Ad Clicks, Pageviews and Visits Explained

Nov15
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Recently one of our clients had some questions about a banner campaign they ran with a partner. Their numbers weren’t lining up for them and they wanted us to evaluate them. Below is the problem witnessed and the explanation for the confusion.

Here is the conclusion:

The report from the partner (pictured below) shows the number of impressions on their site ‘ad server impressions’ and total clicks ‘Ad server clicks,’ this means every click they have is counted and displayed. With ad servers its better for them to show the biggest numbers (this is a better selling point for marketers) so that is why their report shows 52,099 clicks.

Next we can look at GA’s campaign tracking you set up (pictured below titled “visits”). This measures the visits from the partners site, as defined by Google, visits means:

A visit is a group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example a single visit can contain multiple pageviews, events, social interactions, custom variables, and e-commerce transactions.

read more here. So, basically you will always have less visits then Pageviews.

 

Finally, when we look at the actual landing page you set up, that the partner site sent the traffic to we can see the Pageviews (pictured below and titled “pageviews”). Pageviews as defined by Google are:

Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.

So this means the pageviews should closely resemble ‘Ad server clicks’. It makes sense you have some loss from ‘Ad server clicks’ to ‘Pageviews’ users can click the banner then hit back or close browser before landing on your page and before GA has the ability to track the Pageview.

In regard to sales…

Ecommerce Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits that resulted in an e-commerce transaction.

Key word here is ‘visits’ basically if users came from your partner site and bought something it was recorded because it would have been during the visitors session on your website. So unfortunately you saw very low conversion…with your current conversion rate, you should have seen more sales. That’s 30,120 visits times (x) your conversion rate. This source of traffic is good and you should work on conversion optimization to get sales from this campaign. This just involves lots of testing and tweaking on both ends. You should not expect any of these campaigns to turn a profit on first try. This is where testing comes into play!

If you would like WMD to help you with conversion optimization contact us today!

Huffington Post – “How to Build Your Small Business Customer Base”

Jul17
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Author Melinda Emerson published an article last week about how to build a small business customer base, and the first piece of advice is to maintain a social media site. Of course, in the digital era an online presence is absolutely necessary to create and maintain a loyal customer base. She also suggests that with this social media presence comes a desire for face-to-face networking to add a personal touch to a growing business. With the substantial presence of online shopping, studies are showing that customers recognize and appreciate personal contact with businesses now more than ever. As a web marketing firm focusing on SEO and revenue marketing, sometimes we lose sight of the value of the personable sale.

Check out the full article by clicking here.

The Basics of Pingbacks

Jul14
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A pingback is a type of link notification method for web authors (particularly blog owners) to be notified when someone links to one of their documents. At Santa Barbara Web Marketing and Design we recognize pingbacks as an effective way of securing backlinks from other blogs on the internet that are posting about the same niche subject.
WordPress, a common software to publish online, supports the pingback function to the extent that if you place a link to an external blog post in a post on your original site, WordPress will automatically send a pingback notification to that external blog. Sometimes the external blog will automatically approve the pingback and then a reciprocal pingback link is placed on the blog post that you linked to that creates a backlink to your original site from the blog. Although the process sounds confusing, pingbacks are essentially a method to secure backlinks from higher authority blogs and forums online that contain related subject material to your site.
Most of the time, blog owners require pingback requests to be approved and they appear as comments in the approval area of the blog owners account. At Santa Barbara Web Marketing and Design we recommend that you place links to 3 or 4 external blog posts and no more. If you post more than four times, your comments may appear as spam, which would deter your site from attaining a backlink.
Backlinking is a basic part of SEO, and pingbacks build on this notion by connecting you with your online community niche.

Huffington Post Technology Blog Discusses the Future of SEO

Jul13
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Huffington Post Technology Blogger Julio Fernandez discussed in early June how simply using keywords and tags is not enough to optimize search engine results as the online marketplace becomes more competitive. Search engine optimization techniques are evolving and the staff here at Santa Barbara Web Marketing and Design is keeping up!

Click here to check out the full article.

 

Santa Barbara Web Design is Moving Up!

Apr12
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O.K. So we have optimized our homepage for Santa Barbara web design and set up a few social media accounts. That is all we have done to date and look at our rank flying up in the SERPs.

The best part about these new improved SERPs placements is the momentum. Seeing us improve wants us to work harder on them. Working harder on improving our SERPs placement for our main target Santa Barbara web design will show us better placement and the short circle is complete. It is now time to write a few articles about SEO and Web Design and put them out on the web! Links, links, links all of them equal votes for our site in Google’s and other Search Engines eyes.

After we hit #1 in the SERPs for Santa Barbara web design we are thinking about putting together a course on how to rank for keywords, best practices etc. Send us comments if you have them, we would love to hear from you!

SEO Basics for Small Business

Mar29
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Santa Barbara Web Design firm Web Marketing and Design Talks About SEO

It’s about time we start to practice what we preach here at Web Marketing and Design. We are finally getting around to designing and optimizing our website, a common saying among designers and SEO companies is, “You are your worst client” meaning that optimizing, marketing and designing your website, if you have existing clients, is one of your last priorities on your list. This common saying is true because your paying customers (your clients) come first. In this article we are going to cover some Search Engine Optimization basics for Small Business.

The surgical approach for Santa Barbara SEO

A surgical approach to SEO for Small Businesses means that you don’t need to have a huge SEO team working on your sites optimization, you can have a small focused more defined approach to get the results that you want. There are simple and rules of thumb every business should follow to make their website more visible on the web and generate great results.

First things first, you need to know what keywords to target. More on this in another post. When selecting your specific keywords you must do your research, keep your keywords extremely targeted and keep the list short and sweet. It is bad practice for Small Business to take the shotgun approach and try to go after a broad list of keywords to dominate. As a best practice, take the surgical approach and choose three main keywords and use these to start to optimizing your website.

Major on page optimization factors That Make Marketing Automation Easier

Critical on-page optimization factors:

  • Every page on your site needs to be accessible to search engines
  • Simply put, if the page can’t get crawled by search engines then that page can’t get indexed, therefore it might as well not exist.
  • Make sure you are not blocking search engines from the pages you want to optimize
  • Targeted keyword in body, make sure to include your keyword in the body of your text on each page
  • Use the targeted keywords throughout the page, but don’t stuff it by using too many
  • Usage of keyword in the page title
  • Use your targeted keywords in your title tags, but make sure that each page title is unique
  • Use Rel Canonical attribute properly
  • It is common for sites to have several pages listing the same set of information or product, make sure that the rel canonical tag attribute is used correctly and is not pointing search engines to a different url

High Importance on page SEO factors

  • Use exact and broad targeted keywords throughout the page
  • Try and use targeted keywords you are targeting at least 4 times on the page
  • Avoid keyword stuffing within the page and title
  • If you use keywords unnaturally or stuff the page it will hurt you!
  • Use only one title per page
  • Use exact keywords in title
  • Put your keywords at the front of the title
  • Don’t use more than one rel canonical tag

Moderately high on page factors

  • Use exact keywords in the document
  • Use keywords in image alt tags
  • Use no more than one meta description
  • Use a fair amount of keywords on each page
  • 50 or more is the lowest number to shoot for
  • URL structure
  • Keep your URL structure simple and easy to read
  • Don’t stuff the url with keywords
  • But, be sure to use your targeted keyword in the url
  • Static url (basically it should always be the same)

These are only a few of many basics for SEO for Small Business we are deploying in our Santa Barbara Web Design Firm and soon you will see us deploying these practices on our web site. It is important to continue to constantly make changes and record your results, which will be an ongoing effort for any website. There are many more ranking factors that can be a determining factor in your websites rankings and we would be happy to talk to you about them. Feel free to share your opinions and expertise in the comments section below and we answer any questions you have.

Is Email Dead?

Mar24
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We get asked this all the time and I found this very interesting infographic that sheds some light on the survival of email marketing. Email is an effective communication channel that is cheap and has the ability to reach a large amount of targets fairly easily.

Small Business SEO Put to the Test

Mar21
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Web Designers in Santa Barbara Start a SEO Test

We have done next to zero marketing for Web Marketing and Design since we opened our web design office in Santa Barbara we are going to run a test. As of now we are showing up nowhere in the SERPs for the following three keywords:

Santa Barbara Web Design
Santa Barbara SEO
Marketing Automation

So the test is, we are going to start optimizing our site for those three keywords and see how we do. We are going to start by following the SEO Basics for Small Business practices. This is a great test for anyone trying to optimizing their site for local search, because it’s a great way to learn SEO on a small scale. Just remember, for anyone that tries this test, it is imperative to remember to maintain a small and focused approach when choosing your keywords.

Additionally to following the SEO Basics practices, we are going to apply some off site optimization techniques.

  1. Get backlinks, we are going to try and get as many backlinks as we can from authoritative websites. Search engines like to see links pointing to your website that have authority and that are relevant. It is important to remember, when getting backlinks try to get your keywords in your link anchor text.
  2. Social bookmarking, we will be utilizing various social media sites to begin participating in our online reputation to build our social presence and online brand.
  3. Local search, in order for us to gain a better ranking for our keywords we must submit our local listing to major search engines such as Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, CitySearch etc.

This is only some of the many techniques we plan to use, throughout this entire process, we will keep a log of our weekly progress through the SERPs and see how long it takes us to hit that #1 spot in Google for each of the three keywords we are targeting.

SO…Santa Barbara Web Designers and local SEOs beware! This should be a fun experiment and since its run on our site, for our site, we will publish the results and keep you posted with any of our findings!

Please leave any comments or questions you may have.

How to Become a Better Revenue Marketer

Mar15
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A few ways in which organizations can take the first steps into becoming revenue marketers.

Top down approach
The first step in becoming a revenue marketer is getting buy in from top level management. If they don’t see the value in aligning sales and marketing with process and technology then it’s going to be a difficult road. Think about how tough it is to manage a sales person within your organization. Now add to it service level agreements and strict process. It won’t make things easier if upper level management isn’t enforcing it. In fact it will probably make your life miserable.

Technology
Without the use of automation software or an organization wide CRM it is going to be impossible to align sales and marketing in today’s dynamic workplace. These tools not only automate processes they help deliver quality leads to sales. With these powerful tools you can weed out leads that don’t fit your demographics or aren’t ready to buy. This helps your marketing team build credibility within your sales organization and build a more efficient sales cycle. It gives you the ability to enforce the “no lead left behind” policy.

Experience
With these new and powerful tools you are going to need someone to drive them. Marketing automation is such a new and fast growing trend that it’s outpacing the increase in automation skills. It’s becoming difficult and even expensive to find talented marketers who have experience with automation software. Trying to implement these tools on your own are possible, but it takes time and patience to learn them. Without expert guidance it can be difficult to get your automation program at peak performance. Consultants can not only ramp up your program faster, but it can put your automation software to full use.

Revenue Marketing

Feb15
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What is Revenue Marketing

Marketing and sales alignment is on the to do list at most B2B companies, but many struggle to find it or even fail to recognize the value of it. According to IDC it was found that B2B organizations are losing close to 10 percent of revenue per year due to their inability to align sales and marketing around the correct processes and technologies. Marketing automation software companies are reporting growth year over year at an amazing rate, but marketers fail to fully implement their technologies.

To become an efficient revenue marketer it’s apparent that organizations need to bridge the gap between sales and marketing but how do they go about doing it? Organizations spend a substantial amount of money on marketing efforts, but are they getting their targeted ROI or have they even accounted for it? Web technologies are getting more advanced but do they have the talent within their organization get peak performance from it? Are your competitors getting an unfair advantage because they’ve got a head start on their marketing automation program?

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