Everyday it seems like a new SEO tool or toolset is launching. I’ve been quite impressed with the improvements and enhancements to Raven’s SEO Tools since they launched. There are so many features in Raven but I want to focus on some of the really unique ones which make Raven a must have for me. Link Research Tools Raven has 2 powerful, time-saving tools in their Link Research toolset. Site Finder and Backlink Explorer are 2 tools that really help me quickly assess and work through link profiles and the link landscape of a particular keyword. Site Finder Site Finder is keyword driven and the reports are saved under the website profile you are working on in Raven. While the tool is fast (my auto insurance quotes example took about 6 seconds!) one of the workflow features that I really like is that I can run a bunch of these and go off to do other things within Raven rather than waiting for the reports to come back. On to Site Finder! : To use Site Finder, just navigate to it under the Links tab, enter your keyword, and hit “Run”: Here are the results returned for my query on auto insurance quotes: Site Finder gives you quite a bit of data and options in an easy to use interface, here’s how it breaks down: Search Box - search for a specific domain or reset the results post-search Display Settings - show anywhere from 25 - 1k results on the page, show links that are “hidden” (links you “hid” via the options column), or show all links with no filters Display Settings Option Box - click “Display Settings’ and you’ll get a box where you can toggle ACRank, MozRank, Page Authority, and/or Connections off and on Domain- the name of a domain which is linking to at least 1 site in the top ten Google Results. Click on the domain link to get a slick drop down of the sites that domain is linking too Link Icon - click the icon to display the domain in a new Connections - number of sites in the top 10 for your keyword that have a link from that domain ACRank - a quick, simple data point which aims to show how important a specific page is (0-15, 15 is the highest) based on referring domains. A more in-depth definition can be found here MozRank - SeoMoz’s global link popularity score. It mirrors PageRank but SeoMoz says it updates it more frequently and is more precise (scaled 0-10, 10 being the highest). A more in-depth overview can be found here Page Authority - a predictor of how likely a page is to rank based on a 100 point, logarithmic scale independent of the page’s content. The higher the better Backlinks - total number of links the domain has going into the top 10 Google results Options Tab - if you want to hide a domain from the report (maybe not a link you want to go after, you or your team members can click “hide” and the link will be hidden from the report. If “add” is clicked then the link is added to the link queue in the Link Manager (more on this shortly) Export Options - export your report to PDF or CSV (really helpful, especially when running reports on hidden links to gauge how well a link builder might be doing in terms of assessing the appropriate links to hide So that’s Site Finder. The flexibility, power, speed, and collaborative features of Site Finder make it one of my favorite tools to use. Backlink Explorer Researching competitor’s link profiles is usually a time-consuming piece of the SEO puzzle. While it still involves time, especially on larger link profiles, Backlink Explorer delivers some pretty impressive results quickly and efficiently via a 3rd party tie-in to Majestic SEO. Another nice thing with Raven is a consistent, clean user interface across the toolset. Here’s the spot where you enter the domain you want to research: Just like Site Finder it will save the report in the history of whatever website profile you are saving the report in. You can explore it at anytime or delete it at anytime: Continuing on with the auto insurance theme, I ran a quick report on GEICO: Backlink Explorer gives you the following data points and options: Search Box - search for a particular domain or words within a domain Display Settings - group domains (this is really helpful for cutting down duplicate results from domains with more than one link to the site), show/hide hidden or already linked from domains, filter by ACRank, and display up to 1,000 results on the page Display Settings Box - display or hide no-follow, image, or date data fields Source URL - the site the link is from Link Icon - open page in a new window ACRank - as discussed in Site Finder’s review, more info here Anchor Text - the anchor text of the link No-follow - whether it’s no-follow or not Image - whether it’s an image link or not Options Box - hide the domain or add it to your link queue Export - export results, filtered or non-filtered to CSV What’s really great about this tool is that you can do some pretty heavy filtering to get rid of the noisy links and quickly add the good ones to your link queue. On its face it may seem like it’s not that big of a time-saver, but it really is if you are combing through a large profile or multiple link profiles. You could really buzz through some fairly thick link profiles with the filtering options and put them right into your link queue for you to work on later or for a team member to work on. Once you start working with it you’ll quickly see how efficient it is for you or for you and your staff. Link Management This is probably my favorite tool in the toolset. Prior to utilizing this tool, I was using lots and lots of spreadsheets to track link building campaigns which got to be pretty time consuming and tough to collaborate on. It’s built in to the Raven SEO Toolbar which allows you to quickly add a link to your link queue, right from your browser, rather than hand copying the website’s data to a spreadsheet for further processing. This is a slick feature for a one person show and really sings when used in a collaborative link building environment. The last 2 spots are where your site would be listed and your account profile name: When you are researching link partners, simply click that Add Link button and you are presented with this screen: The link manager in an of itself is worth the price of admission in my opinion. So here you can: Set the status to queued, requested, active, inactive, ignore, or declined. Most of the time it will be “queued” if you are saving it for further handling Input the date the record was created Select the type of link (organic, paid, blog, exchange, and so on). You can even define custom types in Raven and it will show as an option in this application Note the desired anchor text of the link (great for collaboration with link building staff members) Include the URL of where you’d like the link to point to Add more links if you might be getting more than one link from the page Tag the link for sorting within the link manager application Set it to be monitored automatically from within Raven Add it as a task for you or a staff member Raven pulls in the URL, domain name of the site, and PageRank of the page If available you can list the contact name and email as well as the type of site it is and even leave a note attached to the record Try doing all that in a spreadsheet and a bunch of word or text documents for notes Once again, another solid way to save loads of time doing what is probably the most time consuming part of an SEO campaign, link building. So that was just the toolbar portion of the Link Manager. Within your Raven account you have access to the same “add link” application that you do from the toolbar. Perhaps you have link opportunities that you or a staff member cultivated outside of Raven. You can use this form to plug them right in. You can also import links into your Raven account. You can upload a CSV file with custom data that Raven will recognize up to 20 columns of data points. These data points relate to Raven’s Link Manager application. So you’re able to define all of these (Raven gives you a handy sample CSV to do this from): Status Link Type Link Text Link URL Website Name Website URL Website Type PR Contact Name Contact Email Contact ID Cost Type Cost Payment Method Payment Reference Start Date End Date Creation Date Comment Owner Name Currently the currencies supported are USD, GBP, EUR, AUD. When you upload you can automatically add link monitoring by clicking the link monitoring box. You can also import up to 1,000 backlinks from Yahoo! via your domain or your competitor’s domains (ones you’ve defined in Raven). Raven’s link monitoring service will alert you if any changes occur to a link or a page the link is on. For example, you would be notified if: PageRank changes Anchor text changes Another link gets added to the page They add no-follow to your link The location of your link changes I believe Raven now has about 21 different tools within their toolset now. This one tool, for me, is well worth the subscription cost. It really does save quite a bit of time and there’s really nothing else like it on the market that I’ve seen (in terms of functionality, collaboration, and ease of use). Facebook There are a growing number of applications out there where you can manage your social media accounts (mainly Twitter and Facebook, but Facebook in this example). If you want the most bang for your buck, Raven offers a state of the art Facebook application within its toolset. In addition to the deep reporting Raven gives you from within Facebook you can now integrate with Google Analytics from within Raven. Here are some of the features offered within Raven’s Facebook Tool: Deep Google Analytics integration White label reporting of Facebook metrics Automatic wall post scheduling Fan tracking, customizable by date range Monitor posts, comments, and likes What I really like about the Facebook tool in Raven is that you can really synch up your analytics information and truly get a handle on what’s working and not working over defined periods of time. The reason why I’m a big fan of the integration here is due to the fact that you are likely going to be using either Twitter or Facebook (or both) in your internet marketing campaign(s). So to have this data in one place and integrated, as well as using the deep metrics that the tools provide, amount to a set of game changing features with respect to Facebook campaign management. Sometimes with all in one toolsets you see features like this get added and they are kind of watered down. This is not the case here, it’s one of the stronger Facebook management tools out there. If you are going to allocate resources to search and social then you need a way to accurately track the ROI of your campaigns and that’s exactly what you get with this tool. Twitter Occasionally Social Media campaigns can be tough to quantify in terms of ROI and overall effectiveness. Much like the Facebook Monitor, Raven offers a tool for Twitter users which is a real gem. Raven’s Twitter Tool One feature within the Twitter tool is the ability to post a new tweet right away or schedule it for later, integrate with 3 URL shortener services (bit.ly, is.gd, j.mp, and tinyurl), and set custom Google Analytics campaign variables. Raven also gives you the ability to work with bit.ly and j.mp’s APIs. Monitor Twitter Activity and Engagement If you are allocating resources to Twitter, or being paid by a company to run their Twitter account, then you’ll want the ability to see some pretty juicy stats related to your Twitter campaign. With Raven’s new Twitter tool you’ll be able to see the following: Posts Followers Friends Friend to Follower Ratio Mentions Google Analytics referral data Reply and Retweet reach (a great way to see how many readers are seeing the message Here’s a screenshot of the statistical overlay: What’s really nice about this is the date range comparisons. It’s a huge time-saver to manage this data mostly in one place, you can truly get a handle on what’s working and what’s not working, as well as why it’s not working or working. The level of detail and integration is really unique to Raven’s suite of tools. Monitor Tweets Related to Your Account In addition to viewing tweets from your public timeline you can also see all mentions associated with your account, as well as tweets posted from your account: A great feature here is that if there is a thread associated with a tweet you can click on the “view thread” link and see the entire thread from within the Twitter tool. You can also access this via Raven’s slick iPhone/iPad app Campaign Reporting Much like the link tools are worth the full subscription for me, if you have a need for custom reporting then Raven’s Campaign Reporting features are probably worth the price of admission for you. In lockstep with their other tools, the Campaign Reporting feature set is super easy to use: You can quickly create white-labeled, customized reports for the following modules within Raven: Link Building Twitter Rankings Facebook Keyword Research Competitor Research Social Media Monitoring (track mentions of your brand and/or keywords related to your service. It also allows you to manage overall sentiment and track daily buzz) Google Analytics The reporting options include the ability for you to use customized descriptions to explain different parts of the report, summary pages for different sections, and Raven will even generate a table of contents for you. Brand Templates Here you can quickly create a completely customized brand template for use with your reports, just click New Brand Template in the campaign home screen. Give the template a name: Assign it to a website, a profile or an account: Pick a custom logo or text header: Customize the colors and the footer text Customize the appearance of your ranking results (keyword and rank alignment, numbers/+/-/arrows) Report Templates Report Templates allow you to configure specific aspects of each report, saving you from having to create them over and over again for each client or each report: Similar to a Brand Template you start by clicking “New Report Template” in the Campaign Report screen. What I like about these reports is that they are fully customizable. Maybe you have clients that just hire you for keyword research, or just links, or both of those and social media (and so on). Well with the customization flexibility of these reports you can set up a custom template for just about any reporting need you may come across. So name your report (I did Test 1) and you’ll see the creation options on the left side: To give you an idea of how deep your customization and reporting options are, here is that left bar fully extended: Every singe one of those tabs is a customizable report So you just click on the ones you want to add and they are added to the report template. Customizing Reporting Fields When you add the fields to a template, or when you are creating the report, you can expand the section and customize each one (the summary page and title are report-wide options, but they each have other options depending on the piece you are reporting on). Here’s the customization options you get with the link detail module: Once you add more than one, you can collapse them and reorder them in a drag and drop fashion: Scheduling and Auto Delivery Maybe you want to auto-deliver reports to employees for further customization or presentation work, or maybe you want to set and forget the delivery of reports to your clients. You can send reports as attached PDF’s or as trackable download links. You can do monthly, daily, weekly, or quarterly reports and select a day between 1-28 as well as define a custom date range. Create the Report It’s really easy to create a detailed, customized report within Raven. Name your report, select your brand and report templates, set you scheduling and delivery options, and create! It is really that simple. As mentioned in the Report Template section you can add, customize, and arrange all those reporting areas to suit your reporting needs. Additional Features While I focused on key areas that sold me on Raven, I also utilize their other tools. In addition to the tools mentioned above Raven’s tools also include Blog Manager - manage unlimited WordPress blogs (or any blog that supports XML-RPC Competitor Manager - track competitors and see key metrics like PageRank, pages in Google’s index, and links. Contact Manager - this is where Raven stores (via this feature and via the Link Manager) contact information (mailing address, email, phone number, username, company, etc) which you can assign to different links, websites, and tasks Content Manager - a place where you can manager articles, website content, and posts. You can add keyword analyzer features to check frequency, density, and relevance. You can also list where the article or post was used (quite handy for link building campaigns) Design Analyzer - what I really like about this tool is the ability to look at your website in a Lynx browser Event Manager - similar to GA annotations, the event manager can help you track any type of event related to your site. You can even include these in your reports, which is great for in-house record-keeping and/or client reports. Firefox Toolbar - a killer link building assistant as discussed in the link section of this review. You can easily switch between your site profiles in the toolbar, use the analyzer features, and use logins for different social media personas. Keyword Manager - a place to store potential and active keywords. A handy tagging system can be used to group keywords and you can add them to your rank tracker in one click. Persona Manager - store multiple social network profiles and logins. In addition, you can also share these with staff members. This functionality is also available in the Toolbar. Quality Analyzer - you can use this in your Raven account and from the Toolbar (which is a nice feature when scouring the web for links). It measures the site’s indexed page count in Google and Yahoo, links from Yahoo, .edu links, .gov links, domain age, domain expiration, Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, and whether or not the site is in DMOZ. It assigns a numerical score based on this data. Research Assistant - enter a domain to see data regarding the site’s paid keywords, organic keywords, and competitors in both. You can one-click add a keyword or a competing URL to either the keyword/competition manager or to your SERP tracker (rank checker). Enter a keyword to see matching keywords and related keyword with data from SEM Rush, Google, and Wordtracker. View a page to see semantic data powered by OpenCalais.Com and keywords (related to the page’s content) from AlchemyAPI.Com. SERP Tracker - Raven’s rank checker, runs once per week automatically, has historical chart and data viewing capabilities, and supports a bunch of international versions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google Analytics Integration - tie in your Google Analytics account for easy viewing and slick reporting. Social Media - in addition to Facebook and Twitter Raven also offers brand/keyword monitoring services, integration with KnowEm and Omgili. Website Directory - records of all the websites used in your campaign with filtering options to sort out different site and link types. iPhone and iPad apps Give Raven a Try Raven’s integration is slick and powerful: Google, SEM Rush, and Wordtracker for keyword research Majestic SEO & SeoMoz for link building and research Google Analytics integration Twitter & Facebook integration with lots of engagement goodies Raven currently offers a free 30 trial, no credit card required, on all their plans. The combination of SEO tools, link building tools, social media integration, and custom reporting options were strong selling points for me especially at the price points Raven offers. I think you can also see the significant time saving benefits Raven provides, especially in the reporting module. There isn’t much to lose, a free 30 day trial that doesn’t require you to enter any payment information. So give Raven’s SEO Tools a try. Pricing and Free Trial Info

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Raven SEO Tools Review

by Jennifer Laycock   Earlier this week, I explained the concept of micro goals in regards to social media and why it’s so important to track such a large collection of seemingly insignificant numbers. I walked you through both the universal micro goals and how to establish campaign specific micro goals. Today, it’s time to look at how those numbers can be of value to us over the span of a social media campaign. Looking for What Works and What Doesn’t The single biggest benefit of tracking things on the micro goal level is the ability to quickly identify the areas of your campaign that are performing well and the ones that aren’t. Micro goals are all part of the wonderful world of metrics and each of them acts as a clue in the mystery of campaign results. Making sure each of your metrics lines up carefully with your campaign efforts and goals will go a long way toward equipping you with the information you need to refine your campaigns. Finding Problems within a Campaign Let’s say you’ve just launched a new piece of viral content on your blog and you’ve pushed it out via social networks. The content is aimed at educating your target audience about a new product offering and does it via a creative and entertaining video you’ve hosted on your blog.  You launch the content, seed it with influencers and watch the traffic start rolling in. Traffic spikes and sales don’t just stay flat, they drop. What happened? If you have established and kept tabs on a set of micro goals for your blog, the story may tell itself. On the surface, the campaign looks strong. Traffic, links, social mentions are all up, leading your team to celebrate with nice graphics like this: But if you dig a little deeper and look at all of your micro goals, a different picture begins to emerge: Despite the uptick in traffic and links, we see a distinct decline in engagement related metrics. Time on site has dropped, the number of pages per visitor has dropped, comments are down and less people are converting. Each of these micro goals matches up with a drop in sales. It’s also enough data to make us go back to our campaign and ask ourselves what might have led to this combination of metrics. Match What You Know with What You Planned In this instance, we can go back to the original campaign idea and look at it from the perspective of the metrics. There was clearly interest in the video because we see a rise in traffic. The content clearly resonated in terms of word of mouth, because we see strong numbers of social shares and a nice increase with links. When we take a second look at the content, however, we might realize the $250 price point and the fact that it’s an add on accessory to a $700 piece of electronics gives us a naturally small target audience. That means that while the video we’ve created has broad appeal, we’re not focusing in on our targeted audience. For our next campaign, we’ll want to focus more on the specific needs of our target audience and focus less on getting a broad launch and more on reaching into targeted communities. Variations in Metrics Tell us Different Tales Of course different metrics on your micro goals might help you come to different conclusions. Let’s say the video was for a brand new cell phone battery extender that cost $20, fit on a key ring and delivered an extra hour of battery life to a phone. This is the type of product nearly anyone can use and the price point qualifies it as an impulse buy. In this case, perhaps our metrics look something like this: You’ll quickly notice our metrics are up across the board with the exception of our conversion rates. We’ve got moderate increases in links, traffic, social shares and comments. We’ve got zero movement in our conversion rates. We’ve got a very strong increase in time on site and pages viewed per visitor. This tells us something. On the surface, everything looks good. The problem here is that a huge jump in pages per visitor and time on site simply does not mesh with zero change in sales. There’s simply no reason why an increase in targeted traffic that has demonstrated an interest in the product via their use of the site wouldn’t result in conversions. This means we need to go back and look more closely at the site itself. More than likely, the issue here is about usability. Ask a friend to watch the video and take action. You might be surprised to find out they can’t locate an order now button or they’re hunting for shipping prices and giving up in frustration. A few quick fixes to your interface may result in a sudden jump in conversions and a slight decrease in time on site and pages per visitor. You Can’t Fix it if You Don’t Know it’s Broken Of course the above examples are only looking at the micro goals for your blog. This same type of examination in other social media outlets and even across the board for your campaign can often give you a completely different perspective on the success (or failure) of your campaigns. Stop looking solely at traffic or conversions to determine the success of your campaigns. Sometimes it’s a lack of RSVPs or a dramatic increase in social shares on a specific network that clue you in to the changes you need to make. Either way, if you aren’t gathering data, any decision you make will be based on your best guess rather than supported logic. Take a look at your campaigns and dig deeper into the metrics of you campaign. You may be surprised at what you learn. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Using Micro Goals to Fine Tune Your Social Media Campaigns

Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have confirmed that they will start testing the Bing algorithm live on some Yahoo! traffic this month. One of the big questions from the SEO perspective is what happens to Yahoo! Site Explorer ? If it goes away then webmasters will need to get link data from web indexes built by SEO companies, perhaps either Open Site Explorer and/or Majestic SEO . Yahoo! also offers a link: search in their BOSS program . While they have stated that the BOSS program will live on , there is little chance of the link: operator working in it over the longrun as Bing has disabled inbound link search on Bing. Blekko , which is a soon to launch search start-up, doesn’t have much to lose in sharing data. In the short run anything to gain awareness will likely make them money in the longrun. And so they are doing just that : Blekko is also showing just about all the behind the scenes data that they have to determine rank and relevancy. You can see inbound links, duplicated content and associated metadata for any domain in their index. Blekko will also come with custom slashtags which users can use to personalize search. And end user feature for average users? Not sure. But it will be interesting to web developers & power searchers. There are already heated debates in the comments on TechCrunch on if people will use that feature. IMHO the point isn’t for it to be an end user service for average searchers, but to be one which generates discussion & builds loyalty amongst power users. And clearly it is working. They are also following the Jason Callus-Anus strategy of anti-SEO marketing (while giving SEOs tons of free data) The SEO gamers, content farmers and link shoppers are not going to be happy. These guys are flooding the web with content designed to turn a profit, not inform, and the searcher pays the price. One company alone generates literally tens of thousands of pages every day that are solely designed to make money from SEO traffic. Slashtags are the perfect way to bypass them and search only the sites you like. One more reason the content farmers aren’t going to be happy: we’re opening up all the data that is the core foundation of their business. Link data, site data, rank data - all there for everyone to see. In one fell swoop the playing field just got leveled. I think a core concept which many search engines have forgot (in an attempt to chase Google) is that if you have a place in the hearts and minds of webmasters & web developers then they will lead other users to your service. Money is one way to buy loyalty. And Google will pay anyone to syndicate their ads, no matter what sort of externalities that leads to. But now the web is polluted with content mills. Which is an opportunity for Blekko to differentiate. Since Yahoo! is a big publisher they had mixed incentives on this front. They do share a lot of cool stuff , but they are also the same company which just disappeared the default online keyword research tool and replaced it with nothing, and they recently purchased a content mill . This was a big area where Bing could have won. They created a great SEO guide & are generally more receptive to webmaster communications, but they have fumbled following redirects & have pulled back on the data they share. Further, if you look at Bing’s updated PPC guidelines , you will see that they are pushing out affiliates and chasing the same brand ad Dollars which Google wants. Bing will be anything but desperate for marketshare after they get the Yahoo! deal in place. Blekko goes one further than the traditional sense of “open” for their launch. They not only give you the traditional open strategy : Furthermore, we intend to be fully open about our crawl and rank data for the web. We don’t believe security through obscurity is the best way to drive search ranking quality forward. So we have a set of tools on blekko.com which let you understand what factors are driving our rankings, and let you dive behind any url or site to see what their web search footprint looks like. but they also offer a “Search Bill of Rights” which by default other search companies can’t follow (based on their current business models): 1. Search shall be open 2. Search results shall involve people 3. Ranking data shall not be kept secret 4. Web data shall be readily available 5. There is no one-size-fits-all for search 6. Advanced search shall be accessible 7. Search engine tools shall be open to all 8. Search & community go hand-in-hand 9. Spam does not belong in search results 10. Privacy of searchers shall not be violated And so based on the above they appeal to… anyone who submits themselves to the open ideology journalists who hate content mills searchers who hate junk search results SEOs & webmasters who like free data programmers who like to hack and tweak people interested in personal freedom & privacy From a marketing perspective, their site hasn’t even launched yet and there is *at least* a half-dozen different reasons to talk about them! Pretty savvy marketing.

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Blekko Cozy Up to Webmasters, Offers Killer SEO Data Free

by Garry Przyklenk Back in March, Google launched a new AdWords reporting feature called AdWords Search Funnel.  This long awaited reporting feature provides valuable insights into search user behavior with respect to conversions attributed to paid search campaigns, ad groups and keywords.  If you use all of these reports, that’s great, but I’m guessing you already have a tough time keeping up with the standard AdWords interface and changing quality scores.  So instead of going through all the reports, I’m going to focus on three absolutely essential reports you should be scrutinizing: assisted conversions, top paths, and time lag reports. NOTE : The public roll-out should be complete by now, so ensure you have access by logging into your AdWords account and selecting the Reporting tab > Conversions > Search Funnels (in the left column). Assisted Conversions Most Google AdWords accounts are built on a product or geographic hierarchy at the campaign level, so looking at the assisted conversions report at the campaign level might not yield much insight.  Drill down to the keyword level and prepare to be amazed.  This particular report isn’t explained too well in the Google AdWords help section, but I typically rely on it to tell me which keywords are driving last-click conversions, and which are contributing to last-click conversions on other keywords. Let’s use an example.  Say you’re an electronics retailer and you’re targeting two phrase match keywords: digital cameras canon digital cameras Users type in “digital cameras” into Google, see your ad and click it and are sent to a relatively generic but well-converting landing page of cameras on promotion.  In their effort to research their eventual purchase, they might do a number of searches on particular models before settling on a particular brand, say Canon.  Knowing you had a bunch of cameras on promotion, their next search term might be “canon digital cameras” and this time they click on your ad to a landing page with all your smoking hot Canon promotions.  Your price and pedigree is irresistible and they buy a Canon camera.  Google AdWords attributes the last-click conversion to “canon digital cameras” and an assist to “digital cameras.” Would you have gotten the conversion if you only had the longer tail keyword?  Maybe, but maybe not.  With the “Assisted Conversions” report you can test out. Top Paths Once again, the “Top Paths” report defaults to Google AdWords campaigns, which is probably less useful for most advertisers than selecting ad group, or keyword level data.  Although the “Assisted Conversions” report conveys much of the same information in terms of conversion events, “Top Paths” gives you the ability to go beyond a binomial relationship.  This stuff is exciting because you may actually witness user intent and search sophistication increase incrementally over time.  In addition, if you have a fairly large set of keywords, it can also give you some clues into the influence your ads and landing pages have on visitors.  Consider the same example we used above, except introduce another step in the path: digital cameras canon digital cameras canon sd110 digital camera If you notice this path show up in the “Top Paths” report fairly often, you may want to circumvent the second or third step in the process by influencing a purchase decision for the “Canon SD110″ on your generic landing page.  Asking questions from your data also helps: do I see the same top path behavior for other manufacturer products like Sony or Nikon?  If not, why? Time Lag Although the data available from the “Time Lag” report is also available in Google Analytics with a bit of tinkering, having it available through Google AdWords Funnel Reports without the need for specifying segments is extremely helpful.  As the name suggests, the “Time Lag” report displays the distribution of elapsed time before visitors convert through AdWords campaigns.  Considerable insight is provided by way of customizing your analysis starting point: from first impression, from first click, or from last click.  Obviously, you’re aiming to optimize the time to conversion from first impression. ASIDE : Googlers, if you’re reading, the only thing I don’t like about this report is that you cannot break down distributions by campaign, ad group, and keyword like all the other reports.  Sure, a quick workaround is to specify new conversion goals that are campaign-, ad group-, or keyword-specific, but I would probably reserve doing that only for the severely problematic ads. Why should you scrutinize the “Time Lag” report or even worry about its existence?  Of all the conversions I generated last week from paid search, 83% occurred on the same day.  You could say that’s pretty good, and I’d agree, but I’m still worrying about the 7% of conversions that occurred in the “12+ days” bucket.  What that’s telling me is that a good chunk of conversions can be attributed to old ads, potentially old landing pages, maybe old keywords!  Even if I don’t report the true number of conversions for my campaigns for last week to my boss, I need to know what the true performance of those campaigns was so I don’t make matters worse. A little bit of extra data can go a long way in making you look like a PPC dynamo, so be sure not to skip over the Google AdWords Search Funnel reports. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Google AdWords Search Funnels: 3 essential reports you should scrutinize

by Mike Fleming If you have a PPC account, as you read this you are paying for wasted clicks . Visitors that aren’t really interested in what you offer are coming to your website and you’re paying for them. Isn’t that frustrating to know? The bad news is that the nature of PPC won’t enable you to ever totally eliminate this from happening. Why? One reason is because you can’t control searcher behavior. You could write the perfect ad for your most targeted keyword on exact match so that it cannot be mistaken what it is you’re offering. But, searchers that are not at all candidates for purchasing will still click through for many reasons. Maybe they thought you were in their price range, but aren’t. Or maybe their query failed to return the kind of results they were looking for but your ad piqued their curiosity so they clicked through in exploration mode just to make sure. Or how about when you are running keywords on broad match ? In exchange for larger keyword volume, you’re giving a search engine the right to decide what search queries match the search intent as your chosen keyword and show your ads there. And at this point in time, to put it lightly; that’s not an exact science. For example, consider what I found this month. I’m advertising on a keyword phrase that starts with the adjective ” best .” The query with the most impressions and clicks for that ad group? Google decided that the word ” cheap ” matched the search intent of ” best .” Now, when has the best of anything ever been cheap? (No smart aleck answers please) Needless to say that I didn’t receive a high click-through rate and not one conversion on that keyword phrase. In fact, with ” cheap ” as a negative keyword , my click-through rate goes up by 18%. Not only does this save money by not paying for wasted clicks, the improvement in click-through rate factors into Quality Score and improves ranking in ad auctions. So, it saves money two ways. The good news is you can get rid of many of these wasted clicks. How? Simply run a Search Query Report for your ad groups and it tells you what keyword queries Google decided to show your ads on. You can then use the data to tell Google not to show your ads on certain keywords anymore . And another little tip: you can also use keyword phrases that are performing rather well to give you intelligence into how you might communicate in your ads. The result = paying for less visitors that aren’t interested in specifically what you offer, a happy boss, and a reason to ask for more money! Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Stop Wasting PPC Clicks and Start Saving $$$ Now

SpyFu is one of the more feature rich tools, but probably has the least attractive interface out there. SpyFu offers SEO and PPC spy tool options along with their own keyword research tool. The SpyFu toolset covers US and UK markets. SpyFu’s toolset includes: SpyFu Kombat SpyFu Classic Keyword Ad History Domain Ad History Keyword Smart Search A Variety of Top 100 Lists SpyFu Kombat With SpyFu Kombat you can look at overlapping and site specific keywords for up to 3 websites. For the PPC version you can also see a chart which goes back over a period of a few years showing the overall amount of keywords being bid on by all three sites. You can also rollover the chart to see keywords specific to just 2 of the sites if you feel the 3rd site may not be doing as good a job (or vice versa) as 2 of the other sites. It will also show you the PPC budgets of the sites as well as the number of organic keywords ranking in the top 50 results for said keyword. When you click on an area of the circle chart it will show you the keywords in whatever bucket you click, to the right of the chart. You can view and download those keywords for your own use. As you can see I am on the ads tab but the options are similar when you click on the organic tab (on the top box, the organic one on the bottom shows you total organic keywords). Switching between the organic tab and the ppc tab (as well as the overall # of organic keywords + PPC ad budget should also give you an idea of which of the bigger sites are more into the PPC or SEO side of things which can be a good barometer to look at if you happen to be concentrating on one area over the other. SpyFu Classic SpyFu Classic is the “flagship” section so to speak. This is where you enter one domain on the home page and are presented with a TON of data including: Daily AdWords PPC Budget Links through to SpyFu Kombat Average Position of Ads vs # of Advertisers Estimated Value of Organic Traffic (estimated traffic with a variable of CPC factored in) Paid Traffic Compared with Organic Traffic Estimates Subdomains (useful for looking at how a site might break out parts of the main domain, perhaps a good spot to look for niche keywords???) Top Ten Paid Keywords w/ Keyword Ad History (links through to full Keyword Ad History tool) Total Paid Keywords Total Organic Keywords PPC Competitors (with a link to overlapping keywords) Organic Competitors (with a link to overlapping keywords) Category In addition to searching for a domain SpyFu let’s you search by keyword as well, as shown below: The data here can be useful, as you can see the: Estimated PPC, Clicks, Cost Per Day, Total Advertisers…all with trend data Top Ten Domains Advertising on the Keyword, with Domain Ad History Additional Keywords Purchased By Relevant Domains PPC Ad Copy with a Link to Keyword Ad History Top Ten Organic Results with Title, Meta Description Related Terms Related Concepts (based on semantic relationships) Categories Keyword Ad History Keyword Ad History will show you, via color coded bars, how often the keyword appeared in a domain’s PPC campaign along with any changes in the ad copy (all of which can be exported to excel). It shows a year’s worth of data up front and goes back to 2006 via the Bonus History Button. So it’s pretty straightforward, which is what I like about SpyFu Tools. No over-reliance on “in-house metrics” it’s just “here’s the ad history of the keyword”, plain and simple. Typically, if you see a keyword being advertised on by a good PPC advertiser consistent then you can look to apply that ad copy technique to a niche market of that larger keyword. If I were advertising for “hotels in Oklahoma” I might pay attention to what ad copy has been successful, over time, for that main/core keyword “hotels”. Domain Ad History Domain Ad History is similar to Keyword Ad History except it shows the keyword history of a particular domain: This tool is useful in looking at keywords that have been successful for your competitors (or larger players in your niche) and which ones they tried and abandoned (which could be ones for you to avoid out of the gate). All of this assumes the domain you are researching is competent PPC advertiser. Keyword Smart Search The Keyword Smart Search tool in SpyFu uses semantic word relationships, publicly available keyword data, and PPC campaign data to return a list of keywords related to the keyword(s) (up to 10) you enter. As you can see, you can also filter by CPC, search volume, and you can also exclude keywords: Here is a screen shot of the results page for Keyword Smart Search: For me, I prefer to use the PPC keywords and the Organic keywords found in either SpyFu Classic or SpyFu Kombat. I like to use other tools for pure keyword research (Google tools, Microsoft Ad Center Intelligence, and Wordtracker). Primarily, I feel SpyFu is at its best when used as a competitive research tool versus a keyword research tool. A Variety of Top 100 Lists They have a list of all there Top 100 Lists here . In Closing… I find their tools pretty useful for competitive research. I don’t use their Keyword Smart Search much as described above but the amount of data that they give (in a straightforward fashion) at the price points they give is quite a nice combination. SpyFu makes its way into my toolbox on just about every project.

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SpyFu Review

​ Late last year, a fantastic post went around the Internet with 55 Google Website Optimzer Tips and Tricks . Today, we have a sequel for you. This is a guest post from Khalid Saleh, who is the president and cofounder of Invesp , an ecommerce conversion rate optimization company. ​ Increasing e-commerce conversion rates is challenging. With thousands of possible pages, where should you start optimizing? Even if you can answer that question by picking a small set of pages to start with, what changes should you make? The following tips will be focused on product page testing, but we will first set the stage with few setup items: ​ 1. Segmenting your visitors. Nothing is more powerful than segmenting your visitors and examining the different trends these visitors follow on your site. At a minimum, you should segment visitors by source of traffic, keyword, type of visit (new vs. returning) and country. 2. Segmentation with Google Website Optimizer = Testing on Steroids! Not all customers are created equal, nor should you deal with all customers equally. Testing different versions of your page or funnel is powerful. Testing different versions based on the type of visitors is even more powerful. There are different ways of doing this, but we recommend starting with BTBuckets or with these instructions . 3. Setup your funnels. Funnels tell you what pages are causing visitors to exit the site. At a minimum, we recommend you setup the following funnels: Home page to cart page funnel General checkout process funnel including the cart page General checkout process funnel excluding the cart page Checkout process funnel for different payment types including the cart page Checkout process funnel for different payment types excluding the cart page 4. Funnels & visitors. Beyond setting up funnels is segmenting your traffic and examining how it moves in funnels. But how do you do that in Google Analytics? We will let you in on a small secret: Setup the different funnels in Google Analytics Setup different profiles to represent the different segments Now, you can examine each of the funnels for the different profiles 5. Returning visitors vs. new visitors. Comparing different segments of visitors can be confusing. You should expect visitors from organic search to interact differently with your site compared to visitors from paid search. We find that segmenting new visitors versus returning visitors can reveal major design problems in the site. Generally returning visitors will take longer on a site, view more pages, and have lower exit and bounce rates. If that is not the case, then you might have major design issues to deal with. 6. Product pages: A micro conversion. We like to run the product pages tests twice with different conversion goals: Micro conversion goal: When a visitor adds an item to the cart, we count that as a micro conversion. Macro conversion: When the visitor completes an order, we count a macro conversion. 7. Product pages: the image. Yes, you heard it before. An image is worth a thousand words. However, product images do require an investment, so test the correct solution for your website. Each of the options below will require considerable time, software, and resource commitment. So, test with 5 to 10 products before choosing the right solution for your website. 8. Product pages: Image of product in use. Test with showing the product in use vs. images with solid backgrounds. While in many cases showing the product in use helps the visitors see themselves use the particular product, this is not the case for all products. Apparel websites seem to benefit from this feature. Electronics or book websites, not so much! 9. Product pages: Location of the image. Where should you place the product image? Common wisdom is to place product images on right side of product pages. But common wisdom fails to predict how visitors will act on your website. So test placing the image on left versus the right and see which converts better. 10. Product pages: Product zooming. If you have the software installed on your website, then allowing visitors to zoom in and examine the product closely is an excellent feature to add. 11. Product pages: Multiple product images. Finally, consider having multiple images of the product. We usually recommend having 3-4 images per product to start with. But a word of caution here: hire a professional photographer for these images. Having several low quality images versus a single high quality image is something worth thinking about. 12. Product pages: your product descriptions. Most e-commerce stores take the product description from the manufacturer and place it on the site. So, you will find the same description on competing e-commerce stores. Pick your top 10 best selling products and: Test the impact of having the standard manufacturer’s description versus custom copy your team creates. What impact does this have on the micro conversion (visitors adding items to their cart)? Test different versions of the custom copy you create: Not all copy created equal. You might want to test technical copy versus non-technical. Consider the different market segments and what words will have the most impact on them. 13. Product pages: Reviews. Reviews are great for increasing conversions. There are many studies that show product reviews are responsible for up to 30% uplift in conversions. However, if you are just starting out, allow customers to add reviews but do not display them right away. Wait for a product to collect enough reviews before sharing them with your visitors. Consider using services such ProductWiki to add images on your site. 14. Product pages: add to cart buttons. Yes, they do impact conversion. And there are many things you can test with these: Test the location of the add to cart button Test different designs of the add to cart button Test the wording on the add to cart buttons 15. Product pages: don’t overdo it! What do you think of this? Too many CTAs (call to actions) can stop a visitor in their tracks. 16. Product pages: cross-sells and upsells. We know that you want to sell more of your products. Cross-sells and upsells can help you do that, but they also can distract the visitors. So, test the placement of cross-sells and upsells on your product pages. Should they go in the left navigation or somewhere in the middle section of the product pages? 17. Product pages: pricing. Most of your visitors will do some sort of comparison shopping. So, test different prices and see what impact that will have on your conversion rates. We had a client who reported a 135% increase in conversion rate by lowering product prices by 10%. We do not like to focus on pricing as a mechanism to increase conversion rates but sometimes it works really well. 18. Poor man testing: pricing & Google Website Optimizer. It is usually difficult to switch back and forth between different pricing for items, but here is a general framework to help you: Most ecommerce packages provide a way to maintain a single price for a product. Plan on a strategy for testing multiple prices: Price A is the original price Price B is the original price x 1.10 (10% increase) Price C is the original price x 0.90 (10% decrease) Price A (original is already saved in your database). You can either maintain Price B, C in the database or have application logic to switch between the different prices for a single item. One option to implement this is to have all prices available on the page and use GWO to display one price and hide the other two prices. Another option will be to use GWO to pass a variable value to be used in a formula to change the price. Implementing this should take less than a day and will provide a mechanism to test prices in Google Website Optimizer. 19. Product pages: stock availability. This is a no brainer. No customer likes to add an item to their cart only to discover later that the item is out of stock. So, tie your front end e-commerce store to your inventory system. If that is too much, then consider a daily update. Bad: No product availability on your site Good: Always display product availability Excellent: Display messages to encourage customers to buy a product if you have limited stock available (Only 5 left in stock — order soon.) 20. When can I have it? Tell visitors when the product will be in their hands. Do not tell visitors the items will arrive 3 to 10 days. That will simply kill your conversion and if it does not, it will irritate visitors. 21. Product pages: Feature list. The first level of attracting customers is features. Features are the facts about a given product. Features of an outdoor grill might include: Electric Grease tray Non-stick cooking surface Temperature control 300 square inches of cooking space Attached working surface 22. Product pages: The benefit list. Benefits start you on the road to closing a sale. The benefits of the above outdoor grill include: Convenience Electric Non-stick cooking surface Attached working surface Easy to Use: Electric Non-stick cooking surface Temperature control Attached working surface Saves Money Electric Temperature control 23. Product pages - People buy benefits, they do not buy features. What results do your customers want from your barbeque? They want a grill that offers: Tasty, Healthy Food Every time Temperature control Grease tray Perfect for Easy Entertaining 300 square inches of cooking space Attached working area Easy to clean A Double Bonus: Environmentally Friendly While Saving You Money! Electric versus charcoal emissions Do not have to buy charcoal for the life of the grill 24. Bundled pricing. Consider bundling shipping costs with product items so visitors will not have to worry about paying for shipping costs. If the shipping costs are too complicated to understand or might be on the high side, we recommend testing bundling them with the product price. 25. Free shipping is a great way to increase sales. We have many clients who offer free shipping on orders above a certain size and usually see a nice uplift in both conversions and average order value by doing so. 26. Bonus tips: If you are about to start conversion rate optimization, then these resources are a must: Conversion rate 101 : a series of articles on conversion rate optimization. Personas 101 : a complete guide to creating personas for your website 30+ principles to a better landing page design : a must read for anyone interested in landing page design. Landing page templates : we optimized these templates using GWO to increase their conversion rates to the double digits. They are a good starting point. Thanks to Khalid for putting together this great list. Share your own favorite GWO tips in the comments. Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team

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​25 Google Website Optimizer Tips for Better Product Pages

​ Late last year, a fantastic post went around the Internet with 55 Google Website Optimzer Tips and Tricks . Today, we have a sequel for you. This is a guest post from Khalid Saleh, who is the president and cofounder of Invesp , an ecommerce conversion rate optimization company. ​ Increasing e-commerce conversion rates is challenging. With thousands of possible pages, where should you start optimizing? Even if you can answer that question by picking a small set of pages to start with, what changes should you make? The following tips will be focused on product page testing, but we will first set the stage with few setup items: ​ 1. Segmenting your visitors. Nothing is more powerful than segmenting your visitors and examining the different trends these visitors follow on your site. At a minimum, you should segment visitors by source of traffic, keyword, type of visit (new vs. returning) and country. 2. Segmentation with Google Website Optimizer = Testing on Steroids! Not all customers are created equal, nor should you deal with all customers equally. Testing different versions of your page or funnel is powerful. Testing different versions based on the type of visitors is even more powerful. There are different ways of doing this, but we recommend starting with BTBuckets or with these instructions . 3. Setup your funnels. Funnels tell you what pages are causing visitors to exit the site. At a minimum, we recommend you setup the following funnels: Home page to cart page funnel General checkout process funnel including the cart page General checkout process funnel excluding the cart page Checkout process funnel for different payment types including the cart page Checkout process funnel for different payment types excluding the cart page 4. Funnels & visitors. Beyond setting up funnels is segmenting your traffic and examining how it moves in funnels. But how do you do that in Google Analytics? We will let you in on a small secret: Setup the different funnels in Google Analytics Setup different profiles to represent the different segments Now, you can examine each of the funnels for the different profiles 5. Returning visitors vs. new visitors. Comparing different segments of visitors can be confusing. You should expect visitors from organic search to interact differently with your site compared to visitors from paid search. We find that segmenting new visitors versus returning visitors can reveal major design problems in the site. Generally returning visitors will take longer on a site, view more pages, and have lower exit and bounce rates. If that is not the case, then you might have major design issues to deal with. 6. Product pages: A micro conversion. We like to run the product pages tests twice with different conversion goals: Micro conversion goal: When a visitor adds an item to the cart, we count that as a micro conversion. Macro conversion: When the visitor completes an order, we count a macro conversion. 7. Product pages: the image. Yes, you heard it before. An image is worth a thousand words. However, product images do require an investment, so test the correct solution for your website. Each of the options below will require considerable time, software, and resource commitment. So, test with 5 to 10 products before choosing the right solution for your website. 8. Product pages: Image of product in use. Test with showing the product in use vs. images with solid backgrounds. While in many cases showing the product in use helps the visitors see themselves use the particular product, this is not the case for all products. Apparel websites seem to benefit from this feature. Electronics or book websites, not so much! 9. Product pages: Location of the image. Where should you place the product image? Common wisdom is to place product images on right side of product pages. But common wisdom fails to predict how visitors will act on your website. So test placing the image on left versus the right and see which converts better. 10. Product pages: Product zooming. If you have the software installed on your website, then allowing visitors to zoom in and examine the product closely is an excellent feature to add. 11. Product pages: Multiple product images. Finally, consider having multiple images of the product. We usually recommend having 3-4 images per product to start with. But a word of caution here: hire a professional photographer for these images. Having several low quality images versus a single high quality image is something worth thinking about. 12. Product pages: your product descriptions. Most e-commerce stores take the product description from the manufacturer and place it on the site. So, you will find the same description on competing e-commerce stores. Pick your top 10 best selling products and: Test the impact of having the standard manufacturer’s description versus custom copy your team creates. What impact does this have on the micro conversion (visitors adding items to their cart)? Test different versions of the custom copy you create: Not all copy created equal. You might want to test technical copy versus non-technical. Consider the different market segments and what words will have the most impact on them. 13. Product pages: Reviews. Reviews are great for increasing conversions. There are many studies that show product reviews are responsible for up to 30% uplift in conversions. However, if you are just starting out, allow customers to add reviews but do not display them right away. Wait for a product to collect enough reviews before sharing them with your visitors. Consider using services such ProductWiki to add images on your site. 14. Product pages: add to cart buttons. Yes, they do impact conversion. And there are many things you can test with these: Test the location of the add to cart button Test different designs of the add to cart button Test the wording on the add to cart buttons 15. Product pages: don’t overdo it! What do you think of this? Too many CTAs (call to actions) can stop a visitor in their tracks. 16. Product pages: cross-sells and upsells. We know that you want to sell more of your products. Cross-sells and upsells can help you do that, but they also can distract the visitors. So, test the placement of cross-sells and upsells on your product pages. Should they go in the left navigation or somewhere in the middle section of the product pages? 17. Product pages: pricing. Most of your visitors will do some sort of comparison shopping. So, test different prices and see what impact that will have on your conversion rates. We had a client who reported a 135% increase in conversion rate by lowering product prices by 10%. We do not like to focus on pricing as a mechanism to increase conversion rates but sometimes it works really well. 18. Poor man testing: pricing & Google Website Optimizer. It is usually difficult to switch back and forth between different pricing for items, but here is a general framework to help you: Most ecommerce packages provide a way to maintain a single price for a product. Plan on a strategy for testing multiple prices: Price A is the original price Price B is the original price x 1.10 (10% increase) Price C is the original price x 0.90 (10% decrease) Price A (original is already saved in your database). You can either maintain Price B, C in the database or have application logic to switch between the different prices for a single item. One option to implement this is to have all prices available on the page and use GWO to display one price and hide the other two prices. Another option will be to use GWO to pass a variable value to be used in a formula to change the price. Implementing this should take less than a day and will provide a mechanism to test prices in Google Website Optimizer. 19. Product pages: stock availability. This is a no brainer. No customer likes to add an item to their cart only to discover later that the item is out of stock. So, tie your front end e-commerce store to your inventory system. If that is too much, then consider a daily update. Bad: No product availability on your site Good: Always display product availability Excellent: Display messages to encourage customers to buy a product if you have limited stock available (Only 5 left in stock — order soon.) 20. When can I have it? Tell visitors when the product will be in their hands. Do not tell visitors the items will arrive 3 to 10 days. That will simply kill your conversion and if it does not, it will irritate visitors. 21. Product pages: Feature list. The first level of attracting customers is features. Features are the facts about a given product. Features of an outdoor grill might include: Electric Grease tray Non-stick cooking surface Temperature control 300 square inches of cooking space Attached working surface 22. Product pages: The benefit list. Benefits start you on the road to closing a sale. The benefits of the above outdoor grill include: Convenience Electric Non-stick cooking surface Attached working surface Easy to Use: Electric Non-stick cooking surface Temperature control Attached working surface Saves Money Electric Temperature control 23. Product pages - People buy benefits, they do not buy features. What results do your customers want from your barbeque? They want a grill that offers: Tasty, Healthy Food Every time Temperature control Grease tray Perfect for Easy Entertaining 300 square inches of cooking space Attached working area Easy to clean A Double Bonus: Environmentally Friendly While Saving You Money! Electric versus charcoal emissions Do not have to buy charcoal for the life of the grill 24. Bundled pricing. Consider bundling shipping costs with product items so visitors will not have to worry about paying for shipping costs. If the shipping costs are too complicated to understand or might be on the high side, we recommend testing bundling them with the product price. 25. Free shipping is a great way to increase sales. We have many clients who offer free shipping on orders above a certain size and usually see a nice uplift in both conversions and average order value by doing so. 26. Bonus tips: If you are about to start conversion rate optimization, then these resources are a must: Conversion rate 101 : a series of articles on conversion rate optimization. Personas 101 : a complete guide to creating personas for your website 30+ principles to a better landing page design : a must read for anyone interested in landing page design. Landing page templates : we optimized these templates using GWO to increase their conversion rates to the double digits. They are a good starting point. Thanks to Khalid for putting together this great list. Share your own favorite GWO tips in the comments. Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team

Read more here: 
​25 Google Website Optimizer Tips for Better Product Pages

All website owners need to pay for the costs of creating content and making it available online. Whether delivering entertainment, products, news, services, social networking or opinions, they need to pay their way by selling advertising or charging their users. Website owners, or “online publishers,” span the range from individual bloggers to multinational companies. If they sell advertising, they can do this directly themselves, via their own sales force. Alternatively, they can use an ad network to place ads on the pages of their website. Many publishers use a combination of these methods if they can’t sell all their ad space themselves (for example, a publisher may have an unpredicted surge in traffic — and therefore ad space — resulting from a popular post, or from a major website linking to them). We have a long history of helping online publishers make money from their websites. We wanted to update you on our continuing work in this area, and how Google’s newer products can provide real and significant results for clients. We currently have three main products that work together to help online publishers of all sizes and types maximize their revenue. AdSense AdSense , launched in 2003, places highly relevant ads on our partners’ websites , who share in the ad revenue. In 2009, our AdSense partners, comprising over a million large and small publishers, earned over $5.2 billion through AdSense. AdSense is designed to help online publishers get the most revenue possible for their ad space, without having to directly manage advertiser relationships. When a publisher enables AdSense on their site, Google automatically maximizes the publisher’s revenues every time a page loads . It does this in real time, by selecting the most valuable ad from AdWords advertisers and a large pool of other competing ad networks and buyers. Ad serving Larger publishers with their own ad sales teams use our ad serving products (like DoubleClick’s DFP or Google Ad Manager ) to serve the most valuable ad that they’ve sold directly to advertisers or ad agencies. DFP is the industry’s leading ad serving platform that powers the advertising businesses of the largest online publishers, while Google Ad Manager is designed to meet the needs of growing online publishers. Our ad serving products are a key focus for us and we’re continuing to make significant investments in this area. You can read about some of our DFP customers here and some of our Google Ad Manager customers here . DoubleClick Ad Exchange DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a real-time auction marketplace for display ad space — it includes ad networks on one side, and major online publishers on the other. Publishers are in complete control of which networks they allow to bid, what ads can appear on their sites and which ad space they make available. Maximizing revenue across various ad networks is sometimes called “yield management.” For major online publishers, the Ad Exchange offers an easy-to-use yield management solution — it selects the highest paying ad from across multiple, competing ad networks, in real time. However, the Ad Exchange goes further than simple “yield management” to provide a more complete revenue maximization solution. Through a unique process called “dynamic allocation,” it also compares — again, in real time — the value of the highest-paying ad in the Ad Exchange with any ads that the publisher has entered into their ad server (such as ad network deals) and chooses the highest paying one. By definition, the Ad Exchange only serves ads when it can offer a higher price for ad space. In fact, analysis shows that the average price a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange is over 130% higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to ad networks and other third parties. (Of course, while similar, the ad space being compared is not identical.) A continuing effort Today’s online publishers, large and small, operate in a complicated and fragmented advertising environment. We’re focused on developing a full suite of technology products — such as AdSense, ad serving products and DoubleClick Ad Exchange — that can maximize all publishers’ advertising revenues. We’re also working to bring new advertisers to online advertising and make the process easier for them, to grow the advertising pie for everyone. By doing this, we hope to help all publishers fund their websites, which enables them to create a wide variety of online content for all Internet users. If you’re interested in the ins-and-outs of our approach to maximizing revenue for publishers, you can read more in this document . Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

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Our approach to maximizing advertising revenue for online publishers

All website owners need to pay for the costs of creating content and making it available online. Whether delivering entertainment, products, news, services, social networking or opinions, they need to pay their way by selling advertising or charging their users. Website owners, or “online publishers,” span the range from individual bloggers to multinational companies. If they sell advertising, they can do this directly themselves, via their own sales force. Alternatively, they can use an ad network to place ads on the pages of their website. Many publishers use a combination of these methods if they can’t sell all their ad space themselves (for example, a publisher may have an unpredicted surge in traffic — and therefore ad space — resulting from a popular post, or from a major website linking to them). We have a long history of helping online publishers make money from their websites. We wanted to update you on our continuing work in this area, and how Google’s newer products can provide real and significant results for clients. We currently have three main products that work together to help online publishers of all sizes and types maximize their revenue. AdSense AdSense , launched in 2003, places highly relevant ads on our partners’ websites , who share in the ad revenue. In 2009, our AdSense partners, comprising over a million large and small publishers, earned over $5.2 billion through AdSense. AdSense is designed to help online publishers get the most revenue possible for their ad space, without having to directly manage advertiser relationships. When a publisher enables AdSense on their site, Google automatically maximizes the publisher’s revenues every time a page loads . It does this in real time, by selecting the most valuable ad from AdWords advertisers and a large pool of other competing ad networks and buyers. Ad serving Larger publishers with their own ad sales teams use our ad serving products (like DoubleClick’s DFP or Google Ad Manager ) to serve the most valuable ad that they’ve sold directly to advertisers or ad agencies. DFP is the industry’s leading ad serving platform that powers the advertising businesses of the largest online publishers, while Google Ad Manager is designed to meet the needs of growing online publishers. Our ad serving products are a key focus for us and we’re continuing to make significant investments in this area. You can read about some of our DFP customers here and some of our Google Ad Manager customers here . DoubleClick Ad Exchange DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a real-time auction marketplace for display ad space — it includes ad networks on one side, and major online publishers on the other. Publishers are in complete control of which networks they allow to bid, what ads can appear on their sites and which ad space they make available. Maximizing revenue across various ad networks is sometimes called “yield management.” For major online publishers, the Ad Exchange offers an easy-to-use yield management solution — it selects the highest paying ad from across multiple, competing ad networks, in real time. However, the Ad Exchange goes further than simple “yield management” to provide a more complete revenue maximization solution. Through a unique process called “dynamic allocation,” it also compares — again, in real time — the value of the highest-paying ad in the Ad Exchange with any ads that the publisher has entered into their ad server (such as ad network deals) and chooses the highest paying one. By definition, the Ad Exchange only serves ads when it can offer a higher price for ad space. In fact, analysis shows that the average price a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange is over 130% higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to ad networks and other third parties. (Of course, while similar, the ad space being compared is not identical.) A continuing effort Today’s online publishers, large and small, operate in a complicated and fragmented advertising environment. We’re focused on developing a full suite of technology products — such as AdSense, ad serving products and DoubleClick Ad Exchange — that can maximize all publishers’ advertising revenues. We’re also working to bring new advertisers to online advertising and make the process easier for them, to grow the advertising pie for everyone. By doing this, we hope to help all publishers fund their websites, which enables them to create a wide variety of online content for all Internet users. If you’re interested in the ins-and-outs of our approach to maximizing revenue for publishers, you can read more in this document . Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

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Our approach to maximizing advertising revenue for online publishers