5 Quick Google Analytics tips

Google Analytics (GA) is an indispensable tool to get more sales and enquiries from your website. Here are five tips to make GA work for you:

Conversion tracking for all actions

In these tough economic times, you have to justify each rand that you spend. GA provides you with the tools to report every action taken on your website. You should at the very least track sales and views of the “contact us” page. Tracking more actions like enquiry form, whitepapers and views of a key page, and assigning a realistic economic value to them, will help you justify your marketing budget.

Bounce rate

Monitoring your website bounce rate (the percentage of initial visitors to your site who “bounce” away to a different site) will help you improve users’ experience of your site and generate more sales from the same amount of traffic. Remember that a bounce rate of higher than 50% is bad. You can improve the bounce rate by changing the information, navigation or layout of the landing page. A lower bounce rate = more profit!

Long Tail is the big driver for traffic

Long Tail marketing refers to the use of a long string of keywords, instead of one or two, when targeting prospective clients. As 25% of searches in Google every day are new, you should not just focus on the top keywords. Make sure that you achieve high rankings for a higher number of quality keywords.

Compare keyword volume and traffic ranking

You should monitor your top 20 keywords for traffic received and their ranking in Google. This will help you see what influence your ranking in Google has on the number of clicks received from a specific keyword over time.

Use visualization tools

GA provides you with all the keywords people typed into Google to find your website. There are literally thousands of keywords, which is way too much information to easily analyse. Use tag clouds or other visualization tools to make sense of this data and turn it into useful information.

5 Twitter tips for companies

Twitter has become this massively popular new media channel (and medium) within a matter of months. From Formula One commentators to big companies are now using it to reach out to their audiences. We are a search marketing company, but Twitter has become a factor in search engine optimisation due to real-time search, content and user behaviour. Here are a couple of best practice tips to get the most from your Twitter account:

Schedule your tweets

Broadcast your tweets at a time when your target audience is active. This may be over lunch or, if you are based in South Africa, during normal office hours (most people in SA surf at work).

Don’t fully automate

Remember that Twitter is an engaging medium, so make sure that a real person responds to any received messages or mentions.

Use company handlers

They provide you with a Twitter platform where many people can post under the same handler, in order to consolidate your followers. It also allows you to send commercial or promotional information to followers from time to time.

Repeat tweets

We know it isn’t really allowed but remember: if you create great relevant content, some people might have missed your first tweet. Don’t repeat tweets more than three times.

Track and monitor

Use a Google Analytics custom campaign URL if you have links in your tweets (you might have to shorten it with a service like bit.ly). This will allow you to measure the traffic from a campaign. Happy tweeting!

Step-by-step guide to let customers find you on Google Maps – for free! 

Internet search engine Google has just launched an updated Google Maps for South Africa, offering new functionality that allows users to search for local businesses in a specific area.

This enables businesses to create an online profile that can be found through Google Maps – for free! Taking into account that people usually search for things online that they’re looking for in their area, you simply cannot afford not to be on Google Maps.

Web Analytics to give you an “Insightful” Advantage 

Corporate companies spend millions on research to gain the slightest advantage over their competitors.  Considering this fact, is it possible for a startup or business with a modest marketing budget to gain a competitive advantage in a similar way? 

Yes, it is.  With Google Insights for Search it is now possible to make decisions based on consumer interest.  Insights for Search is an extremely helpful tool for anybody that offers a consumer product or service. 

Google AdWords Editor – Save Time with your PPC Campaigns 

Those that use Google AdWords will agree that although the online interface is user friendly, making multiple changes to complex accounts can become cumbersome. My introduction to the AdWords Editor application has helped me to streamline my account setups, and daily account maintenance. Google AdWords editor is a standalone software application that downloads the structure and content of your AdWords account and lets you perform fast, easy changes.

The beginner’s guide to search engine marketing

7 Tips for Google AdWords Optimisation

This whitepaper provides tips on how to get the most from your current Google AdWords campaign. It's been written for Advertisers with a basic understanding of AdWords but want to improve.

Some the of the following is discussed:

• Lowering CPCs
• Keyword bidding strategies and why it's important
• Conversion tracking

Click here to download the whitepaper

SEO Tip for link building

We recently discovered, while working with a client, that Google WebMaster Tools now offer the functionality to download all the links to your website.

Internet advertising 101

The key internet advertising terms explained

Internet advertising offers various ways to reach your target audience in a more effective way. Here are some of the aspects of internet advertising to consider:

Search engine optimisation (SEO)