Blue Tent Marketing

Ever wonder how the search volume for one of your top keywords varies over time?  Curious as to why your site saw a decrease in organic search traffic despite a month of improved search engine rankings?  Trying to determine when you should ramp up your paid search campaign?  Look no further.  Google Insights for Search is a powerful tool that allows you to compare search volume patterns across search terms, location and time ranges.  The tool is helpful for many aspects of your search engine marketing efforts including:

Seasonality: Budget and plan your internet marketing efforts (and your business) according to the seasonality of your top keywords.  For example, if you run a snow plowing business, determine when people are searching for relevant keywords in your geographic area and ramp up your paid search campaign accordingly.  Consider increasing your budget proportionally to the search volume.

Geographic Distribution: Where do you customers live?  Compare search volume across countries, regions and cities.  For example, if you are responsible for marketing for a vacation rental company in Colorado, you may need to know when people in different geographic regions start planning their ski vacations.  From the data below, you can compare different geographies and target these markets accordingly.  With paid search, you can create unique campaigns for individual cities and states and can increase and decrease their budgets according to the search trends.

Predicting the Future: Will the search volume for your top keywords increase, decrease or remain steady over time?  Do you need to ramp up your search marketing efforts to capture a larger share of search traffic in 2010 compared to 2009?  Using extrapolation of data, Google helps to predict the future of search for specific keywords.  Use their forecast tool, to help plan your search strategy for 2010.

Lindsay Reither
Director of Search Engine Marketing & Web Analytics

Many sites have internal site search functionality which allows visitors to search for content, products and more.  Google Analytics can track these site search terms.  Analyzing this data can be beneficial for your search engine marketing campaigns.

To set up site search for a Google Analytics profile, log in and select “Edit” website profile.  Select the “Do Track Site Search” button and then enter your query parameter in the provided field.  You can determine your query parameter by going to your website and performing an internal site search.  For example in http://www.domain.com/search/?q=site%20search%20query the query parameter is “q”.  For more information on setting up Google Analytics site search check out the GA help center.  Depending on the volume of your site, give Google Analytics a few days to collect data and then analyze the data.

Access the report in the content section of Google Analytics.  Identify high volume search terms and compare these to the content currently on your site.  If you don’t already have content dedicated to these topics, consider adding new content.  This will help improve visitor retention.  Strategize on how to generate more search engine traffic from these terms.  Is paid or organic search more appropriate?  In this example, we might add a new page dedicated to area hiking including safety tips and recommended trails for all levels of hikers.  In time we would expect to start ranking in the search engines for keywords relating to [Aspen hiking] and thus we would begin to drive search engine traffic for this keyword.

Check back next week for another Google Analytics’ reporting tip.

Lindsay Reither
Director of Search Engine Marketing & Web Analytics

Blue Tent search account managers use Google Analytics everyday to help manage clients’ campaigns and to maximize ROI.  Here is one of our favorite reports for paid search.  Check back next week for another Google Analytics’ reporting tip.

Determine the Best Time of Day to Run your Paid Search Account

Most paid search campaigns operate on a budget and all seek to maximize their ROI.  One way you can spread your budget more effectively is to use ad scheduling which lets you specify when you would like your ads to run by hour and day of the week.  The Google AdWords scheduler includes an advanced setting which allows you to adjust your bids during certain periods of the day.  When should you run your paid search campaigns?  Should you increase your bids at certain times of the day to increase your click through rate?  Rather than guess and test, turn to the following Google Analytics’ report and see immediate results.

You can apply this custom report to an advanced segment such as your search engine traffic or to your paid search traffic if your campaigns have already been running for a while.  Analyze the data to determine those times of the day where visitors perform the best. Look for goal conversions, e commerce transactions, a low bounce rate, high pages/visit and high average time on site.  Be sure to consider sample size before drawing concussions.  Once you have determined the hours of the day that perform best, set the ad scheduler in your paid search campaign appropriately.  Also, you can create a similar report for day of the week to determine if your paid search campaign should be turn off some days of the week.

Stay tuned for next week’s Google Analytics tip relating to site search data.

-Lindsay Reither
Director of Search Engine Marketing & Web Analytics

As I made the trek into Denver for the advanced Google AdWords Seminar for Success I began to think back on the world of search. It struck me that Google the King of Search at this moment in time is just over 10 years old. Lets put that into perspective. At Ten years old you were probably in the 5th grade, 10 years ago you were getting ready for Y2K while jamming out to Prince’s Party like its 1999. To say the least Google is young, and Google’s AdWords is even younger. To think about the many strides that have been made in Pay Per Click Advertising is quite astounding especially in the time that it has been around. In Less than 10 years AdWords has become the backbone of Google’s Business and has evolved into a tool that companies of all sizes use to advertise. Companies as big as Exxon and as small as your local dry cleaner use AdWords to target those who search for keyword specific terms that relate to their business.

While Google has been ever changing, the rest of the world has had to be as well and so has Blue Tent Marketing. Specifically staying ahead of the curve, especially with all the advances that have been made in Search Engine Marketing. Blue Tent has found value in the fact that education is key to the success of a company. The SEM Account Managers at Blue Tent have been fortunate enough to attend the Seminar for Success classes that Google offers. The great thing about attending these classes is that it keeps all our clients well ahead of the curve and their competition. We always strive to offer cutting edge services to our clients and in order to do so we have to live by the adage “never stop learning.”

This week I have been fortunate enough to attend the Advanced Adwords Training. The amount of knowledge I have obtained from one day of training is off the charts. Here’s a glimpse at some of the top takeaways and cool tools that I look forward to using on an everyday basis. I encourage you to dive in and see how the tips and tools listed below can help your internet marketing efforts.

• When you create Ad Copy be sure your ad answers the question that is being called to action.
• Landing Pages are a huge help to those who click on your add, they can help your quaility score by 30-40%.
• When you ad negative keywords know that Google never matches misspelled words.
• Rarely have an AdWords Ad URL land on the homepage. Find a Page on your site that relates to the ad.
• Use your “Thank You” pages to continue your business, NOT end a session with your customer. Give them an option to visit another page on your site.
• Download the Adwords Editor, Its free and is a great tool to help you learn more about your keywords.
• Site Overlay is a powerful tool. It allows one to see which pages are leading to conversions
• When testing an ad copy test if for a minimum of a week.
• Write several unique ads and see how they perform.
• My number one favorite quote from the AdWords Seminar is: “Advertising isn’t advertising when its information!”

And be sure to check out the following tools to enhance your paid search planning and execution:

• AdWords Editor – Use the adwords editor with out having to log into AdWords. An easy place to manage your Campaigns.
• Google Sets – Use Google Sets to find related keyword terms.
• Google Trends – Use Trends to see what the search volume of a particular keyword term is.
• Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
• Microsoft AdLab – New tool to refine your ads and make them more specific for each individual.
• Google AdPlanner – Take a look at the demographics of a websites traffic.
• The Wonder Wheel – To Find the Wonder Wheel. Do a search, once you have the results click on the “+Show Options.” Once that has loaded you will see on the left side towards the bottom an option for the Wonder Wheel. Cool tool…. My fav! Gives you word options for a search.

A big shout out to Brian Geddes at bg Theory for putting on an excellent seminar. If you have any specific questions please feel free to contact me directly. We are here to help you better your company!

– Tim Hampton
SEM Account Manager
tim @ bluetent.com