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 pursuing online traffic such as PPC and SEO.  If you know your SEO and Blog cost of work, you can pretty easily get to a cost per click.

2)      Traffic Engagement. Easy to Track.

This chart compares traffic engagement indicators including bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit and contribution to repeat visits across the different online marketing strategies.

3)      Links. Some Effort to Track.

This chart tracks inbound links to your blogs, along with anchor text and the “link juice” each link is contributing.  It compares inbound links to your blog with other website links attained through the more traditional SEO.  The goal here is to get down to the cost per link level to help compare the tactics.

4)      Keyword Rank & Click Share. Some Effort to Track.

This one can be a bit more challenging depending on the depth of your analytics system.  This one also assumes you are targeting keywords in your blog posts (which if you aren’t, you should be.)  This chart compares the rank of your blog posts, web pages and pay-per-click ads for target keywords, along with the % of clicks that each brings in.  Often times the CTR of blog posts in the natural search results is much higher than other listing types.

5)      Social Buzz.  Easy to Track.

This chart tracks the social buzz generated by your blog posts including retweets, social bookmarks, likes and social mentions.  While this chart is not a direct comparison to other online marketing efforts, it does help to articulate the value of your blog.

6)      Twitter Followers. A Bit Tricky to Track.

This chart measure the number of Twitter followers and quality of those followers achieved from your blogging compared to other social efforts.  You can do the same type of analysis for other social media venues in which you participate such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.

7)      RSS Subscriptions, Newsletter Subscriptions. Easy to Track.

This chart tracks how many site visitors from your blog signed up for an RSS feed or your newsletter, versus sign-ups you receive from other organic and paid traffic.

8)      Conversions. Easy to Track.

This chart tracks conversions from visitors who visited a blog post, or came to you via a blog post.  It includes the number of conversions, the percentage of total conversions, the conversion rate and the cost per conversion.  It’s also really important to track conversion assists and not just leave it all to last-click attribution.  You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how many conversion assists your blog contributes.

These metrics will help you articulate the value of your blog. This type of reporting also helps to focus your blogging efforts so you can continue to improve the value it provides.  It is quite rewarding to see the value, rather than just continuously creating content and hoping for the best.

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 score on their own, and also lack the budget to pay an expert to get them a great quality score.

Big advertisers know about Quality Score, and pay someone to take care of it for them.  So the big advertisers end up with the winning combination of great quality scores and large budgets.

So: how much does Quality Score matter? A ton. Quality Score is a direct factor in determining:

If your ad is eligible to be shown. Keyword / ad combinations with very low quality scores are not always shown.

What position your ad will appear in. Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score

How much you pay per click. Actual CPC = (Ad Rank to beat ÷ Quality Score) + $0.01

What’s Quality Score should advertisers be striving for?

First, make sure you are keeping track of your quality score.  Quality Score are actually based on keyword and ad combinations, but in AdWords they are shown at the keyword level   The Quality Score column is hidden by default, so you’ll need to click on the columns option and to add it in.

Google shows a simplified score within AdWords based on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the worst rating and 10 being the best.  They do add some qualitative descriptors to the scores “Poor”, “OK” and “Great.”

You should strive to have all of your keywords show a quality score between 7-10.

For any keywords with a quality score of 1-3.  You’ll need to give some long, hard thought as to how important these are to your advertising campaign.  Most of the time it’s easiest to just delete these and start fresh with new variations.  Keywords with quality scores of 4-6 are usually pretty easily repaired.

The Fastest, Easiest Way to Improve Your Quality Score

Don’t advertise on any single-word keywords. These are too vague, get them out of your account.

Create super small ad groups, so that you can repeat the keywords inside of your ad copy multiple times. Here’s an example:

Getting the picture?  It’s not rocket science, but it is a data entry nightmare.

Check the call out button next to your quality score within AdWords to see if it says anything about your landing page.  If it does, the landing page issue (often speed) needs to be fixed.  If not, don’t worry about your landing page.

Start to use negative keywords.  This will weed out unwanted ad impressions.  Here are two great resources for getting started:

In AdWords, select the Keywords tab, set the date range to view a couple months worth of data.  In the menu select to sell all of the search terms.  Look through this list and add any words that aren’t relevant to your website as negative keywords.

Think about all of the basic types of searches done that include your target keywords, but aren’t relevant: (1) People hunting for jobs (job, jobs, employment, resume, salaries, etc.); people hunting for pictures or presentations (pic, pics, pictures, ppt, etc.); or people hunting for reading material (news, industry, market, blog, blogs, forum, forums, etc.)

So if you are a “little guy” we recommend you start to monitor your quality score and make steps towards having a great quality score to help level your playing field.

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 before they are ready to take that conversion step.  There are four generally-accepted steps in the sales cycle you should keep in mind:

Ignorance — This is the phase when a person is unaware of their need of a particular product or service that might make their lives or their own business somehow better or more efficient or less expensive.

Awareness — When a customer has become aware of a need and the means of addressing it, but is still learning, investigating and preparing.

Engagement — A customer-prospect has selected your company as one that might address their need.

Investment — Success! A prospective customer becomes a paying customer.

Most people these days go through these four stages of the sales cycle.  So rather than throwing all of your eggs in one basket, hoping to convince your visitor to “go all the way” on that very first visit, we encourage you to offer different avenues to make a connection on that first visit.  This will enable you to foster the relationship and be the one the searcher comes back to when they are ready to convert.

For prospects in the “ignorance” phase, it’s important to speak to a particular pain point.  Call out that pain and the clear cure for it.  For instance, say you sell solar panels.  You may want to run PPC ads like this one:

Energy Bills High?

Solar is more affordable

than ever – learn how.

solarxyz.com/lowermybills

(Hopefully, this is a fake company… we intended it to be!)  In this instance, the ad is addressing a common customer pain point: high household energy bills.  They point out why an alternative could be viable for the searcher.  And they entice the searcher with an answer to their pain (”lower my bills”).

Next, during the “awareness” phase, think about why your searcher is likely to be hunting around gathering more information:

Are they looking for the best price?

Do they need reviews / ratings / referrals before selecting?

Are they researching a gift for someone else?

Are they sure about the exact product accessory they need?

Did they simply get interrupted in the middle of their search?

Are they not currently using the right device or computer that they intend on converting from?

Do they need to run it by someone else?

We could go on and on — there are so many different reasons why people aren’t ready to commit on the first click.  After you figure out the likely scenarios for your particular offering, you can start to think about the types of valuable information for a connection that will enable you to stick in the mind of the visitor and leave a lasting presence they will return to.

The content that you offer to make the connection will need to be unique, valuable, helpful and just plain irresistible.  Following are some additional “connection” ideas that you can try out:

Newsletter sign-up.  You’ll need to say more than just “sign up” though – for instance, does the newsletter contain offers?  What type of content is in it that will entice them or be useful to them?

Facebook / Twitter following.  Again –why would they want to do this?  Is there some enticing content from your community that you can use as a teaser?  Are there special offers you have for your social following?

Webinar sign-up.  Do you have any relevant upcoming webinars that might be of interest that you can encourage them to sign up for?

Conference sign-up.  Any upcoming conferences that you will be attending?  Perhaps you are going to have some form of a giveaway that they can sign up for.

Notification sign-up.  Can you entice them to sign-up for an email notification if there is a price changes in the future?  Or would they like to be notified of future reviews that are posted, or stock level notifications?

Third-party data.  Do you have valuable industry or market data that you can share with them – any analyst or third party reports, or review aggregations that would help guide them?

Personalized information.  Can you provide them with any information that is personalized to them?  The ROI on a purchase, help finding the right solution through a series of questions, previewing how something will look for them, analysis of something that is theirs, any form of a calculator, etc.  Make sure to capture the results so you can also email them to them.

Personal response to questions, or personal review of something.  If an expert can help guide them in a personalized, non-salesy way, this is often attractive.

Contests.  Everyone loves to win things!

Polls.  Ask them for their input on something about what you offer.  This will usually require a strong incentive – but even showing the results of an ongoing poll that you have, that they can participate in can often times be enough.

A product brochure, white paper, recent use-case video, etc.  Any content that can help them learn more about you after they go away from your website.

After you are able to make the connection, you’ll want to spend some time nurturing it.  This gets you to the “engagement” level.  Continue to reach out to the visitor on a regular basis with more unique, valuable content along the lines of the connection they made with you.  Whether it’s an updated analysis, a new notification, some interesting community content from Twitter, or some new poll results, keep the conversation going and stay fresh in their mind.

Once you’ve gotten your additional connection points in place on your landing pages and throughout your website, you’ll want to make sure you are tracking their success.  Track all the meaningful events for your online campaigns, realizing that any connection made carries value – so if you have keywords that are bringing in lots of new connections, but no immediate revenue you’ll want to keep them alive to see if your nurture-rate to revenue is high.  For each of these connection points, you’ll want to monitor how often they bring about return visits and eventually generate revenue.  This will help you know where to focus your efforts as you go forward.

All of which gets you to that “all-the-way goal”: investment.

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 bringing in the clicks and be sure to add any irrelevant terms to your negatives keywords list.

New Keywords from Actual Search Queries that Triggered PPC Ads. There are so many different ways of saying the same things, so it’s important to monitor the terms your audience is actually using to search for your products.  This list of actual search queries can especially be a gold mine of new keyword opportunities if you are using broad match – it can be one of the easiest ways to move into longer-tail terms with lower CPCs and better conversions.

To Marketing Strategy:

Hot Geographies, and also geographies to not focus on.  Monitor your PPC activity and results by geography.  This will give you indications of where to focus your marketing dollars and where to avoid additional spend.

Hot Offers.  Monitor your PPC ad CTRs to see which offers generate the most interest and which offers searchers don’t seem very interested in.  This will help you know what offers to emphasize in your other more expense marketing channels.

Product Popularity.  PCC traffic trends are a great way to see which product areas are hot and deserve more marketing dollars and which product areas have little interest and might even be candidates for sun setting.

To Website:

Hot Taglines & Calls to Action.  If you want to know the best content especially around calls to action to include on your website – your PPC ads can be the best indicators.  See what calls to action get the highest CTRs and which ones are ignored and you’ll have a great head start on the content to use in your website itself to garner action.

To Social Media:

Hot Product Areas.  Where should you be emphasizing your social voice – through blogs and social sites?  PPC keyword and search query trends can be a great indicator of hot areas of interest vs. areas which won’t garner much interest in social activity.

Market Feelings.   Searchers frequently include their feelings in their search queries.  Mining these feeling keywords can be a gold mine for relating to your potential audience and the current issues they are facing.  These feeling keywords can be a great way to grab a searchers attention through a blog title or other social post.

Data From PPC / Content Network Results…

To Marketing Strategy:

If you are running an automatic placement or re-targeting campaign these are a great way to identify popular websites that potential and past customers frequent.  You can use these to determine associations that might be valuable to join or thought leaders that you might want to incorporate into future events.

To SEO:

With the automatic and re-targeting campaigns, you can also generate a great list of popular websites which are complementary and relevant to your site and fantastic link building opportunities.  Showing a website the stats of visitors who take interest in both of your sites is a very compelling way to conduct manual link building.

Data From Natural Search Results…

To PPC:

New Keywords from Actual Search Queries. Monitor your logs to see how people are searching for your products.  Be sure to include all these different flavors in your ppc campaigns.  It has been shown that having a ppc and seo listing on the same page greatly improves the overall CTR for those keyword terms.

To SocialMedia:

Blog Keywords and Topics. Your natural search query list is also a goldmine for finding out hot topics to write blog and other social media entries for.

To Marketing Strategy:

Hot Geographies.  Natural search traffic data by geography is another great source for identifying geographies to place more emphasis on and those to ignore.  The natural search geographies can frequently carry surprises about areas you didn’t expect to get great traffic from, since they are not restricted like they are in PPC.

Data from Google Alerts / Social Monitoring…

To PPC:

Negative Keywords. Monitoring alerts for hot current topics for which you don’t want your ad to appear.

New Keywords. Monitoring alerts for hot current topics for which you do want your PPC ads to appear.

To SEO:

Websites for Link Opportunities. Monitoring current blogs postings, news articles and other social posts can provide great indicators of potential complementary websites for link building opportunities.

Link-bait Content. Monitoring trends can give you great ideas for what type of content is most likely to be successful link bait.

To Social:

Be the News Source for Your Clients. Being on top of breaking news and the latest trends will enable you to be the first one to push out new news information to your social followers and enable you to have the blog postings on the hottest topics.

To Marketing Strategy:

Thought Leaders. Monitoring the news, social and blog worlds is a great way to identify thought leaders for you to develop relations hips with and to leverage in marketing events.

Newsletters, Blogs to Regularly Monitor. To make sure that your staff is always up to date, monitoring thought leaders is a great way to identify what blogs and news feeds your staff should be regularly reading updates from to ensure everyone is always up to date on the current market pulse.

Many larger, more matrixed marketing organizations manage many of these functions in separate silos, and understanding the impacts of one tactic on other, related tactics can be difficult due to organizational structure or dysfunction.  It would be in the best interests of these kinds of organizations, however, to improve interdisciplinary communication and cross-pollination in order to achieve a more effective marketing strategy.  Try sharing your portion of the data first with teams across different organizations in order to start opening up the communication lines and collaboration.

Marketing data from every aspect of your overall effort can positively impact a whole range of related and unrelated marketing and sales tactics.  It’s important to listen to that data, and to appropriately apply what you learn to every aspect of your marketing program.

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. Compare the keywords from the time period in which your conversion rate was good to the time period for which you have not been getting conversions. Are the keywords different?

For PPC, this is an easy problem to solve – pause the keywords which have been taking up budget but not bringing in leads. Then make sure the keywords that used to work have bids that will enable them to get the most traffic.

2. Have the natural search keywords that are bringing traffic to your site changed?

Comb through your analytics to get the list of natural search queries that were bringing people to your site in the good times. Are they still bringing you natural search traffic? Has your natural search rank for these keywords fallen over time?

If these keywords aren’t still working for you on the natural search front, get busy with some SEO activities. Conduct some on-page and link building around those keywords that used to bring in the converting traffic.

3. Are you receiving 100 percent of available ad impressions on Google AdWords?

If you’ve lowered your budget, raised your bids or have been busy adding keywords to your campaign, you may not be receiving 100 percent of your available ad impressions.

Look at your campaign inside of AdWords and if it says “Limited by Budget” in the campaign status column, you are not currently receiving 100 percent of available ad impressions.

Review your keyword list to make sure that the keywords that were bringing you conversions previously are getting 100 percent of available ad impressions. To ensure this you might need to pause keywords that have not been performing and lower bids for keywords that are not the true work horses. If you have a large volume of keywords, but only a tiny budget you may need to do a lot of trimming here to ensure the performing keywords get their full exposure.

4. Has your ad position changed?

Different ad positions perform differently. Which ad position is best? Well, that depends on many factors. But, if you were getting conversions, you can start to hone in on the ad positions that were working for you. Go back to the time during which those conversions were coming in and review the ad positions for those top-performing keywords. Compare this against the positions you are currently attaining. Have things changed? If so, modify your bids (this may mean switching from automated bidding to manual bidding) so that your ads for these keywords start to appear in positions that bring you results.

5. Has your offer changed?

Did you have an offer in your ad copy or landing page that changed? Has pricing increased or has an incentive expired? Go back to when those conversions were coming in and review the offers in your ad copy and on your landing page. If previous pricing or an expired offer was bringing you results, consider re-enabling that offer.

6. Is it the season?

Many businesses go through seasonal changes, but when the slow season comes around, they often forget that it happens every year. Go back through your analytics and your lead tracking and check to see if this same thing happens every year around the same time. If so, think about ways to motivate leads during the slow times – you might need to whip up some special attractive offers to help increase your conversion volume during these times.

7. Has your competition changed?

Check out your natural search and paid search competition for those top-performing keywords which were bringing in conversions. See any new faces on the block? Get to know the new faces and make sure you are highlighting your unique capabilities and offers as compared to them.

8. Has your competition changed their offer?

Look at the ad copy, landing page and website offers for your natural search and paid search competitors? Where do you stand? Are they offering more? Have they lowered their prices? Have they won awards? Have they added guarantees?

Review their offers and see what you have to offer that makes your business unique and a competitive winner.

9. Has your competition upgraded their landing pages?

This always seems to hit in waves. While reviewing your competition, check out their paid search landing pages and websites. Have some of them gone through website re-designs recently and raised the bar? Have they added new features to their sites such as reviews, testimonials, blogs, forums, photos, or social feeds?

If their websites are looking more professional, understandable, engaging, convincing or iterative than yours, it’s likely influencing your visitor’s impression of your company. Consider updating your website so you don’t lose out on sales due to this initial impression.

10. Has there been a lack of reviews or negative reviews on your business?

What have customers been saying about you online lately? Check out Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, City Search and any other applicable sites, which let people review your business online. Are there negative reviews that have come up recently? If so, reach out and take some steps to address them. Let people know that you care and inform them of the actions you are taking to improve.

Or, perhaps you don’t have any reviews but your competition does. In the online world of selecting services, reviews hold a lot of weight. If you don’t have many (or any) reviews, but your competitors do, many people will favor the business with positive reviews. Think about offering incentives to previous happy customers to get them to vocalize their great experiences on these review sites.

11. Has your landing page changed?

Have you changed your landing page content or layout? Have you increased the data, decreased the data, modified colors, moved your call to action, or changed your call to action text? All these things have an impact on user behavior. Try some a/b testing with the two landing pages (the old one and the new one) so you can see which one of them truly performs better. Sometimes the changes we make to our pages feel like an upgrade to us, but aren’t perceived that way by visitors.

12. Has your website changed?

Similar to #11 above – if you’ve been making some changes take a hard look at the things you’ve modified since your conversion rate plummeted. Think about the things that might be having the most impact on your visitor behavior and slowly try out some of the older concepts in your new site to see what content or layouts have the greatest impact on your conversion rate.

Obviously, you should use appropriate data from your Yield Web Marketing Suite reports to make these assessments to the extent possible. And be sure to the landing page optimization module to ensure only the best performing versions of these important pages are available to your customers.

A word of caution: don’t make too many changes at once. Go through this list in order and stop at the first item that is applicable to your situation and adjust it – then wait to see what happens. You may only need to make adjustments in one area, or you may need to make adjustments in several areas, but it’s important not to make too many changes at once so you can get to the root cause.

In my last post, I talked about how to get your team involved in evaluating your 2009 marketing efforts. In part two of this series of preparing your marketing plans for 2010, I cover how to evaluate “reach” and “engagement.”

“Reach” is the new word for “awareness.” Others call it your “sphere of influence” or “thought leadership.” Basically, you want to measure the tactics you used to make people aware of your company / products / services – and these tactics aren’t limited to social media.  Why?  Because social media, your Website, and offline tactics such as speaking gigs or print ads often influence each other. Some things to consider when measuring “reach” include:

Social media – The number of followers you have on Twitter, fans on Facebook, or connections on LinkedIn.

Website – The increase in traffic / unique visitors / repeat visitors.

Blog posts / mentions – How many times was your company cited or talked about in blog posts or industry articles – both print and online?

Search engine optimization – The number of first page rankings you have for your chosen keywords.

Webinars – Number of attendees (has this gone up or down?).

Speaking gigs – If you weren’t speaking last year, are you now being asked to give presentations at industry conferences or workshops due to your increased reach?

Having a wide reach or sphere of influence in your industry is good. However, reach works better if your followers, fans, and connections are actively engaged with your company – as that’s what eventually leads to sales. Of course, it’s better if they’re positively engaged with you – and not negatively due to bad press! (But, believe it or not, negative engagement also has its benefits as you can learn from your marketplace.)

To measure engagement, both good and bad, look for the following:

Twitter RTs / DMs / Links – Are your followers retweeting (RT) your content? Do they direct message (DM) you with personal replies or follow up questions? Do they provide links to your content to their followers? Or, are they unfollowing you or Tweeting nasty things about your company and products?

Facebook – As with Twitter, you want to measure if people are responding to your posts and telling their friends/fans about your content or products. If you’ve built a Facebook app or a Facebook Connect site, you’ll want to measure its viral effectiveness – or lack thereof.

Blog – Engagement here can be measured by looking at how many people leave comments, retweet your content, or write about your company in other blogs. Also include whether your blog is included in “top blog” mentions for your industry – i.e. the top marketing blogs, top food blogs, etc.  And use blogger tools such as those available at Technorati to measure the impact of your blog.  You can also use TweetMeme’s WordPress plugin to measure RT analytics for your blog posts.

Email – Don’t forget to determine how many leads / customer inquiries came in through your sales@companyname.com or info@companyname.com email address. What were some of the questions your received and were some of them unexpected requests you hadn’t thought of?

Newsletter – To what degree has your newsletter list grown or gotten smaller?  Evaluate your newsletter host (we use ConstantContact, but there are other services such as MailChimp) metrics for your newsletters to get a sense of whether subscribers are opening your newsletter; forwarding it to friends; clicking through on links; or hitting the “spam” button.  When folks do click-through on links, measure, if possible the degree to which those clicks produced new business or a sale.

Web analytics – Here is the nitty gritty of your marketing efforts and where you’ll want to measure a number of things (especially if you have Google Analytics or some other website analytics package):

• What were your top content pages? Do you see any trends in terms of what people are looking for?

• What were the top keywords to your site? Do you see any surprises or trends?

• What is your bounce rate for your keywords and/or top pages?

• What sites are referring to yours – and how did these links come about? How can you build more of them?

• If you use forms on your site, determine how many people filled out each form and calculate your conversion rates.

• If your site has a search box, what search terms do users type into it? Again, do you see any surprises or trends?

We can help you measure how people engage with your website through its landing pages, SEO and PPC. Instead of measuring these data points manually (which, trust us, can quickly become mind-numbing), you can use the Yield Web Marketing Suite and its Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel, full set of dashboards and extensive reports to quickly (and painlessly) drill in to see what’s working and what’s not.  Just log-in to your account and be sure to check your quick overview in the Dashboard tab; your funnel report located under the Paid Search Optimizer tab; and your fine-detail reports under the Reports tab.

We here at Yield Software are going through the same process – and it definitely takes more than one staff meeting or a “back of the napkin” approach! Here are some of the strategies we’ve used to help us make plans for 2010 and beyond:

1. Get your entire team involved

Small companies have one advantage big companies don’t have – the ability to hold company-wide meetings and solicit people’s feedback and insights. It’s best if you hold a series of meetings where you can have each team member present reports on their area of expertise as well as provide recommended changes or new ideas.

Pay special attention to those employees who interface directly with customers. Why? Because they’ll have real information that you can take to the bank, including challenges customers are facing, complaints about your company, and other anecdotal information that you just can’t get from PPC or web analytics data.

2. Reaffirm your company values and mission.

Companies naturally change and grow and when this happens, you can lose sight of your company’s values and reason for being. If you’ve never actually committed to paper you company’s values, have a brainstorming session with your team.

One trick that works is to list out all the values you and your team members can think of, then narrow this list down to 10 values – and then narrow this list down to the top three values that all of you agree on.

Write these values on a flip chart and hang the page on the wall so that you can refer back to them as you go through the next step.

3. Put everything on the table.

If you’ve read the new book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, by Ken Auletta, you know that Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s success is based in part on their asking why things have to be done a certain way.

You can ask “why,” too. When evaluating your business and marketing efforts for 2009, look at everything you do – from PPC and SEO to your e-newsletter and blog, and even your point-of-purchase signage (if you have a physical storefront) and how you answer the phone. Examine each tactic by itself and ask:

Does it match our values? Simply put, if you’re doing something that doesn’t fit with your company values, you have a disconnect — for example, if your value is “superior customer service,” yet it takes you 24 hours (or more!) to respond to client requests via email or the web. In this case you’ll need to determine how you’ll respond faster to customer requests in order to live up to your company’s value of “superior customer service.”

What’s working and what’s not? – Just because some expert said you should have a blog or an e-newsletter doesn’t mean you *should* have one if you can’t maintain it properly or if it’s not generating any return. If no one in your company has a passion for blogging, then ditch it. Ditto for anything else you’re doing.

What do our customers want? – Using the information supplied by team members, list out what customers have been asking for and what it would take to give it to them.  Are some of these “wants” realistic? Do they easily scale – meaning, you have some of the pieces and just need to add others. Or, is a “want” as simple as making the “order now” button on your Website bigger or sending them text messages when their favorite product is in stock or you’re having a sale?

What brings in 80% of our business? – Alan Weiss, a well-known business consultant, often advises that companies drop their “20% clients” – those that bring in only 20% of the business. You can use this same advice when evaluating your marketing efforts. Determine which tactics brought in 80% of your new business and then eliminate the low-producing campaigns, tactics, etc.

Not only will you feel better, but you’ll also open up room to implement new strategies.

Small plug: If you’re in the middle of planning for 2010 and you’ve been thinking adding PPC or SEO to your marketing mix but hesitate due to the cost or complexity, consider our Yield Web Marketing Suite.  You save time and money – and most importantly, you can easily determine what’s working and what’s not. You can see for yourself with our free 15-day trial.

What Are the Most Important PPC Metrics?

Our current subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite will see a new feature when they log on today: the new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel.  This groovy new feature is a very visual way to instantly see how each of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are doing.

We frequently get two key questions from folks regarding their PPC campaigns:

How can I tell if my campaign is doing well?

What are the metrics I should be paying attention to?

Depending on the campaign, the response is often not a simple one. And accurately concluding how your campaign is doing pivots off of what sort of results you want from your campaign.  Our system provides a variety of both simple and more complex reports to gain insight to these questions, but we heard from our customers that they wanted something a little more visual and easy-to-understand.

Because, of course, within the proper context, you can instantly see the answers you’re looking for.  Which is why we introduced our new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel.

Folks often wade through a sea of metrics and opt to pick an easily-visible one to fret over – most often cost-per-click (CPC). Of course you want the most traffic at the lowest cost… That’s just plain logic, right?

But what if none of those cheap visitors stay on your site to check out what you have to offer? What if most of them never come back for another visit or never convert to a paying customer?

You can be the world champion at CPC optimization and easily end up with a campaign that’s a total failure.

That’s where the age-old concept of the marketing and sales funnel comes in.  For those who don’t know what this is, the funnel is a visualization of the prospects you bring to the table and the degree to which they pass through each phase of the funnel (or not).  The funnel can be a great tool for quickly seeing if you’re losing customers along the way and, ultimately, just how successful your campaign has been.

For those who know funnels, you also know they’ve been abused or misused, but in the case of PPC campaign measurement, it works perfectly to provide visual context so you can see how all those metrics fit together.  And it provides a solid answer to the question “How’s my PPC campaign performing?”  With a good funnel, you can instantly see your campaign’s exposure, interest, relevance and results. And you can easily see where problems are occurring and then make the necessary adjustments.  And we think ours is a very, very good funnel!

What Are the Best PPC Optimization Techniques?

But now that you can see just how well your campaigns are performing and where you may be losing folks in the funnel, you’re probably wondering what  adjustments you can make to get to improvements in performance. This leads us to the second most popular area of questioning: What are the best tips for me to improve my PPC campaign?

Alas, yet again, our answer is often: “It depends.” (Sigh.)

And, yet again, there’s no shortage of techniques to optimize your PPC campaigns. (Double-Sigh.)

Many experts are eager to share their proven tricks for PPC campaign optimization, but just like the metrics, these techniques are meaningless without impact context.

Different optimization strategies impact different aspects of a campaign. So, beyond just understanding campaign performance, you also need to understand which optimization techniques are the best to improve your specific areas of lackluster performance.

For example, throwing more money, keywords or ads at a campaign that has a high bounce rate isn’t the best place to start. Rather, you’ll want to take a look at adding negative keywords to your campaign to stop irrelevant clicks, for example, or put some work into your landing pages, or create a campaign-specific landing page rather than sending users to your home page.

But there’s no need to play at guessing games.  The Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel also highlights a variety of optimization recommendations available to you at the specific points on the funnel where your campaign performance is less than stellar.  Click on the links directly below any particular funnel metric and you’ll see tips and strategies you can use to help improve the key metric in question.

The sales and marketing funnel is familiar to most marketing professionals but it may nevertheless be new to you.  Whichever category you fall in to, our new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel will answer two of the most important questions you can ask:

1) How is your PPC campaign performing?

2) What you can do to further improve PPC performance?

Want a glimpse but not already a subscriber? Try our free for 15-day trial and see if you can take your campaign to the next level.

My co-worker, Jenae, recently sent me this email:

“I can’t tell you how many calls I have with folks who are hung up on cost per click (CPC). It’s the main metric they focus on when they start to dig into their campaigns and what they think they want to use Yield Software to optimize. It takes me a couple of discussions and lots of detailed examples to help them understand that while CPC is a tempting metric, having a low CPC doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful campaign — especially if you want conversions or are more ROI-driven.”

Search engine marketing comprises a number of tactics – online and offline – including pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, organic search, branding, and the various methods used to funnel traffic to your Website landing pages.

Too often, however, businesses of all sizes tackle only one aspect of an online marketing campaign without considering the costs of the entire campaign. And the one metric they often focus on, to the exclusion of everything else, is CPC.

Due to this narrow focus, we found that clients have a tough time answering this very basic question: “Is your PPC campaign making money or losing money?”

So, while driving down your CPC is good (and our Yield Web Marketing Suite is fully capable of delivering on this objective), focusing only on this metric may not help you achieve real return on investment (ROI) – nor will it show you how much it cost to achieve those clicks.

Which is why we counsel customers to focus on CPA – or cost per acquisition.

You’ll find lots of definitions for CPA, but in a nutshell, CPA is the amount you pay in total to acquire a customer or online order.

Notice, I did not say the amount you pay per click, but the amount you paid in total to acquire a customer or online order. This total dollar amount should include all of your marketing-related costs for a particular campaign including: branding and advertising, SEO, inbound customer support, and PR, to name a few things.

Only by looking at CPA can you determine if your cost is too high (compared to industry or internal benchmarks).

Let’s say you’re a shoe manufacturer that sells shoes in bricks-and-mortar stores and online. To build brand awareness, you must advertise — whether online, in print, or on TV. You may build mechanisms for capturing Website visitor information (i.e. via newsletters, contests, PPC ads). And you’ll likely need analytics that let you slice and dice data to determine who your target customer is, how she found you online, which products she’s ordered in the past, and when she likes to be contacted (to name a few things).

You may also develop email campaigns promoting your shoes, hire an agency to oversee these campaigns (if you don’t do it in-house), develop landing pages, etc. etc. etc.

By now it should be very clear to you that solely focusing on reducing CPC is not the best tactic. This is because you could be getting a ton of untargeted traffic that doesn’t covert – and reducing CPC won’t don’t anything to increase campaign ROI.

Put another way, which would you prefer:

100 clicks at $0.10 per click, resulting in 1 conversion, at a $10.00 cost per conversion; or

10 clicks at $1.00 per click, resulting in 5 conversions at a $5.00 cost per conversion?

(I know which outcome I’d pick!)

The key, then, is understanding how many clicks – and what kind of clicks – you need in order to convert one sale. Then you can understand what the cost is of getting those clicks. But as I’ve pointed out, you must consider a whole host of other variables before deciding that CPC is too high.

The reason so many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) become befuddled with regard to campaign ROI is precisely because of the sheer number of PPC variables. Once you begin focusing on CPA, you may go through a period of trial-and-error in order to arrive at the exact right results.

Sadly, time (and its corollary, sustained investment) is not something most SMBs have on their side… which is why we suggest you start in a more limited way: focus on optimizing three elements of your marketing strategy in tandem – paid search, natural search, and your landing pages – and focus on driving down your overall cost to acquire and convert one visitor.

By optimizing natural search you can improve your page rank in the leading search engines, thereby driving more free traffic to your site. Similarly, by optimizing your paid search campaigns by focusing on your best-performing keywords (in terms of generating conversions), you can drive more of the right kind of traffic from paid sources. When combining the cost of acquiring your paid search visitors with those visitors you acquired through natural search, you effectively lower the cost of acquisition overall.

And because you’re also looking at optimizing your site’s principle landing pages, you increase the likelihood that those visitors will convert.

Small plug: Doing this all on your own, with disparate systems or consulting specialists, can be time-consuming and costly. Which is why we designed our Yield Web Marketing Suite to simultaneously optimize paid search, natural search and landing pages in one fully automated solution. Using our system can help you grow your business and keep it sensibly focused on driving down CPA.

For instance, instead of spending months in trial-and-error approaches, our Yield Web Marketing Suite tests multiple variables across your PPC campaigns and favors the best converting variables in real time. To learn more, sign up for our free, no obligation 30-day trial and see for yourself how you can reduce your CPA efficiently and quickly.

Unlike outdoor advertising (i.e. billboards) or radio and television ads, where precise correlations to ROI can be elusive, search engine marketing (SEM) enables marketers to track interactions and behavior at every step of engagement.

Though a huge number of web marketing professionals employ display advertising on sites like NYTimes.com or FOXNews.com or Yahoo!, a growing share of marketing dollars are being directed to the search engines and specifically pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.  By buying the “Sponsored Links” you see on search result pages on Google, Yahoo Search or Microsoft Live Search, marketers are able to track: (a) clicks on an ad link; (b) arrival at a website’s landing page; (c) what visitors do once on the site; and (d) whether or not that visitor converts to a paying customer, among many other possibilities.

Such tracking is typically achieved by using a third-party analytics package in your website.  Such packages range from free and easy-to-install (i.e., Google Analytics) to quite complex and powerful systems that are very expensive and time-consuming to implement.  If you’re a small or growing business, Google Analytics is a great tracking package that will give you much of what you need and is very easy to implement simply by following their detailed instructions.

Once a visitor converts to a paying customer, web marketers are able to do an ROI analysis on that particular individual and across all customers who similarly converted to paying customers from the same campaign.  By comparing the total amount spent to acquire customers through a web marketing campaign to the amount of revenue generated by those who clicked on links and converted to paying customers, a campaign ROI can be quickly calculated.

Obviously, most web marketers want to make at least one more dollar than it cost to execute the campaign.  And, there are some instances where web marketers will make well-calculated decisions to arrive at a negative ROI in order to achieve their campaign objectives (for instance, you might decide that acquiring a large volume of new traffic within a tight timeframe, even if there is a negative ROI, is the right long-term strategy for your site).  But ideally, campaigns will perform much better than either of these scenarios and the degree to which a campaign’s ROI is impressive or not will have much to do with a number of factors.  These include:

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management.  Achieving excellent placement in the Sponsored Links sections of search results pages is a holy grail of search marketers.  There are a number of factors that ensure a PPC campaign is well managed and optimized for the best outcomes.  These include keyword lists, bid management, geo-targeting choices, product pricing and promotion decisions, etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  While it is important to actively and accurately manage paid search campaigns, it is equally as important to ensure websites rank high in natural (or organic) search results.  Clicks on these links are free to the advertiser and can effectively lower the overall cost of a web marketing campaign when averaged with paid customer acquisition.  By effectively optimizing a website for search engines, web marketers can ensure the same paid links appear high up in natural (and therefore free) search results.

Landing Page Optimization (LPO).  Clicks from both paid and natural search results must resolve to a web page that is optimized for converting first-time or returning visitors into paying customers, which is why LPO is of such great importance to search marketing.  And, LPO is also concerned with keeping the sales cycle as short as possible.  There are both simple and sophisticated ways to manage how such pages are optimized—either dynamically or in limited tests.  Landing pages can be the homepage of a website, but more experienced web marketers will typically create a specialized landing page that ties directly to the links that generated the clicks in the first place.

Anyone interested in embarking on a web marketing campaign should do so with a measurement plan in mind.  Being able to justify the time and expense of such efforts is critical in understanding the best ways in which to attract and profitably retain customers.

So time for a Small Plug: our Yield Web Marketing Suite is a fully automated and fully integrated set of powerful modules to enable you to easily set up and manage your web marketing efforts.  And to effectively measure the ROI on your efforts.  It’s ideal for small businesses and those with limited marketing resources.  Even more sophisticated web marketers use Yield Software to make the management and tracking of campaigns fast, easy and profitable.

For more information about our Yield Web Marketing Suite, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.