Track the ROI of Your Blog – 8 Simple Metrics

Track the Value of Your Blog with 8 Simple Charts

You just know your blog is incredibly valuable, but how can you prove it?

To help measure the ROI of your blog, we put together 8 metric areas you can track. These metrics will enable you to track the value and costs associated with your blog, and compare results to other online marketing efforts such as pay-per-click advertising and SEO.  This cost and value comparison is very helpful when determining marketing budgets and resource allocation.

1)      Traffic. Easy to Track.

It’s easy to track traffic generated by your blog inside Google Analytics and other analytic applications. This chart tracks the traffic numbers from your blog along with the percentage of total traffic that it represents.  It’s important to compare the cost to attain this traffic, to the other methods of…

Small Businesses Plagued by Poor Quality Scores

How to Overcome a Significant Competitive Deficit

One of the major touted benefits of Google AdWords’ Quality Score system for advertisers is that the “little guys” should be able to compete with the “big guys” on a level playing field.

However, 99 percent of the small and medium-sized business that we work with come to us with such low quality scores, they are the ones being punished by the very system that is supposed to help them out.

Many small businesses don’t even know about Quality Score.  Of the businesses that do know about it, most are only familiar with the high-level requirements that keywords, ads and landing pages should all be relevant.  In the mind of the small advertiser, they have created a relevant ad campaign.  Small advertisers lack the time and resources to figure out quality…

Expecting to Go All the Way

… On a First Date?

Let’s face it: it’s typically not recommended! Though it may happen once in awhile, for most people it just doesn’t — usually for good reason.  And yet many businesses treat first visits to their websites as if they’re expecting to go all the way on a first date.

Since we all need that little thing called revenue in order to stay in business and be profitable, many businesses just focus on tracking their one main revenue-generating action as a conversion event for online activity.  Whether it’s a product purchase or generation of a lead, all online campaigns and keywords are judged by their ability to immediately result in this one conversion.

However, in this day and age of information abundance, reviews, referral sources, and the like, many searchers do lots of poking around…

When Search Marketing Tries to Tell You Something

The Key Point: Are You Listening?

Search marketing is the fastest, most affordable way to stay on top of market trends.  In order to make the most out of every search marketing dollar that you spend, we’ve outlined some important data you should review regularly to inform other, parallel marketing efforts and to insure optimal performance across all your marketing channels.

Data From PPC / Search Network Results…

To SEO:

Keywords that are Popular and Bring in the Most Relevant Traffic. This will help you know not only what keywords to target, but, can also save you money if you optimize your SEO for the highest traffic PPC keywords.

To PPC:

Negative Keywords from Actual Search Queries that Triggered PPC Ads. When clicks occur on search queries that are irrelevant you are throwing money out the window- so monitor the search queries that are…

When Your Conversion Rate Plummets

Twelve Diagnostic Questions to Get Answers

We frequently get inquiries from businesses that were getting a healthy amount of leads and conversions, but then suddenly their conversion rate takes a nose dive. When the phone stops ringing in today’s economy, panic ensues.

Many businesses aren’t even aware of all the different factors which can cause a negative change like this to occur. In order to give you a hand, we put together this list of questions to ask yourself to get to the root of the problem.

We’ll start at the “front” of the line with our problem-solving and work our way back to the landing page and website, since front-line changes are much easier to address.

1. Have the paid search keywords that are getting clicks changed?

Check out your pay per click (PPC) advertising keywords bringing in traffic.…