Tools and Tips – For your PPC Campaigns

I promised to address tools in this post. The tool that I wish to talk about this time is Google Analytics.

Analytics is useful and I would dare say essential to the streamlining and optimization of the total solution when it comes to affiliate marketing. The total solution in this case consists of online marketing campaigns, via CPC/CPM efforts, SEO optimization, Blogging, Social Bookmarking, as well as web site content. Basically it is useful for any effort that is used to drive traffic to the affiliate website.

Web analytics more specifically is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web page usage. There are two categories of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics.

Wikipedia states to following definitions for off-site and on-site web analytics:

Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis irrespective of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.

On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

The Tool

Google Analytics(GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates very detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. One of the best perks of this tool is Its aim at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.

GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing, social bookmarking, blog, social networks, and even digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. WOW!!!

GA's approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. Through the use of GA analysis, poor performing pages can be identified, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed on any given page, and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation, and website testing.

From the dashboard there are several metrics that are most apparent. Those metrics are: visits, page views, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and % new visits. The graph above shows the visits, and pages/visit.

The Metrics (under the Site Usage section)

Visits – This metric is obviously the overall number of visits that a website will see on any given day

Page Views – This metric is how many pages were viewed on any given day

Pages/Visit – This metric shows how many pages were viewed per visit on average

Bounce Rate – This metric shows what percentage of visits ended with the visitor navigating away from the landing page without taking any other action.

Average Time On Site – This metric shows the average amount of time a visitor spends perusing the site

% New Visits – This metric shows the average of how many visits are unique on a given day

Visits, Page Views, and Pages/Visit really give an indication as to how relevant our efforts are to attract attention to the affiliate website. Ads and ad bodies must reflect the information that is on the landing page. Blog information must be relevant to the niche it focuses on and related in some way to the affiliate website. Display ads must also prove relevant to the landing page, and so on.

I have been informed recently that a bounce rate close to 50% or less is most typical. It is when the bounce rate is consistently well above 50% that one should be concerned. It is a clear indication that the marketing efforts need to be revised in some way. Relevance is definitely key when it comes to marketing. Keep in mind however, that not all CPC/CPM marketing offered by the various search engines are created equal. It is obvious that the most popular search engines present higher quality traffic. The top three are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are smaller entities that offer CPC/CPM marketing and those are: 7search.com, Search123.com, Miva, AdBrite. I am currently using Google, Yahoo, and Miva. Unfortunately Miva is not yielding the highest quality traffic, as I have seen high bounce rates recently. Thus I will try MSN next. Initially I went to Miva because the charges we significantly lower.

There are more sections on the GA dashboard for drilling down to more advanced information. The sections are:

1. Visitor Overview
2. Map Overlay
3. Traffic Sources Overview
4. Content Overview

The visitor overview shows a graphical view of the number of visitors/day within the dates selected. The Map overlay shows where the traffic is originating. The darker the green is on the map the denser the traffic is from that location. The traffic sources overview shows a graphical view of where traffic is coming from. The three sources measured are, search engines, referring sites, and direct traffic. Under each of these sections is a “view report” link. This expands the report to show highly detailed information of its parent section. (ex. you can see metrics on each of the pages viewed under the content overview report)

Integrated with AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimize or cull campaigns.

Getting started with GA is relatively simple. Setting up profiles within GA takes little effort. The process is as follows:

1. create a profile for your website
2. copy the generated code, and place it into the body of your websites home page.
3. Allow up to 24 hours for the metrics of the first day to be collected.

The snag that most run into is the copying of the generated code into the body of the website home page. If you do not have control over your website, then you must let your webmaster do it for you, if there is no facility provided for you. If you do have access to the source of your website then adding this is academic. It is non-viewable code so there is no need to worry about anything being displayed on the web page.

I have read that the official limit on profiles is 50, and the upper limit for metrics is 5 million page visits per day.

References:
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Bounce Rate – Demystified at Web Analysis, Behavioral Targeting and Advertising

Web Analytics at Wikipedia

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