WSI Blog - Internet Marketing Tips and Strategies

Think you have squeezed every last dollar out of your Pay Per Click campaigns? Or think you have your Custom Landing Page down to a science? Maybe....maybe Not.  As the old saying goes, "You can't improve what you can't measure." This holds true even more so during tough economic times like we are facing today. The answer is effectively managing your Analytics.

Maketing managers and business owners are looking for ways to trim marketing budgets and increase ROI  (we should always be looking to do this, recession or not). If you can spend less and make more money, why wouldn't you want to do this?

Ask yourself:
1)  Does my print ad in the local newspaper really work? And how well does it work?
2)  What is my Yellow Page Ad costing me per lead? 
3)  Is my website unattractive to my visitors?
4)  Is my search engine optimization (SEO) work giving us the leads we are looking for?
5)  Are my email marketing campaigns even reaching my prospects INBOX or going straight to Junk Mail?
6)  I am spending all this money on a radio ad, but how can I measure its effectiveness?

If you are asking yourself these questions then its pretty clear that you probably aren't up to speed with Web Analytics. You can track and measure all of these marketing campaigns effectiveness. Without proper analysis and not being able to make informed decisions, business owners and marketing managers might stop campaigns that might be working or just need some tweaking. 

Check out our Analytics Webinar and Whitepaper on Web Analytics and How to Optimize Your Marketing Dollars During a Recession.

Optimize Your Marketing Dollars During the Recession (410 KB)

Watch the Webinar
 

Many companies are either at the beginning stages of experimenting with internet marketing or just beginning to see the true potential of this marketing medium. We are seeing a lot of companies using social media, pay per click, search engine optimization, and email marketing to promote their products and services and promote their company name because its effective at driving conversions.  The best way to shed some light on the actual performance of your marketing campaigns is through Web Analytics.

Web Analytics (Click Tracks, Google Analytics, Urchin are popular analytics software), will shed some light on which sites increased your marketing Return on Investment and are worth spending time on as well as which ones to eliminate or modify. Saving time (our most valuable commodity), analytics will aid in helping businesses make better decision as to how to allocate the time spent on a particular site, web channel, or internet campaign.

Analytics is not limited to tracking just online marketing activities, Television, Print, Radio, and other offline campaigns can now be effectively tracked and analyzed using Web Analytics. Why guess at how effective your marketing dollars are being spent? You can find out exactly what is happening with each campaign using Analytics. You can also use Web Analytics to guage how effective your Press Releases, Blog Posts, News Articles, Brochures, Videos, Podcasts, etc are working ON and OFF your site.

Having used Web Analytics to track the various websites and businesses we have developed over the years, its amazing the level of information you can find out about how people interact with your site. Analytics is as important to internet marketing as the website itself. Without Analytics, it's like driving at night from Boston to Chicago with no headlights. You can't get where you want to go without seeing what's in front of you. Analytics can shed some serious light on your marketing campaigns.

You should think about learning everything you can about Web Analytics if you are going to market on the internet, or hire a Web Analytics consultant to help you out. I am a Certified Google Analytics consultant and would be happy to help you sort through the data on your site and make your marketing dollars succeed. 

Contact me today to schedule a consultation radams@wsipremierEsolutions.com

As many people may know, Google has always worked hard at their ability to deliver the most relevant search results for their users. This is in large part due to their advanced Search Algorithm that helps determine where a website should be positioned in their search engine results page (SERPS). But with the rapid rise of "live web" or social media sites, the web tends to be dominated by social bookmarkting sites as well as viral videos, and sometimes, not in a good way (at least not in Google's eyes). This has lead to the beginning steps of Google changing their algorithms again, which is going to be a good thing for your business and when searching on the major search engines.

These new steps by Google are an attempt to prevent what we call "Black hat SEO" - the unscrupulous optimization (spamming) of a website by using often illegal methods such as page hi-jacking, cloaking, link blasting, and other methods. As Google gets smarter in dealing with the search spammers, they get smarter in terms of getting around new Google updates. Everytime this has happened in the past, we have been able to adjust our Search Engine Optimization methods to ensure compliance with Google. And now, we are adapting again to Google's attempt to stop "Live Web" spamming and how they look at incoming links.

The upcoming changes by Google will lead us into a new era of search called Personalized Search Optimization (PSO). This new search focus will be dominated by great content on a website, effective blogging and social media, quality videos and podcasts that engage your audience, and basically your site will be ranked on how well your site effectively personalizes content to your audience. People will no longer be able to "trick" the search engines to achieve a high ranking, you will have to develop great content and use advanced search engine optimization and social media marketing to effectively market your site on Google.

Also, search rankings in Google will be heavily influenced by Google Analytics - tracking the conversion rate of your site and goals, bounce rate, and more. If you aren't using analytics now, you better start or have a Certified Google Analytics Consultant at WSI help you set this up and manage this for your business.  Google is going to be using the data from analytics to determine the relevancy of your site which will affect your search engine positioning amongst other things.  And if you have a Google Adwords PPC campaign running, and you have a low click through rate or poor conversions, Google is going to take this into account as well as to how your site will rank organically.

These changes by Google are all about delivering quality search results and a quality user experience to Google users. We all want to search for a product or service and have it deliver exactly what we want without having to skim through page after page of irrelevant websites. With these new changes and Personalized Search Optimization (PSO), the user experience will increase dramatically, but it will make it that much more difficult to drive quality traffic to your site without the help of an expert.

For more on this topic download our Whitepaper on the upcoming changes for Google in 2009.

Google Changes for 2009: What They are and how they affect us? (67 KB)

At WSI, we have been saying this for years....SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click), and E-mail marketing are the most effective ways to increase company wide "conversions", and now Forbes Media has just completed a study that confirms this.

Forbes Media "Ad Effectiveness Survey" polled 112 marketers online back in February and March to learn more about their attitudes towards digital marketing. Not only were these forms of internet marketing considering most effective at increasing conversions, but also considered most effective in demand fulfillment rather then demand creation. That is the true beauty behind effective internet marketing, your message appears at the exact time the prospect wants it to appear, its not forced, the prospect has the control.

Internet marketing is not a "demand creation" marketing medium like TV or radio. TV, Radio, and even magazines can be effective in creating demand for your product, but we get bombarded everyday with thousands of marketing messages and most people are simply tuning out. A greater ROI can be derived from effective internet marketing campaigns because we are focusing only on those who want to learn more about our products and services, and not wasting our time/money on those who don't. In today's economy, a great website marketed effectively on the internet, can be the difference maker between those companies who survive and those who don't.

Our local WSI office in Maine has a new location! We have relocated our sales office to historic downtown Portland Maine. Right in the heart of Maine's business district, we are now located on Congress Street in Portland. This move will allow us to improve our operations and ability to serve the New England business market as well as continue to serve the Chicago Illinois office. WSI continues to provide leading edge internet marketing solutions to small and medium sized businesses across the US.