* Would you trust the information presented in this article?
* Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
* Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
* Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
* Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
* Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
* Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
* Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
* How much quality control is done on content?
* Does the article describe both sides of a story?
* Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
* Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
* Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
* For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
* Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
* Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
* Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
* Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
* Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
* Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
* Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
* Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
* Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Now, you may not be selling software, but many people are now using some sort of Freemium model – that is giving a free trial & later upselling that person into a paid version of the product (eg a membership site)

So hopefully my answer will be useful to you:

Sorry mate – the short answer is NO.

The AdWords conversion cookie is set to 30 days & as far as I’m aware there’s no way to change that.
So when your new customer downloads the trial, you obviously register that conversion (via the AdWords conversion code on the thank you page for the trial)
but if they come back & buy something 31 days later, that conversion won’t get attributed to the initial click.

There is some fancy stuff you can do with cookies…not perfect of course (the customer might change machines or clear their cookies) but if I had to find a way to do this… it would look a little like:

- as soon as they land on the initial landing page, cookie them & store something like “visitor” in an Analytics custom variable
- for bonus points you could also save their google search query (presumably the main info you want to track) in an second Analytics custom var
- add a conversion tag to a different custom var (you get a few these days) once they download the trial (maybe “trial”)
- then when they come back to buy you could cookie those that get to the cart (”interested”) and even a separate one again for those that buy (”customer”)

then you can pull apart the analytics data & find which keywords (or adgroups if you’re using the content network) lead to purchases, almost purchases & free trials

there’s more about custom vars here (you’d want the visitor level stuff at the bottom of the page):

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html

Another thought… you can also use that data for remarketing. Show ads to the people that have downloaded the trial but not yet bought, reminding the of the benefits & maybe offering a special deal…

Hope that helps!

http://smallbusinessbigmarketing.com/how-to-master-google-adwords-locally/

Go check it out & let me know below if (like Luke) you still have questions you’d love to ask me about AdWords

Now, you may not be selling software, but many people are now using some sort of Freemium model – that is giving a free trial & later upselling that person into a paid version of the product (eg a membership site)

So hopefully my answer will be useful to you:

Sorry mate – the short answer is NO.

The AdWords conversion cookie is set to 30 days & as far as I’m aware there’s no way to change that.
So when your new customer downloads the trial, you obviously register that conversion (via the AdWords conversion code on the thank you page for the trial)
but if they come back & buy something 31 days later, that conversion won’t get attributed to the initial click.

There is some fancy stuff you can do with cookies…not perfect of course (the customer might change machines or clear their cookies) but if I had to find a way to do this… it would look a little like:

- as soon as they land on the initial landing page, cookie them & store something like “visitor” in an Analytics custom variable
- for bonus points you could also save their google search query (presumably the main info you want to track) in an second Analytics custom var
- add a conversion tag to a different custom var (you get a few these days) once they download the trial (maybe “trial”)
- then when they come back to buy you could cookie those that get to the cart (“interested”) and even a separate one again for those that buy (“customer”)

then you can pull apart the analytics data & find which keywords (or adgroups if you’re using the content network) lead to purchases, almost purchases & free trials

there’s more about custom vars here (you’d want the visitor level stuff at the bottom of the page):

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html

Another thought… you can also use that data for remarketing. Show ads to the people that have downloaded the trial but not yet bought, reminding the of the benefits & maybe offering a special deal…

Hope that helps!

In its simplest form, it’s a way to show ads to people browsing the web – but only to those people who have already visited a particular page on your website. The benefits are improved ROI & more powerful search marketing strategies for your business.

How does remarketing work?

To use Remarketing in AdWords, you first need to ‘tag’ visitors to your site. Then you’re able to show ads (on Google’s Display Network) to those people & only those people. This gives you a number of strategies.

The type of visitor you tag is entirely up to you. For example you may choose to tag some or all of the following types:

• all visitors regardless of which pages on your site they visit
• visitors that view a ‘category’ of pages within your site (eg mens, womens & childrens; or, luxury, business & budget)
• only visitors that successfully performed an action on your site (eg opted-in, bought, downloaded a pdf etc)
• only visitors that placed an item in the shopping cart but then abandoned the cart & left the site without buying

Each type of visitor is then stored in it’s own remarketing list. You’re then able to market to individual lists, or even combine lists for more advanced strategies.

You can even combine your Remarketing lists with other AdWords features such as Geo-targeting, frequency capping, image ads and more.

A popular remarketing strategy

One of the more popular remarketing strategies is targeting users who left your site without purchasing anything. Since one of the most common reasons for not making a purchase is price, why not target these people with a special offer & either add value, offer a better bonus or discount the sale price?

To set this up create two remarketing lists. The first is for all your site’s visitors & the second is for your ‘buyers’. Google will give you two different code snippets – one for each list. Install the code on your site (eg snippet 1 on all pages, snippet 2 only on the thank you page). Now target the ‘audience’ that consists of all visitors but not buyers.

Customise your creative

As with anything in marketing, you’re only as good as your offer. So try different creatives for your remarketing campaigns. You already know which parts of your site they were interested, so try cross-selling or up-selling related products & services.

Once you find an offer that works, you can quickly roll out new text ads with variations on that theme & even add new image ads if your budget allows.

Another great feature is that you have control over the length of time that users see the ads. Google’s default time is 30 days, but you can always adjust this to the timeframe you think is reasonable.

For more information visit http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173945

You can now choose a Target CPA instead of a Max CPA. So what does this mean and, more importantly, how does this affect you?

Max CPA

Is how Conversion Optimizer has traditionally worked. You set an amount that you’d like Google to not exceed for each conversion, for example you’d set a max CPA of $10 to get a new subscriber on your list.

In the past the result of this has been that your average CPA has generally been less than this Maximum (much like a Max CPC bid of $1 generally means you’ll pay an average of say 50-80c per click).

Your new option is Target CPA Bidding

Now you set a ‘target’ rather than a ‘maximum’ which means your average CPA should be a lot closer to the CPA bid that you choose ($10 in our example). The cynics will say this is another money grab by Google, but this should give more control to advertisers & help achieve CPA targets more accurately.

As with all bidding options, go to the Settings tab under the Campaigns tab & scroll down to the ‘bidding & budget’ section.

What does this mean for you dear reader?

Well, the new exams that have to be passed test more than theoretical knowledge… they test real-world practical skills. And with our main AdWords account about to reach it’s 2000 day birthday (!) it’s pretty safe to say we’ve been doing this longer than almost any other company in Australia.

Important? We think so. Because we’ve seen inside hundreds of AdWords accounts we can help you improve your account faster & increase your ROI – that’s what online marketing is all about, measuring & improving results.

Certified Partner Exams

It’s great to see more advanced exams (some questions are very tricky!) and to see that Google have plans for many more exams in the near future

Because the managed spend threshold to become qualified has dropped considerably, we’ll see many more companies with Certified Partner Status over the coming months… we’re just stoked to be the first.

Thank you!

Thanks to Steve, Justin, Issie & Steve for all their hard work over the past few months – it’s been a big year already & it’s about to get even bigger!

Thanks also to our wonderful clients – without you we’re nothing.

Typically the reason for the minisite is to create a segment of the main business website. This might be to laser-target a particular niche, or it might be to create a special offer that you wish to keep separate from the main site (eg discounts, added value, time limited offer etc)

Another reason is typically to improve your SEO results.
If the main site doesn’t rank well for a particular term (or group of terms), then a minisite may be a solution.
Because the domain name is a major factor in how well a site ranks, choosing an keyword-rich domain will often prove to be a shortcut to better rankings.

Guidelines for domains:

Obviously the main thing is to include the main words of the niche you’re targeting!
Keep it as short as you can (1-3 words is best).
Don’t use dashes, hyphens or underscores if you can avoid it (particularly if you’ll be advertising the site offline)
Only consider using dashes IF you’ll only advertise the site online (ie people will click a link, not have to remember or spell the domain) AND if the domain without dashes has been taken (& isn’t for sale)
Do some basic keyword research to determine the phrase(s) that most people use when searching in the niche & choose the domain accordingly (contact us if you’d like us to do that for you)

We recommend using DomainFace if you want to look for domains for sale, or domains about to expire.

The goal of the minisite …

will typically be to capture a visitor’s email address, or possibly even create a sale.
Either way it will usually be some sort of direct response offer, so the site should contain:

• some sort of form to capture the information & send that through to your email/CRM
• a static ‘thank you’ page. That is a second page that the user is directed to after they’ve successfully completed the form. This is then used to track how many users managed to complete the form – which gives you your conversion rate… a VERY important number to know
• Analytics tracking installed on all pages (we recommend Google Analytics NOT AWstats)
• As few form fields as possible. Preferably you’ll only require the user to give you an email address. Every field you ask for in addition to this (eg name, mobile, address) will reduce the conversion rate (in almost every case – although of course there are exceptions to this)

Additional pages to consider for your site:

Don’t just build a site with the landing page & a thank you page.
Users (& Google) won’t like it as much as something that offers plenty of value

At a minimum you should also include: a privacy policy page (essential if you’re collecting personal information), an about us page, a contact us page & possibly an FAQ page

You might also want to consider 5-10 pages of relevant, unique & valuable content that the user would find helpful in making their purchasing decision
Each page might contain 300-500 words & be about one particular aspect of the targeted niche.

How to build the site:

There are literally hundreds of ways to build sites these days & no shortage of bespoke systems to help you do so. The problem with those systems is that once you use them, you’re beholden to the owner of that system forever more – which can mean costly changes down the track.
Far better to use open-source software such as WordPress - as this is not only free (!), it’s also being continuously improved by a world-wide army of geeks!
WordPress (WP) is also very easy to use & is very well optimised for SEO without you having to change anything – it just works!
And because it’s open source, there are no shortage of helpful how-to videos on  the web explaining every aspect of how to use the platform.

Where to build the site:

You can of course use your usual web development team & pay accordingly
But increasingly it’s getting cheaper & easier to use web designers from around the world.
Sites like elance.com, odesk.com, rentacoder.com & guru.com make it easy to find, work with, then pay a freelance designer anywhere in the world
The huge benefit of this is cost – you might expect to pay ~$500 for a complete site, assuming that you provide the copy & images to be used
Stuck when it comes to finding images – head to iStockPhoto.com & choose from millions of shots for a few dollars each (the medium size is fine for website work)

That’s it.
Once the site is built, we can help you ‘split-test’ the site… for example testing 4 different headlines to see which works best.
Small changes to headlines (and other copy, the offer, the colour scheme & other elements) can have a massive impact on your conversion rate.
It pays to test!

Let me know how you go with your site & good luck!

James Schramko‘s excellent Fast Web Formula is now in it’s second year.

I highly recommend going – there’s a great lineup of speakers:

• Ed Dale
• John Carlton
• Kenny Goodman
• the guys from Flippa.com
• me
• and many many more…

I’ll be revealing some cutting edge AdWords Strategies & some very cool new ideas.

James is one of the Internet’s good guys, 100% genuine and totally focused on delivering value. This will be an awesome event – make sure you’re there.

Sydney, September 10-12 2010.

And keep your eyes peeled for some great bonus content coming out in the coming weeks…

We all know that you can’t manage what you don’t measure – so Analytics (or some sort of stats package) is vital if you want to improve your website over time.

Well it just got a lot easier to do so

Google have just announced a number of improved features for Analytics, such as:
- better engagement metrics. eg you can know count a goal as someone that stays on the site for over 2 minutes
- up to 20 goals for each profile (at last!)
- filtering of results. eg don’t wade through a list of thousands of keywords, now you can filter say those with a low bounce rate & high time on site. sweet.

and many many more

check it all out here
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-analytics-now-more-powerful.html

eg. setting a goal that a visitor stays for over a minute