5 Web Analytics Metrics to Pump Up PPC

These five Web analytics insights can help you boost your pay-per-click marketing efforts.

Using Web analytics to gain insights about user behavior can be an effective way to develop new strategies for pay-per-click accounts.

High-Revenue Keywords

Tracking revenue and goals in analytics is extremely helpful, especially for this exercise. Review keywords bringing in the top percentage of revenue or leads. What are the commonalties? For example, say the majority of your top revenue keywords tend to be branded. Look for opportunities with non-branded keywords, and ensure they are in the correct campaigns or create new ones and assign additional budget to optimize revenue potential.

Sign-Up or Cart Abandoners

An "abandoner” is a site user who started down the conversions path, but for some reason left the site and therefore didn’t convert at that time. By looking at the Web statistics of the relevant pages, you can see how many users bounced from the site, or stayed for a very short time. This may occur directly before a user has to input personal information or credit card information. Use this abandoner data for retargeting campaigns to reach them again with appropriate messaging. For example, for someone abandoning a shopping cart, serve ads with a discount toward the next purchase or remind them of free shipping. For an account sign-up, perhaps message them on the advantages to becoming members. Urgency will be important because abandoners may forget about their site activities by the week’s end.

Content Consumers

For companies that invest in content or blogging on a regular basis as part of their marketing strategy, users who are viewing or interacting in some way with the content can be valuable to reconnect with and drive into the conversion funnel. Two interesting ways to do this:

1. Remarketing to users who visit specific content and serve ads with complementary products or services. You can select multiple pages of similar content or specify a length of time on the site to ensure they are the most qualified leads.
2. AdWords offers a type of targeting called Remarketing Lists for Search Ads that reaches previous site visitors based on searches in the search results pages and on their activity on the company’s website. In the case of content, if a user is frequently reading a specific content topic, then conducts a keyword search on Google.com, it is possible to reach them with a customized ad text.

Highly Engaged

Engagement with a visitor will depend on the website and audience, but generally in analytics you will be looking for returning visits, page depth, time of the site, and number of visits. Identifying the engagement of converters vs. non-converters can give insight into how a campaign could be designed for best results. For example, say the majority of converters purchase in one day. For a new potential customer, using ad copy with timeliness might be important to communicate a same-day sale: "in stock-now," "fast, free shipping," "daily deals."

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2403032/5-web-analytics-metrics-to-pump-up-ppc

YouTube-Style Analytics Make Their Way to AdWords for Video

The new additions to AdWords for video will help marketers create ads that people choose to watch.

Google's AdWords for video has been revamped to offer a more YouTube Analytics-style performance, bringing a greater focus on video creative to campaign management and optimization.

Up until now, marketers using AdWords for video, have been able to add targeting and budgets to their YouTube videos to make video ad campaigns. But until late last week, should they have needed more information on how their videos performed outside of when they appeared as ads, they needed to jump over to YouTube Analytics for that data.

The new Video Analytics page prominently features a visualization of your video’s views, split by paid and non-paid to give a holistic sense of how your video is doing. The page also brings the audience retention graph to AdWords for video, which was formerly only available in YouTube Analytics. With the audience retention chart, advertisers can fine-tune their creative by visualizing when audience interest waxes and wanes. For example, if advertisers see a steep viewer drop-off at a certain point, the chart alerts them to an opportunity to re-cut their video to hold their interest longer.

The new reporting page also offers a panel that provides a sense of a video’s contribution to overall account performance, letting advertisers see which videos are over- or underperforming across all their campaigns, and more fully depicts how your video creative is helping to build their audience on YouTube.

This may seem like a small stocking stuffer, but this new feature provides more context for your video ad creative, and helps you make ads people choose to watch. And that’s a big gift to advertisers for the holidays.

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2386944/adwords-for-video-enhances-video-analytics

Ten pros and cons of online advertising

Pros & Cons of Digital Advertising

The digital world has made online advertising an absolute must for many companies. While it is the primary way to get your name out there and attract the billions of dollars that flows through e-commerce and retail stores as a result of online advertising, it’s not without its downfalls. When you’re setting up an online advertising campaign, it’s important to understand the pros and cons of the situation before you invest a significant amount of time, money, and effort into the process.

Pros

1. You have the ability to reach your potential customers at the places they visit online. Online advertising through search engines, social media sites, and popular websites gives you adspace on some of the most trafficked places on the Internet.
2. Ad targeting. While you can simply get impressions on high traffic sites to get as many eyes on your advertising as possible, your marketing results tend to be much better if you do some targeting before you start running the ads. Many sites have extensive data on the type of reader who visits and uses their sites on a day to day basis. Some have ad platforms that allow you to only display your ads to certain user segments, such as the way Facebook handles their advertising. Since a significant amount of demographic and location information is shared by Facebook users, this allows the social networking site to give you a great deal of opportunity for laser focused ads.
3. A wide range of costs. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a massive business, there’s a site that has an advertising cost that meets your needs. Smaller niche sites also have the advantage of attracting your target demographic, so you’re getting high quality traffic without having to pay an exceptionally high price.
4. Responsive testing. In the print and television advertising world, it takes time to change marketing collateral to adjust to errors in the advertising, change marketing tactics, or update the information. Online advertising allows you to quickly change your marketing materials, sometimes even without the direct intervention of the publisher. For example, the Google Adwords backend allows you to make on the fly adjustments of existing advertising so you can see the phrasing or style that works best for you, and what’s falling flat for your company.
5. Easy split testing. Many online advertising platforms allow you to load several versions of a particular ad, as well as how often you want to run a particular ad type, so that you can test several ads at the same time. This makes split testing and other types of online advertising testing easy to accomplish.

Cons

1. Many website visitors are so inundated with online advertising that they experience ad blindness. Their eyes simply skip over the locations that banner advertising and other types of advertising are located, and may have a negative view of sponsored content.
2. Ad blocking. All current versions of popular Internet browsers such as Google Chrome have access to ad blocking extensions. Instead of experiencing banner blindness and not seeing your ads, they completely block the ads from getting to their browser. By default, these extensions block a majority of ad servers and are updated to adjust to new ones on the market as well.
3. Competition. You have a great deal of opportunity on the Internet, but you also have a great deal of competition. You can’t just set up an e-commerce site and expect the money to flow in. If you don’t have any way to set yourself apart from your market, you’re going to be drowning in a saturated market. Your online advertising is likely to be displayed alongside competitors, so it’s important that you have a way to stand out.
4. Distraction. When you’re advertising through a search engine or on a site that has a lot of content curation, your potential customers are getting distracted by dozens of things on the screen at once. The amount of traffic leaks can easily lead your online advertisements to not be as effective as they are.
5. Analytics learning curve. To completely take advantage of online advertising methods, you need to spend a lot of time tracking the data and adjusting your advertising by watching stats tracking and other analytics programs. If you haven’t used this before, there is a learning curve before you understand how all of the stats interact.

http://www.toptensocialmedia.com/social-media-social-buzz/ten-pros-and-cons-of-online-advertising/