First, I got to Google Insights for Search. Type in anything you want to promote, for my example I will use a digital camera brand, Coach Purse. Now take a look at this, pay attention to the Rising Searches section in the lower right.

Now, I start checking what domains are available using PCNames.com. This is an accurate AJAX powered domain search tool and it works well. So start searching…. When I wrote this, patchworkcoachpurse.com was available. Now we need to make sure there is enough traffic there to make it worth it.

For the last step, I use Googles External Keyword Tool to check search volume. Its showing 8,100 monthly searches for patchwork coach purse, not bad. Now you hurry your butt up and go buy it while its still available!

So there you have it… It’s not rocket science but its effective. Find a brand that’s coming out or has come out with a new product and often times you will see the word “Breakout” next to it, those are usually really good domains to get and can drive some serious traffic. Enjoy!

What Google knows about you and I
Do you use Gmail? How about YouTube? Google Maps? Chrome? Chances are, you use at least one, if not many Google products. Now, do you think Google stores any personal information on your? Have you ever gone on Google and done a search and then saw sponsored ads with your city under them?

Of course you have, and no matter if you were aware of it or not, Google knows more about you then you think. The techies will say, they are just IP locating people and displaying ads relevant to where they live, they don’t actually know exactly where you are, nor is there proof that they store that data, but what about when I log into my Gmail account. All of a sudden, almost every single ad says San Diego, CA under it.

Taking AdWords to the next level
We know that the more relevant your ad, the better it converts. This has been proven over and over and over.

Imagine… You’re signed into your Gmail account, you do a search and the new ads look more like this.

It targets my name, and based on previous searches I’ve conducted it predicts where I want to go. Will it always be 100% accurate, no way, probably not even 10%, but there are ways this can be refined. Looking deeper into my Gmail account they can search against it for any mentions of a limo and a club, restaurant or any type of location stored in the Google Maps database and more accurately predict where I want to go. Is this an invasion of privacy? Probably. But what if we opt in for it? What if we can control what Google knows? Say I only want to share my name, location and sex. Do you think that would help marketers? Absolutely!!

Now, we’ve only covered the AD, what about the landing page!? Landing pages could be targeted to men and women, two separate landing pages which are triggered by a URL string. Its simple, a typical Adwords AD looks like this: http://www.google.com/url?q=san+diego+limo&url=siteyoureabouttovisit.com and now the enhanced version would look like this: http://www.google.com/url?q=san+diego+limo&gender=m&name=Marko&city=San+Diego&state=CA&url=siteyoureabouttovisit.com. If someone shares more information in their privacy settings, Google lets their advertisers target more attributes.

This would completely change landing pages! We could make them more personalized and target each one to our target audience. Assuming we have personas on our target audience, we can then create landing pages that target each one, and using their privacy shared attributes we can better funnel them to a page they would be more likely to convert on.

Using the information that the user decides to share, we can create landing pages that are very dynamic and very personalized. Even if we can only use their location and sex, we could construct two completely separate landing pages for the same product.

Will the above ever happen, I have no idea but I think its a great way for Google to one up their competition. Either way you look at it, there will be an evolution in online ad targeting because how its currently being done is simply not good enough. As customers learn more about the web, how to search for items and are overall better educated in life, they will begin to look for products and EXPECT you to impress them!

Alexa rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of pageviews and visitors is ranked #1.

One of the first things I noticed was that my pageviews per visitor was low. Each visitor only visited about 5 pages before leaving my site. This is clearly an indication that the user did not find what he/she was looking for.

The second issue was that my bounce rate was high, about 70%, on average.

Based on those two metrics, the indication was clear that my website was missing something…

I began looking at my competitors Alexa ranks to see how they were doing, and noticed a similar trend, most of the sites got decent traffic but their bounce rate was high, until I found one site, one very, very small site and noticed it had an alexa score higher then most of the sites that out ranked it the organic search results.

I then began to dissect its pages to see what it was doing and how I can improve on it.

Low and behold, a few weeks later I was able to substantially lower my bounce rate and increase my pageviews per visitor. I still get the same amount of traffic, but I now get 4 to 5 times more sales!

For my next post, I will reveal a unique way to utilize Twitter’s content and create a unique website around it.

Take care for now,
Marko