John Wanamaker (1838-1922), considered by some at the father of modern advertising, is often quoted in marketing circles: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” A hundred years later, we no longer have that problem. In the age of digital marketing, with exceptional tracking systems (that stretch the very definitions of privacy), it’s no longer a matter of not knowing, but of investing the effort to find out. Today, savvy online marketers are saying “no campaigns without metrics.” SEM is a perfect example of this principle in action—a principle that can also be applied to email and social marketing. When you drive traffic to a web or mobile site using SEM, the basics of managing pay-per-click include an analysis of the costs for each keyword, deciding what to bid on, and then monitoring click-through reports to check performance and to see if you get out-bid on your keywords (in which case you may need to increase your bid or lose that keyword). But the basic reports in Google and Bing are about how much traffic you receive for what you spent. They don’t tell you how individual keywords are performing in terms of your business and organizational goals. What you don’t want to do is simply point to high SEM traffic and say you were successful. What if your top performing keywords are just draining your budget and delivering no value? You need to monitor what your visitors are doing, based on which keyword they came in on. A good analytics program will tell you not just which keywords get the most clicks (and thus cost you the most), but you’ll also gain insights into whether visitors are coming through but then immediately leaving (SEM cost with no value), or which pages they visit, in which order, and do they return to your site later (SEM cost with high value). About 10 years ago I developed a system for tracking campaign and keyword performance from Google AdWords and Overture (Overture was bought in 2003 by Yahoo, and Yahoo SEM is now merged with Bing). The idea was simple: if...
Read MoreCategories
- Digital Marketing (8)
- eLearning (2)
- Future of eBooks (10)
- Future of News (11)
- More Visitors: SEO & SEM (8)
- Newspaper Revenue (3)
- Tablet and Mobile (9)
- Technology & Analytics (6)
Contents:
- Data Preparation for Analytics
- Community Engagement: Moving from Broadcast to Conversations
- Schema.org, Entity Search, and Semantic SEO Tagging
- Responsive Design: One Site for All Devices
- How Mobile Fits Into Your Overall Digital Strategy
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: Information Architecture
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: User Experience Design
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: Content Analysis
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: Audience and Purpose
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: More Bells and Fewer Whistles?
- The Work Behind Social Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Analytics and Performance
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Keyword Management
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Competitive Analysis
- Kids, News, and Video
- Tablets, eBooks, and eLearning Make Middle School Less… Awkward
- Epilogue: The Miranda Proposal, Future and Facts
- The Long Tail of Publishing
- Who Will Develop the Next eBook Platform?
- What is the eBook Platform of Tomorrow?
- The Rise of eBook Applications
- Social Reading: Beyond Gutenberg? Beyond Zuckerberg!
- eBooks and the Triple Bottom Line
- The Future of Books
- Prologue: It’s Time for eBooks to Evolve
- Journatic, The Tribune, and Offshore Outsourced Journalism
- Warren Buffet is No Fool
- The Ultimate News Device: Tablets
- The Future of News: It’s Not About You, It’s About Them
- Newsroom Software: WordPress and Other Open Source Options
- Paywalls: The Wrong Solution for News
- How to Drive Online News Revenue
- Don’t Build Your Own Newsroom
- Digital Editions and Portable News
- Why Photos are Critical to Online News
- Site Analytics: Intelligence Gathering for News Sites
- How To Do SEO Right
- From Newspapers to Digital Media: Follow John Paton
- What is SEO?
- SEO and SEM for News
- Trusted Advertising: The Value of Newspaper Web Sites
- Capitalizing on News Assets
- Where Did Newspapers Go Wrong?
- The Fall of the Newspaper
- Why Blogging Writes?