16¹²
2015

Optimization:
When it comes to the online world of marketing it is important to make sure that every aspect of your business is truly planned out properly and optimized as much as possible. While there are a vast amount of options available for both exposure and advertising, sometimes making it hard to optimized every aspect, it becomes important to develop strategies that will work towards your goal. While small businesses have a difficult time fighting through the ever growing market place, there are tools at their disposal to aid in moving towards the direction and goals that are desired.

Analytics and AdWords:
While we have mentioned before that Google products working together not only help but aid in the optimization process, Google has now provided more of a reason to make sure both are linked together. Google has now introduced a new way to help advertisers in terms of converting better for visitors to the website through clicks that might be considered high-valued. These new Smart Goals have a specific conversion goal in mind, to try and help provide more qualified clicks to those that, through an algorithm determines users who are likely to purchase or contact.

Smart Goals:
This new addition to Analytics has shown that the connection between both platforms is starting to become more important than ever, in an effort for Google to try and connect local businesses of any size with customers that are truly looking for a specific service or product. These smart goals help to take conversions to the next level in which instead of just setting it up for contact form fills, orders, clicks to the website or anything related to that, it has become a tool that will allow for optimization as opposed to more of just a statistic. There are now benchmarks that allow companies to compare engagement level metrics for said Smart Goals compared to other visits to the website which will help in developing more effective strategies for online advertising.

Conversions:
Conversions are important to track when it comes to AdWords and online advertising campaigns. While some businesses only perform AdWords as online advertising, those who are using multiple channels should have conversion tracking in place to differentiate and see where all sales, contacts or sign ups are coming from. This will help in determining which channels are working and which need adjustment. These adjustments could mean changes in spends, shift towards other more profitable avenues or even stopping various channels. While AdWords is not for every business it must be remembered that it is instant recognition and potential conversions are just a click away.

Experts:
It is always important to use experts in this field of online advertising, especially when it comes to Google AdWords. While these Smart Goals are a great solution for some businesses, it truly is not for everyone. When companies work with experts in the field, smart goals are truly not necessary as optimization is developed from day 1. Smart Goals truly focuses on helping businesses that are somewhat new to AdWords and Analytics and are wanting to develop strong strategy for their online advertising campaigns. Experts in this field will help guide companies in the right direction in terms of seeing how far clicks go when coming from AdWords through the Analytics dashboard.