The Maine SEO Blog

This post is the second of a five-step process to set up, measure, and manage your Facebook ads.

You’ve just finished creating your Facebook ad; now it’s time to finish the setup process.

• Start by selecting the proper currency and time zone.
• Choose a campaign name – be mindful that if you’re going to create multiple campaigns, they should be unique enough to describe exactly what that campaign contains.
• Pick your daily budget. Facebook will never exceed this amount, but be mindful your ad will stop being shown if it reaches a certain ceiling.
• Schedule: choose to run your ad during a specific time frame (for a special event, for example) or to run it continuously.
• Pay for impressions (CPM) or for clicks (CPC). Here is Facebook’s official definition of the two:
  

  If you choose a Pay for Clicks (CPC) model, you will also bid on how much you are willing to pay for each click on your ad. Facebook will display your ad in the Ad Space. The amount you are charged will never exceed your daily budget.

  If you choose a Pay for Views (CPM) model, you will also bid on how much you are willing to pay for every thousand impressions of your ad. Facebook will display your ad in the Ad Space. The amount you are charged will never exceed your daily budget.

• Finally, choose your maximum bid. Notice Facebook will provide you with the estimated number of clicks you will receive based on your budget and bid.

Review your ad, enter your credit card, and your ad is live!

Next time, we’ll talk about measurement and ad reports.

Nicki Hicks
Like flyte on Facebook

This morning, I put on a presentation sponsored by the kind folks over at Ameriprise Financial. I spoke to the group about Search Engine Optimization basics.

Here are some key takeaways:

• SEO is about making both search engines and users happy. It’s about balance.
• First and foremost, make sure your website is user-friendly – your navigation and information architecture should be intuitive.
• Do a keyword analysis to find out what your audience is searching for online.
• The more quality incoming links, the better. How do you get links?
  • Directory listings
  • Contact bloggers/webmasters
  • Blog
  • Guest blog
  • Article marketing
  • Participate in forums
• Submit a brick-and-mortar business to all of the major local search engines.
• Don’t forget about social. It plays a huge part in SEO these days.

For even more takeaways, view the full presentation below:

Let’s say your site ranks #1 on Google for the best terms imaginable. What’s more, people are searching for those keywords. And most importantly, those people are actually going to your website!

But then, when you’ve got them right where you want them…they leave. They leave without buying, they leave without signing up, they leave without contacting you.

Why? You don’t have a call-to-action. Calls-to-action get people to convert. SEO doesn’t amount to anything if you don’t have conversions.

If your call-to-action is buried at the bottom of a page or deep within the site, how do you expect people to convert? Don’t think you’re putting your “buy now”, “sign up now”, or “call us now” buttons in people’s faces too much. There is, of course, a limit; but the truth of the matter is you need to make it obvious what you want people to do next.

Let’s look at SEOmoz’s website as an example. They’re pros (excuse the pun) at this.

What do you think they want you to do?

Subtle, yet above the fold. And tells you exactly what to do. There are a few calls-to-action on the SEOmoz homepage, but the Pro Signup is where they make money. (For some great specific pointers on how to make a call-to-action, check out this post.)

Calls-to-action aren’t SEO. But if you don’t have great calls-to-action, you can’t count on high conversions.

Nicki Hicks
What do you want people to do?

The search engines know your website exists, but can they see the whole thing? Not sure? Double check by Googling “site:www.yoursite.com”. (Here’s what the results should look like.)

Google Webmaster Tools might also give you some insights into crawl errors and page errors.

Large websites, especially Ecommerce sites, are often the unfortunate ones to have a percentage of their pages never indexed. That means that searchers will never see those pages. Big problem? I’d say so.

Search engines find new pages by using links. So, with very few links to the deep crevices on your website, it makes sense that Google can’t see them. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is creating links to the page(s) in question. There are a few ways to do that.

On your own

Make sure that the page(s) is/are easy to find in the navigation. If not, fix it. If the page is already apart of your navigation, or it’s still not being indexed then…

• Add a sitemap (if you don’t have one already).
• If you have a blog, write a post about the page and link to it.
• Create a link from your homepage. Perhaps a featured product or service, depending on what the page is about.
• Create a link from similar pages on your site, but make sure they are indexed first!
• Share the page on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, etc.

Help from others

• Get a link to the page from another website or blog.
• Ask your network to share the page on their favorite social network.
• If it applies, share the page in a press release.
• Create an article and distribute it on your favorite article marketing site.

The trouble is, submitting your website to Google doesn’t necessarily mean it will be indexed. Instead, you’ve got to create links that Google will follow to your non-indexed pages.

Nicki Hicks
Get indexed

Rand’s going to talk about how to make standard metrics actionable. [woot]

To make Analytics actionable, always ask:

Why am I measuring this?

What would I do if results were different?

Search Referral Analytics

# of visits per search engine over time – You want to see this number increase over time, in relationship to the search engine’s market share/overall global growth [Action: find out if it's a ranking/indexing issue]

# pages getting search referrals over time – Measure for each search engine and often. [Action: discover if indexation is an issue worth effort, read more about that here]

# of keywords sending traffic from a search engine over time – Look for increase in number of keywords sending traffic to your site – especially if you create a lot of content [Action: might be a rankings/demand issue; determine if content additions are accretive and what drives growth/shrinkage in search traffic]

Keyword Referral Analytics

# visits per keyword – Compare week by week, or even month by month [Action: Analyze top traffic drivers from a value perspective, check rankings for potential easy wins & get answers if traffic dips]

First time vs. returning visits per keyword – Business decision: which is better for you? [Action: Determine value of reaching new visitors vs. converting branded users (focus efforts on the more valuable one)]

Keyword rankings – They can be valuable! [Action: know if traffic spikes/dropoffs are from rankings, indexation or search demand shifts by matching traffic with rankings, SEOmoz has their own ranking tracker and you can track rankings using Analytics!]

Engagement Analytics

Time on site – Take it to the next level [Action: compare ROI metrics; if they correlate, improve on keywords/landing pages with low time on site]

# of Pageviews – Again, take it further than “sweet, it went up this month” [Action: Depending on your metrics, a "sweet spot" of pages browsed often dictates a conversion event - optimize towards it!]

Repeat visit ratio – [Action: Find what content/activities/referrers send engaged (read: returning) traffic and copy those while improving subpar pages]

Sharing/linking activity – Start tracking these actions, just like a conversion! [Action: Find patterns/sources that predict sharing activities (both content and CTAs) and make them testable conversion events]

Latent Conversion Tracking

Removing last-click attribution – Do you know what happens before their last click when they become a conversion? Look at full path analysis within Navigation Summary in your Analytics. This post will show you how to do this.

ROI Analytics

Lifetime Customer Value = CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value): how much money they spend, how many referrals

Cost of Acquisition = CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): how much spent on sales, SEO, marketing, advertising

ROI = CLTV – CAC

Always be asking “What’s the ROI?”

Q&A

Q: In your opinion what’s the best Analytics software?
A: Depends on the person using it. Omniture experts will have difficulty with WebTrends. You can get a lot of the same information from all of the packages.

Q: Why the symmetric dip in SEOmoz’s traffic?
A: B2B websites will usually see dips on the weekends.

Q: How can I see the number of unique visitors for a particular section of my website?
A: At the bottom of Google Analytics, you can filter  landing pages based on page, like:

Q: Is there a big difference between different Analytics packages?
A:  Eric Enge did an extensive study with this at StoneTemple.

Q: Is there a way to automatically see rankings in Google Analytics?
A: Yes, here’s the Yoast link again.

Q: What’s the best tool for measuring ROI?
A: Salesforce.com, SEOmoz uses Infusionsoft.

Q: In your opinion, what’s your favorite part about Google Analytics?
A: Simplicity; the greatest thing is it’s easy to use, fairly fast.

Q: How do you compare bounce rates with other websites in your industry?
A: Google Analytics will let you view your site stats compared to similar sites in your industry using Benchmarking. You can find these stats under Visitors > Benchmarking. [You can set your industry at the very top of the page.] It’s up to you whether you actually believe these stats or not, obviously.

Q: Tell us something about bounce rates.
A: I only care about them when they happen in my conversion funnel. Always tie it to conversion and ROI.

Q: Why is rank tracker different than actual search?
A: Make sure personalized search is off (use &pws=0 after your query); local search could also change your results.

Q: When looking at social media sites, what are the metrics to track?
A: It depends on what you want them to do. Branding? Time on site. Go to your site and look at ads? Maybe page visits.

You’ll be able to find the archive of this webinar here shortly. And here is all of the Twitter chatter about the #mozinar.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
@randfish