Archive for December, 2011

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Cindy Wilson

If you advertise using Google AdWords, you want to know where your ad will be positioned and how it looks on the search results page.  Typing your keyword into Google Search will allow you to do this. However there is a “cost” associated with this action, even when you don’t click on your ad.  If you look at the page showing your ad, you generate an impression for your ad. When impressions go up but the number of clicks doesn’t, it reduces your Click-Through-Rate (CTR). A reduced CTR negatively impacts your Quality Score, which can cause Google to raise your Cost Per Click. But if you click on your ad, in order to improve your CTR, then you will have to pay for that click.

As an advertiser, you also may want to see how your ads appear in different locations, such as other parts of the country, or even in a different country.

In either situation, the best way to see your ad is to use a free tool that Google provides; an online tool aptly named the Google Ad Preview Tool. This tool allows you to “search for your ad just like you would on a regular Google search results page, without accruing any impressions.”

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Posted on December 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer

For Google's eyes only!

One of the most important things a Web Analytics tool can tell you is the keywords people are typing to find your website on the search engines. Lately, however, Google has been blocking significant portions of that data, ostensibly for privacy reasons.

To see what we mean, here’s an example of keywords as a traffic source. You can do this yourself in your own Web Analytics account. These instructions are for the new user interface in Google Analytics but instructions for the old user interface are also provided in parentheses, if appropriate.

• Log in to your account (and then click View Report).
• Select Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic (Select Traffic Sources > Keywords and then select “non-paid” just below the graph).
• Scan down the list of keywords that brought non-paid traffic to your website. You may need to expand past the first 10 that are shown by default. You are looking for a keyword called “not provided” or “not set”.

In the actual example shown below, Organic Search brought 4,810 visits over a 30-day period. Of those 4,810 visits, the #1 keyword was “not provided” which brought 1,110 visits.

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