Google AdWords swap “Delete” With “Remove”

Google Ads on Google+ announced yesterday a small change to the language within its user interface (UI) that could have a big bang on how people view "old" campaigns. In about two weeks, AdWords will swap most instances of the word "delete" with the word "remove" in its UI. 

That means, advertisers will remove campaigns, not delete them. And even though the change may seem trivial at surface value, AdWords says it will help advertisers "better understand that removed objects are still available for future reference. For example, you can report on a removed campaign's historical act."

A Google spokesperson said this transform is just the terminology, and "anything you could do before the change, you can continue to do."

Heads up that downloaded reports will also have the "status" column values updated to show detached instead of deleted. 

"If you use spreadsheet macros or other scripting languages on these downloaded reports, we recommend you update them by July 21st, 2014 to to reflect this change," Google said in its announcement.

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Tips to make Traffic Without Google

 There are several top blogs in your niche  that get hundreds if not thousands of visitors on a daily basis. The right way to do blog commenting is to cautiously read the post and if you have something helpful or meaningful to add to the conversation, then leave a comment.

The idea of commenting isn't to drop a link, but to add value to the conversation and to raise your network. Use your real name as the commenter and a proportion of readers will click through to learn more about you.

Pro Tip: If you have content on your site related to the post, use that URL as a link somewhat than the home page. Those who do click during will then have an even better user knowledge.

2. Content Aggregators

Just make great content and Google will incentive you with traffic, right? Maybe, if you have an familiar website with lots of trust and authority. Not so much, if you have a new blog or website. The workaround for this is getting your content listed on popular content aggregators, where lots of people will see it

Some trendy aggregators include:

•    Alltop bills itself as the "online magazine rack" of the Web.

•    BizSugar.com is a community of small business owners and entrepreneurs.

•    Growth Hackers is a community sharing online marketing techniques.

•    Hacker News is a social news website that caters to programmers and entrepreneurs.

•    Inbound.org is a community sharing and discussing content and online marketing ideas.

3. Forum Commenting

 As you are reading this, there are probably dozens of conversations happening around the Web that are connected to your niche. Joining or starting a forum conversation can result in immediate traffic.

As with blog commenting, this isn't about dropping a link, but rather about engaging a conversation and adding value to that conversation. Forum commenting reminds me of the show American Pickers, where they discuss finding the honey hole. When we find a forum where the client really "clicks" with the community, it can drive thousands of visits over time.

4. Google+

Forget the assumption that Google+ is going away – it isn't. If you need help getting started with Google+, please check out my Google+ Quick Start Guide. Google+ can drive loads of traffic, and you don't even need followers.

The strength of Google+ lies with communities. As with forums, the participants are normally hardcore fans of a given activity. We like to think of these folks as highly targeted prospects. Google makes it easy to find niche communities.

5. Guest Blogging

Matt Cutts' manifesto, "The Decay and Fall of Guest Blogging for SEO," has been widely misunderstood as meaning that guest blogging is dead. It isn't. What Cutts said was this: "If you're using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop."

Guest blogging done properly has nothing to do with links – it's all about leveraging traffic.

Pro Tip: Read "Power Guest Posting for SEO" by Eric Enge and follow his instructions on the suitable way to guest post heading forward.

6. Q&A

Q&A sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers present another great opportunity to generate highly targeted traffic. If you can offer a genuine solution to a real problem, you may have a customer for life. At the very least, you'll build up good karma.

7. Reddit

If you can find a relevant niche or subreddit with a decent number of subscribers (thousands) and traffic, then Reddit is an option worth exploring. The key is to create useful content applicable to the subreddit. A percentage of Reddit users will read your content, click through to your site, and buy your product or service, if it is a good fit.

8. Social Media

Bet you saw this one coming. For most people, Facebook offers the best opportunity for traffic. The formula for success is pretty simple: Optimize your Facebook profile and link back to your website. Provide helpful and fun content on a regular basis. Make it easy to share your website content on Facebook by using a share button.

Pro Tip: Depending on the niche, Twitter, Vine, and Instagram have all proven to be successful in driving significant traffic. If you have the resources, test these out as well.

9. YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Web, giving out more than 3 billion searches a month. To put this in perspective, it's bigger than Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and AOL combined and should not be ignored.

In my experience, the best performing videos for many e-commerce websites are how-tos and tutorials. Niche videos can drive tons of traffic.

10. Email

The number one message delivered by top affiliate marketers is "the money is in the list." In reality, every business can profit from a mailing list. With robust and easy-to-use email services like mailchimp to manage lists and campaigns, there's no excuse for missing out on this opportunity.

A Word of Caution

Most, if not all, of these opportunities have been impure to some extent by spammers over the years. I'm not suggesting that you act like a spammer. The point of this post is there are legal ways to use these channels to deliver valuable information and drive targeted traffic to your website.

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The major slip that PPC Advertisers Make

The biggest in PPC is one that’s not easy to fix, but it’s completely necessary for success in PPC: neglecting to focus on conversions.

No Conversion Tracking at All.

The lack of any type of analytics or conversion tracking is appallingly common. I see this most regularly among traditional advertisers who are familiar to offline methods of advertising. Even if they have a Web presence, most of their traffic comes from offline channels that can’t be effortlessly tracked to their source. As a result, these advertisers do not have a good tracking system in place. Yet, many of these advertisers understand they are behind the times, so they are worried to try PPC.

Tracking Code Installation Errors.

While the analytics vendors make it sound easy to install conversion tracking, it’s really a technical and often challenging process. I’ve had more than one experience with an unwitting advertiser who placed the Google or Bing conversion tracking pixel on every page of their website. While it’s fun to see a 300 percent conversion rate, it’s not very significant.

Make sure to follow code installation instructions very carefully. And if you’re the agency providing the code, give clear directions on where it should be placed.

URL Tagging Errors.

This one is typically the fault of the PPC manager. We’ve all done it – and hopefully, we’ve all caught the mistakes before they became too costly. Tagging errors can be a minor nuisance or an luxurious error. The best-case scenario is that visitors will reach the correct landing page, but their visit won’t track properly. The worst case is that the tagging error causes the whole URL to break, sending the visitor  to a 404 error page.

Always check and validate your tagged URLs before launching a new movement. It only takes a few minutes, and it’s worth the effort.

If you’re using Google Analytics, and your AdWords account and Analytics accounts are linked, you won’t have to worry about tagging your AdWords URLs. Also, Bing newly launched a long-awaited auto-tagging feature. Bing Ads auto-tagging will mechanically append tracking tags to your PPC campaigns. It’s a much-anticipated feature – be sure to take advantage of it. 

Not Going Deep Enough.

If you’re using auto-tagging, you should be able to get all the detailed data you need to properly optimize your campaigns. But some third-party analytics programs want manual URL tagging.

Resist the excitement to simplify the tagging process by only tracking at the engine or campaign level. You must tag down to the keyword level at a minimum to effectively optimize your PPC campaigns.

If you find that you’re running into challenges with getting the data you need, don’t desolation. Both Google and Bing offer free conversion tracking scripts that will not only track campaign data, but display it right in the interfaces. Most social PPC engines also offer a conversion tracking script. It’s a good idea to install these scripts anyway, if probable, as they offer a redundancy to your other tracking package, enabling you to spot issues with code or other discrepancies rapidly.

Not Setting Goals.

Believe it or not, many advertisers embark on a PPC campaign without setting goals first. If you haven’t decided on metrics that define achievement, it will be impossible to focus on conversions. Take the time to define the actions on your website that indicate a conversion has taken place. For e-commerce, it’s typically sales. For lead generation, you’ll want to track lead form fills. For any type of website, there might be other actions that show a hand-raiser: spec sheet downloads, "contact us" form fills, video views, etc.

Even if you are using PPC for awareness, you should be tracking actions that point out visitor interest. Whitepaper downloads, views of a key page, or even time on site are metrics that can be used to indicate "conversions" in an awareness campaign.

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Significant Features From Google Webmaster Tools

Website owners and developers all over the world previously use Google Webmaster tools to analyze, monitor, and optimize their site. And those who aren’t using this free feature to their advantage should start instantly. The awareness you get from monitoring keywords, links, alerts, and manual actions is priceless.

1. The Best Not-Provided choice for Keyword Data

Since the dreaded message plagued analytics reports, it is not possible to figure out which keywords are the most creative. Even though it’s not quite the same as before, you can still access some of the keyword transfer data you lost.

To start, Google provides insights into impressions and clicks, and allows you to see how visitors are getting your site. You also have data regarding the click-through-rate, so you’ll know what percent of people determined to click on your site’s link, and finally the average place of your site in the search results.

Monitoring the keywords over time may give you a clue on what works for your site and what is the direction you should take concerning the keywords you need to rank on.

The information provided in the Search Queries tab in combination with the Google Analytics data will give you more relevant information about your ranking keywords. Keep in mind, the data provided by Webmaster Tools isn’t 100% complete, and they display only a small piece of keywords for sites with lots of ranking keywords.

 2. Monitor Your Site’s Link Profile

I can’t stress the significance of the “Links to your Site” feature from Google Webmaster Tools enough. You can see exactly what websites link to you. For sites with more than 100,000 links, Google may not list the entire the backlinks.

You also have the choice to download the URL lists in a CSV or a Google Docs file and use it in a variety of back link analysis processes.

3. Get E-mail Notifications About Your Sites Penalties

GWT directly alerts you the instant you’ve been penalized by Google or if there are any other problems with your site. This is one of the bread-and-butter basics since this is the only place where you will notice if there have been physical actions taken against your site, if you’ve been the aim of a malicious hacker, or if there are robots.txt or crawling issues.

You do have the option to set GWT to send you email notifications so you’ll be notified quickly, even if you plan to do other stuff besides monitoring the site on the tool.

4. pick up Your Site Using The Disavow Tool

It’s not all fun and games with GWT and sometimes, from one reason or another, you might be struck with the punishing hammer by the omnipotent entity called Google.

If your site is raising a lot of red flags to Google, it’s going to be reviewed by a human and it will be penalized until the guideline violations are resolved.

But, don’t let that rain on your parade –  it’s not the end of the world. Since Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t proffer specific information regarding the links that were focused upon when the manual actions were taken, you can browse through the links and see which one are abnormal

5. Recognize Broken Pages on Your Site

As a marketing rule, if you try to get visitors to your store but you don’t have the product on the shelf, they are going to go away and head to your competitor. It’s the same when it comes to sites. When people can’t contact your site or certain pages from your site, they’ll go back to the search results page and click on another link. It renders all your SEO efforts useless and nobody wants that.

Looking at the Crawl Errors feature from Webmaster Tools from time to time can save you from disappointing many visitors.

You’ll have data about URL/site related errors that were recognized when GoogleBot was crawling your website so you can fix the problems and pick up the user knowledge.

Conclusion

This article was destined to offer you a solid idea of how useful Webmaster Tools can be. Building a healthy website that continues to grow and performs well in search results isn’t simple. It requires paying notice to many different things, but these tool make it significant easier.

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