Welcome back to the third installment of Search Marketing 101 (if you have missed the previous installments please visit Part 1 & Part 2). Today we will go over the basics of tracking and targeting your ads.
Whether it’s in house reporting or an analytics package offered by the search engine you choose to buy ad words from, you MUST track everything. Tracking results provides you all the insight to accurately determine test winners, move bids up and down and add negative keywords.
At the very least you should get conversion tracking (a service that is offered by Google, Yahoo and MSN). If you cannot track the performance of your search engine marketing efforts and assign a value to it, there is no reason to start in the first place. There is also a lot of value to Geo-Targeting, specifically for small regional businesses that might only be interested in reaching a specific geography.
If your product or service is only available in a specific region, Geo-Targeting (see Google’s demo video below) is a great option. This will allow your ad only to show to users in a select region. You can target by city, state, or even country. By geo-targeting you will most likely have lower costs-per-click and will get an additional line of copy calling out your local roots. This can be a boon for locally based small businesses, and is an option offered by the search engines.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9r3PayqaZM]
Please check back next week for the fourth and fifth installments of Search Marketing 101.
