Tools for Google Marketing

Channel Digital's services include search engine optimisation for your website to increase traffic and sales. However, we can teach you how to use a lot of these functions so you can do it yourself - helping you to drive costs out of your business.

Here is a list of a few of the greatest and best tools - most of which are free.  We highly recommend these tools, and use them ourselves on a daily basis, so please go and have a look and tell us what you think.

Google SEO Tools:

Google Analytics

This leading Analytics package tells you everything about the visitors to your site, how they are reaching you and which pages work the best. It also integrates with Google Search, Webmaster Tools and AdWords, allowing you to gain a complete picture of the flow of traffic and eventually sales through your site.

It is free to set up an account,You can set up a free account by visiting the Google Analytics website.
Google also maintains a Webmaster Central Blog which includes a lot of very useful Analytics information as well as covering wider aspects of Google's suite of tools.

Webmaster Tools and Sitemaps

The next important offering from Google allows you to add Sitemaps to Google to monitor the effectiveness of your site for various search terms. This tool is also great for checking crawl errors on your site - places where links may be broken and pages missing, which will harm your site's performance.

Again, the Webmaster Central Blog is the best place to start, along with Google's Webmaster Tools section.

You can also find out more information about Sitemaps from Google.

Google AdWords

AdWords PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising is possibly the easiest way of bringing traffic to your website. You only pay when visitors come to your site and you can choose which keywords you want your ads to appear for.  It allows you to create create text, image or product ads depending on which you think will be the most effective for you.

Other great functions allow you to target only a certain geographical area or time of day, potential customers by demographic, or set your adverts to appear on only specific types of websites.  You are then able to closely monitor and compare the effectiveness of different advert texts and formats to ensure you remain in control of your own advertising.

There is a lot to learn if you wish to get the most out of AdWords, but all the information is available from Google's Adwords University. At Channel, we can help you optimise your AdWords campaigns to make them as cost effective as possible. If you want to see how it works, set up an AdWords account and then link it through to your Google Analytics account to give you a complete picture of your website's performance and effectiveness. 

Google AdSense

AdSense is the other half of AdWords and is where the adverts get displayed. On Google, adverts are shown either in Google search results or on the Content Network - that is, all the other websites which display Google Ads. AdSense is one of the easiest ways to make money from your website, as Google will pay you to display adverts, so for sites with significant user traffic, this can generate massive income. It's worth taking a look at Google AdSense to find out out how to get paid for hosting ads on your website.

Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping

Google Merchant Center allows you to sell your own products in Google Shopping or on Google Product Ads (see AdWords). The upload of these products can also be automated, meaning that all your product and price changes get reflected without you having to lift a finger. This can be a great tool for driving traffic and sales to your e-Commerce site.