Occasionally, AdWords likes to add in nifty new features to its interface that even the most on-the-ball search marketers never really notice until a few months later, when they suddenly ask themselves (or the entire office at large), “Has this always been here?”

Such is the story of the new Segments feature, which AdWords first implemented in November of 2009 under the Filter tab.

Now, though, it gets a tab of its very own, sandwiched between All but Deleted Keywords and the aforementioned Filter tabs. Just click on that handy dandy little Segments tab, and you can sort all your performance data by network, day, week, month, quarter, year, day of the week, click type, device, and… oh, that’s it?

I think you get the picture.

Needless to say, this is a really cool and versatile new feature, made even cooler by the fact that it saves a lot of time as well. Instead of going through and selecting one day or week or month at a time in the date range in order to view your data, you can view it all at once and, blessedly, compare numbers without having to lay a finger on Excel.

Of course, since the initial discovery and subsequent whoas, we here at Engine Ready have been putting the new Segments tab to use. So far, we’ve mostly been segmenting by week, so that we can get a really good picture of why performance increases or decreases week to week. To do this, select a month (or two or three) as your date range, then segment by week. You end up getting something that looks like this:

Each of the four weeks of data is broken down, so that you can easily take a look at the changes in cost per click, conversion rate, position, and anything else that might be affecting your account’s performance. Which makes it much simpler to answer the question: why?

Which makes it much, much simpler to go for the impossible: true optimization.

Adwords, Analytics, Google AdWords, PPC

There is a list of do and don’t when it comes to building a website or redoing an existing one. But have you ever thought about how these decisions can affect your online marketing? This post is intended for the decision makers of businesses, those who might have so many things on their plate that sometimes the obvious questions get skipped over.

One specific I’d like to bring up is the process of picking a shopping cart. In the past couple of months, we have come across shopping carts that do not host 3^rd party analytics or at least the shopping cart customer service says this. Meaning the shopping cart will not support the analytics to track your online marketing efforts such as PPC, Organic Search, and Email Blasts.

But if your website is dependent upon ppc marketing, email blasts, organic rankings, banner ads, etc it is even more imperative to keep track of these channels. The great advantage to online marketing is the ability to track your leads or sales.

Okay, I know most of you already know this and the importance of tracking so I’ll get to the point. For those in the position to make the final decisions…you may want to ask the shopping cart vendor if they’ll support 3^rd party tracking from the get go. Below is a quick check off list to help you on your way.

1.       Do you support 3^rd party tracking?

2.       Who will or is allowed to implement the tracking?

3.       Is there additional cost if the shopping cart vendor installs the tracking?

Analytics, Shopping Cart, tracking

Operation Camouflage: Redux

There is a little talked about feature in Google AdWords listed under the Tools section called IP Exclusion.  This feature allows you to block your ads on Google from being seen by a specific computer.  You are allowed a maximum of 20 IP’s per campaign.

Many SEM analysts focus more on Search Phrases, Demographics, Referring URLs, etc… But what about the visitors IP address?  Provided that the visitor has a Static IP, we can assume that each visit under the same IP address is a unique visitor.  One known exception would be any visitor which has AOL.com as their Host Domain.

If you are using a Website Analytics product which allows for custom reports to be exported (including the visitors IP address), you are in luck.  If you are only using Google Analytics, you are out of luck as they do not capture this information – although there is another way…

Export the largest data sample you can and open it in Excel.  Select the IP address column and perform a Pivot Table. (See Instructions)

·          Save the file to your Hard Drive (Any Name)

·          Select the IP Address Column

·          Select the <Insert> tab

·          Under the <Tables> ribbon you will see PivotTable

·          Select <OK>

·          A New Sheet will open and on the right hand side of the screen you will see “IP” with a check Box

·          Select the Check Box

·          Drag the “IP” and Checkbox while holding the left mouse button down into the Values Field directly below.

·          Now Select the 1^st value under “Count of IP” in the cells to the left

·          Right Click >> Sort >> Sort Largest to Smallest

What this action has done is show you the number of times a unique IP address has visited your site.  Typically the 1^st IP address is your own, but what about the others?  You can blindly add the top 20 IP address to your AdWords campaign immediately if you would like, but I highly suggest you investigate further… Who are these visitors?  Are they Organic visits or PPC? Are they returning customers who have bought in the past or are they a possible competitor who has clicked your ad 20 times off of your most expensive keyword?  There are many questions a data analyst should ask before ultimatly using this information in Google.  The better the filtering capabilities of your analytics, the greater the chance that you are isolating your competitors and avoid blocking your best customers.

There are many benefits to blocking your ad from competitors.  If you are both competing for the top position, you will be less inclined to increase your bid if you see yourself in the 1^st position (meanwhile the rest of the world sees you in the 2^nd).  You will also decrease the number of impressions which will ultimatly help your CTR.  And most obviously, you will limit the number of poor quality/fraudulent clicks.

Worst case scenario is that 20 people in the world may not see your ads but the best case is that you will save money on bad clicks, keep competition down, and increase your CTR. 

If you do not have an analytics package which allows you to see the IP address, there is a black-hat method of discovering your competitions IP address.  This method is by no means perfect, although I would venture to say that this stratagy has a 90% chance of being effective.  But you will need to ask me directly to find out.  This one is private ;)

Analytics, Excel, Google AdWords, IP Exclusion

For many people using Google Analytics, a major drawback when analyzing data is the max 500 rows constraint in their reports.  For a person who wants to look at all keywords & search phrases over the last year, it could take hours to export and compile.

The easiest way to get this data without running numerous reports is to add “&limit=50000” to the end of your URL.  Although you will still see 500 lines in the browser being displayed, when you export you will be exporting all rows up to the 50,000 line mark.

Analytics, Google