Many of our clients, local clients especially, are shocked to see just how many of their website’s visitors are on smartphones and this number continues to grow. We’ve seen the numbers explode over the last few years from 1% to well over 40% and even if you’re not planning to target mobile users specifically yet in your marketing, you might want to consider offering a mobile optimized website to convert more of these existing handheld guests.

 
But before we get ahead of ourselves, there’s an easy (and free) way for you to see just how many of your current monthly visitors are mobile. Check the analytics! Yes, it’s all right there at your fingertips. Check your website’s traffic statistics and if you don’t easily have access to that information, go directly to Google Analytics and get it set up on your website. You can have this up and running in under 5 minutes and it may just uncover a key demographic that you’ve been ignoring.

 
To access the mobile related statistics in Google Analytics, just log in and in the left hand column you will see ‘Mobile’. Select ‘Overview’ to get a quick and dirty percentage breakdown and then select ‘Devices’ to see the type of smartphones being used.

 
And if you find that mobile users are hitting your website and bouncing right off because they don’t like what they see, contact us with any questions you may have. We’ll be happy to help out and even provide a mobile design quote if you’re interested.

Most people are always logged into Facebook as they browse the web and when they come across your website and see that they can post a quick comment to ask a question, make a suggestion or comment on someone else that has, the number of of these interactions can skyrocket!

The best part is that their comments is likely to be posted back on their Facebook page for all of their friends to see since the ‘Post To Facebook’ option is ticked by default and if your page is something that they think will make them look good to their friends, they are likely to leave this checked.

If you have a WordPress powered site you can use a plugin, , or you can go here to get some code for your HTML pages.

Give it a try and comment below with your results.

If this is new to you, go to AdWords and pause your campaigns right now before you waste any more money.

In case you don’t know, GeoTargeting or Location Targeting within a Google AdWords campaign allows you to specify where, geographically, you would like your ads to be displayed. This means that if you select the city of Des Moines, Iowa, as the only place for your ads to appear, then only searches performed by people that are physically located in Des Moines will trigger your ad to be shown.

So if you run a Hair Salon in Des Moines and are only targeting people who reside or work in Des Moines, you can use a broad search term like “Hair Salons” and be reasonably sure that you aren’t wasting money on clicks from people located outside of your target area. You can see how troublesome this can be for a service based business that has a limited service area. If when setting up their campaign they leave the default setting as is, United States & Canada, they are are basically making their ads available to roughly 350 Million People instead of the 40,000 Des Moines residents that could actually use their service.

A quick side note, currently Google will also display your ad to people located outside of your targeted location if they use the name of the city you are targeting in their search. So for example, someone in New York searches for “Hair Salons in Des Moines Iowa”. This seldom happens and is not likely to be a concern. It actually tends to deliver great results for the advertiser. If for some reason this causes a problem for your campaign, you can always use the city name as a negative keyword.

OK, so it’s obvious why you would need to use GeoTargeting, but it’s not as obvious how to get the most out of it. So we’ll take you through the process. We’ll use the Hair Salon example since it presents a limited service area. You can adjust as needed for your campaign. We always suggest casting a small net at first and then widening the geographically tageted area as you see the traffic come in. And that doesn’t mean waiting weeks or months. You can gauge the traffic within 24 hours.

Here we go:

If setting up a new campaign, click on ‘Select One Or More Other Locations’ in the Locations and Languages section.

If you are modifying an existing campaign, click on that campaign’s “Settings’ tab and then click on the ‘Edit’ link in the ‘Locations’ section of the Locations and Languages section.

Once you have done this you will be presented with the pop up Select a Location window. Down in the ‘Selected Locations’ area, click the red ‘X’ to remove any countries that are in there. Now click on the ‘Search’ tab at the top of the window and type the name of the city you are going to target. Click ‘Find’ and then select your city from the list. (Note that some cities have a ‘Metro’ area associated with them. Although you can select the Metro Area option, selecting individual cities may give you a more desired effect since AsWords will include the name of each city under your text ads when appropriate.)