Renegade Search

This post is meant to inspire people that aren't tracking goals on their site (or don't pay attention to them). If you're one of those people that says "well, i know that business is up, so I must be getting more traffic on my website" OR "business is down, so it must be because I'm getting less traffic on my website", this post is for you.

If you're going to do only one thing in your analytics implementation, YOU SHOULD TRACK GOALS.

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Many businesses find that they can greatly reduce the amount of wasted ad spend by simply analyzing and observing when the majority of their most profitable transactions and leads take place. By comparing this to the periods of time when Cost-Per-Conversion, number of leads, and quality of leads have decreased, it can become clear that certain times of the day and week yield superior advertising results.

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A very simple exercise that can benefit an organic or paid search campaign is the use of annotations within Google Analytics. As your website continues to develop, inevitable changes will occur - your traffic may increase or decrease, rankings in the SERPs may rise and fall, and in the end, determining the cause of such events is a quintessential piece of the puzzle. If you are able to identify sources of improvement, or in some cases regression, taking the necessary steps in creating the most efficient, well rounded internet marketing campaign possible becomes easier. Making improvements should always be a goal; the ever-changing nature of search engines forces us to constantly re-assess both time-proven and more recent, untested strategies that may help a website's performance. Knowing how to effectively utilize annotations can be quite helpful in that process.

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Over the last year, Google has begun weeding out less serious Google Product Search feeds by tightening up their product feed requirements through Google Merchant Center. Recently, Google sent out emails asking many advertisers to add a line of code to their Robots.txt file on their websites.  Their email listed the following:
Robots.txt preventing image crawl

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SEO fulfills one main purpose: making an introduction. When a Google user searches for a generic keyword like "Chicago internet marketing firm" they are turning to Google to sort out all the possibly relevant websites on the web and rank them in an order of most authoritative to least. But just because a search engine user comes to your site via Google from a non-branded keyword doesn't mean they are going to become a customer or client. SEO only gets them in the front door; it's your website that has to sell them.

If you are trying to bring in business by ranking for generic keywords in Google you are relying on your website to be the initial point of contact for a potential lead or sale. You don't just need to have a website that is, "up to snuff," Your site needs to persuade the visitor to convert. A conversion is a predetermined goal of a website - it can be filling out a lead form, a download, a sale etc... and if you have a bad site there is a good chance your visitors aren't converting as much as they should be.

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