Build Your Campaign with Traffic in Mind – Try Google Analytics URL Builder

We all want to drive traffic to our Web sites, and search engine ranking and indexing has become an important part of our marketing efforts. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are hot topics, with keywords, meta tags, description lines part of our daily marketing vocabulary. We also want to track traffic, and many of us are use site analytics tools to determine where the Internet traffic goes to and where it comes from.

In making your site friendlier to organic (not paid) search results, don’t forget to improve the structure of the site URLs. We think carefully about the primary site URL and pay to procure domain names for our sites. But the URLs within the site are important too – each page has a unique one, and Google offers opportunities for you to better organize your site and make it easier for Internet ‘robots’ and ‘spiders’ to crawl the pages. In particular, Google has a great tool to help you manage promotional campaigns through Google Analytics URL Builder. You have to be a current user of Google Analytics to use the tool.

The free URL builder uses a simple online form to help you create and track URLs for the landing pages of your latest marketing campaign. Just enter in the primary URL (domain name) of your site and follow the easy steps on the form. Be clear and specific on each descriptive title you add to the builder – Google uses these titles to help you identify the traffic once the campaign is launched.

When you’ve completed each field, just click on the “Generate URL” button and the tool will create a tracking URL that you will use as the page link for the banner ads specific to this campaign.

To measure the traffic results of your campaign, log into Google Analytics and click on “Traffic Sources,” followed by “Campaigns.” Google then displays your traffic by each marketing campaign.

As with most things Google, we love that it’s free, simple and highly effective!

Feedburner Moving to Google

If you have not heard, Google has acquired
FeedBurner. In order to maintain your feeds you will need to move your FeedBurner account over to Google no later than February 29, 2009.

If you are wondering why do I need to do this take a minute to visit the FAQs Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ.

If you already have a Google Account, then you would use that username to make the transfer, if you don't have an account with Google you can open one by visiting Google.

Once you move your feeds your old FeedBurner feeds with automatically redirect traffic to the new address.

This is a very quick and painless tasks, but if you are not sure what to do ask your virtual assistant to assist you with this very important tasks. Just another way your virtual assistant can help you with your everyday business.

Are Your Photos Legal?

Something interesting happened today, I was contacted by a past real estate client today that the images I used on his website were being used illegally! I, of course, did not use any photos for his website or any other clients website illegally. As a real estate virtual assistant I know better than that and I responded to him that any photo that I personally used on his website were purchased through www.istockphotos.com and I have receipts to verify this and was happy to produce them at a given moment to anyone challenging this fact.

Since I started my company in 1999, as a real estate virtual assistant, I knew right away to always buy your photos or at least get permission from the photographer, not the person who has the photo, but the person who took the photo. This is important because if you get permission from anyone other than the original owner this does not mean anything in court. So always go to the source for permission.

It took me a matter of 5 minutes to open my archives on past clients, pull his folder and review the photos and review the invoice with the photo. I then told the client if anyone was challenging him on this have them contact me to resolve this situation.

In a matter of minutes this problem was resolved, so lesson here people, get a receipt and save it where you can find it. This was a project I worked on over 3 years ago. The IRS says they can legally request your past 7 years of tax returns, but if you need to prove you have the right to use an image, an article, etc. make sure you keep very good records on everything you purchase.

My personal opinion of the online photo company is they are bullies and they are looking for ways to take your money. I researched this company only to find out that they are notorious for sending these emails, but when challenged they back-off. So, don't panic if you get this type of letter, just make sure you can prove it and if not make them prove you do not have the rights. Don't just send them money, make them prove it to you.

And, be careful in the way you use images from Google Images, Flickr, etc. Check to see if the image or photos are copyrighted and if you do find a photo on the Internet ask them where they got the photo and then get permission.

This also goes for articles. Do not take an article without written permission from the author and when you have permission make sure you link back to them for credit.

We all can play nice in the sandbox, just know the rules.