Results-Focused Online Marketing Strategies

I’ve been helping launch a new blog for LicenseStream, a fantastic product that makes it extremely easy for photographers (and other creative pros) to sell their work using Rights Managed, Royalty Free, and “Rights Simple” licensing models.

If you’re a photographer, check it out to learn a bit more about the product. If you’re considering a corporate blog, have a look to see a great example of a blog that helps educate customers, drive SEO and establish credibility within a vertical.

Something happened in December that should have gotten headlines in every small business paper, magazine and website in the world. Interestingly, instead, unless you‘ve read the Google blog or done a search on “local targeting” you’re probably unaware of what happened.

What happened is that Google added Google Maps functionality to its Adwords program.

Got a decent website for your electrical supply company in Seattle and don’t want to waste money paying for clicks from outside of Washington State? Simply select the Locations feature in the Target Audience options in your Adword campaign settings, select Washington state on the map and you’re done.

Ooops, discovered you need to add Portland because you’re getting lots of sales from there? Just go back in, select Portland and add it to your target.

Your own targeting criteria will be as unique as your business, but the results are the same: less overall cost for your Adwords program, much more qualified traffic to your site, and much higher ROI.

With only a tiny percentage of businesses taking advantage of these opportunities there is no good reason for you not to dive right in.

Worried that it’s too complicated? Well, it is a bit intimidating at first, but with an investment of a couple hours of keyword/competitive research and hour to set up your Google Adwords account you’ll be rocking.

In recent weeks we’ve been gearing up to relaunch our website for the next “iteration” of our business. This involves doing things like registering domains for “client-branded” A/B testing, getting professional help to redesign our site, and implementing the tools we need to optimize our site.

Much like the “shoemaker’s children,” we’ve been going without a number of the things I tell clients they absolutely must have in place for effective website optimization. Well, we’re finally changing that, but as a young company we’ve still got to consider our budget (or lack thereof) for this effort.

This is where Google comes in. There are a couple of free Google tools that are mind-blowingly powerful if you leverage them well. Without further ado:

Google Analytics
While lacking the “Enterprise” power of major analytics providers (Omniture, WebSideStory, etc.), Google Analytics is incredibly robust for a free tool. Plus, it’s easy to install.

Even non-techy folk (like myself) can manage to implement it by themselves across their site and blog if they take the time to read through the instructions. I had it up and running correctly on our 50 page site and blog within 30 minutes.

Our implementation even included setting up specific conversion goals that we wanted to measure.

Interestingly, for some companies, Google Analytics is a better choice than some of the more robust offerings. The reason for this is that you’ll never get past the surface of what the Enterprise solutions offer unless you spend a LOT of time at it (trust me on this, I’ve spent days sifting through data in Omniture and WebSide Story).

Put it this way: unless you have a huge site or a large multi-channel effort (i.e. involving email conversion tracking and CRM), you’re likely just fine or possibly better off with Google Analytics.

Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer is a tool you’ll find within Adwords. It’s primary purpose is to quickly and efficiently conduct A/B testing on landing pages for clicks to your site from Adwords.

Put simply, you can create two dramatically different versions of the page that people land on when they click on an ad you have placed in Google Search or on a content site. Then, you track the results until you can determine a “winner” of the test.

For smaller companies, this saves an awful lot of hassle in setting up a script to randomly display the different pages in the test and having the web team manage the process. If you can edit your web page and put it online, you have all the skills you need to do it yourself if you’re willing to read the instructions.

Now, the beauty of this is that Google Website Optimizer works even if you’re not paying to run Adwords. The folks at Google are quite generous in these regards. All you need to do is sign up for an Adwords account (free) and you’ve got access to it.

Also, using the Website Optimizer is not limited to Adwords. For instance, assume you have two strong opinions on what headline should be on a product page. This usually involves an argument and possibly (50% likelihood) the wrong decision.

With Website Optimizer, you can quickly create a second version of the page (with the different headline). Simply drop a snippet of code on both pages, set your conversion goal in Analytics, and you’re off to the races. You can now run an A/B test on the page.

So, what are you waiting for?