Building Your Business Online

8 Tips to Avoid Costly Mistakes When Managing Your AdWords Account

2012-01-24T07:56:00.007+11:00

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo da Vinci

In this article we explore a few pitfalls to avoid when planning online marketing campaigns.

1. Be Strategic Figure out what your online goal is before you plan the AdWords Campaign. The page where your visitors will land needs a defined purpose. That might be a *Quote Request, *Contact Us form submission, *Shopping Cart purchase or *Newsletter signup (as examples)

2. Keywords The keywords you wish to bid on have to be popular with Google and the public. Well known industry jargon does not necessarily make for a useful keyword list. Satisfy yourself (get expert help if necessary) that the public does indeed search on the terms you think they do – before building the page

3. Weigh up Cost versus Return The price of a click varies widely from one industry to another. Find out what the price of a click in your industry is and then set yourself a realistic budget – for both *daily spend and *monthly spend. If you can’t responsibly afford to buy say ten clicks/ day at the market price, it may be wise to either postpone until you can, or explore other forms of media

4. First impressions Industry insiders say you have a window of around 5 seconds to capture your visitor’s interest before they move on. Ask a stranger (rather than staff members) to road test your page. If they aren’t clear in less than 8 seconds what they’re being asked to do on that page, you may have a problem.

5. Which business model Be flexible and willing to tweak your battle strategy, as the market dictates. Perhaps you chose a shopping cart purchase as your online goal earlier. How will you respond if your AdWords is not generating online sales, but is making your phone ring with enquiries? Could your business be better served by a campaign which aims to generate leads by phone or email, rather than online purchases?

6. Simplicity Avoid the clutter and try to build a page around just one theme. The page needs adequate, unique content (around 150 words as a guide) and this applies to dynamically created shopping cart pages as well

7. Know your competitors If time suggests that people are visiting your e-commerce site on the right keywords, but not buying anything, could it be that the opposition is stealing your thunder? Is your pricing and service equal to –or better than – your online competitors? People shop around online just as they do in malls. And price comparison is much easier online!

8. Hometown advantage Whilst not a certainty, it’s possible that competition in AdWords will determine that your budget won’t stretch as far as you’d hoped. If this eventuates, be prepared to campaign in a smaller radius first, and then later expand to State-wide or Australia-wide when your model is proven

What We Can Learn about Customers' Online Behaviour

2012-01-10T13:43:00.009+11:00

The fundamental things marketing professionals want to learn about customers online are similar to what we want to learn offline. For example, we would like to understand and refine our target segments. We would like to better understand the customer journey, demographics, psychographics, consumer behaviour and decision making process, how best to differentiate, propensity to buy, seasonality factors etc. Similarly to direct mail, the web can provide you with timely data to demonstrate and quantify the effectiveness of campaigns. We have a feedback mechanism through analytics that can tell us whether or not we are on track with our marketing objectives - provided the data is treated in the correct manner (e.g. ‘comparing apples with apples’). As the ability to measure online activity with analytics increases we can also learn additional things about our customers relating to buying behaviour. For example:

Understanding the language that customers use and where they are in the buying cycle by examining the keywords that they use to find the site and search its contents;
Watching what customers do versus what they say;
Learning what offers visitors respond to best. Visit www.whichtestwon.com to see how small changes to a web page can make big differences in results;
Using visitor behaviour information to create targeted offers, identify the propensity to purchase and estimate the sales pipeline.

Successful companies who are ahead of the pack are now investing in learning about and understanding the online customer. They realise that converting digital data into insights has currency. As customers become more empowered the emphasis will be on understanding the individual in real time and responding accordingly.

Further reading on the shift to data-driven marketing and the implications of the empowered consumer can be found in the IBM CMO Study

The Rising Cost of Customer Acquisition - III

2011-12-16T08:39:00.013+11:00

In our last article, we visited the importance of Ad positions in managing customer acquisition costs. This time we discuss the relevance of your website content; it is an element which you can control tightly and its importance is frequently underestimated by many advertisers.

When you visit a new website, can you tell quickly what the page is all about and what the advertiser wants you to do next? The publisher of that website could have a problem of relevance if you can’t answer clearly in less than 5 seconds. When conversions are not occurring at an acceptable rate or cost on your own website, could there be a relevance problem with the landing page(s) you are using? Google’s editorial policies make reference to what it calls user experience. An example is serving information which is closely aligned with the searcher’s expectation. In a nutshell, if the public interacts well with your page, chances are so will Google.

Google Analytics may provide some insight. By navigating to Content > Site Content > Landing Pages try examining these metrics: bounce rate, pages/visit and time on site. The objective is to ensure your traffic is landing on your most relevant, compelling page. This might not necessarily be your Home page. Aim to make every page you publish unique and relevant to the term it is targeting.

In Part I of this series, we touched on the importance of content which is abreast of your competition. The strength of your landing page content & the offer you are making is of equal (potentially more) importance to the Position of your Ad alone. This is where user experience comes into play. A/B and multivariate landing page testing can help you prove beyond doubt which content brings in more conversions and identify the best optimal cost for your business.

The Rising Cost of Customer Acquisition - II

2011-12-09T07:47:00.008+11:00

In our last article, we touched on the impact of unmonitored competitor activity. This article looks at another possible contributor to the rising cost of customer acquisition.

When the forces of rising demand and limited supply interact, it’s almost inevitable that prices will increase. Let’s consider this powerful cocktail:

Every year there are more advertisers competing for less space, amongst search results which are becoming more localised. Add to this a tendancy for Advertisers to impulsively bid higher when sales are slow and there is a strong likelihood of increased cost of customer acquisition.

Furthermore, the first two factors collude to push organic search results further down the page – sometimes to/ below the critical fold of the page.

Possible remedy: review of Ad Positions. We review history of Positions first at an Adgroup, then at a Keyword level. Identify the high and low performers and bid according to their Positions. If budget is being exhausted each day, consider trying lower positions to make it last longer. Another option is to grant Google’s wish and increase your budget.

Try to prove a successful conversion model with a position-based bidding strategy. If sales are thin more spend may be required, but the rise in cost per acquisition should be contained, by avoiding entering a bidding war.

Another helpful byte coming up!

The Rising Cost of Customer Acquisition - I

2011-12-01T12:13:00.013+11:00

Like the internet itself, Panalysis has seen online advertisers evolve dramatically in the past decade. Knowledge of best practice is increasingly the rule, rather than the exception and now more than ever, savvy online advertisers seek to extract the maximum return for their online investment.

In this series of help bytes, Panalysis will identify possible causes of Rising Acquisition Costs and we’ll be sharing a virtual shopping list of management techniques which we’ve found can temper the impact.

The Dutch auction pricing model used by Google in AdWords ensures that there is latent upward pressure on click costs. It measures a host of quality metrics about you and your competitors, then rewards the most compliant with better Ad positions and/or lower click prices.

Possible remedy = Look for fresh innovation which may have stolen the march in the market. The new offers you might need to match could include; *extended warranty, * up-sizing, *price discounting etc. Online shoppers compare offers – in an instant – just like high street shoppers do. Diarise to monitor your top 3 competitors’ websites at least once a month, preferably more often.

The consequence of not monitoring competitor innovation may mean no change to your advertising expense, but fewer conversions and higher acquisition costs. Our experience suggests there is no silver bullet. Rather it’s a hybrid of best practice techniques which will convince more new customers to do business with you and coerce the search engines to reward your online efforts.

Another helpful byte soon.

Diving into Data Visualisation

2011-11-24T21:00:00.000+11:00

When is a pie chart the best way of communicating data - almost never.

Whilst I have fought the good fight for the abolition of unnecessary pie charts for many years it was refreshing to hear why from one of the worlds leading experts in data visualisation. For an excellent discussion on why see this article.

This week I had the rare opportunity to take a few days out of the office to attend Stephen Few's course “Visual Business Intelligence” in Canberra. For 3 days straight it was nothing but data and visualisation. During the course we went from how we perceive to sophisticated analytical techniques to dive into massive datasets using visualisation tools.

Some key take aways:

Select the chart type and tool wisely and with the purpose of communicating the data utmost in your mind.
There are good rules about which chart type to use and when. Stephen Few has provided an excellent chart to show which to use and when.
Dashboards should visually communicate all important information to identify the performance of the business, website or other activity at a glance and in one screen.
Interactive dashboards that require that you select options to select the data to display are far less effective as these require you to remember the data between screens. At a glance is far more effective.
3D charts are rarely useful except in the hands of highly skilled and trained technicians who have the experience to understand and interpret them.
Data analysis is far easier where all of the data can be explored intuitively and in near real time.

I encourage you to tune into Stephen Few's blog and to buy his books. If you have attended one of Stephen Few's course, I'd like to hear your key take aways. Please feel free to add a comment.

Tracking the Effectiveness of On-Site Promotions

2011-05-23T14:44:00.003+10:00

The hard work has been done and you've got the visitor to your site, now's the time to sell to them. Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, Unica and other tools can tell you a lot about how the visitor reached the site and whether they became a lead or a customer. But what about the effective are the messages displayed within your website?

Landing pages, special offers, key messages and other factors within the website can strongly influence the final outcome. A poor message, an ineffective call to action or weak content could be preventing your site from producing the best results.

There has been a lot of discussion around testing landing pages during the past few years and this technique has a lot of potential, but what do you test and when? What is the impact of adding a promotional tile to the side bar on your site or adding a slide in overlay? How useful is the headline on the persuasive copy page in increasing the visitor's awareness and desire to act?

Using Custom Variables to Track On-Site Promotions

With some adjustments to your website you can track a number of these influencing factors through the use of custom variables. All of the tools mentioned above provide this feature and using it effectively can lead to significant insights and these insights can lead into a systematic testing program to improve performance.

To illustrate how this can be done, I will outline the process tracking a promotional tile which appears across many pages within a website. This is to answer the business question; "do visitors use this tile to get to the product page and purchase or do they navigate a different way?" Our initial assumption is that the tile is driving sales of the product, but as the product can also be found by browsing the site and via the site search engine, is this tile actually boosting sales or does it need work improving?

To start the process, adding an additional tracking parameter to the link on this tile will leave a marker that we can use to track whether the visitor clicked on the tile or not. As Google and other search engines use the URLs on the site to crawl and index the content it is important that we either use the # value or apply the tracking parameter via JavaScript so that the modified URL doesn't make its way into the index of the search engines. For simplicity in the implementation I tend to use the # value. E.g. http://www.yoursite.com/product-name.html#ad=hp-offer1. As search engines don't index this part of the URL it won't impact search rankings.

When the user clicks on this link the resulting URL has the # value and this can be checked by JavaScript and a custom variable set based on the value in the URL. As this custom variable relates to tracking a sale, the variable must be set to be valid for the entire visit. In Google Analytics this means that the scope is set to the visit level (2), within Omniture this is an eVar and WebTrends set this to "most recent value" or another suitable value but not "all hits".

Next we need to define a counter that tracks the sale. This can be the revenue generated, the number of transactions or goals achieved. This combined with the number of visits to the product page provides the basics to do this analysis.

Analysing the Results

Once we have run the tile for a period of a week or so we can start to analyse the results. Ideally you want to create a table that shows the following data:

The results show that there is a difference in the number of visitors who clicked on the tile to the final sale of the product. Checking these figures for statistical significance indicates that the difference is not due to random errors but the results seem counter intuitive. Why would visitors clicking on the promotional tile have a lower conversion rate than visitors who didn't? So we succeeded in answering our original business question but in doing so we just raised another question which needs to be answered.

The answer may lie in whether the tile is triggering sales or not. For instance, it may be quite plausible that making a special offer is driving these visitors to check whether they can get a better offer elsewhere. Also the mere presence of the tile itself actually influences sales without visitors feeling the need to click on it.

As such our business question is changed to "what is the impact of displaying a promotional tile on the site to our revenue for those products?"

To answer this and similar questions we need to run controlled experiments to measure the impact on sales of not having a tile at all. I will cover this topic in a future blog post.

For now I hope that I have raised your interest in measuring the performance of your "on-site" advertising and its importance in improving the performance of your website.

For assistance with any of the issues raised in this post please contact Panalysis panalysis.com/contact_us.php

Why Not Use Google Analytics Campaign Tagging?

You may think that just adding in the campaign tracking tags to the promotional tiles will work. For instance Google Analytics makes tracking advertising campaigns easy; just add in the campaign tracking tags add the link and the campaign starts tracking right away.

These campaign tracking tags are designed for external campaigns and should only ever be used for campaigns that refer visitors to your site from another channel. It is very important that they are never used for tracking clicks on advertisements within a website e.g. a tile with a special offer on the home page. The reason for this is that setting the campaign variables for internal campaigns plays havoc with the data that is collected from the external campaigns. Internal tracking should be kept separate as it has its own methods of analysis.

eMetrics Sydney - Day 2

2011-05-07T15:45:00.001+10:00

How could you predict that different coloured buttons provided different results at different times of the year? This is what Paul Robinson, Marketing and Communications Manager, from the ABC shop found when he conducted multivariate tests to optimise the purchase process on the ABC shop website. Paul is a skilled user of WebTrends and always provides wonderful insights on how to get the most from web analytics in a retail environment. I was definitely looking forward to this presentation and I wasn't disappointed. His insights into the lack of return on investment for Facebook commerce were interesting as was his insights into the decisions that he makes based on the data from WebTrends.

Mark Allison from WebTrends shared the stage with Paul and provided a sneek preview of some of the features of WebTrends Analytics 10 and its ability to merge data from many different sources (more on this to come in my post on WebTrends Engage 2011).

Frank Grasso from e-Channel Online presented an interesting argument in using AdWords more as a distribution system than a pure advertising platform. In essence his argument was based on the efficiencies that can be created by effectively bidding on long tail keywords to close the sale once a user has made a decision on their purchase. His examples of how poorly companies use AdWords were a real wake up call for the industry.

Alan Long has moved away from Hitwise/Experian to set up his own venture Online 1984 which provides reputation management services in the area of social media. His presentation on the difficulties of analysing social media sentiment across a large scale highlighted some of the key issues that the sentiment analysis market needs to solve before they can provide meaningful tools to the industry.

Other speakers included Aiden Beanland, Regional SEO Manager for Yahoo on engagement analytics for publishers, Christian Bartens from Datalicious on cross channel attribution models, Gregan McMahon on integrating mobile advertising data with other campaign tools and David Brigham on the use of web analytics to optimise marketing spend.

Finally I also spoke at the conference on the topic of Measuring the Environment which covered some of the key factors that should be considered when using web analytics tools. I hope to make this presentation available online shortly.

If you are interested in web analytics and optimising marketing, once again, I can't recommend the eMetrics conference highly enough. It will be coming to Melbourne later this year and hopefully back to Sydney in 2012.

Thoughts on E Metrics Sydney - Day 1

2011-04-17T15:50:00.000+10:00

What a wonderful treat it was when eMetrics returned to Sydney for its second year this week. Personally I can't thank Jim Sterne enough for bringing this valuable conference to Australia.

With around 50 people attending this conference was far more intimate than the ones that I have attended in Washington. It is a real joy to be able to participate so candidly and directly in such a small group.

Web Analytics is a small, vibrant community in Australia and the chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones should never be overlooked. eMetrics will return to Melbourne later this year so stay tuned and if you are interested in using data to make better decisions make sure that this event is on your calendar.

So what happened at eMetrics Sydney? Well it is too much for one post so here is a summary of day one. I promise to follow up with posts on each of the concepts covered. The key theme of the conference was to examine the human side of marketing analytics. Jim Sterne started the conference with a presentation that urged us as analysts to go beyond the simplistic channel based thinking and look at the big picture. Some of Jim's key messages were:

Tell stories with the data, otherwise no one cares,
Tie all analysis to the three primary business needs:

Increase revenue,
Reduce costs,
Increase customer satisfaction.

The role of the analyst as therapist; "so tell my why do you feel that you need this report..."

Jim relayed some telling stories about the use of data for data's sake. In one of these a new head of the accounting department decided to withhold all of the regular reports until someone asked for them. As the requests came in slowly the requests were prioritised and the reports delivered based on the priorities. The net result was that the 14 or so days that were required to produce all of these reports was significantly reduced, freeing up valuable time for the analysts to do what they do best - analyse.

Marty Weintraub quite simply blew us all away with his talk on social metrics KPIs and the use of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc to find markets to sell services and products. I would have never thought that identifying groups of people with certain opinions could result in marketing divorce lawyers, chocolate, pizzas and much more to them. Marty gave excellent examples of how you can use the Facebook advertising system to estimate audience size and then how you can target them. If you get the chance to see Marty speak it is worth going, his energy level is amazing.

Lauren Vaccarello from Salesforce.com provided insight into how Salesforce uses its own systems to calculate actual return on investment from its campaigns across all channels. Tying in the offline sales process using the company CRM system with the online advertising data from AdWords and other channels provides a powerful way of checking the actual cost of acquisition of a customer. Without this data we are just left with a best guess on whether a campaign actually converts where the sale is completed outside of the website.

Speakers covering social meda included Ciaran Norris from Mindshare Ireland who discussed how to measure buzz from social media and James O'Toole from Social Media Chief who discussed how to track ROI and measure engagement from social media.

James Dixon from Atomic Search provided a way for companies to self assess where they are positioned in regards to the marketing optimisation maturity model and Will Swayne covered the analysis of display media across a number of different providers.

More to follow on day 2 later.

Lessons from the field – The impact of changing your website structure on search engine rankings.

2010-03-04T20:52:00.000+11:00

Your website was working well, you agreed to changing a few things to improve the site and in just a short time your website’s PageRank dropped from 5 to just 1 and you lost 40% of your hard earned traffic overnight.

It is the stuff of nightmares but this actually happened to one of our customers and yes, it can happen to you.

There were several factors involved. These included:

Restructuring the website to optimise the URLs for search engines.
Adding geographic redirection based on the country where the visitor is located.
Changes in the technology used to deliver the site.

The critical mistake made was that the changes to the URLs resulted in lots of broken links. Some URLs redirected to their new location using 301 server side redirects, however the number of redirects required was vastly underestimated and this led Google to drop the website’s PageRank dramatically. Google also dropped a large number of pages from its index.

Our customer tried to fix this by adding XML files to the site and submitted these to Google via its Webmaster Tools. This was partially effective but didn’t fix their rankings.

The actual fix was to thoroughly audit the website and changes and then implement a rescue plan, the first step of which was to correct all broken links on the site. As the site had good quality inbound links getting the errors fixed resulted in the rapid inclusion of the new pages into Google’s index.

Following the implementation of our advice, the site has since returned to a PageRank of 4 and traffic from Google has slowly recovered over the past two months.

So what could they have done better?

Firstly they should have carefully planned and more importantly tested the redirections from the old URLs. Had the client run a simple link crawler over the URLs from the old site structure they would have easily identified the problem before it happened.

Secondly in the panic to fix everything they made so many changes so rapidly it was difficult to identify what happened and to unwind the negative changes.

Thirdly they also changed the structure of their pages including the keywords used in page titles, headings, links etc.

To prevent this from happening to you:

Treat any proposed changes to your URLs as a significant threat to your search engine rankings and put in place a strategy to manage this. (Changing to or from a content management system is a key risk factor)
If you do need to restructure the site, then start by building a comprehensive inventory of URLs. This can be done using your web analytics tool or from the web server log files.
Identify the top keywords used by visitors to locate the site and the pages that rank for these keywords in Google and other search engines.
Ensure that as much as possible that the page structure and links used to point to these pages remain as close as possible to the earlier site.
Redirect all new URLs to the exact alternative URL using a 301 server side redirection only. Nothing other than a 301 redirection will work correctly.
Any page that can’t be redirected to a new location should use a custom error page. This custom error page should return a 200 status code if the page is to be retained in the index.
Test all redirections using a site crawler to ensure that there are no errors.
Monitor your site carefully using a quality web analytics tool such as Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends or similar. You should be the first to know about any changes to your search rankings from a rise or drop in the number of visitors from your previous keywords.

If you would like professional assistance to manage any change in your website and its impact on your marketing and search engine rankings please contact Panalysis to discuss your requirements.