Online Advertising for Search Engine Placement

Below is a sample PDF of a Google Analytics report, for an actual local company that's doing about $100 worth of online advertising per month.

 google_analytics_sample_report 32.40 Kb

(We've redacted the names and keywords to anonymize the client. This is a very limited report that only shows a single set of data... there are literally hundreds of possible reports.)

Analytics

You can see from this analysis that they are getting plenty of Search Engine traffic from the three major ad networks. You can also see that they are trending up in Direct Traffic and Referring Sites, though they get 3/4 of their traffic from Search Engines. This is a positive trend because they are getting more links from sources such as weblogs, industry sites, and emailed links. They are very happy with the results and are getting plenty of qualified leads and business from the ads and from online "word of mouth".

Google Analytics is set up by adding a small javascript link to every public page on a site. You can set this up fairly easily if your site uses shared headers & footers, or you can just add it to the particular pages you want to track.

The nice thing about Google Analytics is that the reports are very configurable, and you can either access the dynamic version on the web, or you can construct and email reports, either ad-hoc or automated. It will build .doc, .xls or .pdf reports.

Google Analytics also allows you to track ad campaigns (pay-per-click) or "conversions", e.g. if you link an ad to a page that includes a "buy now" or "add to cart" button, you can track how many users are actually initiating or completing a transaction. You could also use it to track form submissions such as contact forms, etc. Other cool features are "site overlay" that overlays hit-counter bars on top of your site so you can visually see which buttons & links are getting the most clicks. Overall, it's the best thing going for analyzing web traffic. We still use cPanel's statistics for some cursory analysis, but Google Analytics provides much richer tools once you get it set up.

Learn More...

Search Engine and Content Network Advertising

Google AdWords is one of the pay-per-click "Sponsored Search" advertisers, probably the best bang-for-buck. This is a service that allows you to bid for keywords and phrases in a virtual auction... the more you are williing to pay relative to the other bidders, the better your ad placement on the search engine page and content networks. You may have seen Google Sponsored Ads on various websites, or Sponsored Links on your favorite search engine. Google AdWords and other services are the gateways for these ad placements.

You may be interested in getting a Google account so you can test how much it would be to create a pay-per-click ad campaign. Other pay-per-click advertising networks Chattanooga Online works with are MS adCenter and Yahoo Ads. If you don't want to take the time to do the setup, we can create campaigns for you for a small fee, per campaign, for simple keyword/phrase targeting, and give you an estimate for the monthly charges to your credit card that will fit your keyword bids within your targeted budget.

XML Sitemaps 

XML sitemaps are ordered lists created for search engines, to let their robot programs know which pages should be listed on search engines, and the relative importance of these pages within your website. 

To raise your site's search-engine placement, it's a good idea to frequently update your index page, keep your site pages current, and set up an automated cron job that weights your pages according to popularity and generates and submits a weekly XML sitemap to Google, MSN, About.com and Yahoo. If you are familiar with setting up cron jobs, we can give you the code to do this on our cPanel servers, or we can configure it for a small fee. 

We can also do other things to help you raise your search engine placement... one of the simplest and best is to have your site listed within our Links pages.