How To Use Google Ad Words To View Paid Ads & Organic Search Results

There are millions of pages for your potential customers to choose from, what makes them show up on your web site or blog page?  Research tells us that the three main sources of web site traffic are …..

1. As a result from a search in a search engine
2. A link from another web site, including social media
3. A friend or associate gave them you link or business name

Because the internet is constantly changing, what worked yesterday may not work today, with the exception of SEO (search engine optimization).  Quality SEO means you are producing organic search results in the search engines. And, you always want to be on the first page of search results, studies show most people don’t go past that page before clicking a link.

Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements. In contrast, non-organic search results may include pay per click advertising from services like Google Ad Words or Bing Ad Words.

Now there is a way to compare your paid Ad Word campaigns with your organic search display listings - and it’s easily accomplished with a free tool.

Many businesses like to use paid ads to boost their appearance in search engines. Google Ad Words has a neat trick you can use for your web site(s) that allows you to view and compare the number clicks from paid ads against clicks from organic search results.

With this combined reporting of paid ads and organic listings you receive an entire view of your online marketing that includes discovering potential new key words and identifying new strategies in terms of who is viewing your content and what is being liked or not clicked.

Here are the steps to accomplish this powerful and comprehensive research on your business marketing.

In order to use the paid & organic report, you’ll need to have a Search Console (aka google Web Masters) account for your website, Once you have that, then you can link it with your AdWords account. While Search Console is a free Google tool, it provides quality data and tips to assist you with improving your visitor traffic from Google searches.  Once you link your accounts, you’ll be able to view your organic search results alongside performance statistics for text ads in your Ad Words campaigns.

Link you Search Console & Ad Words Accounts

• Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com
• Click the gear menu in top right hand corner of screen and choose Account Settings
• On new screen that displays click Linked Accounts in left hand side of page
• On right hand side of page is a section title Search Console, click"View details
• In the text box, type the URL for the website you want to link, which may require a verification process by editing meta tag or uploading a file
• Once that is done, when your verification is a success, you will see a Verified status appear

Be sure to verify (link) both versions of your site: www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com.

Index Your Site

Also, make sure you index both versions of your site: www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com.

It goes without saying, so let me cover it to make sure you have it completed. Be sure to index your site at Google Web Master Tools,  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools which is also referred to as the Search Console we discussed above.

Choose Sitemap in the left hand column to submit your sitemap. Click submit new sitemap on top right page, be sure to type in the name of your sitemap.

Next, Choose Fetch and make one section from the drop down box (see image below). When prompted, be sure to click the Submit To Index buttons.

Do this process four times, making one section each time. Each time you do this Fetch calls the google spiders over to read your site and store that data in the Google mother lode of data.

This is a short Glossary to understand the terms that appear in the Ad Words reporting:

Ad Clicks     

The number of times someone clicked your text ad when it showed for a particular query.

Ad Impressions     

How many times your text ad has appeared on a search results page or website on the Google Network.

Ad CTR     

How often people who see your text ad end up clicking it. CTR can be used to gauge how well your keywords and ads are performing.

Ad Avg. CPC     

The average amount you pay each time someone clicks your text ad. Average CPC is determined by totalling the cost of all clicks and dividing it by the number of clicks.

Ad Avg Position    
Helps explain where your text ads rank, on average, on the search results page.

Organic    

Organic Clicks     
The number of times someone clicked your site's listing in the unpaid results for a particular query.

Organic Queries     

A web search. This column indicates the total number of searches that returned pages from your site over the given period.

Organic Clicks/Query     

The number of clicks you’ve received on your organic search listings divided by the total number searches that returned pages from your site.

Organic Listings/query     

A listing is when a page of your site is returned as a search result. This column indicates the average number of times a page from your site was listed per query.

Organic Avg Position    
Average position is calculated by taking the average top position of your listing (or multiple listings) for each query.

Combined ads and organic
   
Ads and Organic Clicks
This column represents the number of times a person clicked either:
- one of your text ads
- one of your organic search listings

Ads and Organic Queries     

A query is a web search. This column indicates the total number of searches that returned pages from your site in the organic search results or triggered one of your text ads.

Ads and Organic Clicks/Query     

The number of clicks you’ve received on your text ads or organic listings divided by the total number queries that either:

- returned a page from your site
- triggered one of your text ads

There are three important elements to keep in mind on the paid ads versus the organic search listings:

1. What ever level of money you put into paid ads has no bearing on organic search listings. The two are not linked in any way. Don’t think if you buy more ads that somehow your organic listings will have a better chance of being increased.

2. Organic search results have no limitations in terms of geographic locations or language. However, your paid ad campaign is constrained by the settings you choose in your specific campaign(s).  As a result, the organic impressions may be significantly higher than paid impressions because organic results have a wider audience.

3. Your organic data is collected starting from the time you import it by linking it with your Ad Words account using the process described earlier.

Hopefully this article will help you get a better handle on your online marketing. Ad Words has been a powerful marketing tool for researching key terms and phrases. Now, combining it with your organic search results. it becomes even more comprehensive in measuring traffic statistics and drilling down to fine tune your online marketing.

Steu Mann has over 15 years of consulting with business owners and educators to learn more effective ways to use web technology. He can be reached at (541) 200-5269.

Buiild & Sustain Your Online Marketing - 3 Steps

“Over Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend over $14.7 billion in online sales took place, over half of those on mobile devices.”
~ Market Watch

We live in the age of digital marketing, like it or not. Without a web site touting your wares, you will be dropped from the map that the hordes of shoppers peruse.

Obviously, the first step to be a marketer in the 21st century: get a web site in place with your own domain - one that you own. With that accomplished, you must determine what degree you want to participate in the evolving, and essential, three segments of a professional digital marketing plan: content development, web site development, and marketing campaigns.  Let’s take a closer look at each of these so understand if you are making the best steps to advance your cause.

Content Development

Having quality content is the core of any successful web site - across all business markets and industry categories. Typical this happens in phases for a small or medium size business. In a large business there is usually a web developer on staff. Meaning, with a full time resource, that kinda commitment produces an automatic content creator will churn out content constantly. 

“Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.”  ~ Google Web Master

Small and medium size businesses, in my experience, hire a local resource to produce their web content. I have to add, that most businesses I work with get bombarded with calls offering SEO services, the majority of which are people saying they represent Google, and using high pressure tactics to sell content development services. Consider yourself warned; they are a fraud.  Smart business owners want a face to see and hand to shake to do business, especially since they rarely understand the complexity of online marketing and need someone they can depend on to accomplish that for them.

Quality Pages

According to the buzz at this writing, a quality page, according to Google Search Standards, is at least 1,00 words and 2,000 is better. The content on that page is unique and relevant to the topic that relates to the web site. For example, if your web site is a bakery, then maybe your home pages discusses your services in general with specific links to each section of your site. One section is catering services. Another section is breads and pasties. One more section could be cakes. Still another section is your cafe.  How to make the page links to unique sections is covered in Site Architecture below.

When considering the effort tout into your site content, a base rule is 50 pages. When you have 50 pages or more online in your site, you have reached a real milestone. This level of content tells Google and Bing that this web site is here to stay and, more importantly, has something to say.

Producing that is a significant expense in terms of time and labor. But, remember, once you have achieved a first page search result in your SEO status, using organic search results, it cannot be taken away unless your competitor does better content than you. Investing is quality content production will pay off dividends in search engine marketing unless you let it stagnate.

Visitor Traffic

Beyond the obvious goal of increasing web site visitor traffic to your pages, you have to think about conversion and engagement.  When a visitor lands on your home page, you have about a minute, or less, to get them to take some action.

Build your home page content so it is interesting from a customer point of view.

What benefits do your wares offer to customers?

How will your wares help customers solve an issue?

Those three questions will help you build an engagement strategy.  a simple engagement strategy is using a call to action. You see them today as a pop up window on many sites. The window asks you do to something. In fact, you have to do something, even if it’s clicking the ‘X’ to close the window.

Another, more subtle, engagement strategy is using a subscribe button to collect email addresses.

The conversion rate measures the number of people who complete a call to action you created, EX become a subscriber, out of the total number of visitors. More about that in the Marketing Campaign information below.


Web Site Development

There are three main components to web development. Before we cover those, here are some quick tips to keep in mind:

• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the ALT attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

Site Architecture

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.  Site architecture is important since it’s the map to of your business, in the eyes and ears of the search engine spiders. Each section should be it’s own directory. And each page of a directory should be the index.html or index.php, or index.htm page.

In our example above, here is a listing of the site architecture of the bakery.com site:

Link                                 
http://www.bakery.com/index.html           
http://www.bakery.com/Catering/index.html       
http://www.bakery.com/Breads/index.html             
http://www.bakery.com/Cakes/index.html       
http://www.bakery.com/Cafe/index.html       

Ideally, on the Home page you have text and pictures that link to each of the section pages.

When you have pages within a section, be sure to make the link descriptive since that will enhance your SEO credibility.

For example, you produce birthday cakes and customized cakes and wedding cakes. Why not make a page for each one?

http://www.bakery.com/Cakes/birthday-cakes.html
http://www.bakery.com/Cakes/custom-cake-making.html
http://www.bakery.com/Cakes/wedding-cakes.html

Meta Tags
 
For every page on your site be sure to use descriptive and unique meta tags for the page Title and page Description. Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page's content; the meta tags don't appear on the page itself, but only in the page's code. We all know tags (labels) from blogging, and meta tags are more or less the same thing, little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.

A new meta tag to arrive is Open Graph (OG). It’s not so much about SEO but has more to do with sharing your site in social media. Facebook introduced OG in 2010 to help it assimilate content data into an existing Facebook Standard.

Nowadays, other social media sites also are taking advantage of social meta tags. All of the other major platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, recognize Open Graph tags. Twitter actually has its own meta tags for Twitter Cards, but if Twitter robots cannot find any, Twitter uses Open Graph tags instead.

Marketing Campaigns

Marketing really involves your content development and your web development. Without a solid approach to those two, you will minimize your search engine traction. SEO weaves it’s self into all three segments covered in this article. Publishing your site is, in its self, a marketing endeavor.  For many web site owners that is their marketing  strategy.

To build a more complex marketing effort, here are a few points to consider.

#1 Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.  Research what terms are being used to find your wares in Google Ad Words. Use a limited number of those phrases on your pages. Even better, use them as text links to other pages on your site.

#2 Links play an important role in SEO. They help search engine crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

#3 Another method to build your SEO is creating inbound links to your site from high traffic, media rich, web sites. For example, produce short videos about your products and place them in YouTube and Vimeo, include your web site link in the description of the video. And, be sure to embed keywords into your video.

Social media is a great place to create an inbound link to your site. Be sure to use a natural link and not a shortened link.

#4 Use Google Analytics to measure general and specific visitor traffic. General traffic is the day-to-day traffic. Specific traffic is measuring the engagement strategies we discussed above in this article. Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. According to Wikipedia,  Google Analytics (GA) is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.

Maybe you have a call to action where you want people to view a video on a specific age. Or, you want to track what page visitors come from on your site to view a subscription offer or discount product special. You can track all of those metrics, and more, in the free version of GA. If you have any questions, let me know.

#5 Automate your marketing processes whenever possible and maximize cloud storage. There are so many free and cost effective tools today, plus more are created every month. Keep your pulse on ways to 1) store your marketing data freely online, 2) build or use existing tools, that automate your conversion processes - most can be done with free online tools, 3)  to process web site visitor



Steu Mann has over 15 years of consulting with business owners and educators to learn more effective ways to use web technology. He can be reached at (541) 200-5269.

Six Signs Your Business Marketing Is Unraveling

Web Sites, Blogs, and Social Media have changed the face of advertising. Why? Because they are not dependent on the ole print world - they gather life, morphing to ignite and be the flames of the digital world.

“As of January 2014, 87% of American adults use the internet.”
~ PEW Research

What are some signs that your business is in trouble? By that I mean, not engaging technology to promote and sustain your business reputation.

#1. No budget for online marketing
To get started does not take a boat load of money. If you want professional help for design and SEO (search engine optimization), then you are going to have to hire it. Here is a guide to help explain that information in more detail.

#2. Deep content is missing
Having a blog or web site without well developed content can do more harm than good. Keep your content simple and to the point. Stick to the benefits and features of what you provide. Help the reader understand how you are solving their issue(s).

With online content you can develop an image of being a leader in your industry. It is all about positioning yourself with pictures and news about what you are providing. How are your helping your customers?

Get in the good habit of telling helpful news about your business.

#3. SEO is just a concept
Many businesses have content but the search engines cannot decipher it. It’s like you are making the best apple pie in the world, but no one knows because you aren’t using the proper communication techniques to broadcast your message.

Back in old days when the yellow page book dominated advertising, it was all about a print image. Nowadays getting your information distributed is about using a digital message. That is the system of effective SEO - using the proper techniques. You get what you pay for. Put SEO on your team with someone that has proven SEO results on a local and national basis. Start receiving more traction in the search engines.

#4. Where are you in search results?
How easy is it to get your product or something similar from your competitor? Your competitors can be in Hong Kong, New York or London. In the digital world it is about search results, not your geographic location. If you are not an organic search result on the first page of search results - forget about more people finding your business.

Gear your content strategy and SEO so that you are on the first page of search results for terms relevant to your business period.

#5. Not applying continuous learning
So you have been to university or college. Your business education is done. You can sit back and bask in the glow of the framed degree on the wall. Many white collar folks pride their business on that foundation - I see it all the time.

“Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less.”
~ January 2015 (CMO Council)

A fast changing world means yesterday’s degree is just a piece of paper. How much do you know about online marketing and the current trends?

#6. Passion and creativity is missing
Phones are a mainstay. The house phone days are over. Now, each house has more than one cell phone. Is your business available to the cell phone audience?

If you want to build your brand then you MUST include the younger audience - this is just common sense. The most popular activity with younger mobile phone users is social media.

“As of January 2014, 74% of internet users use social networking sites.”
~ PEW Reseach

Libraries are reinventing their product line to accommodate changes in readership interest. What are you doing to adjust your social marketing to reach that audience?

#7. Content is rigid or invisible in search engines
Ever bought an product on Amazon. It is so easy with one click. How easy is it to buy your stuff online? Are you making obstacles to online shoppers or making money?

According to Ev Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter.
“Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company. Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”

Finding information, checking the weather is no longer something one does in a newspaper.

The trend of buying products from paper catalogues is being replaced with online shopping.

Reading emails and making purchases are done on the bus, the beach and in the cafe.

Companies that are ignoring the smartphone revolution need to design their business and technologies for a mobile world.

Read More: http://ezweb.company/Blog/Blog/2015-business-marketing.php