I panicked, thinking I had accidentally changed the geo-target settings in Google AdWords. After assuring that this was not the case, I started looking into what could possibly be causing this.

Let me set the stage a little bit here:

Client – Lethbridge College

Geo-Target – Most of Canada

I looked at the Google Analytics reports and sure enough, just over 100 visits from the Philippines and close to 200 from the USA. Why on earth is this happening?

I dug around a little bit more but couldn’t find anything so I did the only thing I could think of: call Google! I spoke to a very friendly individual who put me on hold while he investigated. A few moments later, he came back on the phone and assured me that all the settings were fine. This is happening because Google doesn’t only use a users IP address to serve ads. WHAT? Apparently, the IP address is used but so are geo-specific terms such as ‘Calgary’ or ‘Lethbridge’. So I dug a bit deeper into the Analytics data. Sure enough, the keywords indicated searches like “Lethbridge College” or “college in Lethbridge”.

This case is a little out of the ordinary because the ‘business name’ has the city name in it. Normally, when a business name is something like, for example, Anduro, these searches would not generally result in ads showing for “internet marketing” in Europe, when we are targeting Canada.

I wanted to take it one step further. Why would they want to pay for these people to click on the ads? Interestingly enough, a lot of these clicks resulted in conversions. This tells me that someone in the Philippines is looking to come to Canada to go to college/university and found Lethbridge College as a result.

That’s good but is it worth it? Turns out it is! The cost/conversion in the Philippines is 72.5% LOWER than in Canada. That is incredible.

Granted, there are a lot less clicks and a lot less conversions but there is no need to panic over the ads showing in different countries.

The Google rep also told me that they are working on implementing a setting that allows advertisers to turn this off. Now that I have been looking into it some more, I am not sure I would. The cost/conversion is so much lower – why not advertise there? In this case, it works out but in the future, I will really need to think about whether or not it makes sense to advertise elsewhere.

For a local painting company – not so much. But a school catering to a vast number of people? Absolutely.

Last November we hosted our first seminar on Online Marketing Strategy in 6 Hours. It was sold out and a tremendous success. So much so that we are offering this seminar again – re-titled as Social Media Strategy in 6 Hours.

The topics and dates for these new sessions are:

• Quickinar: Tweet Like a Pro in under 3 Hours on January 21
• Quickinar: Social Media Strategy in 6 Hours on Monday, January 31
• Quickinar: Lights, Camera, YouTube Action in under 3 Hours on Thursday, February 10
• Quickinar: Facebook Business Page in under 3 Hours on Thursday, February 17
• Quickinar: Kick Your Blog Up a Notch in under 3 Hours on Thursday, February 24
• Quickinar: Social Media Strategy in 6 Hours on Friday, March 25

As you will notice we are calling these sessions, Quickinars. This is a name that we came up with to emphasize that these are short, intense seminars that focus on relevant topics. Right now we are focusing on providing social media training for the Calgary market – we may expand.

We hope that you find these seminars useful and valuable. For the entire list of seminars and more details look at our Quickinars page on Eventbrite.

If you have questions please email me, jeff.nelson@anduro.com or call me (403) 410-3803.

Hope to see you at one of the sessions.

Benchmarks Bounce Rates into different page/website types.

As a result, we had an objective (do the video) but this was one of those situations where we had no time, no media room, dysfunctional equipment, and no one to shoot the video.  Being 2 resourceful guys we improvised. We met at Mount Royal University, snagged a classroom, set up our cameras on a tripod, hammered out a script (very loose) and shot the video. Here is what we came up with. Enjoy.

I was complaining to my co-workers about this because the only way for me to check a site is to go through EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the site and check the html code to see if Analytics is there. This is, as you can imagine, incredibly time consuming. SEO-Browser makes this a bit easier because you can click through the pages of the site and it checks the html code for you.

Still though, you have to click on every link to every page of a site. Now you can imagine, this is no easy task if you are looking at a 100+ page site.

So while I was complaining, Jeff sends me a link to this great tool. I was skeptical at first but thought I would try it out. It is called SiteScan by EpicOne and it does just that – it scans any site and spits back a report letting you know if any pages are missing the code, and if they are, it gives you the URL of the page! Brilliant! The free version let’s you run 11 or 12 tests a day!

I have gone through all of my clients and checked. Luckily, there has only been one who had a bit of code missing. Phew! This tool saves me hours of time. Maybe it can help you as well!