It struck me while I was climbing Castle Peak (14,279 ft) that there is a great deal of commonality between hiking 14ers and solid internet marketing:

1. Go With A Trusted Team

When you’re in the backcountry and in some pretty precarious positions, you want to make sure that you’ve surrounded yourself with the right people in case something goes wrong.  Likewise, you want to make sure that the internet marketing team you go with possesses the right expertise and the appropriate level of professionalism.  It’s always wiser to jump into the fray with a company that has a proven record of success and the right professional certifications, such as being a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Google Adwords Qualified Company, than go with a bargain basement company that probably won’t answer your calls or even exist in a year.

2. Slow And Steady Wins The Race

The trail up Castle Peak is fairly well traveled and we encountered quite a few other people along the way.  One group flew by us about halfway up the mountain but ran out of steam before the final push along the final stretch of ridgeline leading to the summit.  After we had reached the summit, taken some pictures and snacked on some beef jerky, we looked down and saw that the group who left us in the dust still hadn’t moved an inch from their spot on the ridge.  A solid SEO strategy works exactly the same way; you can’t just invest 20 hours one month and hope to remain on the first page of Google forever.  You have to take a methodical, sustainable approach with your long-term goals serving as the foundation of your strategy.

3. Plan Your Strategy Carefully & Measure Your Progress

We saw another group venture off route and have to retreat, needlessly wasting time and energy. To avoid wasting time, energy and your precious marketing dollars, you need to carefully plan your internet marketing strategy, and closely monitor your progress along the way.  Leverage Google Analytics like you would use the cairns on a trail to ensure you aren’t veering off course.

4. Glissading (& Social Media) Requires A Healthy Dose Of Caution

After conquering Castle Peak, we enjoyed some spirited glissading down the remaining summer snowfields.  While this is surely a fun way to descend, glissading certainly calls for a healthy dose of caution.  There’s no way to tell what’s lurking under the snow, and the rocks that fill the scree fields are sharp and nasty.  If you hit them going too fast they’ll certainly cause you some pain and could even result in getting your name in the local newspaper. Similarly, social media is a fun and effective marketing tool, but just like the snow – you don’t know what’s lurking under the surface.  Keep it to what you’d want everyone to know; inside jokes, questionable photos or a poorly worded tweet can cost you.  Just ask any politician, celebrity or journalist who’s had a run-in with Twitter.

5. Follow SOPs

Our group got started bright and early.  As a result, we were warm and dry in the car by the time the typical afternoon thunderstorm rolled in.  The same holds for web marketing; be smart, abide by the best practices, but also don’t be afraid to take some calculated risks.

I’m staring down the barrel of my last week here at Blue Tent and my first year of law school.  Working here has been a great learning experience.  Much love and a huge thank you goes out to the entire Blue Tent crew! I’ll miss you guys.

- Chapin Lewis
Assistant Marketing Assistant

Gift basket material?  I’d say so.

Ever wonder what it looks like when a plan comes together with an aggressive Search Engine Optimization campaign and a killer Email Marketing Campaign?  Well, if you have Google Analytics tied in properly, it looks just like this.

Skills to pay your web marketing bills…

•    We implemented an aggressive setup and began a recurring custom SEO program December 11-ish.  See above.
•    Note* this is non-paid search traffic from Google only.
•    That increase, in that amount of time, is absolutely ridiculous.
•    If your site has been in the dark (SEO wise) for a long time, these are the immediate results you can see with the proper help.

Killing it with Email Marketing…

•    In 9 months we made 7 sends.
•    That equated to $77,370.49 in online bookings alone – That obviously DOES NOT include people that got it, went to the site, then called and booked.  We have those stats in another report, but let’s stay focused on online bookings for now.
•    Cost for that particular Email Marketing Campaign is $15k-ish over 12 months, including utilizing our ACE program.  Again, we have only sent 7 times and these booking numbers do not reflect the ROI for 12 full months.  Looking back, those 2 missed sends hurt, ouch.  Consistency is key, and would have made these ROI numbers look even better.
•    Let’s do the math – that is over 500% return on investment………so far.

Congrats to the SEM and Email teams for a solid performance.

Good Morning Vacation Rental Managers!

Listen to a very informative interview with Blue Tent President Peter Scott on Scott Colson’s VacationRentalTraffic.org Podcast.

VacationRentalTraffic.org is dedicated to bringing Vacation Rental Managers today’s best online strategies, tools and techniques to drive floods of traffic to their websites and maximize their bookings.

In this wide ranging interview Pete discusses some SEO challenges often faced by Vacation Rental Managers, some emerging threats, the importance of having solid content and clean code, various SEO strategies, and backing up your efforts with a Google Analytics set up.

Leverage the power of Custom Reports in Google Analytics and improve your paid search campaigns.  It’s safe to say that it’s always a good idea to concentrate your actionable intelligence in as few places as possible.  While making it easier for users to wrap their heads around the data, it also makes for shorter mental leaps in the measure, modify, test and repeat decision cycle. Streamline this process by concentrating important metrics normally spread across 3 tabs onto 1 custom report tab.

Here is an example of traditional AdWords data as seen in Google Analytics.  You’ll notice that the information you need to make decisions on individual keywords exists on four tabs – Site Usage, Goal Set 1, Ecommerce and Clicks.

Here’s a good example of a traditional Adwords setup:

Contrast that with the more lucid custom report which consolidates those metrics that matter to you most in one place:

Clearly, the custom report has a higher concentration of important actionable metrics, which include bounce rate, visits, cost per conversion and revenue.  With a custom report you can cut right to the chase and see exactly how your paid search campaign is contributing to your bottom line.  Moreover, by concentrating these important metrics in one place it is easier to make tweaks to your paid search campaigns.  Read more about creating custom reports, download this custom report, and contact us today about customizing Google Analytics to produce actionable reports that are custom to your business and its needs.

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