The Maine SEO Blog

Ben Seslija, Senior Director, Analytics, Clickable Inc.

5 Tips for Utilizing Market Differences

1. Geo-modified campaigns (national/larger area)
2. General search campaign (geo-targeted)
3. Create local ads
4. Custom local city and general landing pages
5. 25 mile radius (not overly precise; i.e. using IP addresses)

True impact of quality score

• Ad Rank  = Bid x quality score

The better your quality score, the less you pay…

• QS 10 = $5/CPC
• QS 1 = $27.50/CPC

Increase Quality Score

1. Split keywords into smaller ad groups
2. Create relevant ad copy for each ad group
3. Optimize creatives
4. Experiment with matching options
5. Build SEO
   - Link Building
   - Implement keywords
   - Don’t forget about essential site pages (About Us, etc.)
   - Make sure Google thinks you’re relevant

Negative keywords

• Don’t forget about them
• They might acquire higher CTR’s than positive keywords
• To find them:
  - Use keyword tools
  - Search query performance
  - Analytics
  - Competitive analysis tools (like compete.com) [this is the one point I personally disagree with]

Andrew Beckman, President, Location3Media

Important tools through Google Analytics:

• Site overlay reports
• Create funnels
• Blocking IPs

Google Analytics (background/why you should use it)

• Comprehensive data
• Easy-to-use interface
• Free!!!

Site Overlay Reports

• Shows redundant areas (links that should be removed)
• Shows successful areas (links whose real estate should be increased)
• Flaw: link click-throughs are a total of all click-throughs to that page (in other words, if you have multiple links to a certain page, the click through percentage is a total of all of them). Work around: add “&location=x” (x = 2, 3, 4, etc.)

Other important tools:

• Top pages (Google Analytics)
• Crazy Egg
• Google Website Optimizer

Crazy Egg Heat Map

• Might help you decide to make images links (that people are clicking on)
• Further verify what people are clicking on

Funnels

• On-click events
• Cant track links, videos, PDFs

IP Filtering

• Block your, your developer, designer, etc. IP addresses
• Look at “pure data”

Resources

• www.analyticsmarket.com/freetools

Jill Emerson, Search Marketing Manager, Allegis Group, Inc.

Social Media

• Be sure to add value, other than what you give through the .com website (e.g. adding RSS feed from blog, etc.)

Takeaways

1. Answer the “so what”?
2. Translate for management (put it in lamen’s terms).
3. Clearly identify next steps.

Questions

Great book for GA: Measuring Success with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 11:41 am and is filed under Analytics, Expert Advice, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.