Marketing: Demystified Blog

Last Wednesday night (16th July 2008) saw me and SCL Analytics host our 9th successive bi-monthly London Web Analytics Wednesday event.

Web Analytics Wednesdays (WAW) are a free to attend networking event, that are held globally, traditionally on a Wednesday Night.

Background on the London WAW events

We began them back in march 2007 and have been running them bi-monthly ever since. They have gone from strength to strength and at last count, we have had over 400 web analytics professionals attend a London WAW event at some point, with many returning time and time again.

Testimony to the event’s success is the fact that we have had regular attendees from places as far flung as Sheffield, Edinburgh, Europe and even the USA, with Web Analytics Wednesdays very own Eric T. Peterson kindly agreeing to be our guest presenter at our March 2008 WAW event, presenting on ‘the future of Web Analytics’. Eric helped us pull in our biggest crowd to date, with over 200 people registering to attend and approximately 110 people turning up on the night!

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Inspiration for this blog post came from some work I have been doing recently on optimising SCL’s Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns in Google Adwords and Yahoo!. I have been using a portfolio-based bid management tool called SearchForce (who SCL has recently formed a partnership with to represent the tool within EMEA) as well as our Web Analytics tool Unica NetInsight, to help with the streamlining process …Ok endorsement over!

Keyword Research

I set up a new Google Adwords PPC campaign within the SearchForce tool and conducted some keyword research with the aid of the keyword generation tool in SearchForce (powered by Keyword Discovery) and also used some other free tools, including a nice free keyword research tool from Wordtracker.

Its important to try and use more than one keyword research tool when conducting keyword research, allowing you to use a triangulation approach to your research. Also remember that these keyword tools are there to provide suggestions, but it is always worth including some of your own knowledge of your products or service when building your keyword lists.

Once I identified some keywords to bid on, I set the keywords predominately as broad match keyword terms and decided to let the new campaign run for a few days to collect some data and allow me to further refine my keyword list.

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