The Positive:

• The interface is very easy to use. Just about anyone should be able to easily upload a banner ad and choose the demographic they wish to target. It’s straightforward and intuitive.
• If you’re serious about marketing your website, you probably already have banners made, but MyAds Beta has a really neat tool called “build an ad” that will let you choose an appropriate background image for your banner and write the text that you want it to say. Just like the rest of the interface, it’s simple to use, and even the most novice internet marketers should be able to start up ad campaigns using this.
• Great targeting options. MyAds let’s you choose who will see your ads based on:

  Gender Age Education Relationship Parental Status And Geotargeting options like: US, Region, State, City, and Zip Code

• Interest targeting is the biggie here. One of the unique things about social media marketing is the fact that these social media sites have so much data about people’s hobbies and interests. This is where these ads excel at reaching niche markets. MyAds allows you to choose who to show ads to based on many different levels of interests like: health, automobiles, fashion, movies, music, poker, etc.

Invalid Click Filtering, The Negative

1. It was something I should have started long ago.
2. There is no doubt that it will be successful.
3. That it has tremendous profit potential.

• First and foremost, make sure you can track conversions so you know how your Adwords campaign is performing. Start by getting a cheap 1-800 number from Kall8.com and forward it to your regular number. Replace your phone number on your website or Adwords landing pages with this one so you can check your call detail to see which calls came from your Adwords campaign.
  
  Then make sure you set up conversion tracking in Adwords, this usually only requires putting a small bit of code on your “thank you” page.
  
  It also helps to have Google Analytics installed on your website, with “Goals” setup properly. With “goals” in Google Analytics, you can easily track conversions whether it be a lead submitted through a contact form or purchase through an online shopping cart, and Analytics allows you to see quite a bit of information about the different types of traffic your website receives, much more than what you will get form the Adwords interface.
  


• Second, make sure that your site is conversion-friendly. Internet users have short attention spans, and some may not visit more than one page of your website. Since you are spending your hard-earned money to get these people to your site, it’s of utmost importance that you can turn a visitor into a conversion on that first page.
  
  This may mean setting up landing pages that are targeted for each type of ad you’re running in Google. For shopping carts, the ads should send the visitor to the specific product page or category that they are targeting. For lead generation sites, the ads should send the visitor to a page that deals specifically with the ad and keywords you’re targeting. Most importantly, web pages should have your 1-800 number displayed prominently on the website, and if it’s a lead generation site, there should be a contact form on every page.
  
• Next, create specific ads that match up with the keywords you’re targeting. For example, if your company sells red, white, and blue widgets, make a separate ad group for each type of widget. You can always test out a general “widgets” ad group, but your success will more likely come from specific keywords targeted to highly relevant searches, that send the user to a highly relevant landing page. This also helps out your Adwords “quality score” and reduces click prices.
  
  
  
  So the ad above should target “blue widgets” keywords and send visitors to the best possible landing page for “blue widgets” on your website.
  


• Last but not least, use different match types of each keyword to help find what converts best for you. Google has 3 different match types: broad, “phrase,” and [exact]. In order to use different match types you will have to add your keywords, once by themselves (ex. blue widgets), once in parenthesis (ex. “blue widgets”), and once in brackets (ex. [blue widgets]). This controls which searches Google will show your ad for.
  
  By using [exact match] your ad will get shown only to people who type in the exact keywords as you have them in the brackets. This usually brings in the least amount of traffic, but can be some of the most well-targeted keywords in a campaign.
  
  By using “phrase match” your ad will get shown when someone types in the keywords you specified, in that order, but with other keywords in the search as well. For example, the phrase match “blue widgets” can trigger your ad when someone types in Google “buy blue widgets,” or “sell blue widgets.” The fact that you will get unintended searches triggering your ads can be good and bad. Good because some will bring in conversions, and bad because some will cost you money and not convert. You can run a “search query report” or set an Analytics filter to show you what searches are resulting in your ad being clicked. This will help you to exclude certain searches by adding “negative keywords” into your Adwords campaign.
  
  By using broad match you really put your faith in Google by letting Google pick which keywords to trigger your ad for. My experience has been that a broad matched “blue widgets” keyword (without the quotes of course), can trigger your blue widgets ad for searches like “red widgets,” “widgets that are blue,” “buy widgets,” and even searches that have synonyms or related words that aren’t your actual keyword. This can be a double-edged sword. Broad matched keywords can bring in the most traffic. They can also help you find new keywords you hadn’t thought of before that convert well for you. But the downside is that they can wind up costing you a lot of money if you’re showing up for keyword phrases that aren’t relevant enough to produce conversions on your website.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain2\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain2.com/$1 [R=301,L]

1. The problem is, I didn’t always know… you just can’t be on your website around the clock. Especially when you have multiple sites.
2. For search engine marketing campaigns, being unaware of downtime can cost a lot of money and skew conversion data.
3. Downtime is money. When you have profitable websites, you lose money while they are down, regardless of whether or not you’re running pay-per-click campaigns.
4. I had no idea how unreliable shared hosting was. Once I started monitoring my sites on the shared accounts, I realized that I was having regular weekly downtime of anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour.
5. Monitoring services give you information that can be used to diagnose problems through support. When I talk to support about downtime, I now have a record of exactly when it occurred, with the IP of the test site(s), and the length of time it occurred. This information can go a long way in helping to get to the cause of the problem, and it gives credibility to your complaint – especially with shared hosting providers.

From Google.com: If you have recently restructured your site or moved to a new domain, pages that previously performed well may now rank poorly. To avoid this, use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.) For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.
Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34444&query=301+redirect&topic=&type=

From Matt Cutts: Now let’s talk for a minute about moving from mattcutts.com to someotherdomain.com. All other things being equal, I would recommend to stay with the original domain if possible. But if you need to move, the recommended way to do it is to put a 301 (permanent) redirect on every page on mattcutts.com to point to the corresponding page on someotherdomain.com. If you can map mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com/url1.html, that’s better than doing a redirect just to the root page (that is, from mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com). In the olden days, Googlebot would immediately follow a 301 redirect as soon as it found it.  These days, I believe Googlebot sees the 301 and puts the destination url back in the queue, so it gets crawled a little later.
Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/

1. We made a new copy of the site, with all of the identical pages, only changing the name of the company, logo, and adding a page about the name change.
2. The new domain name was pointed to the new copy of the site.
3. We used Apache’s mod rewrite to 301 redirect the old site to the new. Each page on the old site redirected to the corresponding page on the new site.
4. We contacted all of the sites that linked to us, asking them to change the links to point to the new site, and we changed the links we had control over ourselves.
5. We watched the old site fall out of the search results for nearly 30 days and held our breath.
6. The other guys in the firm were curiously silent about our missing rankings for the whole 30 days, and the one time they mentioned it, I calmly said, “don’t worry, we did everything like Google says to do it, we should be back up in no time.” :)
7. Apx. 30 days after the switch, we started showing back up in our old positions (yeahhh!!!)

1. I was really worried about duplicate content issues and having both sites live at the same time, so I used robots.txt to exclude Googlebot from the new site until I was ready to do the 301’s. This probably wasn’t a good idea with the way that Google handles duplicate content these days. I think the change would have even gone quicker had I let Google crawl the new site first.
2. We put out an SEO’d press release about the change. This was a good idea, it got us links and showed transparency in what we were doing.
3. We paid attention to trust factors with the new domain, we registered it for 10 years, used the same contacts as on the old domain, didn’t hide the registrant information using privacy protection, etc. These were all things that probably helped.

1. Incredible Response Times – granted these differences are in milliseconds, but obviously there is a significant difference here. These two charts are my site monitoring results from my dedicated server at LiquidWeb, and my Gridserver (shared hosting) account at Media Temple. If you look at the scale on the left, you will see that the LiquidWeb dedicated server is about twice as fast on average. I should also mention that the Media Temple account has regular unscheduled downtime, still to this day.
   LiquidWeb Dedicated Server:
   
   MediaTemple Gridserver:
   
2. Great Tech Support – I always get a knowledgeable tech on the phone within a minute or two of calling. I’ve never had to wait on hold for longer than two minutes ~ever~ and in the beginning, I had to call quite a bit. While I don’t have experience with LiquidWeb’s shared hosting, I can honestly say that as a dedicated server customer, you get treated with a lot of respect and get premium service. I never had that feeling in all the years I used shared hosting.
   
3. Ability to Customize Server Configurations – One of the most frustating things I had to deal with on shared hosting was the fact that the shared hosting companies had many different restrictions regarding what could be run on their servers, and settings they allowed. Aplus.net was particulary bad about this…I had to submit a support request every time I wanted a site to download an RSS feed from another location, they restricted the number of simultaneous PHP processes, causing all kinds of errors. With my dedicated server, I can change just about any configurable service I want and do some neat things I couldn’t do before like using PHP code in .htm pages.
4. More Control Over Email Functionality – With shared hosting you get email in a can, but with a dedicated server, you get a first class butler saying, “sir, what outgoing port would you like to use for your pop3 connection?” Many different aspects of email service are configurable through CPanel, much more so than what you’re probably used to with shared hosting.
5. Ease of Adding / Removing Accounts & Static IP’s – It’s never been easier to add or remove new websites to my account. Who knows how many this server will actually let me add? Another great advantage is that I can get static IP addresses for all of my sites. From an SEO standpoint, static IP’s are a plus, and I had no idea that I could even get static IP’s from different class-C blocks hosted on the same server – another great advantage.

While I was somewhat reluctant about moving my sites over to a dedicated server for quite some time, I can look back with confidence now knowing that it was one of the best decisions I’ve made as a website owner. The price was quite a bit higher than what I was used to paying, but the peace of mind, service, and flexibility all make up for it. The bottom line is that my websites are a significant source of income for me, and what is more important to a website than hosting? When hosting fails, everything fails – your whole business.
]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/5-great-advantages-to-hosting-on-a-managed-dedicated-server/feed/ 7 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/a-great-new-orleans-photographer/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/a-great-new-orleans-photographer/#comments Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:04:45 +0000 Chris H. http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/a-great-new-orleans-photographer/ Problogger has a good post on the benefits of using your picture on your blog.

My time had come. I needed a picture for our firm’s website. I’ve been getting along with some crappy old pictures that I cropped from random photos for too long. So being the internet marketing hacker I am, I hit Google up for some “New Orleans Photographers,” and that’s how I was lucky enough to find George Long.

I actually requested quotes from quite a few of these gurus, but George was in line with the rest of their prices, and he could see me the fastest. I showed up at 9am this morning, and was amazed by his professionalism and attention to detail. Within an hour we had the perfect picture for Foreman & Pike’s “About Us” page, as well as a few casual shots I got him to do for my blog.

George’s studio is adorned with amazing pictures from his 30 years of photographing New Orleans and Mardi Gras. He’s even got a spectacular book of post-Katrina photos that’s about to be published soon. I highly recommend his work, and I plan on using his services in the future. ]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/a-great-new-orleans-photographer/feed/ 1 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/buying-advertising-the-truth-about-website-statistics/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/buying-advertising-the-truth-about-website-statistics/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:27:43 +0000 Chris H. http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/buying-advertising-the-truth-about-website-statistics/
The truth about what people are selling you in terms of advertising, is that the bottom line is the price you pay for each conversion. In the case of the therapists who advertise on my website, a “conversion” is a referral for counseling services. With that being said, statistics on visitors and pageviews that people send their advertisers can potentially be meaningless due to the fact that conversions are highly dependent on how targeted the traffic is.



Targeting Traffic

Let’s start with the concept of targeting, “How Targeted is the Traffic?” The truth about traffic, is that you can literally buy traffic for a website through a number of sources, but different traffic will convert into a referral at different rates. A case in point was an experiment I did one time when I bought cheap advertising through a lesser known pay-per-click service. I got a lot of “traffic” from the service, people where clicking on my relevant ads and visiting my website, and the cost was less than what you would pay for clicks through Google or Yahoo! Sounds good right?

It wasn’t good at all. The reason being, that the traffic had nearly a 100% “bounce rate;” in other words, those people hit the homepage of my website and left from there. They weren’t at all interested in what my site had to offer. Would you want to advertise with a site that got that kind of traffic? There are a lot of ways that companies can fail to deliver conversions to their advertisers and poor targeting is one. Another common mistake is by not managing pay-per-click campaigns properly.

Case in point: See the attached screenshot for a Google search I did for “massage therapists in New York.”

The circled ad on the right is for a relationship therapist who hasn’t added the negative keyword “massage” to his pay-per-click campaign (which would keep him from showing up for this search). Mistakes such as these are common, and can cost advertisers a lot of money because consumers don’t always realize that the ad isn’t for them until after they click on it.

My purpose in bringing up targeting is to demonstrate that 100 visitors, doesn’t always equal “100 visitors.” I wish I could stop there, but there’s more. Another reason “100 visitors” doesn’t always equal “100 visitors” is that there are different ways of defining a visitor to a website, and the same goes for PageViews! Unfortunately, most stats packages define these concepts in different ways that can result in significant differences amongst the stats they report.



Differences Among Stats Packages

Some of the most common methods website owners use these days to look at their stats are log file analyzers that take raw information from the web server’s logs and translate it into useful tables and charts (like AW Stats and Webalizer), and tracking tools like Google Analytics which use javascript to track your site’s visitors. While all have their advantages and disadvantages, the numbers from each can be very different. Since Google Analytics uses a javascript, only visitors with web browsers that handle javascript will be tracked, so those numbers can be more conservative. On the opposite end of the spectrum, log file analyzers like Webalizer and AW stats, will frequently count bots that are spidering your site for different reasons as “unique visitors,” which can make those statistics grossly exagerated. There are a lot of other stats packages out there, but these free ones are commonly used and sufficient for most websites. The important thing to be aware of though, is that the manner in which a stats package defines a visitor or pageview can vary significantly amongst them.

These differences also hold true for ad serving software. One of the most common tools people use to send stats to their advertisers is an auto-generated report that comes from the software they use to serve ads on their website. A lot of online ad sales are done on a “CPM” or “cost per mil” basis, with a “mil” being 1000 ad impressions. In order to estimate the kind of value you will get from such advertising, one needs to know how that advertiser defines an “impression.” Some ad serving software will show a new impression to a visitor who has been on the same web page for an extended period of time. Typically, this happens when the banner cycles through to another advertiser then back to your banner, but not always. Is that something you want getting counted twice? Do you have a choice? Probably not. What about if the visitor refreshes the web page?

Confused yet? Me too. That’s why I take what people tell me about their website’s stats with a grain of salt when I buy advertising. It’s a trial and error process for me that I have learned to evaluate effectively over time.



The Bottom Line

The bottom line is, you need to “level the playing field” by evaluating your own stats. You can easily compare different advertising by looking at the referral stats for your own website. Many therapists I talk to have websites and don’t realize that they already have a stats package installed – that their designer or web host just needs to provide them access to it. Once there, you should be able to look under a “Referring Sites” category to see where your websites visitors are coming from. Compare the amount you spend with how many visitors you get from each advertiser.

Track your conversions as well. For therapists in particular, if you have a “contact form” on your website, you can track conversions by entering a “Goal” (the URL of your “Thank You for Contacting Me” page) into Google Analytics. With this information you should be able to easily see which sites are sending traffic to you that results in a referral. Conversion tracking is an absolute necessity for any serious marketing campaign; it can mean the difference between “making thousands” or “spending thousands.”

But what about phone calls? How can I track those?

First of all, if you have a website for your services, it is important to have your phone number in a prominent place (near the top, and BIG). The easier it is for people to contact you, the more likely your website will be to convert visitors into referrals. Keep a spreadsheet handy to record new referrals you get, and politely ask, “Do you mind me asking how you found out about my services?” If they say “your website,” also ask if they found your site through a search engine or another website. Sometimes people will be able to recall, and the information can be very useful in determining if your advertising dollars are being well spent. This information can also be gathered through new patient intake forms.

The internet is one of the best ways to advertise for many different professions, products, and services. For therapists in particular, the demographics of internet users are perfect for getting quality referrals. Your money can go a lot further on the web than through traditional means such as yellow page or print advertising. With that being said, this form of advertising is relatively new compared to traditional means, so many are not familiar with the concepts involved. Hopefully my explanations will help.]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/buying-advertising-the-truth-about-website-statistics/feed/ 7