Jeremy Hutton

That’s right, folks. After much studying and slaving away at the three year old out-dated questions, I have passed the Google AdWords Qualified Individual exam and become an Advertising Professional. This helps put POP on the map of being a Certified Adwords Advertising Professional.

For those of you unfamiliar with the web analytics industry, never fear, because this really has nothing to do with web analytics. This is more web advertising.

So let’s say you want to advertise on the web (because everyone’s doing it and you need a piece of the pie).  If your maxed out search engine efforts don’t land you on the first page of google or yahoo, there is always sponsored search (also referred to as paid search and search engine marketing).

 Thus you can pay to be at the top of the search results. Granted, this does put that “sponsored link” title above your ad and usually give your result a nice light yellow background but you get that sought after visibility and possible click through that could eventually lead to a sale or conversion.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are a great place to start because you can begin with smaller denominations to test how profitable a sponsored search campaign will be.

The other day a co-worker sent this article about monthly, ongoing SEO work being dead. Lately, I’ve been contemplating the value of an ongoing search engine optimization versus a search engine marketing plan and their respective return on investments over time.  Everyone knows to begin doing SEO work on your website through meta data and title tags but how long should you be focusing on purely organic search results?  When should you begin looking into doing paid search through Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing?

In fact I rough plan to help decipher when a website should be focusing on organic search engine optimization and when they should focus on paid search engine marketing for the best ROI. 

Pre-Launch: Spend lots on SEO development before you launch the site – Metadata standards, H1/H2/H3 Heirarchies, friendly urls, xml sitemap, 301 redirects, internal content rich urls, etc.  Build a solid foundation for good organic search crawling so that a year down the road you won’t need to uproot all your existing

SEO Phase 1: Confirm your indexation for major search engines, get search referring data from analytics tool, make sure those keywords are in your meta, content, and H1, start blogging regularly (weekly), sign up for Webmaster Tools so you can tell what search queries your site is showing up for (prepare to be surprised).

SEO Phase 2: Confirm that SEO practices for meta, H1, content, friendly urls, press releases, blog schedules, etc.  These should be checked as you develop your ongoing publishing process to ensure quality.

SEM Phase 1: With what you know from referring organic search data in your analytics tool, build paid search engine marketing campaigns on successful keyword searches and other keywords that should’ve been successful on search.  Make sure to use unique and relevant landing pages for each keyword group.

SEM Phase 2: Analyze and SEM Campaigns and looking deeper into competing campaigns and websites.  What are they doing that you could learn from?  Do this too, where neccessary.

MVT Phase 1: Use results of paid search campaigns and abandonment data (from analytics tool) to begin planning some multivariate testing options for your main landing pages.  

MVT Phase 2: Continue with your paid search campaigns while implementing your different landing page variations.  Use your results to optimize the effectiveness of your campaigns.  Don’t forget to continue following best SEO practices.

Well, there you have it.  My ultimate plan for overall website performance optimization.  Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

Google announced this morning that updates to the Google Analytics tool will be coming shortly.  My two highlights are that they unveiled event tracking capabilities and a more in-depth site search section within the GA Tool that allows for some better segmentation.   Some of the new updates trump what POP has already created manual work-arounds for (off-site link tracking), but overall, it’s good to see the web analytics industry progress.

At this point, my analytic experience is still pretty shallow so my comments remain fairly low level.  Hopefully as new analytics tools emerge I’ll continue to grow my analytics expertise.  In the meantime, feel free to comment and leave your feedback.