Valentine's Day - Ads

It is important to separate your keywords into specific ad groups tailored to different Valentine customers. Things to consider are:

• Men: Create specific ads for male customers, stressing the ease and speed with which they can shop. If you sell lingerie and provide easy sizing guides or tips, make this known within your ad copy. Lingerie sales are expected to be down this year, in part due to falling prices but perhaps also because of the potential "risk" of the purchase. Overall, make it as easy as possible for men to get it right!
  
• Women: Popular presents could include accessories (wallets, scarves, cuff links), underwear and jewellery. In the main, women are less last-minute, so a good returns policy or delivery deal may be more appealing.
• Last-Minute Shoppers: If you have next-day delivery, make sure this is prominently displayed in the ad. If delivery is free, make it even more pronounced, and if you are able to deliver to multiple addresses (e.g. home or office), make this known too. Include last delivery dates in your ad, and reassure the customer that you will deliver by 14th, if you are able to. Other reassuring messages can help customers find you more easily (e.g. "Forgotten Valentine's Day? / Don't Worry! 100s of gift ideas online")
• Flowers: Special deals, delivery discounts and flexibility are often the most important part of any ad, but it's worth also mentioning the quality and freshness of flowers, as well as range. Make sure your rose keywords are in a separate ad group, with highly tailored ads (trial at least three), and if you have any special deals (e.g. "Spend £30 - free chocolates"), these must be mentioned. It seems obvious, but the facility to write a "personalised message" with your flowers may also appeal.
  
• Manage Budgets Effectively: Use last year's results and industry predictions to estimate peak buying times for your products. Ad-scheduling could help you fine-tune efficiency levels and help you deal most effectively with seasonal hikes in traffic. Last year, for example, searches for "flowers" on Google started to rise dramatically on 11th February, peaking on 12th, but not really tailing off until the end of the day on 14th http://www.google.com/trends?q=flowers&ctab=0&geo=GB&date=2007&sort=0) Finally, separate high-performing keywords into tailored ad groups and manage this budget separately.

Valentine's Day - Keywords

Valentine's Day 2008 was estimated to be worth £1.3bn to retailers, with shoppers spending an average of £95.80 (British Retail Consortium Feb 2008). Preparation for this event should begin as early as possible. The key products for retailers during this period are:

• Flowers - If you sell flowers, be sure your keyword coverage is as comprehensive as possible, prioritising the most popular products. It would be a good idea to manage your budget for each bouquet differently, and consider writing tailored ads for best-performing bouquets.
• Chocolates - Last year, 43 per cent of people bought chocolates as presents (Retail Week, Feb 2007), possibly alongside flowers or other seasonal gifts, or as part of a special offer. Other confectionery goods such as truffles, luxury chocolates & Valentine-specific candies (e.g. chocolate hearts) are all worth double-checking on your keyword inventory and expanding upon if neccessary.
• Jewellery - Ensure good coverage on last year's best sellers, as well as any new items for 2008. Predictably, pendants, lockets, and engagement rings are going to be popular, so expand on these ad groups within your campaign, write compelling ads, & make sure you monitor your bids closely.
• Miscellaneous - Other gifts to consider are lingerie, cuddly toys, Valentine's cards and Ecards. Also popular are "experience" gifts and accessories. Remember more generic searches ("valentine's gift", "quick valentine's ideas", etc.) and don't forget to add negative keywords ("anti-valentine's", "valentine's day massacre", as well as "lyrics", "poems", etc. if you do not stock these products).

Google Analytics

In this installment of Analytics 101, we'll dive straight into some statistics that you can use right away. Hopefully by now you've finished installing your tracking code and have had some visitor traffic you can look at.

When you sign in to Google Analytics and view your reports, you'll be taken straight to the Dashboard, which is a top-level view of your site so that you can see how you're doing at a glance.

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It's important to make sure you always have the date range you want selected. Use the Date Selector in the top right to choose your range with either the Calendar or Timeline view.

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The large graph shows your Visits over time by default. If you click on the drop-down near the top right of the graph, you can make it expand to select any one of six important statistics for your site: Visits, Pageviews, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and % New Visits.

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You might also notice that these same six statistics appear in the Site Usage section under the graph. You can learn how Google Analytics defines the basic terms of Visits, Pageviews, and Pages/Visit from this Help Center article; to be consistent, make sure everyone who'll be using your reports understands them.

The latter three stats are where it really gets interesting. Each of them will provide unique insights into your traffic based on context that only you, the person who best understands your website, can provide.

• Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who left your site after only seeing one page. For most sites, a high Bounce Rate is bad since people are arriving, taking a quick look around, and leaving immediately. Either the site isn't useful or they're turned off by something. By monitoring your Bounce Rate over time, you can optimize your landing pages and then check to see if your changes worked - a lower rate means people like what you've done with the place. Bounce Rate is best used to compare different sets of your own data. Websites and industries vary too greatly for us to give you here a set number on what a healthy Bounce Rate is. For example, blogs usually have high Bounce Rates no matter what since normal visitor behavior is to read the newest post and then leave.
  

• Average Time on Site indicates the average length of time a visitor spends on your site's tracked pages. A high number may mean that visitors are very engaged with your site, which is great if, say, your goal is to provide entertaining content. However, you may not necessarily want it high. If you have an e-commerce site and people spend a long time on it, perhaps your buying process is too long or confusing. Once you find out which way is best for you, you can take steps to change your Average Time on Site number in the desired direction.
  

• % New Visits tells you the percentage of visitors that have never visited your site before. If you look at a date range where you've run a far-reaching ad campaign, you'd be excited to see an increased number of new visitors who have been exposed to your campaigns and are curious to see your website. Or perhaps your goal is to create loyalty among your customer base, in which case you'd want a significant portion of your visitors to be returning. Because % New Visits is a statistic that usually needs more context and absolute numbers to be useful, go ahead and click on the link to see a detailed report for it. You can do the same for any of the statistics we've discussed. In fact, you can pretty much click on any stat in the Google Analytics interface to drill down for more details.
  

We've just covered the first set of metrics that you can use to measure the performance of your site, as well as the success of any changes you happen to make to it, and we didn't even have to leave the comfort of the Dashboard. Next time, we'll look at another set of useful data, your Traffic Sources reports.

Google Closes DoubleClick Acquisition

Finally, Google completed its acquisition of DoubleClick. This acquisition is one of many steps we're taking toward enhancing monetization and serving technology for advertisers, agencies, and publishers, making search and display advertising more targeted, and improving advertising relevance for users.

Over the next few months, we'll work with advertisers, agencies, publishers, and users to determine the best approach for enhancing DoubleClick's offerings.

While the acquisition will bring about some exciting new opportunities, rest assured that it won't change our commitment to Google products, DoubleClick products, and our service to you.

Google Audio Ads, Meet Google Analytics

The Google Audio Ads and Google Analytics teams have been working hard to create integrated reporting tools so advertisers can more easily track the impact and the resulting ROI of their Audio Ads campaigns. We're very excited to announce that these tools are now available to AdWords and Analytics customers.

For the first time, advertisers can now easily track website visits, conversion rates, revenue, transactions, and other metrics generated by Audio Ads campaigns. These metrics are available in the Analytics tab of AdWords accounts, as well as in Analytics accounts.

As you can see in the image below, the Audio Campaign report shows the correlation between your campaign impressions and website traffic, for example. Keep in mind though, that the website traffic may include traffic generated by other channels, not just Audio Ads.

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Bedding.com, a leading online home furnishings store and beta tester of the new report, used Google Audio Ads to reach their target customers in areas like Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, New York, and other smaller markets. Then, they used Google Analytics to analyze the reach and success of their campaign, by looking at website traffic, conversion rates, revenue, and more.

Here's what Ted Kavana, President & CEO of Bedding.com, had to say:

"Using Google Audio Ads and Google Analytics, we were able to reach thousands of new customers very fast and at an incredible price. As the customers arrived at Bedding.com, Google Analytics made it very simple to analyze the data and start preparing for our next advertising blitz."

Bedding.com has seen unique visits increase by over 32% and sales by 28% since running Audio Ads.

If you're new to Audio Ads and are interested in starting a campaign, just sign in to your AdWords account and look for the Other Campaign Types link at the bottom of the Campaign Summary page. From there, you can create an Audio Ads campaign. Once you've run your first radio campaign, the Audio Campaign report will automatically appear in your Google Analytics account if you've linked it to your AdWords account.

If you already run Audio Ads campaigns, learn more about how you can use the Audio Campaign report to track your progress.