Searching for a new home can be a fun and terrifying experience all at the same time. You enjoy the process of looking for that new place to call home, but is it the right choice? Will you fit into this new community? Will there be someone there to help make that transition as seamless as possible so that your life can continue uninterrupted? The answer to your questions is The Halsey Connection.

We recently launched a site for the Halsey’s, a family of three realtors focusing not only on high-end, luxurious Charleston real estate, but life after the sale. Jenny’s manifesto for the Halsey’s describes them best (and if you need more convincing, read one of many testimonials throughout the site):

“Our love of Charleston inspires our intimate knowledge of its most treasured neighborhoods, traditions, and culture – and the desire to share it with those who understand its magic. More than realtors or brokers, we’re the curators of Charleston’s homes and heart, the keepers of the legends and stories that make it utterly unique. For us, connecting you to Charleston has always been about more than helping you discover the perfect home in a beloved neighborhood, more than uniting you with the schools, churches and events that are part of something greater. It’s about the joy that comes from getting to know your hopes and dreams – and making them real.”

The Halsey’s came to us with a wish list of items. After a few brainstorming sessions, we had several goals that we wanted to accomplish with the build:

• Simple & clean site that’s easy to navigate
• High-end, luxury feel
• While being high-end, we still wanted the site to be very personable and approachable
• Ability to generate leads without requiring sign in to search the MLS
• Highlight several high-end neighborhoods
• Fully responsive design

The site uses a fade-in & fade-out functionality across several elements on the site. You’ll notice on the homepage that when you begin to scroll, the headline copy on the hero image begins to fade-out and content below the fold begins to fade-in.

We wanted to make sure that a visitor could perform or refine a search no matter where they are at on the site, hence the sticky search bar that sits at the top of your browser when you begin to scroll.

You’ll find what we are calling Agent Cards, on Area Overview pages and Neighborhood pages. These Agent Cards highlight the best, most knowledgeable agent for that specific area.

These were easy to gather. So many clients were willing to send along their experiences with the Halsey team.

To highlight their knowledge of the area, we added in several Area and Neighborhood guide pages that highlight community features, photography and featured listings.

As most real estate sites have, we added a Favorites tool so that searchers could save and share their favorite homes. We dropped in a nifty “quick-view” so that you can view your Favorites without navigating away from the page that you’re currently on.

So if you’re in the market for Charleston Real Estate, enjoy a “Log In Free” search at The Halsey Connection.

The post The Halsey Connection: Luxury Charleston Real Estate appeared first on Blue Ion.

I recently setup and launched a new AdWords account with all the best & standard practices in place. Campaigns opted into the Search Network with Ad Groups consisting of tightly themed keywords, keywords set to modified, phrase & exact match types and targeted ads reinforcing those keyword themes.

I usually like to launch a campaign on the more cautious side rather than opening up match types and running budgets at max. Main reason for this is because AdWords will look at the account history when calculating quality scores across your account so I want to make sure we start off with really good account metrics.

After launching, several campaigns/ad groups had very low (<1%) CTRs. This seemed a bit odd to me so decided to do some digging into why.

After digging into numerous items – double checking match types, ad copy & networks, looking at average positions, device performance, and search query reports – I couldn’t figure out what the issue was. Eventually I applied the ‘Network (with search partners)’ segment and discovered thousands of wasted impressions with little clicks and terrible CTRs on the search partners network.

After disabling the search partners network, within a day or two CTR increased and CPC decreased… beautiful!

I’ve seen this in a few other accounts, but not across all. The above case study was for a real estate client. Have you encountered the same issue? Was it in the real estate industry or something different?

The post Google AdWords Search Partners: A Silent Killer? appeared first on Blue Ion.

The Blue Ion team had a great start on this Friday morning due to the #muffinbomb that Duvall Events dropped on us.

The muffin man is hitting Charleston! Watch out for the @duvallevents #muffinbomb! @ Duvall Events http://t.co/qRZV7GHzre

— Duvall (@DuvallEvents) September 26, 2014

Aside from the bad*ss tasting brown butter muffins, the campaign idea and execution by Duvall is just awesome. The muffins were presented in a nice wicker basket with some sweet “Muffin Bomb” graphics printed on both a towel & card.  The plan is to identify 100-ish companies (hope you’re on the list) and #muffinbomb a handful each Friday. You can then give Duvall a shout out the social medias and they’ll enter your company into a drawing to win a company happy hour!

Well done, Duvall, well done.

The post #muffinbomb by Duvall Events appeared first on Blue Ion.

It seems that no matter how active I am in managing our AdWords accounts or staying up-to-date on news, I always come across new features that I didn’t previously know existed.

Several months back I came across AdWords Location Groups (now just getting around to writing about them.) Come to find out these have been accessible since early Spring… awesome!

AdWords Location Groups add on an additional layer of targeting based on one of the following – Place of Interest (universities, airports, parks/public areas), Household Income or Location Extension radius.

I’ve been testing out the Household Income targeting option, which allows you to target income thresholds for the specific area you are targeting. The income thresholds are lower 50% ($0 – $64,000), 31-40% ($64,001 – $80,000), 21-30% ($80,001 – $102,000), 11-20% ($102,001 – $146,000), Top 10% ($146,001 – >$146,001). So for example, I could target the top 10% household incomes living in North Carolina.

According to Google’s Support center, these numbers are based on publicly available data from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

If interested in testing out, you can follow the below steps:

1.) Select your campaign
2.) Navigate to Settings
3.) Edit Location Info
4.) Choose Advanced Search

5.) Select Location Groups

6.) Drop down ‘Choose location group type’

7.) Select ‘Locations by demographics’, search for desired geographic location, select ‘Select household income tier’

8.) ADD

I’m testing out across several accounts, all in different industries with different targets as far as income tiers go. The below is a quick snapshot from a luxury hotel account

A couple things to note:

• The ‘Top 10%’ segment is performing the best when looking at cost per conversion and conversion rate.
• Keep an eye on volume. I’m targeting top 10% in the US, but if I were to scale that back to a specific state or city, volume would drop off significantly.
• We are currently placing in the number 1 spot and capturing 100% impression share, but if either of these were an issue, we could add a positive bid adjustment to the ‘Top 10%’ target in order to capture more volume and increase average position.

The post AdWords Targeting by Household Income appeared first on Blue Ion.

Over the past few years, AdWords has strived to make their product an easy-to-use platform for any business owner. This is good in the sense that anyone with a basic understanding of how AdWords works is most likely able to setup an account and get a campaign running fairly quickly. However, there are several “default” settings that you are opted into when creating new campaigns that you need to be aware of and understand how these settings will impact performance.

Search Network with Display Select
This type of campaign opts you into both Google’s Search Network and Display Network. Best practice is to create separate campaigns for each network, so in very rare cases are you going to want to choose this option. Instead of choosing Search Network with Display Select, choose either Search Network Only or Display Network Only… you can create  a campaign for each.

Networks
This only pertains to a Search Network campaign. There are two different networks that you are serving ads on when running a search campaign. One is Google and the other are Google Partner sites. I’ve found that in some cases clickthrough rates (CTR) take a nose dive on the Partner sites. You can check performance by using the Segment report > Network (with search partners).

I’ve noticed that when I opt out of serving ads on Partner Sites due to low CTRs, CTRs increase and cost-per-click decreases (CPC) over the next few days to a week.  You can easily opt out of serving ads on Partner Sites under the campaign Settings tab > Networks settings.

Advanced Location Targeting
This is a big one as many people think they are only serving ads to individuals that are physically located in the areas that they select. However, this is not the case. By default, you are opted into a setting referred to as “People in, searching for, or viewing pages about your targeted location”. So for example, if I’m targeting Charleston, SC and someone in New York has shown “interest” in Charleston and then performs a search for a keyword I’m bidding on, my ad will show to that individual even though they are not located in the area I chose to target. You can review performance for these settings under the Dimensions tab > Geographic report. You may need to update your columns to include Location Type.

If you want to update this setting so that you are only serving ads to individuals physically located in the areas you select, navigate to the campaign Settings tab > Location Options (Advanced).

Mobile Devices
With the rollout of Enhanced campaigns, device targeting became a bit more difficult & confusing in my opinion. Regardless if you want to or not, you have to serve ads on Desktops & Tablets while Mobile is optional. In order to opt out of Mobile targeting, you’ll need to apply a negative mobile bid adjustment. A bid adjustment applies a percent increase or decrease to your max CPC. So if my max CPC is set at $1, and I set a -100% mobile bid adjustment, I’m essentially saying, “don’t show my ads on mobile devices.” You can set mobile bid adjustments at the Campaign or Ad Group level under Settings > Devices.

Keyword Match Types
There are five different keyword match types, but by default, keywords are added as Broad Match unless manually changed to a different type. You hardly ever want to launch with Broad Match keywords. At the very least, update to Modified Broad Match. This will help control the search queries that are triggering your ads. You can always add in some Broad Match keywords if you notice that your ad group has low search volume, but do this after you have a chance to evaluate a week or two of performance. Lastly, it’s always nice to launch a new campaign with some negative keywords as well.

The post Is Your AdWords Campaign Doomed from the Start? appeared first on Blue Ion.

Several months back we started using Google AdWords Conversion Import feature to better track activity occuring outside of the interwebs for a client. Results have been awesome. With the new tracking framework setup, we are now able to follow a lead that was submitted via an online form from an Adwords click through the sales cycle (handled in-person or over the phone by their sales team) and eventually import that conversion with revenue back into AdWords, which attributes credit down to the keyword level… badass.

How it Works
Each time someone visits your site from an AdWords ad, a unique ID (also known as a GCLID) is added to your destination URL (if you have Auto-Tagging turned on.) For example, if you are sending a “clicker” to abc.com/events, that URL would look like this after an ad click, abc.com/events?gclid=HNDGS988739823_ASDFKJH_98348. That GCLID holds all sorts of information such as campaign, ad group and keyword that generated the click. This information can then be imported back into AdWords via a spreadsheet with monetary values added to each GCLID number. By doing so, those values are appropriately distributed to the correct campaign, ad group and keyword that generated the click.

Our Tracking Framework
AdWords provides all the necessary code that you’ll need to add to your site in order to store that GCLID number. The code allows you to capture the GCLID in a cookie, which can then be retrieved and added to a form submission as a hidden value so that the end user never sees it. For our client, we did just that. We added the necessary code across the site, updated our lead forms so that on submission, the GCLID string gets pulled into the form as a hidden field and is then passed along to the lead management system along with the “leads” personal information. We now have a name, email address and phone number tied to a unique GCLID number that we can then add a monetary value to once the sale is complete.

What Now?
Again, AdWords provides the documentation that allows you to upload information back into AdWords. The quick and dirty, you setup a new conversion type in AdWords, Import Conversion, and upload your spreadsheet with all the necessary columns.

Results
We’ve had the framework setup since June. This particular client has a long sales cycle so there are tons of leads still pending, but we’ve definitely seen the value to date.

Spend – $9,428
Trackable Revenue Generated from Leads – $52,371
ROI – 456%

The post AdWords Online-to-Offline-&-Back-to-Online Conversion Tracking appeared first on Blue Ion.

Practice what you preach, right? We believe so, but when it came to our blog, we found ourselves preaching a bit more than practicing. When you are busy, it seems that the first thing to get pushed to the bottom of the list is that blog post you’ve been meaning to write for the past week, month or in many cases year. Things are no different here at Blue Ion, and as a result, our “postings” were suffering. This is no bueno as we believe a blog is a reflection of you and your company’s expertise & culture. Your not saying much when you haven’t said much… you know what I’m saying.

We decided to change this and hold ourselves more accountable in 2014. To start the year, we put together a content/publishing calendar so that each employee knew what day they had to post on. You had to post once a month (12 posts a year… not bad) and it didn’t matter what you posted, you just had to get something up there. Naturally, the majority of posts are work related (expertise), but the ones that aren’t I like the most because they touch on the culture aspect.

Being a data guy, I wanted to dig into our Analytics and pull out some stats comparing 2014 to 2013. Here we go…

Posts

• 23% increase in number of posts

Acquisition

• 13% increase in Visits
• 18% increase in New Visitors
• 31% increase in Referral Traffic
• 23% increase in Organic Traffic
• 24% increase in Social Traffic

Behavior

• 13% decrease in bounce rate
• 17% increase in Pages per Session
• 20% increase in Average Session Duration
• 32% increase in Pageviews

… pretty good year. Let us know if you need help cranking out some content!

The post What a Year in Blogging Looks Like appeared first on Blue Ion.

We’re always looking for new & better ways to track ROI back to our client’s online ad spend. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s pretty easy to track visitor interactions on a website – form completions, pdf downloads, purchasing a product – especially when you have a team of savvy programmers at your disposal. But how can you track valuable offline interactions back to online ad spend? This is where it gets a bit tricky, but definitely doable. In a previous post, I wrote about importing monetary values back into AdWords when a sale occurs offline, but the lead was generated online. What about when the lead was also generated offline? For example, someone visits your site from an AdWords ad then picks up their home phone (do these exist anymore?) and manually dials a phone number listed on your site? Yup, we can track that!

What Are You Talking About?!?!
Back in August, AdWords introduced Website Call Conversions. Website Call Conversions allow you to track phone calls back to ad clicks by inserting a Google Call Forwarding number on your site.

How Does it Work!?!?!
A searcher clicks on your AdWords ad. When they arrive at your site, your real business phone number is dynamically replaced with a unique tracking number. The visitor sees this tracking number, calls it, and then metrics like call date, call duration, area code, and more are tracked and reported back into your Google AdWords account attributing calls down to the keyword level.

I Still Don’t See the Value!?!?!
We implemented this type of call tracking for a hotel client last month. Within days, calls were getting generated from AdWords ads that were previously blind to us. Simply by reporting call times & durations back to their team, they were able to identify successful bookings and corresponding revenues. Pretty powerful stuff!

Do you know what your campaigns are doing? If not, why not?

The post Proving ROI with Call Tracking appeared first on Blue Ion.

We had a great time being on the Dig South Spacewalk route last night. Met some awesome people, enjoyed White Russians served up by The Dude and tossed the rock on our new office bowling alley.

The post The Dude Spacewalkin’ appeared first on Blue Ion.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALLLLL… Women’s Fifa World Cup, Copa America, the Gold Cup; My wife swears soccer is always on.

I, and many others at the office, really enjoy watching and playing soccer so we were really stoked when the team over at Lloyd’s Soccer asked us to help revamp their website.

Lloyd’s has been in the Mt. Pleasant / Charleston area since the late 90’s selling soccer gear to kids, adults, clubs, high schools, colleges, and pro teams. They’ve since expanded their operation with two new stores in Greenville and Atlanta.

We wanted to accomplish a few things with the new build:

• Design a homepage that highlights new product releases, featured products and their team uniform service.
• Better organization of the navigation, which we broke out by gender (and youth), replica, gear & referee
• Better organization of products by setting configurable products based on size and color.
• Better imagery for all products.
• Easy to use filtering and sorting tools when viewing products. Several custom made color swatches so that you can find the exact color you’re looking for.
• Inventory integration from all three locations – Mt. Pleasant, Greenville and Atlanta – so that products are constantly up-to-date on the site.
• Off-Canvas shopping cart so that you can quickly view your products without leaving a page that you’re on.

The post GOOOOOOOOOOOALLLLL appeared first on Blue Ion.

We had the pleasure of working with the awesome team over at Signature Breads on a new website. Signature Breads tasked SRG with updating their brand identity, which we then helped bring to life through the web.

Signature Breads is an independent, employee owned bakery specializing in par-baked breads for restaurants and supermarkets. They have been operating bakeries in Chelsea, Massachusetts and Tempe, Arizona for nearly 30 years and proudly serve customers in all 50 states.

The bulk of the site is their bread guide, which is 100+ breads, each with their own detail page consisting of nutritional facts, ingredients, allergens, baking instructions & more. The bread guide is broken into 13 categories for easy navigation. If you still can’t find what you are looking for you can use the keyword search tool. We built a custom backend application so that the Signature Breads team can add, remove and update breads on as needed basis.

Another nice tool that we developed is the Baking Instructions Tool. Many of Signature Breads clients need a quick and easy way to find the best and most efficient way to prepare the breads before serving to customers. The Baking Instruction Tool offers this type of convenience. You simply choose your bread, indicate whether it’s frozen or thawed, choose your oven type – convection vs conventional – and then you’re immediately presented with time & temp instructions.

There’s plenty of other great content on the site that you need to check out!

The post Signature Breads Site Launch appeared first on Blue Ion.

We recently launched a new site for the team at Places Real Estate. Places is an expert in Charleston luxury homes, Charleston real estate, and the Lowcountry’s most sought-after communities. Places is about more than finding you a house. They strive to match your lifestyle with the most desired places and properties that the Charleston real estate market has to offer. Their local agents are experts in Charleston luxury real estate and know the Lowcountry landscape and communities.

The site is packed full of features including new listings by area, area & neighborhood guides, handpicked homes curated by the Places team, integrated Instagram feeds by area, and beautiful imagery throughout.

We also built easy-to-use back end tools so that the Places team can easily update their Handpicked Homes, Featured Listings and Agent profiles.

Check out the site and let us know what you think!

The post A New Place for Places Real Estate appeared first on Blue Ion.

We’ve been running AdWords campaigns for a Charleston based restaurant that has an awesome outdoor patio, which is located on a street with heavy foot traffic. A healthy percentage of their business comes from individuals simply walking by the restaurant or from individuals searching for breakfast or lunch spots online. About ~50% of those searches are coming from mobile devices reinforcing the fact that these individuals are on the go looking for somewhere to grab a quick bite.

As you could imagine, their business is heavily reliant on the weather being nice – foot traffic, outdoor patio, people on the go with mobile devices. In fact, we discovered this to be true by comparing revenue on rainy days to revenue generated on days where there was no rain. On days when rain fell, revenue was in fact down. So what can we as digital marketers do with this information?

Queue Google’s AdWords Scripts!

AdWords has a great tool (er, function) referred to as a Script, which allows you to pull in third party data to dynamically change settings with in your AdWords account. In this particular scenario, we implemented the AdWords Weather Script, which pulls information from the OpenWeatherMap API. At a simplified level, we are running this weather script on the hour every hour. The script checks the weather at OpenWeatherMap and if there is a return of precipitation, we run a command that decreases our keyword bids by 50%. The script then runs again in another hour and if there is no indication of perception, the script reverts the 50% decrease back to the original amount.

You could imagine the amount of work it would take to change these bids manually when its raining and then revert the bids when the rain stops. The Script has helped save a tremendous amount of time from a management standpoint as well as budget for the client, which can then be used at better, more beautiful times of the day!

Have you used scripts within AdWords? If so, which ones?

Learn how to setup your own AdWords Weather Script here.

The post Save Your Budget from a Rainy Day appeared first on Blue Ion.

It seems that no matter how active I am in managing our AdWords accounts or staying up-to-date on news, I always come across new features that I didn’t previously know existed.

Several months back I came across AdWords Location Groups (now just getting around to writing about them.) Come to find out these have been accessible since early Spring… awesome!

AdWords Location Groups add on an additional layer of targeting based on one of the following – Place of Interest (universities, airports, parks/public areas), Household Income or Location Extension radius.

I’ve been testing out the Household Income targeting option, which allows you to target income thresholds for the specific area you are targeting. The income thresholds are lower 50% ($0 – $64,000), 31-40% ($64,001 – $80,000), 21-30% ($80,001 – $102,000), 11-20% ($102,001 – $146,000), Top 10% ($146,001 – >$146,001). So for example, I could target the top 10% household incomes living in North Carolina.

According to Google’s Support center, these numbers are based on publicly available data from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

If interested in testing out, you can follow the below steps:

1.) Select your campaign
2.) Navigate to Settings
3.) Edit Location Info
4.) Choose Advanced Search

5.) Select Location Groups

6.) Drop down ‘Choose location group type’

7.) Select ‘Locations by demographics’, search for desired geographic location, select ‘Select household income tier’

8.) ADD

I’m testing out across several accounts, all in different industries with different targets as far as income tiers go. The below is a quick snapshot from a luxury hotel account

A couple things to note:

• The ‘Top 10%’ segment is performing the best when looking at cost per conversion and conversion rate.
• Keep an eye on volume. I’m targeting top 10% in the US, but if I were to scale that back to a specific state or city, volume would drop off significantly.
• We are currently placing in the number 1 spot and capturing 100% impression share, but if either of these were an issue, we could add a positive bid adjustment to the ‘Top 10%’ target in order to capture more volume and increase average position.

The post AdWords Targeting by Household Income appeared first on Blue Ion.

Over the past few years, AdWords has strived to make their product an easy-to-use platform for any business owner. This is good in the sense that anyone with a basic understanding of how AdWords works is most likely able to setup an account and get a campaign running fairly quickly. However, there are several “default” settings that you are opted into when creating new campaigns that you need to be aware of and understand how these settings will impact performance.

Search Network with Display Select
This type of campaign opts you into both Google’s Search Network and Display Network. Best practice is to create separate campaigns for each network, so in very rare cases are you going to want to choose this option. Instead of choosing Search Network with Display Select, choose either Search Network Only or Display Network Only… you can create  a campaign for each.

Networks
This only pertains to a Search Network campaign. There are two different networks that you are serving ads on when running a search campaign. One is Google and the other are Google Partner sites. I’ve found that in some cases clickthrough rates (CTR) take a nose dive on the Partner sites. You can check performance by using the Segment report > Network (with search partners).

I’ve noticed that when I opt out of serving ads on Partner Sites due to low CTRs, CTRs increase and cost-per-click decreases (CPC) over the next few days to a week.  You can easily opt out of serving ads on Partner Sites under the campaign Settings tab > Networks settings.

Advanced Location Targeting
This is a big one as many people think they are only serving ads to individuals that are physically located in the areas that they select. However, this is not the case. By default, you are opted into a setting referred to as “People in, searching for, or viewing pages about your targeted location”. So for example, if I’m targeting Charleston, SC and someone in New York has shown “interest” in Charleston and then performs a search for a keyword I’m bidding on, my ad will show to that individual even though they are not located in the area I chose to target. You can review performance for these settings under the Dimensions tab > Geographic report. You may need to update your columns to include Location Type.

If you want to update this setting so that you are only serving ads to individuals physically located in the areas you select, navigate to the campaign Settings tab > Location Options (Advanced).

Mobile Devices
With the rollout of Enhanced campaigns, device targeting became a bit more difficult & confusing in my opinion. Regardless if you want to or not, you have to serve ads on Desktops & Tablets while Mobile is optional. In order to opt out of Mobile targeting, you’ll need to apply a negative mobile bid adjustment. A bid adjustment applies a percent increase or decrease to your max CPC. So if my max CPC is set at $1, and I set a -100% mobile bid adjustment, I’m essentially saying, “don’t show my ads on mobile devices.” You can set mobile bid adjustments at the Campaign or Ad Group level under Settings > Devices.

Keyword Match Types
There are five different keyword match types, but by default, keywords are added as Broad Match unless manually changed to a different type. You hardly ever want to launch with Broad Match keywords. At the very least, update to Modified Broad Match. This will help control the search queries that are triggering your ads. You can always add in some Broad Match keywords if you notice that your ad group has low search volume, but do this after you have a chance to evaluate a week or two of performance. Lastly, it’s always nice to launch a new campaign with some negative keywords as well.

The post Is Your AdWords Campaign Doomed from the Start? appeared first on Blue Ion.

Several months back we started using Google AdWords Conversion Import feature to better track activity occuring outside of the interwebs for a client. Results have been awesome. With the new tracking framework setup, we are now able to follow a lead that was submitted via an online form from an Adwords click through the sales cycle (handled in-person or over the phone by their sales team) and eventually import that conversion with revenue back into AdWords, which attributes credit down to the keyword level… badass.

How it Works
Each time someone visits your site from an AdWords ad, a unique ID (also known as a GCLID) is added to your destination URL (if you have Auto-Tagging turned on.) For example, if you are sending a “clicker” to abc.com/events, that URL would look like this after an ad click, abc.com/events?gclid=HNDGS988739823_ASDFKJH_98348. That GCLID holds all sorts of information such as campaign, ad group and keyword that generated the click. This information can then be imported back into AdWords via a spreadsheet with monetary values added to each GCLID number. By doing so, those values are appropriately distributed to the correct campaign, ad group and keyword that generated the click.

Our Tracking Framework
AdWords provides all the necessary code that you’ll need to add to your site in order to store that GCLID number. The code allows you to capture the GCLID in a cookie, which can then be retrieved and added to a form submission as a hidden value so that the end user never sees it. For our client, we did just that. We added the necessary code across the site, updated our lead forms so that on submission, the GCLID string gets pulled into the form as a hidden field and is then passed along to the lead management system along with the “leads” personal information. We now have a name, email address and phone number tied to a unique GCLID number that we can then add a monetary value to once the sale is complete.

What Now?
Again, AdWords provides the documentation that allows you to upload information back into AdWords. The quick and dirty, you setup a new conversion type in AdWords, Import Conversion, and upload your spreadsheet with all the necessary columns.

Results
We’ve had the framework setup since June. This particular client has a long sales cycle so there are tons of leads still pending, but we’ve definitely seen the value to date.

Spend – $9,428
Trackable Revenue Generated from Leads – $52,371
ROI – 456%

The post AdWords Online-to-Offline-&-Back-to-Online Conversion Tracking appeared first on Blue Ion.

Practice what you preach, right? We believe so, but when it came to our blog, we found ourselves preaching a bit more than practicing. When you are busy, it seems that the first thing to get pushed to the bottom of the list is that blog post you’ve been meaning to write for the past week, month or in many cases year. Things are no different here at Blue Ion, and as a result, our “postings” were suffering. This is no bueno as we believe a blog is a reflection of you and your company’s expertise & culture. Your not saying much when you haven’t said much… you know what I’m saying.

We decided to change this and hold ourselves more accountable in 2014. To start the year, we put together a content/publishing calendar so that each employee knew what day they had to post on. You had to post once a month (12 posts a year… not bad) and it didn’t matter what you posted, you just had to get something up there. Naturally, the majority of posts are work related (expertise), but the ones that aren’t I like the most because they touch on the culture aspect.

Being a data guy, I wanted to dig into our Analytics and pull out some stats comparing 2014 to 2013. Here we go…

Posts

• 23% increase in number of posts

Acquisition

• 13% increase in Visits
• 18% increase in New Visitors
• 31% increase in Referral Traffic
• 23% increase in Organic Traffic
• 24% increase in Social Traffic

Behavior

• 13% decrease in bounce rate
• 17% increase in Pages per Session
• 20% increase in Average Session Duration
• 32% increase in Pageviews

… pretty good year. Let us know if you need help cranking out some content!

The post What a Year in Blogging Looks Like appeared first on Blue Ion.

We’re always looking for new & better ways to track ROI back to our client’s online ad spend. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s pretty easy to track visitor interactions on a website – form completions, pdf downloads, purchasing a product – especially when you have a team of savvy programmers at your disposal. But how can you track valuable offline interactions back to online ad spend? This is where it gets a bit tricky, but definitely doable. In a previous post, I wrote about importing monetary values back into AdWords when a sale occurs offline, but the lead was generated online. What about when the lead was also generated offline? For example, someone visits your site from an AdWords ad then picks up their home phone (do these exist anymore?) and manually dials a phone number listed on your site? Yup, we can track that!

What Are You Talking About?!?!
Back in August, AdWords introduced Website Call Conversions. Website Call Conversions allow you to track phone calls back to ad clicks by inserting a Google Call Forwarding number on your site.

How Does it Work!?!?!
A searcher clicks on your AdWords ad. When they arrive at your site, your real business phone number is dynamically replaced with a unique tracking number. The visitor sees this tracking number, calls it, and then metrics like call date, call duration, area code, and more are tracked and reported back into your Google AdWords account attributing calls down to the keyword level.

I Still Don’t See the Value!?!?!
We implemented this type of call tracking for a hotel client last month. Within days, calls were getting generated from AdWords ads that were previously blind to us. Simply by reporting call times & durations back to their team, they were able to identify successful bookings and corresponding revenues. Pretty powerful stuff!

Do you know what your campaigns are doing? If not, why not?

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We had a great time being on the Dig South Spacewalk route last night. Met some awesome people, enjoyed White Russians served up by The Dude and tossed the rock on our new office bowling alley.

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GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALLLLL… Women’s Fifa World Cup, Copa America, the Gold Cup; My wife swears soccer is always on.

I, and many others at the office, really enjoy watching and playing soccer so we were really stoked when the team over at Lloyd’s Soccer asked us to help revamp their website.

Lloyd’s has been in the Mt. Pleasant / Charleston area since the late 90’s selling soccer gear to kids, adults, clubs, high schools, colleges, and pro teams. They’ve since expanded their operation with two new stores in Greenville and Atlanta.

We wanted to accomplish a few things with the new build:

• Design a homepage that highlights new product releases, featured products and their team uniform service.
• Better organization of the navigation, which we broke out by gender (and youth), replica, gear & referee
• Better organization of products by setting configurable products based on size and color.
• Better imagery for all products.
• Easy to use filtering and sorting tools when viewing products. Several custom made color swatches so that you can find the exact color you’re looking for.
• Inventory integration from all three locations – Mt. Pleasant, Greenville and Atlanta – so that products are constantly up-to-date on the site.
• Off-Canvas shopping cart so that you can quickly view your products without leaving a page that you’re on.

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