Making Money With Google Analytics

It's an OK overview of how analutics works. Doesn't really tell you how you can make money with analytics. Anyway I find analytics is useful for assessing which of your traffic generating campaigns are working and which you should ditch http://www.affiliatemarketingintro.com/InternetMarketingArticlesforNewbies.html is a website that actually does teach you how to make money online, free!!!

What factors account for the success of Google’s online advertising model? Automation means that it almost runs itself! Google has created a 2-way market place. A great percentage of internet sessions start with a search. Google is the gateway. Google has created a market in sales leads. It has created an open and near perfect market place in sales-oriented behaviouristic leads. This is particularly great for small businesses and for businesses that need measurable, flexible targeted results oriented ad campaigns. It brings advertising to the masses. In some ways Google is the ultimate classified advertising company. In addition, Google has opened up the world of CPC (cost per click) advertising to third party sites who can now earn every time a relevant Google syndicated text ad is clicked on their page. Thus Google has effectively colonised several large sites around the world and can sell targeted ads to billions of users. This has largely been achieved without guaranteed payments to third party site owners, meaning that Google is now selling advertising on millions of web pages that it does not own or have to maintain. The program allows hundreds of thousands of small web marketers the opportunity to sign on to Google’s ad program who can see their ads on hundreds of thousands of other relevant web sites. Google is the perfect middleman. Thousands of web masters are working for Google in effect too, at no cost to Google. There are hundreds of millions of web pages that exist with Google ads. Often these pages exist ONLY to promote Google ads as entrepreneurs set up sites to lure in readers (via search engine optimisation – SEO) techniques in order to drive CPC traffic and thus share revenues. It’s a sort of unpaid, “WIKI-style” global workforce. Crucial to Google’s success are therefore: 1. Great search product. Simple. Fast. The best. 2. The demarcation between paid ads and natural search results. Integrity is all 3. Branding. Simplicity of branding creates trust. 4. Lots and lots of traffic. Lots and lots of searches. 5. A genuinely automated system allows transparency in the bidding process for advertisers, reduces sales costs to a minimum and reduces the cost of targeted advertising to advertisers. It also empowers very small advertisers too as the minimum entry cost is small. Google also rewards effective advertisers who generate clicks, not just the highest bidder. 6. At present, members of Google’s program also trust Google to pay them their share of advertising click thru’s on their sites. Google is the Microsoft of the web; the company is effectively an operating system for online advertising and search. Why does Madison Avenue View Google as a Threat? Google is a trusted dynamic brand that effectively is a synonym for web search and thus search related advertising. The sheer muscle the company brings through its cash and its stock market capitalisation means that it is a multiple threat to established advertising practices. Google provides fast moving, simple to create ways of running dynamic intelligent, targeted advertising campaigns with instantly measurable results. Traditional advertising does not always do this (although direct response marketing does). TV audiences are falling as viewers move to the web, thus giving Google the edge. As online ad spending increases, Google should benefit as it is a market leader. Having said that, clever ad agencies should be working online and with Google. In some way Google cuts out the role of creative and buying agencies, but effectively Google has changed the role of the service provider. Agencies now need to understand how to use Google & the Web better. I expect a wave of M&A in the online ad sector over the next 5 years. Google is however trying to extend its “democratic”, market driven approach to advertising onto non-Internet platforms. In particular, Google has purchased newspaper & radio ad space and has tried to auction it off using its Adwords style bidding platform. As TV and radio become more interactive and personalised and audiences become more dispersed into time-shifted smaller unit sizes Google may well be able to offer context based ad distribution on these semi-new media platforms. The company’s move into mobile is most threatening of all as if it wins in its bid for some of the 700 MHz telecoms spectrum it will become a gatekeeper to a portion of the mobile web and broadcast system. Google can often cut out the role of Madison Avenue for small to medium size companies, although larger companies and brand-based products/services often require a more traditional and/or creative touch. Do you agree that CPC is the best way for Google to price its online advertising or should it adopt a different (CPM or CPT) approach? A search engine generates search results and thus effective advertising should take into account both the query itself and the results, as well as the geographical location and other stored (profile based) data about the searcher. Cost per click seems a great way to provide advertisers access to a fairly priced, market driven route to focussed internet traffic. The questions matter more than the answers in this case as the queries tell advertisers a huge amount about the mindset of potential customers. A CPM approach just based on each 1,000 views of a display advertising banner or box (“MPU” – ‘media placement unit’) frankly does not have the same impact to this section of the advertising market and would clutter up Google’s fantastically simple on the page user interface design. CPM campaigns are usually better for brand based non-direct sales organisations who are trying to build up brand recognition. Having said that a well targeted CPM unit that is contextually related to a search can be effective to the advertiser. A large, colorful MPU advert would inevitably detract from the CPC’s on the page influence however and would result in less clicks and therefore less revenues for Google. I think Google has got it right. Google does, however sell MPUs and banners on other parts of its empire such as Youtube to far less effect than its CPC campaigns on the main search campaign. The recent purchase of Doubleclick means that Google should be able to syndicate display (CPM revenue earning) ads off site to third party web sites more effectively. Regarding CPT/CPM in general, I think that this kind of model could work better for Google in its vertical content sites, sites that specialise deeply in single subject matters, such as Google Finance or even Google Earth. What Steps should Google be taking to protect and grow its existing programs? What are it biggest threats? How difficult would it be for another player to begin eroding Google’s share of the online advertising market? As long as Google maintain its lead in search and extends that onto the new mobile platforms then it should stay as the gateway to the Internet for 50% of users. A search gateway means that Google should be able to maintain its lead in the search advertising marketplace. Major threats are thus: 1. If another better, faster search engine comes along, then Google is vulnerable. 2. If another platform such as mobile begets another Google then the original Google would be vulnerable. 3. If the brand is tainted, then Google is vulnerable. If click fraud escalates and advertisers lose confidence, problems could ensue. If Google starts to over-tweak its search results for either political or commercial purposes or starts to edit out “unacceptable” search results then users may move elsewhere. 4. Copyright, legal and political problems are on the horizon. Google video and Youtube host thousands of hours of “stolen” video content. Google is already facing a $1 billion single case lawsuit that could spell disaster and a host of copycat legal actions. Google also links people to illegal sites, distributors of pirated content, fraudulent and phishing sites and racist, terrorist and pornographic content. If Google blocks these it will no longer be a reliable ‘open’ search engine. Users will then leave in droves to find results elsewhere. Youtube grew only out of providing access to stolen content. Google itself provides one-click access to the world of the “Dirty Internet”. It is possible that some governments will now move against this. 5. Google needs to increase visibility of revenues and sharing to its partners in the Adsense network or else it could lose customers. Google is far more vulnerable to a competitor taking on some of its syndicated off-site business than its main search pages. In addition, another ad network such as Yahoo could start to erode Google’s third party ad network but it would have to guarantee traffic to third party sites, a large volume of guaranteed traffic and a steady flow of monetised bids. The real threat would come from a large grouping of high traffic media companies getting together to set up a huge competitor ad network. 6. Google could face a number of regulatory problems as it tries to increase market share and its range of activities from competition authorities. This could tie the company up in knots. 7. Privacy issues – Google holds too much information and this could be abused. A government action to gain control of search data that attracts the wrong publicity could erode users’ trust in Google. 8. The Internet moves at great pace. 14 years ago, Google did not even exist. 10 years ago, Yahoo was the dominant search gateway (and was then itself powered by Google for a short while). New technologies, personal autonomous agents and speech based searching could all become threats. A ‘pull’ based system of advertising where advertisers pay to reach out and “travel” to users’ own search portals could dramatically change the economic power. For example, users could Google’s biggest competitors in the text ad marketplace are probably Yahoo, Microsoft and Miva. The really important thing though is for Google to remain the main player in search. As long as it receives billions of search enquiries then it is worth advertisers bidding for keywords. As long as companies are bidding on keywords on Google’s off site as well as on site network, then it is worth third party sites signing up to Google ‘s Adsense program. Should Google begin venturing into new advertising formats such as video ads, banners ads etc. Google already carries and sells banner ads etc on services such as Youtube, to relatively little success. Video ads are a new phenomenon. My instinct is that an interruption from a video ad may ruin a user’s search experience. In offices, users do not want to be interrupted by sounds and video when they are searching. Video ads will become an important part of Internet advertising soon and a new form of flash based video style MPU ad is taking off. Nonetheless, advertorial style information-based advertising might work on the Google site, but it moves away from the automated advertising easy to use marketplace that Google has created. Should Google begin moving into new advertising channels such as print, radio and television? Google is a threat because of its web presence, branding and financial muscle. There needs to be a distinction between FMCG and branded high spend advertising and the more dispersed, specialist advertising markets. Google could be very successful in offering advertising products and sales to smaller unit sized advertising buyers and sellers but the premium levels of branded advertising will always require a specialist human touch and a high level of creativity plus high level sales relationships with key decision makers. Ultimately though, Google has proved itself relatively weak so far in providing a relationship based high end non-internet advertising sales function. Google is a media company, yes but it is a search company that matches searches with advertising opportunities automatically. It could be a threat but it would probably require a huge offline acquisition in a volatile ad agency market. Dealing with human beings at Google is just as frustrating as with any other web company. Customer service does not yet exist at the human level at Google. Nonetheless the company could become a market place for classified advertising and marginal ad space in the non-internet markets. More importantly though is how Google deals with the move of television product and radio programming onto the Internet, as well as how the company manages to make the transition to the mobile internet. Google has just piloted a content syndication program for video, whereby video content owners can embed their videos onto pages in Google’s Adsense network and receive a share of ad revenues that Google can sell around that content. A similar program now exists for content owners on Youtube where Google is offering up to 70% of ad revenues generated around the video content. So far though, Google is not achieving much success for content owners. This may be because a viewer watching video content is not the same as a search based user query from a search engine. Is it possible to reconcile these new advertising formats and channels with Google’s current philosophy? The core values that Google offers should, in the most part carry over into Web 2.0 and beyond. Video advertising is probably the next big thing. Video is harder to move around than text and more difficult to produce, but it essentially comes in two flavours; advertising in video form (pre-rolls, advertorials, post roll video advertising) and text or display advertising placed around the video unit. Google, because of its position as context-based advertising syndicator should still be a huge player in this market. The company has started a video syndication program matching its ads, third party video content and third party web space together, taking a margin of around 25-50% of the ad spend per page itself. As long as Google retains its position as the world’s leading search company then it will be a huge influence in the online ad markets.

that's a great video...I've been looking for information about google analytics for ages. Just out of curiosity, is it possible to use google analytics on Ebay shops?