Quick Tips on Google Adwords, SEO, SEM & Google Analytics

Written by Ananthanarayanan Venkateswaran, Faculty of Digital Marketing & Metrics at SP Jain School of Global Management.

Though each aspect of Google Adwords, SEO, SEM, and Google Analytics are detailed learning and in-depth topics on their own, here are 7 quick tips on each of them for the professional digital marketer in you:

Google Adwords:

– First understand the WHY behind your marketing objective. This will tell you which Campaign to go for. For eg. Search Network, Display Network, Universal app, Videos, etc.
– Understand your budget & ROI expectations and realistically allot a budget for your Adwords strategy and campaign.
– Don’t run campaigns at a stretch. Rather, focus on the results every day and keep track of the same to ensure they are delivering the right set of results as desired from your stakeholders, organisation and of course, your customers.
– Focus on creating a good landing page, it is the key to get a Top Position for your Google Adwords.
– Use tools like Google Keyword planner for getting the best understanding of your core keywords, landing page etc. and bid accordingly.
– Focus on Content Quality (and relevance), Landing Page Quality (and relevance), Core Keywords, and finally, your bid across the same to get best results. Abide by Google Adwords guidelines at all times.
– Did you know? If you get a high-quality score for your google Adwords, it not only gets you a top page position for your ad, but also might help you get optimised bids and costing if your ad focus is high on customer expectations and relevance.

SEO/SEM:

– Organic reach is crucial to any business today. So, ensure that your content is relevant, high-quality, and original.
– Your website traffic, quality and the flow of customers & prospects will play a key factor in SEO. Ensure that your website domain and hosting deliver perfect uptime and bandwidth. Your website URL, permalink, content or Page Heading (H1, H2, metatags, meta description) etc. are to be clearly planned and designed.
– SEO and SEM work very well together – good content boosts organic traffic. Investing in PPC (Pay Per Click) from time to time ensures you get a competitive advantage. Focus on both.
– Create a KRC – Knowledge Resource Centre which will enable your prospects and end users to build a level of trust about you as an organisation and more importantly, help you build trust about your level of expertise.
– Images, optimised and used efficiently with title, description and of course, Alt Text tags will also empower or boost your SEO results.
– Integrating Blog posts, social media feeds, actively and engaging users in real-time boosts your SEO and SEM effectively.
– Today, as a digital marketer, you can add features and functionalities in the form of plugins, widgets etc to get great results, to track metrics, and to deliver content in a way that your end readers expect, which, in turn, will boost your SEO/SEM. Also, using social media strategies like social media contests and influencer marketing adds great results to your SEO and SEM strategy.

Google Analytics:

– We are living in an age of data and information overload. Ensure that you track only that data which is relevant to your digital marketing campaign objective or strategy.
– Use the data available across your google analytics that helps you understand the audience type, demographics, etc both across Real-Time feature and the Audience feature in Your Google Analytics account.
– Users flow will help you understand your customer journey and digital touch points. It’ll help to know which pages and what kind of content your end users consume, what appeals to them, where the drop offs are, and helps you design a more suitable website, content marketing, and SEO focused experience for your end users.
– Affinity: Across segments like In-Market, affinity categories, others etc will help you understand your customer likes, dislikes, online buying and browsing behaviours, topics of interest etc. It will also play a crucial role in designing Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns integrated as part of your digital marketing strategy using Google Adwords, Facebook ads etc.
– Measure the lifetime value (LTV) of your users using Google Analytics: The Lifetime Value report shows you how user value (Revenue) and engagement (App views or Page views, Goal Completions, Sessions, and Session Duration) grow during the 90 days after a user is acquired. These could be anything based on your Goals tracked, measured through the analytics. For example, actual sales conversions, lead enquiry, subscribe, email newsletters, page views, sign-ups etc. These will work better if you have clear GOALS defined for your business. Understanding customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value will help organisations to design a customised goal based digital marketing social media brand ROI campaign. Goal tracking using analytics will allow you to have a great amount of control on your ROI results.

Consumer behaviour, lifestyle, mobile footprint and Custom reports can also be tracked using google analytics. Connect your Adwords with your analytics for optimised reporting of the same.

Digital marketing is a vast subject. But like any other field, the more you learn, the more your practice, the better you get hands-on with respect to delivering real industry focused solutions using digital strategies.

About the Author: Ananth V

Ananth V is a Global Award Winning Digital Marketing Professional and a renowned international speaker in the field of Digital Marketing, Social Media, Marketing Research, Marketing Management, Technology and Entrepreneurship across industries and countries. An IIM graduate with over 14 years of work experience, he has worked with varied advertising agencies and corporates for leading global brands. Over the years, Ananth has received a series of global awards for his expertise. From being the “Most influential Digital Marketing Leaders 2016” by CMO Asia and World Marketing Congress to winning first place in the Global Peter Drucker Challenge Award in Entrepreneurs category and being interviewed by BBC Business Worldwide News Money & Finance, at GPDF14 in Vienna, Austria “Global Business: Young Horizons”, Ananth also serves as a speaker, influencer, panellist and corporate trainer on Digital Marketing discussions.

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