Online Business owners and marketers know the importance of performance measurement of all online marketing campaigns specially Paid Campaigns. If you are not aware of your online campaigns performance, you can not take decision on whether to continue a particular campaign or increase/ decrease budget of a campaign.

In order to measure the performance of a Campaign, you need to know the volume of online traffic this campaign is generating and the conversion rate. For example a paid campaign on Google can easily be analyzed using Google Analytics and by linking Google Analytics and Google AdWords accounts. Your GA account accurately shows the amount of traffic, no. of inquires, online orders your AdWords campaigns are generating. You can easily analyze the performance of each keyword you are using in your Adwords Campaign. You can easily make adjustment in daily budget and keywords and fine tune your campaign.

On demand of one of my clients, I created Paid Campaigns on Yahoo (Yahoo Marketing) and Bing (Microsoft AdCenter) but when I checked the Google Analytics I did not find these campaigns on my panel. I did not find any traffic coming from Yahoo PPC and Bing PPC although both Yahoo Marketing and AdCenter Admin Panels showing the no. of clicks (You can embed conversion code of AdCenter to view conversion rate in your AdCenter Panel). Actually GA showing traffic sent by Paid Campaigns under Organic traffic; Yahoo Organic and Bing Organic. Not differentiating between paid and organic traffic.

I had to research on how to tag these campaigns on GA. It is very simple to tag your all online marketing campaigns using Google’s URL Builder Tool. Go to Google’s URL Builder Page.

Googl’e URL Builder Tool

Enter the URL of landing page of the campaign you need to tag. . If you want to tag different ads. under one campaign you may do so. You may enter same URL for different Ads. to generate different landing page urls for different ads. If it is home page of your web site, enter it here. Now enter “Campaign Source” (referrer: google, citysearch, newsletter4), enter “Campaign Medium” (marketing medium: cpc, banner, email) and “Campaign Name”. You may optionally enter “Campaign Term” (identify the paid keywords) and “Campaign Content” (use to differentiate ads). Now click “Generate URL” button. Use this generated URL as your Campaign or ad. landing page.

Using this URL Builder, you may tag all your online marketing campaigns, including PPC Campaigns on Yahoo, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, eMail Marketing Campaigns, banner ads. Campaigns etc. Now you can view Bing PPC and Yahoo PPC under your GA account, if you have assigned “Bing PPC” and “Yahoo PPC” as “Campaign Source”. You may differentiate your different campaigns with these parameters.

If you need to ask any question about how to use this Googl’s URL Builder Tool in order to tag your online marketing campaigns, please contact SEO Guru.

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Geo Targeting is getting more important for local businesses running online. Local Online Businesses operating within a particular region, city, county, state or even country don’t need global traffic. For example a Pizza Shop delivering Pizza only with in Karachi city don’t need traffic from UK or US.

If you are running PPC Campaign on Goggle (AdWords) or Bing (AdCenter), it is very easy to show your ads. to visitors located in a particular region and receive only GeoTargeted Traffic. Some Web Masters use other techniques to block unwanted visitors by tracking location of their visitors. One of my clients operating business worldwide but focusing visitors from Caribbean and Africa needed not to show some of his products in countries outside these regions. I proposed him an IP/ Geo Location system using IP2Location Database to show/ hide content in a particular region.

When it comes to small local businesses, they don’t have huge budget to go for PPC campaigns or implement IP tracking system. They usually have shared hosting with limited bandwidth and can’t afford unwanted traffic. They heavily rely on SEO, free traffic from Search Engines. It is very important for SEO doing optimization on such web sites to know how to target local traffic. Very few SEO know how to tell Google that a particular web site is for a particular region/ city/ country only.

There are four very simple techniques which may be used in order to target local visitors. These are proven techniques which I have used on some of my clients’ web sites.

• Register a local domain: If your client has not yet registered a domain, advise him to buy a local domain. For example, for a local UK business go for “.co.uk” or other local domain. This will help telling search engines that this is a local UK web site and your web site will be placed higher on Google.co.uk, uk.yahoo.com and bing.com/?cc=gb, provided that it is optimized correctly. This will definitely help attracting local UK visitors.
• Use Geolocation targeted keywords: For your SEO, use GeoLocation targeted keywords. For example if your web site is an online furniture shop delivering its furniture only with in UK, then you may use keywords like “Online Furniture Shop UK”, “Garden furniture UK” or even “Living Furniture London”. These keywords will help generating local UK traffic through search engines.

www.Google.com/webmastertools

• Once registered, Add your web site using “Add a Site” Button and verify it. After verification, your web site will appear on your Web Master Tools Panel. Click on your website to go to dashboard. Once you are on dashboard, click “Site Configuration -> Setting”, you will be taken to “Setting” where you can set “Geographic Target” by selecting your country from the list of countries. This will tell Google that your site is local web site. This is a proven technique and I have used this for one of my clients having “.com” domain but has local business in Zimbabwe. I set the Geographic Location from Google Web Master Tools and optimized his web site for general keywords which were highly competitive. After certain time the site stared to show up on 1st page of Google.co.zw for all its main keywords. These keywords were nowhere on Google.com or other local versions of Google.
• Local Web Hosting: Hosting your web site on local web server may be helpful in getting top ranking in local search results and driving GeoTargeted traffic. If you are a local UK business, it is advisable to have your web site hosted on local UK web server.
• Geographic Targeting in Google WebMaster Tools: As we all know that Google is the No. 1 search engine and almost all the SEOs focus their optimization on Google. Google drives over 60% of the total Search traffic and it is worth to focus your SEO efforts on Google for maximum search traffic. As far as GeoTargeting is concerned, you can tell Google about the GeoLocation of your web site even if you don’t have local domain. This can be done using Google WebMaster Tools. If you have not yet registered your web site with Google WebMaster Tools, do it now. Go to:

The GeoTarging SEO Techniques discussed above are proven and most likely to produce results. If you need to discuss in detail please contact:

SEO Consultant

Dynamic web sites have many advantages. Dynamic web sites can send and receive and store data between the web page and the database. This data can be useful information about your products, members or your contents. Beside many advantages, dynamic web sites have some issues and dynamically generated pages’ URLs is one of the major issues which Search Engine Optimizers face while optimizing a dynamic web site. The disadvantage of these URLs containing many parameters, is that they confuse search engine bots and effect site indexing.

Many dynamic web sites now use URL rewriting to hide ugly looking long URLs to rewrite them to short search engine friendly URLs. But there are thousands of web sites still running without URL rewriting. In some cases the parameters used in URLs cause problems for search engine bots. Session IDs, other sorting parameters and dynamically generated calendar with no data and time restrictions may generate huge amount of duplicate pages. SE bots encounter an extremely high number of URLs from the web sites which causes search engine bots to crawl a large number of different URLs pointing to same page. This not only effects the proper indexing of web site by major search engines but the excessive consumption of bandwidth by search engine bots.

This problem can be handled in different ways and one of the available solutions is the URL rewriting but fortunately Google has also offered a solution to this important problem. You may handle this dynamic URL issue by using Parameter Handling Tool. It is very easy to use tool available under Google Web Master Tools.

In order to use Google’s Parameter Handling Tool, you will have to login to your Google Web Master Tools account. From your GWT dashboard, click the site you want and under Site Configuration click setting. Now click Parameter Handling Tab from top menu. For each parameter there are three options available:

1. Ignore
2. Don’t Ignore
3. Let Google decide

You should select “Ignore” for all your problematic parameters. If a parameter is not listed on this page, it means that Google has not detected it during crawling of your web site. There is an option available here to add any parameter which you want Google to ignore. Remember this tool handles parameter for Googlebot only, for other search engines you need to adopt other techniques.

If you have any question regarding  this Parameter Handing Tool, contact SEO Guru by visiting:

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