Improving my ads, analyzing with Analytics and seeing some progress

Very slowly but very surely, my business project is getting up there.

My wife and I went out on the weekend to get more pictures of some places I wanted to write articles about and we ended up visiting 7 different free museums in downtown Mexico City that afternoon alone. There were a lot of museums we didn't have time to visit since we were very tired after that but now I have lots of pictures and experiences to write about.

I installed Google Analytics in my site using the Google Analytics Drupal module. It's amazing how much information I can obtain with it and I have been using it to improve my site. I especially liked being able to see the bounce rate to see how effective my landing page is after visitors get there as a result from my Adwords campaign.

I am also working on a new version of my site trying out different Drupal distributions and themes before I make changes in the actual website. 

I also started my Adwords campaign. At first I was having a very high bounce rate as I was sending visitors to my home page, but I found much better results as I created more specific ads that lead to specific sections of my site, especially to the ones that are better connected to products from my affiliate networks.

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453976?hl=en

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6080602?rd=1

Ads, getting traffic and getting ready

The website (in Spanish) is taking shape, although I really want to make some major changes on it. I found some interesting Drupal distributions and modules that will allow me to do a complete makeover for my website and make it more like what I want it to be but I haven't had the time to do it. Another obstacle is that I don't want to lose what I already built doing an experiment that might or not work.

The solution: I am creating a local website using XAMPP to create a server and installed Drupal there, then I will create a sample of the website layout and features that I want and see how it works before doing it in my actual site. That way the process will be smoother and faster and I won't miss revenue and visits now that I'm about to start my Adwords campaign.

I am also happy to say that I just earned my first $0.10 from Adsense and I started having clicks on my affiliate ads! It's not a lot but it is an important milestone for me. I got this little traffic by creating a Facebook page about my website, inviting my friends and my wife's friends to like it and then posting links to the articles in my website.

This week I learned a lot about Adword ads. I had some experience creating Facebook ads campaigns for a couple business projects and this is quite a different system with a few things in common. With Adwords I choose the keywords I want to associate my ad to rather than purely demographic information. Adwords also provides a lot of feedback on the effectiveness of my ads and my Keywords through the ''quality score''

I am very excited about officially starting my Adwords campaign tomorrow. I also have a lot of ideas for articles and sections that I am about to create as well as a YouTube channel associated with my site and turn it into a whole online magazine.

Tips for Adwords Ads: http://www.addme.com/newsletters/issue269.htm

Getting started with Adwords ads: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1704392?rd=2