Online Advertising & Changes at Google - Full Content
Posted to Shop Management Forum on 12/15/2014
14 Replies
Be forewarned this is another long post, so grab a cup of
coffee and read it only if you have the time. I want to help
explain to iATN members what we've been doing that's helped
our rinky-dink 3K sq. ft. 4-bay transmission shop go from
$600K/yr. to $1.3M/yr. in only 3 years. This is merely an
update to those activities, as Google, Bing, & Yahoo are
constantly changing. This post was originally made in
transmission-only forums and I thought it would be useful
for those iATN members who are engaged in transmission
repair. Here's my post:
I have multiple changes to report with Google that span
multiple products and product lines. The only thing that
ever stays the same at Google is change. The Y-gen &
Millennials keep changing stuff while the old people (X-gen)
oversee and coordinate what's going on.
First, I'd like to mention that when Google makes a change
or comes out with a new product, they don't do a global
deployment. They pick a small, manageable user base as a
test bed or "sandbox" to see how users like it and more
often than not, make tweaks and changes based on user
feedback. Often they will slowly grow the deployment area
until they feel comfortable enough to finally do a global
deployment.
The first, and most important change (to me, at least) is
Google Drive. For those of you not familiar with Drive, it's
much more than cloud storage. It includes Google Apps which
has a host of business apps that replaces MS Office and does
a lot more. All of the Google Apps have been highly upgraded
with much more functionality to make them more "MS
Office-like" to compete with MS's cloud version of Office,
Office 360. Before, the Google Apps were more like lite
versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Access, and
the other products that come with the full professional
version of Office. Now, they are closer to being the same,
due to Google Apps being more powerful. The entire suite of
Google products being available on your Android phone is
just the icing on the cake. We bought a Galaxy tablet, but
we have learned that we really don't need it because there's
nothing we can do on a tablet that we can't do on our
Samsung Galaxy S4's. To us, the tablet is just another
electronic device we'd rather not tote around.
On the storage end of Drive, I now have access to my 1TB of
storage from my Android smartphone and tablet along with all
of my Google apps. The one I use the most is Calendar
because that's how we schedule work at the shop. Here's a
short video that will explain what Google Drive can do now,
a lot better than I can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWvKAYKlnnM
The very best change they made with Drive is that the price
dropped 80%. I was paying $50/mo. for Google Apps for
Business with 1TB storage ever since I used it to replace
Office 3 years ago and it's now been renamed to Google Apps
for Work and it's only $10/mo. per user! And get this: If
you have 5 or more users, the storage space is unlimited.
Goodbye hard drives.
Google Goggles have been in the works for years. Google
Goggles has the potential to make bar codes, QR codes, and
more, unnecessary just as voice recognition has the
potential to make a keyboard unnecessary. Basically it's a
picture search. You take a picture of a product, ad, book,
business card, or perhaps sign or menu in a foreign
language, or anything else you want more information on and
Google does an automatic image search for more information
or translates it if there's foreign text in the picture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq-hXD33vXs
There's been a multitude of changes in Google AdWords over
the last 6 months. Some of the changes started as long as 2
years ago, such as Universal Analytics. Google Analytics as
everybody knows it, will be totally dead by Spring as those
web developers who have not already voluntarily converted
over from Google Analytics to the new Universal Analytics,
will be forced to as Google will automatically convert those
accounts over who have not already done so themselves. Old
habits die hard and I feel the old name of Google Analytics
will stick or maybe somebody will make up a new name like
"The New Google Analytics", but the official new name is
Universal Analytics. Here's the 4 big differences I see,
although there's many more:
1. The same user using different devices won't get counted
as a different visitor each time they visit as they were
before. First visiting on your smartphone, then on your
desktop when you get home will count as 1 new visitor and 1
returning visitor. Before, it was counted as 2 new visitors.
2. Easier cookie timeouts, and visitor exclusions. The
default timeout for a tracking cookie is 30 minutes and you
had to know JavaScript to change it before. Now it's a
button you click, along with you can exclude IP addresses
and websites that you don't want to count the data on, like
your own IP address, employee's IP's, competitors, and etc.
3. Helps you understand how your customer interacts with
various touchpoints instead of the historical last click
attribution model. It integrates and follows users who make
contact with your blog(s), YouTube channel, social media,
website, and any other URLs you list in GA as touchpoint
properties and even allows you to either link or import 3rd
party (non-Google) data into Universal Analytics to see how
much all these dimensions play a part up until the ZMOT for
that all important phone call. See ZMOT Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIFBwIAdpu4
4. Enhanced Link Attribution-If you have more than one way
for visitor to to get to another page, (2 different links on
the same page that go to the same place) Universal Analytics
can tell you which link got them to that next page, not that
they merely went from point A to point B. For instance, if
you have a button on your home page that takes the visitor
to the "Contact Us" page, but on that same home page, you
have a SiteSearch box to where if the visitor enters the
search term "email address", it will also take them to the
same "Contact Us" page, Universal Analytics can now tell you
by which method the visitor went from your home page to the
"Contact Us" page. This is very useful information to help
tweak, adjust, and design websites for the best user
experience possible.
Lastly, I'd like to comment to those shop owners who think
they don't have time for this kind of stuff, this sort of
work isn't important, or perhaps you can't afford it. Or
maybe you can simply care less, who knows?
Google has multiple YouTube channels, as well as help
websites to help anybody learn how to use AdWords, YouTube,
or social media to help your business grow. One of the big
shifts that Google has made is to start training business
owners on how to be able to handle all their online
advertising themselves, or have a key employee, wife,
secretary, or anybody they trust handle this sort of stuff
to where they don't have to pay an alleged "Google Guru" a
large monthly sum. Google quickly learned there's a lot of
"experts" out there that are giving Google a bad name and
Google's way to confront the issue is through education.
Here's a Google YouTube channel that Google developed
strictly to teach business owners (and consultants) how to
start using AdWords and develop an ad campaign:
https://www.youtube.com/user/learnwithgoogle
You can also easily learn Google Analytics by watching short
courses which are usually 10-20 videos of only about 2 to 4
minutes in length each with a short quiz at the end. If you
pass the quiz at the end of a course, you receive a
Certificate of Completion. Here's the 1st of a 16 video
playlist for Google Analytics that gives a brief overview of
the course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQFJ4fP1E7o&list=PLI5YfMzCfRtZmnYo8IWIXlI90EqJoJuKU&index=1
When you wished you had that 1 extra transmission job a
week, or perhaps 2, think online advertising. And after you
get your Google Adwords campaign(s) working, Bing/Yahoo
conveniently have an import utility so that you can import
everything out of Google Adwords and into MSN so that you
don't have to reinvent the wheel all over again by designing
a new Bing/Yahoo advertising campaign from scratch.
If you can read a manual or watch a video to help you learn
how to fix a transmission, you can do the same to learn how
to be at the very top of all the search engines in your
market area like we are and have the phone ring! Soon, your
mouse will become Like A Switch On The Phone To Make It
Ring
If an old burned out transmission builder can do it, anybody
can do it.
Larry Bloodworth, CMAT Certified Transmissions Draper, Utah
84020 523-1313 http://CertifiedTrans.com Check out our
YouTube channel and Google+ page links on our website!
Larry from Utah
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