You’ve done it. You’ve setup your SiteWit account and you can’t wait to start optimizing your Paid Search campaigns. But wait. What is this? They want you to put some Javascript code into your website? Do they know how involved that is? Do they know how difficult it is for you to get any changes made to your website? Is it really going to make that much of a difference?
Actually, it can. The Javascript code allows SiteWit to do a lot of really cools things that can help you save money and increase revenue much more quickly. It allows the SiteWit engine to see which ads are really driving traffic and sales to your site. It allows the Predictive engine to determine the most desireable behavior over time. It helps determine what regions, times of day, ad positions, keywords, and search properties perform best for your individual site. Lets look closer at some of these benefits.
Whithout the SiteWit code installed on your site’s pages SiteWit can only see which Ads and Keywords produced the most clicks. This is useful, but SiteWit can do so much more. With the code installed SiteWit can see how the visitor behaved when using your site including wether or not they accomplished any goals you have defined (i.e. purchase, form submission, etc..). SiteWit can then use this data to predict what other visitors will do based on their current behavior. Furthermore, SiteWit can tie a visitor across multiple visits to your site and thisinformation can be invaluable.
Lets look at a realistic scenario. Lets say you sell shoes online. A visitor searches for shoes in their favorite search engine, sees your ad and clicks on it. They browse your site for a while and decide to come back later and buy some shoes. Later they come back by searching for youe site’s name and clicking on an Organic search result or even a different ad than the one they originally clicked on. Now they purchase six pairs of shoes. Congratulations you have made a sale, but where did the sale come from? Well that is tough to say. If you do not have any analytics for your site, you will probably never find out so you can’t really risk making any adjustments. If you have a basic analytics package installed in your site it may look like the customer came from either the organic search result from an Organic Search or from that last ad they clicked on. This could cause you to reduce or eliminate the first ad they clicked on since it does not appear to be producing.
But, GREAT NEWS, you installed the SiteWit code so you know that that first ad is actually how people who are making purchases are actually finding you. You also know that it takes them a few visits before they buy. You also know that the Ad is performing well in Colorado and Florida, but it is burning most of its budget in California and not producing any results. Now you are armed with the data to make an informed decision. But wait it gets better. SiteWit has already done that analysis for you and is offereing to make the changes to your campaign for you. It is suggesting you turn the ad off in California, turn off the ad between 1:00am and 6:00am, and disable some overly broad keywords that are expensive and not producing any results over time. And because you took the time to make sure you were passing the order totals back to SiteWit as well, you have a very accurate view of you ROI for all your ads, keywords, and campaigns.
So that time you took to install the SiteWit code is really paying off in a big way.
Goals in SiteWit are assigned an average amount of revenue. In the case of sale leads for example, you would add the total sales generated from a set of leads and divide it by the number of leads that came in during that same period. If you sold a single product per goal then you would enter in the exact amount of revenue you receive from that goal. But many e-commerce systems sell a variety of products at different prices, which could lead to wildly skewed totals in the final sales invoice. So using SiteWit’s detailed transaction object will allow you to know much more precisely the ROI for each of your paid search campaigns, ads, and keywords. For most systems implementing this will require knowledge of you eCommerce system and in most cases server side code.
The following code is a template for recording a transaction’s values with your goal:
You can start with the goal code that is given to you when you create the SiteWit Goal, the [account_id] and [goal_id] will already be filled in as appropriate. From there you will want to use your shopping cart values/variables to replace the following fields in brackets [order_id], [affiliate], [subtotal], [tax], [city], [state], [country]. These are all optional, but the more data the better SiteWit will be at attributing your best clients to the campaigns or referrers that sent them to you. You can also add as many or as few item lines as you’d like, which could serve you in future reporting features.
If you need any assistance in setting up a transactions for you SiteWit goals please call our technical support and we’d be more than happy to help.
We have all heard the hype regarding cookies. If the people selling the tools to remove cookies are to be believed then cookies, left alone on your computer, will drain your bank accounts, max out your credit card, and burn down your house while you are at work. We all know that there are very serious threats to your finances and your identity on the web. It seems that every week we are hearing about another online retailer be hacked and losing credit card data or someone giving their banking info to a wealthy foriegn dignitary who just wants to get money out of his country. Think very hard and try to recall a news story about someone being taken advantage of due to a cookie. So why all the hype? Well there is a lot of money to be made by scaring people into buying software to protect themselves from those evil little monsters.
So are cookies dangerous?
Well that depends on your definition of dangerous. If you are like me, and I am pretty protective of my privacy, then no, but If you are reading this in a tin foil hat then you would probably think they are dangerous. Lets start by looking at what cookies are and what they do. Cookies are a text file. They are not a program. They cannot access data on your computer. They are not viruses. In the majority of cases they store extremely little data about a user, ususally just an encrypted identifier that allows a website to reference the user in their database. This is so a website can identify you as you go from page to page on their site. It is important to understand that the internet is inherently stateless which means a website has no way of knowing who you are from page to page without some kind of reference like a cookie. This may sound wonderful if you are worried about being tracked online, but lets look at what this would actually mean. Think of a website that you log into in order to access something (i.e. Amazon). Without that cookie to identify you from page to page you would be required to login on every page. Seems like a bit of a hassle doesn’t it?
Don’t cookies have a bunch of my personal data that other sites can read?
Generally not. Usually any personal data you have shared with a site is stored in their servers and they only use the cookie to identify you through an ID that only makes sense to them. Remeber cookies are required to be pretty small and it does not make sense for a company to store data about you in a file you can delete. They want to keep that data secure in their servers. More importantly cookies can generally only be read by the website that made the cookie in the first place.
What about tracking cookies?
Tracking cookies slightly different in their purpose. They do generally store an identifier so that the tracking service can identify you across multiple visits to a website, but the companies that generate them also generally do not have access to the infomation you have entered into a particular website. Only the company you provided that data to can distribute it to other companies. That is why reading a company’s privacy policy is so important before supplying any sensitive information to them.
So what do tracking cookies do then?
Well that depends on the the particular tracking service. Most are strictly for analytics purposes. Companies who run websites need to look at how users interact with their site to determine what works and what doesn’t. They can use the data from analytics companies using tracking cookies to discover what pages or products are most popular or to find out that certain pages are broken or missing from their site. They can also tell how you arrived at their site so that they can see what advertising or websites are driving customers to their site. For the most part nobody is looking at what you in particular do online. It is generally aggreagated into large segments of users who visited a certain page or follow a certain path through a site. It would be insane, and frankly quite boring, for someone to try and review everything every individual person did on a particular website.
Don’t they use my data to advertise to me?
Yes, sometimes. But that has been going on long before the internet existed. The whole point of TV ratings is to determine what demeographics are watching a particular show at a particular time in order to target advertising to them. Whithout that kind of market analysis you would be watching commercials for the latest animated movie during CSI and your kids would be watching beer comercials during their saturday morning dose of cartoons about an obnoxious sponge.
Lets be realistic. The sites you visit online cost a lot of money to run just like it costs a lot of money to make a TV show or a movie. So the companies running to se sites have to pay the bills and they only have a few ways to do that. One way is to charge you for the content on the site like a movie theater charges you for a ticket. Sure you pay a lot for the ticket, but there are very few comercials to deal with. The other way is to sell advertising on the site much like a TV network sells commercial time. Now lets assume you are browsing a large online retailer that sell everything from Socket wrenches to panty hose. If you have browsed that site frequently looking at power drills and resiprocating saws, would you rather see an ad for the latest feminine hygene product or an ad for a table saw? Likewise if you are always browsing the latest kitchen gadgets would you rather see an ad for an ED treatment or an ad for the Fry Master 4000? Deleting advertising cookies does not stop you from receiving advertisements. It only makes the advertisements more random.
Cookies are a tool used by websites to improve your experience so that you will return. If online privacy is a huge concern then it is more important to evaluate the websites to which you are giving your information than to waste your time and money trying to destroy every cookie as it appears on your computer.
First let me say that if you develop an application or an API and you would like to put restrictions on how it is used, that is your right. That being said, some requirements make little sense. Case in point is Google’s Required Minimum Functionality (RMF).
The idea here is that you can use one of their API’s, for example the Adwords API, as long as you utilize a minimum set of functionality that they think is most important. Seems like a fairly simple request right? Well, of the 153 features that Google touts on its list of Adwords functionality, 58% of them are required. So a majority of the available functionality is included in the required minimum. I would also like to point out that this API is not free to use. Companies pay for every call they make to it so shouldn’t they be given a choice as to what calls they make and what features they implement?
Now let’s be clear on what “required” means. It does not mean that your tool utilizes these functionalities to, let’s say, automatically optimize campaigns through the required features for those clients that do not want to manage every nuance of their online marketing campaigns. “Required” means the user must be able to find the feature easily and make changes to it as they see fit.
So if your businesses’ goal is to handle all those nuances behind the scenes and minimize the amount of work your clients need to do to their campaigns, then you are out of luck. If your goal is also to present a clean interface that does not overwhelm first time users, well, sorry, you’re out of luck there too. I think the obvious use of an API should be to distill information in a different way for certain segments of people and allow them to interact with your service in a different, hopefully better, manner than they can through the interface offerings that already exist. Perhaps I’m wrong but it seems that requiring developers to basically recreate a tool you have already created is a bit short sighted.
With that being said, I don’t think Google is trying to be difficult. I do think they need to rely on their API to allow other companies to bring them more clients from markets they have not yet tapped. I do believe all of the features listed in the RMF are important when running a successful internet marketing campaign. I just don’t believe that a company should be punished for creating an innovative way for people, who are new to internet advertising, to easily create campaigns without worrying about all the ancillary settings.
Let’s look at an Automated Bid Management feature for example. Auto Bidding is generally based on algorithms that look at a desired outcome, such as a particular position for an ad, and experiment frequently with the bid to attain that position at the best possible price. This feature would obviously utilize the “Edit keyword max CPC” feature that is required by the Google RMF. But just using it would not satisfy the requirement. One would also have to allow the user to be able to change the individual Keyword Max CPC. Never mind that this is already set by them at the Ad Group level or that the whole point of the service they are paying for is to manage those settings. Never mind that changes made by the user to this setting may throw off the algorithm and cause it to perform at a less than optimal level.
Another example would be a company that builds an application that provides reporting on a user’s Adwords performance in a different way than Google offers. Let’s say that company polled their target market and found that their customers are only interested in Average CPC, do not care about how it breaks up by device or ad network, and they do not want to see total impressions. Again, sorry, they all have to be included because these items are RMF. It is this kind of rigid regulation that kills potential innovation.
I understand having requirements to protect users (i.e. security requirements) is important. But I do not understand stifling innovation with an arbitrary list of required items. If a company develops a tool using the Adwords API and they tailor it in a way that brings more people into Google’s advertising fold, then everyone wins. The company earns money, Google earns money, and the client is reaching a potentially new client base. And if that same company does not provide enough functionality or people do not like the way they are presented information, then that company isn’t going to stay around for very long.
Policies like these seem short sighted and Google is not the only company to implement them. I remember some arbitrary rules laid out by some big companies in the past and the problem is that the more of those rules a company has the more people they irritate and then suddenly everyone is looking for an alternative to whatever product that company provides. I know that Google is king right now and they can do whatever they want. I can think of a few companies that used to have this same philosophy. But one day they woke up to a world where they were no longer king and realized it is much, much harder to return to the top than it was to get there in the first place.
