Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Google Analytics is a great tool to use for website owners – it gives you lots of interesting information to help you improve your site, can track revenue and a whole slew of other things, all for free. But sometimes it can be a little difficult to figure out why it’s not working properly, even for the Google Analytics team.

Case in point: I have a client who I’ve been working with for about three weeks, trying to get Analytics to properly track their site. They use NetSolutions storefront, so it’s easy to add the Analytics code to the site, as they have it built in to their store. We just added the client’s UA number to a field and the code is automatically added in the footer.

Of course, one of the first couple of things I did to try figure out why it wasn’t working was to verify the UA number (it was correct) and that it was populating the code on every page (it was). I called in JumpFly’s dedicated Google Account rep for help, since that about exhausted my troubleshooting options.

After some back and forth with Google and the Analytics team, they finally asked if there was a potential redirect on the site, since the “gclid=” portion of the URL was being stripped off of the destination URL from Google Search, and they couldn’t think of anything else that was wrong. (Basically the “=GCLID” holds all the visitor information for analytics to track; if it gets removed, Google Analytics attributes the visitor to no source or Google organics.) Sure enough, if I seached for the client’s ad, clicked on it, and checked the destination URL, there was no “=GLID”, therefore Analytics couldn’t attribute the source properly.

And that’s when I figured out that the client’s webmaster, in order to improve natural rankings, had changed the client’s site to use more search-engine friendly URLs – instead of a “category=##” URL, it was now using actual names, like military.asp or movie.asp. He had done the right thing in creating automatic redirects so old links didn’t go to dead pages, but it’s not something we were notified of, so we had no idea it was happening.

Now that we know, we can fix the URLs to the correct pages so the redirect stops happening, and Google Analytics can properly attribute traffic to the correct source. At least, that’s the hope.

More about Nikki

According to Google, “Click Through Rate (CTR) is the number of clicks your ad received divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions).”

Every once in a while a new pay-per-click (PPC) advertising client will come in who considers their account CTR to be the benchmark by which their accounts performance is judged. Depending on the keyword strategy, it is most likely not a good idea to use CTR to judge an entire account’s performance.

True, we know that CTR has a big influence on the somewhat mysterious Google AdWords Quality Score(s). It is also a great indicator for comparing performance on your various AdGroups’ different ad copies. There are certainly many instances when Click Through Rate (CTR) is a very good indicator of performance.

Now, what about when low CTR is a good thing?

There are definitely times you want to eliminate a worthless click from a potential keyword, and while this would have a negative impact on the Click Through Rate (CTR) it would certainly have a positive effect on the account.

For example, a strategy that I recently adopted for a client really drives this point home.

One of my client’s competitors has a very common word for a company name. For the sake of confidentiality I will simply call it “widget.” Well, this competitor name “widget” is also the name of a very popular movie, an artist, a location overseas, a highway landmark, and dozens of other completely unrelated things. As you might imagine, the search volume for this popular term is through the roof, while the percentage of people actually using it for the company name we wished to target is extremely small. So small in fact, that it would almost certainly discourage anybody from even trying it as a keyword.

I thought it was worth trying, and to give it the best chance at success I used only the exact match version of “widget” in its own campaign, with a very specific ad designed to only solicit the searchers looking for my client’s services.

The results were surprisingly great. The campaign resulted in my client converting at half of his target conversion cost. The CTR for this keyword was a downright horrible 0.02%, however this was a good thing as it meant the ad was eliminating all of the unnecessary searchers and only targeting the exceptionally small amount of people looking for my clients competitor. In this case, the exceptionally low CTR was a good thing.

The low CTR also had a definite impact on the keyword’s quality score and forced my client’s minimum bid up to $10/click. Even with the the high minimum bid, the conversion cost was cheap and the quality of leads generated tens of thousands of dollars in new revenue for my client. Winner.

Now, the 0.02% CTR dramatically lowered the whole account’s CTR. If that figure had been used as a benchmark to judge performance, it would have been a huge mistake that would have cost my client a considerable amount of revenue. In this case, the actual conversion cost/rate was a far better benchmark than the pathetic CTR.

The bottom line here is that a low CTR can be a good thing in some strategies and is not always the best indicator of an entire account’s performance. Every account is different, just as every marketing strategy is different. Helping to determine the best strategy for your PPC marketing campaign is just one of the many unique skills that JumpFly PPC account manager brings to the table.

What’s your benchmark?

You can’t do it alone. 

This is not something new to entrepreneurs and small business owners but I’ll say it anyway:  you can’t do everything and you can’t be great at everything.  If you try to excel at too many things, you will end up only mediocre in many things as opposed to strong in a handful of your core business skills.

Obviously, here at JumpFly, we believe strongly in the concept of outsourcing.  Our business is made up of clients that have chosen to outsource their PPC management.

But my belief in this philosophy goes beyond the services we offer.  I believe there are many places in your business where you should consider “letting go.”  It can be difficult to delegate, especially if you are an entrepreneur. But it is critical to your growth to understand that not only do you have limited time to perform these tasks, you also have limited capacity to learn them and become skilled in them.  

I have found this to be true in many aspects of businesses both online and off, including programming, graphic design, accounting management, just to name a few.  These are professions that, like PPC management, require fairly large learning curves and once mastered require constant use, practice and education to maintain the skill.

Always keep in mind what your time is worth on other tasks in your business and when deciding whether to hire out these important business roles, be sure to take the cost of your time – both in performing the task and becoming educated on the topic – into consideration.

More about Kristie