Author: Dan Morris

So I’m using “Black Friday” as a metaphor for any campaign you just undertook which also just ended. Just like list building, just like conferences and events, just like ebooks. . . a campaign is a tool to learn and grow your business.

If you don’t learn from it. . .if you can’t build upon it. . . if it doesn’t get easier each and every time then why are you doing it? Shouldn’t it get easier?

Think about the folks at Target the week, month and quarter after Black Friday. Think they got analysts figuring out what sold well, what didn’t sell, what products should have been on the top shelf versus the eye-level shelf? Did you visit Wal-Mart over Black Friday? Notice that they put bananas in all kinds of crazy places? They did that because it made them a lot more money last year. Think the Target guys are trying to figure out what sold at Wal-Mart that they failed to even carry? I bet they have entire teams dedicated to learning.

How dedicated is your team to learning?

So what analysis should you be doing now? And what analysis should you have done between Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Here’s some steps to print out and keep handy:

1. What did you sell? Let’s make a list of everything you made money on and how much you made. I mean everything from Amazon, ThinkGeek, AdSense, Coupons.com, GoDaddy . . . wherever you derive income. Don’t forget something because it is all important. Where you can, like Amazon, note whether the product was a direct link or something else they bought while they were there.

2. What did you promote? Let’s make a list of every deal that you published and promoted. If you’re using a spreadsheet put #1 in columns A and B and this one in column C.

3. What did people find organically? From Google Analytics export the keywords people searched to get to your site for Black Friday (or you campaign period).

ANALYSIS: Now let’s connect the dots between what we sold and how we sold it.

For instance if you sold 8 iPod Shuffle’s on Amazon during Black Friday but never once promoted nor have a web page about it. . . that would be an ancillary sale. That means someone clicked our Amazon link and then searched Amazon for other things. This is important to note because it tells us more about our customer’s actual interests. It tells us that’s what the customer was going to buy with or without us.

If we promoted the heck out of the “Nemo in 3D” DVD and sold 37, but find that not a single “Nemo in 3D” keyword was used to get to our site, then we know we were able to convince people to get it.

And if we sold a bunch of the fishing pole we posted earlier this summer, and see that “fishing pole” was one of the search terms people used to get to the site we know that organic search sold the product. That means we had the right product at the right place at the right time. If fishing poles didn’t show up in our search results AND we didn’t promote it, we know that people navigated around our site to find it.

If you really, really want to make more money next year then you’ll hire a VA in Australia, the Phillipines or New Zeland next year. And then at midnight on Black Friday have them start working on this analysis so you’ll have it when you wake up the next morning. Can you imagine how much more you’ll sell with this information on Saturday, Sunday and Cyber Monday? Seriously if a bunch of people bought that fishing pole you posted in July, might you want to republish that to your readers today?

And what about the products we promoted but didn’t sell? What about the DVD’s that we promoted just as much as “Nemo in 3D”. . . why didn’t they sell? What does that tell us about our readers’ interests? Where did our efforts go wrong there?

In Google Analytics look at the webpages that got good traffic but didn’t produce sales. Why didn’t they? Are we optimized for research keywords like “iPad features” and not commercial keywords like “cheapest iPad” or “Black Friday iPad deal”?

If today is the day before CyberMonday would it be good to use this kind of information to test and change the poorly performing pages? Would that be enough information to know what not to promote on CyberMonday?

And more importantly, shouldn’t we really be pushing the stuff that already sold? We can use the sales records to justify knowing what people want. Can we then start promoting that stuff? It does make sense to promote what people want to buy, right? And with a good month left before Christmas, might we want to work on our SEO for the products people are buying?

This is the kind of analysis you should be doing after each campaign to see how you’re performing, to adjust what you’re doing, to improve and meet the needs of your clients better. This is what running a business is really about. Growth and change.

With information comes confidence.

Dan R Morris is the author of LettersFromDan a site dedicated to improving your revenue stream from online efforts. Dan is an infomercial producer, niche website owner, product developer, author and Mastermind leader. Dan actively encourages marketers to take that extra step so that “Hope” doesn’t become the marketing plan.

One of the most frequent questions I’m asked here at SavvyBlogging is about optimizing AdSense accounts (most recently in this very popular blog post).  And a good question it is because rarely do I run across sites that are fully optimized.

But what does that mean exactly? How do you optimize your site for Adsense? To be completely ready, you need your front end and back end working correctly. The front end being the ads, and the back end being the way those ads are tracked and reported.

Optimizing the Front End

There’s a couple hard and fast rules for optimizing the front end for Adsense. But these “rules” are only good until you start testing. Then you’ll either prove them and be happy or disprove them and feel like you’re smarter than everyone else. 🙂 You’re more than welcome to try and reinvent the wheel, but should you desire the standard, these rules are based upon thousands and thousands of pages featuring Adsense.

• Rule #1. Make sure the color and font of your AdSense links are the same as the hyperlinks on your site. (And yes, you can customize them. You don’t have to use the styles they suggest below)
• Rule #2. Place your Ads in highly visible places. That varies from site to site, but making sure readers can engage the ads above the fold AND below the fold (for the readers who scroll down) is important.
• Rule #3. Don’t disguise your ads to be anything but ads, but do try and put them near your menus and navigation.
• Ads right under the post titles make money.
• Ads between the end of the post and the comments section make money.
• Ads in the top right position of the sidebar traditionally do best

One way to tell whether you’ve got a good theme is to print out your website page, draw a line where the “fold” is and shade in any area from which you make money. If you find that your header takes up 50% of the space, reducing your header and thus “moving your sidebars” up will increase the # of ads that your readers can engage with.  Some people really like their “white space” and “big headers”. If you’re one of those people, do this exercise just so you have an idea of what you’re sacrificing for beauty.

There’s nothing wrong with sacrifice, but you should at least know.

Preparing the Adsense Dashboard

Even more important than the front end is the AdSense Dashboard. You’ll never know where your ads are making money if you don’t set the ads up right in the first place.  Adsense gives you what I consider to be a confusing backend to put together. In fact, I had to get help the first time I set one up.

So here’s the goal. You want to create a system so you can sort your income lots of different ways. The way you do that is with custom channels. I don’t know why they’re called channels, they should be called tags because they function the way your tags do on your site.

So, firstly (that’s such a weird sounding word) you want to set up strategic custom channels. I would suggest you create custom channels for each of the different ad sizes (300 x 250, 468 x 60, etc. . . ) to start. Then create channels for the different positions you’re going to put ads on your site (sidebar right 1, sidebar right 2, above header, top right post, etc. . . )

To help you figure out all the channels that would be useful for your site, imagine you made $10,000 and you wanted to know where it came from. You will be able to break it out by individual page so you’ll know which pages bring you the most income. Then what? Want to know whether above the fold makes the most? Create a channel (tag) called “above the fold”. How about whether you should have “300 x 250” or “200 x 200” ads. You could even create channels for ads you create that have blue links vs black links.

Then when you create the actual ads, think about where you’re going to put that ad on your site and “tag it” with every custom channel that makes sense. If it’s “above the fold”, add that one. If it’s “300×250” add that one, too. If it’s “above the header”, add that one too.

Then when we pull the reports, you’ll be able to compare all the “above the fold” ads to the “300 x 250” ads. You’ll be able to see if the blue links or the ads with black links do better. And you’ll be able to see if Sidebar Position #1 does better than Sidebar Position #2. With 200 people per day, it shouldn’t take you more than 2 weeks to increase your revenue substantially. I haven’t seen too many 100% gains but it is possible. In fact, once you know which keywords have better paying ads, wouldn’t you make it a point to create more pages with that theme?

Now, you should have both ends ready for optimization. All you need next is some focus, some attention and some testing. Watching the amount of money you make daily, it shouldn’t take too long to figure out the best set-up of ads on your site. Once you figure that out, you’ll know how much AdSense money you sacrifice for email opt-in forms, Facebook widgets, blogrolls, etc. . . You’ll also know the minimum you could accept from an outside advertiser.

With information, comes confidence.

Dan R Morris is the founder of LettersFromDan.com, a website dedicated to improving your revenue stream from online efforts. Dan is an infomercial producer, niche website owner, product developer, author and Mastermind leader. Dan actively encourages marketers to take that extra step so that “Hope” doesn’t become the marketing plan.