custom variable. If you watch the __utmv cookie, you'll see that the data for the visitor-level custom variable is actually removed when a page-level or session-level custom variable is set for the same slot.

The results of this test also prompted a follow-up test for an edge-case:

Case 10: Visitor-level on the first visit, page-level on the very first page of the second visit.

It turns out that the visitor-level custom variable is reported on the first visit, as expected, but the page-level custom variable is reported on the second visit.

Based on these results, it looks like two cases is sufficient to account for all mixed type situations, but it might help if the first case provided in official Google Code documentation more clearly show-cased these rules.

For the first case, instead of the following scenario:

The following would more clearly illustrate the precedence property:

The fact that the visitor-level custom variable set on page 2 would be the one reported more clearly indicate the way the precedence works. There would also be an opportunity to mention the fact that because the page-level custom variable occurred after the visitor-level custom variable, that the visitor-level custom variable would not be reported on any subsequent visits.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments about custom variables, especially if you can think of additional scenarios that are not covered by the official Google Code documentation or this post.

If you've ever advertised on Google's Display Network (formerly called the content network), then your story probably sounds something like this: you launch a campaign with high hopes, it burns through enough cash to buy a used car, and you reel in horror at the dismal ROI it brought in and you pause it in disgust, refusing to spend another dime there ever again.

But guess what? Your competitors are making it profitable; with ease, no less.

This is why it's absolutely crucial that you have a solid strategy for advertising on the Display Network. After all, people spend 95% of their time browsing websites, not scrolling through the Google search results.

An entire book could be written on how to most efficiently launch and optimize various Display Network campaigns, but we'll focus on a few tools and strategies that will help you succeed.

Predict The Future

Throughout 2010, Google introduced a whole slew of new tools and features to help ecommerce advertisers become more profitable, but most of the popular features are related to the search network.

While everyone was drooling over product listing ads, sitelinks, modified broad match, call metrics, and automated rules, people seemed to overlook the invaluable Contextual Targeting Tool for the Display Network.

Imagine if you could type in a handful of your best keywords, click a few buttons, and create dozens of tightly-themed ad groups within a campaign, complete with bid suggestions and a prediction of where your ads will show on the Display Network down to the URL level. That's extremely powerful!

The new Contextual Targeting Tool does just that and handily gives you an edge over your competitors using the old strategy of "launch and hope for the best". Let them waste their money.

The visibility into the potential websites on which your ads will show means you can block particular domains or URLs before you even take your ads live, saving you money and frustration while giving more budget to relevant and potentially profitable placements.

The Placement Tool also allows you to view potential placements where your ad would show. While this tool isn't necessarily new, it has certainly been improved as of late. Just enter some of your top keywords into the tool and it will show you relevant placements where your ad is likely to show, along with impression estimates, which ad types are supported, and one-click access to view that website's profile in Ad Planner.

The advantage here is that you can filter by category and type of placement (site, video, mobile, etc). If you sell "swings", that can be pretty ambiguous. Are you selling a toy? Swings for babies? Fitness swings? The Placement Tool lets you narrow this down to filter out the junk, letting you focus on what's important.

Make Them Remember You

Remarketing was also released last year and is a powerful way to make your brand appear bigger than it really is. Gone are the days where you have to launch an expensive multi-channel marketing strategy involving TV, radio, and print in order for people to think "wow, I see them everywhere!"

While there's dozens of remarketing strategies to capitalize on, a simple yet powerful strategy is to target anyone who has been to your website within the past 7 days but not purchased yet. The default remarketing length is 30 days, but by changing it to just 7 days (or less), you can spend a short burst of funds at a slightly higher bid to keep your brand top of mind while the prospect is making their purchase decision.

Test Cool Ads

Google has also been quietly improving their Display Ad Builder tool to allow advertisers to easily create customized robust image ads in 7 sizes with ease.

In particular, the Retail templates allow ecommerce advertisers to offer a way for shoppers to browse multiple product offerings from within an ad. The great part is that you don't even pay until that person clicks the product they want and are taken to your site. Combined with remarketing, these templates can be extremely powerful.

Google also offers seasonal templates that allow you to keep your brand topical and up to date. The Summer-themed templates just might get a better response.

Get Those Customers!

The Display Network should be an essential part of every advertiser's strategy. If you're not using it effectively, then you're leaving money on the table and allowing your competitors to scoop up new customers in a cost-effective manner. Take some time to reevaluate your Display Network strategy and ask yourself if you're really maximizing your profits, or if it's your competitors that are the ones cleaning house.

We're sometimes asked "why should I bid on my own branded keywords?" In most cases, the asker wants to know if they can save money (or improve ROI) by not bidding on their brand keywords. It's an interesting question, with a not-so-simple answer. Each click costs money, so yes, theoretically, you can save money by not bidding on your own branded searches. But with that same logic, can't you also save money by keeping it under your mattress instead of in a 401k?

It's understandable to initially focus more on the cost of branded keywords, rather than the value. Cost is a measurable, absolute number that's seen in paid search accounts and credit card statements. The value is usually less-measurable, with some shades of gray in the calculations.

Sometimes it can be tough to quantify the effect of branded exposure, especially in dollars and cents. Our experience shows that branded keywords almost always convert at pennies on the dollar, with very high profitability. That's only for the immediate, measurable traffic though. What about the long-term effects in customers' minds or residual traffic that may come later on? In my opinion, the harder-to-measure effects of "bidding on your own branded keywords" are almost always a reason to spend more on them, not less.

Here are eight reasons why bidding on branded keywords can be a good idea (and a good investment):

1. Professional appearance - An ad at the top of the page can give an impression of a bigger, more established and a more savvy company. It suggests that you're anticipating the visitor and welcoming them to your site with a paid ad.
2. Ads are ads, organic results are not. With ads, you have absolute control over which messages your searchers will see. You can instantly get a message in front of your customers without waiting 2 months for your site to get re-indexed. You can quickly and systematically test different brand messaging in your ads. You can set start and end dates to your messaging. I wouldn't recommend trying those things with organic listings.
3. Better traffic control through a paid ad can help your customers reach your site's best page (according to you, not Google's crawler). Believe it or not, a company's home page is not always the best place to send branded traffic. Your company's top organic search result may not be the most ideal landing page. Is there a different page that's better designed and has a higher conversion rate? If so, use a branded ad to get people there.
4. Two links are better than one. One more link on the page makes your site easier to find. It's one more search result that you have control over, and one more chance to create a positive impression of your company. Own as much of the results page as you can.
5. Guard your customers from distraction. If someone's on their way to shop at your store, you don't want them seeing other people's ads, offers or companies along the way. Bid on your terms and be the first one to catch their eye.
6. If you don't, someone else will. Competitors' ads can show up for your terms too, potentially robbing you of sales and customer loyalty. More commonly, ads from your own affiliates and authorized resellers can chip away potential profits and erode your bottom line. Consider the example of Reebok (below). Each pair of shoes they sell on their own site is likely worth considerably more for them than each sale through one of their distributors. Would they be wise to only rely on their #1 organic ranking in this case?



7. Make it tough for your competition - If competitors bid on your branded keywords, then you can raise their costs substantially by simply slapping your ad next to theirs. Yours will very likely have a higher CTR, better position and better quality score. Great for you, bad for them. As a result, you'll reduce their conversion rates, increase their CPA, lower their position and diminish their traffic volume - all while requiring them to jack their bids to compete for your same ad slot. If you don't bid on your own branded terms, you make it much easier (financially) on your competitors who might.
8. Prepare customers for their visit. A paid search ad can effectively reroute the visitors' attention to specific events or issues:
   • Promotions & Sales - If you have a sale or a special promo, branded ads are the best and fastest way to get the word out to people before they come to your site. Holiday specials, upcoming sales, coupons, etc.
   • Company Info - News, product launches, contests, slogans, mottos, credibility, testimonials, phone numbers, etc. Search engines might not show the text you want. If you have a clear and effective "value proposition" that's nowhere to be read in your organic rankings, think branded ads.
   • Public Relations or clarifications - Taco Bell recently received some bad press when word got out that their beef was 88% beef. Never a better time for a branded search ad. They bid on "taco bell" and wrote an ad to welcome researchers to their page and prepare them to learn more about their high quality beef (their words, not mine).

     

     Notice that in their ad, they also offered a "limited-time-only" promo for people to try the beef for themselves: An 88¢ Crunchwrap Supreme. While I didn't "convert" on the Taco Bell site or partake of the Crunchwrap, I was impressed at their reaction to the press, and it had a positive impact on how I viewed the company. Price of a click - maybe $0.15. Price of losing a lifetime customer? That's another story.

Google's released a slew of new ad formats over the last few years that are both eye-catching and functional. You can do some creative stuff with your branded ads to increase the value of your company and give a better user experience. Some new ad formats include:

• Click-to-call mobile ads - shows on mobile devices only.
• Site links - you can send traffic to up to 4 more highly-targeted pages.
• Location extensions show a map of your store(s) underneath your ad.
• Seller ratings place your 4 or 5 star rating next to your ads.
• Phone extensions can track phone calls from your AdWords ads.

Each advertiser's situation is very different so I won't recommend branded ads in all cases. In most accounts that I've seen, branded ads can be utilized and tested much more efficiently, and can really help influence both direct sales and customer perceptions.

If brand loyalty is a big deal to you, then branded ads are certainly worth rethinking.

In your Paid Search Advertising, account growth is vital to maintaining profitability and staying ahead of your competition.

Bids, position, and ads are the lifeblood of your account. Without detailed management, you will begin to offset the increase in revenue with wasted spend and missed opportunities. But what do you do if you simply do not have the time?

That is where AdWords Automated Rules come in.

Automated Rules, released by Google in November 2010, is a tool that can help you effectively manage your account at the most granular level you need. The triggers you set up, using your own parameters, can help you quickly identify poor and strong performers, freeing up time for you to perform the analysis needed to make the right decision.

One of my clients has an account pushing the limits of scale. I use a rule to identify high CPA's on the Display Network, as well as domains that spend but do not convert. Just recently we added branded terms to the Display Network. Volume for the search term was not very high, so there was not a lot to expect. However, I came in one morning last week to find a rule was triggered. I quickly found an automatic placement that spent $368 in 1 day without converting (it was a poor match on Google's end). Because of the size of the account, and the fact that the Display Network regularly underperformed compared to search, it could have been 2 or 3 days before I found the bad domain. Instead, I found it the first day, excluded the placement, and was able to save hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars.

Keep in mind, however, that Automated Rules are not a substitute to manually adjusting bidding and enabling keywords and ads; instead it is a directional guide that can make this work quicker, and more effective. Using rules along with an analysis of historic performance can help you find new opportunities and identify wasted spend while saving dozens of man-hours.

AdWords rules should not replace bid management, only enhance it, allowing you to continue to grow your online presence, without sacrificing performance. Read more from Google about AdWords automated rules and their wide variety of uses.

If you are advertising on the Google Display Network there is a good chance you know what a "view-through conversion" is. In case you don't, a view-through conversion (referred to as a VTC) occurs when a user views an image or rich media ad (but doesn't click on it) and later completes a conversion. Way back in 2009, Google introduced the VTC reporting feature to help better measure the value of display advertising.

Last year Google took this a step further, and released a couple of improvements to VTC reporting including a customizable view-through conversion window and de-duplication of search conversion reporting.

What these settings do
Customizable view-through conversion window Previously the VTC window was set to 30 days, meaning Google reported on the number of VTCs that occurred up to 30 days after a user saw the ad. Now, you're able to customize this time-frame.

De-duplication of search conversion reporting:
If this setting is disabled (the default) your VTC report will include conversions from users that viewed a display ad and later clicked on a search ad. Essentially, these conversions are reported twice - in the VTC report for the display network image or media rich ad and the conversion report for the search network ad.

If you enable this setting, Google will exclude from the VTC report conversions from users who have also clicked on your search ads. These conversions will only be attributed to your search ads.

Benefits of setting a custom range for view-through conversion reporting
You're able to customize the VTC time frame, based on what makes sense for your product or service.

• Products or services that have short purchase consideration cycles (e.g. newsletter opt-in) are good candidates for shortened VTC windows.
• Products with longer cycles (e.g. purchasing a car) are more appropriate for keeping the setting at the default 30-days.

Benefits of de-duplication
VTC metric is an easy way to measure the effect display advertising has on your overall performance. We know that image ads on the Google Display Network often drive performance beyond immediate clicks and conversions. VTC reporting allows you to determine the role Display Network advertising plays across different advertising channels.

For example: A user sees your display ad on a Google Display Network placement. The user later remembers the ad and searches for your business on Yahoo.com. The user clicks on an organic link and makes a purchase on your site. This sale will be attributed to Yahoo organic, when actually the original source of interest was a Google display ad. The VTC metric in Google AdWords allows you to identify the Google display ad as a contributing factor in that purchase on your site.

Why should view-through conversion search de-duplication be enabled?
Previously, VTC data had to be taken with a grain of salt. Because of how VTCs were reported, and the possibility that a conversion could be counted twice in AdWords, it didn't provide concrete actionable data.

With the de-duplication feature we are now able to report VTC numbers and know that we are not double counting conversions. This makes VTC reporting more accurate and actionable.

This allows you to more effectively monitor your display ad campaigns and hence make more practical and cost-saving strategies to better maximize your ad campaign expenses.

Beyond the benefits the de-duplication feature has in AdWords, the transparency this feature adds to the VTC data allows you to more accurately measure how Display Network advertising contributes to your overall advertising goals and ultimately factors into your bottom line.

Why should view-through conversion search de-duplication be disabled?
The most common reason to disable search de-duplication is if you want information about placements that are positively correlated with search ad clicks. If you are running branding display campaigns and attributing conversions to Display Network campaigns is not important. VTC is a useful tool to analyze the relationship between the Display Network and search behavior.

Other reasons to keep search de-duplication disabled are if you're trying to compare campaign information with other non-Google content campaigns that might not include search click activity. Additionally, enabling search de-duplication would be unnecessary if you're already using another kind of tracking system.

4 view-through conversion pointers:
While these features certainly are improvements for VTC reporting. VTC data is not foolproof. A few things to always keep in mind when analyzing VTC data:

1. Avoid flipping back and forth between enabling and disabling these settings. This will muddy your data and negate any usefulness either option may have.
2. The enable feature isn't retroactive. Starting at the point you enable de-duplication, the number of recorded VTC's in your campaign will likely drop. The "missing" VTC's are now only being recorded as conversions elsewhere.
3. An ad impression on the Google Display Network is counted when the webpage loads. Even if the ad is below the fold and is never actually viewed by the user that impression is counted and the tracking cookie is placed. This being said, there is a chance that a VTC could be from a user that did convert on your site but never actually viewed your display ads.
4. Google doesn't report revenue data in conjunction with VTCs. If you're CPA or conversion goal is based on associated value this makes factoring the VTC data into performance not viable.

We certainly don't discourage using the VTC data. If you're running display campaigns the VTC metric is a very valuable tool in determining the campaigns and ad's performance and worth. But, we are eagerly awaiting Google's next improvement!

Immediate Job Openings Available for Multiple Positions

Business is strong and we're ready to open our doors once again on the search for new talent. If you've been looking for a career with tons of opportunity, flexibility, and a challenging (yet rewarding) work environment, you're in the right place.

ROI Revolution manages measurable, ROI-driven online marketing campaigns for business firms large and small. Our team of 32 works with clients throughout the USA, Canada and six additional countries worldwide from our offices in Raleigh, North Carolina.

All employees receive dual-monitor PCs, free educational books from Amazon.com, a full kitchen stocked with free sodas, coffee and all kinds of goodies, and complimentary lunches every Friday (518 West, Shaba Shabu, and Firebirds are among our favorite Friday restaurants). We offer competitive compensation commensurate with experience, and excellent benefits including health, dental, vision, and 401k with a generous company match.

By visiting our careers page, you'll see that we are a bright, growing company with lots of opportunity. Empowerment, teamwork, flexibility, focus, and vision combined with a strong financial foundation is the key to our company's success.

If you are looking for the perfect challenge, a chance to change the world one website at a time, and live in or are already moving to the Raleigh, North Carolina area, join us.

In order to begin the process, review our available positions below and the qualifications that we require. If you meet listed qualifications, submit the requested information through our online submission process today.

1. Internet Marketing Associate - Entry Level

   As an entry level Internet Marketing Associate you'll get all the training you need to create and manage successful online marketing campaigns for small to medium sized businesses throughout the planet.

   Day to day, you'll be responsible for writing and testing new ad creative, deciding where to place ads for your clients, and optimizing how much you pay for each ad placement. You'll work in a team environment alongside a Web Analytics Engineer (responsible for installing and maintaining detailed tracking for your marketing efforts) and your Strategy Manager or Team Leader (who will help oversee strategy and provide guidance for your accounts).

   Working at ROI Revolution is a challenging, yet rewarding process that requires you to continually monitor, revise, and optimize your strategy to provide ROI-driven results for your clients. You'll be able to clearly see the impact of your efforts for every business you manage making the entire process extremely fulfilling.

   

2. Pay-Per-Click Specialist - Experienced

   Experienced Pay-Per-Click Specialists have the same role as our entry level Internet Marketing Associates, but bring 12 months or more of prior pay-per-click marketing experience to the table. The right mix of experience in pay-per-click marketing is extremely valuable, but rare. We value applicants who come to us with a creative, proactive, intelligent and curious mind coupled with relevant and deep industry experience.

   

3. Web Analytics Engineer

   Data is the backbone of all decision making at ROI Revolution (see our tagline if you don't believe me). Day to day, you'll be setting up and maintaining detailed web visitor tracking to measure the effectiveness of our company's marketing initiatives. To get the job done you'll need intermediate to advanced experience with HTML, JavaScript, and PHP or ASP in order to create and customize tracking solutions for our clients. Our existing team of highly talented Web Analytics Engineers will give you the training you need to get up to speed with the actual web visitor tracking tools and techniques you'll be using on the job, but you'll need to bring the strong technical foundation and experience first.

   It doesn't stop there - to keep you on your toes you'll be the go-to point of contact for both our internal team and our clients to dive into the data and analyze results. In your spare time you'll stay up to date on the latest trends and technologies, create helpful reports for our clients and internal team, and develop new tools that help automate common tasks and promote efficiency for reporting and data management.

   

As always, we're looking for highly motivated, energetic, talented individuals with an eagerness to gain deep expertise with web analytics and online marketing to add to our winning team:

Want to learn more before you apply?

Here are some helpful resources:

• Our company: About ROI Revolution
• Our primary service: Pay-Per-Click Advertising
• With a focus on the following business models:
• E-commerce - a model whereby goods are sold directly to consumers (B2C), or businesses (B2B).
• Lead-based websites - a strategy whereby an organization generates value by acquiring sales leads from its website.
• Backed by:
• Web analytics - the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

We all know that Facebook is "where it's at", but the problem from an online marketing standpoint is learning how to tackle this growing source of traffic in the most appropriate and profitable way for your business.

Facebook's advertising platform allows for extremely targeted ad campaigns, and you can pay per click (like Google); however, when learning how to measure & profitably create an ad campaign the playing field is vastly different from other pay per click advertising platforms. The biggest difference is that Facebook is all about relationships. Anything that is not fostering or developing some sort of relationship on Facebook is deemed inauthentic.

Here are four ways to successfully grow & measure your Facebook presence authentically:

Get a Facebook Business Page:
Facebook advertising works the best when you have a Facebook business page set up, and you are actively adding posts and content. Having Facebook ads, but no facebook page is a dead give away that you are an advertiser just trying to "make a sale", and will not work well on Facebook.

If you are not on Facebook at all yet, creating a business page is a great place to start. Here is a Facebook link that outlines setting up a business page.

Once you have a page created, you are able to target ads directly to fans who have "liked" your page. There is also an option to target folks who are friends of fans who have liked your page. These options allow for more personal ad copy, and allow for you to relate to your audience better in your ad text.

If you are choosing to target to friends of fans who have "liked" your page, you get an added benefit of having their friends endorsement in your ad copy--making your ad extremely relevant. Here is what that looks like:

Build Your Relationships:
Once you have built up your Facebook page, begin by adding relevant and useful content that will keep your prospects and customers coming back for more!

Here's how: announce events, have a "deal of the day", promote new products, post tips, the ideas are endless-- just make sure they are relevant, useful, and engaging to your target market.

Set Realistic Facebook Advertising Goals:
Before you start your Facebook ad campaign you need to step back and think about your goals with Facebook advertising. Facebook is different than Google AdWords & MSN AdCenter in that visitors are using the site to develop relationships and connect with people. You will want to do the same thing with your ads. Think of your investment on Facebook advertising as an investment in beginning & nurturing relationships with your prospective and current customers.

Here are a few ways to foster your relationships in personal ways with Facebook Ads:

• Write your ad copy in very personal ways (talk about people, not things)
• Create Facebook only sales & promotions
• Test using images of people & not things
• Have ad headlines that speaks to your target market directly
• Test a number of different demographics & targeting --write ads accordingly

Measuring Your Relationships:
Since we are looking at Facebook advertising as a way to foster relationships, we need to ensure we are measuring the effectiveness properly. That's not to say that revenue won't come out of it, but to purely look at Facebook from an immediate "dollars in dollars out" standpoint like search advertising is not the place to get started.

You need to look at the metrics that are clearly revealing the level of relationships you are developing with your Facebook page, and the advertisements you are using to promote that page. Also, if you choose to send your users to your website you need to understand that these visitors may take longer to convert than a visitor from a search engine.

Here are a few of the metrics that reveal your level of relationship nurturing:

• Number of new "Likes" on your Facebook business page
• Number of interactions on your Facebook page (comments, votes, etc)
• Number of email sign ups, or catalog requests
• Number of Facebook referrals to your website

The interactions & likes on your Facebook page can be measured using Facebook insights within the Facebook interface. You will need to turn to your web analytics program for data on Facebook referrals, and other goals.

I hope you have found this information useful in directing you towards Facebook success!

Have any more ideas you've found successful? Leave your comments below

The smart paid search advertiser is consistently testing their ads, seeking the most effective language that can turn clicks into the desired action - conversion. However, the smarter advertiser knows that there are different ways to define what makes a 'winning' ad. The click is not the endgame for most advertisers, action taken after that click is often the most important.

In the past, AdWords has been limited to either rotating ads based on click through rates (where the ad with the most clicks leads to more visibility for that ad) or splitting traffic evenly on each ad. The issue with the click-based rotation route is that it's not uncommon to find ads with less clicks converting much more frequently than the more popular ad. For a long time, advertisers have been vocal about this less-than-accurate definition that 'high click through' equals a 'successful' ad.

The advertisers have spoken, and Google has answered the call by introducing a new type of ad rotation.

Instead of optimizing towards clicks, or rotating evenly, you can now opt to have your ads rotate based on which brings in more total conversions. This feature requires that you have conversion tracking enabled in your AdWords account for it to show up in the interface.

It is important to note that optimizing for "more conversions" does not necessarily mean it will optimize for the ad with the highest conversion rate. If an ad with a slightly lower conversion rate has a much higher click through rate, it will indeed provide more total conversions. The metric actually being optimized for is "conversions per impression". This KPI continues to be central in our own internal ad testing tools.

How do I enable conversion-based ad rotation?
First, select the campaign you wish to use this with, then click over to the 'Settings' tab, scroll down to 'Advanced settings', and follow the steps below.

You're done! You're now on your way to testing ads for the best performer in terms of conversions, whether that is defined as leads generated, sales completed, or anything that best fits your business goals.

We, here at ROI, are often motivated to rotate ads evenly since we're involved in improving ad copy on a consistent basis. However, for many advertisers with less spare time to invest, and for some special instances where many ads are being tested, this feature can easily help leverage the most successful ads, where success is defined as conversions rather than clicks.

You can learn more about this setting at the Google AdWords Help Center.

In my desperate search for the perfect web analysis and optimization toolbox, I can't help but be drawn to new tools and gadgets whenever I get a chance. Of course some disappoint, and some are amazing - but it always comes down to the question of value.

Back on Valentine's day, I had the wonderful opportunity to present some of the results of my curiosity to a great crowd at the 2011 Internet Retailer Web Design and Usability Conference in Orlando, and I'd like to be able to share some of the tools I discussed with you, too.

Hopefully you'll be able to find at least one tool that can help you gain a little insight into what your users are thinking when they visit your site and give you some great ideas for analysis and optimization.

Here is the summary of all tools, tips, and resources we covered in our presentation, which was called Measure and Optimize your Web Site Without Going Broke.

Due to time limitations, I've had to leave many great tools out. For example, Crossbrowsertesting.com is a fantastic tool for developers and designers - you may be surprised to see how your site looks in different browsers (including mobile ones)!

If you have used another great free or inexpensive tool and would like to share it with everyone, please leave a comment!

Finally If you want to read more about the presentation, here are two articles (the first one's worth it just for the horrible photo of me):
Low-cost web tools can unearth a treasure trove of data
Free analytics tools offer big help to retailers with small budgets

Learn More About Us:

If you've spent any time looking through your traffic sources in Google Analytics, particularly your referral sources, you may have noticed a lot of your traffic coming various mail sources:

Clearly it's not terribly useful to see your traffic broken out this way. At the very least, you would want to consolidate all of those mail.yahoo.com sources.

But if you think about it, it probably doesn't matter a whole lot which email service provider a visitor happened to be using when they clicked to your site. Perhaps it'd be better if we just consolidate all of those email sources into one entry. Not only would this significantly clean up reports, but it would also allow you to see the overall impact of traffic coming from email to your site.

The easiest way to handle this is by using filters:

While this is called a custom advanced filter, it's fairly straightforward. If you noticed in the first screenshot, all of traffic coming from email had "mail" somewhere in the source and "referral" as the medium. So this filter takes all of that traffic and changes the source of that traffic to webmail.

Also note that we set "Field B Required" to "Yes" and "Override Output Field" to "Yes". Both of these settings are necessary in order for this filter to work. The first setting ensures that we only change data for visits that fit the requirement we set in Field B, while the second one ensures that all visits that meet the filter requirements will have their source overridden with "webmail".

Once you've applied this filter to your reports, your email visits going forward will be consolidated into a single entry:

webmail / referral

Now if you tend to look at your traffic sources by medium, you'll notice that even after this filter, webmail traffic is still included with the rest of your referral traffic:

If you're OK with this, that's fine, but it is possible to separate your email traffic out by adding a second filter in addition to the first filter:

This is similar to our previous filter, but here we specify that we want to filter on visits with a source of "webmail" and change the medium of those visits to "webmail". Filters build on each other, so it's important that this filter come after the previous filter, otherwise it won't find any visits with "webmail" as the source.

After you make this change, your report on mediums should look more like the following:

This makes it much easier to differentiate between true site referrals and traffic that's coming from email.

Here are a couple final considerations:

1. It's possible to use advanced filters to break out webmail traffic by source. That is, you could have yahoo / webmail, aol / webmail, etc. The filters for this are much more complicated, however, and you may have trouble finding a good reason for knowing that an email visit came from aol instead of yahoo. But if you decide you need help with this we can help you via one of our Google Analytics technical support plans.

2. Getting a lot of webmail traffic may also be a sign that you aren't properly tagging your emails. If these are emails that you are sending out, especially from some type of autoresponder, then you should consider tagging these in some way. Click here to find out how we usually tag these emails.

As always, feel free to ask questions in the comments about this topic or let us know if you found this technique useful and/or how you used it.

If you have ever used Google's AdWords Editor you know that it can save you a tremendous amount of time in making changes both big and small to your AdWords account. While most features of AdWords Editor are highly visible throughout the various menus and tabs, there is one hidden feature that can save you a tremendous amount of time and headache. This hidden feature is called Formula Words.

Formula Words are a great short cut in AdWords Editor that allow you to quickly find and replace the text of one editable field with the text of another editable field via the Replace Text tool. There are Formula Words available for the majority of editable fields in Editor including: campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and all fields associated with a text ad. The fields that can be edited with Formula Words vary based on the tab that is currently selected.

Here are a few examples of the Formula Words that are available in AdWords Editor and the format that is required for each one to work properly:

[campaign] - Campaign text
[adgroup] - Ad group text
[keyword] - Keyword text
[headline] - Headline text
[description1] - Description line 1 text
[description2] - Description line 2 text
[displayUrl] - Display URL text
[destinationUrl] - Destination URL text

Since campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ad text generally have a common theme defined at the campaign level, there is usually a fair amount of overlap between the text used to build out each section. Instead of repeatedly typing the same thing over and over again, use Formula Words to quickly insert an ad group name into an ad headline, tag a destination URL with relevant campaign information or in any other instance where a particular value from one editable text field would be repeated in another editable field.

Here's an example of how Formula Words can save you a significant amount of time in building out the keyword list of a new campaign with a quick find and replace:

Let's say you are building a campaign around different types of chairs for sale on your website. Some of the different types of chairs available on your site include wood chairs and metal chairs. You also have several root keywords that will be used repeatedly in each ad group such as chair and chairs. Your initial campaign structure might look similar to the following:

Now you want to qualify your root keywords with the type of chair (wood or plastic) in each respective ad group. From the keywords tab in Editor, select all keywords that need to be built out further and click the Replace Text tool. In the 'Find text:' field enter [keyword]. Change the drop down menu to 'keyword'. Then, enter [adgroup] [keyword] into the 'Replace with:' field and click 'Find Matches' (Please note that spacing does matter in both the 'Find text:' and 'Replace with:' fields!).

Editor will now look for the first keyword in your currently selected keyword list and replace it with the ad group name, a space and the value of the first keyword. Once the Replace Text tool has finished replacing all values in your current selection, your campaign and keyword list should look like this:

All keywords in the Chairs campaign are now built out to include the type of chair based on their ad group location. While our example only used two different types of chairs, imagine if you had several hundred ad groups that needed keywords built out in a similar manner. The use of Formula Words in this instance would save you a significant amount of time!

Keep in mind that there are a few instances where Formula Words cannot be used or may not provide you with the desired results. When using Formula Words, consider the following:

• Formula Words only work in the Replace Text tool. They are not compatible with other features such as the Append Text tool or the Advanced URL Changes tool.
• Be sure to select the appropriate drop down menu option in the Replace Text tool. If you are trying to replace the text of your ad headline with the Formula Word [headline] and the text of that ad headline is repeated in the description lines of your ad, the Replace Text tool will look for every instance of the headline text regardless of what part of the ad it is located in unless you choose the exact field you are editing from the drop down menu.
• The Replace Text tool will not recognize Formula Words that are entered directly into editable text fields as words. For example, you cannot enter www.chairs.com/[campaign] into the Display URL text field and then use the Replace Text tool to find [campaign] and replace it with the name of the campaign. If you're trying to do this, it would be better to create a placeholder word for the replace tool to look for. For example, it would work if you entered www.chairs.com/placeholder into the Display URL text field and the use the Replace Tool to find placeholder and replace it with the different campaign names.

For additional examples of how to use Formula Words, check out Google's Help Center article. If you have any examples of how Formula Words have helped you in the past please feel free to share below!

"Show me the money!"

Cuba Gooding Jr. certainly understood the power of seeing the money in black and white. Anyone running an ecommerce site should be just as excited to see the money in reporting tools such as Google Analytics. Not only can overall revenue be measured in Google Analytics, but that revenue can be viewed for different segments such as sources, mediums, new or returning visitors, etc.

By using custom variables, it is possible to get an even more granular breakdown of ecommerce data than what Google Analytics offers by default. Although these custom variables can be very powerful, certain pitfalls should be avoided if you are also using ecommerce tracking. For a good introduction to custom variable implementation, see Caitlin Cook's article here.

Use Case for Advanced Implementation of Custom Variables for E-commerce Attribution

Recently, I implemented custom variables to break down revenue by customer types for one of our PPC clients. For this particular client, there was a dealer sign-in, which indicated a different type of customer. With a careful installation of custom variables and ecommerce code, the client is able to see ecommerce data for their dealer customers.

Continue reading to find out how to set this up correctly and to see a sample report.

Custom Variable Recap

Before getting to the implementation, it bears talking a bit more in depth about custom variables. On any given page, you can set a maximum of five different variables. There are three different scopes for each one that you set. The broadest scope that can be set is visitor level. At this level, the variable will last multiple sessions until overwritten or deleted. The next scope is session level, which lasts the duration of one visit. The narrowest scope is page level, which only applies to a single pageview. With this in mind, let's take a look at installation:

Page Tracking:

Tracking code needs to be placed on the dealer sign-in page to set the custom variable. NOTE: E-commerce data will only be associated with a custom variable if its scope is set to session or visitor level. For our example, the scope is set to '2', which is session level. Depending on whether you are using asynchronous or traditional syntax, your code should look similar to one of these examples:

Asynchronous Syntax

Traditional Syntax

E-commerce Tracking:

The ecommerce instructions from Google (found here ) show the code typically needed for an ecommerce installation. NOTE: If you need to set a custom variable on this page, you need to do it before the pageview is tracked. Depending on whether you are using asynchronous or traditional code, the completed ecommerce code should look similar to one of the two example codes below (with the parts in yellow indicating the custom variable code).

Asynchronous Syntax

Traditional Syntax

Sample Report

When all is set up correctly, expect a custom variable report similar to this:

You might notice on the report that dealer and regular customer types both appear as values. Getting this extra level of detail requires a little more logic built into the custom variables, and with a little care can be extended to even more granular customer segments.

So just to recap, in order to make sure ecommerce is properly reported within Google Analytics, you must make sure of the following:

1. The custom variable must be set at either the visitor or session level (1 or 2).
2. The custom variable must be set before the ecommerce code is called.

Have you used custom variables in an interesting way? Tell us how by leaving a comment!

Here at ROI Revolution we are always students of the best practices and the smartest strategies in the world of data driven paid search. Brad Geddes, founder of the Internet marketing training firm bgTheory (pictured right), has some of the most powerful pay per click insights around.

Brad is a long time internet marketing veteran who regularly speaks at search marketing conferences throughout the country and is the only Google AdWords Seminar Leader in the world who teaches, under Google's authorization, AdWords 301 and 302.

I've personally used Brad's techniques to come up with powerful new ad text for my clients, find new keyword opportunities, and find areas where my bids were limiting exposure on profitable keywords.

Brad has recently written a new book, Advanced Google AdWords, and we've already purchased five copies for our office.

We've got a unique opportunity to join us for a live webinar with Brad Geddes. Brad will shed light on the 6 most important AdWords reports that will give you all of the actionable insights you need to make some powerful changes within your AdWords account.

The AdWords report center is a powerful tool that should be leveraged by every advertiser, but without knowing what data to focus on it's easy to waste time running useless reports.

The webinar will be on Thursday, April 22nd at 2pm ET.

Click here to get signed up for this free event:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/855171728

Hosted by: ROI Revolution's CEO, Timothy Seward
With Guest Presenter: Brad Geddes, Founder of bgTheory

Brad will break down each report and go over exactly what metrics to focus on, how often to run each report, and most importantly, how to apply the data so that you are making smart changes to your AdWords account.

We are extremely excited to have the opportunity to host a webinar with Brad. You don't want to miss this opportunity!

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/855171728

When PPC Hero first pulled the tarp off Google's newest AdWords extension beta, we got a lot of juicy details about the lead generation mechanism coming down the pipe, but few ideas of how this might impact advertisers on the whole.

Corey Trent over at Marketing Experiments recently published an article on Google's new lead capture extension where he and I discuss the impact that a feature like this will have on AdWords, businesses and PPC in general.

If you're running AdWords to generate leads, check it out. You just might catch a glimpse of the future of your online advertising!

I was thinking the other day about some of the problems with Advanced Segments in Google Analytics. Don't get me wrong, I like the feature quite a bit and use it all the time. The main problem I have is that advanced segments require an extra step.

What I mean is that when you view a profile's report, if you want to apply an Advanced Segment, you have to expand the drop down or click the link in the left nav, click a few more things, and then finally it's applied.

That's OK if you need that advanced segment infrequently. But what if you have an Advanced Segment you use constantly, all the time, maybe even every time you view a particular profile? Then this process becomes a bit of a hassle.

Enter Default Applied Advanced Segments.

This new feature gives you the ability to set a particular advanced segment or segments as the default segment that will be applied to the profile every time you go to view that profile. Once you're viewing the profile, you would still have the ability to remove that advanced segment or apply a different advanced segment altogether as usual. What this feature does that's nice is offer a "recommended view" of the profile.

Currently, Default Applied Advanced Segments are both login based and browser based. Custom Advanced Segments are already login based, so that's no big deal. But if you access Google Analytics from multiple machines on a frequent basis, you might be frustrated if you have to set up your Default Applied Advanced Segments on each machine.

Eventually I would like to overcome this limitation, but this is a bit beyond what I've done so far, so it will likely be a while before I can come out with the update. I would also like to create a version of this that is managed at the admin level. That way, any admin will be able to set up which advanced segments are applied to the profile by default, and can change this for other users.

You can get in on the action by:

1. Getting Firefox
2. Getting Greasemonkey
3. Getting GARE

Of course, if you already have Firefox or Greasemonkey, you can bypass the appropriate step(s).

I would also like to get some feedback as to how useful this feature is so far. This blog post is intentionally devoid of details on how to use this feature. I'm hoping that this feature will be both obvious and discoverable. So let me know what works, what doesn't, or what else you might like to see, and I'll see what I can do.

Google Website Optimizer is a very capable testing platform allowing you to setup complex multivariate experiments using a simple, intuitive interface. So what's the problem?

AVERAGES LIE

Simplicity, while being Website Optimizer's greatest strength, is also a tremendous weakness when it comes to data segmentation. Google Website Optimizer doesn't offer the data granularity that Google Analytics does.

In Website Optimizer all of your traffic, no matter how different the traffic source, is lumped together into a single bin. You might be sending traffic from paid search, organic, and content to the same page. When you view data for an experiment on the page, you'll see aggregate data across all traffic sources

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana

Previously tucked away under the tools menu in the old AdWords user interface, the "My Change History" tool is an account manager's best friend and as such, has been moved to a more prominent place within the account under the reporting tab.

Why has this tool been granted such a prominent position in the new interface, alongside such heavy hitting account management tools as Google Analytics, Conversion Tracker and the Report Center? Well, sure it's a reporting tool like the others, but it's unique ability to track changes to your account, coupled with its performance metric graphs and visual timeline overlay make it a key weapon in any AdWords account manager's arsenal. It's placement under the Reporting tab is a testament to its usefulness.

While managing any AdWords account, it is common to make tens or even hundreds of changes to your account in one sitting in an effort to optimize traffic for better return on investment. Periodic tweaking of your account is essential to long-term growth and greater ROI. However, these changes are only beneficial to you if you can account for which ones resulted in performance improvements, and which ones didn't. In fact, it is the accountability of PPC optimization that affords us confidence in the power of split testing to boost profits.

And so, AdWords has given account managers the "My Change History" tool which records all changes made to an account for 2 years prior to a given date, then categorizes those changes for easy access.

You can see from the screen shot of the tool's controls below, the many ways by which you can filter your change history to find exactly what you're looking for.

You can specify an exact or preset date range, filter changes by campaign and ad group, and narrow the scope of change types (ad creative, budget, cpc bid, etc.) displayed in your report. If you're trying to find the exact date you rotated new ads into a given ad group over the past 3 weeks, these filters will isolate them for you in seconds. This makes it easy for any manager to analyze the performance results of the changes you have made without the fuss of digging through pages of detailed and itemized adjustments hoping to find the needle in the haystack.

What if you notice a significant change in performance, but you're not sure what caused it? Was it a bid increase, or maybe some new keywords you added? The "My Change History" tool can help you find the cause of performance fluctuations even if you don't know what you're looking for.

Let's say you noticed a significant drop off in conversions in your account and you have no idea why your ROI is in the toilet. Just fire up the "My Change History" tool, select a date range that precedes the drop in conversions, select all change types and voila.

Click on the number, and the tool will display only the changes that were made on that date, narrowing down weeks, months, or even years of records. Once you have this information, you'll be able to reverse those changes, and get your conversions headed back in the right direction.

When used methodically, you can optimize your account with precision and confidence, knowing that any changes you make can later be analyzed, isolated, and expanded or reversed based on their success or failure. AdWords' "My Change History" tool is a major asset in managing an account.

There are two different types of budget delivery standard and accelerated.

Standard Delivery: Selecting this option can potentially limit the number of times your ads show throughout the course of the day. This option designates the campaign to spend the daily budget allocated steadily throughout each day.

Accelerated Delivery: Selecting this option guarantees that your ad will show as much as possible throughout the course of each day except in the event that the budget you allocated for that campaign is depleted before day's end.

As an AdWords advertiser you must decide which of the two settings is a better fit for you and your overall account budget.

To switch between Standard Delivery and Accelerated Delivery, follow these steps:

• Start by accessing one of your campaigns.
• Then, in the new AdWords Interface you will see at the top of the screen an edit link next to Budget:

• On the following screen you will see the "Networks, devices, and extensions" section. Within this section you will see "Delivery Method" and an edit link.
• Click edit and decide which of the two best suits your needs.

Remember: to maximize coverage in your marketplace, choosing accelerated as your delivery method will position you far better to achieve this.

January is a fresh start, a time for resolutions, and a time for cleaning up the mess made from the holiday season. The same should apply to your Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Breathe new life into them with fresh keywords, ad text, and competitive research.

Here is a 5 step plan to give your PPC accounts a (much needed) winter makeover:

1. Read Blog Articles For New Keyword Ideas: Read your industry blogs to keep up with the latest buzz words. Reading the latest and greatest articles may help you think of new ways people will be searching for your products. Setting up a Google blog reader to follow blogs from your industry can help make this task much more time efficient.

2. Write At least 10 New Killer Ads: Take 1-2 hours and brainstorm some new ad text. Walk away from your computer, maybe talk to some clients, go to a white board. Break out from your mold of sitting at your computer and writing your ads. Switch it up! Sometimes to be creative you need to break away from the norm.

3. Study The Quality Score of Your Keywords: Check out which keywords in your account need some quality score help. Then separate those keywords out into their own ad groups and write highly specific ad text around them. Note the quality score before the change, then check the quality score in two weeks. Most likely you will see a big improvement.

4. Use SpyFu.com.: Use this tool to see what your competitors are bidding on! It's not 100% accurate, but it's a great way to come up with some new keywords and keep an eye on your competition. Simply type in your competitors' URL to the search function on this site, and a list of your competitors' paid terms is automatically generated.

5. Social Media: Stay in the loop on Facebook and other sites to see what your target market is saying and how they are talking about your products. This may help you come up with new ad text, and even make some changes to your landing page copy. Keeping your keyword, ad text, and landing pages relevant is an ongoing task. Social media sites can help you stay on the pulse of your ever changing and evolving target market.

I challenge you to make January a month of change! Think outside the box, and make some powerful changes within your accounts that will really impact your bottom line. Also, if you have any success using the 5-step plan please share!

1. Use AdWords Editor instead of the web interface when creating new campaigns

You can't "undo" a first impression, so you'll want to create and optimize your new campaign in an offline editor. This will allow you to reorganize keywords and ad groups before Google can give you an initial quality score.

2. Don't launch campaigns as paused until the landing page is ready

It can be tempting to one-up your web developer by launching built-out campaigns as paused while waiting for the landing page to be completed. Don't do it. Have patience

We've updated our Urchin 6 Demonstration webinar to include examples of Urchin's CPC integration (AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing), tracking and reporting for the next presentation on Tuesday, January 12th at 2:00pm ET.

During this 35-40 minute webinar we'll be reviewing a few of Urchin's signature features along with pricing and upgrade information. The webinar will be conducted online and over the phone for your convenience (this is a live event, no recordings will be available). The presentation will be followed by Q&A, so don't miss out on the chance to bring your Urchin 6 product questions to the experts!

The updates we'll be going over include:

The Cost Per Click (CPC) Data Import Manager allows you to create CPC Sources. It enables automatic extraction of CPC Campaign Data from AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). The CPC Sources can be linked to existing profiles and this will enable automatic inclusion of the CPC Data into Urchin reports.

Once the data has been imported, Urchin has the following features to manage your CPC campaigns:

• The Keyword Generation Tool allows you to generate and manage keywords and to see their performance information.
  
• Direct links to AdWords allow you to navigate directly from Urchin to the appropriate screen in your AdWords account.
  
• The Urchin Tag Manager inserts a dynamic keyword insertion tag {keyword} in ad destination URLs. This feature simplifies the URL tagging experience and allows you to seamlessly import AdWords cost data into Urchin.
  
• A CPC Structure group of reports has been added under the Advertisement Optimization section.
  

When it comes to ad text "Always Be Testing" is the motto that we hold in high esteem here at ROI Revolution. If you continually test your ads (to beat the current best performer) you will constantly improve the performance of your campaigns.

It is important to remember that there are a few strategies and tips you pretty much always need to implement as you are writing and testing ads. I"ve come up with an "ad recipe" that I keep on my desk to ensure all necessary elements are included in the new ads I write.

I"ll break down each ingredient:

Keyword Relevancy : This is plain and simple: have your keywords in your ad text. If possible place the keyword in the headline, also in the description lines and the display URL.

Differentiate From Competitors: This takes a little more work. Study your competitors' ads. What do you do differently? What sets you apart? Whatever it is, make sure it is in your ad copy (and stands out)!

Call To Action: Engage the visitor to take action on your site. Offer them a free report, a free consultation, ask them to call now, buy now, browse more. Whatever call to action makes sense for your industry and is the most powerful.

Like with any recipe, take the time to add each ingredient slowly. Then combine all to ensure your batter (or ad text) is well mixed! If you follow these steps, you will surely have a tasty ad that will keep your potential clients coming back for more.

Want more strategies and inspiration (including example headlines, ad text, etc) for writing your next pay-per-click ads?

Get our free PPC Ad Writing Quick-Reference Guide, simply fill out the form and the guide will be emailed to you instantly so you can start using it right away to write more compelling ad text.

With PPC advertising, the best use of ad copy is not just to attract prospects, but sometimes to filter out searchers who are unlikely to become your customers.

Since you pay for each click to your site, when a click-happy searcher pops into your site just to browse or to do a little price comparison, you're probably wasting some of your precious ad spend.

One way to effectively ward off some of these searchers is by including the price of your product or service in your ad. You obviously can't eliminate clicks from these users entirely - if they want to click through, they're going to. But adding the price makes them less likely on average to want to click.

For searchers who sincerely think they might be interested in your product or service, your price acts as a great filter, keeping out prospects that don't want to pay or can't afford your price point. And if the searcher has zero interest in spending money, your price makes it loud-and-clear that they won't be getting any freebies by clicking your ad.

This strategy will likely lower your clickthrough rate (CTR), but this should be the result of filtering out poorly qualified searchers, the very reason that you included the price in the first place. To confirm that this is in fact the case, analyze your conversion rates before and after adding your price to your ads. If it increased after the change, then your strategy was probably successful.

The effectiveness of this strategy will vary substantially depending on your situation. The most obvious time to include your price in your ad copy is when you have the best price. Not only will you be filtering out some poor quality traffic, but the price will double as a unique selling proposition in your space. If you don't have the best price it gets a bit trickier.

If you're not the price leader but almost every other ad on the page includes price for a very similar or identical product or service, then you might have a good reason to throw it in your ad as well. A search results page littered with prices means that the price is a very important factor for this particular product or service. If you don't include your price, searchers are going to click your ad at a high rate just to check out your price and if it's not the best, then they'll probably bounce. But if your price is in your ad, and you are not the price leader, then you can be confident that most clicks are going to come from prospects that don't use price points as their only buying criteria, making them a high quality visitor.

Including your price in your ad text is definitely not a strategy that will help every advertiser using PPC, but if you're having issues with low conversion rates and high CPAs, it's probably smart to give it a try and test it out.

Get more ad writing strategies to test from our free Ad Writing Quick-Reference Guide.

The end of the year is a nice time to take a look back over all that was accomplished throughout the year. To that end, I'm going to give you a list of our top 8 Analytics Blog Posts of 2009. As we go through the list, I'll give you a short description of each post as well as any random thoughts I have about the post.

Enjoy the posts and have a Happy New Year!

#1. 6 Tools Every GA User Should Have

Shawn Purtell

Random Thoughts:

This was by far the most popular post of 2009. It did so well that I decided to steal its format in hope of boosting the popularity of this post. It now includes 7 tools instead of 6 for added tool enjoyment. Looking over this list, even though this post was written back in January of '09, most of these tools are still very useful enhancements of the Google Analytics Interface and have even been updated since the writing of the post. GANotes, on the other hand, has achieved what every Google Analytics Tool dreams of becoming one day: it is now a Google Analytics fully-fledged feature known as Annotations.

#2. Tracking Transactions back to Initial Referrer

Jeremy Aube

Random Thoughts:

What's up with that frog? Apparently the idea is that considering the size of that frog, this is probably the first time it's been touched by human hands, i.e. first touch. There's a lot of talk about first-touch attribution vs. last-touch attribution. This post explains a way to get both in Google Analytics.

#3. Five Google Analytics FAILS

Michael Harrison

Random Thoughts:

We've seen people do a lot of crazy Google Analytics setups. Unfortunately, many of these fails are all too common. This post is worth reading just for the laughs alone (well, OK, it's GA humor, but it's still pretty funny), but it also serves as a much needed warning sign. Most of these fails resulted in permanent damage of one sort or another to Google Analytics data.

#4 ga.js code for GWO

Jeremy Aube

Random Thoughts:

Yet another update to GARE. This particular update was nice because allowed you to get the appropriate modifications for subdomain and multiple domain tracking. I'm not sure if this particular GARE feature still works (Update 12/30/2009: just fixed this. It should work fine now.); Google updated the Google Website Optimizer Interface so that ga.js code is provided by default.

#5. 5 Advanced Segments for Ecommerce

Michael Harrison

Random Thoughts:

Another list post, this one dealing with using the fairly-new, enterprise-level feature, advanced segments, to uncover more than ever before about your ecommerce data. My particular favorite advanced segment is #2. It used to be very difficult to determine the influence of a landing page on your site, but advanced segments makes this easy (and maybe even fun!).

#6. 6 Tools to Troubleshoot GA

Shawn Purtell

Random:

For some reason, I'm reminded of a quote: "So far alls I've come up with is the effects of gasoline. {pauses a bit} On fire." There are a lot of things on fire in this post too. We use most of these tools every day. Personally, my life would be pretty much over if I didn't have FireBug.

#7. Stressing About Ecommerce Variables?

Caitlin Cook

Random Thoughts:

Yes, those ecommerce functions sure do ask a lot of you. Fortunately you don't have to give into their demands. This post tells you exactly which variables you need to make Google Analytics ecommerce tracking work for you.

#8. Viewing A/B Experiments in Google Analytics

Shawn Purtell

Random Thoughts:

Getting Google Website Optimizer data for multi-variate tests into Google Analytics takes a little bit of work. For A/B tests, this data is available by default in Google Analytics since each combination in your test is a separate page. This post tells you how to further unlock your A/B test data in Google Analytics using advanced segments. It also has a really nice screenshot of GARE in action.

Here at ROI Revolution we've enjoyed reviewing our most popular posts of the past year. There have been a lot of changes in the Pay-Per-Click world over the last twelve months, and it's been exciting to watch them unfold.

To wrap up the year we've ranked our top 7 PPC blog posts of 2009:

1. The One vs. Many-Per-Click Breakdown --Turn to this article for a breakdown of the One Vs. Many-Per-Click conversion change that happened in Google AdWords this past year. Since conversions are a reflection of your bottom line, understanding this change is crucial!

2. Top 5 Free PPC Tools --There are tons of FREE PPC tools on the web. Some of them are great, some are alright, and some are just OK. Here are ROI we've had experience with almost all of them, and have compiled a list of the top 5 for you to reference.

3. Introduction to Google's Ad Auction, Part 1: Quality Score --This 2 part blog series summarizes a video put together by Google's Chief Economist. Part 1 outlines Google's Quality Score and what is required to have a good one.

4. Introduction to Google's Ad Auction, Part 2: AdRank and CPC -- Getting to the top of Google can be tricky (and expensive). This blog article outlines exactly how Google calculates AdRank and the cost you pay per click.

5.How to Use Negative Keywords When Targeting Google's Content Network -- Setting up campaigns to target Google's content network can be confusing enough, add in negative keywords and you've got yourself a double whammy. This article explains best practices when using negative keywords when targeting Google's content network.

6. Have You Used Google's New Wonder Wheel? -- We loved Google's new tool so much we blogged about it! Google's Wonder Wheel can help you expand your keyword list, build out content campaigns, find new negative keywords, and much more!

7.Google's New Interface Will Make Your Advertising Life Easier -- Google released their new interface for AdWords in 2009. Our article outlines the top features and benefits, and also links to our New AdWords user interface webinar where you'll see how the new AdWords User Interface will save you hours of your limited time, help you cut wasted adspend, and discover hew highly relevant keywords and placements to scale your online profits!

We hope you have enjoyed recapping our top posts of 2009.

Best wishes in the new year!

Last Friday, we held the first ever Tacky Holiday Sweater contest here at ROI!

Each contestant's sweater was judged based on unique features, creativeness, effort input, tackiness, awesomeness, and even repulsiveness. General enthusiasm was also taken into account.

After a vote was taken, the following were our top 3 winners (pictured here with fabulous prizes):

(From left to right)

1st place: Matt Fritz - Matt won the crowd with his personally designed and handmade sweater

1st runner up: Justin D'Angelo - comments on his sweater included "just downright disgusting"

2nd runner up: Erin Skinner - Erin went all out from head to toe!

A "mistake" that we consistently see when conducting our AdWords account audit and strategy sessions, or when beginning work with a new client is that there are no negative keywords throughout the entire account. The use of negative keywords can save you hundreds of dollars every month by preventing your ads from displaying for irrelevant Google.com searches.

The addition of negative keywords to your account should be made in order to have your ads show only when it is relevant to your product offering or service. The easiest (and quickest) way to find negative keywords is to use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

This tool can be found by clicking on "Opportunities" at the top of the new AdWords user interface

Just 10 Advanced day seats left for the downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, Google Analytics Seminar for Success!

This is it, your last chance to join fellow Google Analytics users in the Charlotte area to learn more about this great tool and ask your questions to qualified experts. Google Seminars for Success is officially sponsored by Google, you can trust that you are receiving the most accurate and up-to-date information on the best practices for Google Analytics.

Who each day is geared for:

• The Introduction and User Training, on Wednesday, December 9th, is designed for the beginner in Google Analytics and is primarily for non-technical users such as marketers and analysts. A large part of the day focuses on the reports available and how to use them. The intent is to present reports, explain what they mean and how they might be used with a site. While explaining the reports, the various tools (the calendar, different chart views, tabs, etc.) are explained in context.
• The Advanced Technical Implementation Training, on Thursday, December 10th, is is primarily for the technical user who installs and configures Google Analytics. Familiarity with JavaScript, HTML, and cookie management is assumed.
• You can see all of the content here.

Each seminar costs $499 (or $898 for both sessions, a savings of $100!).

The seminar will be at the Holiday Inn Charlotte Center City. Instruction begins each day at 9am (with registration at 8:45am to get your training materials, the seat of your choice and coffee!) and goes until 5pm with a one hour break at noon for lunch on your own.

As of Monday (12/7/09) at 5:45pm ET, there are NO seats remaining for the Introduction session and 10 seats remaining for the Advanced session. Our last seminar this past September in Chicago sold out a few days before the event! We limit each class to 40 attendees to ensure everyone has the opportunity to get their questions answered.

Hurry to get one of the few remaining seats and join us as we explain how to set up and use Google Analytics in one (maybe two) days!

Click for larger image

Any user with Google Analytics access can write comments on the over-time graph to indicate any notes they have for that particular event. This will save a lot of time for companies where the tasks are distributed between numerous people, which means you the analyst will no longer have to spend hours figuring out why all your data has changed. Just view the annotations to see if any major updates or changes were made!

In addition to this new feature, Google also released the ability to use the Custom Variables in Advanced Segments and Custom Reports, and the new Tracking Code Setup Wizard. To view more information about these you can visit the Google Analytics blog.

Back in August, a tip was released on the Official Google Analytics Blog that allows you to export more than 500 rows from a report. In the post, this technique was used to export more than 500 rows worth of keyword data. Here we often use this technique to export more than 500 rows worth of pages from the Top Content report.

What you may not realize is that you can also use this trick to export more than 10 previous and next pages from the Navigation Summary report. As you may recall, the navigation summary report looks something like this:

In some case, 10 previous and next pages may be just what you need. But what if you want more?

First, look up at the address bar. For Google Analytics reports, you will often see some anchor text at the end of the URL. For example, this URL:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/content_detail_navigation?id=3125976&pdr=20091031-20091130&cmp=average&d1=%2Findex.htm#lts=1259675463422

contains the following anchor text:

#lts=1259675463422

The first step is to remove this, including the pound symbol (#) from the URL. Next, add the following to the end of the URL:

&limit=50000

You cannot export more than 50,000 rows, so it's usually a good idea just to set the limit to this to get as many rows as possible. If you only want the first 1000, you can always set limit=1000 instead.

After adding this to the URL, hit enter and wait for the page to reload. Note that the page will not look any different than before. Adding limit=50000 only affects what you get in the export, not what you see in the interface. Also, only the CSV and TSV exports are affected. You can't get a PDF or XML with more than 10 previous and next pages. You can't even use the CSV for Excel export. But plain, old CSV and TSV work just fine.

There's not much more to say about this, so we'll move on to the next technique.

Pivot tables in Google Analytics are pretty neat. They allow you to see a two dimensional view of your data for a given metric or two. One way we might want to use pivot tables would be to see the number of visits made for each of our keywords, grouped by the hour of day:

What's this? You can't pivot by the hour of day? Download GARE and then come back quick!

So as you'll notice, you can only see the first 5 hours. And by first 5 hours I mean the 5 hours that had the highest number of visits. You can also cycle through the rest of the hours in chunks of 5.

Or you can add this parameter to the URL in the address bar:

&tcols=50000

You should remember to remove the anchor text and hit enter when you're done like before. Unfortunately, the report will now revert to a previously unpivoted state. You'll need to get back to the report you were looking at previously, but once you're there, you should see as many columns as are available. In this case, there should be 24 columns (though you may have less if you have hours without visits):

Note, if try to filter the report, you'll lose the extra pivot columns and revert back to only 5. There is a way to get around this. For example, let's say you filtered by "cheese" to only show keywords containing cheese. instead of just adding &tcols=5, add the following:

&tcols=50000&q=cheese&tpivk=hour

This will result in a pre-filtered report. You can then select pivot as before and see as many pivot columns as you like for keywords containing cheese. Note that we also added &tpivk=hour to pivot by hour of the day. That's because as soon as you change what you're pivoting by, you'll lose the filter. So there's quite a bit more involved if you need a filtered report, but it's still doable.

Now the only problem remaining is that there's no good way to sort by hour. At least not from the interface. You can export to CSV and do a vertical sort on the columns to get everything in order by hour. And if you're needing more than 500 rows worth of keywords containing cheese, pivoted by hour, you can also add &limit=50000:

&tcols=50000&q=cheese&tpivk=hour&limit=50000

If you were able to make good use of one of these tips, let me know! I'd also like to hear any suggestions for improvement or other things you might like to be able to do with the Google Analytics Interface, but aren't sure if it can be done. Maybe you'd like to see this made into a Greasemonkey script or add-on? Let me know!

You're always checking on your landing pages, right? You read the blogs, run experiments, and generally try to make your site as user-friendly as possible.

But chances are, if you're reading the ROI Revolution blog, you're on a high speed internet connection. If your webpages are loading in nanoseconds with your T1, how are they faring for those visitors who aren't as lucky as you? You know, the ones on crappy cable modems and DSL and (gasp!) the dreaded dial-up?

Does it matter? Well, it depends. If you're a gaming website or Internet marketing blog, most of your audience is probably on broadband. But if you're running a site for a retirement community in Florida, then my grandma is hitting your Flash-encrusted site in her AOL browser and she's waiting. And waiting. And waiting. She's a patient old gal, my Meemaw, but she's not going to wait all day. She's going to point her browser and her pension elsewhere.

Aside from your visitors, your site's load time is also important to Google. Not only does page load time affect your AdWords Quality Score, but according to Matt Cutts, it's going to be playing a bigger role in the organic search ranking.

So read on to learn how to optimize your landing pages' load times, and maybe make a few bucks off my Meemaw.

Before you start trying to speed up your site, you should probably find out whether or not it has slow load times in the first place. There's no use beating a dead horse.

First, just log into your AdWords account and check the Keyword Analysis field. From the keywords tab, hover or click on the the status icon (). You'll get a message about that keyword and its destination URL's Quality Score. It looks like this:

Red text is bad. Green text is good. If the landing page load time has no problems, you're golden. At least as far as AdWords is concerned. But what about your visitors?

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to find the average download time for your site. This will alert you to potential problems with specific pages. Just sign into Webmaster Tools and click your site's URL. If you haven't already set up Webmaster Tools, go ahead and do that. We'll wait for you.

Done? See, I told you we weren't going anywhere. Now go to the Diagnostics area and check out Crawl stats. The third graph on the screen shows your site's average load time.

But if you want to make absolutely sure, you've got to experience your site firsthand. So, go buy an eMachine from 2001, find one of those old AOL floppies, and then

Strategy: Using Google Analytics, you can see which cities and states are performing well, and you can create separate PPC campaigns for those areas with higher bids. Conversely, you can see which cities and states underperform, and you can isolate and bid them down or eliminate them altogether.

Google Analytics can reveal so much invaluable information about your online (and offline) marketing efforts, and uncovering where the majority of your traffic and customers come from is just one of the many important pieces of the marketing pie. Using different reports and segmentations in Google Analytics can shed light on where you should be focusing your marketing.

The Map Overlay report under the Visitors section (illustrated below) allows you to see number of visitors, revenue, goal conversion, and many other metrics for your website coming from anywhere in the world! You are able to click on a region and drill down further to see many different metrics within that region.

Another tip for finding out where your most valuable traffic or your trash traffic is coming from is to view any report and change your dimension targeting to Continent, Sub Continent Region, Country/Territory, Region, or even City.

Once you are able to pinpoint where you would like to target or exclude your traffic, you can alter your Google AdWords geo targeting to reflect what you've found.

Allowing your ads to display only in the areas that are most profitable for you and adjusting your campaign budgets to reflect where the best traffic comes from, can't help but boost the return on your AdWords investment!

We've got a few additional strategies to make your AdWords advertising drive more response & profit. Our CEO, Timothy Seward, has prepared his top 3 "undercover" tactics that we consider the cream of the crop. (Hint: there's a large-screen eight minute AdWords training video when you opt-in).

Get the three free AdWords strategies here!