Remarketing is typically a strategy where recent site abadoners are targeted during a short window of time while the purchase is still top of mind. Since AdWords allows you to maintain a cookie for 540 days, its worth considering the idea of targeting past site visitors beyond the 10 to 14 day window.
Traditional display ads on average have dismal click through rates – somewhere in the .09% range. Instead of doing media buys for display advertising based on the demographic information that sites give, why not take advantage of all those people who have visited your site over the last 540 days? These people are at least one step closer to being familiar with your brand than someone who has never seen your site before and is being broadly targeted with gender, house hold income or other demographic indicators which may or may not be totally accurate.
Take a look at the opportunity in the drawings below:

Every message has an intended audience and advertising only works when the ones who see the ad are the one who were intended to. Most advertising is very irrelevant and that’s why people hate it, because it has nothing to do with them. Nobody complains about seeing relevant ads because they are helpful and add value, like Cindy Gallop says “Everyone hates advertising in general, but we love advertising in particular.”
That’s why getting your message to just the right person at just the right time is worth a lot of money – hence Google making billions on allowing advertisers to show their ads to just those people who are looking for it. But Google ads only work when someone knows to search for what you sell in the first place. There are a lot of other advertising mediums that don’t promote relevancy as much. Most innovation in online marketing is in trying to make ads more relevant. Two metrics that can be used to measure relevancy are conversion rate and click through rate.

Conversion rate measures the relevancy between a landing page and the ad promoting it. There is a certain level of expectation that someone has before when they click on an ad, and if that expectation isn’t met, or isn’t relevant, they leave and conversion rate goes down.

Click through rate measures the relevancy between an ad and its placement. Ads that are shown but don’t get clicked get low click through rates and signal irrelevancy.

Low conversion rate and low click through rate should be signs that you’re doing it wrong  - the right person is not seeing the right message. I think the majority of the effort spent on optimizing marketing should be focused on increasing relevance.

When a potential client wants to see an SEO site audit I think there are two main things they are looking for: 1. your level of competency 2. free analysis

So I designed this SEO site audit to try to fill those two needs. Give them what they are looking for but not too much to where you audit your way out of a job. The first section of my site audit is all the on page stuff. I like the colored score in the right column which gives the appearance of urgency to certain aspects of the site and also creates a natural list of priorities for capturing the low hanging fruit first. I use the Google keyword tool to pull a list of relevant keywords. I then use the google site: operator and keyword search (as in site:example.com “keyword”) to see how many times a site uses a keyword.

Happy New Year! Its time to look back on what happened in 2011:

Best Purchase: Eagle Creek Belt – The buckle is plastic which allows me to go through security without taking off my belt.
Best Books: Start With Why – A revelation on the importance of purpose.  Anything You Want – Brings fresh air to business and entrepreneurialism books  Practical Wisdom – A concept so true it made me mad.
Best Graphic Novel: Locke & Key – Awesome art and page-turning suspense.
Best Movies: Time Crimes – Time travel twists that made my head spin for days afterward. The Fighter – I love boxing movies. Following – Why did it take me so long to see this great Christoper Nolan movie?
Best Doc: Inside Job - Also so true it made me mad.
Best Albums: Mariachi El Bronx – II, Swingin’ Utters – Here Under Protest, Dead To Me – Moscow Penny Ante
Best Band Discovery: Smoking Popes
Best Concert: Off With Their Heads / Dead To Me @ Marquis Theater Denver
Biggest Bummer: Ball hitting my glove and then going over the fence for a grand slam in softball game
Biggest Time Suck: Watching all six seasons of Dexter
Best New Skill: Making delicious salsa
Best Hike: Angels Landing, Zion National Park
Hardest Hike: Longs Peak, Colorado
Coldest Moment: Swimming in mountain lake water at Tough Mudder race in Beaver Creek
Most Traumatic: Two year old daughter knocking out her front tooth on the book shelf
Most Stressful: Trying to keep water level down with sewer water backing up in the basement. Most Stressful Runner Up: Getting flat tire on the way to the airport
Most Exciting: Launching Minimalist Tees
Best Moment: Second daughter being born

Books Read: 19
Snowboarding : 6 times
Blog Posts: 34
Movies Watched: 111

In 2012 I plan on also tracking the amount of times I go out to eat and what I buy (not just where I buy like the bank does).

The essence of web analytics is to boil down business objectives into unique actions on a web site. Its not about amount of visits, time on site, or most visited pages. When you match a desired outcome from a web site to a business goal and then devise a strategy around getting that desired outcome to happen more, by analyzing the data around that desired outcome, you’re doing web analytics.

Get enough of these and you can separate them into small objectives and large objectives where smaller ones lead to bigger ones, like it takes 10 sign-ups for every 1 sale. Then you build your marketing strategy off of these business objectives: “we need an increase of sign-ups if we are going to reach our sales goal so how can we optimize the content on the site by looking at bounce rate?” etc.

On a side note: Can the same methodology be used on optimizing your life? What is your personal life purpose and how can you boil it down into unique outcomes that you can track to measure your progress?