I read an interesting article that discussed the importance of targeting and bounce rates and it got me to thinking about the clients that I have had, past and present and the buckets of money I have seen thrown away. So, I decided to put a list together of 10 ways you or your client may be wasting money they could be paying you:

1. Stop sending paid traffic to your home!
   1. Your homepage is rarely the page your potential customers are looking for. If I am searching for �buy sony flatscreen 1080p� PLEASE send me to a page with sony flat screen tv�s on it!
   2. Check your homepage�s bounce rate. It is 60% than you should only be sending people searching for �sitename.com� to that page otherwise, you are throwing at least 60% of your money away. Why do I say at least? Because if you are sending all your paid traffic to your homepage than you probably haven�t optimized your paid search ads and are just looking for a high click through rate.
2. Stop duplicating terms in your paid search accounts
   1. It never ceases to amaze me when clients are using the same keyword in multiple ad groups with the same geo-targeting and timing. Don�t do this
3. Have goals for your website
   1. Set goals for your website. �I want to make money.� Isn�t a sufficient goal. Come up with trackable metrics to get you there so you can optimize your website to eventually make you some more money.
   2. Publishing sites - # of page views, repeat visitors, high CPM.
   3. Ecommerce � lifetime value
   4. Lead-gen sites are a monster in and of themselves. If you generate leads so that they become sales then focusing on the lead only is going to inhibit you from making money. Remember, unless you are selling leads, they don� t make you any money until they become a sale.
4. Don�t cut the long-tail
   1. If you aren�t tracking performance over-time, you are probably missing all of your long-tail terms. Don�t cut terms that are attracting people in the educational phase of the sales-cycle. If you market to them differently you can increase your conversion rate over time. Don�t cut them just because these phrases take a little longer to convert - MARKET TO THEM DIFFERENTLY. These are long sales cycle leads
5. Use negative keywords in your paid search campaigns
   1. This may sound basic, but if you aren�t using negative keywords than you are paying for traffic that will NEVER make you a dollar, pound or euro. If you have paid-search clients or use paid search and using mostly broad match than you really need to spend some time investigating exactly what terms are being clicked on.
6. Learn what terms lead to conversion and optimize your site accordingly
   1. Welcome to the beauty of the internet and web analytics. You can actually tell how people get to your site, what they do there and if they are making you money. It�s brilliant. So why are you optimizing your site based on what you think will work well?
7. Stop making creative decisions based on what your boss thinks is a good idea.
   1. See point 6. We have the ability to test and optimize, which means we can run multiple ad creatives (banner and search) and see what drives the greatest revenue rather than based on the CxO�s affinity to the color blue. Back your decisions with data
8. Test, test, test and SPLIT TEST!
   1. See point 7. Products like Google website optimizer and Omniture�s Test and Target (formerly Offermatica) can optimize your landing pages based on conversions. There is no excuse for not testing your landing pages and assuming that your designers first try is always correct. In all likelihood it is not optimal and assuming it is will make an ass out you but not me because I�m split testing
9. Track how changes to your website affect your bottom line
   1. If designers, programmers, your kids or whomever are making website changes that affect your business� especially your homepage � you should be recording that this is being done and how this is affecting organic placement and conversions. If there is no tracking there is no accountability.
10. Know what your users are clicking on
    1. Heatmaps and click analysis tools, like Crazy Egg are great at letting you know what your users are clicking on and responding to. Using this information to optimize page layout should help you to make the most of the traffic that you have

Originally published on SEO Chicks

Google Ad Planner has been beta testing for more than a month now, but there still isn’t a lot out there about it except for 1 greatpost and an even better rant, so I decided to check it out for myself.

At first, it looks amazing. The data is easy to find, easy to sort and more comprehensive than what you will find from Comscore. As an internet marketer, I find myself performing extensive competitive
research and this tool makes it easy to not just find more competition but gives me site statistics about them.

If I am creditcardguide.com for example, and I do not know who my competition is, I can simply enter my own website in the Online Behavior section and I get results showing acclaimvisa.com, smartbalancetransfers.com and creditcard321.com.

I can then drill down on smartbalancetransfers to see their websites demographics (in the US only at the moment). This can be a great way to show your boss your websites market share or see how the competition stacks up.

This also works great for e-commerce sites to help you find which competitors or even complimentary sites are also running Google text ads for site placement targeting. When searching for thefind.com, a shopping portal, I see that shopwiki.com and bedbathstore.com display Google ads. If I were TheFind and looking to grab some more of the market share, I would target these sites.

Google Ad Planner is very useful in regards to research and planning, but it still isn’t perfect.

Initially, while looking to see what websites Ad Planner associates with www.seo-chicks.com the list looks pretty good. It was populated with the likes of Sphinn, Bruce Clay, SEOMOZ, and SEO Round Table. It also mentions Chris Hooley, but did you know that Chris Hooley is in the Alcoholic Beverages category? I know he likes to have a good time, but do you think this is a little extreme?

Drilling down for more information about SEO Chicks, I found out that all of the US visitors to the site are 35-44 year old men. Am I the only one a little creeped out by this?

Beta errors aside, there is a lot of potential with this product for both media buyers as well as paid search professionals looking to do some more advanced site targeting, but in its current state it is still missing some key features. In addition to displaying websites that do not accept advertising, Google Ad Planner can be sorted to show if it accepts Google image ads, Google text ads, or gadget ads.

This feature is great if you are looking for new sites to placement target your PPC campaign, but there is no way to ONLY display websites that accept certain formats of Google ads.

Also, once you build your media plan, there is no way to actually execute it inside the interface. If I just spent all the time finding sites to advertise on, I can’t do much with it because there is now way to integrate this with my Adwords account. I could manually add everything into my Adwords account, but Google should know this better than anyone – PLEASE make spending money easy!

Overall, if you can get on the beta list for this one, it is pretty cool and well worth it despite some miscategorization. When checking their stats on my own sites to verify accuracy, the pageviews, visitors and demographics were spot on, even for the sites that do not run Google Analytics. This does beg the question of where Google is getting this information from, but I am not going to ponder that too much, because if I do I will likely run screaming from the internet and go back to two tin cans and a string for communication and the Dewey Decimal system for research in fear that Google really is Skynet.