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A five minute task that is saving me $750 A MONTH!

by: Richard Grady

Copyright 2004 Richard Grady

As my regular readers will know, I often share my own online experiences in my articles in the hope that it will help some of you. As my regular readers also know, despite the fact that I have achieved a degree of success with my Internet ventures, I can be pretty lazy when it comes to the more mundane aspects of running an online business. It is usually these 'boring' tasks that end up saving or making me large sums of money (when I eventually get around to dealing with them!). One day I will learn..... :-)

This week, the incredibly boring job that I want to talk about is ad-tracking. Now please bear with me on this - I know it isn't the most exciting topic in the world BUT spending (literally) five minutes on this task a month ago is already saving me over $750 a month (that's $9,000 a year!) and there is every possibility that I could end up saving more than double that amount!

Like many website owners, I use pay-per-click search engines to promote some of my businesses. I am sure you are all familiar with this type of advertising but if not, you basically have your website advertised in the search results of a particular search engine and every time a browser clicks on your advert, you pay the search engine a set fee (anything from 5 cents upwards). The amount you pay is governed by how popular the search keyword that you are listed under is. For example, search terms such as 'hosting' or 'casinos' etc are very competitive and could cost you several dollars a click (that is just for someone to visit your site - they don't have to buy anything!). As you can see, it can get very expensive.

Anyway, back to my story....

One of the most popular search engines to advertise on in the above way is Google, using their Adwords service. Adwords are the paid adverts that show up on the right-hand side of the Google search engine listings. I have been using Google Adwords for years on and off but more recently I have only been using this service to advertise a couple of my main websites. The reason being that these sites have high sales conversion ratios (the number of people that visit the sites and actually buy something) and therefore I can justify the relatively high advertising cost.

Both of these sites were receiving good levels of traffic from Google Adwords and both were making proportionate levels of sales. Of course, the sites also receive traffic from many other sources but I assumed that as Google had always provided me with visitors that bought, that this was still the case. The bottom line was that if my PPC costs were way lower than my sales costs on each day, then I was basically happy :-)

A few months ago, Google introduced a new tool which allows you to track the visitors that they were sending you through your advertising with them. The ad tracking tool is very easy to install and requires you to place a small piece of HTML code on your 'thank-you' pages (for example, the confirmation of order page that a customer will only see if they have purchased from you). Once installed, Google can track their referrals and see how many of them actually make it to the 'thank-you' page (ie. and make a purchase). The results are then displayed within your normal Google Adwords stats.

Last month I had a spare five minutes so I installed the ad tracking tool on one of my sites, expecting to find that I was correct in my assumption that a good percentage of these referrals from Google were buying from me. I was initially very surprised to see that over the first few days, hardly any of the referrals were making purchases but I put this down to an 'off-week' and let the adverts continue to run.

In the end, I tracked this specific ad for a month and the conversion rate from the Adwords referrals was appalling - seriously, I really couldn't believe it. The site WAS making sales but hardly any of the buyers were coming from the Google paid adverts. The fact was that the sales were covering the cost of the Adwords advertising but I was basically wasting money because this advertising was in no way whatsoever as effective as it had been in the past.

Result?

I stopped that advertising campaign after tracking it for a month and guess what? The level of sales on the site in question has remained constant but I am now saving over $750 a month by not paying for the Adwords advertising.

I am now tracking a second site in the same way and whilst the results so far show that the conversion rate is higher than the first site, it is still not as high as I would have expected so I may well end up ditching this campaign also and that will save me considerably more money each month!

The moral of this story? Well, it's obvious really but it is absolutely vital that you track your paid advertising to see how effective it really is. You may well be surprised (as I was) and if it saves you a few hundred dollars a month, I can assure you it is a very nice surprise :-)

About the author:
Richard Grady has been helping people earn online since 1998. Find out more about Richard at: Free wholesale search engines: UK- and US

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5 Ways Google Will Help You With Your Traffic
by: Tinu AbayomiPaul

If you�ve ever had a severe drop in your Google rankings in search results, you may think of Google more of an enemy than an ally.

But if you knew what I do, you�d realize that there are tools provided by the search engine that help you learn more about your traffic, and may even help drive visitors to your site.

Here are five ways that Google provides free traffic assistance.

#1 - Google will Help Your Pages Get Discovered with Google Sitemaps
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Google Sitemaps is a program that gives you the opportunity to present your site�s pages to Google in XML or text. Google will then come by and spider the pages, getting you indexed faster.

Take note that this doesn�t necessarily mean that your pages will be listed for your favorite keywords, only that discovery will take place a lot faster than with manual submission. Google Sitemaps will also give you some basic site stats if you verify your site, such as the top keywords for discovery, errors it found when crawling, and the types of documents at your site.

If you find compiling your sitemap for Google in the correct format difficult, try the SOFTplus GSiteCrawler Google Sitemap generator. It�s my favorite Sitemap generator, free and easy to use.

#2 - Google Will Talk To You and Your Webmaster In His or Her Native Tongue or Plain English with the Webmaster Section
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The Google Information Page for Webmasters should be your first stop when you want to know more about anything that has to do with your site and its relationship to Google and any of its many flavors of search such as Froogle. Particularly for new site owners or operators, checking this page first has saved many from needless anxiety.

Most of the basic information is in straightforward language, with links to details for geeks like me.

#3 - Google will Tell You What It Knows with Web Page Information

If you type info:yoursite.com into Google, Google will tell show you a page that has your link at the top of the page, with a short description, and the following phrase �Google can show you the following information for this URL�.

This special page compiles several queries about your site including pages that contain your URL (all the pages Google knows of that are linked to you).

#4 - Google will Help You Analyze Your Traffic with Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/

After a recent purchase of Urchin Stats, a free online version has been made available, and re-branded as Google Analytics. This cookie-based invisible visitor tracker can give you information that go a bit beyond standard stats such as bounce rates, visitor loyalty, keyword discovery results for a single day, click paths through your site, and page views per visit.

With the ability to analyze your traffic, you can help learn where the holes in your site are, and how to keep them on your site for longer periods of time, as well as better ways to steer a visit towards a specific action, such as a subscription. Results come in flavors for the executive and the search marketer alike.

There�s currently a waiting list to use Google Analytics due to popular demand.

#5 - Google Will Advise On Getting the Most from Your Traffic with Conversion University
http://www.google.com/analytics/conversionuniversity.html

Google Analytics also has two content sections that are available to all, called Conversion University. While the articles are decidedly slanted towards AdWords users, a prudent read yields many clues that can be applied to preparing for visitors who arrive through organic search discovery. One reference area is called �Driving Traffic�, the other �Converting Visitors.�

At the end of the day, the process by which your site gets ranked in Google search engine results is a computation of a complex algorithm, which means Google - the search engine - really isn�t capable of being your best friend or your worst enemy.

Meanwhile, Google - the company - also provides access to resources that will help give your site a fighting chance.

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