While this is in no way meant as an hysterical babble, I know some may find it such. I urge you only to continue reading having been warned that it may impact your thoughts on social media – in how much you choose to share… or not. It’s an enigma in many ways.

In the second world war – not so very long ago in the grand scheme of things – anyone in Germany suspected of being a Jew was rounded up and summarily transported to a camp and most likely executed. Neighbors betrayed neighbors, friends betrayed friends – not for fun you understand, but because there was a noose around their own necks. They were known to have associated with Jews or to have ‘Jewish tendencies’ – the shops they visited, the clothes they bought. It was very easy to be caught out as an ‘accomplice’. The Nazis even had what they called ‘persils’ – ‘clean’ documents for any Jew who would turn in a fellow Jew – and how did they encourage that type of betrayal? Fear, and promises of death to family members.

The persil seekers were sent to cobblers and shoe stores. They waited for the Jews on the run to come in and get their shoes mended, and they ‘befriended’ them – and then betrayed them.

Too much knowledge shared with anyone outside of your closest family meant the camps. It was an environment of fear, treachery and death.

That was 70 years ago. The other most renowned evidences of word of mouth betrayal in our western society (though there are thousands more – and this is not meant to diminish those) involve the French Revolution and the English Court of the 15-1600’s.

• During the revolution it got to a point where business rivals were denouncing their competitors as ‘royalists’ to ensure their trip to the guillotine;
• During Henry 8th’s time as well as during the time of his daughters Bloody Mary and Elizabeth the first – during the huge upheaval of the Church in England, thousands were denounced as heretics and burned in Smithfield, or beheaded on Tower Green. This account doesn’t even consider the desperate state for hundreds of years on the greater continent where just about anyone could denounce his fellow brother/sister/neighbor/priest as an heretic during the dreadful inquisition.

I know that we are a free society, but history has taught us that freedom is hard-won and earned. Hard work and dedication to a clear objective keep it so. I’m as guilty as many of airing my opinions and thoughts in our free press society – but if ever we needed to be concerned about what big-brother, his cronies – or his enemies – were wondering, one only has to look at the reputation management tools of today to know that every-thought we put down in the moment is kept safe for future reference by… who knows who?

Just a thought to consider, one I do anyway. Perhaps I am paranoid, perhaps I am too realistic. Perhaps I am over-protective, perhaps I am a fool. Regardless – these are some thoughts I wanted to share – whether you agree with them or not – perhaps they may generate some conversation among you and your friends – or not.

Depending on what you sell, there are numerous affecting variables. But there are a few tips that work for any ecommerce business.

1. Retention is easier and cheaper than acquisition, so spend equitably on the two where possible if your retention market warrants the spend. Don’t ignore either regardless of how established or un-established you are in the online space.

2. Loyalty programs and discounts are what return visitors want, make them easy to find and honour them diligently.

3. Easy login for returning members with member only discounts and bonus offers is a great way to improve your retention and word of mouth/social spread for acquisition purposes.

4. Simple, minimal registration for new customers with an intro discount for joining is a great way to get those neutrals into the fold.

5. Peer/customer reviews and ratings are highly instrumental in both clinching a sale and directing folks to your best selling products.

6. Intro discounts with clear, easy money back guarantee terms and conditions that don’t take forever to read are effective in converting new time buyers.

7. Easy, timely cost effective shipping options are great for all buyers, especially if your product can also be bought in store.

8. If your product can be bought in store, watch your online vs. offline sales pricing targets and methodology. Shoppers do research, and they aren’t stupid.

9. If you can apply easy tracking numbers and delivery scheduling to your shipping that doesn’t cost you a fortune, it is a bonus security for your online buyers – especially for international shipments.

10. Automatic, personalized follow up ‘did you receive your product and what do you think of it?’ emails may garner you great testimonials/reviews as well as enhance your netpromoter scores.

@lauracallow

As a stand-alone practice in the online world, eye-tracking studies are relatively useless for a number of reasons:

1. The messaging influences what people look for and at. A very clear example that involved a user study can be seen in the images below (from this great resource).

ORGINAL IMAGE

Another example may be found innocently enough in your PPC campaigns.

• If the messaging in your adcopy mentions a ‘10% discount for 1^st time buyers’, users who click through to your landing page will be looking for that 10% discount message and will focus on it. However, if your adcopy is focusing on a different value proposition; e.g. ‘98% of customers repurchase. Read their reviews & find out why!’ – you may very well see that the message is impacting the eye tracking heat-map with the larger/more concentrated area of focus being first the reviews, and second the discount.

2. The eye tracking heat map alone cannot tell you about actual interaction.

Did the reviews sell more users? Did the 10% discount clinch the deal? Even if both areas of the page have equal ‘heat’ or interest, and even if both have their own near-vicinity ‘buy now’ button with the same amount of ‘heat’ – which message actually resulted in the most conversions, if any?

You need a more robust program to work in conjunction with eye-tracking heat maps to measure interaction – like that offered by Crazy Egg and Omniture. Images below are courtesy of www.crazyegg.com.

HEAT MAP

OVERLAY

The eye-tracking heat map is interesting, but the interactive overlay is far more useful and actionable from a usability measurement and refinement point of view in my experience. (I can’t use work examples in this blog but I can say that this info is bang on the money in my personal opinion.)

3. Eye tracking heat maps appear to imply that if there’s no heat no one saw it. People focus on what is most important to them. They scan and they use their peripheral vision.

Just because the ‘point-of-gaze’ does not focus on a message or an image does not mean it wasn’t seen, nor that it played no part in the final purchase decision.

4. Eye tracking heat maps imply that we are more attracted to and engaged emotionally with the area with the most ‘heat’. But areas of ‘heat’ can in turn be affected by a number of other factors; background colour, size of image or text, placement of the image or text and a host of other factors…

…or you’re simply more attracted to Crook.

Eye tracking heat maps do help us to realign our thinking. How great would it be if we could marry our areas of greatest visual appeal with our most effective areas and types of interaction and conversion; best page position, best call to action, best preceding and post-focus area copy and imagery, best driving messages, best supportive peripherally designed collateral… etc.

Eye tracking was a revolutionary way to view how your customers were viewing your pages, but it’s not enough. It’s good to know, but it’s not going to get you the conversions or click throughs to your cart that you want  – not on its own. It’s not going to show you how to optimize your user experience either – not on its own. It has a place in your marketing toolkit for sure – but not on its own…

 (With grateful thanks to Harry Brignull’s ‘What You Need to Know About Eye-Tracking’)  

@lauracallow with thanks to Harry Brignull @harrybr

As search marketers we’re deluged with daily requests from clients or stakeholders on any number of these areas of focus and more. And it doesn’t stop there…

Red tape, unclear expectations, lack of management support, non-inclusive project management, perceived conflict of interests, and more road-blocks can interfere with many search marketers to the point of utter frustration.

I’m a firm believer that a company’s lack of search exposure and success need not lay at the door of the search marketer.

No  matter how good you are, how innovative, diplomatic, or tenacious you may be, if a company wants to call itself ‘The Blue Widget Company’  when it clearly sells pink widgets, and you are under no circumstances ever to use the word ‘pink’ on the site, you’re going to have to be very inventive. Five thousand, quality, ‘pink-widget’ backlinks – which you’ll have to work darn hard to get considering your company is called ‘Blue Widgets’ – will struggle to help you beat out competitors who call a pink widget a ‘pink widget’ on their site, and who have easy, obvious backlinks of the same anchor text.

So with the pain-points and the rather widespread and grandiose expectations of search marketers these days, what’s a search marketer to do?

Just like everybody else, we need to play the SMART game, starting with an overall strategy –  we start with the goals of search within the organization as a whole, and work down to a project level. Get people educated, informed and finally, excited!

Goals

Determine the goals for the search team/s, for each team’s contribution to the web marketing team, for the web marketing team’s contribution to the business unit… and so forth.

The highest level for which you strategize will depend on the size of your organization and your position within the hierarchy. Regardless of either, all search managers should meet regularly to ensure that their goals are connected, supportive, complementary and can be merged relatively seamlessly in terms of data and learnings to provide overall approach, feedback and results data to the stake and shareholders as part of a larger strategy or as an individual piece of the larger strategy. How?

SMART Search Goals

• Smart – Specific, Significant
• sMart – Measurable, Meaningful
• smArt – Attainable, Agreeable
• smaRt – Relevant, Rewarding
• smarT – Trackable, Timely

1. Specific and Significant Goals

This facet of the goal setting process requires that your search marketing goals be clear, concise and easily understood by the primary stakeholders. The objective being to provide a clear, specific guideline as to what you want to achieve and why citing the significance factor – the use of hypotheses and null-hypotheses can make this process a lot easier.

2. Measurable and Meaningful Goals

The goals must be both measurable and meaningful. By measurable, I mean that your search marketing goals need to have a clear start point whatever it may be;

• Revenue
• Traffic
• Bounce-rates
• Backlinks
• Impact-on-direct
• Increased-traffic-share
• Search-traffic-share-of-whole
• Cross-pollination-impact
• Net-promoter-score-impact
• … this list can get ridiculously long, but the point remains the same.

These goals need to be measurable against subsequent stage-completion points, or an end point. They also need to be meaningful. That’s not as odd as it sounds… the goals need to be ‘meaningful’ in that, regardless of how the strategies assigned to the goal perform, the data will be monitored and presented in such a way as to determine how statistically significant any strategy may have been, or indeed if it was insignificant and merely directional. The objective being to provide measurable goals that are meaningful in terms of the chosen strategy.  

3. Attainable and Agreeable Goals

Attainable goals are exactly that, achievable within your current business framework and taking into consideration resource limitations (people, money, time, hardware, software, space etc).

The term ‘Attainable is sometimes substituted for the term ‘Agreeable’ which I wholeheartedly support. Agreeable or ‘agreed-upon’ goals infer that the stakeholders have all had a say in the formulation of the goal, and that they are in majority agreement as to the veracity of its implementation.

In some companies that can be a headache where search is still considered a ‘new-worrisome-addition’. In time, and with education, the agreement between the stakeholders gives the search marketer far reaching responsibility and support, and consolidates their position as a major leader in the web strategy as a whole. Attainable first, agreeable second if you’re not quite there yet, though clearly while you’re getting there within your teams, being agreeable and diplomatic is vital in the personal use of the word. The objective being to provide attainable goals that are agreeable to the stakeholders.

4. Relevant and Rewarding Goals

I know a lot of people use the word ‘realistic’ here, though I see very little tangible difference between ‘attainable’ and ‘realistic’ unless you want to split hairs. If it’s attainable and achievable, I’m going to use the rational-man mentality and assume that it is therefore also realistic.

That said; the goal needs to be relevant and rewarding. Relevant to the overall objectives of the business, your team and your career in that it is SMART as a whole; Rewarding in the sense that, by hypothesis – and assuming your hypothesis will not be disproved – you are testing goals that are going to be of significant interest to the stakeholders, and which will therefore provide them with rewarding results and information to share and examine. The objective being to provide goals that are both relevant and rewarding to multiple stakeholders.

5. Time-based/Traffic-based and Trackable Goals

Trackable follows from Measurable, and is a somewhat skewed idea for search marketers in that the measurability of our goals depends in great part on the trackability of those goals, requiring web analytics and other secondary search tools. The implementation of effective tracking and analytics is vital to the success of search marketing and to the efficacy and veracity of any search marketing goal or campaign.

The time or time-based/time-sensitive requirement is old-school, and is as important. Deadlines for goal achievement are vital, whether they are based on stage-completion or end point data. The caveat is that you must allow enough time or traffic for the goal data to be verifiable and significant.

There is some dissonance between traffic-based and time-based goal parameters in that (1) too much time can result in the affect of unwanted seasonality or other macro/micro affecting variables; but (2) too little traffic to a page may provide less than directional results.

Finding the happy medium with clear hypotheses is an important part of this element. There is nothing to prevent you from phasing the goal by using traffic, and time, and a combination of the two if needed for low traffic pages, thus enabling the consolidation of the most relevant data for each phase. The objective being to create a goal that ensures time and traffic based trackable goals for review.

I strongly recommend you read Shari Thurow’s thread at Search Engine Land for supportive information and further research if you’re so inclined.

Thanks for reading and come see me at Pubcon Dallas next week! I’m nice… I just look cranky OR… I love my tweeple, so follow me anytime you like on Twitter – I’m on Linkedin too!

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[edit... my husband - operations director for a large web company  -  advised me that the differences between 'achievable' and 'realistic' from a personal employee pov, and from a hands-on manager pov is a bit different.]

This isn’t a post for PPC newbies. I’m not going to include an entry list of what you should do to get started in PPC, I’m just going to dive straight into a few things that I’ve learned over the years… Please bear in mind post is aimed at single businesses, not multi-site affiliates, though you never know…

If you have a well known brand name – 12 Thoughts:

1. Your brand terms need to be matched with branded and verifiable adcopy, throw in those ® and ™ symbols, and make use of the word ‘Official’.
2. Advertise on all possible spelling variations. I know of one variation that cost a company 37c for the year and generated over $1K in PPC based revenue.
3. Use any relevant claims you can verify on-page in your adcopy: ‘76% of Americans Prefer our Blinds…’; ‘#1 Rated Kids Learning Craft in the US’; etc…
4. Test these claims against more audience targeted ad copy, against more keyword rich adcopy, and against more ‘sensationalist’ adcopy.
5. Have a targeted landing page for each adcopy variation. Test them all against the same landing page, one page after another.
6. Take the top two performers and test again.
7. If the results are significant in terms of difference, use the winner and start optimization and conversion testing on the winning page and adcopy.
8. Don’t only work to ROAS, especially in a big brand where you have a budget and reallocation may not be so easy. Clearly spending $2m and making $4m is better in terms of pure profit than spending $0.5m and making $2m, but the ROAS for the latter is better (4:1 vs 2:1). IF you can efficiently and effectively reallocate the $1.5m spend difference to other marketing spend opportunities that provide a return of greater than 2:1, you are positively contributing to the company’s bottom line. But If you have to spend it all, then focus on both ROAS and profit. I’ve experienced both situations, and eventually try to work towards reallocation as it’s better for the business as a whole.
9. Dedicate adgroups to each product line and product type – from the highest to the lowest level, assuming your site is structured in a relevantly hierarchical way. So have a campaign for ‘cameras’, and adgroups for (non-exhaustive iullustrative list) ‘digital cameras’, ‘video cameras’, ‘digital video cameras’, ‘nikon digital camera’, ‘canon digital camera’, ‘compare digital cameras’ etc. Use phrase and exact match more as you get more specified. Keep the broader terms to the top level, but be very careful with broad terms and watch their ROAS in particular. I cut a particularly relevant term that was broad, phrase and exact matched by our previous agency after checking the data for the past 12 months. With an ROAS of 27cents on the dollar, there was no point in continuing with that term.
10. Unless you have money to burn, or a dedicated budget to ‘blow’ on brand awareness or for a specified non-return campaign, aim for a minimum ROAS of $1:$1.
11. Try to keep brand terms for which you organically rank between 1 and 5 at a PPC rank of 1-3.
12. Be wary of competitor brand names unless you have a clear competitive advantage or selling point like a free trial, free product or special offer, and watch what they do on your brand terms.

If you do NOT have a well known brand – 12 Thoughts:

1. My personal experience has leant me to believe that PPC ‘brand awareness campaigns’ are not usually worth the effort or cost as a stand-alone endeavour.
2. Don’t target the brand names of the big-players in your space. You will get burned.
3. Targeting generic keywords can be a great investment, but your adcopy must speak to your keywords, which must actually match your target market’s search query intent.
4. Driving heaps of traffic is pointless, and costly, if they are not converting. With the masses of media bombarding your average Joe today, your PPC ad that you worked so hard on to get ‘just-right’ will be forgotten as quickly as that toothbrush ad you saw this morning – unless they bookmark your site. But they have to click before they can do that, and if you don’t have an effective traffic attribution tool, you’ll never know if it was your PPC ad anyway. That may seem jaded, but if you have to prove returns, you better be able to PROVE returns, or kiss your budget goodbye.
5. Be very strategic and tactical with your big traffic generics, watch them carefully.
6. Dedicated PPC pages usually (in my experience) perform better than your usual web pages.
7. Minimize your navigation on these dedicated pages. Use numerous, well-placed calls-to action.
8. Play with colors, button sizes and text and focus on conversion rates. Refine and optimize your pages as much as possible and on an ongoing basis making use of usability studies.
9. Usability studies can be tests using crazyegg, or panel based. If you’re going for a panel and it’s too expensive to conduct via testing experts, screen family and friends of randomly selected staff members who choose to participate. Stress the fact that you want to hear their thoughts, both bad and good. Many informal studies have skewed results because that is not communicated, and the panels incorrectly assume they need to be ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ instead of neutral in their response.
10. Generic keywords are in many cases very expensive to rank in the top 3, so make use of bid management tools and test what works in terms of clicks, CTR, conversion and ROAS. You may find that your revenue at position 5 is as high as your revenue at position 2, but with a far lower cost (higher ROAS).
11. Respond to market changes in search behaviour using tools like Google Insights, and focus on geographic markets that work. As your brand becomes better known you can expand.
12. Try out AdLinks. In my limited experience (they’re pretty new) they work, and I’m not the only one to think so!

For both – 4 More Thoughts…

1. Make sure you are inline and in-communication with other on and offline marketing initiatives to make sure you target tag-lines in dedicated pages.
2. Watch your spend and keep in contact with other MMs to see if there is additional budget for you, or if you can apply excess budget to other performing programs/initiatives.
3. Don’t be shy about trying other comparison shopping sites.
4. Be careful of content.

I know there’s tons more, but for this post I reckon that’s a good chunk to deal with. I admit, I’m a PPC and organic junkie, and I love my job! Follow me on twitter for random PPC/organic and just plain me tid-bits @lauracallow!

Usual disclaimer – These are my personal thoughts on my blog. Nothing to do with my employers – current or past. My thoughts and opinions are my own. You can see my experience on LinkedIn and you’re welcome to join my network!

BUT after years of experience, research and seeing how things work on numerous sites across multiple industries, as well as chatting with experts focused on core deliverables, this is a list of my ‘ultimate conversion tips’ with a short list of links to other fantastic, and more comprehensive, conversion tip posts, documents and articles.

Conversion Tips – Get Started People!

I’m going to make a few very basic assumptions:

• Traffic should be sent to relevant, quality, targeted pages,
• Design should avoid clutter and navigation on dedicated landing pages should be minimal,
• Content should get to the point with a relevant large headline <h1> with key content above the fold, even if the page is very long,
• Promissory enticements, and repeat calls to action are important, but histrionic copy may detract from authenticity and the perception of trustworthiness; things like ‘Today only!’, ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t buy it RIGHT NOW!’, and other dire declarations common to pushy sales-men.
• Testimonials, reviews and statements must all be true, but more importantly, verifiable

With those out of the way, I’ll head on into a countdown of the top 10 conversion tips I personally have found really make a difference throughout my  experience.

10. Make your add-to-cart buttons exactly that – ‘add to cart’¹. The button colour can also have an effect – depending on industry. In many cases I have found it is not a significant factor, but a charity site found that green definitely contributed to online donations².

9. Understand your target market. Know what they like online. Even if you don’t have dedicated usability studies and access to paid research faculties, it’s actually pretty easy to check (give yourself a reasonably wide margin of error and narrow it with tests). Use Google Ad Planner (beta) to find sites that appeal to your target audience, and analyze them. Then to get an idea of their PPC spend, projected revenue and more, Adgooroo (or free similar products) can provide insights. Take that data and extrapolate out using your tailored SEO equation. It’s guestimates in some cases, but it does usually give you a pretty good idea of what is and isn’t working, what your audience likes and does not like in terms of design, content – and it’s always important to filter and sort by industry to get trends for relevant tactics and strategies for your own industry/site.

8. Your online (web) and offline (retail) competitors may well be different, but keeping track of what both are doing online is very important. If you can see they’re testing something, mark it down for a future test yourself. If it’s something you’ve done already you can make a note of their approach and any differences. Following up again with a similar test is not a bad idea to glean learning’s, unless your first test was a total bust – in which case you’re ahead of the curve – a nice place to be. Conduct a usability study of their page, take the learning’s and run with them. Learn from their victories and their mistakes.

7. Usability has already been mentioned a few times, so in essence if the term is new to you – it’s about how fast the essence and functionality of a page is communicated, and how quickly and effectively it is engaged. Show your page to folks outside of your department who fit into you general demographic (age/sex/geo-location) and give them 6-8 seconds maximum to tell you what they think the page:

• is about,
• if they like it,
• if they would leave it,
• what stands out,
• if they would bookmark it.

Like Family Fortunes – quick, fast and fun. Have competitions for a free lunch for the team who agree (or disagree) the most. If they take more than 8 seconds to tell you what the page is about – you got a problem. If they want to leave it – problem. If nothing stands out – being unmemorable is bad from a landing page perspective as far as return conversions are concerned – and while they’re not generally the target, your audience may be characterized by research-and-select based behaviour and you need them to remember your page one way or the other; tag-line, brand name, imagery, propensity to bookmark (you need to offer that functionality)… figure out what it is they use to remember you by testing. Be as usable and user-friendly to your users as possible without being a kid’s game site, unless that’s what you are…

6.  Bear in mind email, DM, banner ad, TV ad, radio ad etc web landing pages are all different, or should be. Each target market demographic is different in some way; older/younger; attentive/inattentive; employed/stay-at-home; employed/retired; busy/bored and so forth.

If you can target your landing pages to convert the demographic you are specifically targeting, it’s all the better. That requires in-company communications and campaign scheduling. It also requires getting full details from your TV/radio/print(where-ever) folks to make sure you have a heads up to online-target the right folks with the best content and design, at the right time with effective use of your vanity URL. Clearly you’ll have vanity URL’s to effectively track activity, as well as a crack phone team/different call-in numbers.

This is about conversion. There are a lot of different sources you need to consider for inclusion as separate entities in your armament .

5. If your conversion page includes a form, keep the mandatory elements for completion to a minimum. Not ideal for market research sure, but ideal for conversion. Include auto fills wherever possible, make it as easy as you can. Tick email sign-ups and notifications ‘OFF’ and encourage click to subscribe with enticing content offers/future discounts – whatever your product/service and market may find of interest. Don’t leave it clicked as ‘Yes/Opt-in’ unless at the bottom of the form, and even then be careful. Encourage them to want to hear more from you. Experienced web writers can effectively manage that conundrum. I’ve seen it work. The objective is initial conversion – repeat conversion is a somewhat different animal. Focus on your core objective with your landing page.

4. A lot of folks find that the ability to print a pdf to refer to is of use. This is especially of interest when it comes to big purchase decisions. Make sure those pages have everything they need with a print option. If you can manage to include a print coupon or discount percentage on print only  with clear legalese to that effect that’s even better for the end user when they are doing their comparisons. Stress your tech specs/reviews/price/capacity/capability/functionality/requirements/ whatever are your selling points. Make sure the pdf is usably designed, and always leave a clear link to the dedicated, targeted conversion page they first found in the copy that can both be easily typed into a browser, or clicked to via a pdf. It’s all about the conversion.

3. Make it easy for comparison shoppers. More and more people are using sites like pricegrabber/ebay/amazon/kijiji etc to search. Review and check pricing on products and services. You don’t have to be cheapest. You do need to be the most informative, authoritative and have a track record of delivery and performance – reviews are becoming more and more important. Even if you don’t have them on your site, enable them via your third party online vendors. Pay attention to what peeps are doing in terms of CTR and conversion, and also pay attention to your review commentary. Pass it to R&D and support. Conversion optimization is not a silo effect. You need to feed your learning’s on.

2. A/B test everything. The copy/size/colours/placement of your buttons; the functionality of your page; headlines; copy length/grammar/formality; image size/colour variation/placement/ type; text size and colour; page layout/design and navigation placement; the navigation itself; calls to action. Visual click heat-maps are great to gain an understanding of paths of interest as well as which areas of the page are underperforming, or which buttons/calls-to-action/links are underperforming. Moving, changing and testing can give you the best possible design, content, and conversion tactics if you do it consistently and with accurate, quality tools.

1. It’s a harsh truth, but a necessary one that many affiliates would agree with even if reluctantly; while you can master – and I mean guru status – 1 (maybe 2 specialties) in general; ‘a-jack-of-all-trades is master-of-none’. If you really want to make a difference in terms of landing page conversion, you need a specialist. If possible, you should have a team of specialists each contributing their own dedicated area of expertise to maximize your users landing page exposure and experience and thus your own conversions;

• hire an SEM for SEO and PPC,
• a social expert for SMM,
• an expert web copy writer for web writing,
• a proven web designer for landing page design,
• an experience designer for additional conversion tips and tricks, as well as
• a qualified web tester to handle your actual testing.

Of course not every business can afford a perfect ‘dream-team’, but if you know what you want to achieve, and give yourself time to achieve it that is realistic and dependant on your resourcing (people or time) limitations, there is no reason that a smaller team of dedicated pros willing to get down and dirty with research and testing can’t make a significant difference to your conversion rates. I speak from experience when I say it’s tough out there, and it’s getting tougher. As a man (or woman) alone, you’ll get there, but it will take you a lot longer, so use the net to gain from other’s experiences to simplify your own learning curve. Bigger businesses can afford dream teams, and those teams perform. Depending on what you’re selling online, it is imperative to your businesses or sites survival and continuance that you be able to compete at some level.

Happy conversions folks!

¹ www.getelastic.com/add-to-cart-buttons/

² http://www.donordigital.com/projects/donordigital_donation_page_optimization_research.pdf – the bottom of this article includes links to an additional 2 research articles:

• Improving Conversion 50-60% by Applying Continuity and Congruence
• 7 rules for landing page optimization

Other resources

- Unbounce.com ebook – 101 Landing page tips

- Seldomstatic.com – Top landing page tips from the pros

- eMarketing Testing – Conversion Papers

There is more freedom (and lack of cost) associated with effective in-house management, but it always surprises me as to how this type of move is met by the engine reps and other folks still using agencies.

In-house you’re after the lowest possible CPA, and the best possible ROAS. You’re also looking at overall profit for the business – but that can’t be done on a short term basis in a big brand, so I’ll stick with ROAS for now. (CPA is slightly different and affected by more than one variable or campaign depending on your analytics.)

My budget was cut dramatically in my first month of in-house for external reasons I won’t go into. And yet we managed to optimize until we dropped, and we maintained expectations on year to index levels for conversions, sales and unit volumes while falling drastically short of expected traffic levels. Makes you think, no?

My “in-house” Point

When PPC is in-house, and your deliverable is to provide great ROAS and minimal CPA, as a search marketer you are unaffected by the (often valid) claims that pure exposure on the long (generic) tail is worth the investment. You are also less affected by the need to maintain or increase spend for %age remuneration purposes. Obviously agencies have to deliver, it’s their job to do so, and there are many that do a great job including the agency we recently moved from. However, when you are told to cut-to-the-chase and give it maximum return on the dollar, it’s nice to have it in-house.

It’s also much faster, more cost effective and efficient to make changes to everything; from new campaigns, to revamped adcopy; from redirecting to new landing pages to bid-management… In a very small nutshell – it’s faster, easier and has more immediate visibility for your stakeholders when you have the opportunity of doing it cost-free and quickly with the ability to pull and repurpose reports at will as you manage the campaigns hands-on.

My “Personal Development” Point

If you are interested in growing as a business in the PPC realm and can afford to hire a PPC specialist in-house, you’ll likely save money – assuming they ARE pro. It’s easy to check; are they AdWords Qualified? Were/are they an affiliate? Who did they do PPC for previously?… They should be able to give you general data without betraying confidence. And it is data you should be able to check in general.

But if you can get a good PPC pro in-house and help them grow – they will likely give you results at a fraction of the cost, and you can help them achieve their own career objectives by facilitating their learning curve, or contributing to it.

Happy PPC!

My comments as an ex-teacher on the post:

1. Many parents are irresponsible
2. Many parents are clueless
3. Many parents are caring and concerned
4. I understand the post, but do not condone their approach

For the irresponsible,

This is a wake-up call to listen to the teachers of your children. You put them in the school. If you don’t like what they do – even in public school – you can make your voices heard, if you take the time:

• Ask for data
• Ask for solutions
• Recommend solutions
• Move your kids
• Relocate

Your kids are the biggest blessing the Good Lord ever gave you. If you don’t like where they are, or the teachers they have. Do something. If you don’t care, or are silenced by government rhetoric– take them home and teach them yourself. It’s not easy.

For the clueless

Parents! You were children once.

• Do you remember what you loved and hated about your parents?
• Do you remember what you wished they had been?
• Do you remember what it felt like to ‘feel alone’, ‘no-one understands me’, ‘no-one cares’, ‘I’m nothing’
• Did you ever feel like ‘I have nothing to offer compared to peter, paul, sally’, ‘my parents don’t care so if I disrespect my teachers, it’s all good’’, ‘my parents don’t love me, why should I show care to others?’ and on and on

Parents are ultimately responsible for how their children behave in their younger school years. Sure, from the age of 12 and up they should know how to be responsible members of society – but that is NOT the teacher’s or the school’s responsibility. That is the parent’s responsibility, with some reliance on the teachers teaching them the academics that are age associated.

For the Caring and Concerned

• I can’t comment on this school, but I do know that teachers tend to chat in the staff room about the kids in their classes and their perceptions of the parents. Most are incredibly impartial and do their utmost to be fair in the classroom – and it’s not easy.
• It’s also not the teachers fault if little Johnny (from a disciplined home*) does better than little Peter (from a home where ‘everything goes’ – regardless of reason)
• Loving your kids does not give parents license to allow them to become undisciplined little monsters with the expectation that ‘school will sort them out’.
• You have one, maybe 2 to contend with. School has 10-30 per class.
• If you don’t like what the school is doing, let them know! Most teachers are more than open to hear from parents. In fact, apart from the slightly overbearing or hysterical parents, they hear nothing or very little.

My understanding – without condoning – of this message

I was a teacher in a very good school for a few years before my twins were born. My students did very well, and I harboured and maintained the school’s sense of respect for both teachers and elders – neither of which our society conforms to today in general.

I did however work for a time, as part of my training, in a public school and the parents ritually:

• Lied for their children when the truth would have been hard, but helped them to avoid the consequences
• Excused their children from school, homework, gym, library etc. for entirely fallacious reasons – most thinking they were helping their children avoid a consequence they were responsible for, and should have answered.
• Defended their behaviour under unacceptable circumstances

In the public school realm, this is the norm in many (not all) instances – and I am sure my experience of England – and this experience of Australia – may not extend to the US and Canada? You tell me. Recent examples leap to mind including the burning of that 15 year old youngster, the rape of another young girl at a prom, and more…

It is not the teachers to blame entirely, nor the school system, but the parents. Ultimate obedience or disobedience, understanding of consequences and ability to integrate with society lies with the dad, mom and close family values and practice.

This answering message unfortunately lacks foresight, understanding of the full repercussions of such a statement, and is in itself offensive with no outlet to concerned parents to actually report a sick or absent child.

For the parents of this school, perhaps you need to go back and get a poll on how your parent body behaved to prompt this response, not cause it.

For the school, this type of response, while understood by staff, is inappropriate in its tone and entirely unacceptable to both students and parents alike. Students, like parents, will stand by their own and while the message was enlightening, it was alienating. I doubt that was your intent as a public school body, and yet I understand that the excuses, lies and misinformation are a hard-cross to bear.

Deal with it as best you can, but not by an abusive, uncaring voice-mail.  

It’s actually pretty easy…

1. Decide if hiring in-house for SEO + PPC or SEM combined is more feasible in terms of your spend than outsourcing.

I realize it depends on size and revenues… but as soon as you get to a point where you can hire inhouse, you chould. Using an agency initially may give you an idea of the power of SEM (SEO+PPC) assuming you get a decent agency. I recommend contacting Epiar or Clix Marketing in the first instance for SEO and PPC respectively. If their books are full, they will point you in the right direction (North America wide).

As with anything, you pay for what you get. If you want to look for your own agency for SEO or PPC, or combined services – I recommend:

• steering clear of combined unless they are pretty big with a decent size staff
• asking to see their current and past client list
• determining how they charge – if they really know their stuff, they will charge for performance, though most will ask for a % of PPC spend and/or will have a flat rate per page/per site (based on pages escalating) or per unit of SEO (keyword research/title tags/meta data etc) for SEO services. If anyone asks you for more than 10% of spend for PPC…reconsider – even that is pretty high, and again, it depends on the size of your account. The best way to go with SEO is via performance models. In which case you will need to give them your analytics data. MNDAs or simple NDAs are fine, most will have no problem signing. If anyone does – don’t sign…
• Clarify how often they will check your account and analytics, how they will report, and how often along with what tactical refinements they will make – and how often
• The key thing is to know what you want to achieve (realistically) and then shop around to see who can offer you the best bang for your buck – hinging on the BANG
• Go cheap and lose your $. Go with what sounds great but with unproven promises or undisclosed clients, and lose $ – pretty safe to say that. Play safe – especially with your PPC dollars…

2. Know which questions to ask

If you hire a consultant – pleas read this post, if you are hiring an agency, we’ve covered that with the above info and the post, and if you’re hiring in-house, I suggest the following along with a review of the type of questions asked in the post mentioned:

• Have a screening phone call first to find out if you think the person might be a fit for your business based on a predetermined set of questions based on your corporate culture, expectations and the personalities of your existing staff. It may sound a bit daft, but it will save you endless amounts of frustration and possible unnecessary quits during probation.
• Follow up prior to first face-to-face with an SEM based questionnaire – preferably about your own site asking for good points, bad points and top points to address for maximum impact within a time frame and/or budget.
• Face-to-face and decide.
• Offer what they are worth, and if you can’t afford them based on their worth, offer them bonus, shares etc to get them. Check out GlassDoor to get an idea of what people may expect. And don’t think cheap or new is better. If you really want to make a difference in the search engines results – you need a pro, or at least some significant experience with what makes SEO work, and what gives PPC a decent ROAS.

LMK if you have any questions, and good luck!

Follow me on Twitter, and come hear me speak at Pubcon!

1. Which Search Terms to Target

This is somewhat subjective & somewhat objective. It really depends on 4 primary interrelated variables:

i.   the level of competition for the phrase

ii.  the relationship between search query language (phrase), search query intent (expectation/anticipated result), and the relevance of the search phrase to your offering (perceived or real match/deviation)

iii. your search marketing objectives

iv. your resources

Example #1. If the query language is very exploratory (generic; e.g. ‘laptop computers’ = 9.1m searches/mo [US]), the competition is relatively high (46m results), and the expectation is more specific (e.g. ‘small dell laptop’ = 2.5K searches/mo [US]) – then you can assume that your primary target audience is not search savvy, and that it’s going to take some work. So you refer back to your other variables:

- Does achieving a good rank for a generic term fit with your objectives?

- Do you have the resources (time, people, money) to commit to targeting this type of phrase set?

Example #2. If your search marketing objective is to generate brand awareness, then targeting more generic, high volume terms makes sense, assuming you have the resources, but; if your search marketing objective is driven by a purely conversion based metric, and you have limited organic pages (by design/default/intent/limitation/whatever), it may make sense to target a more specific set of phrases.

2. Where to Place your Selected Key-Phrases

Most old-hats will know these points, but to continue with the high-level overview, the first thing you need to do is audit your existing URL structure once you have completed the keyword research:

• Get rid of unnecessary folders e.g.:

- yoursite.com/product1group/product1a/overview/product.htm

• Create meaningful keyword rich folders e.g.:

- yoursite.com/dell-laptop-computers/product.htm

- yoursite.com/hp-laptop-computers/product.htm

• Create meaningful keyword rich files e.g.:

- yoursite.com/dell-laptop-computers/small-dell-laptop.htm

- yoursite.com/hp-laptop-computers/hp-business-laptop.htm

• 301 redirect all old files to the most relevant new file. Depending on objectives this could be to the new file for which you anticipate the highest volume of traffic, or for which you anticipate the highest number of conversions (e.g., based on web analytics of the existing site)

Then place the selected keyphrase per page:

• in the title tag (sticking to 70 characters with spaces) – for SEO. Make the title short and match the anticipated search query language & intent as closely as possible e.g.:
  • HP Business Laptop | HP Laptop Computers 
  • Unless you are a very well known brand name, with a high Net Promoter score, don’t include your brand name unless you really have to.
• in the META description (sticking to 155 characters + spaces) – for usability, click-through and some SEO effect e.g.:
  • Easily compare HP business laptops. 1 year factory warranty + 18 months from yoursite.com. Easy payment terms. We get you started – Fast! Find out more…

• in the <h> tags; use the specific term in the <h1> and the more generic term in an <h2> where possible – for SEO and usability e.g.:
  • <h1> Looking for Your Next HP Business Laptop?</h1>
  • <h2> Easily Compare & Choose from our Comprehensive Selection of HP Laptop Computers</h2>
• in the ALT attributes and image names; keep your image naming protocol clean, and remember to title your images as well (see ‘Accessibility and ARIA’) – for SEO and usability
• in the content. Many SEO’s say that keyword density is not important. I disagree – with a caveat; keyword density is vitally important – within reason… If the target keyphrase does not appear in the copy more than a few times in relevant areas, then the page may not actually be relevant to the term regardless of being placed in other key areas. I’m not saying there is a keyword density limit – max or min. What I am saying is:
  • write your content thoughtfully bearing in mind your <h> tags and your actual intent, assuming your intent is to arm people with more information around your core targeted phrases
  • never go back and insert keyphrases into copy once it is written
  • never write copy simply to target keyphrases
  • keep it natural, readable, usable and relevant.
  • it’s simple, yet it’s not. Experienced web copy-writers are worth their weight in gold.
• in the navigation and in your internal linking practice. This may cause some ructions with legal/branding/usability, and if you want to find out how you might get around these challenges, come to my session at Pubcon !

3. Optimized Use of Your Keyphrases

I’ll mention Pubcon again, but in the interim… make sure:

• you know what tag-lines are being used by offline marketing, and create pages
• you connect with PR (press release, not page rank – y’sll have a one track mind)
• you connect with social and help with blog posts, asks and answers and with creating pages around key positives or negatives regarding your offering to speak to detractors and support evangelists. More than 20% of search results are now UGC based. Don’t miss out by ignoring commentary, forums and the social space (a topic I have exhausted in previous posts and nearly bored my lovely readers to death – check them out if you missed them)

Come follow me on Twitter! And please come back soon…

~ Laura