One of the major elements of the sales funnel that is not often focused on enough when doing PPC work is a rather important part: the landing page. Making sure the CTR is high, the QS is appropriately high, and ad groups are separated as they should to maintain relevance – all of these are very important for any AdWords campaign. But one of the most crucial points is the landing page.

It’s one of the final points of the sales funnel and can often make or break the sale. The biggest flaw most often found in these pages is one thing: overcomplicating it. The easier it is to understand what is offered and how to get the desired objective from the landing page, the higher the conversions. By putting too much information in place, other distracting elements, multiple unnecessary exits, all of these will draw away from the focus of the objective.

The best way to handle this is to make it as easy as possible. Make it very basic, minimal steps to take, and a blatant call to action. Even if it isn’t as pretty as it could be with additional content, your chance of conversion will go up when the instructions are clear. Ideally you test each method – one with your own concept for the landing page (as complex as you’d like) and another as easy as possible. Do A/B split testing and see which one converts better; chances are the easier pathway is the better choice.

Read the original article here:
How to double landing page conversion rates

In a recent change Facebook made, posts made to the wall now have a date, time, and a location placed at the end. Something similar to “Yesterday at 11:18pm near Tulsa.” This isn’t something that everyone is exactly happy to have shared.

Facebook has a community forum that got some attention about this. On the forum there was a discussion on how to remove the links to the map and the location tags that show up on the map. The map itself is not going to go away, but you can remove the points that show up on it.

You can find all these posts on the timeline by entering the Activity Log and choosing “Posts with location” when you do a filter. Here you can see all posts that have location information and a map tag, and then remove the ones you want to using the instructions on the link.

Read more here:
Facebook Publishing Users’ Private Location Data

With so many changes and details involved in various areas of internet marketing and SEO, it’s often easy to get lost in the quest for what information to focus on. Keyword research? Competitor tactics? The truth is that there are only a few details that are truly important to improving your ROI online.

  1. Conversion rates and goal completion – This is the one difference internet marketing has between almost every other form of marketing: the ability to track conversions down to a specific action from the source. By setting up conversion tracking in AdWords or goals inside Google Analytics, you can see exactly what on your site or advertisement is triggering actions that you want to see improved. In AdWords this means knowing where your money is showing any return based on keywords you’re bidding on. In Analytics you can see the flow of your traffic and see what parts of the site help achieve the goals you’ve set up. Not taking advantage of these tools is losing a huge benefit from your online marketing setup.
  2. Existing backlinks – This is something that will become more worth investigating as Google completes their new updates (one this upcoming weekend). Learn what and who is linking to you to anticipate potential issues you’ll have to deal with from the search engines and why you might encounter any. Are the majority of your links set up with a specific anchor text? Do you have a large amount of junk links from sketchy blog networks? If too many of your links are unnatural, it may even be in your best interest to just let go and start over with a new site. It would take less time and effort to start over and do it right. To research your backlinks you can use tools like Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer and find out what dark monsters may lurk in your web site’s closet.
  3. Visitors – In all businesses, to succeed the customer needs to be focused on. This includes any online business. One way to effectively track what people are seeing, how they’re reacting to different parts of your site and marketing plan – Google Analytics. Here you can dig down to see what pages people leave your site on (perhaps you’re missing important information they wanted to find and leave to search elsewhere), how long they stay on your site and how much they explore, and how they complete their visit. Do they just leave, or do they actually begin and complete a possible action? You can also use other metrics to learn from your visitor engagement, such as putting social media sharing options in place and seeing how much of your content is worth the trouble of sharing with others. All of these will help you learn further on how well your site connects with the visitors.

These three details are areas worth focusing on to help determine ways you can improve your site and online marketing approach. Doing this will improve your connection to your visitors and help know areas to adjust to improve sales.

Read the following for more details on these points:
The 3 Most Important Online Marketing Metrics to Monitor

Google has made an update to AdWords that now allows for targeting through Nielsen DMAs (designated marketing areas) in the US and postal code targeting in Canada. Using Nielsen means that any marketers can expect to be able to target the same groupings of people online as they would be able to through television. Google has also made adjustments for nine other countries to allow for city and regional targeting, and adding location extensions for the first time in six new countries.

Read the full article here:
AdWords Adds Geo-Targeting Options in 11 Countries, Including Canadian Postal Codes

Most businesses realize they need a solid web presence. There are right ways and wrong ways to accomplish this. Here are four mistakes often made by web site designers that should be avoided to come out on top:

  1. Avoid complicated web design – Making it flashier doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sometimes less is more, keep the design best for the user’s experience.
  2. Avoid overflowing content – Keeping your content short and to the point is often the best way to manage things. If visitors have to search for what they’re looking for it will often push them away.
  3. Don’t look like your competitors – Imitating can sometimes seem like an easy way to get started, but to really stand out you need your own brand and your own image.
  4. Don’t just build and wait – Site design does not magically draw traffic. You’ll need some kind of online marketing to do the work whether it’s social media or paid advertising. Once you’ve done that, the traffic coming will then make you appreciate the work you did for your site design.

Remember these tips when you put your site together and you’ll have a much better outcome with your new design.

Read the original article here:
4 Common Website Design Mistakes to Avoid

In the past year the number of newspapers that require paid subscriptions has doubled from approximately 10% to 20.9% of all U.S. newspapers. This is a sign that the newspapers are seeing a change happening that they’re having to adjust to, but whether or not the public will be willing to pay for online news is yet to be seen.

Read the original article here:
20% of Newspapers Now Have Online Paywalls

Pay per click campaigns are sometimes great ways to generate interest and sales within a business at a low-cost bargain. But what some people fail to realize are that these PPC scenarios also give business owners huge insight into businesses and who and where their customer base comes from. Because the systems track information from the clickers, the business owner can learn a lot about its customer base.

Five quick details data from PPC can tell you about your business:

  1. Brand marketing results – You can put your business brand into a campaign and track exactly how many searches your brand gets daily.
  2. Landing page performance – If you narrow down your PPC campaign to a tightly targeted relevant search audience and are getting good CTRs from your ads, the conversion rates will say a lot about the quality of your landing page and whether or not it needs revision.
  3. USP testing – AdWords ads are a great place to test out various Unique Selling Propositions for your business. Try doing a split test with two different USPs in your ads, see which comes out with a better CTR and conversion rate. This USP can be used for other advertising after testing here.
  4. Keyword usage – Checking your “Search Query” results in AdWords is worthwhile. In your Keywords tab, click “Keyword details” and check either selected keywords or all keywords shown. Here you’ll see what people are really searching for, and you can adjust your site content and ads to match these phrases.
  5. Product popularity – Find out how many people are looking to buy specific products online by targeting these products by keyword, each product uniquely. Seeing the response to this can tell you if it’s worth putting more time in to online attention or not for certain products, as well as how much product you should have available for your target market.

Using these tips should help you use PPC effectively to do business research and improve your ROI.

Read the original article here:
5 Things PPC May Be Telling You About Your Business (Without You Realizing!) – Search Engine Journal

YouTube could be a useful tool for companies looking to boost their customer base through advertising. This tactic has worked for businesses, movies and many other entities in need of a boost. Five basic reasons why you should try YouTube Ads:

  1. Setup is easy – Inside of Google AdWords, create a new campaign, and choose “Online video”. Then, inside the “Shared library” section, choose “Link YouTube accounts” and connect a YouTube account that you own that contains a video you want to advertise. The rest is similar to standard AdWords ads.
  2. Not overly expensive – YouTube ads are still relatively new to many advertisers, so the competition hasn’t driven up costs yet. Your Cost Per View is small compared to relevant Cost Per Click costs.
  3. Free link back to site – It’s a “Call-to-action overlay”. Find this option inside your AdWords video campaign. It will allow you to place a link and call to action back to your site on top of your video.
  4. Options to show – You’ve got four different ways to display the video: in search results, as an option for viewers to choose your video before watching their video on YouTube, as a suggested video in the list of recommended videos next a video playback, and as a preview before a requested video on YouTube.
  5. It works – Video is still growing and a good advertisement created through video, when done right, will get results.

 

Read the full article here:
5 Reasons to Try YouTube Ads & Setup Tips – iMedia Connection (blog)

Before you start worrying about SEO on a mobile device, you’ll want to check and see how many people are finding you through mobile searches. One of the easiest ways to do this is through Google Analytics. You can go in and adjust the Advanced Segments section of any page you’re interested in. On the Traffic pages you can set up Mobile as a segment and see exactly what keywords people are using to find you through mobile searches and details related to those searches.

Another tool that you can use to check mobile details is Google Webmaster Tools. You can set up a filter here to see only mobile searches for keywords and traffic (Traffic->Search Queries, then the Filters button and change the dropdown under “Search:”).

One that many people don’t realize is available is the popular Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You can change settings there to specify showing only search details for mobile searches (under “Advanced Options and Filters->Show Ideas and Statistics for”).

After doing your research, you’ll want to know what kind of results people are seeing when they get to your site. You can use Webmaster Tools again to check this out. In Health->Fetch as Google you can change “Web” to any type of mobile device and Fetch. It’ll take a little bit of time (could be a few minutes), but when completed you can see what the mobile bot is getting from your site, code-wise. You can also use a Firefox plugin (there are several) to change the agent the browser is imitating to display the look that device will get.

So now you’ve got an idea of your site’s appearance. At this point you’ll want to decide if you are going to go through making a separate site design for mobile visitors based on the traffic you’re expecting/wanting and the look mobile visitors are currently getting. Before you can make that decision, having the ability to do the proper research for your mobile market is very worthwhile.

See the video for this here:
4 Tips For Your Mobile SEO Strategy – Whiteboard Friday

Facebook Messages is going through a change in design, to more closely mimic an email interface. They are testing it with limited users at the moment, but this change will roll out to all users over the next few weeks. In a recent post on their blog, Facebook stated, “The new side-by-side layout lets you click your most recent message on the left to see the whole conversation on the right. You can also bring conversations to life with multiple photos and emoticons.”

Read the full article here:
Facebook Messages Testing Recent Design Overhaul