Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Why Your Business Web Site Needs A Blog?

Nowadays more and more companies are integrating blogs with their official web sites. The advantages are well understood and acclaimed by large portion of business community. About a decade back, when blogging was just starting to come out from infancy, companies used to practice traditional methods to update and bring traffic to their web sites. Since blogging has gone mainstream, no company serious about having good presence on web can think about their web site without a blog. Let's see what are the benefits and advantages of integrating a blog to a corporate web site.


Why A Web Site Needs A Blog


Search Engine Benefits


One of the best ways to elevate your rankings in SERP's is to integrate a blog with a web site. Almost all blogging CMS's are inherently search-engine friendly. A blog is updated more frequently than a traditional web site giving a reason to search engine bots to pay a visit and gobble up fresh new content. The SEO-friendly features of blogging CMS and regular generation of fresh content not only makes your tail long in index but also helps you in achieving better rankings through clever contextual linking across your blog and web site. External sources referring your blog content will increase the overall link strength of your domain giving you the required boost in search engine rankings.

Targeted Traffic


Since you write specifically for your business and related products and services, you are bound to receive targeted traffic from organic sources where people are looking for exactly the same information that you are ready to provide. This helps increase your conversion rate by diverting your traffic to the main web site on custom designed landing pages through smart linking within popular posts. Another common methodology is to display custom designed banner ads about your services on the blog that helps in indirectly diverting potential customers to the main web site.

Direct Engagement With Customers


Blogs are not just about posting content which readers read and go away. It's a two way communication medium where conversations takes place and a community builds up around the blog. Comments help you directly connect with your customers and help clear their doubts and questions. This direct engagement gives you vital data about the perceptions prevalent in the minds of your customers who regularly comment and opine about various topics related to your services. Sometimes, a constructive discussion via this medium can give you some very important piece of information that can be strategically used to counter your rivals and in reviving your business.

Exhibits Expertise In Your Niche


Blog gives you the chance to establish yourself as an authority and market leader in your domain. With a team of experienced writers assisted by technical experts, you can create regular stream of killer content that will shape your brand as the most trusted source of reliable information about your domain. Remember, blogs have the ability to build as well as ruin reputations. Always hire a professional blogger to run your company blog to leverage this excellent medium to its full potential.

Multiple Feeds For Audience


Feed syndication provides excellent opportunity to disseminate your content right in the in-boxes of your customers. Almost every business blog sets up multiple feeds (news alerts, new products reviews, regular articles) for different segments of customers to meet their information needs and at the same time keeping unwanted stuff out of their mails. It's the most effective way to reach out to maximum prospects in the most effective and easy manner.

Helps Build Community of Fans


Hugely popular blogs manage to get hundreds of thousands of feed subscribers that automatically help in spreading the word about your services and products. Through various subscription options you can build a large supportive community that helps in building confidence of potential customers who visits your blog for the first time. Whenever you will launch any new product or service, all your subscribers will immediately receive the news via their subscriptions and it may spread like wild fire through various social media channels used by your regular readers.

Image Credit: DavidErickson

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Sunday, July 5, 2009

How To Track Your Advertising Campaigns

Often we spend good amount of money on advertising but fail to convert the incoming traffic. One of the reasons is almost nil meaningful traffic analysis that is so vital for any successful advertising campaign. With the advent of new and improved web analytics services there are plenty of options at our disposal, provided we identify and utilize them in a correct way. Let's see how to track and improve our advertising campaigns that can give us maximum returns in limited budgets.


Tracking Advertising Campaigns


Divide - Segregate - Segment


Let's start with old principle of divide and rule. Whether you are tracking text links in email newsletters, regular text link ads, graphic banners ads or video/flash ads, the basic principle to track these ads is to separate each group of ads/campaigns and then associating identifiable and unique metadata to them. Let's assume you are planning to advertise about your new twitter marketing ebook. Let's further assume that you are going to use multiple ad formats with different landing pages for selective ad formats. To make it simple, lets say you have four text link ads and four banner ads (each with unique creative and different size).

Dividing Ads in Groups

At macro level, these ads can be divided into two groups. Each group can be further divided into four sub-groups each one containing ads of different size and different anchor/description text. Once you have completed the classification, you are ready to move on to next level. You can use Google Analytics to track your advertising campaigns. It's a powerful web analytics service that is often undermined by large number of users. It's free, simple to use and provides plethora of options to monitor, analyze and improve your web traffic.

Tag it! - Make Intelligent URL's


As I mentioned earlier, associating metadata with your ad links can help you track and analyze your ad campaigns in an effective manner. This technique is called - URL Tagging. Major PPC advertising networks like Google Adwords inherently supports URL tagging for intense campaign tracking and analysis. For other ad types (direct ads, promotional links), you can use the services of Google Analytics URL Builder to tag your ad links. Tagging a link involves associating variables with it starting with (? question mark) and each variable separated by (& ampersand) mark. For example,


http://www.xyz.com/landingpage.php?variable_1=value&varialble_2=value

Google's URL Builder uses 5 variables for tagging links out of which 3 are mandatory while other 2 are optional.

1. utm_source - As the name implies, this variable identifies the source of ad where it is going to appear. This can be an email newsletter, a feed, a page, a search engine or any other similar source. In simple words, it denotes the referrer. For example: (twitter_newsletter_v1,google,bing)

2. utm_medium - Again the name says it all. The ad medium is identified through this variable. For example: (email,banner,cpcflash,video)

3. utm_term - (optional) Generally, it is used by auto-tagging feature of Google Adwords to assist in better targeting of paid ads. Use this variable to identify paid keywords.

4. utm_content - (optional) Another non-mandatory option used to specify the type of ad associated with any ad link. If you want to differentiate ads on the basis of their types, you can use this variable to classify them. For example: (textlink,bannerlink)

5. utm_campaign - Identifies the campaign name. Use this variable to differentiate between multiple promotional campaigns running simultaneously. For example: (twiiter_ebook, seo_320pack)

So let's get started with tagging of ad links of our fictitious twitter marketing ebook ad campaign.

In first example, we have tagged a text link ad that will appear only on home page of site x. This ad will be served on cpc basis and is associated with twitter ebook promotional campaign.


http://www.xyz.com/ebook.php?utm_source=sitex_home_page&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=toc_text_link&utm_campaign=twitter_ebook_promo

In second example, we have tagged a URL associated with a banner ad (of size 468x60) that will be served on CPM basis on twitter ebook review page of site y. This ad is also associated with twitter ebook promotional campaign.


http://www.xyz.com/ebook.php?utm_source=sitey_review_page&utm_medium=banner_cpm&utm_content=toc_banner_link_468_60&utm_campaign=twitter_ebook_promo

Once you have tagged all the links, you can see the reports in your Google Analytics account via 'Traffic Sources -> Campaigns'. URL tagging not only allows you to track visits from a source, but you can further break it down to specific page and specific placement within that page. Combined with the power of goals, you can take it to the next level to get the actual performance of your advertising campaigns.

Campaigns in Google Analytics


Analyze and Improve


Every successful advertising campaign is supported by analysis of ad performance data and doing improvisations wherever required. Here are some of the common methodologies that are implemented to improve the advertising campaigns.

Identifying performing creatives - Every creative is different and yield different results irrespective of its placement on the web page. Through Google Analytics campaign reports you can easily identify high-performing creatives. Design similar creatives or replace the non-performers with the other ones. Tip: Even if all your creatives are performing well, consider replacing them with the new ones after some time to help reduce ad-blindness.

Identifying best placements - It's almost similar to finding the best combination of your Adsense ads that gives you the best performance. Again, GA campaign reports can easily help you identify best performing spots within a single page.

Identifying performing landing pages - Some landing pages are like honey pots that inherently have very high conversion rates. Identify these high performing landing pages through GA campaign reports and make necessary changes to your ad links to divert the traffic to these pages. Alternatively, you can redesign the non-performing landing pages leaving the ad links intact without any changes.

Over To You


I would like to know your experience about tracking your advertising campaigns. What other techniques and methodologies you adopt to track your ad campaigns?

Related Reading:
1. How To Get Direct Advertisements For Your Blog
2. Ad Inventory Management For Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide
3. Google Ad Manager: Complete Ad Management Solution For Bloggers
4. Why Your Adsense Ads Do Not Recieve Clicks?


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