There are many ways to generate interest and sales to your company these days. Outside of typical marketing strategies there are many ways, both offline and online, to drive highly qualified leads to your business. One of these ways is through using a lead generation company. These companies usually specialize in driving your company highly qualified and ready to buy prospects. Depending on your company and business objectives leads can even be passed to you directly through a telephone call. For companies that have high close rates over the phone this can be a huge advantage to their business. If done correctly, not only are they getting leads that are qualified, they are receiving leads that are ready and willing to buy now. Companies such as water damage and restoration companies, plumbers, lawyers, and doctors are just some of the types of companies that can profit from lead generation.

So far this may sound no different than a typical marketing campaign. While this is somewhat true, lead generation is different as it is usually outsourced to an outside firm that specializes in driving companies leads your particular industry. For example, if you are a water damage company you can drive leads via seo, paid search, google maps, and yellow pages. However, if you where to employ a company that specializes in water damage leads you can increase your target reach without changing your current marketing strategy. The particular site drives leads from a site that specializes in water damage.

Lead generation companies can use many different methods to drive high qualified and hot leads right to your business. If you are looking for a lead generation to your company feel free to reach out to us for help!

It happens more than you think – and no you are not alone – when creating a new campaign or adding new keywords, ads or even landing pages your ads may not appear right away. However, before you start lobbing emails and phone calls into Google support understand that there is a review process for new campaigns. The review process can take up to a few days, however while you are waiting make sure that it is not your fault your ads are not appearing.

Here are a few reasons that may effect your ads:

1) Campaign, Keyword, Ad – Paused

Yes it happens to everyone (including the pros) – make sure that everything is running correctly and not paused. It is easy to forget about this simple aspect espsically if you are in the interface making changes to your account.

2)Budget Issues

Yet another simple fix. Make sure that you have set your daily or monthly budget for your campaigns. This happens alot if you are using the Google Adwords Editor to create and manage your campaigns. Also make sure that your keyword bids are not higher than your daily budget.

3)Disapproved Ads / Keywords

To make the web a much more user friendly place for you and I, Google does not allow you to bid on certain keywords or place certain words in your ads. Most of these have to do with particular keywords that are prohibited, for a full list take a look here.

Ads can also be disapproved if you use similar prohibited terms or copyrighted phrases. Make sure to double check everything before you launch your campaign.

4)Low Search Volume

While it is always a good idea to bid on long tail keywords that you competitors are not biddng on, Google will not let you bid on terms that receive very  very low search traffic. If this is the case you will be notified in the Google Adwords interface in the status column that your ads are receiving ”Low Search Volume.” While this is sometimes disappointing – Google can not make people search for certain phrases.

5) Billing

This is yet another simple fix – make sure that you have added your credit card information and that Google has verified your card and billing address. And to answer your question – unlike everything else Google does, Adwords does cost money. (Now you know why your gmail account is free!)

Remember, most of the time your ads are not showing because of the review process. But it is always a good idea to double check that it is not your fault.

With more and more companies starting paid search campaigns everyday, as well as more emphasis placed on SEO, many question whether it is worth it or not to bid on branded keywords. From a per-cost standpoint, it seems very cut and dry – people searching for your branded term are going to click on your organic link, so why give them a choice to click on a paid link? However, this high level outlook is not as accurate as it may seem.

Not only do I typically err on the side of caution when it comes to things involving paid search (and other things in life) but having a paid search link under your branded terms can help in a couple of ways.

1) Landing pages: While organic listing are great, they can let your potential visitor come in though a landing page that you might not expect. Just as you might not run a paid search campaign that hit your homepage, you can control the landing page on your branded keyword search campaign. For example, pretend that you sell cars and when a user types in “2009 abc company cars” your organic link sends them to your homepage with all your 2010 models listed. While they may end up finding the 2009 page your chances of getting a conversion by sending them to an optimized 2009 model page are much higher.

2) Competitors: Bidding on competitor branded keywords is just a fact of the paid search industry. While I personally don’t agree with it, the fact remains that it happens. That being said, chances are if you are in a competitive market your brand is being bid on by one or more of your competitors. This means if you are not bidding on your term your competitor is being listed first in the sponsor links and may be one of the first links a potential may see. Also don’t forget to add the fact that it looks obvious that you are not trying to promote your brand to your clients – which might be a deciding factor whether they purchase from you (I told you I sided with caution). This is also a great opportunity to send visitors to a comparison page of your product and others like it.

To sum up – start bidding on your branded search terms. The clicks are cheap and only takes a few minutes to get going, which we all can agree is worth a few more conversions!

Lets face it, most small and even large businesses simply do not have the funds to use advanced Analytics software such as Omniture or WebTrends. However, with Google Analytics, these companies gain access to a very powerful tool for free. Although this is great, many users quickly find that because it’s so powerful, it’s not as easy to learn and use as one may think.

One of the problems that many e-business owners run into is tracking Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo search marketing visits in Goggle Analytics.

The good news is that you can use Google Analytics to track paid search for Adwords campaigns because Adwords automatically tags keywords. Unfortunately, Yahoo and Mircosoft do not automatically tag paid keywords. While the process is not ‘automatic’ it is fairly simple… at least in theory.

The first step is to go to the Google URL tool builder and make a tag for your keywords. This post at Analytics Talk is a great starting point if you need more information. After you get a feel for tagging URL’s the next step is to insert the following strings so that you do not have to change each URL for every keyword. This helps you avoid manually changing all of your keywords destination URL’s.

• For Yahoo use: utm_term={OVKEY}
• For Adcenter use: utm_term={keyword}

These terms are extremely important as they will tell Google Analytics certain information about the paid keywords. There are more variables that you can place into the string to give you more granular data – Look out for Part 2 of this post for more variables.

The final and the part I have the most fun with is to upload the URL’s into Yahoo! and Adcenter.

First, download the Adcenter desktop software located at here. Once it’s is downloaded, simply highlight all of your keywords and change their destination URL’s with the string that you created in the Google URL toolbuilder. Next, upload the changes, and in about 24 hours visits from Adcenter should begin to appear in your Google Analytics account.

I saved the best for last because if you have made it this far, you can do anything! To get Yahoo data into analytics, you first will have to log into your account and download the campaign into an Excel document. Then you will want to open the document and append the URL that you created to the end of each keywords destination URL. Next upload the Excel document and use the upload feature by filling out a support ticket. – If everything is set up correctly then Yahoo will take care of the rest. The problem is that you need to triple check the upload file to make sure everything is good to go. If not it will be another few days before the data starts to show up in Google Analytics.

If you need help with setting this up feel free to contact us!

Some good news over the past week! Google has finally rolled out image ads for paid search for all users. This is great news for all e-commerce companies, as they now can opt to show images and prices of their products right in the Google paid-listings. As I said in the previous post, these images will show when a user clicks on the “Show products from advertiser” link under the display URL.

To set up this feature in your Google Adwords account you first must have a Google Base account and have all of your products uploaded into it. If you already have everything in Google Base set up, then the rest is easy.

Simply go to the campaign your want to display images for and then click on the settings tab. From here scroll to “Networks, devices and extensions” and then go to “Ad extensions” -> Edit.

Click the Ad Extensions "Edit" link

Now, enter your Google Merchant Center account number and away you go!

I found it incredibly easy to link the accounts and start showing the image ads in the search results. It take about 30 minutes to be fully up and running, but it is worth the wait.

A new year to many people means a fresh start in their lives, careers, and relationships. In the coming year I hope that everyone achieves their planned goals and maybe even succeeds in a few new year’s resolutions.

Small and large businesses also look at the new year to develop goals, marketing objects, budgets, and more in hopes of increasing business and generating more revenue. In this day and age, more companies will look online to meet these goals, and if this trend continues, more businesses will start advertising online in 2010 then ever before. If you or someone that you know is looking to start up a new paid search marketing campaign or revamp an existing campaign please take a look at what I believe are the 4 top level tips to remember about paid search.

CTR

Click through rate is perhaps the most important part of your paid search campaign when first starting out. While conversion rate is a key factor in whether a campaign is working or not, click through rate is a great indicator on how your campaign is performing. Low click through rates signal that at the campaign level (not the site level) your choice of keywords, ad text, and placement needs optimization.

Landing Pages

Once an account can maintain a healthy CTR, then you can focus on conversion rates by looking at your site structure itself. No matter how compelling your ad is, a prospect will not purchase from you if your website is a disaster. This is why landing page optimization is just as critical as managing keywords, bids, and ads. If you are not willing to change your landing page or website when running a paid search campaign then you probably need to double check if paid search is right for you. I bold faced the last sentence for a reason: Paid search does not create new leads and sales – your website does. Paid search helps drive qualified traffic to your website, and once there it is up to your website to convert the visitor into a sale.

Existing Accounts

If you already have an account and would like to start fresh, do not delete your account only to create a new one. Instead, work from your existing account so that you maintain your historical data and quality score. This is an important factor for most paid search providers and can effect your rankings greatly.

Quality Score

This is used by the search engines to determine how relevant your campaign is to your the keywords that you are bidding on. It is important that search engines maintain their credibility by only allowing advertisers to bid on keywords that have to do with their products and services. That being said, factors for quality score include:

• Keywords – Make sure that when picking keywords they are relevant to what you are trying to sell, as they affect where your ads will be placed and how much per click you will be charged.
• Ads- When writing an ad, make sure to include the keyword that you are bidding so that the search engine finds it relevant to your campaign.
• Website- Search engines also look at the website to determine if the keywords that you are bidding on are relevant. Make sure that your site mentions the product or service that you are bidding on.

Well, for those of you who are developers out there, you may have noticed that if you’re using FireBug 1.4.5 , you may be getting a JavaScript error caused by in ga.js. ga.js is the JavaScript file that Google Analytics uses to allow developers to track traffic/usage statistics for their website, but recently FireBug in FireFox has been producing an error for developers everywhere.

Continue reading for screen-shots and some more details!

ga.js JavaScript Error in FireBug

The bad news: You have to look at it, and you know that it’s going to tear you apart because you love to write code that’s error free, and you can’t stand seeing a JavaScript error on a website you’ve built, even if it’s not your fault!

The good news: It’s harmless. I’ve read elsewhere that some users have had problems with this error effecting other JavaScript code, but I haven’t seen this on any of my sites. Analytics still works properly and is still tracking your site.

The solution: Wait it out, let’s hope that FireBug can fix the underlying issue and hopefully we’ll get FireBug /Google Analytics working smoothly together sooner than later.

UPDATE:
A visitor sent in this URL from Mozilla.org, which describes a similar issue…
-and-
we checked the change log for Google Analytics and it appears that changes are being made to the setCookiePersistence function that may be part of the problem?

What are your thoughts?

Marketing your website properly is just as important (if not more important) as having a properly designed and developed website. In today’s digital world, having a website that works to increase revenue and sales is crucial, especially in a time where a nonexistent (or outdated) website could cost your company hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales.

Here’s 10 quick tips for marketing your website effectively…

1. Make a BIG deal out of the launch of your website! You should be proud of your new site, and use this as a tool to contact your customers to let them know things are changing, and for the better. Market the new features your site will have both online and offline, and let it be known that you’ve invested in yourself.
2. Start a subscription-based newsletter. Every company, in my opinion, should have some sort of informative newsletter. Your newsletter should be published on a set schedule, but only one that you can maintain. Ideally, your newsletters should contain informative articles. You don’t need too much content, but the content you have should be eye-catching, easy to read, and something that people want to see. If you bore your customers with your newsletter, you won’t be helping to market your website. Create a newsletter that compels people to do something… write a how-to on something related to your industry, or a top 10 tips that people might find interest in (wink, wink).
3. Add your website to your company’s voicemail message. Even if it’s something along the lines of, “Leave us a message, or contact us on the web at www.ludex-marketing.com”. Are you seeing a trend here? It’s important to TALK about your website, and if you have something people want to see (which you should with that fancy site of yours!), your work will pay off.
4. Put your website on your company building’s sign. This one’s sort of a no-brainer, but what better of a way to get people to scope out your company in the comfort of their own home. People driving by will remember your address, especially if you have an eye-catching sign, and make your website large enough and easy to read from a distance.
5. Tell Google when you’ve got new content… Take this tip straight from Google themselves, “If your site is very new, we may not know about it yet. Tell Google about your site. One way to expedite Google’s discovery of new pages is to submit a Sitemap. Even if your site is already in the index, Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages you consider most important.” If you aren’t sure if your site has a sitemap indexed with Google, or you’d like help building your sitemap and properly publishing it, contact Ludex Marketing today.
6. Use an email signature in your correspondences, and make sure that a link to your website is in it. Not only will this provide for an easy way for your customers (or potential customers) to find your site, but it will also allow for an easy portal for them to visit you.
7. Yes, your website is up and running, but now how are people going to find it? Many companies build a website and forget about it… YIKES! Use social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter to broadcast your website to those you are in contact with. For small businesses and startups, word of mouth can be the difference between success and failure!
8. Advertising your site offline is equally important as advertising your site online. Make sure your web address is in your literature and publications (business cards, corporate branding material, fax cover sheets, etc.)
9. Update your website AT LEAST once a month. I would say less than once a week is too little, but it’s important to keep your content fresh, especially if you have an informational site.
10. Make sure that your website is built with valid code (to check it, go here: http://validator.w3.org/), your meta tags are properly used, and each page has a proper title. Consult your web developer about these items, or contact Ludex Marketing for a  pressure-free consultation, as they are all important for your website to have.
11. Realize that the key to successfully marketing your website is a never-ending, integral process that you NEED to do. Take the time to properly work on the items above, and dedicate yourself to doing it right. You just invested in your website, right? Why not make the most of it and start seeing your hard-earned efforts pay off!

Over the course of this month Google has slowly released image ads for some of their paid search advertisers. This will become a great feature for any e-commerce advertiser that wishes to display some of there top selling items along with their prices. For an example, try searching for “hard drives” into Google. As seen below one of the top advertisers has the option for searchers to click below their display URL to “show products from this advertiser”.

While this is good news for the few who have it now, it will be interesting to see how it plays out once everyone gets their hands on it. From current reports, Google claims that advertisers with images displays are getting a much higher click through rate and conversion rate. Yahoo has tested this option out with their paid search ads and have claimed to see click throughs go up as much as 20%.

This makes sense now, but what will happen once all of the advertisers get their hands on it?

I had a chance to talk with a Google Adwords rep and he seemed to think once it rolls out paid search ads with images will require no additional cost. If this information is correct, then once everyone has the image ads then the click through rates will go back to standard levels.

I am a bit skepical now of how image ads will play out in the future, but I am excited to see how Google and Yahoo are constantly updating to make their systems more robust.