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.

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.

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.

With that said, in the United States, we recommend a minimum of $250 per month for campaigns. We find that at spend of $250 the campaigns have enough traction to provide consistent sales and leads. Furthermore, it allows the campaigns to have enough volume to gather insightful data and see what works and what doesn’t. This doesn’t mean that campaigns with budgets of $100 per month wont work. It just means that the budget is constrained between many keywords so it will be difficult for all the keywords in the campaign to get clicks. In such cases, when the monthly budget is $150 or less, we recommend to have a small set of keywords that clearly represent your products and services so each keyword gets enough clicks for you to evaluate them.

So what is a good mix? $250 per campaigns, 20-40 relevant keywords, 3-5 ads with different messaging and a bit of time, 1-3 months. In that amount of time you will be able to clearly see what is working and what is not and then optimize the campaign. You will be able to see what messaging is most effective by performing ad copy a/b testing. You will also see what category of keywords are driving the traffic that is converting on the website. You can then manually pause the elements that are not working well and concentrate the traffic to the best performing keywords and ads. If you use campaign optimization tools such as SiteWit, this process will be automated and they keywords and ads that are most effective will receive the lion share of the budget automatically.

What about higher budgets? The more budget you have, the more clicks your campaign will receive. The more clicks, the more keywords and ads your campaign can evaluate. Therefore, the rule of thumb is that you could effectively optimize and manage more keywords and ads with a higher budget. The more volume you have the better are the opportunities for optimization. You can learn more about actual search queries and compare them to the bought keywords to learn good keywords to buy on phrase and exact match and also negative keywords that are driving performance down. Furthermore, you will be able to have more statistical data to evaluate keywords and their conversion ratio and return on investment. The biggest problem is data analysis and good ROI measurement. Manual bidding also takes longer and is more complex. Bid management and optimization tools are good to help lower the bidding burden and provide good ROI improvement insights and recommendations.

SiteWit’s suite of campaign management tools include bid management, ROI optimization, day parting recommendations, geographical recommendations, automated A/B testing, and keyword discovery tools. There are other tool sets in the industry and we recommend you do your homework to find the tool set that best fits your needs based on budget under management and campaign complexity. If you have any questions on how SiteWit compares please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will help you evaluate if SiteWit is the right product for you.

The idea of organizing and prioritizing necessary tasks in order to maintain a successful paid search campaign is one that I can completely agree with. PPC campaigns can be a very daunting task that can consume hours out of your day if left unchecked or, “…never get better because you never spend the proper amount of time to nurture and grow them” (Geddes). This is true. But why spend more time trying to manage time when the real answer is one simple word: Automation.

When you automate your PPC campaign management, you will spend fewer hours testing ads, researching keywords, setting bids….the list goes on. The majority of these complicated, time-consuming tasks should be technology’s burden, not yours. Letting the computer/software do the work frees up more of your time…time that can be spent elsewhere such as in improving landing pages, building a closer relationship with your current client base, and working on other marketing strategies such as SEO or Social Media.

Jake Hird wrote a blog post back in 2010 on Econsultancy.com where he advocates the use of PPC automation tools. His statements are still relevant today and he highlights three very important facts:

• Advertisers are turning to technology in order to improve campaign performance and measurement.
• Technology suppliers are having to adapt, to keep pace with a constant evolution of the search engines.
• Marketers are beginning to give greater attention to multichannel integration and attribution (Hird).

He is especially fond of tools such as automated bid management software because it gives a, “…significant competitive edge in an increasingly complex environment” (Hird). These statements couldn’t be truer. Automated bid management takes care of the tedious task of setting bids by automatically increasing or decreasing bids to keep your ads in a specific position. The software does this by constantly checking the bidding landscape for your keywords and uses data mining to keep you at that desired position for the lowest CPC possible.

PPC campaigns are enigmas that can be very hard to figure out, making them that much more difficult to manage. If this is true for SEMers that understand PPC then imagine how it must be for those small businesses that have no idea where to start or don’t have time to learn the intricacies of PPC in order to create a successful campaign. Sure, you can go ahead and take on your paid search campaigns as if they were a project. But it’s going to cost you valuable time and much headache to sift through tons of data searching for the right answer. Machines process information a million times faster than we do and they work around the clock! So think smart, invest in automation software, and let the machine do the work for you!

Activity Stream
An activity stream is an aggregated list of activities highlighting a single users actions or a collection of users actions from your contact or “friends” list. Activity streams can promote engagement in your community by keeping users informed as to current happenings. They can show users what actions are possible as well as show you what everyone else is doing. It’s interesting to note that websites like Facebook keep only positive actions in their activity stream. For example you can “like” something but you can not dislike it. Adding a friends is a positive activity show in your stream but removing someone does not because this could be considered a negative action. The best example of an activity stream is the Facebook “News Feed”.

Achievements
You can reward users for reaching or completing certain goals in the community. These rewards or achievements can be displayed for other users to see. This is great to use when you would like to focus your users attention on parts of your product our service that might not otherwise appeal to them. A great use of achievements are the badges earned in the mobile application, Foursquare. The more you explore and “check-in” to place the more badges you receive. Check out Foursquare to see badges in action.

Completeness Meter
This is a graphical or numerical driver that pushes the user to complete a desired goal, like completing a form or a filling in the rest of their profile information. Use this when the user wants to complete a goal but needs guidance in when it is reached and how the user might reach it. Another is the feedback loop. As the user completes sub-tasks, his or her progress moves towards 100% . A great example of a completeness meter is seen in the main dashboard of your Linked In profile.

To find out more about design patterns in web development, check out the Yahoo Developers Network developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns and UI Patterns.

At first it was designed to contact people that had signed up but not purchased. Within the system we would get a ticket for each user and it was assigned to either me or Evan, the other half of marketing/customer service. It was then our job to get a hold of these prospective clients and try to get them to purchase and optimize their paid search campaigns. Every day we would get a batch of new clients and we had a week to try and get a hold of them. Tickets were either open (everyday moving closer to expiration), resolved (we got the customer to purchase), unresolved (couldn’t get a hold of client), or snoozed (delay expiration by a week).

There is a place to write notes, add an event, set reminders, and see past events of the ticket. It also told us how far along the client was along our service funnel (tracking code installed, conversion tracking was set up, and/or Adwords account was linked up). We could also change who was assigned to the ticket. After 7 business days went by (or 14 if the ticket had been snoozed), the ticket would expire and the boss would be notified. This was essentially the sales portion of our job but at least it wasn’t random people out of the blue. These were people that had already signed up for the free service so it felt natural to try and get them onto the paid service.

The problem we ran into most of time was not being able to get a hold of these clients. We would first call and then follow up with an email, but the response rate was fairly low. As time progressed, we started losing faith in Echo and it slowly faded into the background until there came a point where we just didn’t use it anymore. Granted this was around the time that our new product was being developed and the initial marketing for it was being implemented, so our minds were preoccupied elsewhere.

But now that the new product has been rolled out and we’re receiving some good traction from it, we have to reevaluate how we connect with our clients. So we’re going to go back to Echo but with a new strategy. This time it’s all about internal marketing.

We are not only going to focus on those prospective clients that have not purchased, but also put just as much consideration into current paid clients. We want to create a “sticky” environment within our company. We want people to stick around and use our product for a long time and we plan on doing that by checking in periodically with our paid clients. We’re not going to close a customer and wait for them to call us when they have a question/comment/concern. We are going to reach out and let them know, “Hey, we haven’t forgotten about you and we genuinely care about how our internet marketing services are working for you.”

And to do this, we are tweaking Echo and giving it a second chance. We’re remaking the interface to make it easier for Evan and I to get all the information we need about the client. We are extending the expiration period and getting rid of the snooze feature. We are making it so we get a batch once a week (as opposed to everyday) which will make things easier for the marketing team and keep any clients from falling through the cracks.

-Andy Montoya

This same rationale goes for online marketing. When you are too vague in your message, it can easily be misinterpreted. Let’s say you sell collectibles through your online store. Generally speaking, people looking for collectibles are not going to type “collectibles” into the search bar. In most cases, the searcher has a good idea of what they are after. Now don’t get me wrong, the searcher probably isn’t going to search “1966 Vintage Simms Batmobile” either, but that is why you need to meet them halfway. The person searching probably understands that if they are too specific, they won’t be able to find what they are looking for. The same goes for being too vague. This problem could be alleviated by the “two-word keyword” approach. Often times, a one-word keyword is far too general, as in the “collectibles” example above. But when you add descriptors to it, as in “batman collectibles”, it becomes a much better keyword. For example, some better options for keywords, for both the advertiser and the searcher, would be “batman collectibles”, “vintage batman”, “batman toys”, etc. Even though they are pretty general, they still have a central focus.

With broad, one-word keywords (not broad as in the match type but keywords that are just too general), you will still garner clicks from advertising off words like “collectibles”. That doesn’t mean that they will be good clicks. The difference between a good and bad click is night and day. That potential customer that just clicked on your ad can (and will) leave as quickly as they got there if they don’t find what they were looking for. Not only did you not make a customer out of them, but it cost you money for the click. It’s a lose/lose situation.

So even if you have been vague in the past, it is never too late to make a change. Start marketing more effectively today!

When you use SiteWit’s goal tracking feature you’re given a block of script to put on your goal page that looks like this:

This script works great on most html pages, and it’s self-contained with the tracking codes, so it works even on pages that don’t have the tracking code installed. But there are a few cases where you may not be able to put this block of code directly on the page. The cases are: AJAX calls, as well as iframes, hyperlinks, or form posts to 3rd party pages which cannot have the script installed. So here are some options.

AJAX calls

Assuming you already have the tracking script installed on the page, you can simply call sw.set_goal(GOAL_ID); and sw.register_page_view(); with the appropriate goal id at the time of the AJAX call, or better yet at the time of the “on success” callback. Here’s a simple example using jQuery:

Iframes

What happens though when the goal itself is not in a page you control? A lot of websites use iframes to host third party content and/or features like contact forms. Unfortunately, if the page is on a different domain, then most browsers will try to block cross domain communication. One way to get around this is to count the number of times the iframe has loaded and trigger a goal when it has been loaded x number of times (which is presumably how many clicks it takes to accomplish the goal on the remote site). Here is an example of how to achieve this:

This solution is best of course when there are a known number of page clicks to reach the goal (like in a wizard or form environment), and even then there is no way to tell if the user has gotten a failure message instead of the expected goal success. If the iframe contains a page with several success & failure paths or lots of links and/or post backs then the best option is to contact your vendor and have them install the actual goal script in its entirety at the point that the goal occurs.

Out Bound Hyperlinks

Outbound hyperlinks occur whenever your goal is someone visiting another website, opening a file (e.g. pdf, mp3, etc), or clicking a mailto: link. You will need to have the tracking script already installed on the page. All you need to do is add calls for sw.set_goal(GOAL_ID); and sw.register_page_view(); with the appropriate goal id in the onclick attribute of the hyperlink, like this:

Remember to but a ; between commands, if you have existing code in the onclick, put this code first (like in the example above, before the “return true;”.

Forms

If you are using a form that posts to itself and delivers a thank you or confirmation message, you can simply put the standard goal code with that message. As long as the message is not loaded with the initial form, it won’t be run until the form is submitted.

If you are posting to a page that is outside your control, then you will need to record the goal after all the validation has been completed, but before the form is sent off. In the case where your form is validated by calling a function from the onsubmit attribute of the form, the goal code be executed at the point where a the final return value would happen within the form, like so:

If you are using hooking into the event after the fact with something like the popular jQuery Validation plugin by Jörn Zaefferer, it would look something like this:

Hopefully this will give you or your developers some ideas on how to implement the goal code when faced with complicated scenarios. And of course if they ever need help, SiteWit support is waiting for their call.

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.