photo credit: San Sharma

Really quick post this one, but one to the point. Approximately 99% of the sites designed on the web are to make money. Google makes this easy.

1. Google Adwords - Drive targetted traffic to your website. If you’re an ecommerce website, advertise your products.

   Link: http://adwords.google.com
   Blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com/

2. Google Analytics - Monitor the traffic on your website using enterprise website analytics.  Identify improvement areas and increase profits by looking at what traffic converts and what doesn’t.

   Link: http://analytics.google.com
   Blog: http://analytics.blogspot.com

3. Google Adsense - Monetize your website by publishing contextually relavent text and image ads.  Get revenue for every click from your ads on your site!

   Link: http://adsense.google.com
   Blog: http://adsense.blogspot.com

4. Google Website Optimizer - Find out which design, headline, images, promotional text and calls to action work best for your website traffic and which page versions ultimately leads to making your more money on the internet.

   Link: http://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt
   Blog: http://websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com/

The blogs have been included for reference as they often contain many tips, tricks and success stories that may inspire.

Good luck!

Google provide a set of free tools to improve your website conversion rate.

What is a conversion rate? A conversion rate is the number of times (or unique times) a website visitor carries out an action that often influences your bottom line (ie - profit).

If you can get more of your customers to convert you will effectively make more money.

How To Do It

Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics to find problem areas on your site.  Look at site areas that are problematic by analyzing bounce rates, exit rates and abondonment pages.

More info: http://www.google.com/analytics

Feedback Analytics

Google Analytics only allows your to find problem areas on the site.  You often need to do some form of user testing or get customer feedback to find the solution to the problem areas on the site.

Something like: http://www.kampyle.com/

Website Optimizer

Google provide a multivariate testing and a/b tool which will allow you to test your potential solutions, in realtime on your website.  By testing out your different ideas (often contributed to by the means of user testing / detailed analysis) on your website visitors - you will often find a page that converts better than the original.

More info: http://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt

Google Adwords

Lots of people leave “money on the table” with Google Adwords.  Once a campaign is making money and is optimized with regards to ROI and profitability - you should reinvest this money into Google Adwords.  Find more traffic that is looking for your services and analyze using analytics.

More info: http://www.google.com/adwords

Need Help?

Need proffessional help?  Take a look at Google’s new GCP partner program: http://www.google.co.uk/gcp

photo credit: Danard Vincente

A simple post this one - simply to find the opinions of other internet webmasters, marketers and entrepreneurs (or whatever your job may be :)) FYI - This post is not suggesting in any way that website traffic for this blog is dropping. Infact, it is growing! :)  Have you visited our forum?

I work on many websites, some belonging to myself, others not.  Across certain sites I have noticed that website traffic is generally dropping off.  “Your SEO is crap!” I hear you say - but no - it doesn’t.  If you use Google Analytics and the various segmentation tools that are available, you will see that just about all traffic sources are dropping of.  Services/Brand names especially seem to be dropping, this is not to mention referring and direct traffic.  Is this because budgets are being cut in marketing where budget would otherwise be put?

As a side note - check out the new enterprise features (including Advanced Segmentation) that is now available in Google Analytics.

Have you noticed any trends in website traffic dropping?

Its a simple post this one but one simply to capture people’s views and input.  I look forward to your responses.

PS: If the answer is no to the above - do you think the recession will hit the web at some point?

This is going to be a short post - but on a topic that is quite often overlooked. I have a website and I have great rankings in the search engines! Job done. My site is now collecting a decent amount of traffic that is of relavence. I’m doing great. Well, too be honest - traffic is stage one. After SEO- you’re no way done.  You’ve not even started.

photo credit: eduardoizquierdo

Ask yourself: What is your website conversion? The answer should be something that impacts your bottom line.

Well, OK….what is my bottom line? An event on your website that produces revenue or contributes to the success of your website.

For some websites a conversion is much more tangible than others.  For example; a conversion for an e commerce site is quite simple; a sale.  A conversion of my blog could perhaps be a blog registration, time spent on site or somebody to comment on my blog post.

Bearing this in mind, how easy is it for your obtained traffic to carry out an event on your website that results in a conversion?  Is there a path for visitors to follow?  Do you reasure your visitors? Why are you better than your competitors?

Following on from the above; consider the following steps:

1. Install Google Analytics on your website and identify your website conversions.  Configure these as goals.
2. Do all the usual SEO procedures and techniques.  Title tags, heading one tags, link building etc…
3. Monitor the results of your SEO in Google Analytics.  What is working?  What is not working?
4. Move away from using a “rear view mirror” and use Google Analytics to influence change on your website.
5. Test your website using Google Website Optimizer.  Are the visitors finding your conversion point ultimately impacting your bottom line?

Ask yourself: what is my website conversion? Can people easily find my conversion point?  Do I provide them a simple map to the treasure?

Tackle this problem and you’ve identified how to maximise website conversions without obtaining any new traffic.

Google Analytics tracks
photo credit: CLF

Google Analytics, by default uses cookies to recognise traffic sources.  For example, in Google AdWords you may run multiple advert groups, advert campaigns and keywords.  Google Analytics detects this information by passing certain parameters to Google Analytics.

Fact: What people don’t know is that Google Analytics can be configured to measure email campaigns, radio, television and just about any source of website traffic.  Google Analytics is not just made for AdWords - it is an enterprise tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of all traffic sources.

Google Analytics provide a tool which allows you to measure all of the above - and it looks exactly like any other traffic source - except grouped into criteria you wish to report on.

For the purpose of this post - I am going to focus on Google Analytics tracking email campaigns.  I send regular mailings - I want to see if they actually give me any ROI.

In order to pass Google Analytics details of your email campaign - you need to understand the following:

Campaign Source: (referrer: google, citysearch, newsletter4)
Campaign Medium: (marketing medium: cpc, banner, email)
Campaign Term: (identify the paid keywords)
Campaign Content: (use to differentiate ads)
Campaign Name: (product, promo code, or slogan)

The above items are the parameters used by Google Analytics that identify and monitor specific traffic sources.  You pass these parameters via the URL.  If my email were to contain specific links - I would tag these links with the parameters above and Google Analytics would automatically monitor the traffic source.

For the example of a newsletter,  I would use the following:

Campaign Source: February 09 Launch Newsletter
Campaign Medium: Email

In my Google Analytics report - I would then see the above campaign details and I would be able to look at the visitor of these users in isolation from other website traffic using advanced segmentation (I will cover this in another post).  You can build the parameters using the Google Analytics URL Builder Tool.  The result of the above and using the tool would result in:

http://www.tdcreative.net/?utm_source=February%2B09%20Launch%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email

Obviously - for a TV or radio advert you can’t tell your listeners / watchers to type in all the parameters.  There is another way around it…I will see if anybody can hazard a guess as to how to do this!  Hey…I like setting challenges!