Archive for May, 2009

Using Google’s Wonder Wheel for AdWords Keyword Research

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Google have added a new tool to their already impressive array of search engine features and tools which can give you a great insight into how keywords relate in respect of real searches conducted on Google. One of the uses that this tool has is that it can really help you to structure your AdWords campaigns for maximum clout, helping your Quality Score and therefore your cost effectiveness and hence your profitability.

The name of the tool is Wonder Wheel and is available under the “Show Options” link to the top left of the main search results pane. Check out the screenshot below to see how to access it. Read the rest of this entry »

Setting up Google Analytics Goal & Funnel Metrics on a Zen Cart e-Commerce Site

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Ok here is a post on how to do something extremely useful and ultimately profitable on an e-commerce site (online store) which was built on Zen Cart (or any online store system for that matter).

This can give you a crystal-clear view of what pages in the checkout process of your online store are literally losing you sales hand over fist. This post is an adjunct to an earlier post on this blog which is at http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/.

Once you can then see which culprit pages are scaring your customers away (just as they have taken out their credit card), you are thus armed with the knowledge of which pages need changing in order to boost your conversion rate and therefore your sales. Read the rest of this entry »

Goal & Funnel Analytics – Where are we Losing Sales?

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Ok so one of the most important things that you can do on an e-commerce website is to analyse how your pages are performing, especially in relation to your checkout process. This can give you a birds-eye view into which pages on your site (if any) are causing customers to abandon the checkout process just as they are about to take out their credit card. This scientific analysis of page performance reaps many long-term benefits and is a must for any site where the sales are not being clocked up despite a decent amount of site traffic.

In a blog post back in March, (“First Things First – Examine the Analytics Data & Establish the Facts” I wrote about a friend of mine who has an ecommerce website which had a fair bit of traffic but not many sales.

Since then we put a Google Analytics Goal Funnel in place on the checkout funnel pages to examine what site users were doing when they got to the point of checking out on the site. A screenshot of a one-month view of the funnel is below. Read the rest of this entry »

How Google Rewards Smart Marketers – The AdWords Cost-Per-Click Equation

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Most pay per click networks work on the simple rule that the higher you bid for a certain keyphrase, the higher your ad position. But this is not the way that the most popular (and fairest) pay-per-click network, Google AdWords, calculates your ad position.

In AdWords, bid price is only one factor in its ad position equation. The other main factor in the ad ranking equation is Quality Score, as calculated by combining a bunch of factors, the 3 main ones being (listed in order of weighting):
1. Click-Thru-Rate (CTR),
2. Ad Relevance (keywords in ad title and copy)
3. Landing page quality (keywords in landing page copy, structure, etc.) Read the rest of this entry »

Cashing in on Search Traffic – Simple SEO Produces Results

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Ok now I make no secret that I like to build sites on WordPress whenever it is a suitable,  as it allows us to do fundamental on-page SEO on a site pretty easily, and also the blogging system is easy to configure and tweak on WordPress.  We have a client who is targeting the Life Coaching niche (Dating and Relationship coaching in particular), and we recently build a site for her, you can check it out at www.GoodLifeCoaching.ie. Its build on WordPress 2.7 and is also a bilingual site, as it allows the owner to write post and page content in both English and German, and allows the visitors to switch between languages by clicking on the appropriate link.  Read the rest of this entry »