Check Your Measures

Is your brand successful? Sure, you might have a general idea of its success, based on anything from sales and revenue to clicks on your website to the number of followers you’ve gathered through your various social media accounts. But this information is purely anecdotal if it’s not tied to specific measures. No matter how much information you gather or how reliable the information may seem to be, one unassailable fact remains: It means nothing if it’s not measureable. In other words, if you can’t compare your progress toward a specific goal to a specific reference point, you’re not doing assessment at all.

There’s no special science to assessing brand success. Rather, assessment is a commonsense process that works precisely because it’s so simple and straightforward. Once you have the roadmap to success and have established the milestones along the way, you’re more than halfway there.

Figure 10.2 There is no one way to measure your performance.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#227362342

Measuring brand success is a simple matter of following the rules you established for yourself when you created the assessment plan as part of your strategic plan. If you were specific and detailed in the creation of your outcomes, the truly hard work is over. Now all you have to do is gather evidence and compare it to your projected outcomes. If you were thoughtful and thorough in the development of your measures, your analysis should be simple and yield clear results.

There is no one set format for or way of designing measurement tools. You can build yours as a spreadsheet that directly and succinctly presents the basic information. Or you can build yours into an elaborate PowerPoint presentation. Any number of businesses will design them differently to suit their particular needs. No need to get fancy if the plan is just for yourself. Unless you have shareholders or potential investors to report to, it doesn’t matter how your plan looks or is formatted. All that matters is that it asks the right questions and that it yields relevant information that informs the strategic plan. Below are the basic requirements of an assessment plan. You may be surprised by how simple they are.

Before we apply these terms to a hypothetical scenario, we should define a couple terms. Although “outcome” and “goal” are often used interchangeably, their meanings are different. A goal describes an ideal future state. For example, your goal may be to achieve personal financial freedom. This is a broad concept or idea, and it is not directly measureable. An outcome, on the other hand, is a specifically measureable achievement that directly illustrates the degree of progress toward a goal. On the way toward achieving the above goal of financial freedom, you might, for example, determine this outcome: To have maintained $25,000 in a savings account for at least one year.

Let’s consider a hypothetical measure developed as part of the strategic plan. This measure is for an entrepreneurial journalist who is developing her brand as an investigative reporter covering the growth of B corporations, or benefit corporations, in the United States. Unlike standard corporations that exist to serve shareholder interests, B corporations are for-profit businesses certified to benefit not just shareholders, but also society at large by embracing principles of social and environmental responsibility.

Sample Assessment Measure for a Hypothetical Business Blog

• Goal 1: To become the go-to site globally for news and information about B corporations.
• Objective 1: Grow electronic newsletter subscription list to 100,000 within three years of launch.

Formative Assessment

One of the great things about working (with audiences, clients, or customers) online is that there is so much data available every step of the way. You don’t need to—nor should you—wait three years to assess how you did in year one, or at any other stage of the process. As soon as you have enough data to analyze, you should at least start looking for trends. They can identify current problems that you’ll want to fix now.

Pretend you’re the business blogger who created the sample goal and outcome table above. You’re most likely tracking subscriptions to your newsletter more frequently than once a year. You may even be checking the signup list in your online campaign manager account daily. Although you can’t draw any reasonable or helpful conclusions from a snapshot of a single day, checking in every few weeks or once a month to see if you are on track to reach the objective isn’t a bad idea.

Halfway through year one, at the six-month mark, you notice your subscription list is at only 5,000. It’s not exactly a disaster, but if your year-end goal is 25,000, you are significantly behind.

Can you make up the remaining 20,000 new subscribers in the next six months? That depends on a number of things.

Keep in mind that you set your own goals, and if you’re working alone, only you know how hard you’re working to achieve them. This is why it’s important to keep track of your time and how you use it. If you’re already spending several hours a day developing your newsletter subscriber list, you may determine, for example, that you simply have no more hours each day to dedicate to the task. That means it may be time to reassess one or more of your outcomes or goals.

Reassess Brand Goals

Especially when you are just starting out, you may often find yourself guessing at your goals and outcomes. Lacking the data needed to develop realistic and relevant goals, you are forced to make a number of assumptions about what success may look like for you. Often, when we look back at our expectations at the beginning of an undertaking (a career, a job, a marriage, school), they scarcely resemble what actually happened. For this reason, especially in the early years of building your brand, you should seek out any available opportunity to collect data or feedback, and, if necessary, adjust your goals based on new insights and information.

At what point should you reconsider a goal? There is no strict science about this, but there are a few signs you can look out for. They include:

• You have a gut feeling. This is simply a growing sense that the initial goal you set for yourself may not be appropriate, or that you’re working too hard to achieve it.
• You are not on track to achieve an outcome. Continuing the example above, you have grown the newsletter subscription list for your blog to 5,000 in six months. At this pace, you will fall far short of your objective (25,000 subscriptions) for year one.
  

  Figure 10.3 Don’t wait until you’re in trouble to revisit your goals.
  

  Credit: Shutterstock ID#279604145

• You have become less interested in the goal. This is not uncommon in the early stages of an enterprise. In the first weeks and months after launching a brand, you learn more about branding your business and yourself than you will learn about these processes once your brand is established. This is when you’re most likely to learn that your initial goals may not have been as relevant or appropriate as you had once thought.

Regardless of why you may think a particular goal no longer works for you, there’s no harm in reassessing or changing it to better fit your improved knowledge and understanding of the enterprise, its ability to connect with potential audiences, and how challenging it will be to convert online visitors into readers, subscribers, or clients. It may, for instance, take several months of tracking your website’s statistics to develop a good sense of how many people are regularly visiting your site, where on your site they’re landing, where they click once they are on your site, how long they stay on your site, and whether you have managed to convert them by, for example, convincing them to buy something or to subscribe to your newsletter. As with all statistical analysis, it becomes more meaningful as more data are gathered.

As you reassess your goals in the first weeks and months of launching your brand, you will likely find that your initial projections were off. You may find that they were too ambitious, or maybe that they were too conservative. The latter is always a pleasant surprise. Naturally, it is satisfying to exceed your goals. However, exceeding a goal in this initial stage of goal-setting often points to a need to revise expectations. After all, it’s easy to exceed a goal that was set too low. Because your goals at this point are for your own use, to guide the growth of your brand, the more realistic they are, the more useful they will be. So while it may be tempting to set overly conservative goals for yourself, only to easily exceed them, this will not help you achieve meaningful goals.

Of course, it is also possible to legitimately exceed your goals—not by aiming too low with your initial goals, but by performing better than you had expected to. You will know if this has happened after you’ve hit one or two assessment milestones. Assuming you developed the sample worksheet in the previous pages to measure the growth of your brand as a business blogger, by the time you reach your first milestone (the one-year mark), you should have a pretty good idea about how realistic your initial objectives are. If, at the end of year one, you have grown a subscriber list of 23,000 or 27,000 people, you can safely conclude your goals are realistic. If, however, your subscription list failed to top 5,000, or skyrocketed to 50,000 in a single year, you should reconsider your goals.

Build on Success

Let’s assume that you were able to attract 30,000 subscribers to your newsletter by the end of year one. Clearly, you are doing something right. In fact, you are probably doing a number of things right. If you plan to grow your brand by capitalizing on its current strengths, it’s important to determine what you are already doing right.

So you have attracted 30,000 newsletter subscribers. How did you do that? The answer to that question is likely complex. Key is keeping good records of efforts to promote the newsletter, including when and how often you promoted it, through what channels you promoted it, and how. The relative success of each method, channel, and technique may not be clear without some additional data. Any time you sign up subscribers or collect data from those who visit your site, you have a new opportunity to conduct research on your audience. This requires a delicate balance.

Every time you initiate an interaction with a visitor to your site, you must consider the visitor’s (the potential subscriber’s) cost-benefit analysis. For example, the more onerous, time-consuming, or complicated you make the process of subscribing to your newsletter or blog, the greater the visitor must perceive his or her benefit in order to make the transaction worthwhile. If the visitor expects great potential benefit from signing up on your site, he or she will be willing to tolerate a few questions (such as, “How did you find out about the newsletter?”). Conversely, the less benefit the visitor expects to receive for signing up, the less tolerant he or she will be of additional questions or the additional time required to answer them.

We discuss attracting brand supporters and strategic partners throughout this book. Our exploration has included finding, attracting, and incentivizing potential visitors, customers, and clients.

Continuing with the example at hand, let’s say you included in your newsletter subscription pop-up not just the subscriber’s name and email address, but also an additional question: “Where did you learn about the newsletter?”: (a) Facebook, (b) Twitter, (c) Instagram, (d) the blog, (e) other. Although this is just one quick additional question amounting to some 15 seconds of the subscriber’s time, the information it can yield is priceless. If you see that a majority of your subscribers learned about the newsletter from Facebook, for instance, you would be wise to focus on Facebook messages as an ongoing vehicle of growth for your brand—with one fairly substantial caveat: Social media and their usage trends change almost daily.

This means that just because Facebook may be generating the greatest percentage of referrals to your site, this may not be the case for long, as social media platforms and usage trends are in a perpetual state of evolution—particularly among younger demographics. While older people may have embraced Facebook as a simple way to share information and images with family and friends, younger people’s use for and demands of social media are in flux. As this group is particularly conscious of trends and eager to try new things, they are less likely to be loyal to a particular online platform or site. This goes for not just Facebook and Twitter, but also for your blog or site.

But if online trends can change by the day, how can you plan a successful online strategy? This is a legitimate question, and a common one among those just beginning to navigate the challenges of developing a successful online brand in a very crowded marketplace.

It’s worth noting at this point that none of this is an exact science. Data are helpful guides, but they aren’t a panacea. Much of the work of developing and building an online brand is as simple as keeping your eyes and ears open all the time. In other words, there are no unassailable truths about the online world because the online world is perpetually in flux. Using it to its greatest potential means never making assumptions, but simply paying close attention to what works and repeating those successful tactics until they no longer work so well. On the flip side, equally important in the online world is paying close attention to practices that may not be working well, and either transforming them or discontinuing them as soon as possible.

Learn From Mistakes

Many marketing and branding professionals are fond of saying that mistakes are more valuable than victories, assuming you can learn from them. Indeed, often the only lesson we take away from success is that we need to keep doing what we are doing. That is neither very deep nor very helpful. Odd as it may seem, failure presents a much greater opportunity for growth than success. So cherish your failures—but make sure to learn from them.

Figure 10.4 You’ll make mistakes. Learn from them.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#357339065

Returning to the scenario above, let’s say you have fallen far short of your expected outcome for year two. You came close to achieving your expected outcome of attracting 25,000 subscribers by the end of year one. You can rule out the possibility that the outcome you established was unrealistic. But by the end of year two, when your expected outcome was 50,000 subscribers, you managed to attract only an additional 10,000, leaving you with around 35,000 subscribers—far short of your initial objective.

How could you have fallen so short this year? The potential reasons are many. The first thing to consider is comparison to year one, which was much more successful than year two. What changed between year one and year two? What are you doing differently now?

Consider your successes during that same time. Maybe paid Facebook ads had the most impact on growing your subscriber list, based on what subscribers reported during the signup process in response to the question: “Where did you learn about the newsletter?”

Did fewer subscribers in year two report being directed from Facebook? If so, why? Did your paid Facebook promotions lapse? Did Facebook change its policies in a way that reduced the number of people it directed to your site? Or is Facebook use declining among your target demographic?

Build in Ongoing Assessment

Developing a brand is a complex process covered in previous chapters. Now comes the hard part: managing your brand. It is much easier to create a brand than to keep it going and growing over time. Sustainability is impossible to determine without assessment.

Assessment is key to any enterprise’s long-term survival. In order to achieve all you set out to when you first developed a brand, you must set goals for the enterprise, and measure your progress toward those goals by defining clear, measurable objectives. You must compare your actual performance with the performance you anticipated when you defined your objectives. If your performance varies wildly from your expectations, you should consider whether your objectives and goals were realistic. It may take some time—and data—to determine this. It will be easier to determine how realistic your objectives and goals are once you are able to compare your performance during two or more time periods.

Once you determine that your initial objectives and goals were realistic, you have a baseline against which to measure your actual achievement. The point of this exercise is to capitalize on your successes so you can increase their impact and grow your brand, and to stop doing things that either do not help or that may actually damage the brand.

It is important to keep in mind that once a brand achieves success, the story isn’t over. Brands that remain successful over time are not just maintained, but evolve over time to meet the needs of those they serve. A successful brand manager has a keen understanding of the marketplace and, most important, the particular segment of that marketplace it serves. As the world changes—and it does, particularly online—so must a brand. A brand cannot afford to stand still for a minute.

Measuring the impact and reach of your campaigns is central to evaluating your success and planning to achieve future goals. After all, how could you begin to understand where to steer your business initiatives if you do not know what aspects of your campaigns are working, which are not, and what kinds of adjustments may be needed to help you achieve your goals.

Measurement is a term you need to be intimately familiar with if you are not already. You set goals for your enterprise as part of your business plan. To determine the degree of your progress toward those goals, you need some kind of measure. This can be much simpler than it sounds. In fact, it is as simple as the fact you cannot know exactly how far you have traveled, how much carpet you need to install or how much oil you need to add to your engine without some kind of measure. The same rules apply to achieving your determined outcomes.

It’s seldom easy to determine your outcomes, much less how to measure your progress toward achieving them. You will have laid the groundwork for measurement when you created the business plan for your enterprise. This challenge was difficult enough. Now you want to closely examine your goals and outcomes, identifying logical milestones on the way to achieving them.

Most of the measures we use these days are related to activity online, particularly on social media. There are at least a couple reasons for this. For starters, since they involve computers, they leave an electronic trail that is easy to measure. More important, though, most people in the key demographics you would like to reach are heavy Internet users. They spend countless hours online, many of those hours on mobile devices. A third possible reason why online measures are probably appropriate for determining the relative success of your venture is because it’s likely that most of your business—particularly its promotion—now takes place online.

As you may already know, the gold standard for measuring all kinds of online activity and engagement is Google Analytics. This free service from Google provides a wealth of information on the performance of your websites.

Google Analytics is free to all users. However, unless you host your own website or have access to your site’s back end controls, you won’t be able to use it. This means that if you have a free WordPress-hosted account (from WordPress.com, not WordPress.org), or if you use another free hosted blogging platform, you don’t have access to the technical information Google needs to provide you with specific analytic data. That doesn’t mean there is no analytics data available to those with free, hosted accounts.

For instance, WordPress.com provides users with some rudimentary analytics information relevant to visits to your site, including clicks, search engine terms visitors used to reach your site, referring sites, and the posts and pages on your site that have received the most visits. WordPress.com also provides information on the most popular day of the week and time of day for visits to your site.

The following pages explore the basic information Google Analytics tracks for users.

Learn From Google Analytics

If you have administrative access to a website to which you would like to drive traffic, you would be wise to open a Google Analytics account. Google Analytics, which measures website traffic, clicks, and the behavior of those who land on websites, is free. While it is true that Google is in the information business, primarily Google is in the advertising business. Providing access to and analysis of the behavior of visitors who land on your sites is unquestionably a helpful free service. Google figures correctly that those who are interested in knowing more about how people interact with the websites they run or manage will likely also be interested in driving more traffic to those sites. These people may not need much encouragement to also invest in a Google AdWords account.

Figure 10.5 Google AdWords can help improve online performance through payper-click ads.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#426446308

Google AdWords is an online and mobile advertising platform intended to increase traffic to websites based on keyword search ads and display ads that appear on websites and mobile devices. Although the business model and management of keyword- and phrase-based advertising is more complex than most advertisers care to know, in general terms, advertisers (people like you who are trying to drive traffic to your sites) select groups of keywords or specific phrases likely to be relevant to potential clients or customers. Assume, for example, that you are the advertiser, and you want to build awareness of your brand online, and increase the number of people who visit your website. You choose a few words and phrases that your potential customers may use when searching online or on their mobile devices for the kind of goods and services you supply.

We discuss the strategic selection of keywords throughout this book, but for the sake of this example, we’ll assume that you’ve selected a few great keywords and phrases. This means that every time someone types one or more of them into a search engine (like Google’s own), you bid against others who have also selected those words and phrases for the privilege of Google showing the searching person your ad. Because Google is not able to show on each search the ads of every person who placed a bid on the search terms, the ad of the person with the highest bid (more on that later) shows up.

The advertiser (you) pays the bid price only when the person shown your ad clicks on it. Because the bidding process takes place in a fraction of a second throughout the day, unless you opt for manual bidding (which is almost impossible given the timing), there is no way to know exactly how much you bid each time your keywords or phrases appear. You will know afterwards, if someone clicks on your ad and you are skilled at deciphering your AdWords billing statement. There are strategies for making your bids more competitive, but ultimately the only way you can ensure that you do not spend more money than you want to is to set your maximum daily budget. This ensures that you stay within your daily, weekly, or monthly budget, even if you are not able to determine what you pay for each click through to your site. This is called pay-per-click advertising, and it is easy to see why.

We discuss the bidding process in more detail later. Let’s now return to Google Analytics, which, as you will recall, is the research tool you may use on its own or in conjunction with Google AdWords.

Google Analytics is a robust tool that may provide more data or ways of looking at data than you need or want. That said, there are a few basic measures you will likely want to pay attention to if you are interested in learning how users engage and interact with your site, strategies for increasing your site’s popularity, and strategies for increasing the likelihood that those who visit your site will take a particular action, such as signing up for an email list or e-newsletter, or making a purchase.

It’s free to create a Google Analytics account. As long as you have administrative access to a particular URL, you can register that URL with your account. You can register any number of sites you own or manage with Google. After you register your site, it will appear on your Google Analytics home page. Here you will see a few basic measures, including sessions, average session duration, bounce rate, and goal conversion rate for a particular date range. A popup menu in the upper right will allow you to adjust the range.

Figure 10.6 Using Google Analytics is key to assessing online performance.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#445690864

Let’s look at three key terms.

• Sessions: How many times someone clicked anywhere on your site or on its related pages.
• Avg. Session Duration: The average length of time one who clicks on any page on the site remains somewhere on the site before clicking out.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of times anyone who visits your website clicks off without visiting any page beyond the page they landed on (a single page visit). Bounce rate is a measure of user engagement with or interest in your site’s content. The higher the bounce rate, the less engaging your content and the more you may want to consider adjusting it to increase engagement or, as an ultimate goal, conversion. Average bounce rates differ according to site type, construction, and goals.

Generally speaking, an ideal bounce rate is between 26 percent and 40 percent. The average is closer to 55 percent. However, bounce rate may not mean much in certain situations. Specifically, if conversion—whatever the conversion goal is—does not require visitors to click through multiple pages, bounce rate is irrelevant. For instance, on one-page sites, blogs, or news sites where visitors may only need to visit one page to achieve engagement goals, it may not matter if visitors click beyond the landing page. However, in most cases high online engagement is a main goal.

If you have a website to promote your brand and encourage visitors to take some action (signing up for an e-newsletter or making a purchase, for example), high engagement is best. The question you may want to ask yourself is exactly what high engagement means to you. One question you may ask is whether you want visitors to your site to click through many pages, or would you prefer they spend more time on the landing page (placing an order or making a purchase, for example).

The relative importance of bounce rate can be more reliably determined by pairing this percentage with another figure such as the average length of time visitors spend on each page or on the site in general. This is where the average session duration could be revealing. If you have a high bounce rate and short average session duration, you can reasonably conclude that those who find themselves on your site either do so by accident or do not find its contents particularly compelling. Keep in mind that the assumption in measures of website engagement is that visitors will remain on sites for as long as possible, visiting as many pages as possible along the way. Eventually, every user leaves a site, so negative-sounding terms like “bounce” or “drop-offs” can be misleading.

Despite this, the behavior of your site visitors is potentially useful information that can lead to important conclusions. If, for instance, you are able to direct a large amount of traffic to your site, but this traffic leads to few conversions, you can conclude that your search engine optimization is good, but your content is somehow lacking. This may be due to a number of factors, although common reasons for poor user retention include low-quality images and photography, clunky site navigation, and poorly written or wordy content.

More common, particularly for newer sites, is the dual problem of few visitors and low retention. Lacking visitors to your site is mostly a matter of search engine optimization. This scenario provides no insights into the quality of site content because there is no way to determine how engaging users find content if the users are not making it to the site in the first place.

Click beyond the Google Analytics home page, and you will find more detailed information about your audience, those who visit your website. The “Audience” section provides information about people who visit your website, such as age and gender. Other categories of audience characteristics include language and geography. Additionally, Google Analytics will provide you with information about the kind of technology people use to access your site, down to the smart-phone or tablet model, or desktop computer browser and operating system, and even the Internet service provider (ISP). Knowing the kind of technology people use to reach your site can help you make decisions about site design and layout, assuming you want to maximize the ease and utility of site navigation for the largest share of your audience.

This information may be more technical than what you need to run a basic website, but it is worth exploring, even if you do not at first know exactly what to do with it. Generally speaking, the more you learn about your audience and the visitors to your sites and social media accounts, the higher the quality and outcomes of your decisions will be going forward. The lesson is simple: Learn all you can when you can. Information that does not seem to have immediate utility may come in handy later. So review it and keep it in mind for possible future use. It may take a few weeks of examining your Google Analytics data for any useful trends to emerge. Remember that although the statistical information Google Analytics provides is neutral, objective, and reliable, it is hardly the last word in your audience research. In fact, it may be more useful as a starting point.

A Deeper Dive

One of the nicer aspects of Google Analytics is that you do not have to be a pro use it. You can use it for basic information or can dig in to locate ever deeper degrees of detail. Clicking beyond the “HOME” tab to the “REPORTING” tab in the top navigation, you will find a somewhat more detailed list of information, including, for your selected time span, not only the number of sessions, but also the number of users, the average number of page views per session, and average session duration.

You can also see the percentage of visitors to your site that are new or returning, the language they used in their search, and the country, state, or city from which they originated their search. You can even see the resolution of visitors’ screens, which can help in determining how to size your images in a way to maximize visual quality while minimizing load time.

In the “Behavior” section (on the left-hand navigation), you can make comparisons that may help you make adjustments in how your site is designed or how one navigates within it. The information presented here includes comparisons between visitors’ session duration and page views. The “Users Flow” section in the left-hand navigation allows you to track visitors’ progress through the pages on your site, specifying users’ flow from page to page, and at what page the visitor left the site.

It is important to remember that Google Analytics, like all analytics data and statistics, is not an exact science. While it is possible to draw fairly reliable conclusions based on some of the data Google Analytics provides, using this tool to drive traffic to your website and improve the user experience for those who land on it, many of the adjustments you make based on your data will and should be considered trial and error. This means you make a few adjustments based on your findings (for instance, what pages visitors land on most frequently, what—if any—other pages they click through to, how long they stay on each page, and whether their visit results in a “conversion,” which is whatever your end goal is for visitors to your site, such as signing up for an e-newsletter or making a purchase). Make a few adjustments, then wait a couple weeks or a month to compare your findings before the change to current numbers.

Figure 10.7 Keep tweaking your SEO for better online performance.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#379383847

One of the most common and easiest changes to make is to tags. Tags are the words and phrases attached to elements of your website, from posts, images, and videos, to the pages themselves. Adjusting tags or keywords, which are the terms people type into search engines that bring them to your site, is an ongoing process. Because keywords are easy to change and they are central to getting noticed online, these will probably be the most frequently tweaked elements of your site. Google Analytics will provide you with a detailed analysis of how your keywords and phrases perform (how frequently they bring people to your site or content). It is an excellent tool for learning search engine optimization (SEO) as it applies to your brand.

Considering all you may learn about keywords that perform well or perform poorly when it comes to bringing readers and viewers to your content, it can be tempting to make sweeping changes to everything all at once. This is never a good idea. As the Google reps themselves warn, if you make too many changes at the same time, it is difficult to determine exactly which change is responsible for which effect. If, for instance, you stumble upon a few great new keywords, resist the temptation to include these keywords in every place you can. Instead, apply these keywords thoughtfully in a few well-targeted places, and wait to see if they make a difference. If you later find that they made a positive difference (and only then), you may want to make the same adjustments elsewhere.

Search Engine Optimization and Choosing Keywords

Selecting keywords to draw people to your content is somewhat more nuanced than simply choosing the most popular search terms. A simple rule to keep in mind is that the more popular the keyword, the greater the competition for it. In other words, if you select a keyword employed by thousands of other people to bring traffic to their content, it will be more difficult for your brand to stand out from the crowd. The reasons are simple. First, if the keyword is popular, it is likely also quite broad. If you are trying to establish and differentiate your brand, employing broad keywords is not a good idea. Remember, you want to attract visitors to your site or your posts who are actually interested in your content.

When it comes to online search, it is better to have fewer well-targeted visitors to your site than large numbers of visitors who either are not that interested in your content or are unlikely to become your brand’s customers or clients. This is particularly important if you use paid search such as Google’s AdWords, and Google charges you every time someone clicks through to your site based on a keyword that may be overly broad. Assume that you are a freelance copy-editor. Among the keywords you selected to bring traffic to your site is “writing.” When someone who used the keywords “best American writing” clicks through to your site, is not only a missed opportunity to reach someone who needs an editor, but it is not fun to know that Google charged you for that mistaken click. This is why it is important to choose highly specific keywords that describe your brand’s niche, and why simply selecting popular search terms may actually waste time and money. Linking your Google AdWords account with your Google Analytics account will allow you to more easily understand trends and behaviors of those who visit your site.

Google AdWords

If your Google Analytics account is linked to your Google AdWords account, you can access AdWords in the left-hand navigation of your Analytics “Reporting” tab. Under the “Acquisition” heading, you will see the “AdWords” link. The first item in this section is “Campaigns.” This is where you can learn more about the performance of any AdWords campaigns you have created. If you have one website or landing page to which you hope to drive visitors, it is likely that you have just one campaign. By default, it will appear as “Campaign #1.” In this row, you will find the number of clicks your campaign produced, how much you have been billed for those clicks, your average cost per click, the number of sessions (visits to your site), the bounce rate (discussed earlier), the average number of pages visited per session, the goal conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who completed an action such as signing up for an e-newsletter or making a purchase), the actual number of conversions, and the goal value (the value you assigned to each conversion, multiplied by the number of conversions).

Click on the campaign (Campaign #1 by default), and you will find, again by default, “Ad Group #1.” Assuming you have just one campaign to increase traffic to your website, this will be your only ad group. Each ad group you create associates a specific set of keywords with a specific set of ads. You may have as many or as few of each as you wish. It is easy to get lost in terminology at this point, but the concept is actually quite simple.

Remember, keywords are the terms people use when conducting an online search. You select terms to bid on based on which you think people who are interested in your content will be most likely to type into a search engine. When someone actually types that term into a search engine, you and everyone else who has placed a bid on that term compete for the opportunity to show a clickable ad (which looks just like a regular search result, except it is preceded by a box with the word “Ad” in it). When you set up your campaign, you also set maximum bids for selected search terms or keywords. In a fraction of a second after someone types that term into a search engine, Google compares the maximum bids of everyone who has selected that term, and shows the highest bidder’s ad.

When you first establish your AdWords account, your keyword selection will be experimental. Regardless of the keywords you choose, check in a couple weeks after selecting them to see how they performed. This is among the most important learning experiences afforded by Google Analytics and AdWords.

Although you should have connected your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, if you are looking for AdWords data, it will be easier to click out of the Analytics window and into AdWords. This will bring you directly to your pay-per-click or paid search data. Here, you will see the same “Campaign” window you saw in your Analytics account, and you will be able to make changes and adjustments to your campaigns. In the main AdWords window, the first choice you have to make is determining your daily budget. How much are you willing to pay each day for clicks through to your site from your Google ads? Although your daily budget can be $1, keep in mind that a competitive bid for your keyword is likely to be close to $1. Setting your daily budget this low means that you may get zero to one click per day, which may not be particularly helpful in driving traffic to your site.

After choosing your AdWords budget, you need to make a few more choices. If your budget is small or you are just starting out, you will probably want to select “Search Network only.” This means your ads, when they appear, will show up as text listings like any other search results, but with the “Ad” box icon to the left. Other options include “Display Network” ads and video campaigns that run on Google’s YouTube site. While keyword searches trigger search network ads, display network ads can appear on any of Google’s ad platforms, including mobile networks and Google’s YouTube site. If your product is video-oriented, you may want to create a video campaign that runs across Google’s display networks and on YouTube.

Although there are a number of options you can choose among for your campaign, the most important is selecting keywords. In AdWords, you will find a “Keywords” tab in the top navigation. Click here to choose your keywords. There are five options for selecting keywords. They are: broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match, exact match, and negative match.

Broad match is exactly what it sounds like. Selecting this option will trigger your bid for not just your selected keywords but those that Google determines are similar. Google’s example shows that with broad search, a term like “women’s hats” may also trigger searches for “ladies’ hats.”

Broad match modifier includes variations of your keywords and changes in the order they appear. Synonyms do not appear. Like with Boolean searching, with broad match modifier, you include a plus sign in front of each term you want to include.

Phrase match will trigger your ads based on your selected phrase and similar phrases.

Exact match is also exactly what it sounds like. Your ads can appear if someone searches for the exact phrase you selected.

Negative keywords allow you to choose keywords while ensuring your ads are not triggered when certain terms are present. Simply type your keyword, followed by the negative keyword with a minus sign in front of it. For example: “clothing-children’s.”

Google defines “close variations” as “misspellings, singular forms, plural forms, acronyms, stemmings (such as floor or flooring), abbreviations, and accents.”¹

Google keeps the keyword selection process simple by allowing users to simply type the terms they would like to include in their keyword lists. Yet understanding basic Boolean search strategy can help ensure you get the results you are looking for when selecting keywords and phrases. Boolean searches include phrases inside quotes (to denote exact matches, preserving everything that appears inside the quotes as a single, fixed phrase). They also allow the use of plus and minus signs immediately in front of words to be, respectively, included or removed from the search.

For each keyword you choose, you can automate the bid process, allowing Google’s processors to determine the best strategy for you, or you can change your bid strategy manually, possibly increasing your bid for the keyword to increase its likelihood of appearing on the first page of a relevant search. If your daily budget is low ($5 or less, or even $10), keep in mind that increasing the percentage you are willing to bid on a particular keyword may limit the number of clicks you receive overall. For instance, if your daily budget is $3, and you raise your bid for a particular keyword, bringing it closer to $2 for a single click, that day’s budget may be exhausted as soon as someone clicks on that keyword. On the plus side, your ad will appear in a more prominent place, and the person who clicked on it may be a particularly good match for your customer profile, which could increase the likelihood of conversion. However, it is also possible that the person who clicks on your high-profile ad either does so by mistake or soon realizes that they are not interested in your content after all. This can be an expensive mistake, not only for the money you have spent attracting the wrong person to your content, but also for the opportunity cost you pay in exhausting most or all of your daily budget and limiting your opportunity to reach people who may actually be interested in your content.

Bid strategy is one of several options you may want to leave in its default position at first, until you enter your keywords and collect at least a couple weeks of data to determine whether or to what degree they accomplished your goals for them, and what adjustments you may need to make to your campaign.

Mid-Campaign Corrections

Let’s assume that your AdWords campaign has been active for a couple weeks. Now is a good time to see how your search terms performed, and to determine what kinds of changes you may want to make to your campaign to increase its likelihood to attract well-targeted potential clients and customers to your content while minimizing the number of bad leads and mistakes that end up costing you money and opportunities.

Figure 10.8 If your current path isn’t getting you anywhere, try another one.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#192230474

In your Google AdWords account, the keywords and phrases you selected should be prominent. On your home page, you will see a summary of your keywords’ performance. For the selected time period (which you can select from a scrolling menu in the top right corner of the home page), you will see the number of clicks for each keyword; how much each keyword cost you based on the number of clicks it received; “CTR,” or the click-through rate, which is the ratio of users who clicked on your ad to the number of people who saw it; the number of impressions, or the number of people who saw your ad; the “Avg. CPC” or average cost per click; “Avg. CPM” or cost per thousand impressions; and “Avg. Pos Status,” or in what position (first, second, third, etc.) your ad appeared.

Generally speaking, the closer an ad is to the top of the first page, the greater the likelihood that someone will click on it. If the position is eight or less, your ad probably showed up on the first page. This is where you want your ad to appear. There is a dramatic decline in views of search results that appear on or after page two. Although the specific numbers vary by study and report, by one account, only 10 percent of searchers make it past the first page of search results.² In addition to page position, you also want to pay attention to the CTR, or click-through rate. If a keyword is under 1 percent, it is not performing well.

Another highly important area for scrutiny appears as a subtab under the “Keywords” tab toward the top of your AdWords campaign home page. Look for the “Search terms” label. Clicking here will reveal the actual search terms that triggered your ad. Some of these terms may surprise or annoy you—particularly if they describe something that is quite different from what you had in mind when you carefully selected your AdWords search terms. In some cases, it may be difficult to determine both how the actual search term used became associated with your keywords, and then why the person who ultimately clicked on your ad did so considering they would not likely find what they were looking for on your site.

Although there is no exact science to explain why they appear, search term errors are often an additive problem. This means that terms or phrases have been added to your chosen keywords, sometimes making them absurdly specific. For example, your chosen keyword was “social media management,” and an actual search term that brought someone to your site was “plus size model management.” Although one or two words may match, the person who clicked on your content was clearly looking for something much different than what you provide. Although this mistake may cost you only $1 or so, those dollars can add up and eat up your daily AdWords budget.

For this reason, it is important to check your search terms on a regular basis. When you pull up the list, simply click on the empty box to the left of each invalid or misleading term, then click on the box at the top of the list labeled “Add as negative keyword.” This will ensure that no one using this keyword in the future will be shown your ad. It will also help focus your campaign and make your AdWords budget go further. Remember it is an ongoing process, and despite the detailed data involved, it is far from an exact science.

One of the nicer aspects of being a Google AdWords customer is that you can call the company periodically for free education and advice. Soon after you join as a new member, you will receive emails suggesting you call for free analysis of your campaign strategy. Take advantage of this free service. Just as you want your clients and customers to be satisfied with the service you provide, Google wants you to find their services valuable. That means their goals align with yours. If they see that your campaign is wasting money by targeting the wrong people, they will tell you so.

On the phone, an AdWords rep will walk you through options and choices you may not have even realized existed. For example, on one call to Google a couple weeks into a new campaign, an AdWords rep suggested a customer capitalize the first letter of each word in her campaign to increase the ad’s visibility and likelihood to be clicked. While there was no scientific reason explaining why people are more likely to click on ads with capitalized words, the research had proved it. It is unlikely the advertiser would have realized this on her own.

This brings us to the one aspect of your AdWords campaign that is at least as important as your keywords, if not more so: your ads themselves. Too often, in our quest for the perfect keywords, the ads that appear when people use them are an afterthought. In each campaign, you will find the “Ads” tab on the top navigation, to the left of the “Keywords” tab at the time of this writing. (User interfaces change quickly. If important tabs and links move, they usually do not go far. Finding relocated Web features is often a matter of considering its most logical location. This kind of thinking is what drives those who specialize in improving the user experience.)

Under this tab, you will find a prominent button with the word “AD” in all caps next to a plus sign. Click this button to start building your ad. Write as many ads as you like, but two to five is a good number. Click on the “text ad” option, and an ad template will appear, guiding you through the process of writing your ad with the help of previews and sample ads. With limited character counts in each of three lines, your creative process will be reduced to an exercise in compression. Your competing challenges will be to use popular keywords in a focused way to ensure only likely clients and customers see your ad, while staying within restrictive character limits.

Under these circumstances, writing a nuanced ad is almost impossible. The best you can do is to focus on including your most important keywords, and build short lines of text around them. Again, like with selecting keywords and tweaking SEO, this is not an exact science. When you return to your AdWords dashboard in a couple weeks, take another look at your ads with your highest-performing keywords in mind. If your ads do not match your keywords, it may be time to revise your ads.

Build Your Own Assessment Measure

Consider your personal brand or a brand identity you would like to create. Establish one primary goal for your brand and one objective to measure your progress toward achieving that goal. Your answers to the following questions could serve as one part of a complete assessment plan for your brand. Feel free to replace the timelines (i.e., “Year 1,” “Year 2,” “Year 3”) or outcome designations (i.e., “Does not meet expectations,” “meets expectations,” “exceeds expectations”) with your own. (For a completed example of this form, see p. 178.)

• Name and describe the brand in 150 words or fewer:
• Goal 1:
• Objective 1:

Target Your Tags and Keywords

Regardless of whether you subscribe to Google AdWords, you should periodically assess the tags and keywords you use to attract people to your website or blog. If you are paying per click on these search terms, you could be wasting your money. At the very least, choosing more targeted terms should improve your search results and increase the likelihood that those who land on your site actually want to be there.

For this exercise, you will compile the 10 most frequently used tags or keywords on your website or blog. The objective is to assess the strength and relevance of your keywords, and to identify similar keywords that may better target your audience and turn more impressions into conversions.

Enter each term individually into Google Trends (www.google.com/trends), a site that provides analysis of Google searches. Complete the following table. You may want to add additional terms to analyze over time.

1. What can you conclude from this analysis?
2. How might you improve your keywords and tags for search engine optimization (SEO)?