Yesterday was the culmination of the first ever formal PPC training I conducted. For 2 Saturday afternoons, the training covered the introduction to PPC campaign management.

On the first session, we covered the elements of a PPc campaign. The trainess where shown the process of setting up a PPC campaign starting with keyword research and competitor analysis down to the creation of ad copies. The subjects discussed included landing page copywriting as well as checking relevance of keyowrds and ad copies.

On the second session, we discussed how to setup tracking URLs especially with non-Google Adwords campaigns, that would be tracked in Google Analytics. This time we covered the essence of conversion tracking and optimization. The trainees were taught how to optimize campaigns and what to look for in an existing campagin. They were the taught how to setup goals in google Analytics as well as setting up custom reports and advanced segments using both the old and new Google Analytics.

Now back to knowing if you have quality traffic to your site. To know it, you need to know how to segment your traffic. What should be included in the report? What exclusions do you need to do? The official Google Analytics blog released a series of posts title “The Power of Exclusion”. Here’s a recap:

1. Power of Exclusion Part I – discussed in this post is how to setup Advanced Segment.
2. Power of Exclusion Part II – in this 2nd post, how to use Advanced Segments is discussed
3. Power of Exclusion Part III – how to read and analyze the report

There are usually 3 traffic sources sharing the “pie” for your website. Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, and Search Engines. Who are they? Which type of visitors are in each segment?

Direct Traffic – These are the people who visited your site by typing the URL directly, or they could have come to your site through a bookmark. These are the people who you can say, knows something about you already.

Referring Sites – People coming from other websites. Maybe a fruit of your link building labor? From sites who linked to a content in your website that they like? Content scrapers? Social media sites where you’re a member?

Search Engines – These visitors could be segmented into two, that is if you do paid search campaigns. So there’s paid and unpaid.

Each of these segment convert differently too. Direct traffic tend to convert less in most of the sites that I maintain. Those coming from referring sites convert better, and the ones coming from search engine convert best.  In my next posts, I would be discussing about each of these sources  and how to improve conversions per visitor segment.

One of the greatest resources in its use is the Fire Horse SEO Blog. David Harry, the blog’s author, explains in plain and in step-by-step process, the use of segmentation. Here are his posts:

Google-Analytics-tips-for-SEO
Google-Analytics-tips-for-SEO II

I have a little problem with the Beta Advanced Segments though. Each time I use it, my CPC data disappears until the next day. I e-mailed Google and it seems it’s an isolated issue. Waiting for them to get to the bottom of it.

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