Use Analytics’ detailed traffic analysis to gain insight into and improve your AdSense performance. they’ll break down performance in some new ways, showing earnings and ad impressions based on user visits, the top sites referring users to AdSense, and the geographical areas where your visitors are located.

The ranking benefits of having a generic domain cannot be underestimated either. Search engines rely on text links from external sources as a voting mechanism to credit sites as being authentic high value sources of information. When an author of content links from one website to another the text that is linked is known as the anchor text.

When read in context the links give the user a very clear guide as to the subsequent content they will find. Search engines use this text in helping them to better understand what information the linked too site is about. This helps improve rankings for the keyword phrases in the anchor text for the linked to website.

The decision to go with a generic or a branded domain is a tough call so testing the performance of both would be useful. The Citys.info internet franchise team conducted tests to see the performance differences in branded versus a generic domain through the Google Adwords platform. This allows an advertiser to bid on terms that users search for in the Google Search Engine. After submitting an initial bid, Google will then give a quality score (a list of variables that affect the cost per click aka CPC) for the keyword selected. The higher the click through rate on the advert the higher the quality score the lower cost to bid in the higher positions. So there is a direct cost implication in an advert not performing well in its click through rate.

The Citys.info platform is an affiliate of the Vue Cinema network and one of the revenue channels is selling cinema tickets. So the test also encompassed a feasibility study to see whether bidding on these terms was cost effective in achieving a target CPA.
Shows an advert displayed around the keywords “Vue Cinema Swansea” and Vue Cinema Cardiff”

Shows what the search results pages looked like at the time of the trial for the Swansea.info version of the test.

The adverts were run simultaneously over a 3 week campaign and the results were vastly different, the two domains Swansea.info and netcardiff.co.uk were run with the same advert creative and a maximum cost per click of £0.10. netcardiff.co.uk received a CTR rate of around 13% where as Swansea.info was consistently receiving a CTR of 56% which is an almost unheard of figure in any main stream PPC campaign.

Given the exact wording and exact same levels of competition that both adverts received the only conculsion that can be made from the test is that the domain name played a very important part in securing the click from the user resulting in a quality score of 10/10 on Swansea.info and 7/10 on netCardiff.co.uk.

Unless data is available documenting how the website is performing, how can the internet franchise owners be expected to sell against that data. Savvy advertisers will easily be able to trip up a site owner about facts and figures and quote competitors information if they have not been shown how to interpret the site KPIs and analytics data.

Recording data about the sites performance over a period of time allowed for trending information to be analysed such as brand specific traffic. This might give an inclination of how a specific area was performing on the wider tourism map then by looking at the sector as a whole this might be a common trend. As seen below there is a gradual rise from March peaking at the school holidays and Easter and reaching a peak again in July when the schools finish for their summer holidays falling off dramatically in early September. This is a classic tourism yearly trend model for any UK seaside resort.

One of the great things about an online business is its ability to be measured and during the development of the Citys.info internet franchise some advanced uses of Google analytics were implemented to try and measure KPIs on a site wide level from accommodation enquiries right through to premium advert performance.

In Google Analytics there is a function to create “Goals”. Goals are achievements that have been made based on a set of pre defined variables. Maybe a user clicked on a call to action they can then be measured against an older version of that same call to action or maybe a user has clicked on a form and made a hotel reservation. As well as goals these are also known as conversions. The website converted someone to do something and it has been tracked in the analytics.

Conversion tracking can take many forms and become very complicated for example if the keyword “Majorca Holidays” is bought via Google Adwords taking the user to holiday information page for Majorca. Although all the functionality and call to action might be there for the user to complete that booking transaction they may just be researching the market to see what is available and what prices are like. This research may go on for weeks maybe months until the user finally navigates their way back to the original keyword they used some period of time ago and bought the holiday, this is known as an assisted keyword conversion and requires complex tracking software usually in the form of a cookie (a text file assigned to a users browser triggered by visiting a web page).

With Citys.info due to the nature of the content and the lack of paid traffic it is not really necessary to track the conversion down to that granular level. It is important to track hotel enquiries to individual hotels and hotel content in general purely from a sales perspective in giving customers an update on how their listing is performing. At a top level, looking at all the hotels on the website and to get a total number of enquiries for any given time frame some event tracking can be configured in Google analytics.

We have worked extensively with Citys.info to implement KPI measurement to a very granular level. Get in touch to see how we can help you.