Weak Branding Equals Missed Opportunities

There are consequences of having a weak or negative online brand. In fact, 75 percent of web users admit to making judgments about a company’s credibility based on their website’s design¹. If you have an outdated or unappealing website, chances are, your visitors will be left with a bad first impression about your eye care practice. On the other hand, a professional online appearance builds credibility and trust among prospective and current patients.
Neglecting your brand robs your practice of the opportunity to tell your story and sell your services to website visitors who are trying to determine whether or not your eye care practice is a good fit. Brand neglect even gives your competitors the chance to get an upper hand and possibly poach your prospective patients with their stronger brand presence.
In the long run, if you do not properly develop your brand online, your organic search ranking could fall, making it more difficult for new patients to find your site online. Search engines assure web users that the websites returned in the results will be the best options for the inquiry. In order to build that confidence in the algorithm, an eye care practice must ensure search engines understand exactly who you are, what you offer, and where your eye care practice is located. These are all valuable elements of your brand. However, when used inconsistently they can cut down your practice’s credibility.

The Importance of Branding Your Eye Care Practice Website

Proper brand usage starts with developing a branding standard that outlines your overall branding package and how these pieces should be used on your website. This package could include your practice’s logo, colors, name, and slogan. Besides your practice’s identifying marks, also think about the use of color and appropriate stock images on your website and how those play into your overall brand. As graphic elements, logos should be used as an accent to your overall website design, rather than as the main focus.

Brand Messaging

Though an eye-pleasing palette and professional logo are important to establishing the visual side of your brand, it’s just as important to consider what your marketing messaging communicates and how that contributes to creating a strong, well-rounded brand. Often, businesses will use their website to explain why they are the best, focusing on awards, education and, technology while glossing over the needs and concerns of their clients or patients. While it is important to create authority and demonstrate industry expertise with your website messaging, one must also find balance between communicating what your practice has and addressing the information and resource needs of your patients. Determine what your target audience is looking for – and use the messaging of your website to describe how your practice can meet their eye care needs.

Information Consistency

Part of developing your online brand includes maintaining consistency among your eye practice’s name, address and phone number, commonly abbreviated as NAP. The NAP of your eye care practice should be listed the same across the internet. This is one of the most influential factors in ranking highly on the maps section of Google and helps develop confidence from search engines.

Brand in Action

The look and feel of your brand constitute the bulk of what many consider to be the branding package. The marketing and branding elite challenge this idea and insist that your full brand makeup extends to what you do with your brand. Regular updates to your branded website demonstrate that you are up-to-date and care about your audience’s experience. Prospective patients might also make the connection that a well-cared-for website is a sign you offer a similar high-level of care within your practice walls.

Beyond Your Website

Social media platforms and third-party review websites should also be seen as part of your online brand. Manage these properties in the same manner as your website – the logo, colors, and stock images should all be the same as they are on your website in order to communicate brand consistency. While regularly updating your website is important, the same care should also be given to your social pages. A lack of updates is very obvious, which gives visitors less of a reason to follow your social platforms or check for new content.

Want to get started on some of the benefits of branding today?

Now that we have explained to you how important branding is for your business, don’t be intimidated by the work you need to put into it even if you haven’t put much work into it yet. For one, branding is something that you really only need to worry about once, and thereafter you only need to worry about maintaining your brand by consistently using it in your marketing efforts.
iMatrix can help you with this. Our websites are incredibly easy to update and very user-friendly. We make it easy to keep track of how well your website is doing and your brand by extension.
Plus, if you don’t want to spend the time updating your website by yourself, we can help you with our full suite of online marketing solutions. Give us a call at 800.943.6423for more information or simply to learn more about what a strong website should do for you.
For more help on branding and building a better website, check out our free resources.

Looking for more tips on branding your eye care practice?

These articles can help!
5 Ways to Boost Your Brand on Social Media
The Importance of Color Continuity in Online Brand Building
Showcasing Your Brand When Responding to Online Reviews
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The Vocab Basics of Website Analytics

• Traffic: Unlike highway traffic, website traffic is good! The more the better. Traffic refers to how many visitors your website is getting.
• Direct Traffic: This number indicated the website visitors that you get directly from Google or another search engine. Direct traffic can mean a visitor is searching for your business directly in Google or simply that you are ranked high enough on Google that they decided to click your link when they did a more general search.
• Referral Traffic: Referrals in your analytics indicate the source of your traffic if it is not from directly from Google. This could mean your website was linked somewhere and someone saw that link and clicked it.
• Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your website but perform no action (visiting another page or filling out a form.) This is not ideal, but if someone was just visiting your website to get your phone number from a desktop it is not as much a problem.
• Device: This statistic should show the percentage of your visitors who are viewing your website from a tablet, mobile device (a cell phone), or a computer.
• Time Spent: How much time a visitor spends on your website, the longer the better!
• Conversion rate: Your website’s conversion rate is the percentage of visitors you get who perform an action; either filling out a form, calling (if you have mobile tracking), or visiting another page. A high conversion rate is extremely desirable because it means your website is effective.

Set Website Analytics Goals

Now what you know the basic vocabulary of your website’s analytics, go take a look at your analytics right now.
Now take note of all the different numbers and percentages. Go back as far as your analytics will let you and note any changes over time. Do those changes correspond with the reality of your business?
Save this data, you will be referring to it in the future. Now it is time to set goals of the statistics you want to change. You can tackle multiple goals at once, but one is reasonable to start out with.

Optimize with Your Website Analytics

Now that your goal is set, optimize.
Let’s say that your goal is increasing your conversion rate. What do you think could possibly be hurting your conversion rate right now? Is the action you want the visitor to take clearly visible? Is there something else distracting from that action? Is the writing on your website in a passive or active voice?
Change whatever you think could benefit from changing. Then track your numbers. Do your numbers increase? Then keep the change. If they decrease? Change it back to how it was before.

Get your free website consultation today

Knowing what kind of design features your website should include to get your numbers up can be difficult to do on your own, especially if you have minimal internet marketing experience. That’s where we come in. Call iMatrix at 888.719.0733 today to get a free, educational website consultation.

Looking to expand your marketing knowledge?

Learn More:
Manage Your Practice’s Online Reputation to Generate New Referral Business
How to Generate Reviews That Get Results

The post Tracking Your Progress with Website Analytics appeared first on iMatrix.

3 Ways to Stay Abreast of the Latest SEO News

There are multiple ways to keep up with the latest SEO news. We’ve outlined the three that we try to use in various ways.
 

1. Search Engine Results

There are multiple ways to keep up with the latest SEO news. One method you can employ is actually going into Google and running a Google search every day for SEO News. But that can be time-consuming and you would have to remember to do that every day.
 

2. Google Alerts

It is much more convenient to set up a Google alert and have the latest SEO news articles sent right to your inbox.
To set up a Google Alert, login to your Gmail account and go here. From there, you can simply input the searches you want to go directly to your inbox and how often you want them to be sent to you. You will have to have the discipline to actually open your Google alert emails though!
 

3. Websites that Cover SEO Changes

If you don’t want the barrage of emails sent to you via Google alerts, you can consider a simpler method, like following an SEO news website. Moz.com always covers many of the major SEO changes and SearchEngineLand.com is a good one too.
You can also follow iMatrix’s Facebook page because we will post when there is a major shift in the online marketing industry.
 

Partner with a Google Premier Partner

Now, we know that not everyone is as excited about the latest SEO news as we are. And we know that going out of your way to keep up with the changes is not for everyone–especially if you are a doctor or practice manager who has their hands full keeping up with the news within your industry. But not to worry, you have an alternative way to make sure you are always up-to-date with SEO news: you can partner with a Google Premier Partner.
Google Premier Partners are amongst the elite of Google’s partners. They are companies which have proven themselves to be skilled and ethical when it comes to internet marketing strategies such as Pay Per Click ads and SEO.
And because they have proven themselves to Google, these companies get insider tips from Google itself before an algorithm change is made public. That means the two best ways of staying ahead of Google’s algorithm is to either (1) Work at Google or (2) Work with a Google Premier Partner. Since most of us don’t have a programming background, working with a Google Premier Partner is a lot more feasible.
We here at iMatrix have achieved the elite status of being a Google Premier Partner. If Google can trust us, then you know you can too.
For more information on how we can help you with your SEO needs, call 888.719.0733.
 

Want to learn more about SEO basics?

Here are a few articles to check out:

What Are Keywords? How to Brainstorm Keywords for your Google Ranking

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How to Brainstorm Keywords for your Google Ranking

Use Google to Find Keywords

Now that you how important keywords are, you know you need to incorporate them into your marketing content plans. But if you don’t have a professional keyword search account, it can be difficult to know where to start and how to find the right keywords.
So let’s start with the basics: Google.
Google the first words you can think of that are relevant to your business and see what websites come up in the actual search. Are they good, user-friendly websites? Are they relevant?
Then look back at the Google results. At the bottom of the page you should see “Searches related to [whatever it is you searched].” Look at these terms and phrases and pick from these to find more possible keywords and keyword phrases.

Long-tail Keywords Are Key

Keywords do not always have to be just one word, they can also be a few words strung together in what is called a keyword phrase. In fact, using a keyword phrase instead of a keyword is often preferable because there is generally less competition the more specific your keyword or keyword phrase is.
When coming up with keywords, it is recommended you start with brainstorming the broadest, generalized keywords you can think of, then take those keywords and making keyword phrases out of them.
For example, let’s say your business is an optometry office. You can start your search for keywords simply by typing “optometry” into Google. From there you can see that in searches related to “optometry” “optometry near me” is a keywords phrase. You can then click on “optometry near me” to search it and once again see more related searches at the bottom of Google’s search page.

Think Like Your Clients

One thing that many professionals get wrong when they are initially trying to implement keywords is thinking too much like professionals within their industry and thus using keywords that other professionals would use to search the latest research. Not their clients.
Maybe you have a new device in the office that can help you treat your clients, but your potential clients are not going to be researching that device. More likely, they will be using Google to search for their ailments. Likewise, they will be searching for professionals in your area, so be sure to consider the name of your city or town as part of your keywords.

Now that you know what keywords are, save yourself the trouble!

All of these methods can work to help you find keywords, but there is no substitute for professionals who have access to advanced keyword tools. You can buy access to advanced keyword tools yourself as well, but if you own or manage a small business it may not be worth it to pay for an expensive keyword finder tool when you are only managing one website.
Instead, you might consider turning to the professionals at iMatrix for help. For more information or to schedule a complimentary consultation, call 888.719.0733.

Ready to dive further into SEO and Advertising?

Learn more here!
Retargeting: What Is It?
Should You Focus on SEO or Adwords? How to Leverage Both For Your Business

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What are Backlinks?

What are backlinks? Simply put, they are links on other websites that link back to your website; hence, backlinks.
Backlinks are important because they are one of the main components Google uses to determine how much authority your website has. Websites with a lot of backlinks are seen as having more authority because others have deemed them important enough to link back to.

Dofollow Backlinks

Backlinks can work in a variety of different ways. Dofollow backlinks are one of the most common kinds. Dofollow backlinks are backlinks that Google can crawl (or “follow”) back to your website. Dofollow backlinks are the backlinks that carry the most SEO weight.

Nofollow Backlinks

Nofollow backlinks are links that Google does not craw/follow. No follow backlinks have their place in internet marketing as well, although they do not contribute as much to SEO. Nofollow backlinks are common on social networking websites but can also be on your own website.

Nofollow links prevent Google from indexing content that could potentially be seen as duplicate by Google, which is good because Google does ding duplicate content on websites, seeing it as plagiarism even when it is not.

Interlinking

Interlinking, when referring to backlinks, is linking to different pages on your own website. Interlinking is useful for optimizing your website because Google sees websites with a good interlinking strategy as user-friendly and thus better.

How to Get Backlinks

You want that SEO juice, don’t you? Now with interlinking aside (which you can easily do yourself on your own website), you may wonder how to get backlinks on other websites that you don’t manage.
There are a few different strategies you can use for this. One of the easiest and most effective ways to do this is simply asking any businesses that you are affiliated with to link to you on their website. Keep in mind that they might be more willing to link to you if you offer to link to them as well.
This same strategy can be used for blog posts as well. Offer to guest-write a blog post for another business or organization in your industry and you will be able to link back to your website in return. Whatever you do though, do exercise caution when seeking backlinks: your website can actually be dinged for backlink activity that looks suspicious due to inorganic linking.

Need More SEO Help?

Do you have zero time to read up on SEO yourself, let alone implement the strategies you read about? If so, it may be time for you to recruit some outside help. Call iMatrix at 888.719.0733 to schedule a complimentary consultation.

Learn more about optimizing your website:
8 Steps for Solving Incorrect or Duplicate Listings on Google
How to Appear Multiple Times on Google’s First Page

The post What are Backlinks? Backlinks explained. appeared first on iMatrix.

People can spend hours whiling away their time on YouTube, watching funny cat videos or cooking tutorials and everything in between. These people spending their free time on YouTube are your potential eye care customers.  And the best way to reach them can be using YouTube video advertising.

Effective Advertising

Video advertising is actually one of the highest converting forms of online advertising — that is to say that people who view your YouTube Video Advertising are likely to convert from prospects to actual customers, with estimates of as much as a 71% conversion rate. This is part of why running a TV commercial can be so expensive and why commercials slots (which cost as much as $5 million dollars for a 30-second commercial) during the Superbowl are only ever bought by wealthy companies.

But you’re an eye doctor, not a soda or car company, so you likely don’t have the budget to spend so much money on one TV commercial. And running a super-bowl commercial would be next to useless for you anyway because only people who live near your physical locations will ever become paying customers; you don’t need to pay millions of dollars to have the whole country see what your practice is all about, you only need to reach people in your area.

Here’s where YouTube Video Advertising comes in and is actually better for your business than a super bowl commercial. YouTube Video Advertising can (and should) be geo-targeted to the area around your practice. This means that you will only pay for your potential customers to see your YouTube Ad, giving you the greatest return on your investment.

YouTube Advertising Rates

It still sounds pretty expensive though, doesn’t it? But the reality is that not only compared to TV commercials but compared to most forms of advertising in general, YouTube videos provide a lot of bang for your buck. The extremely effective and YouTube advertising rates make these commercials extremely budget-friendly.

On average, you will pay only a few cents per view; and a high-quality, properly targeted commercial will cost even less per view. YouTube will assign your video a quality score, and a higher-quality video costs less to run. Likewise, a targeted video is most cost-effective because it will be shown to people who recently searched for something related to your business on Google or YouTube.

YouTube Video Advertising is for Everyone

Many business owners are reluctant to give YouTube commercials a try because they are camera-shy. It is important to recognize that this is not actually a barrier to doing a YouTube commercial, as you don’t have to be featured in the video if you don’t want to. Instead, your commercial can be a video of your practice with a voice-over.

If you are looking to get your name out there and grow your business, YouTube Video Advertising is right for your practice. But how can a practice utilize it fully?

You don’t have to figure that out on your own. With our services, iMatrix will send a professional camera crew to your practice, record an office video, edit it, and run it for you. All you have to do is show up, looking your best.

For complimentary digital marketing consultation call 800.943.6423.

Learn more about best eyecare marketing practices:

The Importance of Branding Your Eyecare Practice Website
How to Help Your Patients Choose the Best Glasses for Their Face Shape

The post Is a YouTube Commercial Right for your Eye Care Business? appeared first on iMatrix.

An easily updated veterinary website can dramatically reduce the time your staff spends on such tasks, allowing them to spend more time with patients, which is probably why they wanted to work in a veterinary clinic to begin with.

Read on to learn about the five easy ways a veterinary website can streamline your veterinary practice management.

5 Ways Veterinary Websites Cuts Down On Staff Workload

1. Cut down on phone time.

Many veterinary practices have so many phone calls that they must get multiple phone lines and, as you know, these calls are not just for appointments. Many of the time it is clients or potential clients asking questions such as, “Do you perform this particular service?”

When this information is listed on your veterinary website, then you can expect your staff’s time spent on the phone answering these questions to be dramatically reduced because, even if someone calls to ask, your staff can easily direct them to look at your website to find out all about your practice and the services provided after answering their initial question.

In this age of GPS and smartphones, you may get calls about how to actually find your location less frequently, but a map on your veterinary practice website that gives directions and includes pictures of what your building looks like helps ensure that your patients never get lost.

2. Online Payments

Many veterinary practices sell prescription medication, pet food, and other pet supplies, which makes having an online shopping option incredibly useful for streamlining your business. Instead of having clients come in and utilize your staff’s valuable time making product purchases, with an online store your clients can buy the items they need and have them shipped directly to their door.

If you use an advanced veterinary website, such as a VetMatrix website, you can take payments from patients online in your online store. This online shopping will streamline in-office appointments. Your clients will appreciate saving time as well!

3. Educating your clients

Sometimes your clients just don’t know how to properly care for their pet – how to groom them, how to feed them, how to exercise them – and are looking for advice or tips. Your staff may not have to time to explain all of these tips to every client within the time frame of their visit.

This is where your veterinary website comes in. On your website, you can highlight any pet care knowledge you want your clients to know. You can do this on the blog section of your website, or if you are a VetMatrix client, you can even send out periodic newsletters reminding your clients of proper veterinary care. Having this resource can provide value and time savings for each appointment with a client.

4. Paperwork

A client with a huge dog comes into your practice and the owner sits down to fill out paperwork. Then a client with a cat comes in and sits down to also fill out paperwork. Nothing can stop the dog from barking, and both the dog’s owner and the cat’s owner slow down in their filling out of the paperwork because they are distracted by their pets.

Meanwhile, your staff is smiling behind the reception desk but wishing they had earplugs because this is the fifth time this has happened today. Everyone’s life would be so much easier if clients came in with paperwork already filled out–which can be an option with a veterinary website.

Including various forms and paperwork on your website means that your clients can help get a jump start on their initial check-in by having this paperwork already filled out by the time they get to your office. No more distractions and no more delays!

5. Marketing

Think of your website as the window into your practice. Instead of spending time on minimally effective marketing techniques like mail fliers, your staff can devote half as much time to maintaining your website often with better (and trackable!) results. A practice’s website is often the first thing a potential client looks at when deciding what veterinary practice to go to.

Make sure that when you choose your veterinary website, you choose one that is not only attractive but easy to edit. VetMatrix provides beautiful websites with an extremely easy-to-use editor, as well as unlimited tech support for those times when your staff just doesn’t have enough time to make edits themselves.

A website is your veterinary practice management solution

Hopefully, your veterinary website is doing all these things for you because if not, it might be time to re-evaluate your website provider for your staff’s sake and your practice’s sake.

Here at VetMatrix, we understand the hectic situations that can happen in a veterinary office, and we make sure to tailor our websites to make them easy for your business.

Call us today at 866-788-2991 for a no-obligation consultation to find out about the services we provide to your practice to streamline your veterinary practice management.

Looking to read more about Veterinary marketing?

We have some suggestions!
5 Ways to Use Social Media for Your Veterinary Practice
How to Leverage A First Vet Visit To Retain Clients Through In Person Veterinary Marketing

The post Cut Down On Your Staff's Workload with a Website appeared first on iMatrix.

5 Ways to Use Social Media for Your Veterinary Practice

1. Claim Your Name so Others Don’t

One thing you might consider is not what happens if you do become active on social media, but the consequences if you don’t. At the very least, you should own your practice’s name across every social media platform you can think of (Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram etc.), even if you have no intention of becoming active on any of them. Because if you don’t claim your name, there is a chance that someone else will.
You absolutely do not want a rival company or a disgruntled ex-client creating a veterinary social media page about you, and possibly making posts that you do not agree on. Nor do you want another business with a name similar to your practice’s impugning on your brand. If you haven’t already, Keep your business safe by claiming ownership of these names ASAP.

2. Communicate With Clients

If you have ever had to close your practice down due to a personal emergency or inclement weather, you know how inconvenient it can be to notify your clients. While it will not solve this issue entirely, using social media to announce any change in your hours will make more of your client’s aware and will saving them from calling you to find out.
Any events you have can also be easily announced on social media, as well as relevant veterinary news in your area. Many veterinarians also use social media to announce outbreaks such as dog flu, in order to better enable their clients to keep their pets safe. And as you already are likely well aware, when your clients know how to keep their pet’s safe, your job is less stressful.

3. Cost Effective Veterinary Marketing

Social media can be free and somewhat time-consuming if you are a do-it-yourselfer, but even when you pay for an expert marketing company like VetMatrix to handle your social media for you, it is extremely cost-effective.
Social media pages often have a snowball effect. Maybe at first you see few results. The more consistent you are with it, the more followers you will get. Not only that, but you will stay at the forefront of your client’s brains and increase customer loyalty with minimal effort.

4. Get Traffic to Your Website

Unless you already rank number one, you would probably be happy if you increase your website’s Google ranking. Getting more traffic to your website can help you achieve this, and what better way to get more traffic to your website than social media?
Your social media followers can also become your website visitors; having an active social media presence can increase your search engine optimization, and, in turn, help your business reach more potential clients when you are higher in the search engine.

5. Understand your Clients

Social media additionally makes it easier than ever to keep track of what your clients like and what messages really hit home for them. You can tell this by paying attention to posts that you will get the most interaction with.

Read what your clients’ comment on the veterinary social media posts you share, and keep track of what posts of yours they like and which ones they ignore to better communicate with your clients both in and out of the office. You can do this by looking at 2 factors: reach and engagement. How many people did that particular post reach and what type of engagement did that post receive? This will help determine your most popular content and the content that just wasn’t as enticing to your audience.

Ready to get started?

Hopefully, this article convinced you that there is no time like the present to take advantage of social media. It is such an important tool to in your veterinary marketing toolbox. If you’re still confused and need more of a clue on where to start with your social media journey, feel free to give VetMatrix a call at 866-788-2991 for a no-obligation, personalized online marketing consultation.

Looking to read more about Veterinary marketing?

We have some suggestions!
8 Reasons Why You Need an Online Store Today
How to Leverage A First Vet Visit To Retain Clients Through In Person Veterinary Marketing
Why Vets Need to Use Call Tracking to Generate Business Right Meow

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In any of these cases, it can be very frustrating. It may even seem as if Google is purposely misrepresenting your business on their map. This is not the case; Google obtains their information about where you are from two sources: you or your clients. Since Google wants to make sure that the information they’re sharing is as accurate as possible, they want any mistakes to be reported so that the correct information is displayed. Google wants the trust of both your clients and you, and cannot earn this trust if they publish false information without an easy way to correct it.

So if you own or manage one of the small businesses that either has incorrect or duplicate listings on Google, then this is the blog post for you. Find out how to correct your listings simply and accurately in the following steps.

8 Steps for Solving Incorrect or Duplicate Listings on Google

1. Determine whether or not you have incorrect or duplicate listings on Google. Check your address and your phone number to make sure they remain consistent by typing your address into Google’s search engine.
2. If you haven’t already claimed your business, claim your business now. You can do this by clicking “claim this business,” which is under the business hours in the listing. From there, Google will ask you to verify your ownership of the business which they walk you through doing step-by-step via an online form.
3. Once your business is claimed, sign into your Google My Business account. Under your “Account Summary” click “Duplicate Locations.”
4. Click any location you need to remove, then click “delete this listing.”
5. If your business is listed in the wrong place in Google entirely, click the map listing from Google and then click “Suggest an edit.” From there you should be able to make the .location as “permanently closed or never existed.” Select “duplicate” as the reason, and then click submit.
6. Repeat these steps as needed for any extraneous locations.
7. Login to your Google My Business account to correct any other information that needs updating, such as your office hours or phone number, this is easily done by finding your business listing and clicking “edit your business information.”
8. Double-check to make sure everything is corrected in a few day’s time; sometimes Google cannot make changes immediately, especially when it comes to location issues.

BONUS TIP:

Don’t forget to keep track of the reviews you are getting on your map listing! You can request reviews from your happy clients when they come in or via emails when they leave your office. More reviews mean that Google will see your business as more valuable and put your listing higher in its ranks, in turn helping you drum up more business.

If you are one of our clients in need of further assistance, feel free to call our client support team at 800.462.8749. Or call us at 800.943.6423 to find out more about what iMatrix can do for you.

Looking for ways to make your business stand out?

Check out these related articles:
Showcasing Your Brand When Responding To Online Reviews
How to Appear Multiple Times on Google’s First Page

The post 8 Steps for Solving Incorrect or Duplicate Listings on Google appeared first on iMatrix.

4 Useful Adwords Account Tools for Success

1. Google Keyword Planner

One tool, and arguably the most important tool, that Google AdWords training neglects to go over in depth is the Google Keyword Planner.
The Google Keyword Planner can help get you started with your AdWords campaign by giving you ideas on what keywords to use from the beginning. Simply input your initial ideas, and the keyword planner will output similar ideas to get you started.
The Google Keyword Planner also lets you see an estimate of how much a keyword will cost, how much competition there is for that keyword, as well as the frequency that that keyword is searched for.

2. Custom Ad Scheduling

Say your business is only open from Monday thru Friday from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM–in this situation do you think it makes sense for your ad to run 24-7, seven days a week? No, of course not.
Instead, you should use custom Ad Scheduling. With Ad Scheduling you can run your ad only during business hours and not when your business is closed, so you won’t waste money on people trying to contact your business when you aren’t available to speak with them.

3. Google Analytics Integration

Google Analytics is a must-have for running Google AdWords campaigns from your Google AdWords account. Google Analytics is just what the name says it is: the analytics of your campaign.
This includes numbers on your click-thru-rate (CTR) cost-per-click (CPC) and more. Taking careful note of these statistics from campaign to campaign and month to month will help you optimize your ad spend to get the most bang out of your buck.
Like Google AdWords training, you can also receive Google Analytics certification. However, like Google AdWords training, there is no substitute for actual experience. At iMatrix, we not only send you your analytics report monthly, but we help you read through it so you understand just how well your campaign is doing.

4. Call Extensions

If you are a traditional business with a brick and mortar storefront, you should highly consider making use of the call extension Google tool. With call-tracking, potential clients can call you right from your ad, making the transition from potential client to actual client much higher. There is a major difference between a potential client seeing your ad online and continuing to browse, versus simply calling you right away–a call extension on your ad can make you the first and last business that your client sees.

Just the Basics

This has just been a very brief overview of what tools you need to begin for your Google AdWords account to be a success. Each one of these tools could have their own books written about them. Keep visiting our blog for more Google AdWords training and more in-depth information.
Of course, these tools in of themselves can seem confusing as well. If you want your AdWords campaign to succeed without having to learn about all these tools for yourself, give iMatrix a call at 800.943.6423. We can help you succeed in not only your pay-per-click AdWords campaign but in overall online marketing.

Interested in finding out how to utilize AdWords even more?

Read these articles to help get your PPC plan on track:
Useful Features in AdWords
3 Ways to Track Google AdWords Campaign Performance
How to Set Up AdWords Location Extensions
Top 3 Things You Need to Know About AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

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