After a great Keynote I am now at the second panel of the day for Avinash Kaushik of Google. He is presenting with Tom Leung pf Google Website Optimizer.
Avinash has an analogy on how to describe Bounce Rate – I came, I puked, I left. Us SEM nerds eat that stuff up. On the topic of bounce rate if you are running PPC you want to look at the terms that have a large bounce rate and either omit them or make sure that they are on your landing page. Kaushik states that if you are running campaigns don’t let Google write checks that your site can’t cash. Basically don’t over spend on PPC if you can’t make the money back through your site.
Using Google Analytics you can drill down into the long tail and get away from the ‘branded’ keywords on the left side of the graph into what he calls ‘category’ keyterms such as ‘red leather Donna Karen shoes in San Francisco’. This term is a clear indicator of someone who wants to buy. Its a little hard to optimize for these search terms but they do represent the majority of your buyers.
He says to be successful in Analytics you have to obsess but obsess efficiently. Analytics lets you analyze keyword positions in PPC and shows you how many pages a user has looked at depending on the position of your ad. This is extremely useful when bidding on keyterms.
He is a big proponent of Goals in Analytics on a way a measure your sites effectiveness. Goals can be set up and a monetary value can be assigned to this goal to further substantiate its effectiveness.
Kaushik is pointing out plugins for Google Analytics
Leung is up now talking about the cool tool that is Website Optimizer. This little tool from Google is a great thing that I wish more people would use. It is a free multi-variant tools to measure landing pages and test their effectiveness.
When running WO you create different variants of a landing page and you have to have these pages run the whole time. If certain variants don’t get any traffic you weren’t able to take them out of the equation but now they offer the ability to take them out or ‘pruning’ as Leung states.
The great thing about WO is the ability to scratch that itch that’s telling you to try something different on a landing page. Have a hunch that something else might work? Pit it against your original page. Have other people in the company submit ideas on that landing page.
Give it a try, it’s free!
If you have any questions about Website Optimizer, Google Webmaster Tools and/or Google Analytics a great video was created to help you find your way
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com