Facebook Ads Now Ready for Primetime

For years Facebook struggled to offer ads that would bring more business to companies, and until about a year ago, they failed. But things have changed… Facebook Ads now are often a great way to promote your service or product to very targeted markets with great results.

When you are planning on how to attract prospects to your website, don’t leave out Facebook. A combination of Google and Facebook ads can be a winning combination.

AdWords Stops Showing Ads in Right Column

Surprise!

Google, with almost no fanfare, decided to stop showing any AdWords ads on the right side of the search engine results page. Now ads are only on the top left (up to 4) and bottom left of the page. This means there are fewer ads on the page, so if your ad used to show in the 4th or 5th position on the right side of the page, it may no longer be displayed on the first page at all. It may be pushed to the second page… and very few searchers bother looking at the second page!

Given that ads have always been on the right side of the page, this comes as a shock to many. But the real question is “What does this mean to advertisers?”

It’s too early to tell for sure what it will mean, but the pundants are already guessing it means small advertisers will suffer because large companies will begin bidding more to make sure their ads are shown on the first page.

Stay tuned…

Finally, AdWords Can Track When You Get a Phone Call Lead

Google recently announced “Website Call Conversion”. It lets AdWords know when someone came to your website from one of your ads and then called you using the phone number on your website. This is very important… it means now you can really know if you are getting enough leads to justify what you pay for AdWords!

For more details on how this works, check out this Google page:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/08/introducing-website-call-conversions.html

If you get the majority of your leads from phone calls (rather than emails from people submitting your Contact Form from your website), you will want to take advantage of this immediately. It might show you are either wasting your money on AdWords or you are getting a good return on your money. Either way, you will finally know!

Do you have any comments or questions?

by Joe Seidler

Google Analytics Bad Referrals – Part II

Earlier I posted about unscrupulous companies who send people to your website unknowingly, and this distorts your Google Analytics visitor data. So you can’t tell how many “real” visitors you are getting, where they are coming from, etc.; and without this accurate data, you don’t know what needs improving.

There is another category of bad referrals that my Part I instructions will not fix. To get rid of these other bad referrals, you need to create a Google Analytics “filter”. It’s not hard to do, but if you have someone who maintains your website and monitors your Google Analytics data, you should have them add this filter.

 

by Joe Seidler

Website Download Speed

This topic may sound too technical to deal with, but ignore it at your website’s SEO peril. 

Google measures how long it takes for a website page to download and be visible, and they lower your SEO keyword rankings if it takes a long time. In general, you want your website pages to download in less than 3 seconds. Here are steps you can take to measure and improve your website’s download speed:

First, you can see how long your website pages take to download on this site. Just enter one of your website page’s URL and watch the counter:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

If you want to see how Google ranks your website’s download speed, check out this site (and enter one of your website page’s URL). In general, you want a rating of better than 75 (out of 100). This site also shows the high priority fixes you can do to improve your website’s download speed:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

WHAT CAN BE DONE TO SPEED UP DOWNLOADS?
If your website is a WordPress site, make sure you have a “cache” plugin. A good one is “W3 Total Cache”. Here are the plugin settings to check –
1. General Settings:
– Browser cache enabled
– Page cache enabled
2. Browser Cache:
– Enable HTTP

Here’s to speed…

by Joe Seidler