Is your marketing effective?

With most forms of marketing it is difficult to track the connection between an ad, offer or website, and the phone call or other contact that indicates success.

There have been many solutions but none of them are perfect.

Nowhere is this more of a problem than in tracking where a phone call comes from. Was it a response to a direct mail piece, advertisement or an online search?

You can ask the caller, but you don't always get a clear answer, and staff are often nervous about pressing a new prospect.

One solution available for websites is call tracking - where a unique phone number on the website shows that calls to that number came from the website. Services offered often include recording of the calls so that you can evaluate how good a job staff are doing of handling calls.

However, there are serious issues with this approach. Not the least of them is that they create issues with Google. You now have multiple phones instead of a single number for your branding. And if you ever stop the service, the phone number stops working.

Here's a good article on the subject, and at least the possibility of a better solution in the future (and what happened to the "click to call" fad of a couple years ago):

Call Tracking Without Call Numbers

In the long run it pays to make nice with Google. Play by their rules.

If you don't, you are likely to get penalized, even blacklisted.

What then?

All is not lost. If you suspect you have a problem, the first step is to look over Google's rules and your website, and see if you are violating them - or if perhaps you have a technical problem with the way your site is built.

Google's Webmaster Guidelines covers the possibilities in detail.

Once you've addressed that, make and submit a new site map to Google. But also, use the new "Fetch as Googlebot" and submit feature (both of these are in Webmaster Tools). This can materially speed up your site being re-indexed by Google. Within a few days you'll see if changes you've made, have helped.

If you want to know if your site is blacklisted, set up a click ad campaign. That will quickly tell you if your ad is disapproved because your site doesn't meet Google's guidelines.

If there still seems to be a problem, it's time to ask Google if you have a problem - or maybe you just need to do more work. Use their "reconsideration request" form, discussed in this article (with a link to the form).

There's also a new video that talks about the reconsideration process in detail.

Even though Google doesn't publish everything about how they rank websites - they do work hard to be as transparent as they can be. There is really no mystery to what it takes to succeed on the Internet.

Every once in a while a really good advertising campaign comes along.

The current Dodge Durango campaign is very smart. These are the "sheep in wolf's clothing" ads talking about sedans pretending to be SUVs.

It is a very clever and effective job of positioning that furthers the basic Dodge truck branding of tough, manly vehicles.

It is designed to (and does) leave you wondering whether other SUVs are REAL SUVs.

Yahoo is now powered by Microsoft. They keep firing CEOs and Chief Technology Officers, but no joy:

Why Carol Bartz Was Fired as CEO of Yahoo

Microsoft is frantically trying to do a better job of imitating Google (and failing) while financing shady legal attacks on Google:

Court Tosses Out Ridiculous Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google

Meanwhile, Google has a "search anthropologist" who is in charge of "Search Quality and User Happiness" and gets interviewed about how to be a happier Google user:

12 Ways To Be More Search Savvy

Any questions?

Followers of this blog know that I'm missionary on the subject of delivering the best possible visitor experience.

Why put all that effort into SEO or money into buying paid clicks only to blow off your visitors with confusing navigation, unanswered questions, or a host of other errors?

Now here's a brilliant article that gives a great top down view of the subject. Don't neglect to follow the links, it's a short course in HALF of what it takes to make the Internet work (yes, you still have to get visitors to your site).

SEO Smackdown