Thursday, May 14, 2009
Is SEO the "goal hanger" of Internet marketing?
Karl Havard in the British Internet periodical "Econsultancy" uses a football ("soccer", to you NFL fans) metaphor to make a point about all of the other things, besides good solid SEO, that we Internet marketers need do to "score" success. A "goal hanger" is a player who waits just outside the box around a football goal, hoping to deflect the ball that others work so hard to advance. To Havard, we focus too much of our efforts (especially monetary ones) on SEO, while shorting, for example, the conversion elements on our site that make SEO pay off, just as football fans give too little credit to the players who worked so hard to get the ball to the "goal hangers". The algebra of success is Site Entries times Conversion Rate, and the return on conversion investment is often "misunderestimated", as former President Bush would say.
Labels: conversion rate improvement, seo, web analytics, web marketing
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Should I Spend more on Google Ad Words?
After reading the Comscore article talking about how Yahoo’s new update has improved click-through rates, an acquaintance wrote the following:
I do only use Google Adwords. My budget of $10 per day always gets reached. According to a recent come-on from Google, I could up my budget to $50 per day at my current bids and the current search traffic. I am not sure I want to up my PPC though. How can I tell if it is good to increase my budget? Can you see in the analytics how many sales I have for the amount I am spending?
Here was my response:
In response to your comment, you may want to get a handle on the "conversion rate" from your ad campaign. If your $10 per day ($300/month) pays back, it would make sense to spend another $10/day (and possibly more). If it doesn't, you shouldn't be spending the $300 in the first place, or we would work on improving conversion rates. When the incremental $10 payback diminishes, we would start picking up leads and sales using Yahoo and other Search Marketing opportunities.
His reply -- "I didn't know you could do that kind of thing."
Labels: conversion rate improvement, SEM, web analytics
