Tracking Online Advertising

With so many projects “on the go” to promote the average law firm web site (even in small offices), the prospect of tracking online advertising’s true impact can sometimes be intimidating.

Do you really know if that press release converted to website traffic? How about your PPC campaign? Can you translate your paid advertising expense into returned investment?

Today, a colleague and I discussed how to easily track the click-throughs to a lawyer’s website from efforts like press releases, banner ads and even PPC. Assuming your website has some sort of traffic reporting package applied so you can see your visits & pageviews, the answer is simple: use a string variable. Still sound difficult? Read on…

If you click on a link and arrive at the URL www.someurl.com, the owner of that website sees it in their traffic report as a visit and a pageview. If the link pointed to that website has an additional (transparent) identifier in the URL, like www.someurl.com/?id=ad1, that visit and pageview will show in the same traffic report, but broken out from the rest of your traffic. The key is putting that string variable – the ?id=ad1, or ?id=ad2, or ?id=pr1, etc. – at the end of your link’s URL. Test it first, of course, because there are some websites that will have a problem with this, but a majority of the time, this variable will be transparent to the end-user and have no consequence on the way your site is displayed. By including those variables in your advertising’s links & watching your traffic report for those unique markers to show up, you’ll be able to track the incoming traffic unique to that ad campaign. What’s great is that it’s up to you to determine what those tracking IDs will be… as long as you test how your site will react to a variable like this, there’s usually no other interaction with your IT team required. You supply the unique URL to the advertising publisher and watch for it on the website’s traffic report.

An example:

Normally, I’d just send someone to www.hotelreservations.cc for a good deal on a hotel room. If, instead, I make sure that link URL is coded with a string variable – ?id=casedetails – I can send traffic to that site that tracks back to this blog post.

Mouse over this link to see what this looks like Hotel Reservations

From this point forward, the owner of HotelReservations.cc will know when people come from this blog post, because he will see the variable casedetails on the site’s traffic report. From here, advanced ROI calculation is possible.

Hope this helps – this is more a push in the right direction than an exhaustive instructional. And you didn’t even have to talk to your IT guys!

Written by jclayc on July 15th, 2008 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on General SEO Discussion.

SEO Guarantee

It’s July 4th, so I was out in my garage working on my car, listening to WABC 770. A radio ad for search engine optimization (SEO) came on, believe it or not. This post isn’t about the permeation of SEO into the fabric of B2B but, rather, about the guarantee offered in the ad. (I really thought these guarantees had gone away a long time ago.) The provider’s SEO guarantee was this: if they don’t get top 10 rankings for you you don’t pay again until they do. Sounds good, right? This pitch has been around for at least 8 years – when I first encountered it. What’s the trick?

The firm guarantees that you pay them and, if after 90 days, they don’t have top 10 rankings for X of your keywords on the top search engines, you don’t pay until they do. The SEO guarantee “trick” lies within the small print.

Let’s say you have 100 keywords. They’ll guarantee 10, maybe 20 top ten rankings. Ok, so count on them being the worst keywords on your list. But even that’s not so bad. The big payoff (for them) is in the definition of “top search engines”: you think Google, Yahoo and MSN. They will define the group as something like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Looksmart, Lycos, Dogpile and other lesser engines. The problem(s):

1. the “B level” search engines included easily give the SEO firm the rankings they need to satisfy the guarantee… with little value to the site owner
2. even #3 search engine MSN can easily show rankings in 90 days, but it delivers less traffic volume than will satisfy most site owners
3. there is often the ability for the SEO firm to simply pay for sponsored search “rankings” to satisfy the guarantee

So buyer beware…

I’m sure not all SEO guarantees are a rip off… although Google recommends that you reject them, clearly stating “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings…” And we won’t even get into how SEO is about more than rankings (it’s about ROI). But I wanted to make lawyers and other search engine optimization service consumers aware of how guaranteeing rankings should be a warning sign, not reassurance.

Have a happy 4th of July!

[tags]SEO[/tags]

Written by jclayc on July 4th, 2008 with 5 comments.
Read more articles on Buzz and General SEO Discussion and SEO for Law Firms.