Other Online Advertising Features

Geo-Targeting is not new but I realized that I forgot to mention this important feature of online search advertising in my previous newsletter. Geo-targeting helps local businesses advertise only within their service area. Clearly it would do no good for a plumber in Toledo to advertise his services on Google if his ad is just as likely to be displayed in Sarasota and Poughkeepsie. Selecting states and cities for online an ad campaigns opens up huge potential for local businesses. Especially given the rapid popularity of local search, geo-targeting makes online advertising effective for both big brands and small local services.

Another feature relevant to local search (and also one I did not mention in the previous newsletter) is pay per call. Similar to pay per action, pay per call services create 800 numbers that are displayed with an online ad which when called, redirect to the advertisers actual phone number. Google has experimented with "Click to Call" but the rest of the online advertising world seems to have chosen partnerships with third party pay per call providers like Ingenio (www.ingenio.com).

Website analytics software reports and evaluates overall website traffic. We currently use Urchin 5. Other players in the web analytics market include WebTrends, ClickTracks, and NetTracker. If your currently evaluating website analytics software keep your eyes on Seomoz.org, they are in the process of working up a robust comparison on all the popular analytics programs (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-ultimate-analytics-comparison-project-needs-your-help). The June 2005 Web Smart newsletter covered Urchin version 6 which was shortly thereafter bought by Google and is now called Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free and can be implemented by simply adding a bit of code to the header of each page in a website. One of the nice features of Google Analytics is it's built in compatibility with Google AdWords. Traffic and goal conversion from AdWord campaigns is robustly reported along with all the other website traffic metrics.