Google AdWords Keyword Planner Just Launched

Yesterday Google officially launched its new tool, AdWords Keyword Planner, to help create better AdWords campaigns. Keyword Planner will replace our favorite Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator.

You should learn to use this tool even if you never used Keyword Tool or Traffic Estimator and do not plan to use Google ads. Understanding search terms is important because that tells you what words your potential customers use to describe yours and similar businesses so that you can tweak your marketing and sales content accordingly.

Adwords Keyword Planner

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Weekly Reading: Trackbacks and Data Hub Activity on Google Analytics

We have been talking a lot about Google Analytics lately. Do you know of the new Google Analytics reports that show trackbacks and links from social media more explicitly? You should, so read this week’s links for details.

But first, how do you get to these reports? On your Google Analytics sidebar on the left, go to Traffic Sources, and then Social. You’ll see the links for Data Hub Activity and Trackbacks.

Here’s a screenshot of our Trackbacks report. It shows us who linked to our site recently.

Google Analytics Trackbacks for Markitty

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Marketing Reading for the Weekend: Social Media Metrics You Can’t Ignore

Is it only a week since I last did this? It’s been Technology Breakdown Week here at Markitty, with laptops, ACs (okay, one AC), and power all refusing to cooperate. But we survived!

This post is a great quick look at five social media metrics and how you can monitor them.

On the Buffer blog, read about five essential social media metrics and how you can improve them.

Jay Baer claims that social referrals to your website is the most overrated social media metric. Most overrated is probably hyperbole (I think that distinction belongs to the number of Likes on your Facebook Page), but as we said on Twitter:

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Using Markitty: Compare Website Visits, Referrals, and Social Referrals

I’m going to show you some useful Markitty graphs, stats, and features, and explain why we put them in and how you can use them. For the very first in this series, I’ve picked this graph displaying data from Google Analytics.

Markitty graph screenshot: website visits, referrals, and social referrals

As the graph title says, this line graph shows you the total visits to your website, the number of visits that were referred by other sites, and the number of visits referred by social sites. You get all of these for the last three weeks (if you signed up with Markitty over three weeks ago).

Why did we put this graph together?

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The Markitty Story: in the Hustler’s Words

Unmana wrote about how we decided to get started with Markitty: here is my account of the product development so far.

Gathering courage

I had done a bit of coding more than 10 years back, but since then my exposure to the technical side was limited to managing software projects, data analysis, and occasional experiments with SQL or Excel macros. Building a SaaS product of our own was a task I had never imagined taking up.

Outsource or build in-house

We didn’t have a lot of money to hire a great outsourcing vendor or to hire a senior technical lead. We did try looking for someone who could be a technical co-founder but that was not going to be easy.

Unmana and I had both worked in geographically distributed teams for a long time and understood the communication overheads and leakages that need to be dealt with in such a setup. So we were very clear from the beginning that we wanted to have a local team and dedicated developers who can work closely with us. Apart from the cost, culture was the biggest driver behind this decision.

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Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: Let’s Say Goodbye to Google Reader

A sprained ankle, and then food poisoning. The last three weeks have not been good to me. And then I resurface this morning, only to be hit by the news that Google Reader is dying.

Yeah, yeah, it’s been on life support for a while, but still. It’s much too soon, Google. I’m not ready to say goodbye.

Mourning Google Reader

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Making Marketing Easier: the Markitty Dream

Pomegranate spilling seedsOn a broad level, marketing is mostly common sense. You figure out who are the best people to buy what you’re selling, try to catch their attention, and persuade them to buy from you. It’s when you get to the details that it becomes tricky.

Okay, so I created a Twitter account. What should I do next? Should I post photos on Facebook or links to articles I like? Why aren’t visitors to my site buying?

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5 Reasons I Like Buffer (the Company)

Buffer is one of my favorite tools, but it’s not just the application itself I like, it’s the company. So well, let me count the ways.

Simple App That Focuses on One Benefit

I love how simple and easy Buffer is to use (in fact, I liked the earlier interface even better, because it was more simple). I’ve tried a few social media scheduling tools, but this is the only one I stuck with.

Tweets scheduled on Buffer

One click on the text box, type in or paste your tweet, and you’re done.

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Get Markitty Beta Now (Free for Limited Period)

That’s right, Markitty beta is up and ready for use! Go ahead and sign up while it’s still free.

You should get Markitty if:

  • You are a small business (restaurant or retail store or business services or florist or anything, really)

and

  • You have a Facebook Page, Twitter account, website, or blog (at least one of these) for your business 

and

  • You want to make better use of online marketing.

Markitty will help you by giving you your important stats in one place and offering useful tips and suggestions. Try it out for free!

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