The new Google Analytics interface has some incredible new functionality to help you make better marketing decisions.

And who better to discuss these recent changes with than founder of the Google Analytics User Conference (GAUGE Con) in the US, published author, and Google Analytics Certified Partner, Caleb Whitmore. 

Listen in as we talk flow visualisation, multi-channel funnels, user interface changes, custom reports, dashboards and a whole lot more.

I know you will like what you hear, so be sure to read more about his company Analytics Pros, follow him on Twitter @analyticspros, and if you want to learn more, buy his book, we did, and it’s damn good!

Here is the transcribed version:

Philip: Welcome to another episode of the online marketing secrets podcast where we interview only the world’s best experts in online marketing.  Today I have an awesome guest.  He is Caleb Whitmore.  He is the founder of the Google Analytics User Conference in the US.  I had the good fortune of meeting him last year in New York.  He gave a fantastic, well, many fantastic sessions actually.  And, as the organizers of the conference and an Analytics guru, I’m very excited to have you on the show.  So welcome.

Caleb:  Thanks for having me.

Philip:  Can you give us a little bit more about your background and how you led up to founding an Analytics conference?

Caleb: Yeah, so, I’ve been working with the internet since about 1999 and in 2004, started working with an agency in Seattle and prior to that had a web design and development company that actually started when I was in high school.

And started working with this company in Seattle called Pop and my job there was to help them do, figure out and integrate in search marketing and web analytics into their agency.  And that got me involved in the industry at a very interesting time.

In 2005, Google bought Urchin and made Google Analytics and released it.  So at Pop we were able to be one of the first certified partners for Google Analytics and as a result I got to get to meet the folks at Google behind the product and get trained by them and it’s been kind of a roller coaster from there forward digging in deeper and deeper with GA.

And so the conference has been something literally I had dreamed about for many years wanting to create an opportunity to get people that love and use Google Analytics together to share what they know and then also kind of an intense, I don’t know, hatred is too strong of a word but I don’t really like a lot of conferences because they tend to have a lot of theory and very little practicality and that’s something I wanted to make different.

With GAUGE, the Google Analytics Conference, we make it very practical because we’re talking about Google Analytics.  Everybody that’s there for the most part uses it or wants to use it and so we can not only talk about nice ideas and things you could do but we can show you how to go do it.  And so, that’s what kind of brought the idea together and it has become a reality.

Philip:  Well I think you succeeded because that’s the one thing I took away from it was all the sessions were extremely practical as well as the high caliber speakers which I guess you can find at various conferences but it was exceptionally practical.

Caleb:  That’s great to hear.

Philip:  Do you think, listening to your background, do you think that a lot of or most good Analytics experts come up through a specialized area like search or SEO or SEM or even web design?

Caleb: Yeah, I think so.  The academic system really is not geared even still it’s starting to see some changes but the academic system moves so slowly that an industry, a specialty like web analytics is really too recent for the academic world to just churn out good web analysts.

And web analysts are – it really is a challenging field.  You have to be a technologist to a large degree.  You have to be a business strategist and you have to be very savvy with the internet in particular.  And it’s kind of the convergence of those skill sets and then specialty learning around web analytics in particular that I think are the key ingredients to being successful in the web analytics space.

Not to say somebody couldn’t jump in but I definitely do see a lot of people come from search as a background, search engine optimization and marketing, web development design and/or some kind of marketing technology business background as well.

Philip: Yeah, I think even the name web analyst devalues it slightly because you’re actually sitting quite high up above a lot of different specialist areas or you need a really good understanding of a lot of different areas and I think that the analyst term may devalue it somewhat just thinking about it now.

Caleb: I think web analyst, it almost kind of goes back to the days of web stat software.  Every time I hear web analyst people that aren’t in the web analytics field don’t really know what that means.  And I think, what do we do?  We analyze the web?

Philip:  I don’t think it makes sense.  Maybe marketing – I was thinking reading a blog post yesterday actually, marketing optimization is maybe more relevant.

Caleb: Yeah it really is, and it’s – honestly it’s not even about just the web.  The e-metrics conference, Jim Stroan’s conference has done a good thing in kind of terming it marketing optimization conference, it’s not just about web analytics whatever that is to people that aren’t on the inside of the field.

Because when I’m working with a client, I’m not just talking about what’s happening on their website.  It encompasses their business as a whole and marketing whether it’s online or offline relates to their business.  It’s just that we’re using the website as kind of a centre point and collecting data about it to understand more about both the website but the customer and the business on and off line.

Philip:  Interesting.  Excellent, well let’s get into the topic for today.  We’re going to talk about the new interface that’s not so new at the moment I guess depending -some of us may have just started using it, some may have been using it for a while but yeah, let’s call it the new interface and you’re very passionate about it, I’ve heard you speak about it a couple of times on what your thoughts are.

We’re just going to go through that and give people a sense of what’s new, what’s good, what’s bad and a couple of tips.  So what’s your high level view? How happy are you with this new interface?

Caleb:  At this point, I’m very happy with it.  It’s been a while coming though.  I was able to use it a bit before it was out publically and thought it was interesting and then it came out and they had made some improvements in it, continued to be improved.

A year ago, they released it at the GAUGE conference last year in San Francisco.  And, at that point, I didn’t use it as the primary interface.  I didn’t start using it primarily until about August of last year, 2011.  So it’s moved along but it’s now at a point where once in a while, I go to the old interface and I feel like I am – like I have mittens on my hands and I can’t really use GA as quickly as I’m now used to having been immersed in the new interface.

So I’ve come to love it but it definitely – if you’re still using the old interface, it’s a learning curve because some things have changed.

Philip:  Yeah absolutely, so let’s talk about a couple of those things.  Yeah, I think I had a similar feeling when I started looking at it.  You just – I guess like anything in life, when you experience change, it’s a little bit of a shift and you may not adjust to it.  Initially it does take a little bit of time.  What are the key things, just give us the very high level – what are the fundamental differences?

Caleb: Well, high level fundamental is almost a challenge because the new version really is almost – paradigm maybe isn’t the right term but platform change is absolutely right.

So this has been a major effort for the team at Google.  Something they talked about when they released the product is that this gives them a platform on which they are able to innovate and build much more with Google Analytics.

Kind of moving it from its roots in the Urchin software to something that really is – it’s current, it’s all Ajax driven and script driven, the UI.  So it takes advantage of advances in technology and on the back end from what I’ve heard them say is it is definitely this platform change.

So, that’s where we started, it really is taking the same thing and seeing data we have but putting this whole new lens on top of it.  And so, releases like real time, I like the flow visualization of the new dashboarding capabilities, the new custom reports.  Those are all I think evidences of their ability now to build on top of this new platform.

And that’s the most exciting thing to me is that we’re going to continue to see a lot of innovation from the books at Google with this product.  There’s been a lot in the last year and I think the next year, I’m guessing it’s going to be really exciting because they have the ability now to keep throwing stuff into it.

Philip:  Excellent.  So we got an exciting future and we also have some new functionality available to us right now.  If people think about the sub menus down the left hand side in Version 4 or the old version, we had dashboard, intelligence, visitors, traffic sources, content and goals.

Essentially when you move to the Version 5 or the new version, we have similar topics, some have changed their wording slightly.  I think conversions has changed, goals has changed from goals to conversions in terms of the terminology.  But most of the sections are still there.  I think we have a brand new section for advertising.  What are your thoughts on that?  So pulling advertising as its own sub menu out from all the traffic source stuff?

Caleb: Yeah I think that is probably a good move for them, because the Adwords report before were buried down a couple of clicks in.  I mean obviously Google’s giving away this product and except for the premium version, they’re not making money on it unless you end up at some point, having a lift to your ad spend.  So elevating access and visibility to advertising I think is good.

And honestly, the number of people that use GA, that don’t go look at their Adwords report is huge.  So, getting this higher and putting it in front of more people I think is a great move for them.  Maybe they’ll do more to integrate other kinds of advertising measurement, I don’t know but, I think that would be interesting and they certainly are now giving it kind of a high priority location.

Philip: I saw somewhere that Google Analytics is Google’s second most profitable product in terms of people who do have it, spend, I don’t know, in fact I can’t remember the number.  You probably know, but spend three to four times as much on their Adwords or their advertising with Google than those who don’t have the tool because they can measure the success of it.  Is that right?

Caleb: Yeah, I don’t know specific numbers but that sounds totally plausible.  The reality is and I think that Google, back when they made the acquisition of Urchin, they were very smart in doing that because if you can measure, you can manage more effectively.  And if you do that, you’re likely to spend more on your advertising.

So, the incremental revenue increase for them, for ad spend, let’s say they had kept Urchin as a paid product and the Urchin On Demand and released Google Analytics at a few hundred bucks a month, the revenue they would make from that would pale in comparison to what I’m sure they’ve gained from improvement and overall customers making their businesses better, which is really what Analytics should be about.

Philip:  Absolutely, excellent.  Alrighty, well, let’s get into some of the new functionalities.  So there’s been a little bit – people have noticed a little bit of change around the layout of the menus.

Essentially, they are fundamentally the same once you get used to where things have moved to but there’s some chunky pieces of functionality that have been added.  So where would you like to start?  What’s your favorite new piece of functionality?

Caleb: There’s a lot to choose from.  The structuring and restructuring, I think has left a few people going where are my reports, and that’s important to recognize but, as you mentioned, the overall categories are pretty much the same.  And for people making the jump to the new version, just go in and explore those menus, open all of them up and click through them once and you’ll see where a lot of those reports are.

If we wanted to jump to what I think is the most exciting and interesting, I’d probably get into the Flow Visualization tool and that is under the Home tab not the standard reporting.  That’s another good to know about the new version is that there’s these three tabs along the top – Home, Standard Reporting and Custom Reporting.

And, I know a lot of people that, they really have kind of overlooked that Home tab where you have your Dashboards, your Flow Visualization, your Intelligence and your Real Time.

Philip:  Do you want to talk a little bit about the flow?

Caleb: Yeah, Yeah, let’s get into that.  So the Flow Visualization tool, this is brilliant.  For a long time, Google Analytics has been really bad at showing how people move sequentially through a process.

The old funnel view and the goal report, lots of technical nuances to it and hard to read.  You set it up, it’s not retro active.  So in the navigation report, if you’ve ever gone to the Navigation Reports under the Contents section, really kind of dry, stale, hard to understand.

Flow Visualization is this beautiful user experience, visually represents how people move.  Under the Home tab you’ve got the Flow Visualization and you have your two primary, your visits flow and your navigation flow under that.  And then there’s this, the third one which is over – it’s actually not under that Flow Visualization link under Home, it’s back over in Conversions under Goals.  And that’s the Goal Flow Visualizer.

The Goal Flow Visualizer is really my favorite tool.  The general visits flow and the navigation flow are interesting but I find those a bit less useful because the problem with any kind of navigational analysis in a flow report, whatever tool you use, GA or other, there’s so much data that it really quickly gets fragmented down to this miniscule level.

Philip: And I find – yeah, I couldn’t agree more.  I find with a lot of the content stuff you’re almost left at the end of this whole flow stuff is well, so what?  What am I going to do?  If you’re looking from the goal perspective, it’s like, what can I do to get more goals or stop losing goals or whatever.  So yeah, I agree.

Caleb: Exactly, and you can define – here’s a big trick with the new version.  So, and with the Flow Visualizer, the goal flow visualization is retro active.

So we could go today to your account.  Let’s say you have four years of data in your account and we set up a brand new goal and a really awesome 10 step funnel, and you can have up to 20 steps now in a goal funnel.  We set that up today and if those matching patterns you put in are valid patterns against quantity you have, you have retro active reporting.

And you didn’t have that before.  Goals before, use what are called pre aggregated numbers. So you set it up and it’s still the same way with goal conversion rate and goal conversions numbers but the flow visualizor is dynamic against all the data you have.

So you don’t have to set it up and go wait two months.  You can set it up and look back at the last year and that I think is really exciting.  So that’s a key trick number one.  And it also gives you the ability to kind of be flexible with it, to maybe change and try looking at different lengths of funnels.

So that’s something I’ll do a lot of times, I’ll set up three or four goals.  One might be my primary purchase process and then I might have some other goals and funnels for user behavior patterns, I want to understand how people do.

So Home page to shopping cart category to product detail to shopping cart.  That’s a great funnel.  Set up a goal and a funnel for that and then look at it in a Flow Viz and you’ll see what does the picture look like of how people kind of go through that flow.

And that makes the data a lot more consumable than under the navigation flow because if you go to navigation flow and you go Home page and then where do people go next.  It’s super granular.  And like you said, that’s where it’s kind of a so what.  So I looked at this, I put 12 steps in and I’m looking at the slice of three people that had this super granular path.  That doesn’t help so much.

Philip:  And so what – can you give an example of what typical action or what could you look at?  So you’re looking at this flow, you’re seeing how people move through, what type of things have you seen?  Okay, so we now need to fix x, y, z.

Caleb: Yeah, so the best one I found so far is to look at a goal in a funnel process particularly for your high value, your purchase funnel, your lead generation funnel, by browser.

And what you’ll see by browser is really a picture of the relationship of how people using different types of devices interact with that funnel.  And in the goal flow, there’s two parts to it.  Some people haven’t noticed this. If you scroll down below the big kind of squiddy looking thing, that’s the flow visualization, there’s a table of data.  And that’s the data table representation of what’s being visualized and that’s super useful.

So if you go and set up a goal flow on your purchase funnel and let’s say you set that to browser and you go down and look at that table, go all the way over to the far right hand side, your last call and that’s your conversion rate.  And it’ll break down the conversion rate by browser type.

And I’ve seen cases where internet explorer is converting at 6% and Safari’s converting at zero or 1%.  And that’s a really big red flag because there’s very little reason why people using one browser versus another should – they should all complete checkout at the same percentage rate unless psychographically, they just are less likely to convert.

So I have a client that sells yarn and Safari users buy less yarn which maybe makes some sense, the typical Mac user isn’t really into knitting as much versus somebody using a PC with internet explorer that’s maybe a little outdated.  Not to be stereotypical but that fits a bit more the profile of somebody who might do a lot of knitting.

So that could be an explanation but more likely is that it’s a technical usability problem that’s browser specific.  So you can take that a go, wow, we didn’t notice that.  Go get Safari, look your site, find out it’s really hard to check out if you’re using Safari because the button doesn’t work or whatever that issue is and then take that to the development team and you can make changes.

I had a client where they had – this was a case of iPad.  We looked at that Flow Viz and iPad was showing up there, 0% conversion rate and we did the math, they should have, based on all the people that got all the way up to the give-us-your-credit-card page, iPad had 0% of the people that got their gift through and they should have had about a thousand people get through.

And this is on a pretty high value purchase item and the number for them, this is like a multi million dollar problem that nobody had noticed that was a usability problem, the page didn’t work on an iPad.  You couldn’t put your money in because it functionally didn’t work.

And maybe those people ended up coming back on a computer, maybe they called and purchased, we don’t know.  But what we do know is statistically we should have had a thousand of them finish the booking process and put their credit card in and give us money.  And they didn’t and that was costing millions of dollars in revenue.

So this kind of flow visualization against something like browser or you can do it for geography, you can do it for traffic sources, you can do it for a landing page, gives you this really keen ability to visually see and interact with that data and then also that data table, get a precise number and pin point a problem.

Philip: Nice.  Yes, I think it’s pretty awesome.  Is this similar to, in your mind, to Kissmetrics, getting a little bit closer to what they’re doing?

Caleb: A bit, I think it makes Analytics a little bit easier than what it has been.  So Google Analytics, the visual aspect getting easier.  Kissmetrics and other tools similar to that are really good for, I think, a more specific task which is understanding customer and movement through a defined process and a really simple number on conversion.

But, they’re not full blown web analytics tools.  And that’s where – if you come to Google Analytics and you say I have a question, maybe a better example is the in-page analytics reporting in Google Analytics is terrible in my opinion.  I hate it…

Philip:  It always has been, yeah.

Caleb: Yeah, it’s just – it’s always been lacking.  So I’ll have customers that will say I want to see where people are clicking on my page visually and I say, you know what, GA is not a good tool for that.

Let’s go use Crazy Egg.  That’s my favorite tool for that kind of heat map page level analysis.  Crazy Egg is not a replacement for Google Analytics but it’s really, really good at answering specific questions about a specific page.  Where do people click on this page?

And so that’s where there are other tools that might be better aspects of certain questions you could try to answer with GA, but, generally what I’ve seen is there are other tools that are really good at one slice of the pie, they don’t replace the whole pie.  They’re not a full web analytics application.

Philip: Great, excellent.  Right, let’s move on to another piece of functionality.  What’s your next favorite?

Caleb: So after the Flow Visualization, the Multi Channel Funnel tool is another kind of mind bending new way to think about your data tool and that’s in the new version as well.  And this tool is, I think, just a fantastic step forward for Google Analytics. It’s much long needed and it really is designed to answer the question of okay, so I see a conversion from Adwords.  What about all the traffic that didn’t convert from Adwords?  We paid for it, what happened?

And the reality is – I don’t know about you but I very rarely go to a website and do the conversion action on my initial visit.  If I’m trying to book travel, unless it’s the airline I normally fly on, even that I usually take two or three visits to check prices and itineraries and such.  Booking hotel, buying something, navigating a website and finding an interesting new product or tool, I very rarely click/browse/convert.

And that’s a problem, because Google Analytics has always been this last click attribution model meaning the conversion is awarded to the most recent traffic source it came from.  So if you have a business where Adwords serves a function to get people who are maybe early in the buying process.  Say you’re a hotel, people are looking for a New York hotel.  They click your link, they browse around your site, maybe they even look at availability and pricing and they leave.

So Adwords isn’t going to get rewarded with a conversion, that session didn’t convert.  And they go off and they look at Expedia or maybe they just ran out of time and they had to go home or went to lunch or who knows what.  And then they come back but maybe they come back by typing in your hotel name.  Your really awesome hotel in New York into Google and they click through organically and they’re ready to book now and they book.

So Google Analytics traffic source reports are going to say conversion came from that organic keyword and your Adword that you paid for was bad, didn’t convert so maybe you shouldn’t buy that anymore.  And you go off and you give a raise and a bonus to the SEO people because they brought you somebody that converted and you go fire the Pay Per Click people because they didn’t get you a conversion.

And then you get no conversions because Adwords was bringing you traffic that created awareness and then conversion came through organic.  And, it could be through email, it could be through direct, that scenario is the issue.  So this single click, last click model is a problem because it doesn’t actually do a good job of representing user behavior.

Very few sites are actually going to have naturally a click/browse/convert process.  So how do we solve that?  We have to look between the session and we have to look at multiple different sessions within a visit and that’s what the Multi Channel tool does.

It’s not visitor analytics, it’s traffic source touch points.  So it let’s us see a picture of when Adwords was involved, how many conversions involved Adwords either as the last click or as the first or anywhere in between.  So now, using this tool, we can appropriately attribute and reward our marketing investments given their contribution to conversion.

Last click is important but the whole picture should be considered because you don’t want to go stop buying the keyword that actually brings the guy that becomes aware who then comes back later and buys.  You don’t get them in the door the first time, they’re never going to come back.

Philip: Yeah, this is an awesome report.  I remember looking at these multi channel funnels for a eCommerce client of ours and using the assisted conversions report which is, if you go to conversions, click multi channel funnels and click assisted conversions, you can then see how many conversions you’ve actually essentially been under reporting or where your Adwords has been involved in assisting a conversion and it should get some sort of credit.

And there was essentially 30% additional conversions that Adwords was actually influencing that we hadn’t been reporting on because we didn’t have the functionality and as you said, you don’t want to make your decision on just the last touch because Adwords is having a big impact on actually resulting in conversions that are reported in other channels.

I was explaining it to the client that I like to think of online marketing as a team sport.  So in the same way you get an assist if you set up the tri scorer or the person who scores the basket, you wouldn’t just get rid of all the team members that weren’t involved in the actual final score.  You need to take into account all the players that helped to contribute.

Caleb: Yeah, that’s a great – that’s an absolutely great analogy for it.

Philip: Yeah, it’s an awesome report.  I think for users, some businesses, depending on your business where you may not have a lot of assisted conversions, so just go to that report, look at that number.  If you do have a big number on assisted conversions, then there’s a lot more you can do. Just Google multi channel funnels and you’ll be able to see a lot more advance stuff that you can do.  Alrighty, what’s next?

Caleb: So beyond the Multi Channel here – the next thing I think I like the most about the new version is it’s just a fluid user interface and user experience.

Now, in the old version, let’s say you clicked into the traffic sources report and drove down to keyword and you then segmented by landing page and added a secondary dimension segment of city.  And you go wow, this is amazing, great data.  And then you hit the back button.

There’s no back button, you lost everything and you can’t just go forward back to that.  The old version didn’t allow true kind of web navigation.  The new version does.  So I find myself – I’m constantly clicking in, drilling down, chasing down rabbit trails, ideas of data, things that I notice and then I can hit the back button and go back, go back, and then go in another direction.

And that’s because every link, every screen you see in the new version, the address bar is a permalink.  You can actually copy that link and email it to a colleague or somebody else who might want to look at that data, say check out this report.  And you copy the link and you send that to them and they will log in and they see exactly what you were seeing.

So it makes it really easy to share.  Often I’ll take that link and I’ll stick it into a URL shortener and send that shortened URL because it’s kind of a big, ugly link if you copy it as is.  But you can take and make that a nice short link using a URL shortener, put it into a report, put it into an email, send it in chat to somebody to look at, something you found that was interesting, or just even save it for yourself.

So that navigation is really great and that goes hand in hand with – you open that orange bar in the top left where you and click and jump between profiles, if you work with multiple different profiles or like me, you’re working with different clients, you might want to jump quickly between clients or different web properties you’re analyzing.  And you can be drilled into report, go and jump to another profile and it keeps the same report in focus and that’s just a native part of the new version and I really like that.

Philip: That’s great and I think these user experience improvements are quite hard to pick up on.  I think it’s great hearing you talk about them because often you don’t know what you don’t know.  You look at the obvious stuff like Multi Channel Funnels which is pretty obvious.  It’s jumping off the page but it’s these little things that you don’t notice.

Caleb: Yeah.  It also ties with, and this is a trick that I’ve learned and this is browser specific.

So maybe it’s in Firefox or Chrome or Safari but I use Chrome as my primary browser and Chrome has this really nifty feature called Duplicate Tab.  If you write click on any tab, it opens up a menu.

The title of the tab there and it opens up a menu and click Duplicate and it will duplicate what you have on that tab and preserve everything that’s there and in GA this is quite useful because you can drill all the way down, you’re looking at a report and I often, as I’m doing that, and good analytics and analysis is about asking questions.  And so as I’m looking at data, I’m constantly asking questions.

If I see something that’s interesting, I want to be curious about it and investigate more.  And it’s kind of a very little box to be in if you only have one window.  So I use this duplicate tab.  I’ll chase down some data, I’ll come up with a new question, I’ll duplicate my tab and what it does, is it copies everything that’s there into a new tab.  You’ve got your full back button history and everything.

And then I’ll open up that new tab and then I’ll chase my new trail and then if I want I can jump back to my previous tab and there was everything I had.  And then I get two tabs going and now I can cross compare really easily, I can get two sets of similar data and look at them side by side.

And so that’s just – this goes all in hand and this usability is so much better in the new version because you can quickly analyze data back and forth, copy URLs, get multiple tabs going and get screenfuls of useful data up and in front of you all at once.

Philip:  Cool, cool.  So I guess most people think that within analytics there’s more data than you can poke a stick at.  There’s a lot of things they don’t look at and there’s a huge amount of information yet – Custom Reporting, I know you’re a big fan of custom reporting side of things.

Can you tell us a little bit about that, when would you need to start looking at custom reporting.  Why do you want to do that if there’s so many reports already?  Can you give us some good examples on why you like it?

Caleb: Yeah, great example.  I just made a custom report earlier today for a client who had a question about – they were looking at paid search traffic that had low time on site.  So not necessarily bounced, just low time on site.

And so they said, I want to know more about paid search traffic with low time on site.  How can I look at that and look at what the landing pages are to see the relationship between landing page, when I come from paid search and I spend less than a certain amount of time on a site.

That’s a really good question.  So the challenge comes up of how do I give that person that view of data.  And that’s where custom reports, think, are one of the most useful.  So, the old version had custom reports, the new version has custom reports.  But they’ve changed in the new version.

One of the best things about custom reports in the new version is that you can apply a filter to a custom report and this filter acts essentially as an advanced segment.  So in the old version, I might be able to go to a certain report or even make a custom report that was dependent upon an advance segment being applied.  And that made a very difficult analysis scenario because I can’t just say, hey client, click this link to access this custom report and there’s your data.

It would be, click this link to access this custom report and save it and then go create this advance segment and then every time you want to see your data, go to the custom report and go apply this advance segment.

Now that’s a lot of steps.  For somebody who’s a professional analyst or maybe a professional marketer and uses GA a lot, that’s okay, but for people who don’t use GA every day, that’s too much to ask.

So with this new version of custom reports, you can create a report, you can put the metrics in and the dimensions you want on there and then let’s say like this example, I want to confine it to paid search.  So I go down to the bottom and there’s this filter and I can say include only those visits where the medium exactly matches CPC, save.  And now I have the equivalent of a custom report plus an advance segment.  But I can take that report and give it to somebody and it’s just the data that they need.

And that’s really, really useful.  If you are delivering reports to stakeholders within your company, to colleagues or to peers or to your boss or manager, it’s really great to be able to create a report that they can then set up inside their analytics, give them the share link and it’s just what they need.  They don’t have to go through ten other steps and do a back flip in order to get the data they want.

Philip:  So what are the best ways of sharing these custom reports?  Is it just using that link you were talking about earlier?

Caleb: Yeah, the share link is the best option which is still clunky.  The folks at Google need to get this figured out.  The biggest issue is if I were to – this report I made earlier which I think is quite a cool report.

If I was to send you this share link and you open it up it’s going to default to saving that report under the very first profile under the very first account which is in your list.  If you are like me, that’s really annoying.  I’ve got 800 profiles under 200 various accounts in my login, my main login.

So if I want to send this to somebody for a particular profile and they have multiple accounts, it gets confusing.  But to share a report, you’ve only got the share link.

The other option is to create a dedicated Google account just for reporting.  And so sometimes we’ll do that.  We’ll set up a report, a Gmail address or a branded email on a client domain like reporting@client.com and then go set that up as a Google account so you can use it as a log in and then multiple people can share that using your email password and login under it and we can configure stuff there and then say, hey, just go log in, this is your email password and you’ll see the report.

And that’s okay but it still isn’t great because, say you have six people signing in and one person decides they want to delete something, it’s gone for everybody.  So that scenario is where I think GA is still a little weak and hopefully they will resolve that sooner than later.

It’s kind of been like this since the beginning so six years, seven years in, I’m hoping that they’re going to come out with a feature that will improve that kind of access on management and sharing in a way where – I’d love to be able to create a custom report and then assign it to you for your account and profile.  And then you log in under your login and there’s my report that I made for you.

Philip:  What about the scheduling of reports?

Caleb: Yeah so, the much loved scheduled reports and PDF email reports – those are gone in the new version.  They’re still gone but Google did post, I think it was back in December maybe, that they promising to bring those features back.  And that frankly is really good reason still to be stuck in the old version because those are pretty key features I know for a lot of people to not have that automated reporting.

So I don’t remember the exact details from that post but they did say that they’re going to bring those features back, they’re working on it and that will be great when they do because it’s very useful to be able to set up the report and now, particularly with the custom report.

If I can create a custom report that’s filtered to a particular set of data, that’s exactly what a stakeholder needs to see and then I can just click a button and say, send every Monday morning, that’s brilliant and it saves me time.  The person gets the data that they want and everybody’s happy.  So, a really critical feature, hope it comes back soon.

Philip:  Yeah for listeners, I’d say if you haven’t created a custom report just give it a go.  Click on the custom reporting tab, follow the instructions.  It’s very intuitive, pull together some metrics, see if you can add any value, have a bit of a play.  I think that’s the best way to do it, get dirty.

Caleb:  Indeed.

Philip:  Excellent, what else – any other piece of new functionality that particularly excite you?

Caleb: Well, the dashboard, let’s talk a bit about dashboards.  Dashboards in the old version, you log in, first thing you see is this dashboard and then you can kind of drag and drop some things around on it but most of it is pretty fixed.  And you can email it in the old version and that was nice.  But really, not a dashboard, just kind of a summary report screen.

So this is an area where GA again, I think, has been really weak.  Honestly, I’ll say, I think they’re still weak but they are working hard and the new version dashboard section under that Home tab really has a good step forward for the product.  So some things I like about the dashboards.

You can set up multiple dashboards, not just one.  I think the number is 10 or 12 under each profile that you can create.  And on that dashboard, you can create up to 12 widgets and there are four or five different types of widgets and you can filter these widgets.

So you could set up a dashboard that would answer specific questions and that’s the beautiful thing about dashboards.  You want to be able to take somebody who says hey, here’s the six things I need to know quickly and easily without having to click ten times.

You can make them a dashboard that have those six things.  You can have a title for total traffic from all traffic channels so like SEO dashboard for example.  I put up a title and I filter the title down to organic visits and then create another one for organic visits from keywords containing a brand name or brand marker.

So now I have total organic visits and then I have organic branded and then I have one that’s inverse.  So, organic, non branded keywords.  Those three numbers give me a quick view into how much my traffic is coming from branded versus non branded keywords.  I mean you can do one of the widgets that does a little spark line trend so you can see how that trend is going.

And that I find is really useful.  The big thing is this ability to add these widgets now and filter the widgets so you can slice down to a subset of data and really create dashboards that are a lot closer to what analysts are typically used to and other clients are reporting to us to be able to create a dashboard or what you might make and excel on a custom dashboard.

Philip: That’s a great example.  I think for people spending money on SEO, you really want to exclude your branded traffic.  Your SEO consultant shouldn’t get the credit for that increase.  Prior to this you’d have to go into your keyword report and do a filter, maybe an advance segment.  Now just to have it really nice and visual very simple on your dashboard is great.

Caleb:  Yeah.

Philip:  And I guess sharing these dashboards as well, any comments?

Caleb: Okay, so sharing dashboards.  Not possible.  So Google went to the trouble to make a really new awesome dashboarding capability and we get this all the time.  Clients says, I want a dashboard, here’s my six questions and I say great, you want to give me your login.  And they say, no, no I really don’t because it’s my gmail or my company mail.  I can’t give you my password.  And I say, okay, well, we can’t set up a dashboard.  You have to set it up yourself.

Dashboards are at this point tied to the login and the profile that they are made under.  So if you want to be able to really – if you want to make your own dashboard, great.  Do that, experiment with that.  If you’re working with clients or other people within your company, then probably what you’re going to have to do is set up a dedicated login.

So kind of that same method I mentioned a minute ago and so you set up that login where it’s a shared account, it’s not to any one individual and then you can both login under that and you log in and set up the dashboard and then they log in and look at it.  At this point, that’s the best solution we found to deal with the fact that they didn’t build a feature yet for sharing these dashboards.

Philip:  And these multiple dashboards are great for different roles within your company.  So if you’re listening to this – the podcast, maybe you’ve got different stakeholders in your business, you can create different dashboards for different individuals which is pretty handy.

Caleb:  Absolutely.

Philip:  Excellent.  So we could talk for ages, what are your thoughts on the weaknesses or what would you like to see Google improve in the next twelve months?  We’ve touched on a couple already.  Anything else that really sort of gets on your nerves or you wish they would fix or maybe even add a new functionality to make your job easier?

Caleb: Well yeah, the dashboarding issue is a really big one.  The PDF and the scheduling is a big one.  The improving sharing around custom reports is a big one.  I think those are kind of bug fixers almost.  They’re just little fine points of the platform that’s – I don’t know why they weren’t there from the start but they aren’t and I’m sure that the good folks at Google are working hard to bring them back for us.

I think there’s a couple of things that stand out to me about the state of Analytics and right now, in Google Analytics being a big part of this, I think 2012 – I’m kind of calling the year of The Analyst whereas 2011 seemed to be much more the year of implementation.  Saw a lot of companies coming out of the recession, getting a little more aggressive, willing to invest some time and resources into getting better data and to now have better data.

So analysis, I think, is going to grow as a thing of importance, not just having something but actually really digging into that data.  And when you start to do that, the web is changing and evolving.  And we’re hitting this wall of social and this wall of really everything going on with cookies and privacy and measuring individual versus session.

And those are big challenges that I think Google needs to overcome and the industry as a whole needs to address.  I think that we’re going to continue to see a lot of challenges.  When I’m working with data, understanding the multiple touch points, understanding the notion of visitor rather than just a visit.

Multi channel funnel scratches the surface on that and really helps but it doesn’t go about explaining the entire story of being able to go.  How many of my people that came to the website have done this action, whether it was in their first visit or their fifth visit.  If we can do that kind of visitor level analysis or multiple looking across the session, I think that would be really useful.  And there are other tools that do that today, much better than Google Analytics.

So I think that’s something that Google really needs to address and I hope that they do. It will make our lives as analysts a lot easier and give us better insight, we’ll make our websites better and hey, maybe we’ll even spend some more on advertising.

Philip:  Beautiful.  Maybe we can close on one more tip that you are particularly fond of that you think most people won’t be aware of?

Caleb:  That’s a great question.

Philip:  I know we’ve touched on quite a few already, putting you on the spot.

Caleb: Okay yeah.  Here’s a good one.  For the US listeners here, users out there.  Geographic reporting – let’s talk about that.  Geographic reporting is great but reporting at the region level is a bit too broad and reporting at the city level is a bit too narrow.  And what we really need to report on is the market area level which marketers are used to dealing with markets not just municipalities which is how cities and geo works.

You can actually get market level data in Google Analytics and this is something I’ve talked to people at Google on the Google Analytics team and they say, no you can’t.  And I say yes you can, it’s right here and I show them.

So this is a kind of a trick to be able to do to get market area data.  If you go into your geographic reports and you drill down.  It has to be within the United States.  You have to drill down to a US region or city and you can drill down.

Let’s say down to the US as a whole level and if you drill into the US level as a whole and then activate a secondary dimension like landing page and then you go up and you look at your URL in that permalink, what you’re going to see if you kind of go all the way to the side, you’re going to see this spot where it says at the end, analytics.landing page path.

And if you change that to the landing page path to DMA – I know this is kind of hard to narrate.  But if you change it to DMA, it will show you market areas.

Philip:  I’m doing that right now.  So DMA?

Caleb: To replace the .landing page path with .dma and then you’ll probably want to change it from the map overlay to the explorer view and what you get is – you have to reapply the secondary dimension to do that but what you’ll get is column one is going to be a region, column two your market.  So I can see California, Los Angeles, California, San Francisco, Oakland, San Hose and this is way more useful than city level data because city level is really granular.

If you say how much traffic did we have from the city of Los Angeles, it’s literally based on IP addresses that resulted in the geographic city limits of Los Angeles which is a fairly small slice of the LA metropolitan area.  So it can almost be misleading, you say our LA traffic is this and then you look at the market area and it’s six times that size because that city name is very specific.

Philip: Right, so can you just define then – so the market region is broader than the actual city itself, right?

Caleb: Yeah and it’s in the United States.  I think that there’s notions of this in other countries but in the United States the concept is that you have a market area.  So in Los Angeles there’s the city of Los Angeles, there’s lots of other cities within that region.  Hollywood, West Hollywood, two different cities.

I think the numbers are dozens, maybe even hundreds in that greater geographic area.  So the concept of a market is, let’s say you buy a TV ad and you air it and this is really where it comes from is TV, print and radio, the broadcast signal is going to cover the entire area.  You can’t just buy a TV ad and only be visible to people in Burbank, California which is part of the Los Angeles area, if you’re buying broadcast.

So that’s kind of a market area that goes back to in the US.  And that’s it, that’s a – marketers I think are generally a lot more familiar with that as a geographic identifier than they are with municipality.

Philip:  Right, right.

Caleb: You have market area and you have zip code or postal code.  And GA doesn’t show either by default.

Philip:  I have one question for you Caleb.  How on earth did you find that out to change the URL string?

Caleb: In about 2006, I started kind of poking around with GA and noticed that the URLs, in fact even in the old version, it did change sometimes, and noticed that it would have a common name that reflected kind of the dimension you selected it in so I actually just tried lots of different names and discovered all of these other hidden dimensions.  I made a tool called Dimensionator that gets you access in the old version but it doesn’t work on the new version.

So when the new version came out I thought I got to figure out how to get DMA back.  I figured out how their – when you apply that dimension it shows the change in URL and just replace the name and there you go.

Philip: That’s a pretty Ninja tip and that gives you an insight into Caleb’s skills and understanding of Analytics.  If you want to know more of that stuff I thoroughly recommend you buy his book on Performance Marketing and Caleb thanks very much for your time, you’ve been most generous.

Caleb:  Absolutely, thank you so much for having me.  It’s a pleasure.

Remarketing or retargeting with Google AdWords is a huge opportunity for businesses. And who better to tell us how it’s done, than the expert to the experts.

Dave Booth spends a lot of his time flying around the world at Google’s request to teach agencies (who manage AdWords campaigns for a living) the intricacies of advanced Google AdWords.

He is also founder of one the largest pure play web analytics consultancies in the world, Cardinal Path.

Google do not endorse trainers very often. And having attended his training sessions myself, and now having interviewed him, it’s very easy to understand why Google like him so much. 

He is super smart, extremely experienced and like all great trainers, has an uncanny ability to simplify complex topics.

I strongly suggest following Dave on Twitter, or read more about him at Cardinal Path.

Listen in now, or if you prefer to read…

Philip:  Welcome to another episode of the Online Marketing Secrets Podcast where we interview the world’s leading experts in online marketing.  And today is no exception.  We have a man who is the expert of the experts.  He’s been endorsed by Google to teach the expert agencies Google AdWords. So, welcome Mr. David Booth.

David:  Thanks, it’s great to be here.

Philip:  Can you tell us a little about your background, how did you get to be selected by Google?  It’s quite an honor.

David:  Sure I think it all started back in 2004 when I founded a company along with Corey Koberg and that company was called Webshare.  We got involved in the Google platform through the Google Analytics program, the the Certified Partners program which back then was known as the GAC network, and from there we just kept stumbling into opportunities.

We moved into the Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant Network, then we started doing some Adwords Management and moved our way into the GCP program, spent a lot of time in Mountain View and, at some point we got into the Seminars for Success program.  So that’s something that we have in a few different countries around the world.  It’s the Google official branded training on the Adwords, Analytics and Website Optimizer products.

We started doing that, we’ve now got about 23 people and after Webshare merged with VKI Studios and Public Insight, we have a company here called Cardinal Path, and it’s new since September 1^st of last year.  And, we have about 23 people who are running around the world teaching these seminars on behalf of the Google Seminars for Success program.

So from that, we got involved with the Engage group which is targeting the agencies around the world and I’ve been all over the place.  So, started out inAthens,Greece.  I’ve been back to Europe a few times and Australia and New Zealand, South East Asia and of course, across the United States and Canada speaking to the agency groups on things to do with the Adwords products.

So it’s been a fun journey and we’re right in the middle of it right now.

Philip:  That’s exciting.  So you do a lot of education and you teach literally, you do teach the experts.  What sort of surprises you the most in terms of what people or the opportunities they are not taking advantage of or the mistakes they are making?

David:  That’s a great question.  I’ve gotten to see a lot of what these agencies are up to and there’s some very, very intelligent people doing some very neat things here, but I think the biggest thing is Adwords is something that a lot of these agencies aren’t doing exceptionally well.

It’s not their focus so a lot of agencies are working with website development, other agencies are working on the SEO side and SEM is something that they are getting into and Adwords is a great first step, especially for those that are targeting the small businesses that have the limited budgets and like the self serve platform, the Google network, particularly the Google Display Network offers from a display advertising perspective.

So I think what I’m always surprised by is how many wonderful things that these agencies are doing and how SEM just naturally flows right into the web of services that they are offering.  In a lot of cases if they are doing SEO, you can leverage the same sorts of keyword research or take it a little step further and then to get the paid ads up there along with the organic listings.

You’ve got web dev firms that are billing out landing pages for other campaigns and those can be piggy backed on for SEM campaigns.  So I think it’s a great segway for a lot of agencies to get into the Adwords space.  And it’s just a lot to it – it’s become a very big program and platform over the years, and Adwords has a whole lot of features so that yes, it’s true that you can be up and running in five minutes with $5 but that’s a pretty good way to waste $5.  There’s so many dials and knobs and settings to know about and to take advantage of.

Philip:  Absolutely, I mean, I think it’s quite difficult for a business owner or marketing manager to select an agency or a specialist to outsource their Adwords to.  Obviously lots of people are doing it but there’s not – well, there’s lots of people doing it and there’s also lots of people within that who actually don’t specialize in it.  As you said, they do a lot of other stuff and I guess in your due diligence you really got to dig deep and find out what sort of level of expertise they have.

David:  Yeah, I think the ease of use of the platform is a double edged sword.  It makes it very easy for people to get up there and start advertising on the same level.  It makes it very easy to sell those services when maybe you’re not quite ready to yet.

Philip:  So we met a month or two back on one of the training days for Google Engage which was that program you were mentioning that Google have to help educate agencies more.  You’re coming out toAustraliain a couple of month’s time, you’re also writing a book at the moment I believe.

David:  That’s right.  Yeah, the Engage war path is taking us out to Australia and we’ll be going back to Australia and New Zealand here coming up pretty quick.  So I great to see all of you guys out there in Sydney I believe is where we had a chance to chat.  Yeah the book is also coming out.  This is Display Advertising An Hour A Day.  It’s in the same Hour A Day series that Wiley publishes, so if you’ve liked Avinash Kaushik’s Analytics An Hour A Day, this is in that same series.

Philip:  Great.  Yeah, and that’s a great book isn’t it, the Avinash one?

David:  Oh fantastic.  Yeah, Avinash has put out some really good pieces of work through the books and blogs that he’s been out there promoting.

Philip:  So this show is fast becoming the Cardinal Path show, we had Nick Iyengar on last.  We also had Justin Cutroni, I believe he’s moved on to Google.

David:  That’s right.

Philip:  So, we’re almost a Cardinal Path show.  We’ll have to diversify.

David:  It’s been great though.  We’ve been able to attract a lot of really talented people.  So Nick, who you mentioned, is just a fantastic resource.  He actually came from Google.  And then we just graduated Justin Cutroni off back to Google, so he’s working on the Analytics team over there.  We do enjoy a pretty nice relationship with Google and their product teams.

Philip:  Awesome, so let’s get into today’s topic.  We’re going to talk a little about Online Stalking or as most people know it, Re-marketing or Re-targeting.  Can you explain a little about what Re-marketing is?

David:  Yeah, I think, and maybe it’s best to just go back to basics.  When we talk about display advertising in general, we basically have three ways to target people.  We can target people contextually.  That’s by the keywords that we’re bidding in the Adwords display network for example.

We can target people by placements which are actually individual ad inventory slots on particular pages on particular domains that are there, that are able to serve up some ads.

And a third way that we can target people is by audience.  And this is where we’re not really worried about the types of pages that they’re on or the specific pages or areas of those pages that they’re on.  We’re more worried about the people, and this is really where we’re going with targeting into the future.  It’s made possible by cookieing and I’ll certainly dive into that a little bit later.

But essentially, Re-marketing is Google’s entry into this kind of evolution of re-targeting that focuses on the audience and not so much the placements or the context of the pages where the placements appear.

I think if we talk about this, they’re certainly not the first ones who have been in this space.  There’s companies like Fetch Back and Adroll go back to 2007.  And, what happens here is we started out with search re-targeting.

So if you think about just search advertising in general.  Somebody does a search on Google for something like basketball shoes and a whole bunch of text ads appears, and that’s basically the search network marketing that we have.

And, if someone were to click on those ads, that’s fantastic and it’s great stuff for direct response.  But if you’ve gotten someone who didn’t click on your ad, you’ve essentially lost them, and that’s the problem.

So search re-targeting said, “I’ll go ahead and chase this person around the internet based on the things that they typed into search engines, and I’ll continue to show them ads.”  So it’s kind of where this display advertising and search advertising have this intersection.  After you’ve done that search on basketball shoes, you start seeing Nike ads around the web and that would be the search re-targeting.

And there’s all kinds of other re-targeting as well.

Philip:  Sorry, so can I just clarify that.  So, they’ve actually clicked your ad right, they’ve landed on your website and that’s when you cookie them?

David:  Right, so that’s the best part about search re-targeting, they don’t even have to click on your ads.  So search re-targeting is just based on the searches that they do around the web, not just on Google but on any of the major search engines or on product searches that they are doing on different sites.  And this is where re-targeting kind of had its birth, from the search side.

We’ll get into the site re-targeting which is where they actually take an action on your site, that’s really where Google plays here.  But you got all other kinds of re-marketing, re-targeting.  You can re-target based on context, so people who tend to browse certain pages that match a certain context, we can then start to re-target those people with ads.

And again, not with the Google interface specifically but Google’s interest categories, is really all about that kind of contextual re-targeting.  And you’ve got things like email re-targeting or social re-targeting.  If they do something based on an email list or something like that, we can go after them, again, as they browse the web.

So site re-targeting is what you were mentioning and that’s exactly right.  I get to your website one way or another and I do something on your website.  And then, you can drop a cookie on me.  And then, based upon that cookie, I can run around the web and I can see ads that are specified to me and the action that I took on that site.

So that’s really what re-marketing is from Google’s perspective is.  It’s the ability to re-target an audience that you can define by placing some Java script on a page and then cookieing that person to be part of a list that you control and define.

Philip:  And as most people know, conversion rates on a website are typically low single digit percentages which means a huge number of people don’t actually convert.  So that opportunity to get those people back, 95% or 97% of those visitors back to your website is a massive opportunity.

David:  Oh it’s enormous.  And I think this is really where it has its potential and power.  I think like there’s a Comm Score report that came out December of 2011, this is last holiday season when people are out there on eCommerce sites buying for the holiday season and still 96% of them are leaving the websites without completing any kind of a conversion action.

And at the same time you’ve got 7 out of every 10 shoppers, and this is a Forrester report that talks about this.  Seven out of every ten people who actually put something in their shopping cart, don’t buy it which is an amazing lost opportunity because once they leave your site, unless you have a way to re-target them later, you’ve lost them.

Philip:  I remember being in the US recently and I think Zappos do re-targeting very specifically.  I looked at a pair of red PUMA shoes and I moved off their website and I was some other website and immediately I saw the exact shoes colour with everything that I was looking at which bearing, if they’ve got, whatever, tens of thousands of products, that’s quite impressive.

David:  Exactly.  And that is product re-targeting.  So based upon the actual product that you had in your cart.  If you decide not to buy it, they can come back and get you and re-target you based on that product.  So yeah, all kinds of re-targeting is out there.  And you make a good point too, it’s cookie based, right?  So this is based on a browser and not necessarily a person.

Philip:  Yeah, so if somebody wanted to get started what’s the recommended way?

David:  So there’s lots of different players out there that are doing lots of different things and the different types of re-targeting, but to get started with re-marketing, a lot of people start there because it is a part of the Adwords network and the Adwords network is one of those self serve networks that’s easy for people to get into.

So, the advantages that Google has in this space is they’re already such a huge player out there and the odds that you got campaigns running already are pretty good on that network.  So, you have the ability to leverage that right away.

Some of the things to think about from the Adwords perspective are that while some of these networks take a little bit of time to disseminate the instructions per say as to which ads to show to which cookies, the adwords network is pretty extensive.  It’s based on that double click cookie.  So you can actually have someone abandon your shopping cart, on the very next click they can start to see ads for the same place that they just left.

Now they’ve got a coupon or something like that and of course, the scale of the display network, Google’s network are reaching over 80% of the entire internet using world and they’ve got over 500 million unique cookies out there on just one network.  It’s an enormous one.

So the easiest way to get started is probably with the Google Re-Marketing Platform.

Philip:  Right, well let’s talk a little bit about that.  I guess giving listeners a little overview about how they were to get started.

David:  Yeah, so I think the first thing is just to understand kind of what this thing is.  And when I do talk to people I usually, give an example.  A friend of mine who didn’t know what re-targeting was and got re-targeted.  He was in a situation where he had three children under three years old, and that gives him a unique need where he needs to actually have a car that can fit three car-seats in it.

There’s not that many out there but there’s one manufacturer that he found on the web and he went to their website and he went through the process of designing his car on the web and he picked his colors and he picked all the leather interiors and all the LCD panels and the back screens and things like that.  And he found out that this thing was going to cost a virtual fortune to buy it.

He left the website and he didn’t do anything about it.  But then he started seeing ads all over the place and he came up to me and he said, “Dave, I was looking at this car and it’s ridiculously expensive.  But they must be selling these things like hot cakes because I’m starting to see these ads everywhere.”

And I had to explain, “It’s not that their advertising everywhere, they’re advertising to you everywhere.  Did you happen to go on that site?”  “Oh yeah, I put together the car online.”  “Well that’s where they cookied you.  If you clear your cookies, you’ll stop seeing those ads.”

So I think that’s what the response is.  There’s still lots of people out there who don’t understand this is happening.  So they just think to themselves, “Wow that brand really, really had a control in the market!”  Or they think, “Wow I’m lucky, now I got a coupon for that thing I almost bought.”

Philip:  And even more so for a small business, small or medium size business, people can perceive that you are much larger than you are.

David:  That’s absolutely right.  I think there’s – as much as we like to say that branding and positioning are dead in the internet age, they’re certainly not, there is that presence of mind and for a small business that doesn’t have the brand power of a Coca Cola or a Google or a Microsoft or Intel or something of that nature.  Yeah this is a great way to plaster your message in front of the right people who have already qualified to become your target customer.

Philip:  And the great thing is you can, as you’ve built up this list, you now can serve ads or you can change your ad copy to that list whenever you want, and that’s pretty powerful as well.

David:  That’s right.  So in the example of the car, you’re not going to start showing this person ads for a sports car that’s a two door, two seater.  You know what this person was looking for – 17 row bus of a car, alright?  So you can start showing them pictures of a big family piling into a very large car with car seats all over the place, right, and it resonates with them.  It becomes much more relevant.

Now the great part about this is a more relevant ad will attract more clicks.  As we know from general search marketing advertising, the higher the click through rates, the higher the quality scores, the lower the cost per click, the better the placements that you’re going to get.  It just becomes this upward spiral of wonderful things.

Philip:  I mean as you said the click through rates and the re-targeting display ads are ‘x’ times higher than normal display ads.  Do you think re-targeting is sort of going to take over the display world?

David:  Well I think – I’ll even take it broader than that.  I think audience targeting or behavioral targeting is really what’s going to take over.  We’re going to stop putting our ads on our website just because it’s a certain type of website or attracts a certain demographic that we look at in past data sets and I think it’s going to be focused much more on the person.

So, whether it’s re-targeting or targeting to begin with, there’s lots of ad networks out there and lots of services that are collecting this data already.  And so, targeting is happening across the web.  You’re much more likely to see ads targeted to your taste and preferences, not based on any particular item that you’ve done but on the aggregate of all the things that you’ve done on the web.

So yeah, I think we really are going to shift display advertising towards targeting an audience rather than targeting pages and placements.

Philip:  Which is Google’s weakness sort of in comparison with Facebook isn’t it?  Facebook have all that audience data, demographic data that they are using for all their advertising.  Everyone is so excited about it.  This is sort of a good response.

David:  Oh yeah, I think Facebook talks about an IPO here in the spring, really that’s what it’s all based upon, right, is that amount of data that they have about consumers.  And I think Google’s responded – we’ve seen the Google Plus launch and we’ve seen a lot of the numbers that they’re aggressively promoting in terms of how many people are adopting this technology and active users of Google Plus and ultimately that’s what it’s all about is identifying the audience so we can then sell that information to advertisers.

Philip:  So the set up process within Google is pretty fast isn’t it?

David:  Yeah, it’s actually really straightforward.  If you’re already using conversion tracking, it’s going to seem very familiar to you.  There’s actually a tab inside your Adwords interface.  If you don’t see it, it’s hidden by default.  In some accounts, you just go off to the right of the tabs, there’s a little drop down and you can go ahead and check the box next to audiences, and then you just go through the steps.

You click Add an Audience button, just like you would Add a Placement or anything else and what you do is you create essentially a list.  Now audiences also includes that interest category, right, so you don’t even have to create a specific list for your website.  You can start to target audiences based on their interests as they traverse sites on the Google network.

Google has an understanding of people who tend to go to recipe sites and restaurant sites and they can put them in the interest category of people who are interested in food.  Then you can target those folks, you don’t have to add any additional code.  That’s still audience targeting.

But the re-marketing list is another part of that and to create a re-marketing list, what you’re basically going to do there is follow the steps to create a new set of code and the conversion code will look just like conversion tracking code, it’s just some Java script and you place that on your web pages where the re-marketing list activity has been met, where that criteria has been met.  And then it drops the cookie to signify that they have been on that list.

So as an example, let’s say you wanted to create a list of people who subscribed to your newsletter.  What you’ll do is create a new re-marketing listing, name it Newsletter Subscribers, and then you’ll get the tracking code for that.  And you place that tracking code on the page of your website that says “Thank you for signing up for my mailing list.”

At that point I know that you are a newsletter subscriber, I can drop that cookie on your machine and you have now been enrolled in that re-marketing list.  And the last thing you do is you give it a time frame.  You can actually go up to a year and a half with the Google re-marketing solution.  So I can keep you on that list for an enormously long time if I need you to.

Now of course if you clear those cookies, you’re expired from that list as well.  But yeah, once that code is up there, you start building your list and you can do that for anything.

We talked about a newsletter but it could also be a purchase, right.  You put that on your thank you page or it could be just putting something in a shopping cart.  You put that on the page that says “This is what you got in your cart.”  So you have enormous flexibility here.

Philip:  So let’s say you are a service provider, maybe a consultant.  Let’s say you are a management consultant offering different services.  Do you need to sit down before hand and think what sort of strategies you want to follow.  Maybe you want to build a list around a particular type of service that you have, some sort of,  I don’t know, HR redundancy consulting that you do, maybe that’s one of your services and you build up a list just for people who have looked at that page.  So you need a bit of planning before hand.

David:  You got it.  Like any successful advertising strategy, it starts with that strategy, right.  So you have to sit down and start to think about if I had a list of people that matched criteria x, y and z, what would I message them.  And you bring up a really good example, so someone who goes to a management consultancy website and they look for, they’re getting a lead, they fill out a form or they download a white paper, return, they give an email address or something like that as a typical lead generation process.

Or if they didn’t give us an email but they did download the paper on legal services or on accounting services or on any of the types of services that we offer, we have an idea as to what their intent was.  We know that this person was interested in legal, we know that this person was interested in accounting and from that perspective we can drop that cookie on them at the moment we know what their interest is and then we can start showing them legal service ads or we can show them messaging or imagery in our ads around accounting.  And we can chase them around the internet over two million websites or part of the Adsense YouTube double click networks and just with that one Adwords display network, re-targeting, re-marketing campaign, we can go after these guys and they can’t hide from us until they clear the cookies.

Philip:  Yeah, so basically any web page on your own website, you can decide, well do I want to show a separate message about this particular page, then you want to create a separate list for that page which means you need to put tracking code on that page, right.

David:  That’s right, and, for those of you guys who are more comfortable with Java script, this is just Java script.  So it doesn’t actually have to be on a page, you can fire this inside of AJAX actually, you can fire it inside a flash, you can fire it wherever you need to.  All you need to do is fire the code to set that cookie.

So if you have a site that doesn’t have a pure HTML page that signifies an event has happened, you can get pretty creative with that code and I have yet to find a situation where we couldn’t inject it somewhere.

Philip:  And you used the example earlier about an eCommerce site where maybe you look at a product, you put it in your cart but you don’t actually follow through on the purchase.  So that’s a little bit more complex in the set up process, right, because you’re working with different lists.  Can you give a bit of an overview?

David:  Yeah, I think at the base level, you can keep it very simple.  So you could say if somebody went to my store and they put something in their cart and they left my store without buying that cart.  Basically what you’re going to do is set that person’s re-marketing cookie and then you’re going to chase them around, and this time you offer them a 10% off coupon.

Now the tricky part and I think what you’re alluding to here is well, what’s the difference between marketing to someone who put something in their cart and bought something versus someone who put something in their cart but didn’t buy it.  And that’s a great situation to explore.

One of the most powerful things we have about re-marketing lists is that we can combine cookies in whatever way we want in order to create the list that we actually advertise to.  So in this case, this situation will be solved by dropping a cookie when they put something in their cart and then dropping a second cookie when they actually purchase it.

And now what we’ll do is set up our ad campaign to show our ads to everyone who has that first cookie but does not have that second cookie.  What that does is allows us to advertise only to the people who have put something in their cart but have not yet checked out.  Once you check out, you have removed yourself from this particular list and you are no longer eligible to see those ads.

Or better yet, we have a different list.  So for the people who have checked out, if you bought one thing, then we’ll start to upsell you or cross sell you on things you need now that you have this one thing that you bought.  It’s an expanding set of opportunities here.  Really, creativity is your only limitation.

Philip:  I think for people listening to this podcast, maybe they don’t have the Adwords console in front of them, it may sound a little bit confusing as all the different steps, but it’s actually quite simple.  Maybe the first time around it will take you 20 minutes, maybe half an hour if you’re not that comfortable in actually setting this up but it’s a pretty easy process.  Next time around it will take you 5 minutes or 10 minutes.  So it actually is very easy.

David:  Oh yeah, just play around with it.  Essentially when you get into the Audience level, there’s only three kinds.  You got all those predefined categories, you have straight re-marketing lists and then you have what is called the “custom combinations”, and that’s where you can get creative.

Philip:  So you think everybody , let’s take your average plumber, HR consultant, dentist, lawyer, whatever they are, eCommerce site, you think everybody should be doing re-marketing?

David:  I think that the concept can work for just about anybody.  Typically advertiser goals will fall under two different buckets.  You either got direct response or you have some kind of branding in positioning goals.  In actuality this thing was build for direct response and that’s because it’s action based.

You actually did something to show me that you’re interested in what I have to sell.  So now I can chase you around and give you offers until you decide to sell on top of my – continue to present these offers until one of them works.

But if you think about it, even for branding, you have that situation where people start to say, man, this company must really be on top of things.  They have a huge advertising budget, they’re everywhere I go.  And that sticks in somebody’s head, so at the very worst case, you’ve managed to get your brand or your message stuck in somebody’s head by sheer repetition alone.

Now that said, this is some pretty powerful stuff and anything like that comes with some responsibilities so you don’t want to abuse it.  One of the things we see is people will certainly overdo it, so visiting your home page for example, is probably not enough to qualify someone on a prospect list.

We want them to actually go down the path of showing interest.  So whether that’s downloading a white paper or watching through a video or getting to the shopping cart process or something like that.  That’s usually a better way to do it.

And the other thing is you can think about putting some frequency capping in place, right.  So you have the ability to limit how many times a certain person will see this particular ad, and you have to think if they have ignored you the first five times, then you’re probably on the border of doing some brand damage.  You might want to just do the polite thing there and start leaving him alone.

Philip:  Can you explain a little bit more about the frequency capping and how you would do that?

David:  Yeah, so this is something that’s actually not unique to re-marketing but to display advertising in general.  You have the ability in Adwords for example to set a frequency cap of a certain number of times this ad can be shown to a certain cookie before it stops, so you can set that to five times a day or you can set it to 500 times in a month, and you can set that at the ad level, you can set it at the ad group level or you could set it at the campaign level.

If you look at some of the other platforms that bid across different networks, they have the ability to do frequency capping regardless of whether the inventory came from Google, GDN or whether it came from Yahoo or AOL or MSN or any of the other inventory sources out there.

Philip:  So it makes sense, I mean the one point of view is well if they’re not clicking on your ad, you’re not paying.  But I guess, you’re showing them too much, they start to get a little bit pissed off and potentially damage your brand a little bit.

David:  Yeah, and I mean there’s practical implications too, right.  Every impression that doesn’t get clicked is going to hurt your click through rate and that’s going to in turn hurt your quality score and then you get that kind of downward spiral.

Philip:  So are re-targeting ads considered on the same playing field to the normal display ads when Google looks at quality score and click through rates?

David:  Yeah that’s a great question.  So, these actually go to auction just like any other and you don’t get a special bump in your quality score just because you’re using re-marketing.

Basically what happens is there is combinations if you’re doing different kinds of targeting.  So you may have an ad group that targets a contextual keywords and it also has specific placements that you’re managing and it also has audiences that you’re targeting.

So, Google Adwords has a pretty good help file that goes through all the different combinations of which one takes precedence over another.  But once the ad goes to auction, really, no type of targeting is specifically going to influence the outcome of that auction so much as the attributes that make up real quality score and then of course your CPC bid.

Philip:  I mean – so that really means that normal display stuff is going to die.  I mean your click through rates aren’t re-targeting whatever 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 times higher than normal display generally so, those ads don’t really have a chance do they?

David:  Yeah, that was one of the best things when this re-targeting thing was relatively unknown as to people who were using it were able to really take advantage of this thing and get just domination in the market because really it’s almost an unfair advantage.

Philip:  I mean I’m starting to see all our clients ads whenever I go around the web.  That’s the only thing else these days.  So clearly they’re showing these re-targeting ads are getting higher rates or higher quality scores.  For those who don’t know the higher your quality score means the lower your CPC.

David:  Oh yeah.  No, it’s becoming pretty prevalent and people are starting to understand how it works.  The only downfall there is we’re still basing this on a browser, on an actual computer and not necessarily on a person.

So my wife borrows my computer for an hour and I end up seeing ads for organic salad dressings for a month.  Just like when you’re talking about – or worse off, I borrow my wife’s computer and she starts some ads for computer nerds summer camps and enterprise hosting packages.

Philip:  Sorry just on that question, should anybody not be doing it or is this for everybody?

David:  Yeah I think if done well, this is for anybody.  If you have these goals and again any kind of online advertising should start with those goals.  Define the specific objectives that you have – I want to generate leads, I want to generate phone calls, I want to generates sales, I want to get my brand out there, I want to get more followers on Twitter, I want to get more people plus oneing my pages, I want to get more likes on Facebook, all of these can be KPI’s or indicators to help you with those goals.

Philip:  And I think it’s important I find there’s a bit of confusion with clients talking about this re-targeting.  It’s actually very separate from Adwords, the search advertising.  So it applies to all visitors to your website, doesn’t it?  And you don’t have to be doing search advertising to start re-targeting.

David:  Oh sure, from the perspective of how you can be triggered on one of these lists, yeah, inside the Google network all you have to do is hit that page and it doesn’t matter how you get to that page, you don’t have to go through another Adwords medium to get there.

You could click on email, you could see a television commercial and type in the internet address directly.  However you get to that page and do that thing that allows that cookie to the dropped, you will then start seeing those ads immediately and it’s based on the reach of that double click and Adsense publisher network.

Philip:  Okay, excellent.  So, everybody should be doing it, get on to it.  And it doesn’t take too long either, there’s no downside.

David:  No, I think one of the biggest thing to get started with this is just start building your list.  I mean even if you decide not to start marketing and spending on them right away, start building those lists and dropping those cookies.  So sit down and think about that strategy and think about what list would I like to have to be able to market to.

This is really something that, if you were in the business of purchasing marketing lists in the past, this is your golden treasure chest and you can build it yourself for free.  So, just start building those lists.

Philip:  That’s a great point, I think when I first looked at this a while back, you sort of assume that you are setting up a campaign, you’re setting up this list, you need to start advertising on it.  But the list is very separate to the actual activity that you’re driving.

David:  Yeah, I mean there is a time frame on it.  You’re going to expire your cookie and if you expire people off your list before you’ve had a chance to advertise to them, then of course that’s not someone you’re advertising to but at the same time, there’s no cause to set this up and start cookieing people other than the cost of doing it.

Philip:  And when you actually set up that list, you need to specify the expiry date of that cookie and you can change that expiry date, can’t you?

David:  That’s right, you can go up to a year and a half and you’ll want to be thinking about what’s a typical buying cycle or whatever it is that I’m selling or what’s a particular conversion cycle of whatever it is that people are converting on.

So, something that takes somebody a month to think about, retail is a good sector where it is typically 27 day buying cycle I believe.  You don’t want to expire that cookie after two months or worse a year.

If they haven’t made their decision after 30 days or maybe 45 days, they probably, they’ve moved on so you’re just wasting impressions and hurting your click through rate at that point.

The other thing to consider too is delisting event.  So one of the things that a lot of people forget about is setting that delisting event.  So we talked about once someone purchases, stop trying to sell it to them and you could cross sell them something else but you have to have that delisting event.  So that once they’ve done what you’re trying to get them to do, you could either stop promoting that or start promoting something else.

Philip:  And if you do change your – let’s say you set up your list with a 30 day expiry and then you come back couple of months later and you decide actually, you want to make this cookie go for 90 days, is it just a simple process of changing that to the 90 days and then from thereon end all the cookies will be 90 and the others are still going to be 30.  Do you need to do any new installation with the code?  How does it work?

David:  You got it.  That’s just as easy as the interface.  You go in, you edit it, you turn it from 30 to 90.  Now it won’t effect the cookies that have already been dropped, those expirations have already been set.  But like you said, from this point going forward, yeah, it’ll be from 30 to 90 days.

Philip:  That’s great.  You don’t need to put any more code in so it’s very easy, you can play with that.

David:  Yeah, and along those lines, even better, if you’re already using conversion tracking code, you can use the existing conversion tracking code that you have to create a new remarketing list.

So from that perspective, everybody who is using conversion tracking code, should have a list called “converted” and you don’t have to do any additional code if you’ve already got the conversion tracking code in there.

Philip:  So what do you think about this strategy of presenting discounted offers to somebody who’s been on your site, hasn’t bought, you show an ad to them saying special offer of 10% off or something like that.  Because your customers or your prospects can get pretty wise to that.  What are your thoughts?

David:  Yeah, I love it personally, because I’ve never bought something the first time ever since I realized this thing existed.  Just put it into your shopping cart, don’t check out with it and wait 24 hours and you can save 10%.

But I think the key here is – I speak to lot of the agencies – you say these are the folks who should be knowing about this and who should be doing this. Really, what I find is that outside kind of the media agency space a lot of people don’t know about this even the people who are doing it.

So the people who are being targeted by really have no idea that this is happening.  They just think they are getting really lucky.  They have that reaction that says whoa! I almost bought that thing.  I’m glad I didn’t because now I can save $10.  That was really, really fortunate.

And it’s really kind of keeping that fine line between being a little creepy and being just relevant enough for it to almost be believable that this is sheer coincidence.

Philip:  Will be interesting to see how that changes over the years or how wise the general masses become?  But I think you’re right, you live in this world of agency and re-marketing and Adwords and all that sort of stuff, you assume that everybody knows it but you’re right, they don’t.

David:  Yeah, I think in many respects, we’re still kind of in the wild west here with everything to do with online marketing but specially the new era of platforms like this one.  Yeah, there’s still a lot of opportunity to be gained and I think anybody who’s not doing this right now can start and find themselves with a leg up on the competition because we’re certainly not in a place where re-targeting has become the only form of display.  There’s still a lot of dollars being spent on traditional display and poorly targeted display for that matter.

Philip:  So I just want to emphasize to people listening, get that list started because you can’t go back in time and create the list.  It’s only from when you drop the code on your website which creates the cookie.  So just get started today and then work out how you’re going to target those previous visitors.

So any common mistakes that you find people making?  Any advice on what not to do.

David:  Yeah I think what you just said is probably the number one biggest mistake which is just not using this.  It’s really a no brainer if you think about it.  So I’d say start thinking about your list and once you’ve got some kind of a strategy, just get started.

The other one I see a lot is make sure your list makes sense.  And I said it before, but just go into your Home page and then bouncing doesn’t really mean much, that doesn’t qualify you for a list.  So you want to try and drop those cookies into places where you absolutely know that the customer’s done something or you know something about that user’s intent that you can specifically market to.

So ask yourself that question.  Can I actually put together a marketing message that is reflective of the action that this user took and if the answer is no, you probably don’t want to create a list for it.

Maybe another thing is like we talked about.  Just make sure that you are smart about when to stop re-marketing.  So we talked about how you can stop re-marketing at sale position but some people ask the question, well, what if I sold something offline, there is no thank you page where I could drop that second cookie and then use that combination.

So you want to get creative, right.  So, for example, if my friend actually did go and buy that car offline, he could have been driven to a special owner’s only registration website and that’s where a cookie could be dropped.  Just because you know if somebody hit that site, they are an owner of the car and now you can stop showing them those ads.

Philip:  Are there any ways you can set engagement criteria to the actual list?  So, if somebody visits more than three pages, I guess that’s a multiple list, right, or time on site, engagement metrics?

David:  Oh yeah, and this is where we start getting creative, and I’ll take you even a step further.  So everything that you just mentioned is absolutely possible.  You’re only limited by when you can fire some Java script code.

For some of our clients, we actually – we have users that are logging into a site or they’ve opted into receiving customized content.  We can actually drop cookies on random pages based about CRM data or what we know about them.

So for example, we can show people ads across the entire web on the GDN inventory based not on what they did on the site but the demographics and psychographics and any offline behavior and historical transactions or behavioral patterns that we have access to in the CRM.

A good example, we got Valentines day coming up.  And it’s pretty clear that women will shop much earlier than men when they are shopping for Valentine’s day.  They start thinking about it earlier.  So we could actually drop cookies on people that we know are women and start a campaign that targets those folks earlier than the ones we know are men.

So there’s really practical applications of this and any kind of data sources that you have can be used to drop these cookies at any point.

Philip:  It’s pretty freaky stuff isn’t it?

David:  Yeah, and going back to the common mistakes that people make.  That’s probably right up there as well when you cross that border and you get creepy, right.  I mean this stuff is pretty powerful.

Philip:  Yeah I can see some weird ads being targeted towards an individual.  Philip, you’re a weirdo, I know you’re into this, this and this.  I mean and I guess there’s obviously going to be a natural back lash in the media and certain people saying, well this is just going too far, using everything you know about me to present the most targeted ad.  But, I have contrary view.  I just think advertising is not a pain in the a**se when it’s actually targeted, you want it to be targeted.  I have no problem in being shown the most relevant fishing lure for my kayak fishing or something like that.  That’s exactly what I want, I don’t see an issue.

David:  And we’re in a very interesting time where last year it started heating up, this year I think we’re going to see some really intense debate over what is internet privacy and how many people actually want it to take form.

You think about – you said a great thing.  If I have to see ads, and I think everybody is of the impression right now that if the internet is going to continue to just keep distributing wonderful free content for everybody, it has to be funded by something and that something is ads.  So if you have to see ads, I’d rather see something that’s relevant to me.

And the other thing is that whole concept of PII, Personally Identifiable Information.  Really, like we said, this is cookie based which means I’m not targeting you, Philip Shaw, I’m targeting the cookie that lives on your machine.  And I don’t really care that you are Philip Shaw.  What I care about is that you have this cookie and that cookie is demonstrated the potential to be a customer of mine.  This stuff is going to play out here in the near future but I think the other thing to keep in mind is that the online space is probably not the scariest space.

If you think about it, a merchant who has access to your credit card, could go and buy enormous amounts of data and they don’t even need your credit card.  They just need your first and that last name, if they have an address, that’s even better.  And they can figure out what kind of car you drive and when you open a bank account when you were thirteen years old back in your home state.  And then, they can sell those lists and that’s what makes your phone ring right at dinner time when you just sit down.

So, telemarketing and all kinds of marketing lists did not get invented with the internet by any means.  And from a lot of perspectives, they are a lot more intrusive than any kind of an anonymous cookie.

Philip:  Yeah, have a big problem in being a cold called like that all of a sudden with a  particular product relevant to me but, moving on the web, I don’t have a problem at all.

David:  Yeah.

Philip:  So why is re-marketing – it just seems to be the crazy thing that everyone’s talking about now especially in the online marketing space.  Why is it just gone absolute gang busters now?

David:  Yeah, I mentioned that it’s been around for a long time, right.  In the media agency spaces, it’s really kind of been theirs alone and kept secret outside of there, but, people just didn’t know up until recently.  I don’t really know when it started but there’s certainly been a lot of buzz about it lately.

I guess you kind of attribute it two things.  Number one, I think is just awareness. So, it’s now we’re in a situation where it’s not one or two people that are taking advantage of this, there’s lots of people who are taking advantage of this.  It’s getting so prevalent out there that although still there are a lot of people who have no idea, there are some of those savvy folks that are saying, what’s going on here?  Those ads are hidden just a little bit too close to home.  Are they chasing me around or things like that?

And the other one I think is accessibility.  Google is actually not early to the game by any means but they do have that ability to really push something into the spotlight.  And I think when they took on re-marketing and brought it to the masses, it kind of gained a new front and centre stage…

Philip:  And it’s because you’re already in the console.  You’re in the Adwords console, you’re doing search, you’re doing display and now, another tab pops up.  So, it’s a lot easier, a lot less daunting for people to experiment with it whereas with the other networks, you actually have to go to a brand new business and start understanding what they do.

David:  Yeah, and I think it’s definitely worth mentioning that Google’s not the only place to get this, right.  There are some great third party vendors out there that kind of started this whole thing and they’re still around.  And they can give you access to not just the Google display inventory but also AOL and MSN and Yahoo and Adbright and Ad Nexus all the ones you never heard of before all through one vendor.  So I think that’s made it a lot more accessible to people as well.

Philip:  Do you have any – can you give any ones that you sort of think are pretty reasonable quality for a self serve perspective that business owners can check out?

David:  Yeah, I mean one thing you’ll probably have to be comfortable that departing to a full service situation.  A lot of these guys are services based but there’s some great ones out there.  You’ve got Adroll, Simplify and Re-Targeter that are doing sort of the same things that the Google’s Remarketing are, only over larger scales and larger networks.  But then you’ve got Fetchback and Bysite that are specifically targeted to the product re-targeting that you talked about.  So you put that red sweater in your cart, you see an ad for the red sweater around the web, right.

And then you’ve got one like Magnetic and Chango and these guys are really focused on the search re-targeting.  So you’ve done some searching on search engines and on product searches and all over the web.  And then, they can sell that data back to you essentially and start targeting people, showing them ads based on their search behaviors around the web.

Philip:  Right, so with Google – with the Google console there is no minimum spend.  With these guys, most of them have a minimum spend don’t they?

David:  Yeah they’re all going to be a little bit different.  There are some, I know Adroll doesn’t have a minimum spend, for example.  There are some that have some higher minimum spends but really, a lot of these are in reach of even the SME. So, I’d encourage you to take a look at them and make a phone call and have a conversation.  There are some good options but certainly to start with the Adwords network is something everybody should do as soon as they stop listening here.

Philip:  Awesome.  Do you have any secret tip that you think people may not be aware about that you could give some awesome insight or strategy?

David:  Yeah, I think a lot of these come back to just getting creative.  Start thinking about what you’re doing.  We got some situations where for example, we can put together some buffer lists.

So we got a client that sells something and that something tends to need to be bought twice a year.  So the minute that we sell this to someone, we can drop two cookies on the machine.  The first cookie tells us that they bought this thing.  The second cookie is nothing more than a timer.  It’s just set to expire within five months.

We know they have to buy it twice a year.  So right around month six from the purchase, they’re going to be in the market for it again.  So what we do is we set up a custom combination there.  So what we do is we target a list of people who have bought that thing.  They have that first cookie but who’s second cookie has also expired.  So they don’t have that second cookie anymore.

So after five months, they qualify for that list and then they start seeing ads for that thing that they’re just about ready to start thinking about buying again.  So those are some really interesting things that you can do with these cookies and these combinations.  And I really just encourage people to explore, maybe also some non traditional sorts of things that you can do.

We got one client that – pure branding, they don’t really have any sales.  They’re not selling anything online but we’ve had enormous success with re-marketing.  What we do is – for example, they have a sweepstakes and people get to that sweepstakes but they cold feet and they don’t want to put in their email address or they don’t want to download whatever it is that they need to download to join the sweepstakes.

What we do is we re-target them, we get them back at a conversion rate of 21%, and if you think about it, that’s a conversion rate of 21% on an action.  That’s a conversion rate that’s blowing search campaigns out of the water.

Philip:  Wow.  So – that’s – those are two really good tips.  I love the two cookie one for a repeat purchase, timing the second cookie, that’s just great.

David:  Oh yeah, it’s fantastic.

Philip:  Nice, I like it, I like it.  So what do you think will be – we’re running out of time Dave, we could be speaking forever and you’ve already lived up to your status being the guru to the experts.  What do you think we’ll be speaking about in a year’s time regarding re-targeting?

David:  I think, like you said, we’re going to be in a situation where we’ve gone more towards the audience than we did the context or the actual replacement targeting.  The amount of data that is out there, that’s being collected, the Google Plus, the Facebook data, these are just kind of the tips of the iceberg for what we’re going to be seeing in the longer term.

And I think we’re going to be further along in the conversation around privacy and how people want to be marketed to.  So I really think the sky’s the limit and we start to think about all the creativity that we have here, just using the data that we have access to now, I can only imagine that as this data becomes more prevalent and acceptable to use in the marketing community, we’ll be able to target those ads and specific kinds of ads and will be able to feed not just products but specific messaging.

And people will become used to it and it becomes much more relevant, it becomes much more effective and as advertisers are allowed to really control our costs and not have to spend money on ads that don’t have a chance of converting.

Philip:  Nice, excellent.  Well, Dave, you’ve been very generous with your time.  Look forward to catching up soon when you visit Sydney.  Where can people find you online?

David:  So I’m on Google Plus, I’m on Twitter, I’m on Facebook.  I’m on all those usual places and the best place to find me is to go to Cardinal Path.com and you can find me on the blog and that has a link to all of my various places.

Philip:  Great.  There is probably not a link for your book yet but we’ll load that up as well when there is.

David:  That sounds great, yeah.

Philip:  Beautiful, thanks for your time Dave.

David:  Thank you Philip.

Nick Iyengar lead the Google Analytics “Guru Team” at Google in Mountainview, and before that, managed tens of millions of dollars of AdWords spend consulting with Google’s biggest customers.

Now he consults with Cardinal Path, one of the largest Analytics companies in the world. Having been both inside the big Googzilla and now an external consultant, it gives him a very interesting perspective. 

So who better than to talk about how to get great insights from Google Analytics to turbo charge your AdWords campaigns? 

He shares some very smart strategies. So listen in.

You can connect with him @AnalyticsNick or read more about Cardinal Path.

If you prefer to read:

Phillip: Welcome to another episode of the online marketing secrets podcast where we interview the world’s leading experts in online marketing.  I’ve got an awesome guest today, Nick Iyengar.

He’s an ex-Googler, he currently is a Senior Consultant with Cardinal Path which I believe is one of the largest analytics companies in the world.

At Google he was in charge of managing tens of millions of dollars of Adwords spend within that team and I think was also leading it to the analytics guru team which we’ll find out what that is. So welcome very much Nick.

Nick:    Thanks a lot for having me.

Philip:  What was your role at Google?

Nick:    Well it’s like you said I started out doing Adwords, Adwords sales so working with clients in the Tech B2C vertical, consumer electronics and peripherals and those sorts of clients.

So like you mentioned just a lot of the big established advertisers that Google has got an ongoing relationship with.  So I was selling into those clients for a couple of years and then as you might expect being someone that was kind of neck deep in Adwords, I started to get some exposure to the analytics world and decided that was really where my passion is.

So I worked at that for a while and I managed one of the Google Analytics support teams in the Mountain View office which is the headquarters.   So that’s what I did at Google, I officially managed that Google analytics support team which was responsible for doing things like technical support but also for doing some consulting engagements with some of the biggest advertisers in the Adwords world.

Philip:  Nice, nice, and what do you do these days?

Nick:    These days I’m doing some of the same but also a lot of new stuff so probably my biggest responsibility is – I do a lot of custom Google Analytics implementation for enterprise type organizations.

Google analytics, the tracking code that you use to set up Google Analytics, has kind of a vanilla form that you can get directly from Google but it’s just Java script so anything that you can customize with Java script you can essentially make Google Analytics do.

So we work with kind of the bigger organizations that maybe have some needs that are more sophisticated than what the standard Google Analytics tracking will do.  Then we provide a custom implementation for those kinds of organizations.

Philip:  Okay.  Nick and I met at GAUGE which is a Google Analytics User Conference in New York and you had a pretty awesome session on Google Analytics for Adwords which is what we’re going to speak about today.

I thought you were a fantastic speaker, you had a great energy and you clearly know your stuff inside out.  So today we’re going to talk about just what are the insights we can get from Analytics in regards to Google Adwords.

But before we move on to that, there’s a skill that you have that’s probably more highly valued I think if I look at all the other guests you have which is worth mentioning the fact that you brew your own beer.

Nick:   Yeah I was going to say it’s a niche hobby but one that I enjoy.

Philip:  Is that because the U.S. have such terrible beers like Budweiser that you have to brew your own?

Nick:    Well now that’s…I don’t want to steer the podcast outside of the scope here.

No I think that’s part of it, the micro brewing and craft brewing culture in the United States really grew out of the fact that what we call the macro brews like Miller and Coors had essentially driven out all the competition and so there was really sort of this joint monopoly between just a few companies producing some pretty watery tasteless beer.

So yeah, the home brewing movement is strong, I’m a very small part of it but absolutely, I probably spend too much of my free time thinking about and consuming beer.

Philip:  I guess – yeah there are a lot of people that think about and consume it but I haven’t got to make my own yet.  What’s your favourite?  Ale, wheat or what?

Nick:   Yeah, I like some of the hoppier beers, it’s very common here in the West Coast in the United States, the IPA’s and ESB’s are really popular.  I like something that’s got pretty robust flavour profile and try to stay away from kind of the lighter beers but at the end of the day, if it’s a cold beer, you can’t go too far wrong.

Philip: I had a Belgium beer the other day in one of the Belgium beer café’s in Sydney which was – I think it was 11% alcohol.

Nick:    Yeah that’s a good sign.

Philip:   I just found that over the top for me.

Nick:    Way too much.

Philip:  Anyway, we’re getting a little side tracked here but maybe we can have a podcast just dedicated to home brewing, online marketing and home brewing together.  Awesome, so let’s  get into the topic.

So we’re going to talk about analytics for Adwords so let’s start at the very top.  I think maybe some business owners or PPC managers think well, there’s so much data already inside the Adwords console.

You got your click through rates, impression share, quality scores, CPC’s, I mean you’ve got more KPI’s than you can poke a stick at.  Why do we want to look into Analytics as well and give us the main benefit?

Nick:    Sure well I think it really goes down to the root of why you should measure anything from your business reflective and it’s that the data points that you get in the Adwords console, your clicks and impressions, quality score, they don’t speak to business outcomes and that’s where you need an analytics tool like a Google Analytics or something else.

If you want to be able to measure things like eCommerce or generating leads or file downloads or whatever it is that your business cares about for your online presence, for the most part you’re going to need a more robust tool like Google Analytics to be able to measure all of those goals.

Philip:  Right, so we can import those goals from Analytics into Adwords, right, so I guess you get a part of it.  You can see what’s called a conversion in the Adwords console. You can either set that up independently or you can import your Analytics goals.

Nick:    Sure, there is sort of a very rudimentary ability to track some of those conversions as you said in the Adwords console but there are a lot of really important questions that you just can’t answer in Adwords and that’s why Google Analytics is so important to use in junction with your Adwords campaign.

I’ll give you just a couple of examples.  If I asked you what’s the bounce rate for your biggest campaign meaning what’s the percentage of folks that come into your website and then leave right away.  You just simply can’t find that anywhere in the Adwords console.

Philip:  Agreed

Nick:    Just to give you another example if I asked you how many people – let’s say the conversion was to check out of a shopping cart.  If I asked you not just how many conversions you had but how many people reached the last step in the shopping cart but then didn’t check out for some reason.

That’s not a number that you can get from Adwords either and so being able to do even a bit more sophisticated kind of analysis really requires that you go beyond just the scope of what you can see there in the Adwords console.

Philip:  Agreed.  Hopefully by the end of this podcast listeners will feel the same way.

Nick:    Yeah I hope so, there’s plenty to look at so we should jump right in.

Philip:  Yeah let’s do it.  So do you see – before we get into it – do you see more integration between Adwords and Analytics?  Do you think that Adwords is going to start sucking in more data so you can manage it in one console?

Nick:   Yeah absolutely, I think Google is really on a mission to help its advertisers manage their spend wisely and the reason for that is as a lot of people know Google’s revenue stream is almost entirely dependant on the Adwords platform meaning that they are dependant on their advertisers and what they find is the more successful their advertisers are the more reinvestment there is into the Adwords system.

What they have also found is people that use Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords have vastly more success.  They have much longer life cycles in term of how long their campaigns stay active, they spend a lot more money, so for all those reasons they really want to equip their Adwords advertisers with the tools they need to again really manage their ad spend wisely.  So Google analytics is going to be an ever increasing part of that I really think.

Philip: That’s the business case that Google probably presented at one of their acquisitions wasn’t it when they took over Urchin, that’s exactly the reason they did it.

Nick:    I would have to imagine so and that’s one of the reasons that Google Analytics has been free for so long and they’ve added so much sort of horse power to the tool.  It does so much more than it used to and yet it’s still free and the reason for that is by giving it away they really recoup a lot of that revenue through kind of indirect Adwords spend.

Philip: Great so let’s – can you talk briefly about how we get the data? How we get your Adwords and Analytics accounts speaking to each other?

Nick:    Absolutely, common issues that you may have in Adwords account created with campaigns running, you may also have a Google Analytics account that you set up/installed with your website but they don’t necessarily always talk to each other right from the get go and this are a couple of reasons for that having to do with things like  account preferences and settings.

What we want to do though is make sure that your Adwords account is linked to your Google Analytics account.  So the first thing you’re going to want to do is and this is really important across really all of your Google services is to try to use the same email and password as your login credential for both Adwords and Google Analytics.

For example if I’m using Nick@gmail.com to manage my Adwords account I really should use nick@gmail.com to log into my Google Analytics as well because that’s how Google knows that both of these accounts belong to me.  So that’s the first step.  Once you’ve done that, it’s as simple as just a few mouse clicks so what you’ll want to do is log into your Adwords account and in the Adwords account you’ve got the Reporting and Tools Area.

Inside there you can click on Google Analytics and once you’ve clicked on Google Analytics again from inside your Adwords account, if you’re accounts aren’t linked, you’ll be prompted with a check box that says, “Do you want to link your Google Analytics account?”

And so again, just a few mouse clicks can get you there but if you – for example if you go into your Google Analytics account and you can’t find any data about your Adwords campaign, that would be the issue.

Philip:   Excellent.  And can you talk about the Auto Tagging?

Nick:   Absolutely, so the other sort of important ingredient in terms of making sure that all of your data shows up cleanly and properly on the Google Analytics side is making sure that you have an Adwords feature called Auto Tagging enabled.

Now that’s a setting that’s enabled by default, so if you don’t have that turned on, it means that you or someone on your team may have gone in there and turned it off for some reason in the past.  But to turn it back on again is very, very easy.

What you’re going to do is go to the “My Account” area in the Adwords account and go under your Account Preferences and there’ll be a check box there for Auto Tagging.  What you want to do is make sure that Auto Tagging is enabled.

Philip:  Right, that’s a good summary.  So let’s get into the Google Analytics console itself.  For listeners of the podcast it may be helpful depending on where you are to actually log into your Analytics console on your own and then follow along there, may be a little bit easier.

Nick, so can you start off with  may be an overview of the key areas where you would find data relating to Adwords and then we can build down into those areas afterwards.

Nick:    Sure.  The main area where you’re going to find all of your Adwords data, if you’re familiar with that sort of left hand navigation tree inside Google Analytics, you’ll notice that there’s a blue area that says “Advertising” and  If you open up that drop down box you’ll notice an entire series of reports related to your Adwords.

Now it’s important to mention that we’re looking at the new version of Google Analytics which has been around for several months but if you haven’t tried it out, I’d recommend it.  You can click “New Version” at the top of your Google Analytics screen and you’ll be able to follow along with the interface that we’re looking at today.

But again, in the blue area on the left hand navigation where it says “Advertising”.  You just want to open that up and you’ll see again an entire series of reports dedicated to your Adwords campaign.

Philip:  Excellent.  And the area under Traffic Sources as well?

Nick:   That’s right.  So, under Traffic Sources which is the next sort of main category down in the left hand navigation.  You’ve also got some reports there, so for example there’s the All Traffic report.

If you wanted to compare how your Adwords campaigns are performing let’s say against your organic searches from Google or your email marketing or other search engines, the All Traffic report because it contains all of your traffic makes it very easy to see Adwords not so much in a vacuum but really in the context of all of your other kinds of traffic.

Philip:  Excellent.  And I think the third key area is if you want to do Advance Segments where you actually create an Advance Segment just on your Adwords traffic and then move around all the different reports and see all the different metric just relating to Adwords and maybe we’ll touch on that last.

Nick:    Sure, absolutely.

Philip:  So is it worthwhile getting maybe because the smaller area within Traffic Sources once we click into Search and into Paid, there’s some data in there.  Should we maybe get that out of the way and then spend most of the time talking about the advertising sub menu.

Nick:    Yeah, that sounds good.

Philip:  So what sort of – maybe we can just sort drill down briefly into the sources you techs use yeah sort of get stuck in, maybe just give an indication of what data is available in there that’s not in the advertising sub menu.

Nick:   Sure.  When you’re in Traffic Sources, you’re going to notice there’s another subfolder called Sources and then another sub folder called Search.

So you’re going to have to drill down a few levels there to find what’s called the Paid Search report and really the only difference here is that the Paid Search report is going to encompass not only your Google Adwords traffic but any other paid search that you’ve told Google Analytics that you are doing.

So for example if you’re doing some paid search with Yahoo or with Bing then you’ll be able to kind of analyze all of that at a high level and feed it all together as paid search.  So this is for folks that want to analyze paid search as a whole as opposed to just specifically looking at their Google Adwords campaigns.

In terms of the data that’s available, it’s a bit less specific and there are some reasons for that but the main thing that you won’t see in the paid search report is you won’t see data that’s imported from your Google Analytics account.  Things like your click through rate, your number of impressions, the number of clicks and all those good metrics that really help get a detailed picture of Adwords.  So I’d say the Paid Search report is really where you want to focus when it’s time to optimize your Yahoo and Bing and any other search engines that you are doing, that the paid search are doing with them.

Philip: Excellent.  So if you are just doing Google Adwords and I guess to most Australian listeners, Google is really the only search engine here.  If you are just doing Google Adwords you don’t really need to look into this category of reports.  You can go straight to the advertising sub menu.

Nick:    Absolutely.  I think that’s definitely a fair point.  So again there’s nothing in here that you can’t get in the advertising section if you’re trying to analyze your Adwords campaign.  So this is really just for the other search engines.

Philip:  And I think we were talking about the linking of the accounts to get that to link properly is very important and if you haven’t linked properly this is where you can actually see under the search sub menu, you won’t see the differentiation between organic and paid, is that right?

Nick:  That’s right, so, a lot of the data that you end up seeing inside of Google Analytics is subject to how you’ve configured the tool and a big part of configuring Google Analytics properly is again making sure that you have it linked to your Adwords account and so when you link your Adwords account to your analytics account, that’s how Google is able to tell that a certain visitor is coming in from a paid search as opposed to an organic or a natural search.

Philip:  Beautiful, alrighty, so it looks like we can spend the rest of the time talking about actual advertising sub menu so that’s the second sub menu down on the left hand side below audience.  Do you want to give it a little bit of an overview?

Nick:    Absolutely.

Philip:  What’s your favourite things in there?

Nick:   Definitely.  So the advertising section here where all the Adwords reports live.  I mean this is really the meat and potatoes of the reports that Google is giving you in order to be able to analyze how your Adwords campaigns are performing.

You’ll notice if you’ve been using Google Analytics for a long time that there are more and more reports in here and it certainly I’d expect these to grow even into the future but the first thing you’ll see in that menu under “advertising” and called the “campaigns report”.

And this is one – it’s sort of a simple report but actually one where I spend really a lot of time.  So if you’ve got an Adwords campaign running and you’ve got it hooked up to Google Analytics, you can certainly follow along here.  But again in the Campaigns Report what you’re going to see is very similar to what you see in the Adwords console.  You’re going to see a list of all your campaigns but then you’re going to start to see how those campaigns are performing on your website.

That seems like a silly thing to focus on but that’s a huge differentiator between what you see in the Adwords console and what you see in the Analytics console.  So take a step back and kind of highlight that.  In the Adwords console all you can see is how the campaign performs on Google, how many impressions were there and what was the average position of your ads, what was your click through rate and your quality score.  Those are all really important.

What Google Analytics now is going to show you is how did those campaigns perform once the person arrived on your website.  So you’re going to see how many visits you had, you’re going to see how much time the user spent on your website, you’re going to see what the bounce rate was and then, again, most critically you’re going to be able to start evaluating those business outcomes.

Philip:  Excellent.  So is the business owner or marketing manager obviously I guess everybody these days is really short on time.  Do you feel that your time is better spent inside the Analytics console because you’ve got all your metrics from Adwords itself and you’ve got all these additional metrics you were just speaking about.  Do you do most of your work inside Analytics and if you do make changes, go back to Adwords?  Is that too much of a generalization?

Nick:   No I think that’s exactly what I do and I think the main reason for that is once you’ve started to analyze and measure your Adwords campaign with Google Analytics you’ll never feel that the Adwords console is really sufficient in terms of answering your questions and providing you with the metrics that you need.

It’s a bit too simple really.  Once you’re used to using Google Analytics you won’t go back and so I think the Adwords console really becomes just a place where you log in to actually execute some changes that you discovered that you need to make but in terms in measuring maybe where your soft spots are, where there’s some optimization opportunities, I really think that all that should happen on the Google Analytics side.

Philip:  Excellent.  Let’s bring it to life a little bit.  Let’s think of maybe a professional service or consulting or services oriented firm, maybe a law firm with offices around a country, their website has an enquiry form, maybe some downloads of white papers, etc.  What sort of reports do you think they could look at to work out how well their website is working or not?

Nick:   Well I think from an Adwords perspective, you want to start with this report here, the Campaigns Report which is the first one in this section because what it will do is give you a really good overview.  It’s going to tell you exactly what you are spending on Adwords and it’s going to tell you what you are getting back.

So it’s going to give you all the components of ROI, right, it’s going to give you the “R”, the Return and it’s going to give you the “I”, the Investment which makes it actually very easy and sort of unambiguous in terms of finding out are these different Adwords campaigns that I’m running actually working for me, are they profitable or are they not.

And so in your example here with anyone that’s sort of a services firm, I would imagine the key real conversion point on the website would be basically lead generation, filling out some kind of Contact Us form or Quote Request or something to that effect.

So what you’ll want to do is take a look at what percentage let’s say, what percentage of the visitors who come to your website from each campaign are actually converting on that form.

But from there what you can start to do then, one of the things I like about the Campaigns Report is it’s going to let you drill down and so at the account level or at the individual campaign level, those kind of metrics like conversion rates are very useful of course but where you really get the sort of the optimization benefit, where you really get the actionable insight is when you start drilling down away from the aggregate level and down to looking at the individual keywords that you are bidding on in the Adwords system and so what you may find is that you’ve got a hundred or even many hundreds of keywords that potentially you are bidding on and what you’ll find if you are like most businesses is that some of them are working really well for you already and you’re going to find some what I call bleeders, ones that you’re spending a lot of money but they’re not really doing anything for you in terms of outcomes and so what you want to be able to do is understand right down to the individual keyword level, where am I spending my money and are those the keywords that really bring me the most return.

Once you know that, you can start to have a lot of the actionable next steps like adding new keywords or pausing some keywords or adding some negative keywords or changing your bid prices.  A whole world of options sort of opens up once you know how all your different keywords are performing for you.

Philip: Great summary.  And I take it when you’re talking about return on investment and specially for lead gen forms, the beginning of any advertising you are doing and you should address this before you go live with your Adwords campaign is how much is a lead actually worth to you and I found with a lot of businesses that we start working with don’t know that and so maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Nick:   Absolutely, so we’ll just stick with this example, the idea that you want to gain business by generating leads through your website.  So I think there are a few different things that you need to know.

The first thing you need to know is how many – well, let’s back up a bit.  The real question I think is what is a lead worth to you.  I think that’s the question because when the lead becomes a customer, it’s going to happen offline, it’s going to be outside the scope of what Google Analytics can measure and so you’re going to know what a paying customer is worth to you.

What you need to figure out is how much one lead worth.  Because that’s the conversion point, that’s the prism through which you’re going to evaluate your ad spend online.  So let’s say you know that in order to get one paying customer, you need ten leads, your sales team can then close ten per cent of those leads.

It’s a simple example.  If you also know that one paying customer is worth a $100 to you, you can then sort of back out and extrapolate what an individual lead is worth to you.  So again, if you know that your sales team will close 10% of the leads that come in through your website and that one paying customer is worth a $100 what you then know is that the individual lead itself is worth $10.  Does that make sense?

Philip: Absolutely and I think that that’s probably one of the most valuable things to do as a business if you are advertising, well, any type of advertising, is understand that what you are prepared to pay for a lead.

A lot of business owners I find, or marketing managers don’t actually know that and that’s really powerful information because once you’ve got that, it’s great.  If you pay $50 bucks a lead, that’s your starting point, that’s great.

Once you know that you can look at, as Nick was saying, down to the keyword level what the actual return or the ROI per keyword is and once you have that, that’s just awesome.  If you’ve got a keyword that’s delivering leads at $10 a lead, that’s awesome and you’ll break even at $50, that’s great, why wouldn’t you take a million of them.

Nick:    Absolutely, I think the main point here is that Google Analytics can’t tell you what’s good or bad, it can just give you data.  So if it’s telling you that the average lead is going to cost you $25, is that good or bad?

It’s hard to say, you have to know what your break even point is.  So if your break even point is $5 then it’s not very good but if your breakeven point is $500 then it’s great.  It’s a simple thought exercise but really taking the time to actually quantify what a lead is worth to you online will really help you get a really good handle on this sort of campaign by campaign or even that keyword by keyword evaluation of your performance.

Philip:  And it is just a rough calculation isn’t it because specially for service type businesses, you’ve got a whole range of different pricing.  One customer may spend $1000 bucks, one customer may spend $10,000 bucks but you do need to get to some sort of average.

Nick:    Absolutely and there are a lot of different ways that you can get around this.  For those of us that are eCommerce type businesses, it’s really easy because Google Analytics actually will just tell you in dollars and cents  what your revenue was for any given timeframe.

But if you have multiple different services with different pricing and that sort of thing, one of the things you might want to look at is breaking up your campaigns along the lines of your different services.

So for example if you’ve got all kinds of different leads for different services that you are trying to generate, have a different campaign for every service.  That way you’ll be able to calculate sort of a cost per lead for each campaign but then you’ll also be able to go back and say well I know that a lead for a different kind of service may not be worth exactly the same amount.

By kind of organizing your campaign that way or organizing your entire Adwords account I should say, you are still able to deal with the fact that you might have actually different break even points for different kinds of leads.

Philip: That’s a good point.  So let’s say we’re drilling into this keyword report which is the second report down within the Adwords reporting and we now have a lot of data over maybe three months of historical data and we can see as you said lot of keywords, well, generally a smaller portion of your keywords that are actually generating goals and you’ve got maybe 80% of your keywords are not generating goals at all.  How would you then start managing the keywords that are not generating goals?  What sort of metrics would you look at?

Nick:   That’s a great question, I think a lot of times the instinct when you find out for example that you have a whole set of keywords that really aren’t producing a lot of tangible return, the initial instinct is to turn off that campaign or to turn off those individual keywords and just kind of shut off the valve but I sort of look at that as kind of giving up.

A lot of times those keywords or at least some of those keywords could work for you perhaps if you were using them a different way.  So one of the – I think the first thing you’ve got to look at is what is the actual ad that you are serving up when someone has searched for that keyword.

One of the things you need to make sure is that the ad itself is really closely tied and highly relevant to the keyword and so a lot of times specially with folks that are less experienced with the Adwords account you may see actually poor performance on a whole set of keywords but it doesn’t mean that those keywords could never work for you.  It just means they don’t work for you right now.

So I think Step One is understanding what kind of ad am I serving back to the user on Google when they’ve actually searched for a given term.  So you’ve really got to sort of think critically and be a bit tough on yourself in terms of asking yourself is this really a highly relevant advertising experience given what the user just searched for.

Philip: And if you are a service based business clearly you could be getting many leads or many more leads even through the telephone call and the telephone call is not being tracked within these reports.  Any comments around that?

Nick:   Well I think it’s a good point.  I think one of the things that’s sort of inherently a limitation about any kind of online analytics tools is that it really only tracks what happens on your website.  Now there are all kinds of ways that you can do things like serve back different telephone numbers on your website for people that come in through Adwords.

There’s ways you can get around that, it’s a little bit more advanced but you certainly actually you can if you want to make the investment you can track phone calls actually back to your Adwords campaign as well.

I think the larger point there is to keep in mind if an offline contact process like a phone call or a walk-in to a store, let’s say, is an important segment of your conversions, you want to keep in mind that your Adwords campaign reports will always kind of underestimate what your campaigns are doing for you because Google Analytics will not give you a report that tells you this campaign costs ten people to walk into your store the next day.  It is not quite there yet.

Philip:  Alrighty, so let’s dig in a bit deeper to the keyword report and I know you have some pretty cool analytics ninja techniques around secondary dimension and changing the actual view on that keyword report.

Nick:    Absolutely, I think for those of you out there that have used the Google Analytics tool for a while you probably notice that most of the reports that Google Analytics spits out at you are what we call data puke.

They are basically sort of an Excel spreadsheet that lives in Google Analytics and so one of the things that you may want to do to get sort of a more visual presentation of your keyword data is to change the view.

So by default you’re in what’s called the Table View. One of the new features in Google Analytics that I like quite a bit is called a Word Cloud.  If you’re looking at the keywords report, in the Adwords section, you’ll notice that you’ve got this table where you see all of your keywords and then you’ve got your visits and your bounce rates.

Up at the top of that table sort of beneath the line graph but at the top of the data table, you’ll see a drop down box that’s called “View” and if you open that up you can choose the option that’s called Term Cloud.  A Term Cloud is basically a visual representation of keyword level data.

What it will do is it will actually generate this image of all of your keywords where the keywords that bring you the most traffic let’s say will then show up in the biggest font and the keywords that bring you less traffic will be smaller.

So again you get this nice sort of visual representation of which keywords bring you the most traffic.  A really simple technique that I like to use is to then change the metric that I’m using to produce the Term Cloud.  So by default this Term Cloud is generated based on visits meaning how much traffic do these keywords bring.

One of the really simple things to do is change that metric around to something like your goals or if you are an eCommerce person your revenue and see which keywords now show up as being the biggest ones because in theory you really should see the same keywords but in reality often times we don’t.

So this gives you a really nice revisual way of understanding – are the keywords I’m getting the most traffic from and therefore spending the most money on are actually also the same keywords that bring me the greatest return.  And I think the Term Cloud, it’s sort of an unorthodox type of report for Google Analytics but I think it really just makes those insights just jump off the page at you a bit.

Philip:  Nice.  And can you use the advanced filter on that table on that Term Cloud as well because I guess like many clients if you’re advertising on your brand name you may see a lot of huge amount of revenue for example on your branded term which is very common.  Can you use the Advance Filter to exclude those terms?

Nick:    Absolutely, and that’s a great point.  If you’re doing things like running some Adwords on your brand terms you’ll probably find that you have a high conversion rate or high revenue if you’re an eCommerce person.

On the one hand that’s good but on the other hand you shouldn’t pat yourself on the back too much because that’s what you should be doing.  So a lot of times what you want to look at is how are you doing on your non branded or what I call just your generic searches.

So things like products or services as opposed to your brand name.  What you’ll notice is that there is a search box with a magnifying glass on it at the top of the table where you can actually look for a certain subset of your keywords.

So if you want to exclude a certain group of your keywords you can click the blue link next to the magnifying glass that says advanced.  When you do that you’re going to be able to actually exclude a whole set of keywords.

Let’s just say for example you are the Acme Corporation.  If you want to get this keyword report but actually look at it with all of your brand terms filtered out you can use this advance filter to exclude any keyword that contains let’s say Acme and when you hit the apply button on this filter your report will just refresh for you in real time and what it will do is now show you all of your data but it’s going to have removed all of the keywords that were around your brand name.

What that may do is actually paint a very different picture about things like your bounce rate or your conversion rate because often times those non branded generic keywords don’t tend to perform quite as well.

Philip:  Excellent.  I think you raised a really good point about brand versus non brand.  Often we see companies or clients targeting their branded terms within the same campaign and then look at an overall ROI or Cost Per Conversion on that entire campaign which includes the branded stuff and as you said your branded stuff is just – you’re going to get phenomenal returns on your branded campaign and that you shouldn’t let that dilute the overall return you’re getting on the non branded stuff.  So I encourage listeners to always separate branded and nonbranded into separate campaigns.

Nick:    Yes and the Advanced Filter is a really great way to do that just in about two seconds.

Philip:  Beautiful.  So now these keywords that we’re looking at, are these the keywords that are actually we’re bidding on in Adwords.  Are these the actual keywords that the prospect is searching on?

Nick:    That’s a great question.  What you see in the keywords report is a list of the actual terms that you are bidding on inside your campaigns.  What you may want to look at though is actually what are the specific search queries that someone is actually typing in in their raw form into the Google search and so the next report down which you’ll see in the list of reports is called matched search queries which is kind of a mouthful of what Google is getting at here is as opposed to showing you your data broken down by which keywords you basically thought you were buying.

What they now show you is well, which keywords are you actually getting traffic from in the sense that these are the raw queries that the user has typed in.  So often times you’ll see many of the same things but because of things like Broad Match and Phrase Match, the different matching options that you have in the Adwords campaign you may actually see search queries that do not exactly match the keywords that you are buying.

To give you a good example – let’s see, let me think of one.  Let’s say you’re a book store and you only sell new books.  You don’t sell any used books.  Presumably when you set up your campaign you wouldn’t have bought any keywords that include things like used books but because of Google’s matching technology and personalized search and all kinds of factors that impact which ad will show up at a given moment, it’s possible that you’re getting some traffic without knowing it from people that are actually looking for used books.

You wouldn’t see that in the keywords report because you’re not buying the keyword “used books”.  But in the match search queries report you’d be able to see whether or not you’re getting that kind of traffic that you don’t actually want and if you are, what you’re able to do is understand how much money you spent on it and then you can do things like add negative keywords to your campaigns to make sure you don’t keep spending that money in the future.

Philip:  This is if you’re advertising in Adwords and you are using a broad match on a lot of your keywords you will be blown away by the sort of stuff that’s coming up in this report.

Nick:   Absolutely.  I think this is one of the kind of – it’s nearly where Google’s got much more transparent about how their system works and yet at the same time a lot of people still don’t know about broad match and about how the keywords they are buying are not necessarily the only terms that they are spending money on and so if you’ve never looked at the match search queries reports, all you folks out there that may be are newer to this, this can be one of the best money saving reports in Google Analytics and really one that it’s very easy to take action based on the insight that you get from this report.

So again, what you’re looking for in the match search queries report is what kinds of terms are people searching for that may be aren’t as relevant to my business but you’re still getting traffic on them.  Those are the ones that you want to add to a negative keyword list in your Adwords campaigns to make sure that in the future when people are searching for those kinds of terms you won’t be spending any more money to get those people to your website.

Philip:  Let’s move on to the Secondary Dimensions.  Can you explain what that is and why we use it?

Nick:    Absolutely, so Secondary Dimensions in Google Analytics let’s you do some segmentation of your data.  For example just to start off with a basic example, you may be looking at a report that shows you where all your traffic came from, let’s say, broken down by the country.

So U.S. versus Canada versus Mexico versus Australia versus anything else.  What you might also want to know is in those countries what kind of mobile device do those people use.  Maybe people in the U.S. are more iPhone centric and people in Canada are more Android centric or whatever the case may be.

So if you wanted to analyze not only by country but also by the mobile device, you could for example add a Secondary Dimension to your report which would then give you that added segmentation.  It’s a way to get a bit more of a fine grain segmentation around your data.  Now in the Adwords case, there’s a lot of applications here.

One of the things you might want to do as an example if we go back to the campaigns report you might want to add a secondary dimension, something like mobile.  How does your Adwords campaign perform for people that are actually using a mobile device to do a search on Google.

This is something that has a lot of impact on how your website looks and how the Google search result page looks but not something that a lot of people take the time to analyze.  So if I were to ask most people what percentage of your Adwords budget is being spent to attract people who are currently using an iPhone or an iPad or some kind of Android device.

I don’t think most people would know.  If I ask them how does that conversion rate for those mobile users differ from your traditional kind of desktop user, I’m even more sure they wouldn’t know.  So let’s take a look at how that works.

If you were to go back to the campaigns report that we saw earlier in the Adwords section what you’re going to notice again is this data table where you see your top ten campaigns and they are all listed out here in a series of rows.

Just above that you’re going to see a drop down box that’s called secondary dimension and what that’s going to let you do is search for another dimension that you’d like to plot out in this report.  So do a search for mobile and then what you’ll be able to do is actually see basically a simple yes or no meaning did the person come from a mobile device or did they not.

So if you’ve got a campaign that’s called say Campaign No. 1, you’re now going to see two rows for each campaign.  One that says mobile yes and one that says mobile no and what I think is a really interesting analysis to do is look at how your conversion rate differs for your various campaigns based on again just a simple question of is this person on a mobile device or are they not.

And so for those of you that out there that maybe don’t have a mobile version of your website or a mobile style sheet that you use for folks that are on let’s say an iPhone what you may find is that you’ve got a lower conversion rate for those kinds of users.

So the question then becomes is the conversion rate so low that I actually don’t want to buy this traffic. And if it is, then what you can do is you can obviously configure your Adwords settings to stop showing your ads to folks that are on a mobile device.  But that’s a good example of a Secondary Dimension.  Again, taking a campaign and then slicing and dicing it in some other way .

Philip:  And the Secondary Dimension stuff is phenomenally powerful.  I guess the challenge for users is that there’s just so many ways you can slice and dice that where do you start.  Now you’ve just touched on a really good one but there’s thousands of different dimensions you could look at by match type for example.  You could look at anything you wanted.  So any words of wisdom or direction that – there’s just so many different ways, what do you start looking at?

Nick:   I think that’s a good question.  I think one of the things you want to do, not just for analyzing your Adwords campaign but really for anything that you’re going to do from analytics perspective is have a business question.

So have a business question that you’re trying to answer.  I’m not a big fan of what I call report surfing where you kind of click around and wait for something to jump out at you in the data.

So I think sit down before you spend too much time inside of Google Analytics or any other analytics package for that matter and really actually write out in complete sentences some important business questions about your online presence that you would really want to answer with your analytics tool.

There’s really no list I can give of like here’s the top three ways to use secondary dimensions because every one’s business is different and every one’s goals are different.  So what I would say is if you’ve actually clearly articulated the kinds of questions that you feel are important for your business before you start jumping into all of the data, you’ll find that I think you’ll have a much easier time getting to those actionable insights that you are looking for.

Philip:  Beautiful.  Very well explained.  So let’s move on now – I’m conscious of time and we could speak for days on this stuff.  I know that one of the things that you talked about when I heard you speak was the Day Parting report.  Can you explain a little bit about what that is and why we’d want to look at that?

Nick:   Absolutely.  So the Day Parting report, it’s one of these ones that’s so simple but I still love it because it’s one that’s sort of under utilized and there’s a lot of great insight here just waiting to be discovered but a lot of folks haven’t used it before for some reason.

So Day Parting is a term that comes really out of the radio or television marketing world and it’s the concept of essentially different parts of the day hence the name but in a radio context for example you might have something like the morning drive and the evening drive and then you’ve got the times when fewer people are listening to the radio like the afternoon, the middle of the night.

So day parting really comes out of the offline world but it’s also important in the online world and so what happens is we tend often to not really get any deeper than the aggregate level of data when we do our analysis and what you may kind of fall victim to is seeing a report that says, “Hey! Your conversion rate from Adwords is 5%.”  And you might say, “Wow, 5% sounds really good.  I’m a happy camper.”

But what you’d find if you were to dig down into the Day Parts report here just to give you an example is you might find that there are some times in the day where your conversion rate is 10% or 12% or 20%.  Other times in the day where your conversion rate is quite poor like 1%, 2% or 3%.

These are just made up numbers but the idea here is your traffic isn’t the same all the time and you can kind of get that impression if all you ever do is look at your aggregate data but you want to do is dig a little bit deeper and figure out what’s that sweet spot, what’s the time of day where I can really capitalize on some high quality traffic.

So different businesses will find different times in the day but to give you an example let’s say you’re trying to sell pizza online.  It’s sort of obvious what times of day would do really well – evening, into the night.  Around breakfast time, you probably don’t have as good of a conversion rate and people looking for adverts on pizza isn’t quite there yet.

So what you want to do is make sure that you are Bidding In Line With Value.  So Bidding In Line With Value is a hugely important concept for Adwords.  The idea there is again the value of the traffic that Adwords brings you isn’t always the same.  It fluctuates up and down at different times of the day.

So when the value is highest you want to bid the highest.  You want to as aggressive as possible in capturing that traffic.  When that traffic becomes less valuable because it’s the wrong time of day or it’s the wrong day of the week, let’s say.

That’s when you want to dollar your bids down, you don’t want to be paying as much for traffic that isn’t actually worth as much to you.  So a big sort of missed, maybe even the biggest missed optimization opportunity that we see is that people don’t bid in line with value and a big way to kind of get your head around that is understand when you traffic really is most valuable is to use this day time report.

Now the report itself is very simple.  All it does is it spits out the data for your campaign broken down by the hour of the day.  So if you want to compare how 2:00 in the morning performs compared to 2:00 in the afternoon it becomes very, very simple to do that.  On the Adwords side you’ve got all kinds of tools that will then let you dynamically change your bids in line with the different days of the week or the hours of the day.

So again, that Day Parts report, a great way to drill down, get away from those aggregate numbers that don’t help us very much and really understand where are some of these areas where I can really take advantage of the fact the I’m getting some really high quality traffic in a two or three or four hour window of the day.

Philip:  So let’s say we’re converting really well around lunch time, maybe a four hour window.  So we decide to use Ad scheduling within Adwords and control our spend so ads are only – sorry, control the time that we’re going to show the ads just in that window.  Then we also decide that we’ve made some ad copy changes and we let that run and we start seeing results improving.

Clearly you’re mudding the waters because you’re doing two different things which could be effecting the result.  How do you  – what do you suggest?  Do you think you should be changing just one, just your budget at one point and just your ad copy the period after that?  How do you get around that?

Nick:    Well you bring up a great point which that any time you’re trying to sort of make a change and evaluate the results, the more levers you pull, the less sure you can be of which change really drove the observed performance change.

So if you not only – let’s say you changed your bids but also you change the ads and then you observe some kind of change in the performance, how do you know which one of those things really cause what you saw.  So we talked about secondary dimensions and that’s a great way to get around this.

Let’s say you’re looking at the day parts report, you’ve got this report here that’s telling you how your ads perform for every hour of the day.  One of the things you can do is you could add a secondary dimension to actually show you which ad somebody saw at that time.

Let’s say you had a couple of different versions of your ad running, you’d be able to see okay, at 8:00 in the morning what are the two ads that my users saw and which one of them performed better.  So you’d be able to not only figure out at the high level which hours of the day are the most lucrative but also if different ads worked better at different times, you’d also be able to see that using that secondary dimension.

Philip:  Beautiful.  Too easy.

Nick:   This is one of those ones that – I had this aversion to the gurus out there that tell you that everything is so easy and there’s these magic bullets that you can achieve great things.

I’m more in the camp where you got to put in the work and do your homework and do all that kind of thing but this report, the Day Parts report, it really is just dead simple.  I think the reason that people don’t use it is not because it’s too difficult to interpret the data or to use the data to take action, it’s just that people don’t know it’s here.

Philip:  Yeah I think secondary dimension for me is probably one of the most under utilized and highly valuable functionality.

Nick:   Absolutely, I’d say a big lesson for analysis whether it’s analyzing Adwords or anything else is – if you want to get actionable insight you really have to get away from aggregate types of numbers.

If you are spitting out reports that say here’s how much we spent on Adwords this month or this week or even, here’s a campaign breakdown of our spend or our conversions.  It’s really not good enough, what you’ve got to do is really slice and dice that data to get down to the point where you are really answering very specific questions, such as which version of my ads work best at 8 o’clock in the evening.

That’s a very specific question and once you start getting insights at that kind of level of granularity, it become very easy actually to take action on them.

Philip:  I was looking through my notes from your presentation at Gauge in New York and one of the quotes, one of the things I had written in large letters and underlined on my notepad was “The more you segment your Adwords data, the more money you will make” period.

Nick:    Yeah, that’s really how I try to boil it down.  So again, getting as far away from these sort of aggregate types of reports and really drilling down and doing our homework, doing the segmentation.  And again, what it really comes back to, I think a lot of folks ask what’s the best way to segment, right?

And I love that people want to segment but again, you are really going to help yourself out if you start with a key business question.  So what are the things that really matter for your business?

What are kinds of metrics that are most important to your success?  Start asking some hard business questions around those metrics, that’s really going to help you segment and drill down inside of this vast sea of data that analytics will give you.

Philip: There’s some absolute gold in this interview Nick, so really appreciative about that.  Maybe we can close on what is the one thing you would like Google Analytics to innovate on or to add into their functionality?

Nick:   That’s a great question and I think one of the areas that people have struggled with in the Adwords world for a long time is some of these non search formats.  So you can do a lot with your Adwords account beyond just kind of the traditional paid search listings.

So you can do things like display advertising in all of its forms, so that’s image ads and video ads and flash ads and all kinds of new ways that Google is offering you to be able to some advertising outside of search.

Usually what happens is the measurement piece for those kinds of formats has always sort of lagged behind a bit and so I think that’s an area where if Google wants to sell display advertising to smaller or medium size businesses, they are really going to have to give those kinds of businesses the ability to measure that advertising the same way that they’ve given those businesses the way to measure search.

I think they’re not quite there yet.  So folks that are listening, it’s pretty common to have had a bad experience with what’s called the display network or the content network where you’re doing things like banner ads or image ads.

A big part of that is it’s very difficult to optimize those based on hard measurements and so I think Google’s come a long way with that and I think they are going to continue to do that but I think that that’s the sort of the next frontier I think for a lot of businesses is that ultimately you get to a point where you’ve got search pretty well optimized, you can’t really squeeze more juice out of search by maintaining your ROI.

So I think display is again that next avenue once you got search down.  How can I reach out to my customers before they search through display ads and I think the more that Google can do to equip us to measure display ads as well as search I think the more their going to see their own growth and revenue through advertisers really adopting displays.

I think that’s an area of need still maybe where Analytics hasn’t quite caught up to par but something I’m pretty confident that they are going to be addressing pretty aggressively.

Philip:  Nice.  Do you know when they are going to be adding back that functionality around exporting reports as PDF format?  I guess that’s the big bitch isn’t it with this new interface?

Nick:   Well it’s amazing, you think about the kinds of things that Google is able to do with Google Analytics, the amount of data they are able to collect, the power of segmentation that they are able to give you.

Really, if you stop and think about it, it’s actually quite amazing.  And then you think about some of the things that are missing like you’re not able to export a PDF of a report so there are some of those things where you just can’t believe that it’s missing but it’s true.

So things like email scheduling of reports and PDF exports, if you are someone who has used both versions of Google Analytics that are available right now, you’ve probably noticed that some of those things are missing from the new version.  I think that the comforting line right now are those things right now are very actively being addressed so you should expect to see those things soon.

I wish I could give you a hard date but even if I knew I probably couldn’t tell you.  But absolutely, all those little things that are some of the pain points with the new version that people kind of miss from the old one, all those things will be updated so that there’s total parity and then you’ll be able to really focus on all the great things about the new interface.

Philip:  You’ve been incredibly generous with your time Nick and given us some absolute gold in there.  Any plans to come to Australia, we’ve got some good micro breweries we can show you.

Nick:   Hey I’d love to come, I think it’s all a question of who’s paying so talk to the high ups here on my side and see if we can’t make that happen.

Philip:  Beautiful, we look forward to seeing you and we’ll be definitely going out for a pale ale or two.

Nick:    Sounds good, I’m looking forward to it.

Philip:  How can people find you online?

Nick:  Couple of different ways.  If you want to check out Cardinal Path, just www.cardinalpath.com.  I’m also on all the various social networks, too many to manage these days it seems like.  I try to tweet analytics related tips and tricks and articles on Twitter @twitter.com/analyticsnick, all one word.

Philip:  Great, thanks again Nick.

Nick:    No problem Philip, thanks for having me.

Danny Dover lead the SEO team at SEOmoz, the world’s leading SEO software company. He was heavily involved in growing their blog readership to 100,000 readers PER DAY!

He was a big part of the success of Open Site Explorer (the best link analysis tool on the web). He has also spoken at SEO conferences all over the world.

His SEO Secrets book on Amazon is getting awesome reviews.

If you thought he would know a thing or 2 about SEO, you’d be right…

Listen to this great interview where we discuss how to do one of the most fundamental SEO activities – link building.

You can learn more about his SEO Secrets book, get inspired reading his Life Listed blog, or follow him on Twitter 

His email is: Danny [AT] intruigingideas.com

If you prefer to read:

Philip:            So Danny you’ve consulted with some of the biggest brands on search engine optimization like Facebook and Microsoft.  You’ve led a search optimization team for probably the most respected SEO tool set company in the world, SEO Moz.

You wrote for the blog – were involved with the SEO blog which had about 80,000 readers per day which is pretty phenomenal.

You were involved with the Open Site Explorer which was essentially down loading the internet of ten trillion links or something like that.  You’ve written a book on search engine optimization which is being translated into numerous languages.  It’s had fantastic reviews on Amazon.

You’ve spoken all over the world.  So is there anything you haven’t achieved yet in search engine optimization?

Danny:            Oh well, I’m still working on my personal side, I’ve done all this work for other people and I’m just now working on my own stuff.

Philip:              So I think you ticked all the boxes, there seems to be the words ‘expert’ and ‘ninja’ and ‘guru’ seem to be thrown around pretty recklessly these days but I think you ticked all those boxes.

Danny:            I appreciate that, thank you.

Philip:              What are you upto these days?

Danny:            So I’m working for AT&T doing SEO strategy for the company, primarily focused on Yellow Pages.com, YP.com so it’s been a lot of fun.  It’s very different from what I’d done in the past.  The changes I make now will effect generally about 30 million different pages per any given change or any different like template updates.  So that’s a lot of fun.

Then I’ve been traveling a lot.  I traveled I spent the last nine months in South America going to various places, doing various things, and I am back now in the States and will be here for the next nine months or so.

Philip:              Nice, pretty, that sounds pretty awesome lifestyle.  I wonder if you give the listeners a bit of a background to your role at SEO Moz and maybe talk very briefly what SEO Moz is?

Danny:            Absolutely.  So I started that SEO Moz I think about four years ago at this point, might even be a little longer.   SEO Moz was originally a SEO consulting company, I was employee number 3 or 4 and we started just like all consulting companies do just doing local brands and kind of moving up and up and we had a blog that was quite popular.

SEO Moz blog gained a lot of readers, I think today it has about 100,000 daily readers.  We started working with bigger companies as you mentioned Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Disney, all these big names.

From that we learned a ton and gave away all our information for free as the CEO of the company Rand Fishkin is really the person who taught me the most that I’ve learned from a single person about SEO.

I was just kind of experimenting and learning from him who was experimenting as well.  So about two years ago SEO Moz changed from doing consulting to doing entirely SEO software.  So we’re working on a pro web out there and about a year ago I left SEO Moz and joined the ranks of AT&T doing SEO strategy for yp.com.

Philip:              Cool so I use the SEO Moz tool set and there’s some great stuff in there so if listeners haven’t checked it out, I encourage you to do so.

Danny:            Yeah, it’s a great tool.

Philip:              Today we’re going to talk a little bit about link building.  Let’s just start at the beginning, give a bit of an overview for people as how does link building fit in and  why is it important?  How does it fit into search engine optimization?

Danny:            Sure, so link building is from a very basic level, is the art and science of driving links from other websites.  This turns out to be an extremely important factor.  From the research that we had done at SEO Moz and the research I’ve seen from other companies about two thirds more or less of all the components  go into the Google Algorithms going to web pages have to do with links one way or another.

They started a long time ago with Google, when they found that using links to create web pages rather than other social sites people had been using before turned out to be a abnormally good way of finding relevant useful pages.

And so SEO’s spend a lot of time building links and trying to get links from other websites to their websites with relevant anchor text trying to help them rank in search engines.

Philip:              So for businesses listening, what’s the starting point?  I guess understanding the links that you have right now would be a good place to start.

Danny:            Yeah I think that’s the first part.  Or what you’re going to find if you’re like most people on the internet is that the vast majority of websites are going to be going to your home page and they will be doing that with the anchor text of your brand or your domain name.

So let’s say you own example.com.  Most of your links for an average website are going to say example.com and they are going to go directly to your homepage.

From that, it helps you rank for your brand name on the first page of Google.  So if you’re example.com and if someone searches example, it’s very likely just based off of your organic links, you’re going to rank towards the top for whatever is your brand is.  You see this all the time with that, is like what your PDR or yes, Wikipedia and these big ones are going to rank no. 1 for the name simply by virtue of people linking to their homepage with the anchor text of their brand.

Philip:              Okay, so that’s – so most businesses will be having that already.  So how can you work out – what’s the best way to see what links you have today for any website?

Danny:            It’s the tool I use called Open Site Explorer.  It’s a free tool and just to be clear, it’s an SEO Moz tool and I’m biased in that I helped develop it, I helped to build it, at least work on the designs for it.

So what that does is it uses the index that SEO Moz has on the internet so an index a lot like what Google has or Yahoo has downloading all the web pages on the internet and looking at the links that are in between them.  That tool is free.

Yahoo is the biggest contender, they also offer a tool called Yahoo Site Explorer.  They do something similar but unfortunately that tool’s on its way out as Yahoo search technology is going over to Microsoft with the Bing search engine that tool because of that.

Philip:              Yeah it’s a bit of a pity but I mean I think Open Site Explorer, I may be a bit biased too because I use Open Site Explorer but I use it for a very good reason.  I think it’s the best tool out there and they also give you some other insightful data and kpi’s around the quality of links.

Danny:            Yeah I agree, the reason we originally built that tool was because we weren’t happy with some of the aspects of Yahoo Site Explorer.  We were happy that Yahoo was nice enough to give us the information but we wanted more so we decided to build our own.

Philip:              You’d think that Bing would…

Danny:            You would, yeah…

Philip:              Take over that tool and rebrand it and improve it.  I mean it’s a really, it’s a really pretty valuable tool.

Danny:            Yeah, well see what Bing does in that area so the team over there is a very, very smart group, very innovative and they really understand marketing brand names specifically so I would not be surprised if they come up with something in the future but from every channel I’ve heard, it’s not been in the pipeline at this moment.

Philip:              Okay, so step one for business owners listening to the podcast is to visit Open Site Explorer, type in your business URL and have a look at the all the links that you’ve got at the moment and sort of get an understanding of what the anchor text is.  So maybe just get clear what’s your good definition of anchor text?

Danny:            Sure, so the way to explain that is just by example.  The most common link that you see online generally speaking is ‘click here’ link.  So this is the word that people actually use when they’re placing their link.

The interesting part about this is it tells the search engines what a given link is relevant for so if it says ‘click here for information about shoes’, you know the link is about shoes for example or if it’s – a lot of times they mention the brand name so if it’s ESPN it’s very likely that link will be going to something about ESPN.

So it’s this actual human written language generally that is used for humans to click on.

Philip:              Right, so sometimes an anchor text may be the same as the actual web address that it’s going to like ‘www.facebook.com’ or something but sometimes it will be the English that you’re reading.

I think of it a bit like a signpost.  It’s giving that sort of information to the search engines that wherever it’s pointing that’s what that place is about.

Danny:            Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Philip:              Okay, so there in Open Site Explorer, they’ve looked at the links, they’ve typed in their own domain name, they can now see the links and the anchor text of those links that are pointing to their website today.

Let’s say they’ve got a 100 links in there.  Then what?

Danny:            Well now that you are working for your main term.  Let’s assume you’ve got to that point where you’re ranking for your brand, you have your basic off site optimization covered.  Then you start expanding, figure out what terms that people are searching that’s relevant to your content or to your product or service and then you need to start making your web page relevant, popular for those terms.

So my favourite example of this is we deal with yp.com a lot is that we use the legacy taxonomy of the yellow pages, the physical book translated over to the internet a long time ago.  And so all of our internal things we use the word attorney.

It turns out from doing research we found that people are not generally searching for attorney, they are searching for the phrase lawyer.  And so we’re going through an optimization on all our information and all of our pages to be relevant for the term lawyer which is what people are actually searching for as opposed to attorney.

Philip:              Cool.  And in terms of the keyword tools that you use to work out the search volumes for that, what type of tools do you recommend?

Danny:            There’s two that we use.  By far the one that I think is most popular and to tell you frankly the most useful is the Google External Keywords Adwords tool.  So Google has this part it’s called Adwords, they use it as an advertising platform and they have a free tool that helps you analyse the data working around those ads.

So they give you a general idea of how competitive a term is and how many people are searching for it any given month.  So that’s the primary tool I use.

The secondary tool I use are various analytics programs so I can see what people are searching for when they come to my website.  My scope on that tool is a bit more limited and it’s only to track traffic that’s on my site but if it’s a big enough website, you can stop traffic.

It can give you a good idea the language people are using to try to find your site for various web pages on your site.

Philip:              Cool, yeah I mean that Google Adwords Keywords Tool really is an awesome tool.  I’m really – I think we need to do a special podcast episode  just on keyword research.  I think it’s one of the trickiest areas and a pretty time consuming area specially for a business owner who is doing it for the first time.

There seems to be a lack of direction or so many questions on which way to head and there’s so much time you can spend doing it so I think we need to have a separate episode on that, maybe we’ll have to get you back.

But let’s assume we’ve used that tool and you’ve got your list of 20 or 30 keywords, you’re optimizing your website for it, now you’re looking at taking the link building – well you want to start your link building process.

Danny:            Sure, at this point you’ll have a list of different terms you want to rank for, say we’re talking about widgets.  You’re going to have widgets and you’ll have variations on that.  It’s a longer term thing so blue widgets or floating widgets or sinkable widgets, longer ways of expressing this but it will be less searches but they’ll add up to greater than your head terms.

You have a list like this, your next step is you’re going to want to start building content around these ideas that you are relevant for it and then putting practices to build links.  We’ll go into this a little bit more going forward as you make your page popular.

When I look at SEO I kind of broadly break it into two areas – relevancy and popularity.  Relevancy is the content on the page and the links pointing at the page that have to explain to search engines in the terms they can understand.  These are computers, they’re not human, they can’t understand and image like humans can but they can understand certain signals.

Relevancy is about if you’re writing about dogs you use words like Fido and say, leashes and slobbering that is likely that you’re talking about a dog.  Computers and specifically search engines, they are smart enough to be able to figure this out whereas popularity is almost entirely social signals that are coming from other websites linking to it.

If there is a website that is on the internet about dogs, say it’s a Wikipedia article, it tends to happen in a way and this is again very broadly speaking but it tends to happen that the most popular and most useful pages from a social element, from a human perspective are also the ones that tend to get the most links.  There is various strategies involved with that but the search engines can use these popularity metrics that is separate from relevancy matrix to rank pages and get you on the front page.

Philip:              Cool, so what is the difference between – may we touch on quantity versus quality of links.  You are talking about popular number of links coming from multiple sites because its popular content that sort of thing.  Quantity versus quality is obviously is really in important concept with link building.

Danny:            Yes it is.  When Google first came out with this very broad metric called page rank.  Page rank is just at its name implies is a way for ranking pages on the internet.  What they found was that a link coming from someone like the New York Times is a more valuable link, has a lot more authority behind it than a link coming from say Joe Shmo’s blog.

This algorithm that was developed about ten years ago took this into account, the popularity of the page given that, right?  So when you’re talking about links, it’s not about quantity necessarily, you don’t want to get a million links from a bunch of spammy blogs, you want to get as many high quality links.  Links from pages that have many, many high links to themselves, say the New York Times or Washington Post to your websites that Google sees as popularity measures.

Philip:              And can you still rely on the page rank as a metric because there’s a lot of…

Danny:            Yeah, that’s important.  I want to talk about that.  This was the algorithm that was in place about ten years ago at this point.  And it’s actually available online when Larry and Sergey did it as a thesis.  You can actually read it.

That algorithm is now just a very, very small signal in the 300 or 400 signals that Google uses.  So I think a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out how to game that algorithm.  I think that’s the wrong direction to go into it.

I believe that the same kind of general ideas that popularity and relevancy still certainly exists.  I mean this is what I see when I’m doing work with different clients.  I work with this general concept still apply but the algorithm itself has changed.  It’s go lots more different facets to it.

Philip:              We got a bit of background noise there, that’s okay.  So what do you mean by that?

Danny:            Google will release – you can still get this data from Google on what page rank is for a given page.  It will be a scale of 1 out of 10 on an exponential scale which means that to rank between 1 and 2 will be ten times as hard as it will between 3 and 4.  Then they round it to single digits sort of 10 I guess.

This used to be kind of the holy grail of SEO, this used to be the one metric that you look at.  That’s not true anymore, now there are hundreds of different signals.  So things like where are links coming from, what was the content of the page the link was coming from?  Is it about dogs that’s also relevant to you and then more social signals that we’ve seen more recently, the amount of tweets for example or the amount of Facebook likes.

Again what we’re looking at now when do search engine optimization is a whole big tossed salad with lots of different ranks that are each effective but only in small ways.

Philip:              So that sounds pretty complex from a business owner’s perspective.  How can we – how can they think of it in a simpler form or how do they take action in terms of building links or evaluating quality?

Danny:            Well it is very complex so you kind of have to look at it in a very broad context.  The way that I like to think about and I think is the best way to look at it from a long term perspective is look at it from a human perspective and not from a search engine.

So pretend you’re talking to people not computers and if you see a link from a trusted source by human beings, there’s a good chance that that is also going to be a trusted source from search engine perspective.

So again, talked about the newspapers, use that example several times.  There are also government sites, things like educational resources, you have leaders in any given niche, you have big brands that exist in the real world, all of these are going to be trusted by general human being walking on the street and they’ll likely also be trusted by search engines.

Philip:              And SEO Moz has some quality criteria doesn’t it where it starts ranking the quality of individual links?

Danny:            Yeah so SEO Moz has a couple of metrics.  Moz Rank and Moz Trust are the two sort of easiest to understand I think.  What this is is SEO Moz’s attempt to put a numerical score to these kind of trust and powerful like power metrics I described earlier.

A website like from a government sources or from an educational source will tend to have a higher Moz trust than say Joe Shmo’s blog for example.

Philip:              And is it trying to replicate a little bit of the page rank algorithm in terms of just putting a number to quality essentially?

Danny:            Yeah that was some of the reasons the original was created – it’s now being used I think like how page ranking is being used today and it’s one metric that’s used in addition to many, many other competitive metrics.

Philip:              Okay.  That’s a little bit about – so quality is pretty complex and there may not be some listeners may be thinking so what now?  And it is quite complex but we are trying to keep it simple and there is a lot of positive stuff or a lot of proactive activity you can do with your link building so let’s maybe go back to where we were in our example around you’ve understood your current links in Open Site Explorer and you see that you have quite a lot of those links for your branded terms so your ranking for your branded term at the moment.  You know what your keywords are you want to target, you’ve got them on list next to you, you now want to start increasing the number of links that you actually have to your website, what do we do?

Danny:            Well so now is when you have to create – this is actually I think a lot of us feel is most the fun part and all of us SEO’s think it’s the hardest part. I agree with both those sentiments.

At this point you need to entice other people online to link to you and you need to be clever about this.  Some of the most – my kind of one size fits all solutions that I found works is to create a blog.  So you actually write as a human being to other human beings and if you write interesting content, you provide useful information, it is very likely that people will link back to your blog post.  We see this all the time working out all the while.  So this is kind of my first one size fits all solutions is to create great content and entice people to link back to it.

Philip:              Cool.  It’s a good way.

Danny:            So this the main one I do.  But there’s actually lots and lots of different tactics and I think this is the more interesting part of SEO in that you have to figure out ways of how to get the people who are able to link.  In the industry we call these people the Linkeratti, these are the people who have blogs themselves that are able to produce hyperlinks or people who have websites of any kind that can produce these links.

So you need to figure out who these people are and what it is that entices them to link out to other pages.  I guess a blog is the first one but also I like going more for my just a natural networking perspective so actually physically meeting people and not asking them directly for a link but providing them with resources that are helpful to them that they find useful to share with their readers or share with the people that they are writing content for.

Let’s see – a couple of examples that – let’s see I’ve been working with smaller businesses a long time just working with other content, other business partners that already exist so if you are in a supply chain working for another supply chain company is to say now, here is some resource that we have and we’ve already done this process and you kind of explain your process out on your blog or however it is you are producing content.  And provide a lot of the tricks and tactics that you found work for you and then give those out freely in the world so you can both help people and hopefully get links back in return.

Philip:              So the simplest way really is and it’s – I guess there’s not a lot of shortcuts but to the quality content and spreading the work and getting people to link to quality content?

Danny:            This is the first idea, right?  Create something of value that people link to but in any SEO conference you go to you going to hear this phrase over and over again: build links, build links, write quality content, write quality content.  And they are absolutely true.  This is in all the campaigns that are ever done.  This is what we do.

The problem and the thing that makes this difficult is doing it in new ways and finding things that will work for any given whichever specific niche you’re in.  So these two things are true and this is what you should be trying to do, this is the direction you should go.

You need to find the tactics to actually make this happen.  Tactics that come to mind are explaining business tactics you already have, you can ask your customers for links right in your receipts or to say, ‘hey if you like this, here’s our useful resource.’

You can bind the links your competitors already have to tools like Open Site Explorer, Yahoo Site Explorer and see where they’ve gotten links from and then go reach out to those people.  Or you can do interviews like this, you can have some kind of bio line like saying, there’s the link there where you can buy articles about given topic and then just give them for free to other people who are able to produce links.

You kind of have to get into the trenches, you have to be creative.  I think this is what separates SEO from the other marketing channel is in that it’s a lot harder to find and it’s a lot harder to put into a stringent process.  You need to be creative and you need to be working with people.

Philip:              I think I was actually chatting about this with a client yesterday.  Link building has to become a part of your normal business processes and ideally you don’t outsource it or you can outsource it but it needs to be part of your daily process.

When you are interacting with a customer or a supplier or some other third party or maybe speaking at an event, you constantly need to be thinking about how can you get a link from that relationship.

Danny:            That’s absolutely right and this goes back to what we were talking about originally.  A link from a search engine perspective is about popularity or about validity or authenticity.  So you want people to leave a record of that publicly online so that the search engines can then call it out, read it and give you credit for it.

Philip:              I spoke at an event the other day and the bio was going to go up on their website and without requesting anything about link anchor text, I would have just linked to my domain, with my website name to my home page.  But because it’s part of my thinking I was able to craft that in a way that and it was no skin off their nose, they were totally happy to do it and I just got some really good anchor text in that link.

It got on a valuable website, it didn’t cost me anything and I could actually see when Google indexed that page, the ranking for that particular keyword jumped by 15 places.

Danny:            Wow.

Philip:              And I think should be thinking about – that was just one example of just a normal conversation that I had or email backwards and forwards between a third party on a day to day basis.

If link building is part of your mindset you can get those really good quality links which would have been quite hard to get just sitting with a blank sheet of paper and trying to think where can I get links from.  It needs to be part of everyday’s process.

Danny:            I completely agree.  Where’s your marketing – your people work on different ads – you all seem to have people working on aspects for chain links providing something of value that entices the correct people to link back to you with the correct anchor text.

Philip:              So what do you say to the client and I’m sure you’ve heard it many times that we don’t have time to create this content but we want to rank highly on search engines and say we want to get lots of links?

Danny:            Well it’s usually a…

Philip:              Go get Google Adwords…

Danny:            Yeah right, you PPC and you can pay for it.  If you want it the cheap way it’s going to take a lot more work.

So I mean that point – we look for ways to create content so there’s people on the team who can do it or it’s something we have to outsource.  The goal here is to find again like I said multiple times interviews.  You need to find some way of enticing the people who are able to link to the given page.

Philip:              Let’s maybe take – bring it to life a little bit.  Let’s say you are a law firm inMelbourne.

Danny:            Sure

Philip:              Let’s say you are divorce lawyers inMelbourne.  Maybe not a particularly happy topic or you don’t think you’ve got a huge amount of interesting content to give away.  I think a lot of business owners think that initially until they maybe break through their barrier.  What would you recommend in terms of content or link building strategy for something like that?

Danny:            For link building for a divorce law attorney, you’re right, you need to focus on things that are more interesting or in the limelight rather than on terms that are sadder, more highly technical parts of it.

So I like to always think about this kind of content like from what we see in pop magazines right?  And so you see those top ten lists and those work really well like ezines, they work pretty well.  You see these awesome celebrity things, celebrity gossip magazines.  Things work pretty well – offline they work pretty well, online.

From that I would focus on big divorce stories and put a new perspective on it.  You’re talking about say divorce lawyers inMelbourne, you need to talk about big celebrity divorces, something that’s enticing to a lot of people.  And you provide a new legal perspective on it you wouldn’t be able to read in a pop magazine.

You put this out on your blog and you’re able to entice the people who care a lot about these celebrities and care a lot about divorce mention on a completely new perspective on the same story.

Philip:              And there are ways of outsourcing the content production.  I just encourage people to try their own or direct their processes  as much as possible so the content is created with the right feel, the right brand, the right style that fits in well with your business.

Danny:            Yeah that’s absolutely right.  Outsourcing content actually turns out to be very hard because you lose a lot of the voice from it.  That’s what good writing is all about, is about including voice in it and having a real person talk to a real person.

When you outsource I found a lot of that gets diluted unless you’re able to highly control the situation.  The most effective way I found of doing this is hiring interns so people are actually in your business, they kind of get an idea of the day to day things and have a feeling of the hierarchy in the company and just kind of get a voice, kind of feel for what the company is and who the people are that make it up, and then have them right the content.

This is helpful for them because it gives them a resume booster and it helps them get real life experience in understanding how a company works.  It also helps you by getting someone in the organization writing the content inexpensively.

Philip:              Yeah, another tip that I like that I think works really well and we sort of do it for this podcast is doing audio interviews, you could as the business owner or the sales manager or the marketing manager interview key people within the business, record it with your iPhone, with an app or whatever it is, a microphone or on your desktop or laptop and then get those interviews transcribed and then that’s sent to a copy writer.

So essentially you’ve created the content yourself but you’re getting somebody to transcribe it for you and it’s a pretty cost effective way to produce good content on it.

Danny:            Yeah I think that’s an excellent tip.  It’s a lot easier to have a conversation with someone than it is to create original content like textually and so I found that doing exactly what you’re doing what you said doing these verbal interviews is a quick and cheap way to do that.

Philip:              Yeah I mean everyone can speak but not everybody can write or if they can write, some people find it a very time consuming process.

Danny:            Absolutely.

Philip:              So where are we at?  What other ideas around getting links?

Danny:            So I talked about these bigger, broader strategies, now I’ll give you a lot more specific tactics.  Again you can vary by whatever industry you’re in but this will give you starting points.

We talked about interviews and we talked about few of the top ten lists but what I like to do is either guest blogs and so offering a new perspective on something someone else is writing about.  You find this especially with bloggers who are in the linkeratti, people who are able to produce links.  They are always looking for more content.  So if you can provide that for free and you happen to put a link back on it, that’s really, really helpful.

When I first started out, I didn’t have anything on my resume yet, I did a lot of SEO work for charities.  I did it for a local preschool, I did it for a couple of organizations that I thought were interesting in their field of work and so I did free SEO work for them in return for links.

I met a lot of people who’ve done quite well, some kind of easy solution on the website itself, blood pressure calculator. A friend did a very successful  calculator – he calculated how much your body’s worth, after you die, right?  Various ideas and it’s a lot of fun, people go through it and you can get a lot of links from it.  So these simple calculators – use it for fun or actual business reasons.

You can write ‘how to’s’ specially business owners and people who are working are going to know how to do a lot of things that can be valuable so if it’s a lawyer or if it’s a doctor, right, it not be a ‘how to’ on how to do brain surgery but it could be a how to what process to use in the morning to prepare yourself to get to that level where you are able to do brain surgery.  This is applicable to much more people, kind of get them into that mindset rather than the very few people who can actually do brain surgery.

It’s hard to – everyone is an expert in something.  It’s just a matter of figuring out how to explain that and put it into a very simple list that’s easy to digest so that other people can benefit from that.  So a ‘how to’ or more broadly speaking a tutorial.

This is how I started also is doing  a lot of tutorials.  You can do this either from a web version like you had mentioned and have it transcribed or just go through a process.  You’re learning SEO, you’re learning link building, hey these are all the things I’ve tried, this is what works, this is what hasn’t worked and you’re providing real value to people and it’s information that you just learned because you’re out there experimenting.

Philip:              Those are some great tips.  I think it’s really handy as well when you get into – the hardest part around this thinking about quality content is actually just getting started but once you get on a role about all your customers, what are their frequently asked questions and what are these ‘how to’ tips, you actually – it becomes quite easy to brainstorm it and I think during this brainstorming session with whoever is the best couple of people within your business to do it is a good place to start and gather all these ideas and then creating that content is so much easier and you’ve broken the back of it all, got past the hardest part.

Danny:            I agree and I also do want to stress that I thought it’s very difficult to continually produce a lot of content.  The trick I found with this is to put yourself to a schedule.  I work on a lot of lists, this is kind of how I organize my day to day, going through and check, check, check.  But specifically for content creation because there is so much creativity involved and there’s so much wiggle room, what I found is I force myself to do two a week regardless of circumstance, just if I can get those out the door.

Sometimes they are not as good as others, so far as there are more flat pieces than what I want but the process of getting them out the door then puts me into a habit.  I’m pretty well established as to how they work.  I can just start to pump out pieces of content that are pretty good and I can do it on a continual basis.

I mention this because I think this is actually the hardest part of content creation, it’s not so much the brainstorming but the continuing to do it day after day.

Philip:              Right so let’s assume we’ve created some quality content pieces for the divorce lawyer inMelbourne.  How do we go about getting those links?  Is just sending emails, making phone calls – it’s a very laborious process and it can take a huge amount of time.  Any thoughts how to deal with that as a business owner or a marketing manager?

Danny:            So the first thing you need to do is make sure that this content is actually accessible for people.  It can’t be behind any passwords, it can’t be hidden or encrypted in any way.  So it needs to be accessible to humans and to search engines.

So once you’ve made sure that is done, you can test that easily by having people outside the office trying to access the information or if you search for the actual URL in Google, many times you’ll see it gets in there pretty quickly.

The way to really, really help yourself with this is use a popular blogging platform.  I recommend WordPress, that’s what we use for most of my clients and for my personal site.

Philip:              Agreed.

Danny:            Yeah and WordPress is great because it’s already optimized to get the information out there and distribute it via RSS and you can do it through your email and you can do it through all these different things.

You need to make sure your content is accessible and that it is able to be distributed very easily.  Once you have that step down the next step is then to actually start distributing the information.

This is kind of those funny catch 22 situations in that if you don’t have an audience how do you spread it to more people and I think this is where social media has become really, really interesting.  You’ll find that you already have a small audience but just probably be outside your professional world or be in your personal world, it’ll be friends and family to start with.

You can start pushing things through your social networks and have your various employees start to do this also to their [0:34:54].  You can start to get kind of a following there, you can start to get information readily out so people will find it more attractive or more likely to share it with their friends who are more likely to be also interested in the same topic.

So you just have to keep producing, keep producing, keep producing.  I think that many people make mistakes with blogs thinking it can be an overnight success.  Really the most successful blogs that I have seen and that I’ve worked with, it takes a good year to really get it going and chugging along on itself to build its own audience.  So you got to expect that from the beginning.

Philip:              Okay so, that process, those links can happen essentially and naturally, right?  You’re just producing this quality content and it needs to be consistent and relentless.

Approaching specific parties, other websites, business owners, suppliers, all that sort of stuff, I think it’s important to have a process around how you are communicating with those things.

I know there’s another toolset – Raven Tools who sort of have a link building manager where you have a really good understanding of the process, the contact points, what links are outstanding, all that sort of stuff.  What are your thoughts there?  Does SEO Moz have something similar and any other strategies around managing the actual process of contact points?

Danny:            Well couple of thoughts about that.  I like Raven Tools a lot.  Their tools differs in that it uses links as assets you have and then monitors those, so if you move the link.  Let’s say a page disappears off the internet, it will send you an email so that you can then contact people who are responsible for that page being online.  I find that really useful, it’s really a more business like way of managing your assets even if these are virtual assets. So I like that tool a lot, I recommend people check it out.

Your second point there was how to build more links, what was that?

Philip:              Well the process – it can be a very laborious process so you’re making contacts, you’ve got your list of potential targets using Open Site Explorer, you’ve looked at your competitors link profile and you now want to make contact with these people but it can take multiple contact points.  They may be in various stages of responding back to you or ignoring you, whatever and I think there needs to be some control over their communication process and how successful you are.  It’s almost like a link management process, if that makes sense.

Danny:            Interesting.  Yeah, so – that interesting.  I don’t view it from that perspective.  I view it from a different kind of organic experience.

Philip:              Right.

Danny:            So trying to get into a new market what I’ll do first before I start doing the link building is kind of get an idea of what the space looks like as it exists online.  So let’s say we’re divorce attorneys, I’d go in and see where divorce attorneys are already online, are there forums or reading the blogs that already exist and try to get an idea of what this looks like and the language they’re using, what are their needs and who are the big names there.

Then once I start to understand that a little bit, then I start to interact in my community.  So I don’t go straight to the top and say, “Hey, can I have a link?” from whoever’s the biggest name in that industry.  Instead I start reading the blogs, commenting on them in a very – and I do this effectively in a natural way because you’re trying to learn about this industry.

You introduce yourself just like how you make friends in real life, you just do it online, trying to slowly make more and more connections.  Then from that I then distribute the content via social networks generally.  So, Twitter and then my Facebook page are two ways that I do business articles that I distribute like business posts.

Philip:              Okay, I understand.  So your emphasis is more around organically, having the quality content and then nurturing relationships and the links will happen naturally.

Danny:            Yes and it’s kind of intuitive, I found that’s the most successful way to do it and it takes a long time and I think that’s where most people don’t do it this way but I found that once you get the ball rolling, once you build momentum, it’ll just work automatically once you have these relationships, these texts, people will start spreading your content for you.

Philip:              Agreed, and that way you get much better quality links because it’s the people that you want as opposed to – if you’re looking to get short term links, you are looking to make contact with somebody out of the blue.  It’s like walking upto somebody in the bar, there’s no relationship building process and you’re not going to get the quality links

Danny:            Absolutely, to be quite frank, the emails that I get from people who I never talked to before and say, hey can I have a link back, I just delete those emails.  I don’t know if they exist.  They’ve wasted their time, they’ve wasted my time, that tactic just simply doesn’t work.

Philip:              Yeah I mean I think people were doing that maybe – it may have worked I don’t know five or eight years ago or something like that, that reciprocal link trading was very popular.

Danny:            Right.

Philip:              But I don’t think – I mean I get one of those, probably one or two of those emails every single day for the last five or six years.  I don’t think I’ve ever responded to one of them.

Danny:            Likewise.

Philip:              So maybe it’s a good question to get into – can you outsource this process?  I’m sure a lot of the listeners would have been spammed by all sorts of businesses offering to build 500 links for $5 bucks, all that sort of stuff, can you outsource this process without creating additional content.  Let’s say you do have some content on your site but you want to get somebody to get links essentially I guess fairly quickly 20 or 30 a month, reasonable quality links?

Danny:            Well, I think the answer is yes but it turns out that it’s very, very difficult to do.  I think it’s very similar to the great artists that we’ve seen – so Da Vinci is supposedly – he did create a lot of his artwork but he also hired a lot of amateur artists to fill in a lot of blanks, right?  So he painted this rough idea of the piece he wanted to create and then he’d bring in others to kind of fill in all the little pieces of it.

I think that’s kind of how link building has to do if you choose to outsource yourself.  Let me clear that, I don’t recommend that you choose to outsource it but if you find yourself that you need you have to, there’s some reason to do it.  You need to still be in control of the situation, you need to actually see the links that are getting built because it’s very easy to build a lot of scammy links that will actually – they won’t help you at all but they’ll cost you a lot of money.  Go ahead, sorry.

Philip:              No, no, no, carry on, carry on.

Danny:            Sure, so the most successful tactic I’ve seen for outsourcing links is finding people who will actually write articles based around the link.  So let’s say the topic’sMelbournedivorce attorneys.  There’s people who actually go out and write articles about this subject and they include in links that are relevant to it and then submit this to people who need the content so not to directories, not to article forums but bloggers who are trying to find content about this subject.  You then are able to outsource the service of producing content to these people.

Philip:              Right and you just touched on another link building strategy that was probably very popular couple of years ago and maybe less so now specially with Panda update around the article distribution and sending them to ezine articles.  What do you think about that strategy now?

Danny:            I’ve never liked that strategy, it used to work before the Panda update to a degree but I didn’t think it was very scalable, it gets you for low competitive keywords but it doesn’t help you with the super competitive keywords and so my recommendation is the same as it been for years on that one, is to not to participate in that.

Philip:              Agreed.  How do you think link building is going to evolve moving forward?  I mean essentially at the core of link building, your strategy that you defined around creating this quality content, it’s a pretty simple strategy isn’t it and it hasn’t really – that strategy hasn’t changed much and I don’t see that strategy changing too much going forward, maybe the tools to spread the news with new social media tools may change but any thoughts of the future of link building?

Danny:            Well it certainly looks like it is moving in the direction of being more socially based.  You seen things like Twitter and Facebook andLinkedin and Four Squareand all this but I think that too many people are over reacting right now  seeing that as the way to do link building today.  I think that’s just the direction it looks like we’re moving in.

So my advice there is to participate in social media as you see fit and use it as a distribution channel for your information but not to make that your core like marketing tactic.  You shouldn’t be trying to get as high like the – focusing on KPI’s like your amount of Twitter followers or your amount of Facebook fans.  Instead you should be focusing on continuing to create value on your website that other people recommend should link back to you or tweet back to you or Facebook right back to you.

Philip:              Right.  Any thoughts on – carry on.

Danny:            My point there being stay the course, it’s too early to jump ship into the social media, certainly explore the space but keep going the direction we’ve been going in for a long time and that we’ve seen proven results with.

Philip:              Yeah, I agree.  I mean I see social media as just a great way to spread your quality content.

Danny:            Right.

Philip:              Just sort of fanning the flames of what you are producing and make it more spreadable.  Anything – how important is competitive analysis around search optimization in general but mainly the link building process.  So going to Open Site Explorer, putting your competitors URL in there and having a look through all their links and trying to duplicate maybe some of what they’ve got.  Any points in doing that stuff?

Danny:            Yeah I think it’s tremendously helpful and the reason for that is these are people who have already succeeded in the niche that you’re trying to compete in and so you might as well use the same like figure out what tactics work for them and use that to your benefit rather than having to do more experimentation on your own.  So you might as well go out and get those links and content pieces that have already worked for your competitors and use those for your own.

Philip:              How did you find the book writing process Danny?  So you’re book Search Engine Optimization Secrets, people can find it in Amazon.  It’s doing fantastically well, it’s been translated into multiple languages.  It’s got 4½ stars out of 5 which is pretty awesome.  Congratulations!  Did you enjoy the process?

Danny:            Yeah, it was a very long process.  It took me almost two years to go through the whole thing.  It’s very, very different than blog writing so most of the writing I’m doing is been for blogs or various online articles and so obviously writing a book is very different.  It turns out it’s very difficult to update a book.  And so I had to put a lot of time to figuring out what content can I produce that is going to be evergreen, that’s going to stay valuable for years to come rather with blogs I tend to write more of this is what I’m seeing today and it might change some more but I can just update the post.  It was nice, it gave me more discipline and it forced me to take my writing more seriously in that I knew it was going to be tangible and it was going to spread.  It was going to spread all over the place, that I wouldn’t be able to take it back.  I mean it helped me mature in my writing and I think it really helped open my ideas to a bigger audience.

Philip:              Awesome.  And you’ve been involved in educational search optimization for a long time and you’ve interacted with so many people through your conferences, you’ve written a whole book on search optimization.  What are your thoughts on the biggest myths that a lot of business owners or marketing managers would have around the search engine optimization process?

Danny:            The biggest myths, well I think that anyone who thinks that SEO is easy, they’re certainly subscribing to a myth there.  I think it’s a very difficult thing, you have to deal with a lot of very, very smart people but I also think that’s what gets me up every morning.  I think that’s what makes it interesting.

I think that the other myth being the these things change very quickly.  This is generally true for technology, you have more [0:46:59] and you have all this various things that continue to evolve very, very fast specially relative to other technologies but SEO doesn’t seem like this guiding this big best practices or changing very much at all.  It’s still about creating something of value and enticing the correct people to have a link back to that but it’s still pretty much like they are interesting to everyday people that are both going to be able to drive sales via links.

So these ideas have been the same for as long as I’ve been doing this.

Philip:              Exactly that was my answer, I got a bit of a frustrated business owner stood at a conference I spoke at a couple of months ago and said Google made 500 changes to algorithm last year.  How do they expect small businesses to keep up with all these changes.  My response was exactly that.  Fundamentally search engine optimization hasn’t actually changed too much in the last five to seven years.  There’s quality content, yes there can be complex technical issues with your site but you can resolve those with the right consultant but it’s your won quality content and just understanding the basics.

Danny:            Yeah I absolutely agree.  I think – this article that I helped write, it’s called The Beginner’s Guide to SEO and I think if you go through and read that, that you’ll know 75% of what you need to know about SEO right there and for the small technical issues that you might rap against I think that’s a great reason to hire a consultant.  Or the other reason to hire a consultant is you just don’t have the resources that are important or the time to start implementing these things.

Philip:              That’s great, where can people find that resource?

Danny:            If you Google Beginner’s Guide to SEO, you’ll find it as the first result there.

Philip:              Of course, of course.

Danny:            That’s kind of the idea or I believe the URL is seomoz.org/the-beginners-guide-to-seo with hyphens where spaces would be in that title.

Philip:              Cool, nice.  That will be a great resource.  Where can people find you online Danny?

Danny:            You find me a couple of places.  You can find me at dannydover.com which will give you all my professional information and content information to be kind of generally updated.  And then you can find my personal blog at life listed.com which will chronicle this life list that I’ve been working on the last couple of years exploring the world and figuring out as much about life as I can.

Philip:              Beautiful, I’ve been reading through that list and there’s some good stuff on there that I’ve added to my list.

Danny:            Right, that’s great, that’s exactly why I’m doing it.  So I’m glad to hear that’s the case.

Philip:              And I see that visiting the Sydney Opera House was on there and that’s been ticked off, that’s where I met you I think two years ago.

Danny:            It was, yes.  That was the first time I was inSydneyand I absolutely loved it, hope to be able to explore more aboutAustraliaand really that part of the world coming up next year.

Philip:              Awesome, well be sure to look us up.

Danny:            Will do

Philip:              Great, thanks so much Danny

Danny:            Well I appreciate your time and I thank you very much and everyone, fee free to contact me.  If you have any questions, my email address, you can feel free to post this, it’s danny [AT] intriguingideas.com or you can find my current on dannydover.com.  Thank you everybody, appreciate it and best of luck with your SEO efforts.

Stasia Holdren has trained over 5,000  people to improve their returns from the incredible advertising machine called Google AdWords.

Like all gifted trainers, she is great at simplyfing the complex. Google think so too.

They got her to develop the original Seminars for Success curriculum, and have endorsed her to train AdWords users, which she has been doing for over 5 years.

Listen to the interview for a review of some really important campaign settings you need to know about, as well as  some of the newer functionality Google has recently introduced.

You can find  Stastia at ppc-boot-camp.com/ and you can follow her on Twitter @StasiaHoldren

If you prefer to read, here is the transcript:

Philip:              Anastasia’s one of only two Google endorsed Adwords trainers and has been doing this training since 2006 I believe.  You were involved in the pilot study for the Adwords Seminars for Success weren’t you Anastasia?

Anastasia:       That’s right I actually did develop the original curriculum into 2005 so I’ve been managing the program for them since then teaching the 101 and the 201 track.

Philip:              So how did you get involved with Google?

Anastasia:       It was so random.  I was actually at a job that I really didn’t like at the time and I got a hard copy letter from Google that really gave no information.  It said, hey, we’re starting this new program and we’re looking for people.  Could you fill in this extremely in-depth questionnaire about yourself and submit it and we’ll get back to you.

So I said, what the heck and I did and I was about to turn it in and occasionally perhaps I have a tendency to be a bit of a procrastinator.  So I was about to submit it and my husband looked at it and said, sweetheart, did you notice there is another side to this application?

And I read it and it said that I had to make a video of myself teaching a topic.  So we literally ran down to the basement with a handheld camera and videoed and submitted it with minutes to spare.

And that was it and then six months later I got a call – I actually though it was a prank call.  I didn’t believe it was actually Google calling me.  But sure enough that was it and then I went through a grueling interview process, talked about a million different people in Mountain View and here I am today.

It’s been one of the luckiest things that’s ever happened to me.

Philip:              Wow and we were talking before the show started that your real passion is teaching but you’ve been in online for quite a while haven’t you?

Anastasia:       Yes it’s been about 14 years now, I sort of fell into it.  At one point I was actually working my internet job to pay my tuition.  You need a Masters degree in the US to teach in some states.  And I was working towards that and then we moved and well I actually kind of liked this internet stuff so here I stayed.

And now I just coincidently it’s my passion with what I’ve been doing.  So I get to teach and I get to teach about what I know which is fantastic.

Philip:              Yeah, that’s awesome, that’s awesome.  So you’ve obviously taught and trained thousands of advertisers.  How many people do you think have been through your classes?

Anastasia:       Oh goodness, probably 5000 or 6000 at this point.

Philip:              Wow.

Anastasia:       I’ve been all over, it’s been great.  I know most – I mean I really get to know a lot of people at these classes.  Literally everyday today, I have a call helping a student from one of my previous classes.  So I do keep in touch with them and hear about what’s been working and what hasn’t been working and it makes me a better teacher because I get to basically hear their experience over the years.  So I love this.  It’s great.

Philip:              Yeah, well I had the good fortune of being one of your students as well and I can honestly say you’re a very gifted teacher.  It was a great two days in Los Angeles, a couple of years ago.

Anastasia:       Thank you, appreciate it.

Philip:              So I believe your husband is also in online marketing and is one of the founders of a very popular search engine optimization tool called Raven Tools.

Anastasia:       That’s correct.

Philip:              Wow.  So what hope do your children have?  Your dinner conversations must be fascinating talking about search engine optimization and online marketing.

Anastasia:       Well I have now idea if you all have been afflicted by Mind Craft which is this popular online gaming.  But our seven year old daughter, that’s her love.  She’s totally like her dad where she just wants to go in and play online games and they do together.

So she’s totally into the internet thing at age 7.  So it’s working out pretty well.

Philip:              Nice, nice.

Anastasia:       I like going outside occasionally but I’m a little bit different I guess.

Philip:              I’ve just had a daughter and I registered her profile on Twitter and my wife is shocked to say the least.  Anyway moving on, so I’m really excited about the topics today.

We’re going to talk a little bit about some of the new functionality areas, some of the little areas of functionality, they’ve been around for a while that advertisers may not know about.  So this is probably really well suited to the listeners who have been running campaigns for a while fairly familiar with the terminology and the structure and all that sort of stuff.

Things may be going pretty good but they are looking to get more out of their campaign and add some of the new functionalities so let’s get into it.

Anastasia let’s start off with the bidding options and the different types – some listeners who may not know the different types of bidding options.  Can you walk us through manual vs. auto, enhanced and conversion optimizer?

Anastasia:       Absolutely.  So if you are a brand new advertiser and you had never done this before.  When you create a campaign, one of the first things that you do is you specify your settings.  And Google will ask you for a budget and a bidding option.

Google keeps renaming them.  The UI calls them different things at different times, I think I have about 50 or 60 accounts that I manage frequently or from time to time and from account to account, the verbage is different.

So when you’re selecting a bidding option, if you’re brand new, I would recommend starting with automatic bidding to try to maximize click through target, target budget.

Now this was a feature previously called the budget optimizer and I’m fairly critical of it as a permanent strategy because what it does, it basically – you Google a budget.  And you say, hey Google, you spend that budge for me and Google says why yes I can.

But if you’re brand new to it what it can do, it can give you a sense of what you might need to bid for a particular click to get started.  And Google will just – well not just but in the last few months, released the saving grace of this feature where there is a check box that’s CPC bid limit.

And that means that yes, Google does manage your bids for your automatically but you can cap – you can say that’s great Google, you can figure out what I need to bid on a keyword but you can never spend more than $5 bucks.

And so that way you have at least that level of control where you’re not going to accidentally spend $10 for a click which might be worth 50c to you.

Philip:              Right, so if you have a whole – let’s say you have a few hundred keywords, Google’s just going to put more money into the areas to get you the most amount of clicks for that budget.  It’s not focused on conversions or click through’s, anything like that, just maximizing number of clicks?

Anastasia:       That’s absolutely right.  So if you partner you can start there to get a sense for what you might need to pay per click.  I find that the other tools in the keyword like the estimator – they’re not that great.  You might need to run this.

But let’s just say you ran that for a week or maybe two weeks until you have some data to work with.  Then the next bidding model that I would switch to is called Manual bidding for clicks.  And so now you’re not allowing Google to manage those clicks for you.

Now you’re saying, okay, I kind of have a baseline for what it’s going to cost me to get a click on one of these keywords.  Now that I have that baseline let’s try this amount and then with the manual bidding, you can start to assign the bids based on what your value – the value to your business to each of these keywords.  Then you can adjust.

Now you’ve got the groundwork for actually making the system work for you.  And there’s another fantastic piece that you can layer on top of manual bidding for clicks.  It’s called enhanced CPC. Now to use this layer, you have to first enable something called conversion tracking.

For any of your listeners who aren’t familiar, basically what it allows you to do is to specify a conversion.  A conversion is when a click on your ad results in a desirable behaviour.

So let’s just take the easiest example which is ecommerce sites.  So you want someone to do a search on Google, click on your ad and then buy your stuff.  So that would be a conversion.  So when you are just starting out and you have your manual bidding set up, you can set up conversion tracking and then you can click on this CPC bid limit as part of your bidding model.

What this does is it says, it gives Google a little leeway in your bid and Google has a much more multi dimensional view of the adwords auction.  It knows where somebody is searching, it knows history of conversions on a particular query and it’ll say, hey Philip, based on your keyword and based on somebody’s search, we think that there’s a really good likelihood that a conversion will happen.

And so in this case they could let you bid as much as 30% more than you specify.  And conversely it could say Oh Philip, we haven’t see great results on this keyword so we’re actually going to lower your bid based on the conversion history.

So that is the next level that I would work to on bidding models.

Philip:              So yeah, Anastasia if you have conversion tracking set up which I encourage everybody to do.  So let’s assume everybody is doing that which is a dangerous assumption but would you then recommend unequivocally that they should use the enhanced CPC bidding?

Anastasia:       Yes absolutely.

Philip:              Okay, and that’s taking away any of the manual bidding that they are going to have to do in the coming weeks and months?

Anastasia:       No that’s not true, you’re still doing manual bidding per clicks.  But let’s just say that you’re saying okay, for this ad group my default max CPC bid is $2 and so you’ve set that as the limit you want to pay.

But based on the enhanced CPC Google may allow you to go a little bit over – upto 30% over on an individual click if they think it is likely to get that conversion.  So you’re still going to be doing the manual bidding but the next step in this process.  I like to think of this as the ongoing process.

The nice thing about enhanced CPC is that there is no minimum number of conversions.  You could have zero conversion.  You could turn it on – conversion tracking right now and then you could enable CPC – you can enable the enhanced CPC right away.

Now the next step is something called conversion optimizer and that is hands down my favourite bidding model because now it flips everything over.  It’s not the automatic bidding where Google’s just trying to spend your money, it’s not manual bidding where you are trying to figure out on your own whether or not a click is profitable for your business.

Conversion optimizer is actually going to adjust your bids automatically based on the predicted conversion rate of that search query and that keyword and if you’re displaying on the Google display network, the GDN, even on the past history of conversions for that particular site or that category of sites.

And the whole point of this tool is to work towards a CPA goal that you will specify.  So if you know what the value of a lead is to your business, then you can express that as a CPA goal, then you can use conversion optimizer to get that for you.  So that is the best, the best bidding model that you can work toward.

You need conversion within 30 days, that’s the big caveat .  It used to be like 300, then it went to a 100 and then 50 but now you only need 15.  So that’s actually fairly obtainable.

The more data you have as far as how conversions are happening, the better predictions the tool will be able to make on your behalf.  So if you just have 15 conversions, it will do.  Hey, but if you’re getting into the 50 conversions, 100 conversions, it’s going to start to really make money for you.

And my clients who have turned this on, it literally I mean you can read the Google case studies and you’re like oh wow, they’re really painting a rosy picture but literally with the clients that I have that have turned it on, I’ve seen the lowest increase was at 14% in their conversion rate.  The other was like 23-24% increase in conversions at the same cost.  So it’s amazing

Philip:              So for lead generating sites that conversions are probably going to be a contact form or an enquiry form- I’m just thinking one particular client we have, they have job application process as well which we set up as a conversion and they get lots of job applications there.  They employ a couple of 100 staff and they are always looking for a reasonably high staff turnover.

So if we don’t really want to focus too much on those as a conversion and be more interested in a sales enquiry, I guess this could distort some of the performance of the campaign.

We just got to be careful what’s included as a conversion right?

Anastasia:       Right and it’s whatever you specify in your conversion tracking.  If that is not a meaningful conversion for you then you may consider just deleting that or pausing it, really only using it based on what you value is the true intent of the ad.

You could also – conversions would apply to all of the campaigns, you really can’t isolate it in that sense.  So if someone pulls out a lead gen form, that could get applied to the optimizer when you really want to track the sale.

You could try to funnel them in through your landing page so it’s very clear what you want them to do but I think you better pause it if you really don’t want to count that conversion.

Philip:              Okay great.  Just a quick one – talk about conversion tracking, the set up of conversion tracking requires additional code to be put on the thank you page after the action has been completed.  Now you can also import your goals from analytics into your conversions.  Can you talk a little bit about that and the benefits of doing that?

Anastasia:       It’s so easy!

Philip:              And why wouldn’t you do that?  Should you still set up conversion tracking like you used to a little while ago when you have to add new code or should you just import from analytics?

Anastasia:       Well, I do both just because – look at the difference.  So for conversion tracking in Adword it’s simply a piece of code that goes on the thank you page and it’s just really a yes or no.  Did it happen or did it not.

With Google Analytics you’re setting that up as part of your overall tracking where you can see okay, well what else did this visitor do when they went to the site.  What did they look at?  How long did they stand?  What keywords, what queries did they type in to get there and all that stuff.

So you’re going to get a whole lot more rich information on the analytics side where it’s setting up to goals.  Now at the end of the day though when you import them as AdWords, it’s simply a button.

So if you go to where you would find conversion tracking – if you go to the recordings and tools tab at the top and then you click on conversions which is part of the drop down list, there’s a little button that says import from Google Analytics and if you have them set up, it just magically appears there and then that will increase the number of conversions in your account which is nice because then you could get closer to that 15 conversion minimum which is required for conversion optimizers.

That would be the big benefit for doing it.

Philip:              Awesome.  That is a fantastic explanation, love it.  Let’s move onto

Anastasia:       Okay.  I’ve got more, I’m sorry

Philip:              I’m sorry?

Anastasia:       I’ve got one more bit

Philip:              Oh fire away, fire away

Anastasia:       Sorry.  So now I’ve talked about all this stuff with the bidding on keywords, there’s one other option that is available called CPM bidding.  And that’s when you bid a certain amount or you’re willing to pay a certain amount for every thousand times Google shows your ad whether it’s clicked on or not.

This is only available for campaigns that are targeting the Google display network and the reason that I like this model is that I’m increasingly working with clients who really want to focus on branding campaigns or the branding is the first part of their strategy.

They are wanting people to search for them, the people who don’t know about them yet.  So they need to get their name out.  So they are using the GDN, they are targeting specific sites or topics of sites and they just want their add to appear so people will start to get some recognition for their brand.

When you show an image or a video ad on the Goggle Display Network, you run into a problem because there’s a specified space.  Just let’s say that’s a 250×250 or 728×90.  In that given spot Adwords could show as many as four or five other text ads.

So to win a position with one of these other formats, you have to beat out the ad rank of the four competing ads below you.  Basically you have to beat them by four in the auction.  And so with CPM bidding it takes that out of the equation because Google know that the only way they’re going to get paid is if they show your ad a thousand times.

So if you want to show image in video ads, then I would recommend using CPM bidding.  You may have to pay a little bit per 1000 impressions, there will be a little bit of experimentation on your part to see how much your bid needs to be.  But that’s a great way to bid for a true branding campaign.  Does that make sense?

Philip:              Wow very smart, yeah, I didn’t know that.  I understood what CPM bidding was but I didn’t understand the benefit of that strategy behind that.  That’s great.

Anastasia:       Yeah and I’ll give you one more little tip on that.  It will count as an impression for every 1000 times an ad is shown but what if that web page is really, really long and the likelihood of the person who’s visiting the website to get to that bottom is minimal.

There’s a really nice little exclusion or little filter that Google totally buried in their account.  The way you would find this is you would select from the campaign’s tab at the top, you would select the campaign and then you would go to the tab that’s labeled networks.

They’re called roll-up tabs in the middle.  Then at the bottom of that you’ll see a little blue link labeled exclusions and the right side there’s a drop down where it says at the campaign level, you can add exclusions and you pick the second drop down option which is labeled exclude category.

Okay I know there are a lot of steps to get but then once you’re here, you see a really long list of all of these places where you can prevent your ads from appearing.  And the second to last option is a filter labeled below the fold.  So if you are doing CPM bidding and it’s really important to you that you ads appear at the “top” of someone’s computer monitor, you could select that exclusion below the fold filter.

So Google can only show your ads in placements near the top of the page.  I think that’s really important, a lot of people don’t know about it.

Philip:              Awesome, great tip, really great tip.

Anastasia:       Alright I’m done with bidding.

Philip:              Beautiful, that’s a phenomenal – I think it’s one area that is often overlooked.  People just focus on manual or automatic but don’t really think about the other options.

Anastasia:       Yes and it just depends on what the whole point of your campaign and what the strategy of your campaign is.  These different options, they perform better based on what you’re trying to do.

Philip:              Yeah I like that CPM bidding tip as well.  I haven’t experimented too much with CPM, everything – most of our work is around CPC.

Anastasia:       Yes it’s a good one.

Philip:              Great, so let’s move on to another campaign setting which is under the advanced settings and the campaigns settings tab.  And that’s ad scheduling – yes I guess a fairly easy one to explain but maybe you can talk a little bit about some tips and why you’d want to look at the ad scheduling setting?

Anastasia:       Okay.  Under advanced settings, it’s labeled schedule start date and ad scheduling.  By default your ads show 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  So simply it allows you to decide on what days and what hours of particular days you would prefer that your ad appear.

It doesn’t change anything in the option.  It just means that rather than having a 24 hour period to show your ad, that might be an 8 hour period.  So that’s how the tool works.

There is also an option in here called advanced ad scheduling and what that allows you to do is basically add a multiplier to it.  So you can say, I want to multiply my bid ‘x’ per cent during this period of time because I know that that is a profitable or less profitable time for me.

So that’s sort of the mechanics of how this tool works.  Let’s think of different scenarios where that might actually apply to a campaign.  So some of your clients – some people who are listening to this presumably, you sell something, you can only make the sale – you can only close the sale when you talk to somebody on the phone.

And so you may find that your most effective time to advertise is during times of the day when you’re actually in the office or your sales staff is in the office to answer the phone.  So in this case you might actually use the scheduling to show your ads only during your office hours.   So that would be one example.

Going along with that, every single adwords account, when you first created it, remember you specified a time zone and that time zone is what your account is based off of.  So if it’s – I’m in central time in the US so mine works on a midnight to midnight scheduled based on the central time in the US which is going to be different from you.

Another thing to layer on top of this ads scheduling is something called your delivery method.  So let’s just say that you want to show your ads from 9 to 5 when you know you’re answering the phone but now you also want to make sure that Google shows your ads as quickly as possible because that’s your profitable time.

Another option – this one they keep moving this.  Now this is under something called bidding and budget and there is a menu item labeled delivery method.  By default it will be labeled standard and standard shows your ads evenly over time meaning that if you have a 24 hour period, it’ll show your ad evenly as it can based on your budget.

If you pick the accelerated delivery though, then it’s going to show your ad or it’s going to enter your keywords into the option that show your ad every single time someone does a search on it.  And you might run out of budget fairly quickly but if that’s the period of time you’re most likely to make the sale then that’s okay.

That would be one way that you would sort of layer them on top of each other.  Another thing that you can’t get from adwords that you can layer into this is knowledge of when you’re actually completing conversions through your ecommerce site or whatever systems you’re using.

So if you see that all of your conversions are happening say between 5pm and 8pm but your ad spend is astronomical in the wee hours of the morning after that, then you may want to decrease your budget.  Maybe you may want to turn your ads off entirely using this ad schedule and feature if you know that that is a period of time when you have significant ad spend and very little conversion activity on your side of the business.

But that’s going to take knowledge of what’s happening on your side as well as the reports from Adwords.  Does that make sense?

Philip:              Yeah perfect sense.  So you could have – if you had different campaigns set for display and search which you should – that’s a definite in my opinion, you could be running different scheduling for different types of campaign so your display ads could be showing over a longer period when you want to create demand and maybe people are researching in the evening or on weekends but maybe you have your search campaign on business hours Monday to Friday 9 to 5 or whatever it is to capture that when they’re searching and they want to speak to somebody.

Anastasia:       That is exactly correct and you brought up one of Anastasia’s pet peeves is about splitting up campaigns and I didn’t reiterate that but you just did, yes.

Philip:              We mentioned that before.  We actually – the other endorsed Google trainer is Brad Geddes and he was on Episode No. 4 and he is also as you know a fantastic trainer and we were talking about it then.

I think that default switch where the display network is on automatically or by default.

Anastasia:       Is that awful?

Philip:              Well it’s that single decision to have it on by default is fairly well hidden I think.  That must make Google in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Anastasia:       I do not doubt it.  I have met so many small business owners who have spent tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands on that button.

Philip:              And Google have themselves said you need to separate your display and your search yet it’s on by default which is just nuts.

Anastasia:       Yes

Philip:              But anyway, let’s move on, that’s cool.  The other area that we’re going to talk about is Ad Extensions and there’s been quite a lot of innovations in these ad extensions over the last 12 months or so and there’s a good couple of ad extensions.  So maybe we start off with location?

Anastasia:       Okay

Philip:              Maybe give a bit of an overview what ad extensions are?

Anastasia:       Yes let me tell you what it is, and this is another one of those Anastasia’s pet peeves on the Adwords interface.  When you first create a campaign one of the things you’ll see – so you walk through the settings page and then you go and create your ad creative and your keywords and all that good stuff.

And when you first set it up, the ad extensions are part of that initial settings wizard.  Then once you’ve saved your campaign you can’t edit it there anymore.  So for existing campaigns, you actually have to go to a new roll up tab, not the settings tab, that’s labeled ad extensions.

And for some reason for some of my clients, it’s not on by default.  There’s a little down arrow at the end of the roll up tabs and you can actually click on that and it gives you other options like audiences, ad extensions, auto target topics.  So you can turn it on to see it.

When you get to the ad extensions tab, you will see a grey box on the left corner and for some reason it’s a little difficult to notice if you don’t know what you’re looking for.  But that’s what you’re looking for, it says ‘view’ with a colon and then it will tell you which extension you’re actually managing at that time.  Right now there are four basic product Adword extensions that you can use.

So let’s start with the first one which is location extensions.   So Philip tell me how are Google maps and Google places in Australia?

Philip:              Yeah, no it’s big, it’s big.

Anastasia:       Okay good

Philip:              And I keep telling businesses if you haven’t claimed your listing in Google places, do it now.

Anastasia:       Yes absolutely do it now.  And if for no other reason than you get this handy little reward where with the location extensions basically you can connect your places account with your adwords account.  And Google will reward you for using their products by displaying your address, your phone number, sometimes even a map with directions underneath your ad for free.

So it really – by extension, it’s going to make your ad bigger and ultimately what it’s come down to is how do I make a searcher notice my ad and visit that.  What separates me from the others.  With location extensions, particularly for a local business, I know where you are and you are convenient, you have a really big advantage.

If I see a map there where I can get directions, there’s a big advantage.  Now Google recently started charging for getting directions from an extension by clicking on that with a map that is associated with your ad.  So keep in mind that if people take action on the extension, it does cost you money but it’s going to be the same as if they clicked on your ad.  So…

Philip:              Yeah, but yeah, yeah, I think that’s a good point but essentially you’re going to be happy with that, that’s the whole objective, right?  I mean if they are looking for directions, ideally they are coming to buy from you.

Anastasia:       That’s right.

Philip:              Or they could be coming to complain I suppose, so…

Anastasia:       Yeah if they are doing that, they are interested in you and so I really don’t have any problems paying for that.  But that’s the location extensions and it’s such an easy thing to set up.  One tip with that just to make your lives easier, so you have a login to your adwords account, I strongly recommend that a business use that same login for all these Google products.  So the same username/password that you use to log in to Adwords, you should also use that to login into places.  It just makes it easier to connect these products.

So the next one is call extension and this is really cool, it’s based off of Google voice and what it basically does is it allows you to then – basically Google will display a phone number for you that will then ring in to your business line.

So Google will know, okay someone called this number and so we track it that way and that can count towards conversions for you.  So basically you can see – you’ll see basically, it’s called your click through rate but really it’s how many people called the phone number.  And the accounts that I’ve set it up in, it’s worked really well.  I mean I’ve seen extremely strong click through rates being measured by calls into the phone number that is displayed with an ad.

Philip:              So how does that relate to ‘click to call’ when if you’re targeting a mobile device?

Anastasia:       Okay, click to call is best for advertisers who do not have a mobile enabled website or if you’re just far more likely to make the prospect by getting someone to run into you.  So the way that works, it’s instantly and the mobile advertisement is not for smart phones.  It doesn’t apply, I use an iPhone, it doesn’t apply to that.

It’s really for an older style phone and so now instead of seeing a link to your website, we will see the phone number  and we just click on that.  It magically rings into the business and that’s how Google tracks the “click” based on the phone call that came in connection with that ad.  And you have that option with the call extension.

You can say, there’s something called the call only format and so only the phone number will be clickable when it’s shown on a device.  So that’s how the call extensions work.

Philip:              Excellent, what’s next?

Anastasia:       Okay, the third extension is called Product Extensions.  And this is applicable to anybody listening who has an ecommerce forum.  To use this extension, you have to list your products in something called Google’s Merchant Centre.

The Merchant Centre products make up what we see when we do a product search.  So if you go to Google.com and then you click on view products for this search query, that basically changes the view to Google Products and all of those products are pulled from these accounts.

Philip:              So just a quick note for the Australian listeners.  Google Merchant Centre was released a couple of months ago in April, so April 2011.  So it’s fairly new in this country.

Anastasia:       Really?

Philip:              Yeah it is, yeah.

Anastasia:       It’s been around a long time in the US.

Philip:              Yeah we’re a bit behind the times on that but so now most listeners will probably not be too familiar with it but…

Anastasia:       Well think of it this way, we worked out all the kinks for you

Philip:              That’s awesome, we appreciate it.  So I encourage listeners to go – just Google the google merchant centre blog, there’s a fair bit of information on there and how you can get your product feeds from you ecommerce site into the merchant centre and that will enable a lot more search activity within – I think it’s within, yes, the shopping button when people search on Google, they click shopping.  They can see product information and photographs and all that sort of stuff so I highly recommend it.

Anastasia:       Yes, and when you do that, what will happen – I mean there’s a few things that can happen.  Some really cool things actually.  Let me first step back a little bit.  Now that I know it’s new in Australia, just a few tips on that.

What you’ll basically be doing is setting up an XML feed that will bring your products into the shopping database.  There’s actually in Google’s Help Centre, there’s a pretty comprehensive list of the mandatory attributes and the optional attributes that you put in for each product.

Generally you’ll be more successful if you include more information about each of the products.  What Google will do is they’ll say let’s just say somebody goes to Google and they search for costumes for dogs because people here love to dress up their dogs in costumes.

So if you see that, sometimes you will see an adwords ad that says show products for this ad and you click it open and then you’ll see a bunch of thumb nails with photos.  Those thumb nails are being pulled from that advertiser’s merchant centre account, from the feed that they are putting in.  So that’s another great way to get this free visual that goes along with your ads.

So not only have I found you on search but I can see based on the images that you have the products that I want.  There’s also relatively new format called Products Listing Ads.  Have you seen them yet?  Are they in Australia?

Philip:              The Products – say that again.  The products listing ads?

Anastasia:       The Products Listing Ads and this is a little bit different than a product extension and so it’s off topic from the extensions tab but it goes along with merchant centre where now what will happen is typically at the top right hand corner above the right search results, you’ll see just a thumb nail and then the name of the product and the price and the link to the store.

That’s another ad format that they are still experimenting with here in the US but it has been extremely effective for the clients who are using it and for me, people who have taken my classes.  So that’s another nice benefit that you get in the merchant centre.

Philip:              Nice, nice.  Excellent, so we’re onto the fourth ad extension which is sitelinks.

Anastasia:       Oh yes.  So the fourth one – this is one of my favourites, everybody can do this.  You don’t need to do anything fancy with it.  If you’ve ever done a search on Google and then you’ve seen an ad on the top yellow box and then you’ve seen as many as four – actually now I’ve seen as many as six additional links underneath it.  Those are site links.

Basically what you can do at the campaign level – I really wish it was at the Ad group level – unfortunately it’s restricted to a particular campaign at this point.  But what you can do is you basically add upto four additional display and destination URLs.

There’s a really big store here called Pottery Barn catalogue business rather.  If you did a search for Pottery Barn on Google, I see six additional links underneath their standard Adwords ad and it’s labeled furniture, bedding, accessories and pillows, sales, free shipping, free shipping on all pillows.

So basically what this business has done is they’ve identified as many as six really popular categories and their able to give the searcher more options.  So maybe I didn’t want to click on their main URL, their primary display URL but maybe I really want to buy a pillow now that I know that shipping is free.

So now they’ve sort of incentivised me into clicking on a different area of their site and it’s the same parameters where you get a 35 character limit for the display URL and 10/24 for your destination URL.

It’s basically now you can have seven display URLs with your ad.  So really cool.

Philip:              It’s awesome.  I mean so essentially these ad extensions are about making your ad more meaningful to users which will increase your click through rates.  You’re going to stand out from your competitors, you’re going to get a high click through rate, that’ll effect your quality score.  It’s just a no brainer, aren’t they?

Anastasia:       Yes.  I like them because they don’t cost you more to implement.  Only if you actually get the click and that’s what we’re going for.

Philip:              Nice.  Anything more to say on the extensions before we move on?

Anastasia:       No, no, I know I’m talking too much.

Philip:              No, no, absolutely not.  This is good, this what we want.

Anastasia:       Okay, I’ll move on.

Philip:              Excellent, let’s move onto the dimensions tab which is a tab which you have to enable on that drop down area you spoke about earlier.  Give us some insights into what that dimensions tab is for and how to use it.

Anastasia:       Okay.  The dimensions tab basically gives you a way to view and segment the performance of your account by dimension of your choice.  By dimension I mean over a period of time or based on conversion activity or based on the demographic or the geography of that searcher.  So it’s giving us views based on a dimension that we select of what’s happening in our account over a period of time.

For example you could use the report and your could see that you are actually getting ten times the activity in Brisbane than you are in Sydney or that look, you’re getting surprise month traffic in Perth.  So this is going to show you what’s happening and where on the dimension of your choice.

Now there’s another feature in your account a segment and segment, you can actually see that pretty much on all the other rules of tab.  You see it on the campaigns and ad groups and ads and keywords, not in networks.  But that’s similar to the dimensions tab in the sense that what the segmentation, we can segment by the network.

So we can break up the data that we are looking at – show me broken out by click type or the network or the day of the week or the quarter, things like that.  But the big difference between the dimensions tab and the segment link is that dimensions allows you to look at the account as a whole.  So we can see what is happening spanning across all the campaigns.

Whereas the segment option really only let’s us look at that one piece of the account.  Even if you go to online campaigns and you do the segment feature, it’s going to break it out campaign by campaign.  So we can get a clear picture over everything.  That’s what the dimensions is for.

If you’re curious about what’s happening in where, this is the place to go to look for it.  And again like you said, you have to enable the tab from the drop down and just like I showed you with extensions, you look for that little grey box on the left corner under the roll up tab and then you can select to the dimensions.

So if I highlight over time, I can then select the day or week or day or quarter or hour of day, etc. and then I can see exactly what’s happening.

Another thing with that ad scheduling, the thing that we talked about before, you can combine that with dimensions.  So if you’re looking at a dimension to view the hour of the day, I can see based on the hour what kind of activity.  I can see differences in click through rates or my differences in my conversion rate or my cost per conversion over a particular hour of the day.

Then I can use that to work with that ad scheduling to make changes based on my performance.

Philip:              Great, great.  So this dimension and segment areas are really powerful areas and it’s something that you could spend days and days analyzing.  The hard part comes in knowing what to look at and how to do it in a quick time as quickly as possible.

Anastasia:       Yeah, ask yourself what do you want to know.  Before you even open this tab, decide what am I trying to figure out?  What am I going for here? And that will make this much more manageable.

So maybe it’s literally I want to see where in Australia I’m selling stuff or people are visiting me.  So then I would go to geographic version and then I would look based on that to see the answer to my question.  So you use these tools to answer your business questions, unless you just enjoy looking at tools. But really, I mean, how many people do that?

Philip:              Absolutely, I think there was a new segment slice that was introduced a little while ago which is a top vs. side showing your ads in the top three or in the right hand side which I think is quite an interesting one.

Anastasia:       Yes isn’t that nice?  And that’s becoming a big priority for people.  There’s a really big, there’s a lot of competition for top versus side.  In your previous podcast did you explain the difference in getting to top versus side?  I don’t remember hearing that.

Philip:              No, no.

Anastasia:       So anyone who’s interested.  You may know when you do a search on Google, you could see ads in that yellow box above the organic results.  Those are your top results, your top ad results and then the others are at the side.

So the top results are awarded to advertisers who have met three criteria.  First of all they have an extremely high quality score and quality score is measured at the keyword level.  Ironically enough it is one of those things that’s not on by default.  You actually have to turn it on to see it within your account on the keywords tab.

So you have to have a high quality score first, second of all you have to extremely relevant where the query is extremely relevant to the keyword in your ad group and they are both extremely relevant to the ad text that you have.

The third criteria and final is that you met some sort of minimum bid threshold that Google won’t tell you about.  So you don’t even know you have to bid to be there but there is a minimum price to appear in that yellow box.  So that’s the difference between top and side and how you get there.

Philip:              So it’s a mix of quality campaign, quality ad or quality keywords and your bid price.

Anastasia:       That’s exactly right.

Philip:              So it’s very closely tied to ad rank.

Anastasia:       Yes.  It’s possible for you to have an ad rank, be first place in the adwords auction but your bid did not meet the minimum threshold so then you would appear on the right hand side.

Philip:              Is anything to do with commercial intent as to whether you appear in the top or the right hand sides.  So if it’s not a very commercial intent driven search item, it could be on the right?

Anastasia:       I haven’t seen anything about that.  I mean if we correlate commercial intent to the likelihood of that click through rate because your CTR is a huge component in your quality score.  So if you could make that correlation but not directly, they won’t immediately reward you with the yellow box for commercial intent.

Philip:              Awesome, alrighty.  Let’s move onto automated rules then.  We were talking before the show started that there are some dangers in this automated rules.  What are these rules?  How can you use them and when shouldn’t you use them?

Anastasia:       Okay, if you are an SME, a small or medium sized business and adwords is not your full time job.  I generally would discourage people from using these rules because if you use them improperly, then you can really get yourself into a bit of trouble.

Basically – and the intention of this is good.  I think eventually this will be a very good feature for all advertisers because what it allows you to do is it allows you to automatically make changes without having to manually login and review what’s happened and then increase bids or change your ad text or things like that.

This is a relatively new feature.  It’s been in the US for a while but it was released to all advertisers in February of this year and what you can do is you can create upto ten of them at a time.  You can only have ten running and if you set them up, you manage them from the left preview where there is actually link labeled automated rules and that’s where you can see them.

You can make a rule that says when my average position of my ad drops below – my average position is worse than 3 then raise my bid by x%.  That’s an example of what one of these rules might look like.

But the problem is that you have to fairly mathematical about it to extrapolate in this scenario what could be the outcome of this rule.  A lot of people don’t do that.  So there was one example that I read about that I liked.  You might think that okay, I should change my bid based on my click through rate.

If my click through rate is bad, maybe I don’t want to pay any money for it or I want to pay less money for it because that’s a lower quality keyword.  Let’s just say you set up a rule that says “lower my bid if my click through rate is low.”

What happens is that Google when then bid less and then your ad goes further down the page and then your click through rate will probably drop even more.  So then you bid will lower again and then basically you’ll just be basically off the page entirely because every time you lower your bid, you go lower, your click through rate drops and they lower your ad even more.

So that’s an example of how you can sort of get into this downward spiral.  You can see the decline.  So you need to be very, very careful and understand how any rules that you implement are going to impact the rest of your account.  Particularly when you are making any changes based on performance matrix.

I mean it’s just like if the rule is ‘turn my ads off on the weekends’ you can do that with ads scheduling anyway or turn any ads off that mention this holiday on this date, the day after the holiday, sure you can do things like that.

But you need to be really careful when you’re making changes based on performance matrix.  Generally unless you’re really savvy and you really want to monitor this, I would avoid it.

Philip:              Excellent, okay, that’s interesting.  So it looks like – on the face of it it looks like it could save you a lot of time and it’s quite a simple way to improve the way you work but it can be very dangerous.

Anastasia:       Yeah do a couple of searches on it and read any non Google websites and you’ll hear the internet outcry of people who have foreseen the problems with it.  That being said, once they’ve sort of made it a little less “dangerous”, I think it’s going to be a handy feature for helping automate some of the business and process.

Philip:              I mean it looks like they are trying to creep into some of these PPC software space with automation around bid pricing and bid rules and that sort of thing.

Anastasia:       Absolutely exactly what they are doing.

Philip:              And I’m sure this is going to get a lot more complex as the years progress.

Anastasia:       Yes, yes.  I never get bored teaching because literally every month there’s something new for me to learn.

Philip:              We’ll include links to the adwords innovations blog which is a fantastic resource for business owners and you can see how much change is actually rolled out.  I mean they seem to be putting out something, new piece of functionality every week.  It’s quite amazing.

Anastasia:       Yes, it’s absolutely true.  It’s a challenge keeping up with everything.

Philip:              So what one of the other little changes that they introduced recently was using a longer headline in the ad.  So using the first line and bumping it up into the headline.  Can you explain that?

Anastasia:       Okay, so this change launched I believe in February of this year and this effects only ads that appear in that yellow box that I just described.  So those are the ads where you have high bid and high quality score.

What Google will do is if you have your ad wins that place in the auction and appears there, Google will evaluate the structure of the words in your ad and if it appears that your headline and your description line one are two distinct sentences and it ends with punctuation, what they’ll do is they will pull that description line one up into the headline and separate them with a hyphen.

Now basically it’s taking your 25 character limit or your headline and then adding an additional 35 separated by a hyphen.  So it makes your ad stand up that much more and the headline is bolded so it’s really going to be – it’s going to be quite nice if you get that position.  That’s the gist of it.

I haven’t seen it actually in a whole lot of ads when I’ve done my searches so I know it’s available but my experience as a searcher so I don’t see it very often.  I don’t know if that’s because advertisers aren’t properly structuring their ad texts to take advantage of it.  That’s the gist of it.

Philip:              And have you seen it increasing click through rates?

Anastasia:       None of my clients have actually – no that’s not true, some of my clients have actually seen that in some of their ads.  That’s a good question, I haven’t really looked at that Philip so I have to check.

I suspect it would – these are clients, they already have top position in the yellow box.  They’re getting pretty darn good click through rate already just based on their position.  I guess the short answer to your question is most of those clients are feeling pretty darn good about where their ads are appearing already.

It’s too soon for me to tell.

Philip:              Yes, I mean you think it’s a good thing but yeah, I don’t have the data either but you assume it’s good.  Beautiful, that’s a great discussion on some of the new functionalities.  Let’s talk about some more general issues and you’ve obviously, as you said, trained thousands and thousands of advertisers.

At a higher level what’s the biggest mistake that you see most advertisers make?  Let’s talk about somebody who’s been managing their own account for a year or so spending a couple of thousand dollars upwards a month.  What’s the one or two biggest mistakes you see them making?

Anastasia:       Well I mean, at the risk of sounding like a broken record but it really is true, the biggest one is the lack of account structure where you have a client, I mean I’m looking at an old example of this account.

One campaign, one adgroup, hundreds of keywords in there talking about everything that happens to be in the salon in the street, every single service that the salon offered – hair styling, hair colouring, extensions, leg waxing, botox, everything.

Each of those specific themes really needed to be split out into its own adgroup.  Another thing that I’m seeing more and more which is interesting are advertisers who are including keywords that are about products or services they don’t actually offer but may be high traffic.

So don’t do that, there’s someone searching for that.  That’s what they want to find and yeah maybe your ad will show but if you don’t actually offer that service, that’s really not a good bet for you as far as your adwords campaign.

Another big thing that I’m seeing – I’ve been teaching this since 2006, I feel like everyone must know about this by now but they don’t.  Lot of people don’t know about negative keywords and negative keywords filter out all the junk coming, all the things you don’t offer, you don’t sell, that aren’t related to your products.

I think that a lot of advertisers, they add a few in and they think they’re done but your negative keyword list is never through.  One of the funniest – I think it’s a funny example.  I talk about it, I think this might have been post you coming to my class.

There is a woman who’s business sells swimming pools and hot tubs and spas and things like that.  She noticed in her Google Analytics reports that there had a been a huge spike in traffic in 2010 and she tried to figure out what had happened.

During that period of time the movie Hot Tub Time Machine was released and so she didn’t have time machine as a negative keyword in her hot tub advert and she saw a significant ad spike or ad spend spike during that period of time.  So you never know what’s going to happen and you really need to keep on top of these negative keywords.

Philip:              Okay.  I’m expecting a real good pitch for Google Adwords generally, how difficult and I think cost per click prices are constantly going up, how difficult is it for an advertiser to make money with Google Adwords these days?  It’s obviously very competitive, I still think Australia is a little bit behind the US in terms of take up but I know lots and lots of businesses have tried out Adwords and have failed miserably.  Are there certain industries where you think it’s really, really tough going?  What are your thoughts just generally on how easy it is to make money with Adwords?

Anastasia:       Well, I had a call today with a very nice gentleman and I basically told him that he had to scrap Adwords what he was advertising so for some businesses it just won’t work.  His particular angle is he was trying to market an ebook and it was a legitimate book that he wrote but that is just one very, very competitive area where Google admit they have in their documentation, they almost penalize you for advertising on ebooks.

So there are certain topics, certain industries you just can’t make it work.  It’s difficult to do anything with gambling or anything that’s related to gambling because the keywords that you want to use maybe restricted.

Anytime that the products or service that you have, even if they just seem similar to one of these topics you’ll have a hard time using it.  I’ve seen people who sell really, really high end stuff.  For example I had a realtor who specialized in very, very expensive homes in California in the millions, the multiple millions of dollars and she had not seen a whole lot of success with Adwords probably because those people aren’t doing a Google search to find a million dollar ranch or ten million dollar ranch.

I think you really need to look at – Adwords works well for very, very niche topics.  I tell you one of – a client who I’m working with who does extremely well on Adwords and actually putting it right now.  He sent me a sample, he sells something called the Worry Stone and basically it’s a rock.

It’s a very attractive smooth rock that you can hold in your finger – you can basically put your thumb in and rub it when you feel nervous and they sell for like $3 or something but he’s making a killing off of Adwords because it’s such a niche product.

If someone does a search for a purple amethyst worry stone and he’s bidding on that keyword and he has a website that makes it easy to buy then he’s got it made.

But if someone does a search for garden supplies, well that kind of keyword, that could be a billion different things.  That’s going to be a tougher thing to advertise.  It works best when you have a fairly niche product.  You may not get incredible search volume on those keywords but if you can make conversion then you may not have to spend a whole lot of money to actually make a profit with Adwords.

Philip:              Agreed, agreed and I think the one area that I encourage clients to think about is life time value of a customer or even the value of that customer for the entire year.  So there’s nothing wrong with losing money on the acquisition straight up if you can make money on them over time.

So really understanding your numbers around profitability of customers is absolutely critical.

Anastasia:       Absolutely and what do they say that it’s a thousand times harder to acquire a customer than to keep them.

Philip:              Exactly.

Anastasia:       You want them in the door, that’s right.  So with your Adwords you can track what it costs you and maybe it costs me $30 to sell this one worry stone in my hand but you’re right and that person might want to buy 50 more for all their friends and I just dropped it and now I need another one.  So I might have to go back and order one for myself.

But that’s it, that’s exactly right.  Now I know about them so once I have awareness of your website, of your business then you have that opportunity to develop that relationship.

Now you as the website publisher should give people a way to remember you which is stay in touch.  So that might be giving people an option to sign up for specials, do whatever you can to nurture that relationship because you may have to outlay some cash to actually get them to your site or to your store but then you’ve got the best opportunity to keep them.

Philip:              Beautiful, so I’m conscious of time Anastasia, we could be speaking about this for days but it is late there and I’m sure you want to get back to your family.  Let’s close on what would be your favourite innovation for Adwords in the next sort of one to two years?

Anastasia:       Favourite innovation with Adwords

Philip:              What would you like to see them implementing?

Anastasia:       I would really like them to see a more accessible use of the remarketing feature.  Have you all seen that yet?

Philip:              Yeah I think that’ll be a great topic for another show.  We’ve been doing a fair bit with that.  That’s pretty exciting, online stalking to its highest level.

Anastasia:       Absolutely and I think that other products are doing it better.  Right now Google is remarketing is fairly simplistic where I visit your website and then I can see your ad.  You can do some fantastic stalking techniques.  One of my favourite sites is Sundance because Sundance had a lot of catalogues.

I literally see ads that show me funmails of the particular shoes and jewellery that I was earlier perusing in the day.  Now that’s really good marketing.  Makes me think boy, I really want that Lotus 14K gold ring and then I see pictures of it all day long because I happened to be on that web page.

So that is fantastic.  So that’s what I really want to see with Adwords.  And I think we’re going to get there.

Philip:              Beautiful.  Would you like to come back for another show?  We can get into Rep remarketing apart?

Anastasia:       I would love to do that Philip.

Philip:              Awesome, well thanks Anastasia, you’ve been fantastic.  Where can people find you on the web?

Anastasia:       You can find me at PPC-Boot-camp.com and I’m sorry, one shameless plug.  I’m the pending author of Google Adwords which will be published by O’Reilly media and so that should be out in September.

So if you want to read my book, please look for it then.

Philip:              Beautiful, we’ll update the show notes as well with a link to that.  And on Twitter, are you on Twitter?

Anastasia:       Yes I’m @Anastasia Holdren

Philip:              So that’s S-T-A-S-I-A-H-O-L-D-R-E-N?

Anastasia:       That is correct.

Philip:              Beautiful, thanks so much for your time Anastasia

Anastasia:       Your very welcome Philip, it’s really nice speaking with you and thanks for having me on.

Jay Berkowitz is renown for his 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing.

He is a highly regarded online marketing expert who has been in the field longer than most. Listen to this fascinating interview as we discuss the 10 things YOU need to be doing to succeed online.

Jay is also founder of the popular (and free) Internet Marketing Club which provides great content and community to help improve your skills. Check it out.

I highly recommend you follow him on Twitter @JayBerkowitz to get more of his wisdom.

If you prefer to read…

Philip:              So Jay, you’ve spoken at Adtech PubCon, Afffcon, Affiliate Sydney, you’ve keynoted there, Direct Marketing Association.  I guess the question is, is there any conference that you haven’t spoken at?

Jay:                 Yeah, I want to speak at Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum but seriously though, I’d love to speak at a TED conference.  So if anyone has connections, hook me up.

Philip:              That’s nice, and you’re also an author and a fellow podcaster.

Jay:                 Yes, I wrote a book called The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing and my podcast is called The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing funnily enough.  My company and blog is also Ten Golden Rules.com.

Philip:              So I guess it makes good sense to talk about the ten golden rules then, right?

Jay:                 Yes, makes good sense to have good consistent branding and it’s been helpful to be known as the Ten Golden Rules guy and people see me at a conference and remember me by that.  It’s something that I happened upon in developing a presentation and I’ve stuck with it over time.

Philip:              I think it’s a phenomenal marketing positioning because it’s so memorable and immediately people want to dive in further.  I’m just quite surprised I haven’t seen too many other marketing type people, myself included use that technique.  I think it’s a great strategy.

Jay:                 Yeah it’s great.  One thing I would suggest though if you want to do something like that – to with six or seven because ten’s a lot to come up with sometimes.  All my presentations are ten golden rules, ten tips, ten strategies.

Philip:              So when did you come up with these rules? I know you’ve been doing this for a long time – and do these rules change?

Jay:                 Well I think the interesting background is that I’ve always been a big believer in ten lists and I worked corporately for companies like McDonald’s and Coca Cola and got into the internet very early with Sprint which is a large telco here in North America and Cellular as well.

And I always tried to get the companies to focus on priorities and there’s a real leaning with the CEO to try and do too much and an organization to try and do too much.  And I probably had my most success with the ten list prior to starting my company with a dotcom I worked at called ediets.com.

When I came to the company, there was literally 87 different projects in development and I had to work to categorize all of these because my marketing team was constantly being pulled in 15 different directions.

The IT team was doing 15 different things and the product development team didn’t know where to work and the CEO was constantly pushing everybody but there’s really nothing significant getting accomplished.  So we got him to agree to a top ten list.

And if we did this first thing and this second thing and this third thing, it would be huge for the company and we had a ton of success.  By focusing we got our first big project out, our second project, our third project and those were projects – real game changers for our company.

When you had Marketing and IT and Product Development, the business development folks all working on the same project, its amazing how you can accomplish these big projects in like 20/30 days where they were just languishing prior to that.

So I’m a big believer in prioritization and ten lists and I was asked to speak at the Direct Marketing Association and I wrote a presentation called The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing.  I really tried to put a stake in the ground and say these are rules.  These are overriding, over arching strategies of online marketing.

I’m proud to say they really stood the test of time because we’re going on eight years since I did that first presentation probably almost exactly 8 years.  Those strategies in my opinion – recently revisited them at a couple of conferences and presented that keynote presentation again.  The core strategies really stand up as do any business strategies stand up over time.  It’s the tactics that change.

To answer your question I believe that the ten strategies are still really the core strategies of online marketing, a lot of them borrowed from other traditional forms of marketing.  We’ll talk a little bit about that as we get into it but I really believe if you follow these rules, you’re good to go.

Philip:              Yeah, I think that’s really interesting because I see a lot of business owners that get seem frustrated or overwhelmed with all the latest must have shiny objects and with online marketing or tactics in SEO and get quite stressed about it.  In fact I had a tough question at a conference the other day.

A business owner stood up and said, “How do you expect us to keep up with this stuff?”  And my response was well, the fundamentals actually don’t change too much.  Even within search engine optimization the fundamentals are still pretty similar to what they were five years ago even though the algorithm may change 200 times in a year.

I think it’s a really interesting point that you made.

Jay:                 Yeah I agree.  It’s very easy to get caught up in Google Plus or Four Square or Seesmic or whatever’s coming down the pipe but really if you follow the core principles and provide people with really great content, you’re going to have success.

Philip:              Cool.  So you run a business in Florida in Boca Raton I believe.

Jay:                 Boca Raton, yeah

Philip:              Boca Raton.  Now in my research I have found out that message labs or semantic think that Boco Raton is the spam capital of the world.  What is your involvement with that?

Jay:                 We’re very proud of that.  No, I think that’s an old tag that came up because it was a big email community here.  There was actually a big tech community very early on.  They called it Silicon Beach named after Silicon Valley out on the West coast and we of course have the beautiful beaches here in Florida.

There is a lot of tech stuff going on.  Someone at some point stole a big email list.  I don’t know if they started – IBM had big offices here and Xerox and a number of big companies and someone stole a big list and started spamming.  I think what happened was in the early days of email when you could sell these names, a couple of people just downloaded the list and three or four email companies were based out of this area but certainly…

Philip:              But no involvement

Jay:                 No we like to think we have a pretty robust community down here and there is probably an over developed amount of internet marketing success in this area because there are a lot of people who choose to live in South Florida who can choose to live an internet lifestyle.

So there’s a lot of us who do some very innovative stuff down in this market area.  When we have some of our meet ups, some of the real top brains in the world migrated to South Florida and naturally there would be probably an over population of successful internet marketers down here who want to live that quality lifestyle.

Philip:              Cool, excellent.  Well let’s get into it.  So you’re first rule is that they are no rules.  That means that numbers 2 to 10 are meaningless.  What do you mean by there are no rules?

Jay:                 Well really what golden rule number one, there are no rules, refers to is when it comes to internet marketing, you can’t really apply the rules of traditional marketing.  And I worked as I mentioned on McDonald’s and Coca Cola and Sprint, big brand advertising.

We would do focus groups and we would evaluate what the consumers wanted and then we would come back with some story boards with some TV ideas, more focus groups, ask the consumers if we were compelling in our messaging and sure enough we then produced a TV commercials and we put it on the air.

And we maybe have a little bit more success like we might sell 1% more Coca Cola or McDonald’s could be a little bit busier one weekend and we’d attribute it to our brilliant marketing.

But I – to be honest – I think those rules were just intelligent guess work but the beauty of online marketing is there really are the rules to do lots of testing.  For the most part you can’t really predict what’s going to work and I like to think I’m a pretty experienced and effective internet marketer and I would say I’m only right about 67% of the time and that’s actually pretty good.

Because a lot of times we will produce landing page or a test or a new type of offer or promotion for one of our clients and I think it’s just a killer idea and sometimes it won’t work all that well.  And so the moral of the story is that as experienced you are or as sophisticated the learning you bring from another category might not work very well.

A seemingly innocuous type of idea might really kill it.  So the moral of the story is you got to do lots of testing and it’s fast and it’s inexpensive to do lots of testing.  It’s very, very easy to put up one offer on one page of your site, another offer on a different page of your site and send half of your traffic from them to Google advertising or Facebook advertising to Page A and half your traffic to Page B.  At the end of a week or two you got a pretty clear indication which offer is working better.

Then what you do is you come up with offer number C and you test A versus C and then maybe C beats A.  So now you have a new ware.  And now you test idea D versus idea C and on and on it goes.

So really there are no rules when it comes down to the real rule of the rule of testing.

Philip:              Yeah and I think the mindset of not being emotionally attached to what you’re doing and just knowing that sometimes you have a perfectly designed, what you think is a perfectly designed landing page but when it loses to the old version you get disappointed or emotionally involved.  It’s quite an interesting maturity process or progress that you can actually just say, well, that’s fine.  That’s the test, let’s move on.

Jay:                 Yeah, exactly.  Don’t get too emotionally involved.  Let the consumer be right.

Philip:              There’s a great website which I’m sure you’re familiar with which is www.WhichTestWon.com where you can choose and have a guess which are the two tests or two landing pages won and then it shows you the uplift in percentages.  Do you know that site?

Jay:                 Yeah, isn’t it Anne Holland who was with marketing experiments, a brilliant site and I’m ashamed to admit, I’m wrong a lot of times.

Philip:              Absolutely and it’s interesting reading the comments and it’s always more interesting than the actual test because you see 30 or 40 online marketers commenting on why they think the one won and the one lost.  And everyone has very different opinions.

Jay:                 That’s a – you can sign up to get a free email for every test.  I would highly recommend it – Which Test Won.com.

Philip:              Alright let’s move on to the second one.

Jay:                 Well the second rule is that the internet is not television.  To a certain extent we touched on it a minute ago that the strategies you take to market with television marketing are really not the same in internet marketing.

Internet marketing from a strategic stand point and is a lot more like direct marketing than it is like television because television – you’re playing commercials, it’s a one way media.  You have audio and video, it’s a very powerful media.  Don’t get me wrong.

But in direct marketing you have the ability to test.  If you think back to old fashioned direct marketing, you might send out a mailer and you might send it out with a blue cover and a red cover.  You might do a test, you might have one offer that’s buy 12 months, get the 13^th month free.

And the other offer might be 5% off and at the end of a month, once you’ve got a bunch in the mail back, you have a pretty good indication that the blue envelope out performed the red envelope and 10% off out performed 13^th month free.

But the beauty of internet marketing is that it’s essentially the same type of testing and we talked about it a minute ago but it happened so much faster.  So within a few days or depending on how much traffic you have a week or so, you’ve got a very good precise answer down to the penny which campaign is more effective in not only clicks but you can also evaluate conversions.

That’s a really important theme I’m sure you’re familiar with.  But a conversion is very different from a click so you don’t want to just measure how many people came to your website, you can actually how many people took a desired action when they came to your website.

So how many people downloaded your free white paper and became a lead or if you sell something, if you have a ecommerce website, like for example in my book, The Ten Golden Rules we used the case study of my first client which is called Annie’s Costumes.

It’s a costume retailer and make-up retailer.  So they are selling items so you can evaluate how many items were sold which is the ultimate conversion obviously.

Philip:              Yes, yes, agreed.  So you’re rule number 3 is create a unique value proposition which is basically marketing 101.  How does that apply to online marketing?

Jay:                 Well it really is create a UVP or unique value proposition.  The principle there is to create something free or inexpensive that people are going to interact with when they come to your website.

So a simple example is download my free white paper, download my free brochure and you would always want to be very provocative with that.  My friend Jeff Walker calls it an irresistible bribe so that you’re bribing people in effect to get something that seems so valuable and in fact it should be valuable.

So download my Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing, you can get a free copy of the presentation slides or the PDF of the presentation slides on my website.  We also have a free chapter of my book on my website.

These are hopefully irresistible type of bribes and then I can measure how many people came to my website and I also get permission to send them future emails because if they download this information, ostensibly I’m going to email it to them and then I have permission to carry on an email based relationship with these folks.

But other uvp’s could just be like a free calculator, like a mortgage rate calculator or loan calculator or a savings calculator or a weight loss calculator depending on your industry of course.  So something very valuable so people would come back again and again to use and they would bookmark your site or they would remember the same of your site and they would refer other people to your site and link to your site which is going to benefit you from a search engine optimization perspective.

Philip:              Yeah, I mean I think one – I tried to get people into that exact same mindset moving from your website needs to sell to somebody on their first visit to the site to your website needs to just start a relationship.

Jay:                 So true.

Philip:              And I like the irresistible bribe.  That’s a good term.

Jay:                 It is a great line.

Philip:              So what’s next.  Rule No. 4.

Jay:                 If you build it they won’t just come.  And I think so many websites have experienced this or so many web entrepreneurs that you think you’re building something that’s just fantastic, that’s going to change people’s lives – you put up this website and people won’t necessarily just show up at your doorstep.

So you typically have to push, pull and drag people to your website and you can do that with online advertising, email advertising.  You can search engine optimize the site to get people to the site, affiliate marketing and there are a number of different tactics that you can use to get the traffic to your website.

At a certain point, once you build up relationships with people and you build your email list, then you can bring people back to the site.  But you probably going to have to stimulate it with a little bit of paid advertising in the early days.

Philip:              Have you seen much changes – well I know the answer to this, but I guess what sort of changes have you seen around search engine optimization over the last eight years or so.

Jay:                 Well I think the biggest change I would say is it’s tough now.  Even three, four years ago, you could do some basic search engine optimization and quickly get to the first page of Google for a number of terms.  We used to send out a press release and target three different keyword phrases.

So I might target internet marketing company Florida, search engine optimization expert and free marketing tips in a press release for example.  And two of those terms would get on the first page of Google.  Now it’s very, very hard to get one term on the first page of Google with a press release.

You have to work long and hard optimizing against a phrase building links to a specific page, building an internal linking strategy.  So I would say that the biggest factor despite people talking about the algorithm changes and what-not is that there’s millions of websites now optimized, millions of websites with a history of links to the website which is other sites linking to your website make the site more important in the eyes of Google so that massive competition I think is the biggest change.

Philip:              Yeah and that applies to Pay Per Click as well.  I mean a lot of people who haven’t run Google Adwords campaigns before I find have unrealistic expectations as to how easy it is.  You just set it up, turn it on and the money starts pouring in.  I think you really need to have your ducks in a row quality campaign and a quality website, specific landing pages, essentially best practice to make it work.

Jay:                 Although I’m very excited about a new form of internet advertising that’s actually beating Google.  I’m going to save that till No. 10, also to tease folks to stick with this till the end of the podcast.

Philip:              I like it.  An online marketer to the core.  Beautiful!  Rule No. 5 – Subscription Models Survive.

Jay:                 Subscription Model Survive.  Basically a lot of people who in the early days of internet advertising thought they could do the advertising model and that was build a website with lots of articles and information and run ads in websites.

While that model works and it actually works a little bit better because Google has a Adsense program where you can actually put Google ads on your website.  So it’s very simple and cost effective to put targeted advertising on your website with Adsense, so you’re essentially partnering with Google.

For the most part the advertising models really didn’t work.  Unless you’re Yahoo or AOL or Microsoft, you got massive traffic to your homepage.  For the most part, subscription models are going to outperform the advertising model.

So subscription model in its simplest form – we talked about it earlier is people subscribing to get an email newsletter and then every week or every two weeks or every month, you send out really great articles and they have to be really great because you’re emailing people these articles.

But if the articles are great, people are going to come to the website to read the rest of the article for example if you have just the first couple of paragraphs of the article and that’s going to drive traffic back to your website.

Then even more powerful models are when you have enough value on a website that you can get people to subscribe.  It can be a micro subscription for $4.97 or $9.97 or it could be a $49 subscription or $99 subscription.  Some websites are so powerful that people are charging $397 for really cutting edge industry information.

Those types of monthly subscription models are very, very powerful.  Really in my opinion the way to go if you can get there.

Philip:              And what sort of industries does that apply to or what sort of industries does that not apply to?  So if you think about local service based businesses, doctors, lawyers, plumbers, those sort of things.  Is that relevant for them?

Jay:                 Perhaps a little bit less relevant.  Maybe some of them – some of them are typical things that we’ve talked about earlier can still work like there is a tremendous example of a dentist who wrote an ebook.  It was free ebook download like we said a uvp – a unique value proposition and it was “If You Floss, You’ll Get More Sex”.

That’s not the exact title but that was the implication about the importance of flossing your teeth.  And this dentist evidently went from a very small practice to having six other dentists working with her and a ton of success.

The same type of internet marketing, we work with attorneys and lot of folks have tapped into our internet marketing training who are in some of the most basic type of industries.

Like I think you mentioned a plumber or roofer or whatever example, if you provide valuable information in the form of that irresistible bribe, even something as simple as a check-list, like download our free check-list – the eleven things to check before you call the plumber or download our free check-list – 22 things to know about selecting a roofing contractor.

I mean you’re changing the metric so significantly that instead of 1% of people phoning up that plumber, probably 10% or 15% or 20% of people are going to download that free check-list.  Why not?  Here’s 10 things I can check about my toilet before I call the plumber.

And well, you’re going to have your phone number and the contact information for the plumber on that.  The person is going to print it out, take the check-list over to their bathroom and there’s a really good chance that they’re going to call the plumber because it’s the law of reciprocity.

He gave me something for free and I’m getting something of value in exchange and I’m building that first level of trust.  So that works like a charm.

Philip:              What do you use on requesting an email address and adding that layer of friction for any of these irresistible bribes?

Jay:                 I would refer back to Rule No. 1 – that there are no rules, and the really important thing to do there is test.  In some instances we found that without the requirement of an email address, you might get 20 or 30 times as many people downloading something like a check-list or an ebook or piece of information that said downloadable.

But think of the math.  Like let’s say 1% of the people are going to give me an email address but 20% of the people are going to download it without an email address.  And let’s say that two of those people are going to come back later and contact me because I built that first level of trust.  Well, you just doubled your success.

Right, if only one person was going to give you the email address, but 20 people downloaded it without the email address and two of them came back and subscribed, you can track them with a cookie or something like that on your computer, so the answer to the story is you got to test.

Like if you could come up with an amazing irresistible bribe, you can capture the email address in that initial visit.  But if you’re able to evaluate and test, maybe you can bring them back later, you get a much higher percentage of people to download it without the email address.

Philip:              And I think not requesting an email address is force you to focus on better quality because you want them to come back from their own free will.

Jay:                 Yes

Philip:              I was listening to David Meerman Scott’s podcast the other day, he was saying the exact same thing.  They had found in their test that you would get the downloads of that free check-list for example, get out to 40 times as many people – you were saying similar things.  I think it’s quite a – I think it’s a great – it’s a preferred approach.

Jay:                 Yeah, I would recommend check out David Meerman Scott’s website, that’s a great example of a free ebook.  Was it The New Rules of Marketing and PR?

Philip:              That’s right.

Jay:                 I think he wrote an ebook called The New Rules of PR and he said it was downloaded over 100,000 times and it got him a publishing deal.  The book The New Rules of Marketing and PR turned him into an international keynote speaker.

Philip:              Okay, let’s move on.  What’s Rule No. 6?

Jay:                 Rule No. 6 is to remember the four P’s.  Philip you remember them from your marketing text book right?  Product, Place, Price and Promotion.  Well the four P’s are still important in online marketing.

First of all product, I always recommend think of your website like a product and I had the good fortune of working for Coca Cola in product management.  One of the products I was tasked with was to introduce the new bottle for our Sprite brand.

If you remember the – I assume they had the curvaceous Coca Cola bottles all around the bottle.  They also had a unique Sprite bottle with little dimples in the green bottle.  Some markets around the world had been testing the green dimple bottle in the plastic bottle.  So it was my job to investigate those tests and bring that product to market.  So I was a Product Manger in my marketing world.

So if you think of your website in the same way, think of it like a product management procedures.  So I’m going to build a new section in my website and I’m going to map out a strategy to sort of get that done.  I’m going to put a project plan with work backs in place to make that happen.

And always be thinking of how can I improve the product.  What’s the new improved version?  What’s the new packaging?  What am I testing?  Really assign all those project managers to be developing the new component parts of your website.  It’s really marketing and pure marketing and applying that product manager thinking is essential.

In terms of place, the Golden Rule of Real Estate is location, location, location and the most important location on the internet is probably that free site of a Google search.  Facebook’s becoming equally important, you want to build up your Facebook fan page but think of places.  The critical locations and you want to appear in the prime real estate where your target market is going to be surfing around the internet.

Price is often model of free to paid works really well.  We’ve talked about a number of examples of that.  We have free check-list or free download or free white paper, and you build that relationship with people on a free basis and maybe revolve it to a paid type of relationship.

Finally is Promotion.  And we’ve talked about a number of different promotions and different types of testing and again it comes back to that keyword of testing.

Philip:              Excellent.  I love your Rule No. 7.  This for me is probably the starting point whenever we work with a client or evaluate a website and their online presence and that’s trust is golden.  In fact I’m just publishing a blog post on all the trust and credibility indicators that you should have on your website.  Can you expand, talk a little bit about trust?

Jay:                 Sure, the credibility indicators are perfect.  Even one of the things I found really interesting when I was researching this paper was a study that was done at Stanford University.  I think they talked to 2800 consumers and they asked people what makes a website credible in your eyes?

I forget the exact number but I think the number one thing 28% of people said it’s the design of the website.  It has to look professional.  And I think that’s really very true.

Today, if you come to a website and it looks kind of sketchy, the images aren’t clear and it doesn’t load up very quickly.  If that design isn’t professional or well organized, we’re out of there.

The second point of well organized is if you can’t find what you’re looking for, there’s a saying called “the four second rule”, if you can’t find exactly who’s site it is, what they are offering, you can’t figure out how to do what it is you are looking to do within 2 or 3 seconds, you just know how to hit the back button and go back to the search of the other website that referred you in the first place.

So you got to be very attuned to that professional design because that’s an indicator, that’s the first indicator of trust.

Philip:              What other trust indicators – I think having a well laid out website, just a nice pleasing design that portrays your brand really well.  Strong copy – I find copy is one of the areas that a lot of business owners underestimate and tend to cut corners and it’s a really under invested area in my opinion.  What other trust indicators do you think are important?

Jay:                 Well if I could build on that thought about the copy, to me people underestimate how other people use the internet.  Margie in our office is a reader, she amazes me sometimes, the little facts she’ll know about a client when we first go to look at their website.  I’m like, “how do you know that?”  She’s like, “Oh I read it, it’s on their website.”

I’m not a reader, I’m more of a clicker.  I’ll go from link to link to link and I may go a lot deeper on a website than she will.  And then still somebody else in our office loves to watch videos.  I’m a little bit too impatient to watch videos but we know video is massively important across the internet.

So I would say you want to have the different medium available for people because there’s different types of users and far too many times, the CEO will say, “Nobody’s going to watch a video, we don’t need to produce a video.”  I would never do that but the I would never do that is really, really something you never want to say in internet marketing development.

Couple of other trust indicators, obviously as you’re going through the sales efforts and what we call the sales funneling.  You’re getting into some of the secure pages, you want the page to be secure and you want to have some of those indicators like E-trust or some of the credit cards security indicators, associations are really good, if you’re a member of any industry association, other indicators of trust.

Even a simple thing we talked about was uvp’s are those downloads where we’re trying to capture the consumers’ email address.  I never like to use the term capture but that is what we’re trying to do from a marketing perspective.

When we’re trying to give the consumer an irresistible bribe, you might want to have a blue link that says Privacy Policy and just by simply indicating that there is a link to your privacy policy, that’s enough to tell most people, hey there is a privacy policy, these guys are probably not going to sell my email address.

And that can increase the percentage of people who give you their email by 10%, 20%, 30%.  Again these are all elements to be tested.

Philip:              Yes, I was looking for some computer speakers couple of weeks ago and I had to dig around to find the phone number of this ecommerce store which frustrated me.  I eventually called them and it went through to voice mail.  So clearly I didn’t make the purchase and they lost me right then and there.

I had my credit card out, I wanted this exact product but I couldn’t speak to a human to ask them a technical question.  It was just frustrating but I see it all the time.

Jay:                 Yes, so again, you got to treat people professionally and design the stuff like you’re designing it for your best friend.

Philip:              Do you tend to use a lot of video with your clients?

Jay:                 Yes, big believer in video.  Again I’ll give you my little sound byte.  There’s a study recently done – I’ll try to think of the name before we’re done.  They basically talked to 1800 internet marketers and they asked them what tools are you using in your internet marketing programs.

And I think number one was blogs and number two was Facebook and number thee was Twitter and number four was Linkedin.  Then number five was way, way down the list because it was like 81% we’re using Facebook, 80% we’re using blogs.

But way down at 41% was YouTube. So only 41% of your competitors are using video.  Look at the amazing numbers on YouTube.  It’s now the No. 2 search engine in the world.  More people are searching on YouTube than they are on Yahoo or Bing.  Of course Google is No. 1

YouTube is the No. 2 place that people are searching for things.  So I know a lot of times – let’s go back to the plumber scenario.  I have a leaky toilet, if I search ‘fix leaky toilet’, I might find the solution there.  Or ‘how to do SEO’, there’s probably some great demo video.

So if you like learning that way, it’s an amazing tool to search.  I’ve recently been watching a lot of tennis videos and learning tennis, and I found a really great website called Fuzzy Yellow Balls.  I’ve become friends with the guys who run that website.  It’s an amazing way to learn tennis.

The other key statistic, YouTube is the No. 3 website in the world.  Here you have only 41% of your competitors using video and it’s the No. 2 search engine in the world and the No. 3 website in the world.  So yes, video is awesome.

Philip:              Yes, the first question that comes up with clients when we talk about video is the question of how do I get started and what quality is good enough.  Do I need to hire a full production house to have these promotional videos or can I start doing it in-house and how do I get started?  What are your thoughts on just getting stuff up there as opposed to doing a real professional job.

Jay:                 Well you can do a real professional job and it definitely doesn’t have to be the old million dollar commercials we made for Coca Cola.  But you can do a very professional job with a student at your local college and a lot of times they have same HD cameras you could shoot a movie with.

Matter of fact there are some commercials on TV where they show you they shot the commercial with a standard camera using the video function.  So you can shoot HD video, make sure your leggings good.  Most important is to actually make sure you have a mike separate from the camera.

But a lot of times you don’t even have to be a star on camera, you can just use a tool called Camtasia for a marketing video.  You can just use screen capture and just go through a little slide show with audio and really, really simple video can be very powerful.

The strategy that we take with all our clients who are just starting out is let’s just do one video a month which isn’t too high in objective.  It’s pretty easy for us to accomplish and the first one, why don’t we just do a how to video and demonstrate how to use the product or service and then the next month, let’s answer couple of questions that are the most popular questions that our prospects ask us.

The next month let’s try and make something a little bit funny so maybe you could go viral and the month after that we can come back and just do another how to video.  It’s really simple to come up with different kinds of ideas.  If you just use the discipline of a calendar which is very powerful for all the things we’re talking about.

That newsletter should be on a calendar, you know you’re getting out twice a month and you’re writing three newsletter articles.  You should do a press release minimum of once a month.   You should do 3 or 4 blog posts a week but put it on a schedule – Monday, Wednesday, Friday – we got a blog post coming out and Tuesday and Thursday, we’re going to write articles.

So if you calenderize this stuff, it gets done and its very powerful.

Philip:              I’m also a big fan of the batching approach, doing a couple at a time, the set up and the effort of thinking about how to do it and getting all your equipment out and getting ready and finishing off and all that sort of stuff and the planning process.  I quite like the batching and I do three at a time or four at a time.

Jay:                 How many podcasts are you doing today?

Philip:              I’m doing another one tomorrow.  So I like to do a couple of podcasts, do the effort on the research, schedule them in very close together and then the post production stuff, I’ll also batch up.  The editing and uploading to WordPress and all that sort of stuff.  I try to batch it, I find it a lot more efficient.

Jay:                 Yeah that’s smart.  I like that.

Philip:              Right, we’re onto Rule No. 8.

Jay:                 Rule No. 8 is use the right tactic.  What the sort of strategy here is that a lot of people will come to me and they’ll say, we need affiliate marketing.  And I say, okay, what’s your CPA.  And they look at me like they’ve never heard of a CPA.

Well CPA is the internet term for Cost Per Acquisition and you need to know how much it costs you to acquire a lead or to acquire a sale, a conversion.  So these are things we talked about earlier about developing it, the landing page, developing a couple of tests and testing how cost effective you can acquire a lead or a sale for.

Before you do affiliate marketing you need to know what your Cost Per Acquisition is because then you can go out and get affiliates or like a virtual sales force.  You can get those folks to promote your product or service and hey, it cost me $10 to get a lead on my website.

So then you can go to the affiliates and say I’ll pay you guys $8 every time you give me a lead because you know it’s more effective than what you can get and you’re only paying for a lead.

Back to using the right tactic, a client will come to you and they’ll say hey we need to do affiliate marketing.  It’s like well no, first you need to do – you need to develop an offer.

Second you need to develop a couple of landing pages to test a couple of different offers.  Third you should run some Pay Per Click against those offers and once you’re acquiring those folks, you should build a data base and you should have an irresistible bribe and then you should do follow on marketing because most people won’t buy the first time they come to your website.

After we do all that and we got our landing page tested and we’ve got our trust indicators tested and we’ve got really convincing sales funnel and our follow on marketing is in place.

After we do all that we can go and launch it to the affiliate community because there’s no sense putting an offer that’s no good.  Landing pages that don’t work, conversion that’s no good into the affiliate market place.  So you want to use the right tactic.

Basically Pay Per Click advertising, Google, Facebook, even YouTube is a very good place to get started in driving some traffic, testing landing pages, very good way to test different offers, follow on marketing is a great way to build that relationship with people once you’ve brought them to your website.

That’s sort of a highlight if you use the right tactic.

Philip:              Yes, I think that’s some awesome ideas for listeners.  Doing the right thing in the right order and not jumping ahead is really important.  I’d encourage people to listen to an interview I did a while back with Mary O’Brian.  We talked about online marketing strategy and sort of what to approach in the right order.  I thought that was a really great podcast.

Excellent, alright, we’re getting towards the end.

Jay:                 Alright.

Philip:              So we’re on Rule No. 9.

Jay:                 Rule No. 9 is the best never rest.  And the subset of that is the best never rest, test, test, test.

Philip:              Testing has come up in quite a few of your rules and it really is a the core of everything isn’t it?

Jay:                 Yes, and we’ve kind of beaten that one to death but really the best never rest is – once you get that website up, you’re just started and you really need to be constantly developing new content, so new articles and press releases and product information pages on your website.

Google likes to see your site constantly being updated and nice and fresh -  Google and the other search engines.  Of course I’m just referring to the search engines.

You want to be testing lots of offers as we talked about.  You want to be always developing new areas of your website like a product manager.  So really the best never rest is about innovation and constantly exploring new things.

You and I were speaking a little bit more about, before we started recording about info product marketing and that’s a fascinating field that I’m spending a lot of my personal time investigating.  How can you use your professional expertise and sell people relatively inexpensive information.

The kind of things we’re talking about here tonight for you and I are just common sense because we’ve been at this for a long time.  But for a lot of people this is valuable information that people would pay $19.95 or $39.95 for an ebook or $199 for a training course.

That’s an example of – even though I’ve been at this internet marketing stuff for 15 or more years, I’m constantly going to conferences and even though I’m a speaker at the conference I go and see all the other speakers and I’m constantly reading blogs and listening to podcasts and sucking up as much information as I can.  I’m paying for these same ebooks and online courses.

I’ve recently paid $2000 for an online course.  I’m a big believer in the best never rest, constantly learning and always growing.

Philip:              Yes couldn’t have said it better myself.  What tools do you recommend for testing?

Jay:                 Well the simplest thing is just conversion tracking in a Google Adwords campaign.  What a conversion – we talked about that earlier, like if you offer people a free download of a white paper or an ebook and what you need to do is on the first page just put in your first name, last name and email address and then when they get to the next page, it’s called a Thank You page so thank you very much, click here to download the ebook.

Google and the other search Pay Per Click search companies will give you a little what’s called a conversion code.  So it’s a little unique identifier code and you place that code on the Thank You page and you know how many people gave you their first name, last name and email and got to the Thank You page.

So that’s the easiest way to test different variables.  We talked earlier about just testing two different landing pages.  You want to test the conversions, you don’t want to make your decision based on clicks.  You want to make your decision based on people actually taking an action in a business to business like your business or my business where people are just making that first relationship with you.

You want to just evaluate how many people you’re getting as a lead and back to my friends at Annie’s Costumes, the costume store, they can evaluate how many people purchase some make-up or costume or mask.

Philip:              Have you used unbounce at all recently?  We’ve been using that for landing pages and have had some great success.

Jay:                 I’m not familiar with that one so thank you, I’ll check it out.  Unbounce?

Philip:              Unbounce, yes.  I think it’s unbounce.com

Jay:                 Cool, okay.

Philip:              Really great useful tool for building landing pages really quickly and also gives some good A/B testing.

Jay:                 Great.

Philip:              Excellent, we’re on to the last one.  Lead the trends and you promised you had some awesome – the silver bullet to achieve massive online marketing success.

Jay:                 Yes, I’ve been doing, talking about this stuff for 8 years so it’s pretty rare that I get really, really excited about something new.  And I think for about 6 of the last 8 years Google has been really dominant and I actually wrote a new presentation called The Death of the 800 Pound Googlerilla.

I’m not suggesting that Google’s going to go out of business or go away but Google has been such a dominant force in our industry and in a good way for the most part because they’ve allowed us to do a lot of major business but they have become a little bit of an 800 pound gorilla if you know the business expression that they really dominated the market place.

And for the first time we’ve seen something beating Google and by beating I would define – I’ll go back to what we talked about earlier, this CPA or Cost Per Acquisition.  As a marketer, we’re constantly measuring what’s the lowest cost way that I can get someone to my website and get them to take a conversion action.  A measurable action on my website.

So the Cost Per Action, let’s say it’s $10 with Google to get people to download an ebook on a website or it’s cost $10 to sell small child’s costume on the costume website.

Well there’s a new thing on the landscape which is more effective than Google in about 8 out of 10 industries and that is Facebook advertising, paid Facebook advertising.

The reason why it’s so effective and most people tried Facebook advertising and failed because 12, 18 months ago, there really wasn’t enough data in Facebook.  And the other thing is it is still very difficult to do conversion tracking with Facebook advertising.

So two things changed.  One is we’ve all been more active on Facebook in liking different websites and completing our profile information and joining groups and creating other demographic and psychographic and likeographic information if you will on our profiles.

The other thing is we’re using Google analytics to track a Facebook conversion action through to the website.  So we’re tying a Facebook adgroup to a unique URL in Google Analytics.

So those two things have turned the corner for us of Facebook advertising.  I’ve give you the best example.  This is almost like a 100% guarantee.  If you’re able to target people who like your competitors and click the like button and their fans of a competitor.

If you’re selling costumes and you find a bunch of people, they are fans of other costume stores or the next level is if you can find people who are fans of costume parties and people who are fans of Star Wars and Star Trek and all kinds of different dress up occasions.

Or big fans of Halloween, then you can target your Facebook advertising very precisely.  You can target mothers for example because you know they have young kids and they are probably going to be dressing them up for Halloween and coming up in the next month or so, the Halloween season is going to be heating up.

So you can target mothers who are fans of Star Trek and Star Wars and there’s a good chance they’re going to be dressing up some young Lukes and Laras right.

Philip:              Absolutely, we encourage listeners to look at our last podcast.  Do you know Paul Dunay at all?

Jay:                 It sounds familiar but I don’t personally know him

Philip:              Okay yes, he’s a Facebook guru and we had a good chat a couple of weeks back with him.  Have you had much success in the B2B space on Facebook?

Jay:                 We’ve started to have some success and in a similar precise type of targeting on Linkedin.  We’ve had a little bit of success there too.  It doesn’t have the same volume as consumer, but we have had some success.

As a matter of fact I didn’t mention our internet marketing club and we created a new community called Internet Marketing Club.org.  We’ve done a little bit of testing with Facebook and Linkedin advertising and had some initial success in bringing folks to the community even internet marketing club.org is a completely free community but we do internet marketing training webinars every week over there at internet marketing club.org.

Philip:              Yes, excellent.  We have links to that website in the show notes.  You’re also launching a new internet marketing club?

Jay:                 Yes, it’s really just a new upgrade.  It’s internet marketing club 2.0 and we have a lot more features in the site.  If you just join up on the free site, internet marketing club.org, we’ll be opening up the new features probably every month or so.

Philip:              Awesome, excellent.  Was there anything else you want to close with?  Anything around lead the trend or any other parting comments?

Jay:                 Well what was the new – well really just to sum up and I’ll use the Facebook example again.  There’s often about a 6 month window in internet marketing when you hear about something like Facebook advertising and you’ve now heard about it two weeks in a row on Philip’s podcast and you’ve heard a couple of experts saying hey, Facebook advertising is killing it and as I said, it’s beating Google in 8 out of 10 categories.

Part of the reason for that is that not many people have discovered it or not very many people have discovered how to do the tracking that I talked about by using the Google URLs.  So you’ve got about a 6 month window because any day now Facebook is probably going to be integrating conversion tracking into their software.

Unless you take advantage of this window where people haven’t figured it out, you’ve got this opportunity where very few people are bidding for those ads and you’ve got the secret now on how to track it so you’ve got what is it?  700 million people now on Facebook, you can target them very precisely and you’ve got very little competition.

So Lead the Trend is all about taking advantage of those windows, finding out the cutting edge things that are working before the mass market figures it out and jumping on that and doing a lot of robust testing to make it work for you and your category because 6 months from now everyone is going to be caught up and by then you can be onto the next thing figuring out, testing, evaluating how to make it work.

Philip:              Is there any way we can direct listeners to around the tracking with Facebook and Analytics?  Have you done any blog posts on that?

Jay:                 Well we definitely have bunch of – I think we have 5 or 6 webinars that we’ve done in internet marketing club.

Philip:              Great, we’ll direct people there.

Jay:                 Yes and stay tuned.  I’m going to be putting up a whole video on Facebook marketing as well.

Philip:              Beautiful.  So closing comment Jay, what do you think we’ll be talking about or what do you think the big focus will be in 12 months time?  How do you think – any particular strategies, new strategies or challenges with Google and Facebook?  What do you think will be the focus of the online marketing community?

Jay:                 Yes I think we’ll definitely see lots of Facebook.  I mean it’s very early but it looks like Google Plus is going to be a winner.  Looks like Google is finally solved social media and it has some very interesting features that I was looking for as a consumer, particularly the circles.

If you don’t have an invite to Google Plus yet, you definitely want to find a friend who has a Google Plus membership and can get you an invite.  The early numbers were about 2 weeks into it and they say that 10 million people have already signed up.

So and like I said the circles feature you can put people into circles so if you want to send a message out to only your friends, you can put them in the friends circle and if you want to send it to only your business contacts, I wouldn’t send my business stuff necessarily to my aunt and my mom and stuff like that.

So looks like Google circles will be a winner and so it’s ironic that I said Facebook is challenging Google in the paid advertising space.  Looks like Google will be taking on Facebook in the community space so Google Plus might be a winner that we’re talking about in 12 months.

Philip:              Beautiful.  Well thanks so much Jay.  You’ve given us some awesome information.

Jay:                 It was my pleasure and please check out Ten Golden Rules.com.  We have lots of free stuff on that site and internet marketing club.org.  It’s an amazing community.  Actually there’s a group called the down under group.  I don’t know how many of you listeners are down under but there’s actually a networking group of internet marketers from down under within the internet marketing club.org.

Philip:              Excellent, I’ll definitely check that out.  And your Twitter profile is just your name isn’t it?

Jay:                 Yes, Jay Berkowitz

Philip:              Excellent, beautiful.  Thanks so much Jay

Jay:                 Thanks so much Philip, my pleasure

For the first half of the talk I spoke about high level strategy and the 5 C’s to online success, and for the second half I covered some specific quick tips.

This is the first in a series of posts covering these 5 C’s to succeeding online.

1. Credibility.

The starting point for someone arriving at your website for the first time is usually from a place of mistrust. They assume you are not trust worthy. You need to build their trust. From scratch.

This may not be entirely true, in that they think you’re  total fraud, but this mindset can be helpful to get you to take proactive steps to increase the credibility of your website.

However, if you think about your website in this way, you will go a long way to improving conversions. I encourage business owners to think of ALL their ‘real world’ credibility and make sure ALL of it is represented on their website.

Once you start brainstorming, the process gets easier and easier. And it may well be the best investment in your online marketing that you will ever make.

I challenge you to make a list of 10 credibility indicators you could add to your website.

Before we get into examples of these indicators, it goes without saying you need a well laid-out website (information architecture), pleasing design (portrays your brand accurately), well written copy AND strong calls to action. Without these (a complex area indeed, and a subject of squillions of books, courses, webinars & consultants) you are doomed to fail.

But let’s get into it. How many of these do you have, and what additional credibility indicators could you add?

1. Landline phone number on every page. Mobile/cell numbers scream “I’m a one man band operating from home in my pajamas”. If that’s your intention, that’s fine. But for most businesses that’s not the image you’re looking to portray. A Skype landline number is cheap and easy to set up. aA premium 1300 number (routed to anywhere of your choosing) is even better.
2. Physical address on every page (I like at the top of every page – so that it’s very visible). A P.O Box number also screams “operating from home”.  Again, if that’s OK with your target market, so be it. Virtual offices are pretty cheap too. You can add human call answering, which is a nice professional touch if you can’t pick up all calls. (A few weeks ago I was looking for some high-end PC speakers and had a technical question. Blow me down if I couldn’t find a phone number. Eventually after hunting around, I found it. The call went to message bank – during business hours. No one there, not even to take a message. I don’t have to tell you if I made the purchase or not.)
3. Full descriptions of your products/services. A web developer with one small paragraph on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not going to persuade too many people that you’ve deciphered Google’s algorithm. More likely you’re just a reseller of someone else’s service. I might as well find an expert.
4. ‘About Us’ page – People buy from people not websites. Visitors want to know who is behind the business. The more info the better. Include detail about why you’re in business. Your passion is contagious!
5. FAQs – Detailed FAQs give you an opportunity to prove you know your stuff.
6. Customer testimonials. You may think you’re awesome. But who cares what you think. Show me what your customers think. You can’t have too many testimonials. Adding actual names (and pics) improves believability because you could actually call them. Video is even better. And remember you don’t need to put them in one place. You can use in different places, and multiple places, on your website.
7. Business awards. If you’ve bribed a judge or two and won a business  award, shout it from the roof tops. (The winning part, not the bribing part.)
8. Industry regulations. Including links to and information about regulations of your industry proves you understand your market and raises trust instantly.
9. Media. Have you appeared in the newspapers or on TV? You legend! Make sure you include the media logos, and links to this valuable content. (If it was an investigation by a trashy 6pm TV show, perhaps not – rather find a reputation management consultant to suppress the search engine results.)
10. Membership of industry associations. Include their logos and what your involvement is – especially if you’re on any committees.
11. ‘Contact Us’ page – It’s simple, you have to have one. Include all contact details, addresses, maps etc
12. Commitment to learning – If you’re in any industry that requires continual learning, include any activities your staff undertake to keep up to date.
13. Guarantees – If you provide any guarantee for your product or service make sure you include it on your website, and make it easy to find. (If you don’t have a guarantee, why not?)
14. Privacy policy – Every website needs a policy explaining how they deal with their website visitors’ privacy. While I haven’t used this service to create a privacy policy personally, it looks useful. www.freeprivacypolicy.com/
15. Email address from your business domain. This one drives me nuts. If you’re sending business emails from an ISP address (eg Optus, Bigpond or Gmail) rather than your own domain, you’re doing your business a massive disservice. Included with your website hosting will be domain email addresses. (eg enquiry AT cleverclicks.com.au rather than cleverclicks AT gmail.com) Get it sorted.
16. Social media profiles. If you’re active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube or other services, include these links so prospects can get to know you and start a relationship.

I hope this list will get you thinking about improving trust and credibility on your site. Most of these don’t cost much, it’s more about the time to implement, but I offer my (incredible) personal 1 beer/wine guarantee that by adding a few of these indicators you will provide a big boost to your conversion rates.

What are your thoughts? What have I left off?

Next post will look at the 2^nd “C” of succeeding online. Stay tuned.

It seems everyone is talking about Facebook marketing these days. But what really is everyone so excited about and how should you go about developing a Facebook marketing plan?

Who better to discuss this topic than award winning B2B marketing expert & Facebook marketing expert Paul Dunay.

He’s author of the recently published Facebook Marketing Guide for Dummies.  In fact, he’s published four books now. If Paul’s views on the future of marketing in Facebook don’t get you fired up, I don’t know what will.

We discuss:

- Why Paul thinks Facebook will become the preferred platform to acquire new customers, interact with existing customers, and sell products and services

- The #1 secret to appearing in your fans’ news feed (‘News Feed Optimisation’ (NFO) may be the new SEO)

- What is Facebook commerce

- The fascinating Google v Facebook war

- Some great examples of companies doing smart Facebook marketing

- And much more

You should connect with Paul on Twitter, LinkedIn and of course Facebook.

If you prefer to read….

Philip:   There’s a great opening sentence in your new book and I thought I’d read directly from that and we can discuss that point.  I think it’s a cracking statement.  You say in your dedication paragraph that you believe that  Facebook will become the preferred platform for marketers to acquire new customers interacting with existing customers and sell products and services.  I think it’s a pretty cool statement, I wonder if you could explain that.

Paul:    Yeah actually I think it’s a very powerful platform.  The way I like to describe it to my mom is if I was to give you a billboard for free in let’s say New York, in Times Square or in the heart of Sydney, would you take it.  My mom would obviously say yes.  So the 600 million plus people, a 12^th of the world, in less than seven years are all connected on Facebook.  So the marketing opportunities there really abound and at this point we are just at the beginning of whatever this is.  What I think I see are maybe three major opportunities for businesses today to start to use Facebook.

The first is around developing new products.  I think you saw Honda had launched a car and they put it out on Facebook for people to comment and they just got torn apart by the Facebook community.  Do you think that they are going to develop products differently going in the future?  They absolutely will and there are already people who are starting to harness the wisdom of the crowd as you will for development of products.

When it comes to marketing products there’s tons of opportunities now when it comes to advertising your products, having a page for your products or service.  I’m using product but I actually mean product or service or appearing in people’s news feed, I actually think the trick today, if you were to ask me today versus say a year ago Philip, it’s a completely different game in the sense of people are trying to gain that centre column, the news feed when you first log in so you can see your brands there and we can dive into that a little bit more if you want but many brands.  Even state and local governments are starting to do things.

I saw the other day, there was – State of Arizona, a major state in the U.S. put out a What Do You Like About Arizona – all of a sudden 200/300 people are piling in – oh I love spiders and I love cactuses and I love the outdoors and the great bla, bla, bla that happens in Arizona.  What happens from that is that now the next time that the State of Arizona has a question or a posting on their page, those people that answered the question or liked the question which was a total of 600 people will now see that content more.

That’s a really illuminating kind of a content analogy that you want to be doing in your business, is to try to create content that people are going to interact with because why?  It will start showing up more and you can start to market and remarket to them.  And the step that I just put into the next version of the book which is the rewrite is point to the 0.02% of people actually go back to the page that they like.  So they never really end up back on your page.

The big fallacy is oh I got to create this page and make the Facebook page for my company really shine, doesn’t matter, don’t put that much effort into it.  Obviously make it nice, don’t make it sloppy and ugly but the juice is to get them to interact with you when it comes to marketing directly to them.  Then I think the biggest opportunity that you’re just going to start to see and is starting to crop up now is selling.  I have a lot of clients right now how they can sell directly on Facebook.

You have Delta Airlines here in the States, we got Brooks Brothers, Victoria Secret, Godiva Chocolate, retailers you would imagine, J.C. Penny, who else, 1-800 Flowers, these might be little bit more of an American examples.  I’m sorry I don’t have native examples for you but there are tons of folks starting to get their commerce, their social commerce if you will, S commerce.  I’ve even heard it called F commerce going on the site.

I’m working with a couple of clients that sell music that want to put their music, their entire music library up there and names that you would really recognize, big brands and big brand names.  It’s very exciting to see that.  I think what we saw when we wrote that has even gotten larger than we thought it would.  How you develop and how you sell and how you market your products is going to change for marketers specially now with Facebook getting so much momentum.

Philip:  Great, what an introduction.  So when do the lights really come on on the opportunities within Facebook and tell us a little bit about your background?

Paul:    Well my background has been typically in B2B marketing and B2B marketing of technology and my co-author in the book is really my B to C evil twin, Rich Crougar.  He’s not evil, I just call him my evil twin.  So he understands the consumer side of it more.  So the two of us make a nice pair in not just in writing but he’s a little bit more technical and I’m a little bit more big picture and obviously as you know the Dummies series is a very technical book.  Do this step first, this step second, so it’s very informative.  He does that very well and I do the big picture stuff very well so it’s a nice match.

The funny story behind this is the two of us went to college together and that was a little while ago, let’s just leave it at that, before Facebook and we reconnected through Facebook.  As I first mentioned, the first note he sent me is, “Hey, I’m living in New York and I’m doing some interactive marketing,” and I wrote him back, “Hey I live in New York and I’m doing some interactive marketing, let’s get together.”  Then this opportunity arose through my blog while he actually contacted me and said, “Hey do you have any ideas for a book – a dummies book?” and I said, “Yeah, Facebook Marketing for Dummies.”  They said, “Well we already have a Facebook for Dummies.”  I said, “Yeah but you don’t have Facebook Marketing for Dummies.”

That was around 2008, just around the corner from when they had launched in November 2007 the ability for companies to have a Facebook page.  I thought that that was going to be a big thing.  Well who knew at that time and certainly Willey didn’t believe me, don’t think that they immediately thought that that was the greatest thing they’ve ever heard.  It took me about nine months to convince them that that was a wonderful thing.  I finally got the contract in December.  That was in March, I sent the proposal in in March and I got the okay to go in December that same year.  Be careful what you wish for is the under statement there right Philip?

Philip:  Yeah that’s great.  I’ve just been looking through your Facebook Marketing for Dummies and it’s a great read, like I said, straight to the point and give us a really good step by step procedures to follow to get your presence up and running.  We’ll touch on bit of that in the session today.  I want to get back to that statement that we opened with around Facebook becoming the preferred platform.  So where do you see search engines like Google and companies’ own websites fitting into their strategies in the future?

Paul:    Okay, so there’s two pieces to that and I’m going to separate it into two if it’s okay.  One is the future of Google and one is the future of the website.  I’ll take the second part first which is really easy which is the website.  I wrote a post about a year and a half ago that said with all this stuff of Facebook, who needs the website?  And I got to tell you, I got a tremendous response of people who really took offense to the statement.  I actually believe and I’ve seen small accounting firms and local shops, small shops, retailers, small restaurants that have opened just a Facebook presence and not a web presence.  So that’s why I wrote that article was to sort of enlighten people that hey, I think I’m seeing something that’s a small minor trend which could turn out to be a bigger trend.

Now if you watch TV you may see people say go to Facebook.com/walmart, something like that and again, you see people tagging their print and their TV ads with just their Facebook presence.  It’s a very interesting trend, I don’t really know what to make of it except for the fact that they obviously want to drive people there and hopefully they’ll have a very good experience when they get there.

When it comes to the future of Google, that’s another interesting statement.  I think search is losing some of its relevance because of all this social data.  So if you roll the clock back, research used to be really hard.  Think back to when let’s say, I was student, 20 years ago.  We used to have to go to the library and use the Dewey decimal system and all of these kinds of crazy things and photocopying books and synthesizing material.  Google made that obsolete.  You could just go, type something in and all of a sudden get information so it flipped the research paradigm on its head.

Now I think with all of this search data, I’m sorry with all of this social data, it’s turning the paradigm on its head for search engines.  Google does not include all of the Facebook feed, all of the Twitter feeds, all of the blogs and forums and social networks.  All that publicly available stuff and all the stuff that they do, it actually messes up their search results.

So you see a lot of analytics firms and truth be told one of which I’m doing some work for called Network Insights do this kind of analysis of just socials and we can help optimize marketers and advertisers by giving them good social data on people who like your brand also do ‘x’.  That can actually be very informative to them.

It’s something you’re not going to get out of Google.  It worries me a little bit for their future.  Obviously they’ve got tons of intelligent people there that are probably trying to crack the code on this right now and I would also think that they would want some sort of social analytics, Google Analytics for social media or something like that sometime in the very near future.  I don’t have any information on my sleeve but I would just imagine that that would be something that they would be working on so that they can also produce that kind of result.

Philip:  Yeah, GA for social would be quite interesting.  In fact we just published an our newsletter talking about Google’s latest release of – they rolled out this social search which was in beta from October from last year and is now live so Google results will pull in information from your friends profiles but not Facebook.  Google and Facebook are still at war.

Paul:    They’re going to put down their sword with Facebook and really just take it in.  If not, Facebook is going to become its own version of Google.  Just think of the data that they have that you can get from their pipe right now.  You can get geo location datas so that they could say, Philip just updated his status in Sydney and Paul just did it in New York but they could also say Philip did it viz. a viz. mobile and Paul did it viz. a viz browser.  So we are a web based client.

So you can start to get some really interesting data on, hey Paul is doing a lot in Starbucks in Nashville, Tennessee and there’s a lot of mobile activity going on right there.  That’s something that can’t be fathomed by Google at this point or at least the current version of it.  I’m sure they’ve got some things brewing underneath their covers.

Philip:  Yeah, the social website thing I think is fascinating, why wouldn’t you rather ask because there’s an easier way to ask on social network what the best hairdresser was in Perth or Sydney or New York or whatever.  Why would you do that rather than go to Google?  Obviously Google are feeling that.  I wanted to get back to your point around the website, the future of the website being potentially inside Facebook.

The thing that jumps out at me, yes that makes a lot of sense in terms of the interaction with all your prospects and customers, but what about the ownership of the content.  Building on Facebook’s platform, if you have letters to Facebook, that’s Facebooks and you can really get them down and all sorts of stuff.  I mean the ownership of content I think would scare a lot of businesses.

Paul:    Yeah, and again I hate to sound like a know it all but I wrote about this.  I actually read the terms of service like a year and a half before this whole thing blew up and I wrote a blog post that said by the way, Facebook owns all your stuff so just get used to it.  I don’t really see it as such a problem.  I mean people talk about it in ways that well, what if they sell my photos or they take my personal photos and they’re going to resell them.  I don’t see that ever happening.  If they are that hard up for money, that’s going to be a really ugly day for Facebook and most people would probably just delete their stuff and go on and live their lives.

But for me, a firm that’s giving you free access to their system, free uploads and storage of video, they’re the second largest video site, they’re the largest photo sharing site.  It’s something like 750,000 photos were uploaded on New Year’s day on Facebook and all of that for free on top of your own free blogging platform, your own free Twitter, sms kind of platform, now email.  I mean that just doesn’t make any sense.

So I understand the businesses might be a little scared of it.  You got to get used to letting go of your content, you never know what good things could happen, I think everyone’s looking at the downside of it but thank you for asking me that question.  That’s one that typically comes up quite a bit.

Philip:  Yeah I’m sure it comes up all the time.  I mean I’m not fussed from a personal perspective but if I think about the company, if that was the centre of their online universe, that makes me a little worried or would make me a little worried.

Paul:    The other big question that I get, that you haven’t, that I may ask for you if you don’t mind, which is so where’s the next Facebook or when is the next Facebook coming around?  What I like to say there is it’s grown to such a level and I liken it to – let’s just take the history of search.  If you remember search engines like Lycos and Alta Vista, even AOL to a certain extent, there were plenty of search engines that went before them.  But then all of a sudden Google came out of the woodwork and it closed the door on them.  Remember they had just this clean UI and everybody loved it, the buzz about what great results you would get out of Google.  I’m telling you I think the same thing is happening here in Facebook.

You remember Friendster and My Space and all of those kinds of places that have gone by the wayside and they built up such a massive amount of traffic and following at this point that they are going to be able to monetize it in ways similar to what Google did with Adwords.  So they have three great business models staring them in the face, one of which any of us who is listening to this would die for to have.  One of them the ad platform which is going to be similar to Google Adwords, I currently do a lot of work for customers on that, because you’re able to target in ways that you’ve never targeted before.

If you want males that are married living in Connecticut who like to sail, eat sushi and listen to Dave Mathews, then I would appear.  I would be one of the people that you would be putting your ad on.  So that is a fantastic platform and that’s going to be very profitable for them.  The applications platform, you’ve seen a model similar to the Apple App store which is by the way a pretty darn good business too.  Facebook currently takes a percentage of revenues the same way that Apple does and it’s the exact same model.

So again another really, really good model and then the model that I mentioned before which is the commerce model, F commerce, S commerce, whatever you want to call it.  They are flirting with a model similar to ebay that allows people to open up their own store front, think Yahoo shopping or something like that.  Again another fantastic business model.  So I’d kill for any one of them.  They happen to have all three of them under their umbrella there.  I think it’s going to be hard to kill them off any time soon.

Philip:  And I think the big difference between search engines and social network is that for me to move away from Google to another search engine is just a click of a button but moving away from Facebook to another social network – they’ve go so many hooks in me that it’s very difficult to move.

Paul:    It’s a fantastic point.  The switching cost, because they’ve got all my data and all my friends and all my photos and all the bla, bla, bla, all my blog posts I’ve ever written.  Then that’s a really big problem, how are you going to move out of there?

Philip:  I think any threat to Facebook’s dominance is how to handle privacy, one or two large privacy slip ups, that could be their undoing.  Other than that I think it’s pretty hard for somebody to compete with them.

Paul:    You’re right.  Zuckerburg said in his address to the Web 2.0 community in November, he said, “Listen, I don’t know the answers.  I don’t have any of the answers.”  He says, “I’m pushing the envelope because that’s the way this thing runs and if I slip up I’m going to say I’m sorry and pull it back, but there is no precedent for this and I don’t have any guide for where I’m going.  I’m just following the way people want to do things.”  So even he admitted, he just doesn’t know.

Philip:  Let’s get into a little case study or example or something, maybe bring it to life for some of the listeners who aren’t that familiar with the whole how marketing within Facebook works.  Can we use an example of a small business, maybe 100 staff or 200 staff, maybe in the B2B space and explain briefly how they’d go about it and what the opportunities would be for them.

Paul:    Right, so a company I did business with for them on Facebook was Bizlocal.  It’s a small B2B firm that’s businesses to help them become more digital.  They were looking to target individuals online, they were looking to create their own page, advertise their page and create content.  So we were able to increase their fan page dramatically, like 17% in one week.  It was incredible by using some very basic tactics, some ads, some like button, giving some free information like a white paper.  In their case it was an ebook and to get them to really start to engage with the page.  People were sharing it and naturally it grew and grew and grew.

What they were targeting were marketers and it was amazing to be able to see how many marketers were on Facebook and say that they are marketers and then to be able to target these small firms within there.  We were looking at a very special geo location within a 30 mile radius, within a 60 mile radius, etcetera and get them actual leads.  So they swear by Facebook at this point for their marketing activity.

Another one was company called Prediculous.  This was little more of a prediction engine so a very digitally based business in general and we were able to do some fabulous ads for them during like the Superbowl and during the Oscars to get them advertisements and get people to sign on and predict obviously part of the name, Prediculous, to predict the outcome and by opening up an account, that accrues to them as an advertising platform so that they are able to add, to put ads on those pages and it just expanded their business model tremendously.  So we were adding people at 99¢ all the way down to, I forget, our lowest was like 13¢, something like that.  It was a good ad model that yielded revenue for them on the back end.  There was an arbitrage for them and they played it beautifully.  Another great company using it, small company using it.

I would think if you’re any sort of local business like Bizlocal, that is a good – Facebook is a great place to play and to get your message out to people who are engaged and enjoying it.  I would say – a few things that I learned is that if the company itself isn’t very social, people kind of sense that.  So just doing it for the sake of doing it is probably the wrong reason.  If your company is very social and you’ve got a CEO that is social or a marketing person that’s social, leverage them to do something like this because then they understand the medium.  Then they can update.

I think a lot of people spend more time and energy on planning the wedding than planning the marriage.  I equate that to planning the wedding is getting the Facebook page up and running and then they forget about it.  They have no plan for content afterward, that’s the planning the marriage.  I tend to talk to people a lot about well, what’s your content plan and if they don’t know or they roll their eyes, then potentially a problem when it comes to something like Facebook.

Philip:  Yeah, I like that.  That’s a great saying, focusing on planning the marriage.  I think I can see a lot of businesses operating tactically, get something up and running whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or whatever and then not having thought through all the implications and the work that’s involved

Paul:    Yep, you got it.

Philip:  Okay, what about using Facebook for B2B type companies where the product or service is potentially not that exciting.  That’s the one area that I have a hard time getting my head around is that why someone is going to connect and interact with an accounting firm for example?

Paul:    Okay.  If I can pick on accounting firms, I can absolutely help.  The…

Philip:  Sorry to all the accounting firms out there

Paul:    Yeah.  A good example, accounting firm, consulting firm, law firm, let me open the aperture a little bit so we don’t make anybody unhappy.  All of them have been using it for recruiting.  Look at Ernst & Young, very good example there, using it for showing the culture of the company, events that are going on within the company, getting people to interact with the company who might become a potential hire, a new hire.

The ran a game, I think it was Deloittes who ran a game where it was predict the outcome of this particular situation or act like a CEO or what would you do as a CEO in this situation.  They used it very cleverly for a fairly mundane business, it’s a fairly straightforward business.  I think they used it very well to play to their assets which is people.  So then if you get into some more obscure firms like ball bearings manufacturer or a sadder paste manufacturer, few good examples.  There’s one that says soldering paste manufacturer that just talks about all different ways to use sodder.  They have seven different blogs for seven different people, they aggregate it all on Facebook.  It’s like their Swiss Army knife because it pulls in all of those different blogs from each of those people and pushes out content on a regular basis.

For those that are in construction or those that are in I don’t know what you use ball bearings in – car manufacturing – there’s a great opportunity to connect with people who are of like minds.  Don’t forget it’s a community first and a social platform second.  If you’ve seen the movie, the social network, he was talking a lot about building a community of like minded people and what’s happening is you’re splintering the community and not in a bad way, fragmenting would be a bad way but splintering it into smaller sub groups and allowing them to interact with each other.

Philip:  Those are some great examples and I’m sure this next question you’ve heard a million times and that is for business owners listening to this show, it all sounds, it sort of make sense, increasing the communication and then sales lead, what’s the ROI going to be and how am I going to measure that?  Who cares if I have a million fans on my Facebook page, how am I going to measure the ROI and what sort of ROI can I expect?

Paul:    Yeah, the ROI question comes up quite a lot.  I actually just put together an I’m putting the finishing touches on it, I’m going to be speaking at a few different events coming up soon and it’s twelve ways, the dozen ways to monetize social media.  I found twelve different ways that you can monetize a platform like Facebook.

Depends on what your business goal is, I would say the first place that I found that I stepped on that I thought was a really fertile area to create ROI was around supporting existing customers.  Every business out there has customers.  I think it was the president of Procter & Gamble who said the business of businesses is to create customers and so if you’ve got customers, you’ve got customers you need to support.  If the conversation is going on in Facebook then you have a very good reason to be there to support them, whether it’s a product, ball bearings, bananas, sodder paste, accounting, you’ve got customers out there that need support so why not be there for them.  So setting up a page and allowing your customers to come in and interact with other customers, have them solve their problem or for you to actually solve their problem right there is a very powerful way of connecting back with the customer.

I also liked it from a marketer perspective because it’s marketers talking to customers.  Fancy that.  That’s kind of a fancy thing, right?  That’s a great place.  I also think it’s got a great ROI when it comes to looking at the targeting of your advertising and the epicacy of your advertising.  Is it working?  Is it hitting the right target?  There are some really great data that you can pull out of Facebook right now for free by using their ad targeting platform and looking at who is interacting with your messages.  They give us the ability now to get impression counts on every bit of content we post to our page.  So you can begin to look at the kind of people who are interacting with my content are really 18 to 20 year olds that live in Sydney.  Wow, I didn’t really consider that there was a good portion of my brand that is appealing to a new area and I should consider starting to cultivate that particular area.

Philip:  I see no reason why Facebook Analytics is not going to be as powerful as Google Analytics is.

Paul:    I kind of hinted at that a little bit near the top of the call when we were talking about Google and I actually have had conversations directly with Facebook about that topic.  Are you going to – I’ve said to them directly – are you going to launch some sort of data analytics thing here?  And the answer was don’t put it past us, we’re certainly looking at everything right now and that is one area that they are looking at and their looking either at firms or at building something natively.  I would think that they would most likely take in some sort of firm to do it for them, buy the talent and buy the interaction and there are certainly some platforms out there that are making really good money, Buddy Media, Involver, some of these other platforms that are working on top of the Facebook platform and Page Leavers, another one, good friends over there, would kill me if I didn’t mention them.  Really, really great data that you can get out of there and apply in different ways.

Philip:  Yeah, I’m sure that’s really high up on the list of priorities.  But I guess today there’s a huge amount of information you can really get within Facebook but linking it through to Google Analytics may be call tracking specific numbers around Facebook.  There’s a lot you can actually measure up right now anyway.

Paul:    Well, let’s just close our eyes out and look a year out.  If firms start doing commerce as I’m saying in which there are firms doing it, they’re going to have the full close loop right there.  I had a conversation with the folks over at M&Ms.  They have a site up on Facebook as well that they can do commerce.  So they’ll be able to see who, what, where do they come from?  How much did they buy?  It’s like a mini focus group or a mini laboratory if you will for how you would do some of your marketing efforts in the future.  You could take that and extrapolate it out.  I think there are some really great metrics that we’re going to be able to use in the next couple of years that is going to make a marketing and advertising much more efficient than it’s ever been.  And it’s not just a Facebook statement, it’s a little bit more like a social media statement.

Philip:  I have another very common question, I’m sure this is going to be in the top three questions that you come across all the time and it’s the fear of the business owners now dealing with consumers who have a voice.  Suddenly they have to be their own PR agency as well, potential damages to the brand and that sort of thing.  I wonder if you could give a few comments on that?

Paul:    Oh my God, yeah, absolutely.  Whenever you open up the doors like this, I like to say it’s a little bit like in the spring time when you open up a garden hose or a spigot to a garden hose and the water comes out a little dirty and then it starts to run clean, there is always some noise in that channel.  I’ve not met a single business owner that has opened up – that hasn’t gotten some sort of not so flattering feedback at the beginning.

It’s how you handle it.  I got to tell you, I was a big advocate opening up and being transparent at the beginning and I remember the day and I remember exactly where and when.  It was 10pm and I was in a cab in New York city when I got the email that said, look at this comment, it’s pretty ugly and what do we do, from my interactive team.  My knee jerk reaction was delete the damn thing as fast as possible.  First thing I thought of doing.

Then I said wait a minute, (a) that’s not what you say to do and, (b) face it head on.  We invited them to a conversation – to have a conversation about their issue and we successfully mitigated the issue and it turned out to be almost like a great case study.  I mean it’s not a fantastic case study but at least we satisfy the customer and I think satisfying a customer – there’s a positive aura in that one too.  If we saved – like last year when I was doing work for a buyer, if we saved 50 customers of theirs that were let’s say in an adversarial kind of position, not happy about the brand, not happy about their service support, their product, whatever and we took them and we kept them as opposed to losing them, the cost of going and replacing those customers is let’s say $10,000 in a B2B highly considered purchase kind of environment, that’s $500,000.

Were we spending $500,000 on social media, no way.  Now that’s an ROI that even a caveman can calculate.   It’s so easy to do, it’s not even high math, it’s just virtually looking at how much you’re spending versus how much this thing has cost.

Philip:  Yeah, my message to business owners on that is these conversations are happening with or without you.  You might as well get involved and influence that conversation.

Paul:    Yeah, of course, absolutely.

Philip:  Even though it can be a little bit scary sometimes when you have your first negative interaction but as you say, you can turn that person around, turn them into an advocate.

Paul:    And you have to.

Philp:   Let’s talk a little bit about some advanced tips or some new functionalities that are coming out.  You touched on a few today.  How do you see additional functionalities rolling out in the next 12 months?

Paul:    I would think that if you are a business that has products to sell then you should be looking at commerce capability for your page, assuming you have a page.  If you don’t have a page, read the book, get the page up, get it going, advertise the page, build the user base of that page as quickly as you can because then you can monetize it.

I think the advertising model is changing dramatically, you’re starting to get even better combinations and targeting.  You can target customers of your competitors, I mean it unbelievable things that you can now do through that site.

The commerce angle, there’s a few real key leaders there, Moon Toast is one of them, Pavement is a network of painted sites almost like a paint pal that is emerging.  They have about couple of thousand customers and you could buy from any of those sites by searching in their search bar.  It acts like a universal shopping cart, I think that’s kind of exciting as well.

There are some industrial strengths, ones that would integrate with SAP and with Oracle so keep those in mind as well.  They’re starting to pop up so I think commerce at that angle.  But I also think you might want to be considering how you can create content to get the most amount of likes or the most amount of interaction because of the Facebook algorithm.  They have an algorithm called edge rank.  So if Google has page rank, they have edge rank.  What you want to do is be creating that content like I was mentioning before, to try to get the most out of the platform and the most interaction.

People don’t really come back to that site because they’re just not going back to pages that they’ve previously liked.  The more you can create blogs, ebooks, videos – videos are very good, podcasts, pictures – anything with pictures, obviously very good which spurs people to like it or comment on it.  That’s going to be really key for you because the three things that – their edge rank algorithm really ranks hard is affinity so how the user has been interacting with your content, age of the content obviously and then weight.  Do they comment or do they just like it?  There’s a big difference between those two things and if you can start to use that to your advantage, you’re going to see a much greater result specially in what I’m calling newsfeed optimization where you get the maximum amount of content on the newsfeed.

Philip:  So do you think NFO is going to be the new SEO?

Paul:    I definitely do.

Philip:  Maybe I need to register some domains quickly.

Paul:    Yeah, that’s true.  Excellent.

Philip:  That’s fantastic Paul.  Do you have any closing comments?  We’ve run out of time, you’ve given some great information, any closing comments on the big opportunity that’s out there for business owners?

Paul:    I just think don’t fear it, jump in with both feet, try to get good help, read whatever you can about it, this is still the beginning stage so you haven’t missed the boat, that’s the good news but definitely jump in some time soon because this is really an area that’s going to continue to explode and you might as well be there.

Philip:  Great, thanks Paul.  Where can people find you?

Paul:    On my blog, Paul dunay.com.

Philip:  And Twitter?

Paul:    Twitter same, I’m Paul Dunay, Paul Dunay all over the place.

Philip:  Beautiful.  Well thanks again so much for your time Paul.

Paul:    Alright, thank you very much Philip, take care.

Justin Cutroni is one of the most respected analytics consultants around. He has written books on analytics and is one of the few Google Analytics trainers to be endorsed by Google themselves.

In this podcast, Justin shares some great tips, including:

- Why Analytics is so damn important in the first place

- How to setup Google Analytics properly

- Understanding how your different online marketing campaigns are working & measuring ROI

- How to tag links properly so you avoid common measuring problems

- His favourite analytics reports

- Some tips to getting your insights in less time

- And plenty of other tips that will make your time spent listening very worthwhile

Justin has been very generous in offering a great (free) special to all listeners at the end of the chat.

You can connect with Justin on Twitter, LinkedIn or at his excellent analytics blog.

Philip:       Justin Cutroni is a respected leader in web analytics, in fact he has been referred to by the Google Analytics Evangelist at Google, Avinash Kaushik’s, as one of the smartest web analytics consultants around which I think is a pretty awesome compliment.  Welcome Justin.

Justin:      Hey thanks Philip.  Great to be here.

Philip:       And you’re all the way from Vermont in the US?

Justin:      I am, I live in the largest city in my state, it’s Burlington but there’s only about 30,000 of us here and in my city the closest metro area Montreal, Canada.  It’s about an hour away.

Philip:       Right, it’s a beautiful place isn’t it?

Justin:      It really is green, lush mountains in the summer and then in the winter we get a substantial amount of snow so for a guy like me that likes to swoop down hills on skis, it’s a great spot to live.

Philip:       So the only thing you love more than skiing is analytics right?

Justin:      Absolutely, I mean is there anything else that anyone loves, I doubt it.  Analytics is the greatest thing ever.

Philip:       So why is it the greatest thing ever?

Justin:      To be honest, I really love analytics because it’s so empowering for business owners.  Business moves so fast today with the web and it’s such a data rich environment that when we can start to put some structure around this data and we can present it to people in logical ways that makes it easier for them understand, they can measure what they are doing much faster.

When you have the ability to measure something, you have the ability to monitor its performance and monitor the decisions that you make and you can change really, really fast and so I think that’s a really empowering thing.  It’s very liberating for people because now they can literally take the pulse of what they are doing very, very quickly to see is it working or if it’s not working.

Philip:       Yeah agreed, agreed, and I think very closely as part of that there is so much data available now that it can be overwhelming for business owners?

Justin:      Yeah absolutely, yeah.  I couldn’t agree more and I think that’s the curse that comes with this great power.  I think it was Spiderman that said that with great power comes great responsibility or something along those lines but yeah, I think Google Analytics has I believe – I think we’re up to like a 130 reports in Google Analytics and it can just be totally overwhelming and so, yeah you’re right, you really need to kind of fine tune where you’re looking at in order to distill the metrics and the data that’s going to help you make a difference in your business.

Philip:       Yeah and I think hopefully in this chat today we can get into some tips and giving the listeners some insight into how they can use analytics more effectively but also more efficiently.  It’s a lot about saving time, getting those valuable insights but also not spending an entire day trying to get there.

Justin:      Yeah I agree.  I think for all businesses, small businesses, mid size businesses, even large global enterprises, everyone’s trying to do more with less and a lot of that less is less people.  Giving people the ability to collect data, identify what’s important and then act on it quickly is what the goal is with all of this and I think Google’s really been kind of pushing that whole mantra for the last seven years with all the changes that they’ve made to analytics and enhancements that they’ve added to the product.

Philip:       So I met you Justin in New York a couple of years ago, I did your advanced analytics course which was just fantastic.  Can you give me a bit of a background into, and the listeners into what you do?

Justin:      Yeah sure, and you definitely win the prize for craziest person flying all the way from Sydney to New York just for a Google Analytics training but it was great to meet you there.

Philip:       It was money well spent, I can tell you that.

Justin:      So I’ve been working in the world of analytics for over seven years now.  I’m currently the director of digital intelligence at an online marketing and analytics firm called Webshare here in the US.

Philip:       That’s a pretty cool sounding title there.  I like it, I like it.

Justin:      You like that one?  I got to make it up.  Guru was taken so I had to go with but my team and my group were responsible for providing pretty much all different types of measurement services.  We help our clients choose different analytics tools, we help them define how they are going to use those tools, we actually help them do the implementation of those tools and then, if they need us to stick around, we can help them maintain those tools over time to make sure that they are constantly working in the right way, and we can help them analyze the data over time to help them understand how their business is performing.

Webshare also has – we also offer testing and usability services and we do a lot of multi variable tests, user testing, card sorting and things like that.  Me personally, I love this space, I’ve written a couple of books about Google Analytics.  I’ve written Google Analytics published by O’Reilly in 2010, I had another version back in 2007, I co-authored a book called Performance Marketing with Google Analytics in 2010.

I’m very, very passionate about this because I really believe that it can help everybody that’s doing anything online and the investment is more or less your time.  The products are free, the data’s free, it’s the time that you take that’s really your only investment.  I completely love this stuff and eat it up.

Philip:       And you’re a rocket scientist as well I see from your degree.

Justin:      Yes, I really do have a degree in rocket science.  When I was in university, my thesis was about the satellite propulsion unit.  I used to do experiments for NASA here in the States to help design better thrusters to satellites.

Philip:       I think we’ve just lost all our listeners.  They realized they’re not rocket scientists and therefore analytics is beyond them but that’s not the case.

Justin:      No totally not the case.

Philip:       Let’s just start at the high level in terms of analytics for people who are not that familiar and maybe haven’t set up analytics.  I hope that there’s none of those people left but I know there are.  Just couple of the high level benefits around setting up something like Google Analytics.

Justin:      Yeah sure, really hands down the most benefit you’re going to get from analytics tool is the ability to measure what you’re doing online.  So even if you just have a website, having an analytics package is going to allow you to measure that website and the old proverb goes, you can’t improve things that you don’t measure.

Once you start to have some data, you can start to see what’s happening more specifically the behavior of people that are using your website or your store or whatever it is online to understand visitor behavior and then once you start to understand and see what’s happening, that can help you drive change by making new and different decisions.

Just even all you have a website, if you’re not spending any money on online advertising, if you’re not doing any type of online marketing.  If you just have a website, even having analytics attached to it will help you measure what it’s doing and then help you make more informed decisions.

Philip:       So for people who haven’t set up yet, it involves going into Google and googling Google Analytics, sign up for free, get the script, give it to your web developer or if you can, do it yourself, you put in every single page of your website and then that date is then tracked and you can log into your account, you can use some really cool charts and tables of all your data.

That’s a very simple process but there’s a lot of complications or there’s a lot of things you should be doing.  Justin, I know you agree around improving that set up process.  Can you talk about a couple of those things?

Justin:      Yeah absolutely.  I think – I always equate Google Analytics to Apple and their products.  On the surface Apple products are very easy to use.  I can give my six year old son an iPad, an iPhone and instantly he is playing race car games and doing math puzzles and all of this stuff.  Very, very easy and elegant and simple to use but there are layers beneath that of complexity, more features that allow you to get more out of the products and the same is true with Google Analytics.

Probably my favorite feature if you could actually have a favorite analytics feature is something Google Analytics calls Goals.  Goals are a way to measure the business outcomes that are associated with your website.  In the analytics industry we often call these conversions.  A real simple example is if you have an online store, the goal of your online store more often than not is to sell a product.

A goal or conversion in the Google Analytics world for your store would be how many products did you sell?  So you can configure Google Analytics to track how many conversions you had, how many transactions did you have, how many products did you sell.  If your website doesn’t sell a product, maybe it’s there for lead generation.  You have your consultant or you sell some type of service, you can configure Google Analytics to measure how many leads you’re getting from the website.  This feature’s really important because this feature starts to align the data that you get in Google Analytics with your business objectives and that’s the whole point of this, is measuring online what you’re business is doing so that you can again make more informed decisions.

So if you have a website and it’s trying to sell a product and you’re measuring it and you realize it’s not selling as many products as you want, then you’ve got that measurement.  You can start to look at other pieces of data, do different types of analysis and again, try to make better decisions about what you’re doing online.

Philip:       Yeah Goal is just a specific page you’ve told Google, when this page shows like the ‘thank you for contacting us’ page then it registers a goal and a common problem I see is with some websites that are set up – they don’t actually send a person to a thank you page which is a bit of a problem, which they would need to fix first, right?

Justin:      Absolutely, yeah.  Another very common problem that some websites have is if their thank you page resides on a different domain.  So for example, if you’ve got a third party shopping cart.  So everyone goes to your website to look at products and add them to the cart but then they go to another website to check out.  That’s another complicated set up that can cause problems at the implementation.

But by no means are we trying to discourage you.  You should definitely go to your website.  Identify what is the conversion, what is the outcome that I want people to do and then, like you said Philip, it’s usually the url of a page.  You can tell Google Analytics, hey, every time someone hits this page, I want you to count a conversion.

Philip:       So what’s the best way of getting around that problem of someone submits buy or something and they head off to another ecommerce site or a PayPal or something?

Justin:      They should obviously call someone as brilliant as yourself Philip to go have you help them or train them how to fix it.  That’s a situation that we call cross domain tracking, we can work in that scenario, Google Analytics can configured to operate in that environment but the feature that you need to implement is something called cross domain tracking.  If you’re the manager of the website, if you have a technical background, you can go to the Google Analytics help section, look for cross domain tracking, read up on it and you can probably get it implemented all by yourself.  It’s a little bit of a job of javascript coding and a few other tweaks.

If you’re a business manager, a marketing person, not to say you don’t have any technical skills but it’s definitely something that you may want to work with IT or some consultant to get dialed and then fixed.

Philip:       So that’s a little bit of a magical javascript connected to the button they would actually press when they press purchase, right?

Justin:      Yes absolutely.  The quirks of the problem is that we need to transfer what’s called cookies back and forth between websites and it can get pretty narly.

Philip:       Yeah, okay.  Well, we’ll leave it at that for the moment but as long as people know that issue can be resolved, just requires a little bit of magic.

Justin:      Yeah, and again the bigger picture is that we’re talking about conversions and so I’m sure even if you have a shopping cart and it resides on a different website, a conversion just isn’t someone buying a product or as I mentioned getting a lead.  There are lots of different outcomes that we want people to take on our website.  For example even on my blog I have a little newsletter sign up.  I want people to sign up for my newsletter and if you have a store or if you have any type of newsletter, you would want people to sign up for that as well when they visit your website.  The reason being if someone signs up for your newsletter, that gives you a great opportunity to market to them over time.

So don’t just think of conversions as getting that sale or getting that lead, think about all the other things that have to go into nurturing leads or nurturing people through the sales process and those can be considered conversions as well.  Subscribing to blogs, signing up for newsletters, all of those different types of activities that allow you to connect with someone could be considered a conversion as well.

Philip:       So setting up the goals in Analytics you just need to go into your profile, Edit your profile, it’s pretty well described process if you can do it yourself.  Anything else in terms of the set up – you see common problems or any tips?

Justin:      Yeah, the next common problem that I see all of the time has to do with tracking online marketing activities and this is one that, just like configuring goals and having them set up, I think tracking your online marketing campaign is the number two feature in Google Analytics.  Unfortunately a lot of people miss out on this one.  This actually isn’t anything you have to configure in Google Analytics, there’s no setting for this.  This isn’t a special piece of code that you have to add to your website.  Tracking marketing campaigns is actually all about manipulating the different marketing materials that you’re putting out there.

Philip:       You’re talking off line marketing are you?

Justin:      I’m actually talking online marketing.  So if you’re sending out any email, if you are doing any pay per click advertising, if you’re doing any banner ads, any type of activity like that you can track those in Google Analytics.  So you can actually see how much traffic I’m getting from email, how much traffic am I getting from paid search, how much traffic am I getting from my banner ads.  These are actually, probably, in my opinion, some of the most useful reports that you can see.

The reason being that a lot of times when you’re doing any type of online marketing, you’re spending money, right?  If you’re doing pay per click, you’re paying every time someone clicks on your ads, if you’re doing any display ads, you’re usually paying for impressions.  So you’re spending money on these types of things, the ability to measure them and see if they’re having an impact on your business is critical.  That’s why I think that the number two biggest problem I see is around the feature of campaign tracking.

Philip:       Yeah I mean I see this as a very simple table.  At the very least on a monthly basis, you should know where you’re spending your money, whether it’s Google Adwords, Search Optimization, Email Marketing or Social Media, maybe you want to even cost up some of hours or the resources you got doing your social media stuff.  Understand your cost in that month and understand the leads that you’ve generated or the sales you’ve generated by those individual channels.

Justin:      Yeah, right on.  I couldn’t have put it any better myself.  We work going back and forth a little bit about the subject matter of this podcast and to me, if you don’t know what the return is on your online marketing spend, you’re just flushing money down the toilet and again, so much data is available to you, really the cost is just the time to get it configured correctly.

Philip:       That’s right and I mean without understanding  that  sort of basic view, that table I just – essentially your return on investment by different channel.  There’s no point getting into additional details around what page are they looking at and bounce right and all that stuff.  Understand the big picture first.

Justin:      Yeah absolutely.  So if you’re spending 60% of your online budget for pay per click advertising, what’s the revenue, how many conversions?  How many leads are you getting?  You got to be able to answer those questions and what’s even more challenging is that if you don’t configure things like campaign tracking the right way, it can scew all sorts of other data in analytics as well.  Here’s a quick example, if you’re not correctly identifying your email campaigns to Google Analytics, it’s going to skew the amount of traffic that’s recorded and show you more traffic coming from a traffic source that we call referrals.  Or if you’re not correctly identifying your pay per click advertising campaigns using Google Analytics, this system will show you an increase in organic traffic.  So you can actually be doing more harm than good if you don’t have campaign tracking configured the right way.  Shall we tell them how to do it?

Philip:       Absolutely.

Justin:      Everyone will probably just listen to the last three minutes and they’re like well, tell us how to fix this?  So campaign tracking – every analytics tool in existence really functions off this same technology called Link tagging and Link tagging is the process of manipulating the links that you use in your online marketing.  Let’s talk about email, I think everyone here at one time or another has gotten some type of email solicitation.  Within your email there’s usually some type of call to action, a button, click here to buy now, save here.

Philip:       Read more

Justin:      Read more, that’s a great one.  The process of link tagging, what we actually do is, again, just looking at email right now as an example, you want to go into that email and you actually need to add extra parameters to the url that’s behind that call to action.  So if it’s a button, you would actually add these extra parameters to the url.  So you’re url might be dot, dot, dot, my site.com/homepage, while you might add these extra parameters that are specific to Google Analytics to that url so that when someone clicks on that link in the email, it takes them to the same page on the website but there are these extra parameters now that are visible on the url.  Most time the user doesn’t even notice that.  But Google Analytics picks them up and Google Analytics will now be able to identify, oh this person came from an email.

So whenever you do any type of online marketing, if it’s email or paid search, you have to go through this process of manipulating the links that you put in your ads.  So when you do paid search you specify what we call a destination url.  So if you’re doing any Yahoo paid search, you have to modify all of your destination urls.  If you do any display advertising, again, you have to tell the system what is the destination url.  You have to add these parameters to your destination url.  Again this is called campaign tracking, there’s a whole section in the Google Analytics help centre about it and they actually have a tool that helps you build these links.  They make it real easy for you to build up these links.  So before you do any type of campaign, you can go to the Google Analytics help centre, look for the url builder and they will walk you through how to build these links that you then go out and put into your campaigns.

Philip:       Yeah, it’s absolutely critical.  There’s a couple of, depending on what tools you’re using for email.  I know Mailchimp you can automatically turn it on within Mailchimp so you don’t have to do that which is pretty handy.

Justin:      Yeah, Exact Target is another one

Philip:       Yeah and I imagine a lot of the top email marketing – Awebber probably do the same thing, I haven’t used that myself but – so you can get around that tagging and Google Adwords, you can turn on the auto tagging so it knows the traffic is coming from Google Adwords. You’ll see it as the CPC but that url is actually pretty easy.  You walk through it and it’s well explained.

Justin:      Yeah and when you think about some of the emerging media that we have like social media, you want to be able to identify how much traffic am I getting from Twitter.  What are they doing on the website?  You can actually use this process of link tagging – you can use that url builder to build out a url that has information in it that states you’re going to put this link in Twitter, you can then shorten that link using Bitly or whatever link shortener you want.  So that when you put it out there on Twitter and people start clicking on it you’ll actually be able to identify that traffic very, very easily inside of Google Analytics and measure what they do.

Philip:       So you can measure social media?  You just solved it, you just solved the world crisis problem there.

Justin:      Yeah well, believe me, I’m no social media expert but I at least want to see how many visits I’m getting from it.  But the great thing about doing this process of link tagging is that people absorb social media so many different ways, iPads, iPhones, android phones, tweet deck, so this actually will help you to identify social traffic no matter what platform people are on, you’ll be able to identify them as social.  Like I said, there’s a whole section of the Help Center around campaign tracking and that really – once you get your goal set up, you really need to make sure you get your campaign tracking dialed in so that you can clearly identify where people are coming from in Analytics.

Philip:       Right so let’s say we’ve Goal set up.  It sounds like you’re talking about the under the traffic sources that all traffic sources is probably one of your favorite reports.

Justin:      Yeah, and you’ve hit it.  These are my favorites.  I usually start right with the all traffic sources report, that’s in the traffic sources section of Google Analytics and this report’s great because it tells you all of the different places people are coming from.  It tells you your organic traffic broken down by the different search engines, it tells you the direct traffic meaning the people coming directly to you website.  It tells you your paid search traffic and the search engines that people are using, display email and I love this because it gives me kind of a cross campaign view of my traffic allocation.

I can see am I heavy in paid search or am I heavy in organic and how is that changing over time, how’s email doing in general.  When I say how are these things doing I mean we’ve got so many metrics of it, we can look at it for each of these different pieces of data.  So I can see from a traffic perspective how many visits am I getting.  I can look at from an engagement, how much time do people spend and how many pages do they look at and then once I’ve got my goals configured, Analytics has these great tabs right on top of my report that lets me see conversions.  So literally click on a tab and I can see conversion rate all of my different sources of traffic and now I get to evaluate which are the channels that are really bringing home the bacon.  What are the things that are making that bottom line impact?

Philip:       I was consulting with a client the other day talking about this report and they hadn’t had goals set up and it was just incredible how little value these numbers really are. You start looking at balance and time with site, so what does that really mean?  This is two minutes, that’s two and a half minutes and the metrics don’t actually mean too much unless there is some measurable action that’s happening or not happening.

Justin:      Yeah absolutely.  I couldn’t and again this is all – this is just a tool that measures your business.  If you haven’t configured it and aligned it, what you’re business is trying to do, it’s really not that useful.  Great I got visits today, awesome!  It’s not helpful.

Philip:       Are there any businesses that don’t need Google Analytics?

Justin:      Well that’s a really good question.  I guess businesses that don’t have websites.

Philip:       So if you have a website and you’re listening to this, you need analytics.

Justin:      Yeah and if you don’t even want a Google Analytics you should still go get some type of analytics.  I don’t know why you wouldn’t want Google Analytics, it’s the best free analytics tool on the earth right now but you got to have something.

Philip:       So we talked about the all traffic sources report and you have your goal set up, that’s the number one place, what’s the number two place or the number two report you’d advise people to look at?

Justin:      Well also in that section I definitely highlight the campaigns report.  I know a lot of businesses with seasonality, with the products that they sell, they have very kind of regimented different types of marketing activities so if you sell maybe school products, you’re obviously selling at certain times of the year.  If you have seasonal products you’re hitting certain holidays and with that business cycle becomes regular campaigns.

I like the campaigns report also in the traffic sources report because when I get the link tagging set up I can actually name all of the marketing campaigns that I’m running.  I can literally see a list of all of those campaigns in Google Analytics in the campaigns report.  So I can go through the list and I can say there’s my back to school sell or there’s my holiday sell from 2010 and I can then find out what were the conversions from that specific marketing campaign that I was running.

Philip:       Right so what’s the difference?  The campaigns report is just getting to a lower level of detail from the all traffic sources report right?

Justin:      Yeah exactly.  The campaign – an online marketing campaign might actually have a number of different components.  I might be doing some paid search, I might be doing some email and so the campaign is kind of like a container.  It allows me to hold all of the different activities I’m doing.  Again display ads, emails, paid search, social media, whatever they are and I can say just at the campaign level, how did this campaign perform?  Then I can actually look inside the campaign and say well, how did the different components of this campaign perform?  The all traffic sources report kind of takes the campaign out of the picture and it looks across of all of my sources of traffic regardless of their campaign.  I can evaluate things like how is paid search doing across all of my campaigns?  How is social media doing across all of my campaigns and get that broad view.  Again that’s the all traffic sources report.  The campaigns report gives me a much more I think like tactical view of this was the specific campaign I ran, how did it perform?

Philip:       So Justin I know you’re also very keen on the keyword report, getting it to specifics around SEO, how well your SEO and your Adwords is performing & your email marketing and that sort of thing.  Can you explain that a little more?

Justin:      Yeah absolutely.  I think we’ve been talking about the all sources traffic report, the campaigns report and the ability for Google Analytics to what we call segment that data allow you to drill into that data and understand different attributes of it and how it’s working is really, really important.

It doesn’t matter what type of campaign you’re running, if you’re doing Adwords campaign, emails campaigns or if you’re doing a lot of search engine optimization, you have the ability to drill down and look at more detail.  Like you mentioned, you can actually go into the keywords reporting in Google Analytics and there’s a little link in the report that allows you to just view your organic traffic or your paid traffic and see the keywords for those specific media, what we call traffic media or those channels, organic channels versus paid search.

This is critical because now you’re getting the most granular view you can of whether it’s paid search or organic traffic.  You’re looking at the keyword level and you can start to identify keywords that are driving valuable traffic to your website and keywords that really aren’t doing anything for you.  You can look and you can see beyond visits and you can see well, what is a specific keyword bounce rate.  Bounce rate is a metric that’s really, really good to help you understand if there’s a problem in kind of the acquisition process.  Bounce rate tells us how many visits begin and end on the same page.  So if I type in the keyword Hilton to Google and I click on an ad and I land on a website that is displaying Paris Hilton and I immediately leave because it’s probably questionable at best, I’ve basically bounced.  I landed on a page on that website, I looked at that one single page and I immediately left.  That’s what we can do with the keyword type report is look and see what’s the bounce rate for various keywords.

What I’m looking for is any keyword that has a really high bounce rate because that’s telling me that people are landing on a website, they’re looking at one page and they’re immediately leaving from that keyword.  Usually when we’re driving traffic to the website whether it be through paid search or search engine optimization or whatever it is, anything that really has a high bounce rate’s telling me that hey, people are leaving right away.  I usually want them to go deeper into the website, I want them to move beyond that landing page and look at more content, look at my products, add things to cart, stuff like that.

By being able to evaluate the bounce rate at a granular level, in this case by keyword I can say alright I need to do some optimization around that keyword so if I’m spending money on that keyword with Google Adwords or some other system, I might want to play with things like what’s the headline of my ad.  If doing search engine optimization and I’m getting a really high bounce rate for certain keywords, I might be putting people on the wrong page or the content might not really be in alignment with the variation of the word that the person might be searching for.

The ability to kind of segment down into the data, in this case it’s keyword whether it’s paid or organic, it really helps me get that granular look of what’s working and what’s not working.  This is where analytics really gets into the weeds.  This is where we really get into the details and we start looking at very fine things.  It gets hard because you’re not going to make one change to something when it comes to your website or you’re marketing plan and quadruple your business.  You’re going to look at small little things like the bounce rate for keyword, make small incremental changes in order to reduce that bounce rate and over time all of these little changes will add up to make you more successful.

Philip:       Those are some great tips, I mean, I think this is probably one of my favorite reports.  It’s a great report for business owners to check that their SEO provider is doing a decent job.  You can start seeing which exact keyword is delivering traffic but more importantly, also goals.  And I think as you were saying they often end up with a lot of work after looking at this report whether you’re keywords are ranking high and they’re not actually converting it to a goal, you’ve got a problem, you need to either address your website or you’ve got the wrong keyword, right?

Justin:      Yeah that’s a great observation and one thing that I really like that you brought up there is the fact that if you’re working with a vendor, someone else to do these services for you whether it’s search engine optimization or paid search, you have all of the data so you can keep tabs on what’s happening.  I feel very, very strongly that every business owner should have this data and should be able to work with their vendors and say well, I’m seeing this is the data, tell me how this relates to what you’re selling me or what you’re supposed to be doing for me.

Philip:       Yeah, and another one as well I see a very common thing is SEO providers reporting on increased traffic but a lot of that increased traffic is actually branded terms or terms which include the business name which the SEO provider is not really targeting.  That’s happening naturally probably through other marketing initiatives so really I would encourage business owners to exclude all their business name or their branded traffic from that keyword report and see what the net increase is in traffic from other keywords.

Justin:      Yeah absolutely, there’s that great little filter right in the keywords report where you can just choose from a drop down Exclude and then type your brand name in there and right there in the report it will exclude all of your brand related terms.  That’s a fantastic tip and totally I agree, it’s really, when we’re doing search engine optimization, we’re looking to develop traffic around the products and services that we’re providing to our customers and our potential customers.  That’s really where the growth should happen over time, not really brand related.

Philip:       Any thoughts on just PPC or Google Adwords, tips with analytics?

Justin:      I think the great thing about analytics is that it is so tightly integrated with Adwords and if you’ve used Google Adwords before, there’s a lot of different levers you can pull in order to change your ads.  So you can not only change the ad groups, the campaigns, you can obviously move keywords around, you can create different ad variations, you can do day parting, you can bid for position.  So there’s all these different levers that you can pull in Google Adwords in order to change the way your ads appear, when they appear and the format in which they appear.  You can even target global devices in some.

What I would just say is start off by looking at your campaigns, then drilling down into groups and then drilling down into the keywords.  Then at each of those levels, I’d start by looking at which ones are performing well.  Things that are working well, that’s great, keep doing them and I would keep an eye on how many conversions am I getting and what’s my cost per conversion, what am I paying for each of the conversions that I’m getting.

When you look at the campaign level, you might see some campaigns that aren’t performing so well, drill down, look at the ad groups.  Google Analytics will let you drill down into every campaign and look at the ad groups and then do the same thing there.  So you’re getting more granular, some ad groups might be doing really well and the whole campaign might be dragged down by one or two ad groups that are just performing poorly.  You can then get that more granular view and say well, ad group one and ad group two are great but ad group three, not so good.  You can try to fix it somehow, maybe you need to change the ads that you’re running or maybe modify the keywords.

Again, you can drill into that ad group and drill into the keyword.  At the keyword level, see which ones are performing well and which ones are not.  So which ones are driving conversions, how much are those conversions costing and again make changes?

I think that’s the best way to start and then once you start to master that, then you can start to do a lot of segmentation in the adwords report by looking at things like your ad variations, your landing pages, the display url, day parting, location where you’re at, really it can be quite overwhelming but basically Google is going to give you data around each of the different levers that they let you pull an adword.  So start by looking at the campaign level, drilling into the ad groups, drilling down to the keywords so that you can kind of get a feeling for what are the winners and what are the losers.  Keep doing what’s winning and fix what’s losing.

Philip:       Yeah, I love what you’re saying about performance at the keyword level.  It’s fascinating, I was looking at it yesterday for a large ecommerce campaign.  You can actually get down to the ROI by keyword, how much that keyword cost you and how much revenue ecommerce store earned from that keyword and get an ROI by the keyword which is pretty awesome.

Justin:      Yeah, that’s pretty amazing.  Again I think this is another spot where we talk about getting into the weeds of Analytics.  You’re not – it’s very rare that you’ll make one little change to an adwords campaign and quadruple your revenue.  You have to get down to that keyword level and look at how each of them are performing.  What’s the revenue at each keyword that coming in.  those little changes will add up into big changes.

Philip:       You can quickly see how you can spend your whole life in analytics.

Justin:      Yeah that’s true and I think that’s why this is an important skill to have.  We really need to have people that can dedicate their time to doing this.  The tool is free, Google Analytics is free, the data there again, the only cost associated with it is the cost that you have to invest to get things up and running but this is something that on a daily basis you need to be looking at and understanding whether these things are working or these things aren’t working.

Philip:       So Justin, may we talk a little bit about efficiency and process.  That’s the big challenge of businesses today – the lights come on, I see it in training sessions and people starting to get empowered and developing their skills in-house but then they really struggle on how much time to allocate and what to be looking for.  Is it all or just around developing skills or do you have any tips, any guidelines that people can sort of take on board?

Justin:      Well the first thing to say is that if you’re a web analyst, you’re in great shape right now in terms of your job prospects and if you’re in a job that you hate and you don’t like, you should become a web analyst because we need more people.  Businesses need people to be looking at this data.  I really encourage folks if you can to have someone who’s sole job is to handle this and to manage all of the data and looking at all of this information.

Unfortunately a lot of people can’t – don’t have the ability to hire somebody to do this or the people just don’t exist and so I think what we’re left with is marketing people business owners that have to absorb some of this data.  I think to assume that a marketing person or a business owner is able to go in and evaluate keyword performance every single day, it’s kind of asinine.  Really it’s kind of biting off little pieces and if you don’t have a lot of time, the things that you should be looking at are kind of the high level metrics and we call them the key performance indicators.

You really should define three or maybe five metrics that are the critical metrics that measure the health and success of the online component of your business.  It might be revenue, conversions, leads, whatever it is.  It might be just a few – and you should monitor those and I’m talking daily.  You should know how am I doing and you should put some context around that.  That might be a date context, for example, are we up year over year or are we up month over month or it might be kind of an internal expectation.  Am I expecting to make that much revenue this week or this month?  What were my internal targets?

I say if you don’t have a lot of time, start there with a few key metrics that tell you to health so you can understand if things are going up or if things are going down.  If things are going up you usually know they are going up because of any marketing that you’re doing but if there’s an unexpected up, then you need to kind of carve out some time to go look at the data.  Where did that increase come from?  Was it from maybe getting listed on Digg or Tech Crunch or something like that?  Or did an influential blogger start talking about your business or your service or whatever it is, you need to make the time to kind of investigate.

Likewise if things go down, if things are unexpectedly bad, you need to carve out the time to start digging into the data and looking at why did it go down.  I think that’s really the key is to bite off just a few metrics.  If you don’t have a lot of time monitor them on a daily basis and then when something abnormal happens to kind of dig in.

There’s a great feature in Google Analytics where you can basically arrange your own dashboard and it’s not a very fancy dashboard but you can put things like conversions on there.  you can put revenue on there, you can even put basic metrics like traffic and then you can use another feature in Google Analytics, the automated delivery of reports.  They’ll email you a report every day and so you can have your dashboard emailed to you every single day.

Now again if you’re pressed for time, you’ll get an email once a day with your dashboard so you’ll be able to look at those metrics and you’ll be able to see a basic trend or was it up or was it down and you can, again, if you don’t have a lot of time, just look for things that are unexpected.  Revenue was down yesterday but I really was expecting an increase then you can go dig.  I think that’s good first step to kind of getting a handle on this and at least paying attention to the numbers on a daily basis.

Philip:       Even if it’s not daily, I’d urge if you’re a marketing manager or a business owner to get at least a weekly or even monthly reports around your traffic, the top three reports that you think are important and just put a bit of structure around what you’re looking at.  Because I find most businesses, they dive into analytics without a clear path and they click around for hours and then without much direction and then they feel they’ve wasted time and then don’t go back to analytics.

Justin:      I think you brought up a great point is put some structure.  To me the best structure or the best lens you can use to view your data is the lens of what am I doing as a business?  What was my marketing plan for last week or last month because that will drive your bottom line.  That will drive everything that ‘s happening on your site.

Philip:       That’s why to me analytics is so fascinating.  It’s not just crunching numbers at a very detailed level, you have to have very much a business focus.  Whenever you’re interpreting this data it needs to be somebody who has a reasonably high level view of all the marketing going on in the business.

Justin:      Absolutely yeah, I couldn’t agree more.  I’m a consultant and that’s actually one of the most challenging parts of my job is I need to stay very much in tune with what are my clients’ doing so I can make sense of all this data.

Philip:       The other great report and I know from your session we had a couple of years ago is the funnels report, goal funnels.  Can you explain a little bit about those and why they’re so important?

Justin:      Yeah, the funnel visualization report is actually a visual representation of the processes that we have on our websites.  So the classic example is an ecommerce website with a check out process.  You have to enter your billing information, shipping information, payment information.  Then you might get a review order page and then you get a thank you page.  That’s a defined process that we force everyone to go through when they want to buy a product on our website.

Measuring that process is critical because that process is the last thing that stands between us and money.  Anything that we can do to understand that process and visitor behavior in that process is critical.  The funnel visualization report in Google Analytics will actually show us a nice image of where are people dropping out of that process.  Are people dropping out of the billing page, the shipping page, the review page, the payment page, where are they dropping out?

To me this is one of the most important reports because again we’re getting people really close to converting, they are only a few clicks away.  We spent the money to get them to the website, we spent the money to build our website, add content, now we’re four clicks away from revenue, we need to make sure things go really well here.  This is a spot where I would start any optimization or changes to the website because a small change on the shipping page can lead to a lot more orders.  That’s really what we want to do.  We want to try to understand, I’ve got you within two clicks, why are you not finishing.  Fortunately the report doesn’t have a big flashing red light that says, there’s a security warning on this page or your page doesn’t work in Safari.  It just tells you hey, you got a lot of people defecting from this step in your funnel but at least it’s an indicator.  You can then start to experiment a little bit and say maybe this form is below the fold for some people.  Maybe the continue button isn’t really visible enough, maybe I need to make that more clear.  It at least gives you some direction that there’s a step in the process that needs to be tweaked and you can start to play with some changes in order to get more people through that step.

Philip:       And listeners if you have a contact form, you wouldn’t use goal funnels because it’s just a single step process.  Justin for service based businesses, would they still make use of goal funnels?

Justin:      Meaning folks that are looking to, that are selling their own type of service, kind of like me?

Philip:       Exactly.  If you’re a law firm or a consultancy, would you use goal funnels because often you’re goals are just a one step process, a contact form or maybe a newsletter sign up.  Do you see many examples of a multi step process where funnels could be useful?

Justin:      I think for those types of scenarios where it is a much shorter process, I actually do encourage people to set them up for one simple reason.  If you know how many conversions you’re getting, you need to put some context around how many could I potentially be getting.  So even though it’s just a form and then a thank you page, if I know that I’m getting 400 people to the form but I only got 5 people to fill it out, what’s happening there?  why is there such a big disconnect.

Even though it’s not so much a process, it at least gives me some insight into is there the ability to fix that form some how.  Maybe that form is driving people away because it’s got too many fields on it.  It puts more context around the number of completions that I’m getting.

Philip:       Right that’s a good point.  Are there any other tools we could talk Google Analytics is the most amazing free web tool around I think.  Are there any other tools outside of Google Analytics that you are particularly fond of?

Justin:      There are two other tools and they kind of fall into two different categories.  The first category is visitor feedback.  All of the stuff that we talked about is primarily quantitative data.  How many conversions, what’s the bounce rate, how many visits, qualitative data, literal feedback from people about their experience, was it good or was it bad, is unbelievably useful and it’s probably my favorite kind of data.

For qualitative date, we’ve been using two tools for that primarily.  The first is 4Q, it’s by a company called iPerceptions.  They’re based out of Montreal, Canada and 4Q is a free tool that will let you run a survey on your website and it’s a very simple survey, four questions:  why did you come here?  Were you able to complete your task?  If not, would you like to tell us why?  And do you have anything else you’d like to share with us?  Those four simple questions.

You can draw so much insight out of the answers that people give.  They might say hey, I just came to update my account preferences but I couldn’t find the log in button or something like that.  I love 4Q.  There’s another one called Kiss Insights as well.  That’s another feedback tool but start off with 4Q.  if you’re running Google Analytics, there’s nothing better than to add 4Q and you will have a killer suite of data with those two tools running.

Philip:       Excellent

Justin:      There’s one other tool that I’ll totally plug as well.  One thing that Google Analytics doesn’t do well is what we call click maps or heat maps that show where people are clicking and how they are interacting with content.  There’s a couple of really good tools there, one is called Crazy Egg and the other is called Click Tail.  I’m actually a pretty big fan of Click Tail. It does a lot of different things but that’ll create these nice cool heat maps of where people are clicking on your site.  Again so you’ll have a visual representation of what are the parts of your design that people are really drawn to.

Philip:       Click Tail is pretty fascinating.  I was showing it to a client the other day.  Essentially Click Tail can show you videos of a single visit to interacting with our website.  So you actually see a video of the mouse moving and then clicking, typing in fields in your form.  It’s actually quite amazing.  They were blown up the water that they can get this sort of tracking.

Justin:      Yeah that’s – it’s almost scary isn’t it to literally sit there and replay what everyone does.

Philip:       I mean there’s some privacy issues around that.  I think you should make that clear in your privacy policy that you have these sort of tracking tools but yeah pretty incredible tool.

Justin:      Yeah it’s pretty cool.

Philip:       So we could speak forever Justin on analytics.  I think it’s been fantastically useful so far.  Maybe we could close on a big picture question, if you were in charge of Google Analytics, what’s the one thing that you would change or you would like to see added?

Justin:      That’s a great question.  I’ve actually been talking to a lot of people about our industry and what we’re doing and where Google needs to go with this.  I’ll give you the big picture thinking that I’ve been having.  Our industry, we don’t have a lot of analysts.  We need more analysts and in order for more people to make sense of the data, we need a tool that’s actually easier to use.  I really think that Google needs to tighten things up.  They need to clean up analytics and simplify it a bit.  I think there’s too many reports, I think it’s too complicated to navigate and I don’t think it’s really focused around the vast majority of users that are out there.  So I think they need to clean it up.

Now along with that I also think that Google needs to continue to innovate and drive our ability to do better analysis.  So I want them to start to incorporate things like scenarial based analysis where we can do modeling.  So if I reduce the bounce rate on this campaign, what’s the potential upside in revenue?  If I increase my ads spent here, how much more revenue might I get?  I think simplifying the interface and then in a very Googly way allowing us to do more types of analysis, I think that’s really where Google needs to take this tool and then further down the line, I’m thinking like in the 24 to 36 month time frame, I really think Google needs to allow us to expand the amount of data because we’re really missing here is customer data.  We really need to have customer data inside of Google Analytics so that we can evaluate things like churn, we can look at our data based on purchase frequency, potential demographic information as well.  When we start talking about those things, then we’re really getting into more of a business platform and much more of a business intelligence tool rather than just an analytics tool.

Philip:       Thank you Justin.  I think that’s a great place to close.  You mentioned before we started that you had a special offer for listeners.  Perhaps you can say what that is and how people can get a hold of you?

Justin:      Sure, I’m more than happy to connect with anyone that’s out there.  I’m on Twitter, my Twitter handle is Justin Cutroni and if you want to connect me on Twitter, please go right ahead, say hello and I’d be more than happy to send you a free copy of Google Analytics book, an electronic copy, that’s the easiest way to get it from me to you.  If you’d like to connect via Linkedin if you’re not on Twitter, please feel free to via Linkedin or you can always find me at my blog, cutroni.com/blog and again, anyone that wants to reach out I’m more than happy to send you guys a free electronic copy of my book Google Analytics.

Philip:       We’ll include links to all those web properties in the show notes.  Thanks again for your time Justin.

Justin:      Thanks Philip.  This is really fun.  Have a great day.

Listen to this great discussion with online marketing legend Mary O’Brien on how to tackle your online marketing strategy.

Mary has been involved in online marketing since the 90′s (which is a life time in this field). She was part of GoTo.com who invented Pay Per Click advertising (no, Google didn’t invent PPC). She has trained over 4,000 people in her time at Yahoo, and now runs a wide variety of online marketing education services.

We cover a whole range of internet marketing areas including persuasive websites, SEO, PPC, email marketing, testing and more. And just as importantly, we talk about what order you should be doing things.

You can follow Mary O’Brien on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Philip:  Today, I’m very excited to speak with Mary O’Brien from the US, Port Townsend just outside Seattle.  She’s been in the online marketing space for a hell of a long time.  I know she was originally involved with Goto.com which many listeners will know were the pioneers of Pay Per Click advertising.  So thanks so much for joining us Mary.

Mary:   Good to be here Philip.

Philip:  Could you provide an intro to how you got started and what you’ve been doing over the last couple of years.  I know you’ve moved a little bit away from Pay Per Click, now you’re looking at all facets of online marketing and hosting a lot of online marketing conferences.

Mary:   Yes, that’s correct.  So I started in online marketing in 1998.  I was one of the early employees of Goto.com and then Goto got bought by Yahoo and became Yahoo Search Marketing and I was with them for several years doing as Senior Director of Training and Organizational Development.  They hired me to come in and train all of their attendees on how to – all their advertisers on how to do Pay Per Click marketing and then I also trained all of the people in-house so over the course of a couple of years, I trained 450 people within the company.

I trained 4000 advertisers then in the four years following after I left Yahoo.  From that evolved a two day conference that we’ve done for several years called PPC Summit which is the same type of thing only we cover more than just Yahoo, we do Yahoo and Google and we do everything to do with Pay Per Click.  Then this last year we kind of branched out and decided to do things more for online marketing because lots of our attendees were sort of saying to us, “Well, you know, Pay Per Click doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  I can’t just do Pay Per Click, I need to do SEO and Social Media and email marketing and display marketing and a whole bunch of different things.  Not very many people out there are providing very indepth training on that so will you branch out and do that?”

So that’s what we did.  Then with the recession happening in the US and around the world in the last few years, many people said, “Well I can’t afford to go to these big online conferences anymore.  It’s too expensive, can’t afford the time away from the office.  I can’t afford the fee for the actual conference registration.  So can you take the sessions and put them online so I can kind of log in when the time is convenient for me and I can still get the same information and still stay current with what’s going on out there.”

So that’s what we did.  We did our first two online events last year.  We did one specifically on Adwords and we did one on Landing Page Optimization and then this year we’re doing five.  So we’re doing one on SEO and Social Media coming up in March.  We’re doing one on Adwords coming up in May.  We’re doing one specifically for smaller businesses because we know that lot of the advertisers who are attending smaller businesses.  So that’s in July.  Then we’re doing one specifically for eCommerce, folks who have internet retail websites.  That’s in September and then the last one we’ll do in a year is the landing page one again but that’s going to be geared more towards lead generation.  So we have five online events this year.

Philip:            Wow excellent.  So I know those events quite well.  In fact we first met at PPC Summit in Los Angeles a couple of years ago.

Mary:            Yeah, yeah we did.

Philip:            I’ve done your Landing Page Online conference which was outstanding.  Now you’ve pretty much covered the whole range of online marketing fields.

Mary:            We’re covering most of the search side of it with the online events and then we want to kind of broaden it out and cover more of the online pieces of it.  So to that end we’re actually setting up a membership site which should be live probably around May 1^st where people can log in and they can get the training on demand and not only will we be doing the search marketing side of it but we’ll do email and we’ll do display and we’ll do all the ancillary things that people need to kind of pick up to create a well rounded campaign.

Philip:            So Mary in terms of your training experience considering you’ve trained 4000 to 5000 people, what do you think is the biggest misconception or biggest sort of problem area that most businesses have around online marketing?

Mary:            I think one of the real problems is that a lot of smaller advertisers in particular and some large advertisers as well see online marketing as something that is extremely complicated to do, that they’ve got to spend a lot of money doing it, there is a big learning curve there and they don’t really know where to go to get the tools and tips and things like that they need and they don’t really know where to get started.

So that’s what we’ve tried to do with a lot of our online events and physical events.  It’s really sort of set people off in the right direction and say, “Here, do this, then do this, then do this, then do this”  And it’s particularly strong I think that feeling with smaller businesses, because a lot of times it’s one person running the business and they are the book keeper, they are the marketing guy, they are the sales guy, they are the business development guy, I mean they are everything.  And they need kind of really to get up to speed very fast to get the sort of sales that they need using marketing techniques.

They don’t have time to sort of sit around and take a course for three years and figure out what they are doing.  They need kind of immediate results and if you know what you’re doing, online marketing is definitely the way to go to get that.

Philip:            Yeah, and I see that – we are going to talk about the components of what exactly is online marketing but there are so many facets to online marketing and I think there’s a huge amount of resources whether it’s books or training courses or whatever to find out about those individual components.  One of the hardest parts or one of the biggest challenges I see for businesses is they’re not sure which order to approach things and some leads – now the latest craze is you got to have Twitter, you got to be on Facebook, etc.  But you need to consider the overall strategy and focus on first things first.

Mary:            No, I agree and I think you’re exactly right.  And I think really and I say this with a caveat that I drank the Pay Per Click cool aid a long time ago.  But Pay Per Click can be really easy for smaller businesses to get started.  It can be expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing but if you kind of learn some basic fundamentals, you can sort of start an account fairly quickly and you can see results very quickly specially if you’ve set up some tracking on your account and that type of thing so you can see what’s going on.

I think that one of the mistakes that people are making right now is as you say, a lot of people are jumping on Twitter and jumping on Facebook and taking advantage of the social media because it’s free, the problem with it is, it’s hard to measure social media and so you can spend a lot of time doing it and not realize if you were getting results or not.

It’s also hard to drive direct sales with social media.  It tends to work a lot better if you’re driving people to sign up for your newsletter or come to your site and download something, and you’re trying to engage in that kind of community activity.  But social media doesn’t really bring direct sales immediately.

So that’s where Pay Per Click or SEO or those types of things come in.  SEO would be a great place for a lot of small businesses to start.  The problem is it takes a lot longer to get results whereas with the Pay Per Click site you get immediate results, you get immediate feedback, you can see which keywords are performing and then you can tweak it very easily to get it to actually to bring you the sales.

So once you see the keywords that are performing, it’s really easy to then start doing your SEO and setting up an account on SEO and then you can sort of see the things that you want to follow on social media as well.  So if you know the keywords that are performing for you with Pay Per Click, you can use those keywords to actually follow those keywords on Twitter and see where the conversations are happening and then engage in those types of conversations.

Philip:            And if your website’s crap, a lot of this other stuff is not going to matter.

Mary:            Exactly right, yeah.  Starting off with a good website is kind of a given and I think that smaller businesses, that’s one area where I would say make the investment because a lot of smaller businesses think, “Oh I’ll just set up a website myself and I’ll put it all online and it will be fine and it just needs to be basic stuff about me.”

Well in many cases, your website is your store front.  So I mean you wouldn’t have a store front window, just throw a bunch of stuff in it and not organize it and not make it appealing to the customer if they walked down the street.  So it’s the same thing with your website, it has to be appealing, it has to be a really good first impression of your business.

And now it’s relatively simple to set up a decent website for a small amount of money.  Either doing it yourself or getting somebody else to do it.  So there’s really no excuse for having something that looks sort of clunky and like it came from 1998.

One of the easiest ways to do it is to set up a website on WordPress.  WordPress has a really low learning curve for people.  It’s really easy to do SEO stuff on it.  It has a shopping cart, it has a bunch of different things that you can add to it.  There’s also a lot of consultants who will set up a website for you on WordPress very inexpensively.  So if you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t have a website right now and you’re listening to this, that’s my first suggestion.  Go and get a WordPress website, that will start you off in the right direction.

Philip:            Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.  I saw a great quote on Twitter the other day.  I think it was Avinash Kaushik who was saying, “Don’t drive social media checks that your website can’t cash.”  I felt that was pretty cool.

Mary:            Yeah that’s classic Avinash.

Philip:            I think it’s great to breakdown your levels of sophistication as a business, what to be focusing on first.  And I think that sort of phase one, we both – I mean I think every online marketer would agree, the number one focus is to invest in your website.

Maybe we can just touch on the quality aspects of obviously getting websites that looks good, it works well, that’s indexable and scannable and is constructed in the right way so it pleases the search engines which WordPress is a great way of achieving that.

But I think the biggest weakness, even if a website looks good, is around the credibility and the persuasiveness, just providing as much credibility factors and persuasiveness that you’re a highly credible business, right?

Mary:            Well I think I’d actually take a step backwards from that.  I think one of the issues that a lot of businesses face, both small and large businesses.  They say, “Okay I need a website and I like these colours, that’s how I want the website to look”, they go and they look at a bunch of websites. Maybe it’s their competitor or other people that they’ve seen online that they like or they are an internet retailer.  They say, “Oh I have to have a website that looks like Amazon.  Amazon is huge and they must be doing everything right.”

They don’t really stop to think about well what’s my unique selling proposition?  Because before you design a website, you’ve really got to know what the copy is going to say and copy online is very, very important.  So although the design could look beautiful, if you don’t have the right copy and engage with your visitors as soon as they get to the website, you’re going to lose them and online, people have a three second attention span.  And unless you kind of hit them in the face with your message the minute they hit your website, you’re going to lose out.

So the first thing you really want to do is sit and down and say, “Okay, so what is my unique selling proposition?  What makes me better or different or more interesting than any of my competitors out there.”  And sit down and figure that out that.  Take it step by step.  Do it yourself or brainstorm it with some other people and figure that out.  And then that will drive all of your marketing messages both on your website and in the ads that you write that you put on Google, in the ads that you write, you might do display advertising.

And you want to think about how am I different?  So what are some of the keywords that would describe your business.  Is it integrity?  Is it good customer service?  Is it lowest price?  Is it ease of use?  Is it good follow through? I mean what are those things which is when you’re putting that together and if you write all those things down, then you can give that to a web designer and you can say this is kind of the concept, the feeling that I’m trying to evoke when visitors visit my website.

A good web designer will say, “Okay, then I’m going to use these kind of colors, I’m going to use this kind of style and this is what we’re going to look at and then once you have that down and then the next thing I would say is getting good logo which is very important as well and really kind of drives the image of the business.

So start with your unique selling proposition, then get a good logo, then take the logo and then get a good website design and that will start you off in the right direction or design the website yourself.  Otherwise – it’s almost like building a database, you never want to start in the middle because you’ll miss all the bits on the edge and you have to go back and keep redesigning it till you get it right.  So you want to start with a value proposition and kind of go from there.

Philip:            I think a lot of businesses focus too much of their initial budget on the design elements and not enough on the content creation.  Along with the USP you clearly need all your marketing fundamentals in place first but I find a lot of business owners really under value good copy and quality content which achieves two things.  Obviously one is around improving your search optimization results but also providing that level of persuasiveness specially if you are a service provider where you need to be proving your credibility all the time.

Mary:            I totally agree and having just come off this landing page last seminar we did in the fall, it was amazing.  I mean we had all these landing page experts on and their showing all these examples, sites from really huge businesses and you look at their website to start with and you say, “Well that looks pretty good.”  And then you look at the next version of the website and it looks completely different and you’re sort of looking at it going, “Oh, now I see what they wanted me to do.  The other one looked pretty but it didn’t kind of drive me to take any kind of action.”  That’s the whole thing with the website.

If you don’t get your customers to take some kind of action, you are wasting your time having a website at all.  So either get them to do something when they come to the website.  It kind of goes back to that whole concept of getting to yes, that sales people use when they teach them sales training classes.

The more times you can get your customer to respond to you, the better and you do that in the way you write your copy and the way you do your design and the way you sort of position your call to action.  So get them to download a report or sign up for your newsletter or sign up to get a coupon or sign up for a free trial or get them to take some kind of action so you can start engaging with them.  Copy’s a huge factor in that, that a lot of people don’t pay attention to.

Philip:            So let’s assume we’ve got a decent website for this imaginary client, what are the next major focuses or next elements of online marketing that they should be focusing on?

Mary:            So the next thing I would actually do is set up a pay per click campaign.  You would do it in two different ways depending on whether you are a local business or depending on if you’re trying to attract a national audience.  So I start with Google because Google is one of the easiest ones to start with.

Set up your Google adwords account, either set it up as a local account if you’re local business or set it up as a national account if you’re a national business and then start thinking about the keywords that people would use to search for your business, your product or your service and then you write your titles and description, then you put in your url for your website and you start driving customers back to your website.

Along the way, one thing that is really important is that you sign up for the conversion counter which is Google’s simple little tracking solution and you also sign up for Google Analytics which is a more extensive tracking solution which is also free from Google.  And you make sure that both of those things are working on your website first before you put any money into the account because otherwise, what happens is you’re going to be doing all this and start driving some traffic to your account and you won’t ever be able to tell which are the keywords that people are clicking on to actually get to my account.

What are my customers interested in?  That gives you so much information about changing your copy to meet the needs of your visitors.  What are people interested in?  What are people looking for from you?  So before you spend a penny, make sure that that tracking works.

Philip:            A fundamental starting point is using something like Google Analytics which gives you a lot more information but can give you similar type of information to conversion tracking.

Mary:            It can.  So the difference between the two of them is conversion tracking is – it only shows a 30 day window.  If somebody comes to your website and they buy within 30 days, it will give you that information.  Whereas analytics will give you more information and you can use it to test multiple different things in ways that people are coming to your website.

So once you set up an email campaign, you set up an SEO campaign, you set up display campaigns, all those different things, Google Analytics can handle all of that and so you won’t have to set it up multiple times.  You can just set it up once on your website.  The big key with Google Analytics and this is what people get frustrated with, you need to make sure that the code is in the right place on your website and you won’t really know that very well until you actually, kind of, trial and error.  Try it in different places.

Google Analytics site walks you through where to put it but it doesn’t always work in different people’s templates.  So if you’re using WordPress, there’s a very easy Google Analytics plug in that you can use but if you’re setting it up or having a designer set it up for you, you just kind of have to work through the process.  But don’t spend money until you do that because it’s really important.

Philip:            Right so the main objective of the pay per click – starting with the pay per click is actually proving your website is capable of generating leads or selling products or services right?

Mary:            Yes that’s correct.

Philip:            And you don’t need to get more sophisticated until that’s working because what’s the point of spending a lot more money in other areas of driving traffic if – it’s like a bucket with lots of holes in, you put in water and if it’s just seeping out the edges and nothing is working, you need to plug those holes.

Mary:            That’s true.  Yeah, I mean that really makes a big difference.  You can get immediate traffic, you can literally set up your account on Google Adwords and you will have people visiting your website the same day and then you can sort of see what’s working and what’s not working.

You need to be careful with it and set a very restrictive budget. So don’t set the budget that Google tells you to set.  Set something that you are comfortable with.  So maybe $100 a day or something like that and make sure you put parameters around it and don’t walk away and leave it for the weekend and let it run and assume that when you come back, hey, you might have sales.  You may also have spent a lot of money.

You’ve got to watch it very, very carefully at the start and also think about whether this is the right thing for your business too.  Pay per click marketing works really well for customer service businesses.  It works really well for when you’re selling consumer products.  It can work really well when you’re selling to businesses as well.  You have to be a little more careful with your keywords.

Where it doesn’t work well is if you have a product or service that needs a lot of education around it.  So say you’re selling vitamins, how do they say this in Australia, maybe they say vitamins.

Philip:            Vitamins, yeah, yeah.

Mary:            Vitamins okay.  So you’re selling vitamins, then probably not a good idea to actually set up an adwords account to start with because there are so many vitamin stores out there.  How do you differentiate yourself from something else specially where you have a proprietary brand of vitamins that you’re selling.

So in that situation, you might try something different. You might do article marketing or you might do PR or you might do something completely different.  But for most businesses, pay per click is the way to go and it’s quick, it’s easy, it brings you immediate results and it’s the most trackable thing you can do.  So you can see just right away, is it working, is it not working.

The things to look at are – Google likes you to pay attention to your click through rate on your ads and just to see they adjust your quality score and they adjust your bidding based on whether your ads are actually performing.  You should not pay attention as much to that, you should pay attention to whether the actual clicks are converting because that’s what you want to pay attention to.  That’s your bottom line.  So if people are visiting the website and they’re buying.  Yes that keyword is working.

If they’re visiting the website and they’re not buying, then no, it’s not working and if you’re seeing a really, really low result, it means you need to do a website redesign before you go any further.

Philip:            And what about pay per click for service providers say, consultants and that sort of thing?

Mary:            That can work really well but typically not where you’re trying to drive or direct sale.  So in most cases, people aren’t going to come to your website and plunk down $5000 just by reading the copy on your website.  You have to engage them in a relationship the same way that you would if you were doing cold calling and so you go, you pick up a phone and you call somebody, you go out and you meet them face to face and then try to sell them on your service.

So it’s the same kind of concept with pay per click and that’s where a lot of people go wrong.  They think, “Oh I’ll just drive people to my website and they’re going to fill out the form and flip out they’re credit card and sign up for my service.”  It doesn’t work that way online the same say it doesn’t work that way offline.

So in that situation, you want to start the relationship.  Get them to fill out a form and download some free stuff that you’re providing for them – a white paper, or report or free trial or something like that and then start engaging in conversation.  Either sending them email marketing or engage them on Twitter or Facebook or something like that.  But don’t expect to make an immediate sale if you’re a high ticket item because it just doesn’t happen that way.

Philip:            Yeah, I mean I use the analogy that it’s a seduction process.  You got to nurture, you got to develop the relationship over time, it’s not just a quick approach to a person and request to take them home.

Mary:            Yeah, that’s exactly right.  And that’s why a lot of businesses fall down specially people who are selling to businesses because they’ll just use their website as kind of a brochure and then they won’t take advantage of connecting with the customer as soon as they visit the website for the first time.

I’ve seen tons and tons of really big businesses where they have a beautiful website and it’s basically talking about their services and on the contacts page, it gives information on how to reach them and all of that and nowhere on the website does it require anybody to take any kind of action and they’re missing a huge opportunity because if somebody visits your website then, at a certain level, they’re interested in your product or service.  You’ve done something to spark their interest.

You need to kind of continue that conversation forward and the easiest way to do that is put up a little box and say, we’d love to connect with you.  If you’d like to hear information about our products and services, click here and then they fill out a form or if you’d like to download our newsletter, click here or if you’d like to sign up to get notice of advance sales or something like that, click here, just some way to kind of engage them.

Philip:            Okay, so we’ve got a decent website, we’ve set up Google Analytic or some analytical tool similar to that, we’ve got pay per click working well, we’ve proven the website is now starting to convert, it’s persuasive.  So would we move on to search engine optimization at this point?

Mary:            Yeah I would move on to search optimization at this point.  I would do search optimization before I do social media because social media can help to build your visibility in the market place but where you really build your visibility is by getting better placement on the search engines because even though tons and tons of people are engaging with Twitter and Linkedin and Facebook and that type of thing, the sales aren’t necessarily happening there yet.  It’s just kind of the start of the conversation.

Whereas if somebody puts in a search term into a search engine, they have direct intent to buy and they are further along the sales funnel than people are in the social media situation.  So you want to kind of take advantage of that and start using keywords that are working for you on pay per click and then start optimizing your website for those particular keywords on various pages and try and drive more traffic from the search engines.

Philip:            What tips have you got for choosing – most businesses would be outsourcing their SEO, they don’t have the expertise in-house, but saying that  with WordPress, there’s a lot you can get your head around.  There’s a lot of technical problems you can avoid by just having WordPress in the first place and once you understand the basics about title tags, keywords, using your keywords effectively throughout your copy, you can actually do a fair bit of onsite stuff yourself even if you’re not technical.  But the link building side of things, everyone’s had a bad experience with SEO.  What are your tips around getting good results?

Mary:            I would say that you can really get good results with SEO doing it yourself if you’re in a fairly non competitive space.  So if you’re in an area where there’s not a huge amount of competition, there’s not a ton of people really trying to get the number one page or the number one spot on the first page rather, you can do it yourself.  And you’ll get some really good traction with it.

If you’re in a very competitive space and I think that’s more true of most businesses now, then it can be a lot better to outsource it because that person knows all the ins and outs, they know what they are doing hopefully and they can get you faster results than they get yourself.  I think everybody does have a horror story about SEO at some point.  I think there are a lot of people out there who will tell you that they can get you to first page of Google with very mixed results.

Anybody who says they’ll guarantee that they’ll get you to the first page of Google, you can assume that they are guaranteeing it based on some search term that’s so completely obscure that six people and your mother are going to search on it.  You’re not going to get business from that.  So if any search engine consultant uses the word guarantee, walk away immediately.

But what I would do is I would find two or three people where you see that they had gotten results for somebody or you’ve heard that they have gotten results for somebody, I would check references, ask them for at least three client references and check them.  Don’t just ask them and assume that if they’ve got three clients, they must be doing okay.  Ask for them, check them and then you can kind of make a decision then based on what these folks will do for you.

I would say be careful about signing any type of long term contract.  I think most decent SEO providers will tell you that it probably takes about six months to get really good results with the search engines.  So assume that it’s going to take around six months, if they try to lock you into a year long contract, I’d be less inclined to do that.  Six months I think is reasonable, longer than that I think doesn’t make much sense.

But most SEO providers will try and sell you some type of maintenance contract and that can make sense because as the search engines change their algorithms and do things like that, it’s hard to keep up with that yourself and then if you do website redesign, so things like that, you’re going to have to get a consultant to work on the website again for you.

Philip:            Any good tools you’d recommend on SEO?  I strongly suggest all business owners sign up for Google Webmaster tools.  They can get a lot of information on how Google will – the search engines actually seeing your website and what sort of – if there are any problems, technical problems.  You may not know how to resolve them but at least you know you have some technical issues and you can look for somebody to resolve that. Do you have any other good tools?

Mary:            Yeah there’s virtually a bunch of good tools out there.  There are some that are inexpensive, there are some that are free, there are some that require a monthly membership fee.  So the folks at SEOMoz have really good tools that you can sign up for on a monthly membership and that will allow you to sort of check links, it’ll allow you to check your website optimization and check for a bunch of different things for you, fairly inexpensive.

There’s a company called Raven Tools that offers a really nice suite of tools that are great for smaller businesses where they have pay per click management tools, they’ve got SEO management tools, they’ve got link building tools.

Then you’ve got – if you wanted to really dig into your keywords and kind of blow out your list of keywords and that’s really important.  That’s where a lot of small businesses fall down and I’ve heard from a lot of businesses that I’ve trained over the years and have 15 or 20 keywords, then they wonder why those aren’t brining them results.

Well part of the reason they’re not bringing results is because all your competitors are building on the same 15 or 20 keywords.  So you’ve got to kind of think outside the box and broaden out your keyword list.  What typically happens with keywords is about 80% of your business will come from 20% of your keywords.  It’s just the basic rule of sales, but you’ll never know that unless you start off with a large group of keywords and then sort of narrow it down based on what’s performing and what’s not.

A great keyword tool is Wordstream.  They have a free version, they have an inexpensive sort of a monthly version and I would encourage you to check that out, take a look at it.

Philip:            How do you think Wordstream compares to the Google Adwords tool, sorry the Google Adwords Keyword Tool?

Mary:            Wordstream will give you a lot of suggestions that you don’t necessarily get from the Google Analytics tool because you can get – one of the big keys with pay per click marketing is narrowing your universe rather than – you start off by broadening it and then once it starts performing, you narrow it down and the best way to do that is to use negative keywords.

Wordstream has a really great suggestion tool for negative keywords which is more obvious than the Google tool is and so the Google tool will bring you back a huge set of results, some of those things will be relevant and some of those things won’t.  Wordstream is better off in putting it in buckets for you and telling you these are sort of the ones that you should focus on be they negative or positive keywords.  It comes back with some really great suggestions with a really strong algorithm running in the back with that.

We’ve had a bunch of different people test it for us and everybody sort of came up with keywords which they wouldn’t have thought of on their own.

Philip:            Right, so in terms of this phase one we’re talking about, we got a decent website, we’ve been using Google Adwords, we’re getting good conversions, we’re now investing in search optimization, organic traffic from the search engines is starting to pick up, we’re getting more faith in our website, we’re building up the skills I think.

I encourage business owners to really build up their skills around Google Analytics because that’s your dashboard.  If you’re an online marketing is a critical strategy for your business, the skills you need to build up your own Google Analytics are absolutely critical and then I would say the next area which sort of in this phase one is around email marketing.  It’s such a great way of maintaining relationships and nurturing people and building up that trust over time.  What are your thoughts, any tips around email marketing?  Why it’s so important?

Mary:            Yeah I think email marketing is very important and it’s very overlooked by a lot of businesses specially smaller business.  A lot of smaller businesses really – they understand that they need to engage with their customers but they are hesitant to do it too often and so lots of time they think, “Oh if I’m sending emails to my customers, they’ll think I’m spamming them.”  But a lot of times customers need to be reminded that you’re there and many times they are grateful that you actually sent them something and reminded them.  So the balance – the trick is finding the balance.  How often do you need to engage with your customers.

So the first thing you want to do is, you want to set up a really nice landing page where you can give your customers something of value in exchange for their email address.  Don’t just assume because they bought from you that they want to hear from you every month and so ask them if they want to engage with you and if they want to sign up for your newsletter or your free coupons or to be notified when you’ve got classes, whatever the case may be and test several different landing pages.

So an easy tool to do that with is – Google has a free tool called Google Website Optimizer that is really easy to test landing pages with.  Another easy tool that is out there and is really inexpensive is a company called Unbounced and you can test a bunch of different landing pages with that.  So you can test your email campaign, landing pages, you can also test regular landing pages on your website for your pay per click campaign, for your SEO campaign.

The setup place where people can actually sign up, they can put in their email address and they can tell you that they want to receive communication from you and then sign up with the tools that will allow you to do that.

Don’t try and run an email campaign using Outlook because you’ll get blacklisted all over the place on a bunch of the ISP’s.  So you want to use something that is guaranteed to kind of get through to your customer and by using a good email solution and that can really make a difference in the deliverability of your emails.  So if you’re looking for something inexpensive, I would recommend Eye Contact or Vertical Response or Constant Contact, we’ve used all of them.  And if you want something with a lot more fire power in terms of reporting and things like that, then there is a bunch of other more expensive solutions that have really good reporting, things like Exact Target or stuff like that.

But one thing you want to try and do is get your customers to double opt in because it is a good reinforcement that they want to get the information

Philip:            Sorry can you just explain – can you explain the double opt in?

Mary:            Sure.  So when somebody puts in their email address on your landing page or on your site, then what happens is you send them an email and you say thank you for signing up for our newsletter or thank you for downloading our white paper.  In order to send this information to you, I would like you to confirm that you absolutely want to receive it.  And so they click on a link, they come back to the website where the landing page is and then it opts them in twice.

So it’s a really good reinforcement that this person really wants to receive your information.  Once you do that, you will build up a better reputation with the ISP’s because once they know that you double opt in, they know that these are real customers of yours who absolutely want to receive the information.

Philip:            So the email marketing really ties into – specially if you’re a service provider and you’re trying to build up that credibility, the art of seduction, non stop providing really good value.  So rule number one, you want to build up your list.  That becomes often the biggest asset for a business but provide massive value and do not sell.  I say to clients, 80% to 90% of your newsletter or your correspondence needs to be of benefit to the customer and non salesy.  Maybe 10% to 20% of your communication can be salesy.

Mary:            That really makes a huge difference and I think that marketing has really evolved over the last five years or so.  Really with the advent of the internet and people are so much more technically aware now than they used to be.  Now the concept is, before it used to be – it was all about push marketing where you were constantly trying to push your message in front of your customers face, hoping that they would respond to that and actually buy from you.

Now the concept is much more about pull marketing where if you can put your information out on the internet in as many places as you can in a very non salesy, non threatening way then people really respond to that.  So they might not buy from you today but hopefully you leave them with your credibility and so when they are in the market for that particular service or solution, then they’ll come back and they’ll buy from you.  So now the concept is all about inbound marketing rather than outbound marketing.

Philip:            Yeah, there was a great list of tools you had there.  I’d add just two more.  One is Mail Chimp which is – it seems to be going gang busters at the moment, really really popular, very easy to use, it’s actually free upto a thousand subscribers and then another advanced one with Infusion Soft which is also very popular.

Mary:            Yeah we actually use Infusion Soft and we’ve had very good results with it.  The concern I have with some of them and this is something that your listeners will really need to check this is the deliverability.  The whole thing with any kind of email service provider is whether they have a good reputation with the ISPs.  When I say ISP I mean something like Earth Link or Gmail or Google or Yahoo or Hotmail or Microsoft, all these different things where people are using that as their email solution.  So you need to make sure that the email service provider that you choose has a really good reputation and so you don’t get blacklisted because once you get black listed it’s really hard to get off that type of list.  It’ll take you a lot of work and a lot of hardship.  So make sure you choose something at the start that actually does what you need it to do.

Philip:            Okay.  So now, I think for a business to be – I mean with a decent website, getting good leads, getting organic traffic, working well in ppc, email marketing under control, building up the Google analytics skills, that’s a pretty good place to be and I think if you hit that point, you really see the value of investing more of your budget into your online strategies.  What would you sort of move onto, what are some of the more advanced things?

Mary:            Then I would really start to layer in the social media.  I mean the issue with social media, I see a lot of people doing it say, “I have to be on Twitter.  I have to be on Facebook.  It’s the hot new thing.”  Well unless it brings you results, it doesn’t matter how hot it is, all it is then is just a big time suck and you’re spending a bunch of time doing it with very little return and I’ve seen service businesses in particular who really haven’t had a great return from Twitter or Facebook.

The people that I’ve seen doing really well on Facebook are typically internet retailers because it’s really easy to kind of engage your customers in that type of environment where you can offer coupons and you can offer them reasons to sign up and free shipping and a bunch of different things.  And you can create a really nice sort of a Facebook page with a contest and things like that and then it’s very easy to get people to engage with you.

I see businesses trying to sell to other businesses having a little harder time on Facebook because it is so much of a consumer environment and it’s much more colloquial I think in nature than a lot of bigger businesses are really kind of used to.  You can use Twitter very well for trying to engage people with your product or service and just kind of start a conversation but you have to assume that that’s going to be a long term driver of business rather than an immediate driver of business.

I’ve also seen a lot of large businesses using Twitter very well as a customer service solution so monitoring the conversation about what people are saying about their business but it is very time consuming and so unless you have the time to give to it and you can do it consistently because that’s the key with social media, you have to do it consistently and you pretty much have to do something every day or every couple of days to kind of continue to engage with that audience.

You might actually get a better response from a blog specially if you’re a business to business company.  I see B2B companies doing really well with blogs and kind of getting of getting their information out there specially if you are a small company and you can get several people within the company to blog so you get your CEO to blog and you get a couple of other people to blog and doing that regularly really helps and it helps to position you and position your credibility in front of your audience.

So social media is the next thing, I would say blogging is the next thing.  Display advertising can be good but you have to be really careful with that.  It’s less controllable than pay per click or SEO is and so you can run through a lot of money very quickly and so the thing with that is you have to decide which of other sites where my customers are really engaging and you really need to know the demographics of your audience to engage in display advertising.

Philip:            And I think the other thing, the other risk with social media is the PR issues you can create.  As you’re probably aware, there’s been some really bad floods in Queensland in Australia and a massive retail store has just been absolutely slaughtered online and the forums and stuff because they were promising to donate X dollars to the floods for every person that signed up to their Facebook fan page and they’ve created a massive negative PR nightmare.

So a lot of CEO’s I think quite rightly see if they’re putting their opinions out there through blogs or social media now you’re giving the power to consumers, it’s a very big mind shift.  I think it is a mind shift that has to happen but you really need to plan your strategy thoroughly.

Mary:            Yeah you really do and I think that’s the issue for a lot of businesses is it’s very hard to control the conversation in social media and so you have an impression that you want to get your audience to buy into of your business.  You know it’s credible, you know it has integrity, those types of things.  You want your audience to believe that too but people are human and so if somebody else might have a completely different impression of your business and so whereas before they might have come back to you and said, “Okay, well your customer service is a problem and this is not working for me,” and they might have engaged you.  Now they are more inclined to post it somewhere else and post it on Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin or somewhere like that.  And so you have to kind of monitor that conversation constantly so that you can make sure that you are addressing that as it comes up and because if you don’t and if you fail to address it, it will just sit out there forever.

I mean that’s the problem with the internet, it’s going to be there for the next 100 years.  So you got to make sure that you stay on top of that.  So rather than engaging directly in social media a better way to do it kind of at the start of your business is just to monitor social media and make sure that people are talking about you, that they are talking about you in a positive light.

Philip:            Let’s move on to testing.  Landing page creation, landing page testing, AB testing, multi-variate testing, lots of new terminology for business owners, can you give us a bit of an overview of what testing involves and why you want to do it?

Mary:            You definitely want to test because unfortunately what a lot of little businesses do is they have impressions of how their customers are going to respond to your website.  For most business owners they spend a lot of time setting up their website, getting it to look just perfect, fixing the design, doing all the copy, everything looks wonderful.

And then you sort of put your baby out into the universe and you’re trying to figure out okay, well, are people engaging with it?  Do they think it’s great?  Do they have the same opinion of it that I do and honestly, 99% of the time you’re wrong because you’re too close to it.  I mean it’s almost like your children so you put your children out into the world and you’ve dressed them all up and you’ve sent them off to school.

Philip:            And you think they’re beautiful, yes.

Mary:            Yeah, you think they’re gorgeous and everybody’s baby is beautiful to their parents but the problem is that in most cases when they get out there into the world, they get the crap beaten out of them because basically, somebody else doesn’t share that opinion and it’s the same thing that’s true of your website and the easiest way to figure out what works and what doesn’t is obviously if people are buying from you.

So if somebody comes to your website and you’re making lots of sales, okay, that’s a no brainer right.  That means the website is working.  If a lot of visitors are coming to the website and they are not buying from you, that means that you have a problem and you’re not engaging your customers that way that you should be.

So you want to start then testing different pages with different copy and different headlines and different calls to action.  And so a lot of smaller businesses look at that and get completely intimidated and completely overwhelmed and they’ll say, “Oh I just spend all this money building this website, it’s gorgeous and the designer told me that it was wonderful and now you want me to test other pages.  Can I not just stop now?”  Well unfortunately you can’t, you have to figure out it might work for you but it doesn’t work for your customers.

So the next thing to do then is figuring out some landing pages that you can test and when I talk about a landing page, I’m talking about a page that a visitor arrives on when they get to your website.  So it could be your home page.  If you’re an internet retailer, it could be a category page, if you’re a business to business retailer, it could be the page where you get people to sign up for your newsletter.  Any place that people land on your website, use a landing page.  So those are the areas that you want to test.

So what you want to do is you want to look at a page where you’re getting a lot of traffic to it and then start testing things to see if you can prove the conversion rate on that page.  So you might test different calls to action or different buttons that are in different places.  You can do one test at a time which is called AB testing so what you do is you have one page that has a call to action in one place and then you do a second page and it has the call to action in another place.  So you’re basically testing apples to apples.

Once you get more complicated with it, you can do what they call multi variate testing where you’re testing multiple different things on the same page.  So you might do the button in one place here and a different place on the other page.  You might do a red button on one page and a blue button on another page.  You might do one set of copy on one page and another set on another page.  AB is the easiest one to start off with.  I mean basically just test one thing on the page at a time and see which one performs better.

Philip:            This topic is also called conversion optimization which is another way of saying the exact same thing.  You’re trying to increase your conversions or goals on your website.  We had Brian Massey on as an interviewee a couple of months ago talking about…

Mary:            Oh yeah, Brian’s wonderful.

Philip:            He’s fantastic – talking about the science of conversion optimization and it seems that at all the conferences that I’ve been to the conversion optimization sessions are absolutely crammed.  It’s very much all the rage at the moment but for good reason.  You need to get everything else in the line first, you need to improve your – get your skills up around analytics, get comfortable with a lot of the basics of online marketing and then test like crazy and essentially you never stop do you?

Mary:            No you never stop.  I mean I think that’s one of the issues that people find the most frustrating about online marketing.  It never ends.  I’ve had people over the years say to me you’re a guru when it comes to search engine marketing and yes, I am today and tomorrow I won’t be because Google will change their algorithm or they’ll do something or some new thing will come out like Facebook and the next thing I’m learning it along with everybody else.

So it’s frustrating on some level but it’s also extremely rewarding because people used to say to me, I miss the early days of the internet, can I still get a lot of sales?  My competitors got on this thing couple of years ago and I didn’t and now I’m playing catch up and will I ever catch up?  Yeah, absolutely because the internet is just the greatest equalizer.  It’s really an opportunity for smaller businesses to play in the same playing field as larger businesses.

Years ago it wasn’t like some small computer store who was on the corner could compete with somebody like Dell.  Now they can because they don’t have to have the same kind of marketing budget, they can put in the time rather than putting in the money and they can still get some really decent results.

Philip:            So do you think – how do you see a small player competing particularly around SEO with a big player?  A big player, a big corporate’s going to have a team of internal search engine optimization experts who are going to be focusing on that SEO day in and day out.  I see these big players, they are starting to squeeze businesses out of these really competitive phrases.

Mary:            Yeah I think they are and I would also say they are in pay per click as well.  I mean you’ve seen situations where a lot of bigger players have finally figured it out and so now they are buying up all the big major search terms so they can afford to compete with that.

I think what the smaller businesses have to do, that’s where your unique selling proposition comes in.  If you understand that and you’re really true to that all the time and you think about well, what do my customers want.  Well yeah, they might be interested in cheaper sales from a large player but they are interested in local service, really good customer service from me so that’s where I can compete.  And you write everything on your website or in your titles and descriptions or whatever the case might be.  You write all of that with that bias and really let people know.  This is my wheel house, this is where I can actually get results for you.

But the thing to do with SEO or with pay per click is really kind of go after a lot of those smaller search terms.  So yes the term computers might be wonderful and it’s going to drive tons and tons of traffic to your website but it’s going to be really expensive and you’re going to compete on that level with all these national and international players and the cost per click could be $20 a click.  Or you could spend years trying to get on the first page of results on Google for that particular term.  So you’ve got to kind of balance that out with what you’re trying to do.

If you do a lot of niche terms which are much longer search terms where maybe there is only two or three hundred people searching on that particular term in a month, you can still get a lot of results.  I mean you’ll do a lot more terms and you’ll do more work for it but you can still get really great results.  With SEO a lot of it has to do with your links and it’s relatively easy for you to get just the same good links back to your website as one of these national players will get back to their website.  That’s the big thing.  Don’t assume because it’s a huge company that they do a really great job on the search engine marketing because in a lot of cases, they simply don’t.

Philip:            Yeah, some great points.  I think we talked about it in the very beginning around content creation.  If you’re not creating valuable content, whatever that is for your business, all wrapped around why you are unique.  You’re not going to succeed and that could be articles, blog posts, white papers, video marketing where you’re doing reviews of products or books or whatever it is, whatever your niches is that quality content just needs to be at the core of everything.

Mary:            Yeah it absolutely does and you have to give people a reason to want to visit your site and want to link to your site and content is the easiest way to do that.  At a very basic level, if you can’t think of a lot of articles and things to put out there, then do press releases and announce to the world the things that you are doing that are different or things that you are working on or if you sponsor the local football team or did something like that, that should be a press release.

If you introduced your new product line, that should be a press release.  If you have a new employee that you hired away from some big company, that could be a press release.  If you’ve got a new product or service that you are offering, that could be a press release.  So there’s a bunch of things you can do to actually put those press releases out on there online and get them back and a great service to do that is PR Web.  I mean they are really inexpensive.  If you don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to SEO they’ll actually do the SEO on the press release for you.  You probably won’t get a ton of news people calling you but you will get a ton of links and a ton of traffic back to your site because their press releases just get picked up all over the place.

Philip:            And that applies for Australian businesses or businesses in the UK, wherever right?  I mean it’s essentially, it’s global?

Mary:            Yeah, wherever.  I mean PR Web is basically international and we see, when we do press releases we get people picking them up in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, we actually get some people picking them up in other countries where they don’t speak English and their whole website might be in German and they pick up one of our press releases and post it and so we get a link back from a German site but it does drive a lot of traffic for a very inexpensive amount.

Philip:            What sort of focus do you think businesses should have on what their competitors are upto online and there’s a huge amount you can delve into, what their strategy is and learn from them.  What sort of focus do you think they should apply there?

Mary:            I think you have to be really careful doing that.  I mean you definitely want to pay attention to what your competitors are doing but you need to be discriminating and applying that to your business because if you start doing everything that your competitors are doing, that basically takes away from your uniqueness and you just start looking like them or a copy cat of them.

So you want to watch what they are doing and see if you can learn from it and apply it to your business but you want to be really careful with that.  So I had somebody ask me years ago who came to one of my Yahoo workshops and they said I see my competitors are all selling Reeboks and I don’t sell Reeboks, I sell Nikes so I should bid on the term Reeboks right and brink them back to the Nike page and if they see Nike’s that they like, they might buy them.

Well they might and then again they might not and you just paid for all of those clicks with an effort that you’re going to try and educate your audience on the merits of Nikes v. Reeboks.  Somebody who is a dedicated Reebok consumer may never buy a pair of Nikes in their lifetime.  So you’re taking a big risk with that.  So you need to be careful specially when it comes to bidding on keywords.  If you don’t have that product or service on your website, then I would tell you not to bid on those keywords because it’s too expensive a way to educate your consumer.

But you definitely want to pay attention to where your competition is so if you’re competition is on Facebook, well maybe you should try it.  But then again they may be on Facebook and spending a bunch of money and they’re not getting any results from it.  So I would look at that over a period of time.  If you see them on there for 3 or 4 months and they are advertising on Facebook, well, okay yeah, chances are maybe they are getting something from it and you can learn from that.  But if you see them on there for a couple of weeks, don’t just jump on there and assume that you’re going to get business from it because you may not.

Philip:            Right.  Mary we’ve, I’m quite sure of the fact that we can speak about this stuff for hours but we’ve really been going here for a while.  Did you have any closing thoughts on any other tips or good points around the strategy stuff?

Mary:            Well one thing that I would say to your folks is there’s a lot of information out there that they can learn from, there are a lot of really great books on online marketing now.  There are a lot of really great places that they can learn nationally and internationally.  I think there’s some really good conferences in Australia now that people can go to and learn about online marketing.

There’s also some really great kind of online stuff.  I mean we do a lot of online stuff with our events that more than happy to have people sign up for that.  We have quite a following in Australia which is kind of interesting.  We have a following in most of the English speaking countries but the key is to continue learning.  The problem with search engine marketing and online marketing in general is it changes so fast and you have to keep up with it and you have to keep on top of it.  Otherwise you’re either missing an opportunity or you’re account starts to deteriorate.  One of the worst things you could possibly do is set up a pay per click campaign and let it run for a year and not look at because without your input, it really will deteriorate over time.  So you have to constantly kind of keep up with that and figure out what’s a new opportunity for me that I can take advantage of.

Philip:            Thanks Mary.  You’ve been incredibly generous with us with your knowledge and your time.  Absolutely so appreciative of that.  Where can people find you on line?  We’ll include links to all your web properties but for people listening to the podcast, where’s the best place, they can make contact with you?

Mary:            Okay, well they can follow me on Twitter and I am at ppcsummit or marketing institute and that’s mktg institute.  They can connect with me on Linkedin.  I’m on Linkedin and I’m also on Facebook as Mary O’brien.  They can connect with us on our blog and that’s internet marketing institute.com/blog and then the membership site will be live at that url as well.  So if people are interested in that they can kind of follow along and see us, we built the thing out from scratch basically and probably made most of the mistakes that most of your audience makes.  But it’s all about trial and errors.  So love to connect with anybody and then more than welcome to send me a direct email if they’d like to reach me also and that’s mary@ppcsummit.com.

Philip:            Great, thanks so much Mary.

Mary:            You’re welcome.