It’s common practice for most companies to spend most of their marketing budget on increasing traffic, instead of optimizing their existing content to increase engagement and thereby conversion rates. One of our advice here on eGuys is to Forget your marketing and start optimizing your content and thereby increasing your ROI.

In the following series of Landing Page Optimization articles I will give you a few hands-on advice as well as presenting successful Landing Page Optimization cases. But before the optimization can begin, it’s important to devote adequate resources to research of your audience and what you want them to do, once landed on the landing page. 
What use is the greatest design, if it doesn’t appeal to your visitors?

Advice #1:
Pick 1 MWR for the landing page and focus on it.

What do you want your visitors to do?

Before you can start optimizing your landing pages, you’ll need a clear definition of what conversion activity, you want to optimize your landing page for. In other words, what’s the Most Wanted Response on your landing page, what do you want your visitors to do:

- Do you want people to add something to their cart?

- Filling out a registration form?

- Spending a defined amount of time on the homepage?

- Telling friends about your product?

- Creating a profile?

- Opting in to receive communication, ie. newsletter, RSS feed subscription etc?

It’s very important to know your MWR for your landing pages and focus on it. Lack of focus is one of the most common mistakes that I stumble upon – the landing page owner simply want’s to achieve too many objectives, RSS subscription, profile creation, telling friends about the product etc. Too many objectives results in lack of focus on the primary objective, and if you’re confused… why shouldn’t your visitors be.

Advice #2:
Target your landing page to the profile of your perfect converter; if you have several perfect converter profiles, create a landing page for each profile.

Now you’re aware of the response you want from your visitors – next step would be to create a visitor-style profile of your perfect converter. It’s important to construct your landing page to appeal as much as possible to the profile of your perfect converter. If you try to appeal too broadly, your conversions will suffer. You must understand the motivations, concerns, desires and fears these visitors have in regards to your products and/or services. The solution would be to create a series of landing pages; each appealing to your visitor-style profiles. You have around 2-7 seconds to convince/give your visitors the feeling that your product will help them.. they won’t

• read
• read
• read
• reflect
• decide
• choose…click!

the scenario is more like

• scan the landing page manically
• click on anything that slightly resembles what they seek
• back button if  they don’t find what they looked for…
• repeat until they get frustrated and exit.

We usually devote most of our resources to this phase in a landing page optimization project, because failing to understand your visitors will make you fail in converting visitors to customers. It’s simple as that.

In the second part of landing page optimization, I’ll give you 3 landing page optimization advice that if applied correctly, will make your conversions explode!

Back to online marketing.

Some good questions about monetizing your conversions on Kamran’s post Is an Automated Bid Management System for SEM equal to succes? made me think of the great importance of the subject which deserved a post elaborating it.

What do we mean by monetizing
By monetizing your conversions we mean putting a revenue tag on all your conversions, tracking the dollars or euros each specific conversion generate to your business. However obstacles for calculating or visualizing the monetary values of your conversion can be many:

Missing insight through the value chain
If you have full insight in your value chain monetizing the conversions should be simple. Unfortunately full insight into the complete value-chain is rare in most companies. Often the chain is broken between the web analytics system and the CRM system – typically when it is not possible to close the sale online. My advice is to use the data you have to try do your best calculation of a monetary value for your conversions. A way to do it would be to use an estimated sales % to calculate backwards through the chain. If you are not able to track sale conversions on a given marketing activity you probably know or have an estimate on your total sale conversion on the online channel. Then use this sale conversion in your calculation of monetized online conversions.

Intangible conversions
Another typical obstacle is when conversions get to intangible. Putting a prize on a sale is easy but what if the conversion is a download or a video? My advice is that if no data based calculation make sense then use your gut feeling. Always remember that in your current marketing effort you are already indirectly setting a prize on your conversions. When you for example put a bid limit of 2$ to your adword you set that prize in some sort of either calculation of expected return or gut feeling. Use this gut feeling the other way around as a more powerful tool.

As stated above excuses for not monetizing your conversion exist, but I argue that even if your initial valuation may not be 100% precise the power of monetizing your conversions outweigh this inaccuracy. I have listed above some of the major gains from monetizing your conversions

More detailed insight in value – instead of just conversions
One of the first findings you will discover is that you will get a far more nuanced insight in your value- and cash generating content. Instead of just counting conversions with equal weight your differentiated monetary values will make the most valuable content visible. An example: If you drive a bank there is a big difference in converting a student loan in comparison to acquiring a private banking customer. If you don’t have the monetary metric you would in your KPI report the 2 conversion as having the same value. In regards to your online marketing your keyword “cheap loan” could possibly be doing a lot of conversions but let’s say all the conversions are student loans. In comparison you might get fewer and more expensive conversions on “reliable bank” but if all these conversions are private banking customers these conversions outweigh your “cheap loan” conversions by far. An insight you would miss in an old non-monetized conversion world.

Top management attention
When you are able to report dollars or euros to upper management instead of pageviews, sessions or conversions the interest in the web channel will rise significantly. Having this focus will help you get the resources to improve your system integrations to do an even more exact prizing and hopefully  more top level engagement in general to the online channel

Quick way to evaluate marketing efforts
If you have monetized your conversions and implemented them into your webanalytics, marketing campaign evaluation have never been easier. Weighing your campaign cost with your revenue (through your monetized conversions) equals a true ROI on every campaign. Furthermore you will soon be ready to take the next step towards automated marketing campaigns where the rules you set up based on required ROI automates your keyword bidding, display creatives etc.

Back to online marketing.

Integrate Paypal with Google Analytics

PayPal pages cannot be tagged with the Google Analytics JavaScript, you won’t have accurate funnel data for your e-commerce conversion goal. All converting visitors will leave your site (and move to PayPal) before coming back and registering their transaction (also results in an artificial bump in total visits) and thereby getting PayPal transaction data into Google Analytics.

It’s relatively easy for those who are familiar with HTML, scripting, and general web development.

Enable Payment Data Transfer (PDT) in your PayPal account. This allows you to transfer payment details (the item purchased, the transaction amount, geographical location of buyer, etc.) to your own website domain.

Next, create your conversion buttons (Buy Now buttons) as normal. Again, ensure that PDT is enabled for this button and ensure that you have the correct landing page set.

Flow – Summary:
1) Visitor enters your site (from SEM/SERPs etc).

2) Clicks on conversion button, hence leaving the site

3) Submits Paypal payment info by filling out an order form.

4) After submitting, the visitor enters your hidden landing page with Payment Data provided by PDT, where they are not tracked by Google Analytics, as there is no script on this page.

5) Immediately redirects to the receipt page, along with the utm_nooverride parameter, informing Google Analytics not to override their initial referral information.

6) Views printable receipt while their hidden Google Analytics e-commerce form is populated and then sent off for processing by the __utmSetTrans function.

The utm_nooverride=1 parameter from step 5, prevents Google Analytics from overriding your cookie data with referral information from PayPal and allows you to keep the original referrer / keyword / campaign data so it’s correctly associated with your transaction.

So from PayPal your return url needs to be www.yourdomain.com/thanks.html?utm_nooverride=1 as indicated above.

Further ressources can be found on the PayPal Developer site.

Back to online marketing.

Content creation on the web has never been easier – or has it? Certainly the evolvement of user friendly Content Management systems have made creating web content easy as writing a Word document. But at the same time creating content to the web has evolved into being a very technical task if you have to take all best practices and competitive opportunities into account. To state this fact and the challenges it creates I have listed a fictional job profile to a perfect web editor. When reading the job profile try to think of your own content management team and yourself – to what extent do you qualify for the job?

Job requirements

We expect you to be able to translate the delivered content into web optimized content. By this we want you to take into concern using the high value keywords in URL, headlines, content, links etc. This work should be conducted in close collaboration with our search engine marketing team to ensure a perfect SEO/SEM mix in regards to the keywords coverage of our competitive market.

All others search engine optimization aspects regarding metatags, description, alt image tags etc. we expect to be a natural workflow of yours as well as presenting the content in screen friendly short paragraphs, headlines, bullets, no scroll etc.

In reference to links to and from the site we expect you to closely evaluate which links to pass on “linkjuice” and which pages to contain the pagerank. You will be evaluated based on your ability to increase the pagerank and traffic to our most converting pages from search engines.

Beside the search engines traffic you are responsible for optimizing the content to constantly increase conversion rates and the return of our web content. We expect you to be able to do this optimization through different A/B and Multivariate testing tools constantly adapting to our customer segments differentiated behavior.

You will also be responsible for managing our web analytics setup in regards of ensuring a sufficient tagging of customer actions on the site. In a close dialogue with sales and other relevant departments you are to ensure a precise tagging and monetary valuation of all customer actions generating business value covering sales, lead generation, selfservice etc.

We anticipate with great interest your application and to discuss your suggestions for bringing our content even further.

Related posts:

Back to online marketing.

Collecting data from your customers makes it possible to provide targeted and relevant information which without doubt is a good thing. But a pitfall in segmenting is overdoing it and collecting the data just because you are able to.

The example above shows a collection of customer data that pins out several issues to be aware of.

Low conversion rate

In far most cases the fewer customer data you require, the higher conversion rate you will get. The extra value you expect to gain from collecting extra customer data should therefore always be weighed against a lower conversion rate.

Where is the value for the customer

Another problem in collecting extensive user data is not proving the value to the customer for giving up his personal information. Retrieving segmentation data from your customers should be accompanied with proving the value to the customer. If you in this contract with the customer are able to prove valuable customervalue for giving up their personal data you could actually improve your conversionrate even though you add extra inputs.

How often are you able to deliver 100% relevant information

Finally if you are able to deliver relevant information, frequency in your communication can become scarce. If multiple customersegmented rules have to be met for the information to be relevant to the unique customer dialogue can become your rare. In this case I would prefer to have a 80% relevant dialogue with my existing or potential customers every 14 days than having a 100% relevant dialogue every third month.

Back to online marketing.

Backlinks are important in terms of SEO and ranking well in SERPs, but have you thought about the distribution of all that linkjuice on your site and how important it is to control that flow of link equity ?

Optimized linking between pages on your site helps retaining link equity within the site and also a fair and controlled distribution of the overall PageRank value to the most important pages.

Internal links can be seen as pipes in the core ground of your site, these should be placed strategically to distribute link equity and PageRank to the other pages within the site. Having pipes (links) pointing to pages of your site from external websites, will increase link equity (and help increase PageRank) on those particular pages. This goes both ways, links pointing away from your site to other sites will move link equity away from your site and might decrease the PageRank from those pages that contain outbound links.

Structuring Internal Links.
There are two main types of internal linking – hierarchical and mesh. Let’s have a look at hierarchical linking.

Hierarchical linking
Hierarchical linking is where some pages on your site are deemed more important than others.  Link equity is concentrated on the most important pages by internally linking to the most important pages but not cross-linking between the source of links.

In other words, link more often to important pagetypes (content, service, product) to funnel link equity and rank those important sites highest on Google for your most important keywords.

In most cases the root-level page has the highest PR value, as this is the page most often linked to – both externally and internally. This may not be ideal if your site is nothing but a splash page or contains little content. In this case a redesign would do wonders. Include more content and make it more relevant to Google (and your visitors). If this isn’t possible, you should re-link internally to your most important keyword-relevant content pages.

EXAMPLE

Figure 1.

According to figure 1. the ‘About us’ page is only linked to from a single page, the root-level page. The reason behind this is that the ‘About us’ page (in this example) is not nearly as important as the other pages, so instead of funneling PR value to it, we direct the flow of PR value out of the ‘About us’ page and back to the root-level page ‘eGuys’. Please note that the PR values in the figure 1 are fictional.

NOFOLLOW attribute
Here on eGuys we control the flow of link equity using the nofollow attribute on internal links to pages such as registration, login and privacy info. Pages which we don’t find very important. In other words, we tell Googlebot (or other major Search Engines) which links they should and shouldn’t put emphasis on.

In the future, I will cover Mesh linking, so look forward to it.

Back to online marketing.

How do you approach and prioritize optimizing your web activities? With several existing and new fastgrowing marketing channels most website owners find themselves in a harder and harder struggle to keep up pace with the new possibilities on the web and still keep optimizing their existing activites. You can’t spend the optimal time of attention to all your activities so where to start?

The traditional marketer focus

Most optimizing efforts go into optimizing the different online marketing channels to generate higher conversion like this example.

Optimizing this channel would hopefully generate higher conversions which is great. But could you place your optimizing efforts elsewhere and get a higher effect?

Let’s look at the big picture

If we have a look at the big picture on how the marketing channels typically are connected to your website and conversions you will see that the critical “hub” for your conversions is your website/landingpages and not the marketing channels. The conversion is seldom in the actual marketing creative but the user converts through a landingpage, which can contain multiple holes in the conversion funnel (usability, credibility, signup process etc.). If you would optimize this hub instead of the separate marketing channel the result would be that a lift in conversion would be a lift in conversion for all your marketing channels going through this hub.

These findings suggest that when prioritizing your effort in optimizing your web sphere, focus should be concentrated in optimizing your website or landing pages using for example A/B split testing or more advanced Multi variate testing (MVT). With this example I don’t imply you should not be doing any optimization of your marketing channels. If you don’t have any traffic to your website, optimizing it will have no effect . Our experience tells us however that most weborganizations spend 95% of their time focusing on the external marketing channels and only 5% on content optimization. I would argue that in many cases flipping this priority would increase your overall ROI on your website.

Back to online marketing.

In our company, a completely manual approach alone was not sufficient for managing sophisticated SEM campaigns. With sophisticated I mean huge keyword sets, multiple search engines, multiple metrics etc.

My colleague Kristian and I discovered that an automated approach like SearchCenter (ie. Kenshoo, SearchIgnite and Efficient Frontier) on its own wasn’t enough to give us the satisfaction we needed unless it was combined with other products.

Imagine an online bank with low conversion rate (CR) relative to peers. The problem with Efficient Frontier’s data modeling approach is that it can tell you what keywords and ad groups are converting and not converting, but it can’t tell you WHY, which is the most important question in my opionion. For instance, if your CR only allows you to profitably bid to avg position 6.5, you’re going to get lousy volume unless you improve your conversion rate, and there’s nothing Efficient Frontier can do to help you other than giving you the possability to focus upon it.

Thats why an automated bid management system combined with Web Analytics and Multivariate testing is the way to go, because workflow efficiencies would allow you to get alot more done, conversion funnel data relative to search adgroups could easily be analyzed and acted on, testing could be conducted as a direct result of SEM campaign analysis.

Data modeling alone is not enough. There must be a conjoining of data modeling, scalably applied manual oversight and integration with central Web Analytics platforms for SEM. Conversion funnel analysis for SEM must be integrated for its applied output to be scalable across an organization. Multivariate testing must be integrated with both Web Analytics and any automated bid management system.

To sum up, the best results are achieveable by mixing an automated bid management system for SEM with manual management with “Web Analytics being the conscious eyes providing the de-duped, channel agnostic, paid and unpaid unified view of everything”.

What’s your take on this? If you are using any SEM automated bid management system like SearchCenter, Kenshoo, SearchIgnite, or Efficient Frontier please share your experience and satisfaction levels here.

Back to online marketing.