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Most companies with an online presence (and most companies today that consider themselves a viable enterprise do have an online presence) know they cannot get by without spending at least a portion of their marketing budget on Google. While alternatives are emerging, Google AdWords remains a solid and safe bet that the company will be able to drive traffic to its website. For companies experiencing success with AdWords, it becomes a “drug” they are addicted to and cannot do without.

Google’s perspective

This basic online marketing assumption, that Google AdWords is a solid, safe bet to drive traffic to the website, is what makes Google the phenomenally successful company it remains.  The logical impact of this is that, as more and more advertisers spend more and more money on AdWords, the price of click-throughs increases thus creating a virtuous cycle for Google and its shareholders.

The advertiser’s perspective

From the advertisers’ perspective, however, there is a need to constantly manage the AdWords spend to ensure they are getting value. To accomplish this, Google itself offers free and very powerful tools like Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer. Smart marketers –and if you are reading this, you can count yourself in this group– take advantage of these tools to maximize conversions and therefore get great benefit from their AdWords spend.

(I know you are probably expecting this post now move on to Conversion Optimization testing and the need to maximize conversions on the AdWords landing pages but No, surprise-surprise, this post isn’t about that.)

Conversion Optimization testing isn’t the only way for marketers to make sure they are maximizing their AdWords return

Here is why:  Google AdWords is simultaneously easy to use and becoming increasingly complex with the addition of new options and features. It can be a great source of customers, but needs to be actively managed in order to ensure that budgets are spent as effectively as possible.

As AdWords and the Search Engine marketing environment evolve, it can be difficult to keep up with changes, features, opportunities, pitfalls.  AdWords tactics that have worked in the past may no longer be as effective as they once were.

Advertisers themselves are not in the best position to minimize risk

In our experience with clients spending significant and increasing budgets on AdWords, there are two primary models on how they manage their AdWords campaigns: Outsource to an agency, or manage AdWords in-house. Both methods have pros and cons – and both have inherent biases and risks built-in.

When outsourcing AdWords to an external agency, the advertiser delegates the responsibility of deciding how to implement the AdWords budget to a separate organization with its own financial goals which  may or may not be aligned with the advertiser’s. But Google AdWords spend needs to be monitored and managed from the advertiser’s perspective to ensure advertiser spending is optimized and aligned to their business goals, and not Google’s or a Search agency’s.

On the other hand, when managing AdWords in-house , staff have a focus on a particular business so they may not be aware of AdWords techniques that have been used successfully by other businesses in the same or other industries that can be adopted for advantage. So, without full knowledge of how web analytics programs can be used for AdWords reporting and analysis, opportunities to evaluate and improve AdWords performance may be missed. Even staff working at an advanced level with AdWords on a daily basis can overlook opportunities for analysis and improvement.

In either model, management needs  to accomplish two objectives with respect to AdWords:

• Have a clearer picture of the results they are getting from its AdWords investment, and
• Get a greater sense of AdWords features, options, and tactics that they may be able to use to greater advantage in increasing the return on advertising spend

But who watches the advertiser’s back?  Enter the AdWords Audit (the unbiased kind)

Just as a financial auditor is expected to provide unbiased insights into a company’s financial reports, we at WiderFunnel believe companies should periodically engage in an unbiased audit of their AdWords campaigns.  The unbiased Google AdWords Audit must:

• Evaluate the extent to which the company is getting maximum benefit for the AdWords spend
• Identify any areas where changes can be expected to lead to improved performance.

Unfortunately, finding this unbiased source is difficult because of the way online marketing services providers are structured (just Google  “AdWords Audit” and you will get over “about 7,720 results”, most of them from companies that are trying to sell you AdWords management services!).

WiderFunnel does not provide Search or AdWords management services – nor do we plan to.  We want to watch your back!

We decided to launch this new service, the unbiased AdWords Audit, leveraging our web analytics expertise and our single-minded focus on Conversion Optimization testing, so that clients can rely on us to give them the right insights without having to worry about anyone trying to sell them Search or AdWords management services of any kind.

Free from the constraint of selling Search or AdWords management services, we believe this audit is truly unbiased.

Clearly, early client examples are showing that that is the case.

In one particular case, the client was more than a little bit surprised [understatement] to learn from the audit that 3% of their Search budget was delivering 52% of the business. On a more positive note, the “worst news” we have ever had to deliver to a client was that their campaign is being flawlessly managed! (Now they know for sure)

Ready to learn more about the AdWords Audit? Here is how:

WEBINAR: “The Top 10 Signs You Need an AdWords Audit”

WHEN: March 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM PST

COST: FREE

REGISTRATION: Required (limited space available)

In this upcoming webinar, “The Top 10 Signs You Need an AdWords Audit” we are presenting a quick and FREE 35 minute intro where you will be able to learn:

• The 3 major causes of PPC campaign under-performance
• How to identify the Top-10 Signs you need an AdWords Account Audit
• How you too can effectively utilize the FULL AdWords ecosystem
• How to get completely unbiased advice for your Pay-Per-Click campaigns

To register for the webinar, click here.

Ready NOW for an unbiased AdWords Audit?

If you are ready for an Audit, you can request a quote here.

Either way, if you are spending money on AdWords, you owe it to yourself to make sure the money is well spent. You owe it to yourself to make sure someone is watching your back,

Last week WiderFunnel Marketing again had the pleasure of attending the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Partner Summit at Google’s headquarters in Mountainview, CA.

At the summit Authorized Consultants got a sneak peak at the newest features to be bundled into Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer starting today.

Here is a look at some of our favorite new Google Analytics features.

Mobile reporting

According to the Nielsen Company the total number of smartphone (iphone, Android, Blackberry) subscribers grew from 15 million in Q2 2008 to 26 million in Q2 2009. That’s a 73% increase in just one year!

In response to this fast-growing trend Google has expanded its Mobile Reporting feature by tracking applications built for iPhone and Android devices.

Now using GA you can gain an understanding of how users engage with their mobile apps, such as what actions are taken within an app and what features are used.

The Nielsen Company also reports a 34 percent year-over-year increase in mobile Web visitors from 42.5 million in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009. In particular women, teens and seniors are helping to make this growth happen.

Nielsen Company’s mobile media guru Chris Quick comments, “Now that the technology is more mainstream, women are quickly embracing the benefits as ‘connected consumers,’ tapping the convenience of Web access on mobile phones to network, browse the latest shopping deals and get ideas for dinner, all while on the go.”

If you are currently running a mobile web site, GA can help you track traffic to from all web-enabled devices whether or not the device runs JavaScript.

In the coming weeks, site owners building on PHP, Perl, JSP or ASPX will be able to add a server side code snippet to their mobile websites to enable this tracking.

Availability: Mobile Apps tracking available week of October 21, 2009. Users can download mobile tracking snippet instructions from the Google Analytics blog or wit for the code snippet to be published via the Setup UI over the coming weeks

Expanded Goal Tracking

The Expanded Goal Tracking feature is an obvious favorite of ours. Gone are the days of creating multiple profiles in your GA account if you have more than 5 goals.  Google now allows you to define up to 20 goals per profile.

Google has also introduced a new goal type measuring site engagement and branding success on your site.

Web traffic and conversion rates alone do not tell the full story. Measuring engagement and branding success is key in understanding the lifetime value of a customer.

The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit.

Availability: Available to all users the week of October 21, 2009.

Multiple Custom Variables

Initially Google offered us a single User Defined Variable in Google Analytics.

If you wanted to know if your visitors were male or female, you could collect this information in the single GA User Defined Variable and then segment web site activity to learn if Males purchased more than Females, or if Female shoppers purchase different items from Male shoppers and so on.

Or, if you wanted to know whether visitors to your site who purchased something returned to the site to shop again, you could set the User Defined Variable to a value such as “customer” on the receipt page and then segment your GA reports to learn about repeat customer activity.

But what if you wanted to know how Female Repeat Customers used your site? A likely question if you are examining customer loyalty, and the lifetime value of a customer.

Up to now tracking multiple values in a single User Defined Variable in GA has been difficult to implement and has produced complex reports. The problem is that you don’t always collect the same information at the same time.  If you capture a visitor’s gender at one point in their session and then capture the “customer” value indicating that they made a purchase, the second value would overwrite the first value that you set.

With the release of GA’s latest features, you can now set multiple custom variables.

With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into  trackable segments. Multiple custom user segments can now be collected at the page, session, and visitor-level concurrently. For example you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports
section).

Availability: Phased rollout through the coming weeks starting the week of October 21, 2009.

Managing your custom reports and advanced segments

Being able to share segment definitions, custom reports and report templates is a huge time saver when it comes to distributing GA reports throughout the company.

With the latest changes in GA you can:

• Create a custom report or custom segment for a particular profile and make it available to any user who has access to the profile.

• Share the URL link for a custom report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted template will automatically be imported into their account.Once the other person receives the link and clicks it, a template of your custom report or advanced segment will load in his or her own account. Your profile’s data will not be included in the template.

Availability: This feature is currently available to all GA users for more information see the Google Analytics Help article.

For a complete list of the new features released this week see GA Blog

Wake up to 2009 and here we are, drowning in data.

And just like Disney’s (OK, Goethe’s) Sorcerer’s Apprentice where Mickey is the apprentice who cannot control the magic that he has tried to use, online marketers are overwhelmed in data and cannot convert KPI and metric reporting into action items.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

In our experience at WiderFunnel, the only point of web analytics is to improve overall marketing effectiveness. In other words, first and foremost, the data should help your company become more profitable through increased revenues or decreased cost of sales.

It’s that simple.

To proceed, you must have a clear idea as to:
• What information is relevant to your business
• How relevant data can be used to optimize marketing communications

If you stay focused on that, the rest is easy (ok, easier).

What do Best-in-Class companies do with their web analytics data?

Segmentation and Personalization – that’s what they do.

According to CRMBuyer, while Best-in-Class companies experience similar challenges, the implementation of key organizational capabilities and the use of analytics data within other marketing efforts results in superior performance.

Again, according to CRMBuyer, best practices utilized by Best-in-Class companies include:

1. Segmentation: 33 % use it, with the following variables:
• Geographic indicators – 69 %
• Purchasing behavior – 66 %
• Lifestyle profiling – 58 %
• Demographic information – 54%

2. Personalization: 44% of Best-in-Class companies indicate that they both segment customers based on specific variables and personalize marketing messages based on information specific to each customer

• 54% of Best-in-Class companies, compared to 38 percent of all others, dynamically alter online content based on a specific visitor or online behavioral pattern
• 85% of Best-in-Class companies utilize personalized emails that include such variables as the customer’s name, past purchase behavior and targeted promotions.

And what do “not Best-in-Class” companies do? 60 percent of Laggards do neither.

So it becomes a marketer’s choice to be either in the Best-in-Class or the Laggard category.

Personalization is becoming a fixed staple of marketing – where “personalized” messages must do more than simply substitute recipient names.

To generate increased conversion rates, marketers must integrate online customer data with the email marketing solution, for instance, to generate personalized messages that reference online searches, purchases or general browsing.

To derive meaning from your Web Analytics data consider the following steps:

1. Test Early, Test Often.

According to CRMBuyer, the top two strategic actions for all respondents are:
• aligning Web site analysis with overall business objectives (62 percent) and
• tracking and recording all customer interactions with the online channel (44 percent).

Companies must track customer behavior to properly align analysis with business objectives. And, once the data is collected and analyzed, companies must make changes to Web site content, graphics, or “calls to action” to test which combinations result in higher conversions.

The key is to use analytics data to test Web site content early and often.

2. Develop a Process for Segmenting Profitable Customer Characteristics.

The goal of Web analytics is to be able to predict unique user behavior to the point where relevant advertisements and calls to action are served up at crucial points of the Web session.

Conversion path analysis tools, for instance, allow companies to understand the behaviors of customers who complete an online conversion.

By analyzing this behavior, organizations can identify qualifying characteristics early in the visitor’s online session and serve up targeted content to stimulate a conversion.

3. Integrate Analytics Data With Segmentation and Personalization Initiatives.

In some cases, Web visitors are indistinguishable from one another; however, in other cases, organizations know exactly which customer or prospect is on the site.

Whether it is a unique login or unexpired cookie, businesses can often link online behavior to a specific individual. In these instances, companies must be sure to correlate the data for segmentation and personalization purposes.

As Web analytics becomes a larger piece of an integrated marketing platform, Web site behavior and purchasing history become key bits of information that can be used in conjunction with an email marketing campaign, for instance.