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Can I add multiple Adwords accounts conversion tracking to the same web page?

Salvatore — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 20:38:04 +0000

Google Analytics Dashboard showing goal conversions

I was recently asked this question by a client: "Can I add multiple Adwords accounts conversion tracking to the same web page?" As it is a question that has cropped up a few times, I'm publishing my answer here.

Here is the short answer:

1. Google Adwords: Yes (OK to have multiple Adwords accounts conversion tracking on same page - but please read 1* below)

BUT

2. Google Analytics: Not advised (not advisable to have multiple Analytics accounts tracking code on same page)

1*. Having multiple Google Adwords conversion tracking codes on the same page is not a problem (it is also OK to have one Google Analytics account tracking code on same page as multiple Adwords accounts conversion tracking code) - but with the following proviso: If there is a chance that the same visitor could click on two different ads, one from each Adwords account, and subsequently makes a purchase within 30 days of clicking on the first ad, the sale will register as a conversion in both Adwords accounts (that is 2 conversions - but only 1 sale - one conversion in each account).

And here is the longer answer....

This makes sense because maybe they were influenced by seeing your two different Google ads, in two different Google searches, or on two different websites on the Google content ad network. However there is no way to split the conversion between the two, so if you are using the conversion tracking to measure your Adwords campaigns ROI (I hope you are) then you will get a false inflation of the ROI, as you should only credit a portion (say half in this case) of the conversion to that ad.

To improve your metrics, if you do use two sets of Adwords conversion tracking code on the same goal/conversion page, you may want to limit the time that the ad cookie lives - maybe set it to 24 hours, so that when the visitor clicks on the second ad they see and makes a purchase, the first ads cookie has already expired. This will reduce the likelihood of measuring 2 conversions (one to each account) for a single booking, but not eliminate it completely, as a person can still click on two ads the same day.

Why you should not add two Google Analytics tracking code to the same web page

The reasoning behind the "not advised to use two different Google analytics accounts tracking code on one web page" is that Google analytics uses the same cookies in the users browser to store information about their session.

Imagine a visitor visits the website for the first time. They arrive on a webpage, and the first Google analytics account code (account A) sets the __UTMA cookie for the session ID, and sets the start time and page count (count = 1) in the __UTMB cookie in the browser and writes to account A database that this particular visitor has visited 1 page. On the same page the next Google Analytics account (account B) code runs, reads the same cookies and updates the __UTMB cookie to set the page count to two (count now =2) and writes to account B that this visitor has visited two pages. Say the visitor bounces off the site and does not return for 30 minutes till the __UTMB cookie expires. The first analytics account will correctly report this is a bounce. The second may not. For visitors who go to multiple pages, as the visitor moves through the website the same cookies data is read and overwritten, and data from the cookies read and written to the two analytics accounts, there are multiple opportunities for things to go wrong. The only data you'll be able to rely on in both accounts may be the referrer, whether the visitor was new or returning, and the number of visitors. The time on site, bounces, page views, and related data will be unreliable in unpredictable ways. There are ways to get around part of this problem, but they require some javascript trickery and a lot of testing, and you never really solve it properly. And as Google makes changes to the ga.js tracking code (not always announced), the trickery may or may not work anymore.

Some people try the two sets of Google Analytics code from two different accounts on one web page, and you may see answers on the Google forums with code snippets showing ho to get it working. However clever the coders may be, the code does NOT work as intended. It appears to work because both accounts have data in them that looks OK, and the coders will often rely on reading the cookie data during separate browser settings - but everything is not as it seems when you dig a little deeper and run more extensive tests. Only when you turn off one set of code or the other do you see the real stats - with a dramatic difference in page views, bounce rates, visits, time on site, etc.

So, if anyone trys to convince you that they have this working, ask them to do the following test, and to give you the data to confirm that it really is working:

Step 1. Place only one Google Analytics account tracking code on a well trafficked web page for a week.

Step 2. The next week, add the second Google Analytics account code, and remove the first account tracking code. Now you have two weeks data, in two different accounts. Does the traffic look the same? Similar bounce rates? similar peaks and troughs on the same days of the week? About the same amount of visitors per day? Similar time on site, pages visited, etc? If not, then you need to run the same test again for longer (try a month), or for several alternating weekes, until you see the real similarities (remember that this is the same web page, only you are sending the data to two different accounts, one at a time).

Step 3. Once you know what the data looks like, add both sets of tracking code to the same web page for a week.

Now compare the data from step 1, 2 and 3. Do they look similar? How different is the data you are getting from step 3? Do you think this is something you would like to rely on for running your business? Neither would I.

See this page for more information: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html in particular note the following at the bottom of the page:

Multiple Analytics Accounts on a Given Page

Some users want to track the same page or set of pages in multiple Analytics Accounts. Analytics is designed to work effectively with a single account-to-web-property relationship. If you have multiple accounts tracking the same web property (e.g. page or sets of pages), both accounts will read from and set the same set of cookies. This set up is generally not recommended.

The bottom line is - read your Adwords ROI as a guide for watching trends - don't use it as an accounting tool. The same (even more so) goes for Google Analytics data - not everything is measured or reported, so look at it as a statistical sample of all of your traffics behavior.

Please note the date that this was posted - Google Analytics and Google Adwords tracking code is constantly being updated and improved. So although this answer is valid at the time of publication, it may not be so in the future. Feel free to ask in the comments section below of you need clarification or confirmation on this article.

Are you using multiple Analytics accounts to measure the same data? Do the reports from both accounts agree or seem to make sense?

If you have found this article helpful, please share in the comment section below - Thanks!

3 Tips for a More Profitable Google Adwords Campaign

Jhing — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:00:22 +0000

Are you advertising onine using Google Adwords? When you place an ad through Google Adwords, your business exposure is potentially massive and laser targeted. As a matter of fact, Google Adwords has the capability to reach eighty-six percent of all Internet users! No flyer or television commercial can offer that. Now that you’ve decided to swing those statistics in your favor, you need to execute your campaign effectively. Make the most out of your Adwords marketing by following these three tips to running a profitable Adwords campaign.

1.Set some clearly identified goals.

If you want to increase your click rate, focus on adding appropriate keywords, and more of them, and add specific target group designations. Adwords offers its users free tools to help you choose the best keywords possible. To improve your Return on Investment (ROI), make sure you have the best placements possible for your ads, then turn your attention to your website. Your landing page is what will either convert clickers to customers, or turn them away, so you need to make sure those who click on your Adwords ad aren’t put off or disappointed when they reach your website.

2. Organize and manage your Adwords account in a way that ensures maximum productivity.

Create separate campaigns for each product or service you want to advertise, rather than lumping them all together. This will enable you to more specifically target your ads. Avoid using duplicate keywords across the ads, as Google only displays one ad per customer at a time.

3. Create strong, effective ads.

Spread your keywords throughout the text in a way that reads as natural to the reader. Keep your message simple and straight-forward; Choose a few things that you feel make your offering stand out above comparables and focus on those. Include a strong call to action that will incite readers to an immediate response. Be specific about what they should do to proceed when they reach your landing page. Experiment with the wording and placement of your ads until you get it right.

With a Google Adwords marketing campaign, optimization of your ad does not have to mean higher ad spend, but it does mean that you will have to invest your time, consideration and effort toward creating and implementing your optimal ad campaign. Fortunately, with Google Adwords, you control the experience. Improve your ad campaign’s effectiveness by following these tips, and by getting the help of professionals like Web Marketing Ireland. Call now and speak to Sal on +353-(0)85-7089335 or email: sal@webmarketingireland.com if your monthly Adwords budget is over €2000 and you want to improve the return on your online marketing advertising investment.

The 4 Social Networks Vital to Your Local Business Success

Salvatore — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:52:27 +0000

Are you connecting with your customers by using social media?

Social networks are a goldmine of customers eager to buy from smart local business owners. Joining social networks enables your business to tap into your target markets, communicate directly with your customers, gain a following and convert them into subscribers and loyal, repeat buyers.

Here are the 4 most popular social networks every local business should join:

Facebook

Don't underestimates the power of Facebook for business. It’s the 900 pound gorilla of social networking with over 800 million active users. Facebook is the most trafficked website in the world, overshadowing even Google.

Your local business can get a piece of the pie by having a business fanpage attracting those people whose likes, interests and hobbies are a perfect match with your business. It is also a great way to publicize events such as sales, discounts, coupon codes, new products, videos, real like events (concerts, shows, seminars etc).

If you prefer to invest money rather than time, you can use the Facebook advertising program to laser target prospective customers by their location, likes and interests.

LinkedIn is like a grown up version of Facebook for business. There are no drunken student party pictures posted here - only people who want to connect and do business. Your local chamber of commerce probably has a group on LinkedIn, and you'll find several other local groups where you can meet potential business partners, suppliers, and often customers too, depending on the nature of your business.

YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google (Google owns YouTube) - and gets more use as a search engine than Yahoo and Bing combined (Yahoo and Bing merged in 2011, so they are combined now). YouTube outranks all other video sharing sites with a 40% share of the gigantic 30 billion internet video content. So it’s the best place to start with your video marketing. Google loves YouTube, and there is far less competition for search rankings in video - so use this social network/search engine to show how your business matches your customers needs. Remember to ask for the business, and tell them how to get in touch - always ask your viewers to go to your website for more information or to phone you.

Twitter

Despite being limited to the 140 character limit, Twitter is a great medium to create a constant stream of information telling people about the latest happenings in your local business. It’s like mobile phone text messaging, but to a global audience. Yet Twitter is local enough to draw people within a certain radius of your physical premises. Insert links in your tweets that bring people back to your website to relevant product or service offers. Ask your customers to follow you on Twitter via their mobile phone, to be instantly updated with events, deals and special offers. 95% of phone text messages are opened within 15 minutes of being received, so if you want to fill your restaurant at lunch time on a slow day, get your regulars in with a special deal by tweeting them a text message an hour before their lunch break.

Hey, what about Google+?

Google+ is growing fast, and may well turn into a real competitor for Facebook and LinkedIn, or complement them in some way. Most of your customers are members of several social networks, although they may not be active on all of them. Google+ does not yet have the same market penetration or user interactivity compared to the top 4 social networks above, although, if your customers are technically savvy they may hang out there. There is no blanket right or wrong answer as to which social media website will work best for your business - the best way to find you is to test them, and keep doing what works.

What do you think?

Do you agree or disagree with this list? Have you joined these 4 social networks yet? Are you getting results with Google+? Have you attracted any new business through your use of social media? Have you advertised on YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn? How successful were you campaigns? Have any questions you'd like answered? Please ask or share in the comment section below.

Know this? Use it to beat your competition in 2012

Salvatore — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:24:05 +0000

Is your business as competitive as it should be? Will you carry on as you did in 2011 and hope things get better? Or will you take the bull by the horns, and make the changes you know you need to make in 2012, to improve your return on investment in your business?

The lifeblood of your business new customers, and you know you should be using the internet to attract more sales. But what do you do first? And how can you be sure that you are not wasting your money?

I'll help you to answer these questions in a minute, but first let me explain a few things about the search engines, and about Google in particular - because Google is the giant in the industry, with the lions share of the search market.

Google also owns Youtube, and Youtube is the number 2 search engine. Yes, you read that that right - more people use Youtube to search for information online than Yahoo or Bing.

Right now, people are looking for your products or services online, using one of the search engines. Over 80% of adults in the USA, UK and Ireland use Google to search for local products and services - even if they decide to buy offline.

But how does Google know what results to show them? And how can you help Google to find your business, and to know that it is relevant to the prospective customers search?

Here's how it works: Google sends out spiders - software programs - that read web pages, and follow the links on those pages. These spiders (Google spider is called "googlebot") send the information back to Google, and it is stored in their massive database.

Lets say you decide to look for a Search Engine Marketing Consultant to help you with your online marketing. You go to Google search, and type in "search engine marketing consultant".

Google then looks in it's database, and tries to find the most relevant results. There may be millions and millions of web pages containing this search term, or "keywords". But Googles secret algorithm will give you back a page of the top ten most relevant results within less than a second. (An algorithm is just a recipe, or list of instructions, that a computer uses to calculate an answer, or give a result of a search)

Googles algorithm looks for web pages that:
a) contain the exact phrase you used
b) have other related words on the page
c) are linked to by other webpages with related content
d) are owned by or are about somebody near you
e) if you go to one of these websites, and stay there, Google measures this, and uses it to score that website so that it shows it again, the next time you or anyone else uses the same keywords.
f) Google takes over 200 measurements into account in it's search algorithm.

So how does this information help you to get your business found on the internet by prospective customers? If you re-read the paragraphs above you will see four important concepts that you need to keep in mind when planning your online marketing campaign. Did you spot them?

The Four Vital Principles for a Profitable Website

1) The first principle - the "golden rule" - for getting Google to rank your web page high in the search results - is so obvious that most people miss it. Make sure that the CONTENT of your web page is RELEVANT to what your customers are searching for online. So make sure that you use the words your customers would use to describe your products and services (the "keywords" - remember this, it's very, very important). Think about it - they may not know that they need a "data analyst" or a "web analytics consultant" - they only know about the problem they are trying to solve. Your website should educate them - it must show them that your product or service solves their problem.

2) The second concept is one that is also in your control is that the structure of your website - the links between the web pages - needs to make logical sense and be easy for the googlebot spider to follow. You need to make sure that the pages each answer a specific question, or solve a particular problem. Don't make your website one long page which tries to answer everything - have a structure that is easy for people and google to read, understand, and follow. Your site navigation - how people and spiders find their way from one page to another, should be obvious, foolproof, easy to use.

3) The third concept is that the googlebots (and people browsing the web) need to be able to find your website via links from other websites. So you need to somehow get other people to put links on their web pages that lead people (and spiders) to your web pages. How?

Here are four ways of building incoming links:

a) You can get incoming links by asking people who own websites with complementary (but not competing) businesses to link to your website. Talk to your suppliers and customers first - you can reciprocate by putting a link to their website on your website, if it will be of benefit to your website visitors.

b) You can get your business, and your website, listed in online directories. These list businesses in a particular industry, or a local area, or may be general directories like the online Yellow Pages. Sometimes it may be worth spending money for a listing - Yahoo's business directory may bring you more business than the Yellow pages, for less money.

c) Make the content of your web pages so useful that people want to share it - and make it easy for them. Let them copy your content, so long as they acknowledge where they got it, and link back to the web page on your site. Put a Facebook "Like" button on each page, so people can let their Facebook friends that your website is worth visiting - this puts a link to your web page on their Facebook feed.

d) Write an article which helps people to understand your service or product and how it solves a specific problem, and publish it online to multiple article directories.

I've written this article to explain what I do for businesses to help them get more customers using the internet. As well as publishing this on my own website, I have also syndicated it to several article sharing websites, so that more people can find it and read it, and learn about my services.

At the bottom of the article you can include an authors "bio box" which contains a link back to your website. Use the bio box to encourage your readers to take action and visit your website by offering something of irresistible value to them.

4) The fourth concept is the web page visitors behavior that Google will watch - and that you should always measure on your own website.

You need to convince the visitor to stay - by giving them what they are looking for. Relevant content is the biggest factor here, but you can also make their visit last longer by starting a conversation. Ask them what they were looking for, and if they found it. Ask them for their opinions. Ask them to call you.

Get them to take some action, and reward them with a discount, a free sample, more information, a personal response - what you would offer if they actually stepped into your shop in person, in real life, in the real world.

Remember - each visitor is a real person, unique, one of a kind, with a specific problem they need solved. Find out more about them, more about their particular problem, and what it means to them to be able to fix it. Then show that your service - or your product - is the solution.

If you have been in business for any length of time, then this should all sound very familiar - it is old fashioned, common-sense marketing and public relations adapted for the internet. Online marketing is very similar to offline marketing. It is all about getting people to talk to you, and to talk to each other, about your solution to their problem.

How can you make sure you are investing your time and money wisely in your website? You need to measure the results of everything you do. If you advertise online, measure how many visitors arrived on your web page from that ad, and how many of those visitors became paying customers. If it was profitable, advertise more. If not, change tactics.

Consider hiring a search engine marketing consultant to help you plan and manage your online marketing campaigns - a professional will be able to justify their fee by making sure your website is profitable.

Has this article helped you to understand what you need to do to improve your website? What will you do now? Are you going to file this away to do "sometime"? Or will you take action today to start the process that will give you a competitive advantage in 2012? One way of ensuring that you take action, is to make the first step, by stating your intention publicly. So if you will use this information, tell me below in the comment box that you are starting now.

What is Google Adwords?

Jhing — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:58:45 +0000

Google Adwords is a service by Google that enables you to design and run advertisements on the Google search engine and on the Google Display Network.

Adwords makes setting up a Google advertising campaign fast and easy, and only charges customers on a pay-per-click basis. Because of its effectiveness and ease of use, Adwords is so popular with customers that it is actually Google’s primary source of revenue.

If you are a business looking for a fresh, cost-effective way to promote your product or service, Google Adwords is a great place to start.

Here are some things about Google Adwords you should know:

Ads that you place with Adwords appear in either the “Sponsored Links” column to the right of Google Search results, or somewhere above the free search results section.

Keywords associated with your ad determine when your ad is displayed on Google Search, or you may opt to specify where your ads are placed on the Google Display Network. That means your ad is specifically targeted to Internet surfers who are searching for a product or service related to your business.

Adwords gives you the option of also displaying your ads in the Google Network, the largest online advertising network there is. Google Display Network includes Gmail, Google Maps, Google Groups, Google Product Search, and several large corporate entities like Virgin Media and Amazon.com. Google Display Network’s reported viewership of over eighty-five percent of all Internet users equals a lot of exposure for your business!

With Google Adwords, you have a variety of options when it comes to the look and format of your ad, from text to images to multimedia graphics.

The reporting feature of Google Adwords makes it possible for you to track the performance of your ad, enabling you to make changes as you go in order to increase your ad’s effectiveness.

There is no monthly fee for using Google Adwords. You are responsible for determining your own advertising budget and, besides a small one-time setup fee, you will set your daily budget and acceptable expenditure for clicks on your ad. You can also make changes to your budget at any time, putting you in full control of how your Google marketing campaign is implemented.

From choosing your keywords to calculating a budget, Google Adwords’ user-friendly interface includes detailed tutorials for each and every aspect of creating and running an Adwords campaign, and Google’s technical support team is there to help you along every step of the way, if you need it.

Today’s customer lives in a fast-paced world and is accustomed to having global access at their fingertips, via the Internet. If you are looking for a cost-effective way to market to a connected consumer market, look into Google Adwords. Contact us, Web Marketing Ireland for assistance with your next Adwords ad. We can be reached by phone (+353)-(0)85-7089335 or email: Sal@WebMarketingIreland.com, or use the contact form via the main menu above.