Get 13 super smart business owners with their own Google Analytics accounts in a room for the morning, add in some fresh coffee and over a hundred training slides, and anything is possible.
Each was there because they believe, as we do, that managing a website is a lot easier if you have a basic understanding of Google Analytics and its core metrics. Just as understanding terms like profit, expenses and assets makes managing your financials much easier, understanding terms like bounce rate, page views and users is helpful for managing a website.
For three hours we gradually layered the information down with frequent breaks for quizzes, card games and chocolate. We are a relaxed bunch, so questions and insights were fired at Abby and me from all directions. And, as is frequently the case, it was they showed us that the stuff was slowly being absorbed.
Questions and insights like…
Once I remove all my spam traffic my numbers look great in some areas and a disaster in others.
Every Google Analytics account involved in the training had spam in it – some more than others. Those with low visit counts were especially affected. Their high proportion of rubbish traffic made their total visitor count look great, but engagement data a mess.
Early in the course we showed a quick way to filter out spam data to reveal the real numbers beneath. For some it was a revelation – the site they thought was busy with prospects was 80% spam and very, very quiet when it came to local traffic.
Why am I paying someone to manage my advertising when I don’t have any goals set up to measure its performance?
After we had removed spam data from the accounts we then helped people set up their first Google Analytics Goal. Think of this as configuring an account to track all the things that show the website performing successfully. Typical measures include contact forms being completed, or sales made. About 20% of participants already had goals set up – the rest went along with a simple scenario that we suggested. By the end of the training, about 50% had set up a goal, and all got the importance of setting them up to measure the success of their efforts. If you’re paying hundreds of dollars a month to Google for advertising, this is a critical step.
Now if I could only reduce the bounce rate from my home page, life would be so much better.
This from an attendee who had to leave the room to convince her web developer to give her access to her own Google Analytics account for the first time. From that standing start she picked up that her home page was her top landing page by a long shot, and it bounced 75% of the traffic it received. She left with attending to that at the top of her to-do list for the week.
The stats from our new website are both good and bad. Good because our engagement has improved, but bad because the conversion rate looks to have plummeted.
This insight came from a design company who had rolled out a new website two months earlier. Thankfully, they had kept the same Google Analytics code across both sites. So now it was easy to see that their fancy new, redesigned home page had delivered a lower bounce rate but also was now hiding the next-step conversion choices they wanted prospects to take.
This is just a smattering of the questions and insights we heard – they kept flying right to the end.
The post-event survey results tell us that the format size and style of training works; allowing business owners to get down and dirty in their own Google Analytics account while being trained along the way seems to hit the mark. Contact us today if you would like to join the next group.
The other day I had coffee with a friend who was struggling with her business. Their financial year had just wrapped up and the results proved what she already understood – it had been a tough year. However, deep down we knew the direction she was heading in was right – the principles were sound. It was just the implementation that needed work.
I think of principles as the “why” parts of a business, the overarching reasons the business does what it does. They are the bits that the owner stands for – the parts that force you to take those hard decisions. The middle of the Simon Sinek bullseye for the company.
When I set up Ark Advance in 2002 I had two core principles I wanted to apply. As the years have progressed a few more have been added. There are not dozens – probably fewer than ten. However, there have been times where I would have just loved to ditch each and every one of them to make life easier.
But unfortunately principles are not like that. They are part of you and so long as you remain true to yourself then they just sit there – guiding you forward and calling you to task along the way. Visions of my mother remind me of this fact.
My Mum was a quietly spoken person who believed in the principle of fairness. (It’s something I believe in too.) One situation in particular sticks in my memory.
Our home in England had as neighbours the local Anglican Church. All was going well until a new vicar arrived and decided to put up a two-metre high black fence along our border without talking to Mum. Effectively, it blocked the view out the front of our house across the nice church grounds towards the vicarage.
I still remember to this day the vision of my five foot Mum in her mid 50s trying to push the fence over from our side – while the six foot tall Vicar was on the other side trying, quite unsuccessfully I may add, to keep it up. Principles make you do that – fight and push and generally keep going when things are against you.
So here are four of mine for Ark Advance.
#1 It’s all worth zip if nothing gets sold.
I sold offset business printing on commission for many years, probably one of the more competitive markets to make a living in. My boss used to chase us out of the office at 9am to knock on doors – cold call style – to make our budget. We were allowed back in at 4.30pm to write up our orders. If we had any. Walking down the street going door to door is probably the least efficient way ever to market a business. Unless, that is, you pay people only when they sell – then it makes perfect sense.
The directors knew this and paid you well IF you made the sale. They had the numbers dialed in. Each drove around in the latest Jaguar sports cars and the company invested in high end printing machinery from Japan.
The simplicity of their sales model was a charm.
Compare that to all the marketing and sales options available, now that most offices stop cold calling reps turning up at their door. In online alone you have social media, search with all its different facets, email marketing and even remarketing. More options than most have time to explore.
However, what hasn’t changed is that it’s all worth zip if something isn’t sold to someone. Forget the razzmatazz of this technology over that one. The end goal remains the same.
#2 It’s David against Goliath, and we provide the slingshot.
A few large US tech corporates control an ever-increasing slice of the online space you market within. And yep, the dice are loaded heavily in their favour. They can and do change the game on a frequent basis and you are left to react as quickly as the rest.
Small to medium sized companies are only allowed to interact with these brands through script-driven call centres. Fairness has nothing to do with the situation. It’s market economics on a global scale that means a few can control so much.
Nevertheless, there are ways to make things work in your favour. It’s not about doing the same thing the big brands do. Their budgets are crazy and you will never get the same access they do. For you, it’s about finding the nooks and crannies in the online marketing space where, at the right price, you can locate the right prospect, win their attention, and convince them to do the right thing. Our job is to show you where these places are and then hand you the tools to achieve your goals.
#3 Process delivers repeatable success
Ever press the “send” button on an email campaign going to a half a million people? Our team do on a regular basis. The only way I can have them do this is by supporting them with a process that works. We would have over a hundred steps an email campaign needs to follow to ensure it is launched to spec – a similar number to setting up a good paid advertising campaign. So when things go awry it’s the process that’s called to task first, not the team member.
#4 The truth is in the data.
It’s less about opinions, feelings, thoughts or hunches. These are the places where seemingly great ideas can still remain alive, sucking your budget and, more importantly, your time. The cold hard data tells the front-footed truth, the bits you don’t want to know. Such as the thousands you spend with an SEO “specialist” each month without any data to show you the extra sales it produces.
Or the 80% bounce rate from the Google advertising campaign that makes you cringe but is managed by a friend of the boss who is nice to chat with each week BUT still hasn’t asked for access to your Google Analytics account so they can see the data themselves.
Ark would be a different business without these principles. For instance, we would have dived into social media from the get-go. Instead, we held back until we could see it driving sales as opposed to “brand exposure”. Also, our focus on Google Analytics would be way less than it is now. We actively look for data to challenge our approach.
Compare this to the accounts we are asked to review where there’s lots being spent because of just one thing – trust. No data – just the business owner trusting their supplier to do the right thing for them. There’s a great Peter Drucker saying, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, but in these situations it should be “data eats trust for breakfast”.
Struggling to get more value from your online marketing? Time to shape up or ship some tactics out?
If so, let me offer the humble funnel as a tool to steer your turnaround, help you apply the right tactics in the right order, and ensure a steady passage towards your goals.
There’s real power and magic in the funnel. Its basic premise is that more people arrive on your website than decide to convert. So it makes sense that the top is wider than the bottom :).
The segments below the top describe the different levels of engagement as people meander through your pages. There will always be those who bounce in and, before you know it, have bounced out again. Whoa – the funnel just got a bit smaller!
Now we’ve got those who have remained and are enthralled with your content. They’re hanging around to play the videos you’ve so cleverly provided, or download PDFs.
Now you’ve got a funnel that look something like this.
Like all models, it doesn’t capture every situation – and that sharp point may be a bit too sharp. But this little shape with just its four stages can really help you focus on the right things when turning around your online marketing.
Let’s consider two scenarios – one great, one not so great.
The great one first. Here I am, one of your prospects. I hop across to Google to start a search. Bang! and there you go – Google worked. Just what I wanted is staring me squarely in the face.
So I click and arrive on a website that looks just as I hoped. The content is good – it keeps me lingering longer than I planned. Then – not wanting to waste all that invested time – I’ve made contact so someone can follow up with me later.
I’m happy. And, as the website owner, so are you!
Now for the not so great scenario.
Now let’s look at how the four stage funnel can help us debug a poor performing website which delivers very few of these scenarios. First up let’s deal with the top part of our friendly funnel – Acquisition.
I’m the same prospect as before, but this time when I do my Google search, I don’t see your website anywhere. Poor SEO and ineffective AdWords advertising are the problems you need to address first. Until you do, the rest of the funnel is irrelevant. It’s empty.
So now you’ve sorted that issue and I find your site. But I don’t stay long. In that case, the content of your website now needs serious work. Very rarely do we see a website with poor engagement perform well in Interaction and Conversion.
So now you’ve sorted your content and your interaction levels have shot through the roof. But conversions suck. Usually that’s a result of not having the kind of interactive content that the customer needs to make the purchase decision. For instance, complex products or services may require videos to explain them, or PDF documents to provide more detail.
Employing the funnel theory can help you focus your efforts on fixing the right things. For instance, it can help you avoid wasting money on a five minute video of your services (an interaction event) until you’ve increased your engagement values (time on site and pages per session) sufficiently to ensure visitors are spending enough time to even find or play the video.
Or you may decide not to purchase additional advertising from Google until you’ve done something about your 70% bounce rate (again those engagement values need work!).. And yes, improving these stats can be a lot harder and possibly a lot less fun than creating a video or buying more clicks from Google. Sorry … I never said using such a simple shape could make the work simple too.
Nevertheless, when there are more tactics available online than there is time to deliver, the funnel should help you focus on fixing the right parts first. Contact us today to arrange a session with a member of our team on how your online marketing performs against best practice for each of these four stages.
Our copy of the Auckland 2016 Yellow Pages arrived this week. Don’t worry, this isn’t a beat up article decrying the cost of advertising within its pages and promoting a range of online alternatives. Think of it more as my take on why marketing in this medium is a super smart choice – for some. And how, compared to the rest of us who need to advertise online, they have such an easier run towards success.
Let me explain.
First off – there will be a market demographic that looks forward to receiving their copy of the latest Yellow Pages and flicking through those soft pages of colour. For them the publishers have done all the hard work by curating the list of best possible suppliers for them to pick from. All they have to do is sit down with a cup of coffee, work through the options and jot down a few phone numbers to call later that afternoon.
This behaviour could be typical of your ideal market demographic. If so, then advertising within the Yellow Pages would make perfect sense. In fact, it may be the only option you have to reach this group and could well justify taking up most of your annual marketing spend.
Think, for example, of the demographics your marketing would avoid. The younger audience, perhaps, or those who use their mobile phone to search for solutions – or, for that matter, anyone who strongly prefers to search online for suppliers. By advertising in the Yellow Pages, you’re not wasting your advertising spend attracting the wrong person. Instead you’ve got a laser focused on precisely your right demographic. All because of your choice of media. Go, directory advertising!
Now let’s reverse the scenario. Let’s say your ideal demographic would never use the Yellow Pages. Let’s say it’s women aged 25 to 45 who want to holiday in Fiji and use Google to search for options.
Their choice of media – online – means you now have to advertise in a space that includes not only them, but a myriad of other less-than-ideal demographics.
I noticed something the other day that highlighted this very issue. The Price family – my favourite demographic – had just finished eating dinner and was discussing a friend who was enjoying a trip to Musket Cove in Fiji. It’s a place we have never visited so, quick as a flash, my 19-year-old daughter whipped out her phone, Googled the resort, and clicked on the first paid advert that had Musket Cove in its ad copy.
All this in mere seconds.
Little did she care that the ad was for a ferry service between the mainland and the resort. She clicked, scrolled quickly through the page, noticed no images of the resort, then bounced back to Google to keep looking.
In moments she had burnt the company’s ad cost without any chance of actually becoming a customer. Another case of the wrong demographic making marketing a lot more expensive than it should be.
For this advertiser, it would be great to be able to tune out searchers like Maddy. While that option isn’t available in Google AdWords, the Google Analytics demographic reporting function goes some way to solving the problem.
Once correctly enabled, this function allows you to see the age and gender breakdown of your visitors. So in my earlier reverse scenario – also Fiji-related just by chance – you would be able to see the streams of web traffic that match your target demographic of women aged of 25-45.
Then you could compare this demographic to the one delivered through your mobile advertising during the evening. Perhaps there will be many instances of “Maddy-like” people churning clicks with little chance of a conversion? Knowing this, you could then pause your evening mobile advertising or focus the spend more on the desktop searching alternatives, which would more likely come from an older and – for you – more ideal audience.
Actively filtering out people from our clients’ online marketing is an ongoing strategy at Ark Advance. We do this by applying the full range of reporting data within your Google Analytics account to locate the people we don’t want and ensure they are not attracted through your marketing efforts (and spend).
Unfortunately, not many of us have the luxury of marketing to a demographic that is defined by the media it chooses. How lucky they those smart Yellow Pages advertisers are.
Recently Google rolled out a large change to how it presents its paid advertising. This freaked a number of people out for a bunch of reasons, not least of which were the scale of the change and the lack of warning of its implementation.
A growing number of businesses rely on Google Search as their main source of leads. So significant change, like the one just seen, can cause concern and even prompt people to consider their options other than Google.
So let’s say the proverbial really does hit the fan and Google is effectively removed as an option for your marketing. Where would you turn next?
Unfortunately, you can’t simply switch to Search Engine B and enjoy the same results as Search Engine G. But you do have a range of options that, when correctly implemented, should help lessen the loss.
This article outlines a few of them.
#1 Email Marketing. Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you the tried and tested channel of email marketing. In this scenario we know Google search is a no go, but if you have someone’s email address and their permission to use it, and as long as you keep the content fresh and relevant, there will always be a direct link between your marketing and them. Sound good?
So go and grow your email list with gusto. It’s the best insurance against change in the online marketing space. Then you can unlock the smarts of the channel by linking it to your CRM system and follow up with those who engage most with your emails. People have been predicting the death of email marketing for years but still it keeps going. Checked your email today?
#2 Google Display Advertising. This is a bit of a cheat because it is a Google product. But I am going to assume that your total relationship with Google is not destroyed – just your ability to be seen in search.
Display Advertising is where you present image banners and text ads through the Google advertising network of websites that are browsed by your target audience. Finding the sites your prospects visit and placing the right ad in the correct space to get them to click is no mean feat. Hence we always recommend solving the Google search advertising problem first before heading into Display. With that job done, Display hops to the top of the queue.
There are a few chunky benefits to Display. One is that your marketing is relatively hidden from your competitors. While everyone can see who is bidding on what search keyword, trawling the Internet to find the exact websites you advertise on is a lot harder. Get it right and you can have dozens of websites sending individual trickles of quality traffic that collectively add up to what you used to get in search.
#3 Display Remarketing. The next option I offer is a derivative of the first – display remarketing. Here you present banner and text ads on the same advertising network as the Google Display product but with the added feature of targeting them to people who have visited your website before.
This is a common strategy for those wanting to recycle low-converting Google search advertising traffic. However, many forget that it can actually be used for all traffic types. This is especially true when you can target your advertising to match the profile of your visitor groups; for instance those who have arrived from specific geographic regions, or people using specific devices (computer, iPad, mobile phone). With good remarketing, you become a super recycler of traffic compared to your competitors who hope their conversions are completed on the first visit.
#4 Social Media – I put social media last because, like Google search, it is run by corporates who could change the space at will and leave you in the lurch. Social media marketing as like advertising in a place that you rent. With email marketing, you own the building.
That caveat aside, you can do some great work in social channels that are well suited to your audience. For some that could be Instagram and Facebook; others may get more traction with LinkedIn. Pick the channels that your prospects live in, invest in the right content, and gradually build a following that has a good prospect of converting. And always remember that the first – and valuable – conversion may simply be subscribing to your email list.
That’s four alternatives to get you going – and it’s a good set. Every week I come across businesses that rely solely on Google Search to deliver leads. If those businesses adopted two or three of these strategies, their risk would be substantially less.
So here’s a challenge: invest time in one of these alternative this month. Let me know if you need any help.
Chris Price is the Founder of Ark Advance – An Online Marketing Company established in 2002 to help businesses thrive by thinking and acting smart in the online space.
Just imagine if the performance of your website is being held back simply because your visitors are not seeing your best content. Forget about them choosing not to read it – they just don’t get to see it. And this is not just any content. It’s all that “must read” information like testimonials, reviews, videos.
How would that make you feel? Just a tad bothered?
What would cause this? Most often, it’s your visitors not bothering to scroll down the page to read what’s below the first screen.
Does your website rely on visitors scrolling? Perhaps it was set up with the assumption that because you scroll, so must everyone else.
Well, let’s check that assumption against this graph from an actual Google Analytics account.
The graph shows scrolling behaviour for a website’s home page. The tall bar on the left represents everyone who arrived on the page. The next bar shows how many visitors scrolled down to see the top 25% of the page. Subsequent bars show how many visitors got 50%, 75% and 100% of the way down the page.
Let’s state the obvious here – the bars are different heights. Just because people can scroll doesn’t mean they do.
Now note the dramatic gap between the first two bars. Fewer than half of all visitors even start scrolling. One reason in this case was the layout of the page. It looked complete when you arrived. The design didn’t suggest there was more content below.
So most visitors, instead of scrolling, clicked the navigation bar to learn more. And they missed the great testimonials hidden just below the bottom of their screen.
Finally, note the relatively small gaps between bars two to five. This tells us that once people started scrolling, they continued down the page. That’s not always what happens. Sometimes there’s a dramatic drop off at about the halfway point, with few making it to the bottom.
Knowing what proportion of your visitors start to scroll, and how far they actually get, should guide you in where to place your content.
For instance, all the critical content – the “must read” stuff – should be as high as possible. It can be followed by the “good to read” stuff. Then, hovering around the bottom, put the “nice to read” content.
So far so good. Now to add a bit of spice – the scrolling behaviour of mobile visitors can be different from that of their desktop cousins.
The good news is that it’s quite easy to track the scrolling behaviour of all your visitors – desktop and mobile. Just allow us to edit your Google Analytics configuration and you’ll be set.
Once results are in you can re-order your content from top to bottom into the “ Must Read” and“ Nice to Read” groups, and possibly adjusting it for mobile visitors. In our experience, being aware of visitor scrolling behaviour, and re-ordering your content accordingly, can produce a nice upward bump in engagement.
Contact us today if you would like to learn more about this.
(As published in Marketing Online. Issue 4, March 2016)
We have all experienced our own Google Advertising “Content Shock. The scenario usually unfolds like this.
You are on the hunt for a person to help design a new brand for your business. You search Google using the phrase “brand design Auckland”. Immediately you start scanning down the results – starting at the organic results. The top two results catch you eye and open a new tab in your browser on each.
Unfortunately neither are right. Either they are too big or too small, so you start clicking away in the paid advertising space. First click done and you are taken to a page on graphic design – Content Shock – this has nothing to do with the problem you need to solve – so you bounce back to the search results page and click on another ad.
This time the ads lands you on page that shows you what you expected to see. It looks OK – not amazing – just OK – think Mild Content Shock. So you add it to the list of possible contenders. But keen for more choice you bounce back again to the search results and click on your last ad.
Now we are talking – the page you see is clearly the winner. They just “get it”. Through good use of images and text they answer nearly all the questions swirling around in your head. These are the one. So they get the phone call and the rest remain a short fleeting memory for you and say $6 each in wasted click costs for them.
Wouldn’t it be good if all your clicks translated into calls like the last example? You are not alone. Ensuring every costly click delivered its own phone call is the goal for all Google advertisers. So how do you avoid the “Content Shock“ mistakes of the first two?
Here are three strategies that I believe can help.
1. Research the real intent behind the search keyword you are bidding on.
For example, we work in the home services market. Think, cleaning, renovating, plumbing and electricians. A while back we had a company come to us wanting to launch a new service in Auckland as a trial before taking it to Australia.
They had built a website based on what they thought the market wanted to see. We were told to send all advertising to the home page. You guessed it – it failed miserably.
This was a new space for us so we were unsure of the intent of the prospect but the Content Shock our statistics revealed showed what was there was way off the mark. So we kicked off some market research to uncover the motivations and mindsets we were advertising too. A month later we had the data. it revealed the high amount of stress these buyers were facing and the core reasons they began their search journey in the first place.
Based on this information we redesigned the imagery of the landing page and rewrote the top 20% of the content. The ad copy was then tuned to match this new content and the campaign released using the exact same search keyword selection that had failed before.
All this work was well rewarded with conversion rates that were above industry standards as opposed to those well below they had experienced before. The success was so good we rolled the changes outside of Auckland and the core messages were used successfully during their Australian expansion. Research tells you what to say – next up we need to find the best way to say it.
2. Tune your content to be fast to consume and conversational in style.
Once your research is complete and you have created your first draft content you can put it through two very simple “human” tests before going live. The first involves paper and a willing helper.
Go ahead and print out the landing page (print multiple pages if itś a long one) and then take it and a colleague into a meeting room. Place the printing facedown on the table and ask the colleague to sit opposite you – approx a metre away.
Then brief them on who they are supposed to be and the problem they are searching to solve. Then pick up the first page and show it to at eye level for just 5 seconds. Place it facedown on the table and then have them tell you exactly what they saw and if on reading it they were interested in learning more.
Content that confuses or fails to capture attention in print form will struggle online. If your page passes the first test then you can test the persuasive nature of the copy. Simply read it out loud to your colleague and note the reaction you get. Slowly drooping eyelids and contained yawns are not a good sign.
Copy has been described by many as “selling in print”. So if you are struggling to come up the right words, just think back to what you said in the last conversation you had with prospect to guide you. Once all the changes have been made then you can place it into live and head to the final stage.
3. Harness the super analytical benefits of the web to tune your landing pages to success.
Hop into your Google Analytics account and you will be met with a mass of metrics and dimensions to keep even the most geeky of analytics geeks busy for weeks. Here are three to focus on that reveal the effectiveness of your work.
– Bounce rate – how many people viewed your landing page and didn’t go any further. You want this number to be as low as possible but zero is an unrealistic expectation. For your paid advertising I always shoot number that is no more than 15% above your site average bounce rate. So for a 30% site average your top level would be 45% which even so is hovering very close to one in two not looking any further.
– Page Value – bit of an advanced metric and it does require you to set up values behind your goals. BUT it lets you know place an exact value of worth for the page – think numbers like $5.89. So you change the top copy and the page value goes to $8.45 from $2.67 and you know that it really is time to celebrate.
– Content Interaction – not exactly a metric you will find in GA more an approach to track everything you can. So if your page includes a video – you need to know if it is played and if so for how long. And if the good meaty part of the sales message is a third of the way down the page then knowing that everyone scrolled this far would be of help.
So there you have it. Three strategies to apply to ensure your Google advertising doesn’t instill content shock on those who visit your site this way. Want to learn more about other areas of online marketing? Just visit our Free Stuff section at the Ark Advance website.
Recently Google reduced the number of ad slots it was allowing in its desktop search environment. Gone are all the slots on the right hand side. What remains are those at the top – with an extra slot for some queries – and some at the bottom.
That means fewer ad slots are now available for the same number of advertisers. And that means click costs are sure to head upwards. Here’s my take on how the typical Kiwi business owner can navigate through this change.
#1 Become a price setter not a price taker.
You are currently one or the other. Most people are “price takers” who take the price they are given with a gulp. They have no idea how many phone calls they get from those clicks. Nor do they track actual closed customer sales based on the click that started the sales process.
In their situation, $4.00 per click “sounds” super expensive and they grudgingly see their credit card charges from Google in their statements each month.
Compare those people to those who smile with glee when each click occurs. These people are the “price setters”.
They know exactly how many clicks they need to create a lead and how many of these go onto become customers. For every dollar they invest with Google advertising, they see ten, twenty or a hundred dollars in profit. They actively seek ways to divert funds from poor performing marketing channels into their Google advertising.
Forget about $4 per click; they could pay $8 per click and still be making lots of money. They will bid up their clicks to put financial pressure on the rest, who struggle to make their advertising work at $4. In most cases they live at the top of the search results, and the recent change has only positive effects for them. They rub their hands with glee as they see their competition being all but obliterated from view, leaving searchers to focus their attention on what is left – the price setters and their super sized ads.
#2 Focus on the “profit” – ie, conversions – of your clicks
As a business owner, think of clicks vs conversions as the equivalent of revenue vs profit. Your clicks are revenue – they drive the volume of traffic through your website. And seeing yourself at the top of the search results is nice, just as looking at a fat figure at the top of your P&L report is nice.
But we all know that’s not the real goal. Phone calls, submitted quote requests and contact forms are a lot closer to the bottom line of profit. These are the website actions that fuel the growth of a company.
Price setters always have above-industry-standard website conversion rates. Their website is a “conversion engine” that magically turns clicks into calls and form submissions. A good result for the week is not ranking well for their chosen keywords; it’s learning that the recent change to their website landing pages have increased Quote Request completion by 30%. Same traffic, same cost – and 30% extra results.
#3 Know that 1 is the most dangerous number for business owners.
Dan Kennedy talks about this a lot. Here are some examples of where the danger lurks:
– One person in your company can only do one particular kind of work.
– One customer accounts for the majority of your sales.
– One supplier manages all of your IT and telecommunications needs.
– One marketing channel – think Google AdWords! – delivers more than half your leads.
For some people the recent Google AdWords change is merely a problem – but for others it could be dire. Let’s imagine your business is built on the sole marketing tactic of paying for clicks at the lowest possible amount on the right hand side of the desktop search area.
Now these ad places are gone.
Your business growth is stalled, at best. Maybe even ended.
So don’t rely on Google paid advertising to deliver all your leads. There are many effective online marketing strategies that don’t have Google as their focus. Spread your love and minimise your risks!
And remember that Ark Advance can help you achieve this goal. Since 2002 we’ve supported all kinds of Kiwi and Australian businesses to effectively manage the marketing of their website. Contact us today to see if our services fit your situation.
Does your website make your phone ring? If it does, or if it should, then this product is for you.
This is how it works.
We set up a unique phone number just for you and link it to four places.
So what’s the benefit? Here’s one possible scenario.
Let’s say that each month you buy Google clicks for $5.00 from about 50 keywords. While engagement is good your Google Analytics reports tell you you’ve had no Contact Us page conversions. But you are getting phone calls.
That creates a problem. You know Google Adwords campaign isn’t working as well as it could, but you can’t just pause it in case you silence the phone.
With call tracking, your problem’s solved. You can identify the keywords that drive calls, allowing you to silence the wasted spend on those that don’t.
Here’s another scenario. You are not sure how well your office is dealing with the large number of phone calls it receives during the week. You think some are being missed, but you are not sure. Now you visit the reporting portal and see that a large number are being missed during lunchtime when the phone is diverted while the receptionist is at lunch. Armed with this knowledge, you can now adjust lunch periods to avoid this and track the drop in missed calls.
Scenario 3: Occasionally the office is not manned and you are not sure if people bother to leave a message when you are out. Now you will receive a notification telling you who failed to get their call answered – even if they didn’t leave a message – so your sales team can follow up.
Given its benefits, Call Tracking is remarkably affordable. Plans start at $95 a month with bundled minutes. Talk to your account manager to learn more or complete a Contact Us request.
Albert Einstein typified as a sign of madness “doing the same thing again and again while expecting a different result.”
Does that describe your online marketing plan for 2016? Complete the same tasks as 2015 but with the hope of some other result?
This article will seed some ideas to ensure this doesn’t happen to you. But as we all know it’s very easy to slip back into old ways. The “same” can be so much more comfortable than the “new”. I experienced this earlier in the new year when starting a new training plan for my running.
Late last year, for some deranged reason, I signed up for a trail running event in May that has me double my existing max distance in some remote parts of the North Island. I began the plan doing what I had always done before, but with a bit more distance to spice things up. Very early on, my knees made it known that this wasn’t going to work. More of the same wasn’t an option.
Not wanting to give up too soon I happened across a podcast from a guy who helps middle-aged souls like me achieve running goals just like this. First task he sets me is to strap on a heart rate monitor with an alarm set for 180 minus my age. It was a low number.
Within five minutes of my first run this annoying thing starts beeping away. I was still running on the flat. I kept running, thinking it was an error. But no – more beeping and I’m forced to walk until it settles down. I end up walking about 30% of my running course. I had been running much too fast.
Apparently, the path to running long is building a sizable aerobic base. This occurs at a much lower heart rate than I was training at. Ends up there was no way my body could have built the base the way I was training – no matter how hard I tried. I had to slow down to eventually go long.
This translates well to the land of online marketing. There are many tasks that with even 1000% effort will never achieve the result you want if what you’re already doing isn’t effective. Let me outline a few examples in the four areas of online marketing that we optimise – Acquisition, Engagement, Interaction and Conversion.
Acquisition – increasing the number of visitors to your website.
Let’s start with Google and, specifically, being seen by more people for what you do rather than who you are. Fortunately, how much advertising you buy from Google will have no influence on how they rank your website in non-advertised space.
Adding more images to your website has little to no effect here either. Nor does running keyword ranking reports every month to see where your site ranks for certain keywords compared to your competitors.
The only way to reliably improve your ranking is by updating your website with new content in the areas in which you want to improve your rankings, and that Google can find and index.
Simple as that.
Find the keywords you are not ranking for, write good content on them, and you are well on the way to seeing a positive change.
Engagement – reducing your bounce rate, increasing pages per session, lengthening overall vist times.
Here the issue can be a lack of focus. Engagement is not about improving the content on every page of your website. It’s about improving it on just the ones that are super important.
The first page people see sets the tone of the session. Your Google Analytics reports will show these as your “Landing Pages”. Work on reducing their bounce rate as a priority. If you cannot entice your visitors to look at one additional page then all engagement bets are off.
Let’s say, for instance, you invest hours updating the images of your product catalogue. Unless visitors make it past your home page (assuming that’s their initial landing page) then you’re wasting your time. Spend the effort instead on your home page first.
Interaction – taking visitors one step closer to conversion.
If you sell services, interactive content can be a critical. Examples include free eBook downloads, registrations for free audits, online calculators and product demonstrations.
Our own website has a Free Stuff section that IMHO shows how it’s done. Each freebie moves prospects closer to the sale. A common mistake is plastering the website with phone numbers and contact forms, hoping this will drive up the conversion rate of the site – when in fact a lack of interactive content is holding things back.
Conversion – convincing the visitor to become a lead or to purchase a product.
Last but not least is the bit that makes all your work worthwhile – the conversion. Quote requests, contact us completions, booking requests, orders – all those fantastic notification emails that we just love to see arrive.
You can waste time here by jumping straight into fixing up the Conversion parts of your site, while avoiding any work in the Engagement and Interaction areas. Yet we rarely see websites with amazing conversion rates that do poorly with engagement. Or, similarly, with no Interaction content but a steady stream of leads. Work spent in these two areas first naturally leads to growth in conversion activity later.
I’m not saying that following my advice will make your life easier. My runs – even at a much lower heart rate – are still a challenge. But at least I know the effort is in the right direction, and with time the results should come. Follow the points in this article and the same will apply to your online marketing for 2016.
If you would like a more customised approach to your situation for 2016, complete our Contact Us page and we will be in touch.
Behaviour > Site Speed
If I can stream a whole Netflix episode at home with no problems, then why does your website take so long to load?
Hopefully this is not a question your prospects are pondering. With services like Netflix and Lightbox we are consuming more bandwidth than ever and our expectations for responsiveness of the web is only increasing. So how do you know what you can do with your website to keep up with the speed crazed users?
Thankfully Google Analytics is here to help.
Just head over to the Site Speed reports found in the Behaviour area of the tool and you will see what Google thinks of your stats. It’s a simple race: the faster you can make your website, the better. Google helps with some suggestions for both your mobile and desktop site.
As buyers we all know when it is time to “tell” rather than “sell”.
This weekend I met a salesperson who knew the difference between the two. My eldest daughter, Maddy, is in the early stages of looking for a new Apple iMac computer. So we ended up at one of the hundreds of Apple retailers in Auckland. It was picked because it was near a cafe we planned to go to for lunch afterwards.
We started in front of some shiny Apple screens not knowing exactly what we were looking at. Now fortunately for us, we managed to flag down the right salesperson. She sauntered over and started to gently ask Maddy a few questions. Questions about what she wanted the machine for, the applications she would be running and how long she expected to spend using it.
The salesperson brought with her a small piece of paper showing the product specs of the range. After a short chat, she pointed out the ones would be ideal and why. I then asked the “Dad Question”: why wouldn’t she buy the cheapest of the two? The assistant did a great job of explaining the technical differences in a way that we both could understand.
And then she said nothing. No fancy close. No whipping out a handheld computer to tap in stuff to give us a special deal. Just handed us her card and told us which of the two we were in front of. Advising us to have a play and get a feel of what we were considering.
And considering it, we were. Spending over $3,500 takes a bit of time to digest. So we left knowing more than when we arrived and with a feeling that this business: (a) could help us, and (b) knew a lot about how to match the right iMac to the right Apple purchaser.
As I said before, there are probably hundreds of Auckland retailers who sell Apple products but after that simple exchange these guys would now be at the top of our list.
Effective lead nurturing helps you get to the top of the list your prospects have for what you sell.
Here’s how to get involved.
#1 Produce great content to capture your prospect’s attention – and their email address.
We all head to the Internet when researching that next chunky purchase. We will trade our email address along the way for content that will make our search so much easier. Think value, not necessarily volume.
Automatically most people think “eBooks” here, but that doesn’t have to be the case. We have a customer who created a very simple MS Excel calculator plugin that was extremely valuable for his prospects. When they registered to get it for free, which many hundreds did, it solved a very complex calculation in a jiffy. This same theme permeated their very comprehensive and expensive software product which these prospects were ideal customers for.
#2 Talk to them as long as it makes sense.
Maddy will need her new computer before March. I would guess that a three month consideration period is usual for a computer like this. Deciding on what car to buy could take a lot longer, and likewise deciding which graphic designer should design your next logo may be faster than picking a car but longer than buying an iMac.
Let’s also assume that all decisions that should be made by prospects: will be. So there’s an ideal time period to say what you need to say while people are considering. Leave it too late and the purchase would have been made and the relevance lost.
#3 Givers gain.
Capturing your prospect’s attention is the top task after they have traded their email address for your content..
Just a quick refresher: now is not the time to sell, but to tell. And the “telling” part focuses on helping the prospect through the decision-making process. Those that sell complex services have a distinct advantage here, especially when there’s a lot that can go wrong with a poor decision. Think “complex software purchases that never go live”, i.e. business rebranding exercises that actually reduce sales rather than increase them. Situations like these where the risk of a negative outcome can be quite high.
Any content you can offer here to help people avoid these steps will be well received. Drip-feeding it to people in manageable chunks of email ensures you remain at the top of people’s minds as the time of consideration continues.
This leaves you with the task of managing who gets what and when. Thankfully there’s a range of technology to make this a breeze.
#4 Dissolve the complexity with the right technology.
So you are drip-feeding snippets of highly valuable content to possibly hundreds of prospects who are “considering” what you offer. Some are more active than others at this and could be clicking the links in your messages with a frenzy; others could be a bit more passive. The rest flit between the two states while receiving the series of messages you provide.
Somehow you need to isolate those who are keen to buy, possibly for some telemarketing activities, and respectfully and gently nurture those who are still pondering their choices. Thankfully there’s a range of lead-nurturing technology that can make this mind meld act a relatively simple task.
We support a range of tools that do just this. You can start from just $10 per month and head northwards. The more you pay, the more complexity you can manage. However most starting out have quite simple needs so the low-cost technology is usually a starter.
Our experience doesn’t start and end with the tools. We have expertise in creating the content to get the system started AND the messages required to keep the momentum going to the successful end.
Follow these steps and you should end up with a pipeline packed with prospects slowly moving further along their decision-making process.
Contact us today to learn how to design a pipeline like this for your business.
In an age of tweets, status updates and social shares – what space is there for the humble email message?
Thankfully quite a lot if those cluttering up my Inbox can be taken as a guide. Looking back on last week’s messages I see notes from Facebook, Linked In and even Google +. Each with millions of dollars to spend in online marketing but still they choose to send me a humble email message.
So why is this? And what can you learn from these online marketing Gorillas to apply to your modest aspirations online?
First off let’s look at how to grow your business via email – and what we can learn from these powerhouses here. Now we all know that sending unsolicited messages is against the law. So thankfully this is not the angle Linked In chooses as they provide a great example of how to apply it correctly.
In their case, moving from a free product to spending upwards of $90 per month is a sizable jump in value prospects need to take. Bridging this gap will need some serious selling. And in their case they use great content and email messaging to achieve this goal. Just look at what’s on offer here. Beautifully crafted, well presented content. All sitting behind a relatively detailed request form and delivered by great email marketing.
Sound like something you could apply to you as well? Perhaps you sell a service that competes on how your team customises its application to each customer. Think Graphic Designers, Accountants, Lawyers and the like.
In these cases offering content that clearly shows the gap between your expertise compared to the rest is a great plan. Email marketing tools will deliver the messages, “listen” for those who are opening and clicking and notify you when a prospect drops into the “highly engaged” bucket ready for a phone call.
But what about customers? How can email marketing help you retain and expand the revenue here?
Thankfully the problem that is solved via email is one that grows each year as your customers become even more busier. It’s their ability to forget who you are and what you do. Yep after all that great work you did on the last project. If you don’t keep in touch on a regular basis – there’s a possibility that you may be passed over for the next engagement.
Email does a great job of solving this in the land of e-commerce. These days, tools will monitor those who forgot to check out their shopping cart and fire them a short missive to bring them back to finish what they started. Likewise if they purchased 6 month’s ago and should have been back by now but haven’t – then a voucher is sent their way to get them shopping again.
That’s why Facebook is emailing me – I haven’t been online for a week or so now so they are getting a bit jittery.
Let’s not forget the humble email newsletter. Done properly it can build repeat revenue for nearly all business types. Yes you need to pack it with good content (probably more important than a few years back – it’s that busy thing again) , write with some personality and keep it on a regular schedule. Nevertheless do just these three points and you could well be ahead of your competition.
I predict that there’s many ways email marketing can claim some of the space in your online marketing plans. And by their actions, the powerhouses of online marketing seem to think so to. Why not take the time this month to squeeze some space for email in your business?
Previously published in the Marketing Online Magazine – October 2015, subscribe for free here.
Let’s forget what Google Analytics tells us about yesterday – this report reveals the here and now. Yep, you can peek at real live humans looking through your pages, clicking from one to another. That allows you to:
– Confirm your tracking is actually working by visiting your own website on mobile and desktop devices and playing “spot yourself” on both.
– Receive live updates on how your email marketing campaign is working. See who’s clicking across to your site and (hopefully) watch them becoming leads or new customers.
– Check the configuration of your Google Analytics Events and Google Analytics Goals. As the names suggest, Events and Goals are where you tell Google Analytics things you’d like to see happen regarding website traffic and visitor – and GA then tells you when you’ve achieved those things. With Live Reporting you can set each up and confirm all is good without having to wait for the data to be shown in the the main reports.
Not another Google product, I hear you say. Something else to add to the “complex tools from Google that I must learn to understand in my spare time” list. Well, possibly, but this article will show you how Google Tag Manager can help you move from Starter to Savvy Business Owner status.
First off let’s explain what I mean by a Savvy Business Owner or SBO (not to be confused with an S… well, you know).
An SBO knows more about how prospects interact with their website than their competitors do. And if there is one place where the adage “knowledge is power” applies, online is it.
One benefit of online marketing is its ability to be measured. And what you can measure – as we all know – you can manage. So it follows that the more you measure, the more you know, which means the more you can manage.
But here’s the rub. In the online world, the devil is in the detail. SBOs know which detail matters and which doesn’t.
For instance, Starter Business Owners measure website visitor numbers using tools like Google Analytics. That’s all. They don’t track how many chose to play the video on the homepage – the one that cost $5000 and a week of blood, sweat and tears to produce.
SBOs, on the other hand, track both: visitor numbers and video engagement. They know that of the two minutes of video content, only the first 50 seconds is viewed by most visitors. They then know they have work to do, since all the “good stuff” happens during the first minute of video viewing. Then they do this work – editing the video down and ensure it opens with the best content.
And what about the Starter Business Owner whose home page requires the user scroll down to get all the content? Again, they will track just those who arrived. The SBO goes deeper, seeing how far down they scrolled. Then he discovers that just 25% actually make it past the halfway mark into the ¨services” content that tells them what the company can do for them. Then, in a stroke of genius, he re-orders the web content, building a services specific page and enticing people to click through to it.
As you can see, moving from Starter to Savvy Business Owner requires you to track every prospect interaction with your website. Once this data is in your Google Analytics account you can mine it to your heart’s content to guide your next actions.
Google Tag Manager makes it easier to get the data in there.
I like to think of Google Tag Manager as a magic “box of code” that sits on every page of your website. For all pages the box contains your normal Google Analytics tracking code. On some pages, however, the box also contains special code that relates to how the user interacts with that page; eg, plays a video or scrolls up and down.
Without this “box” your web developers would need to hand code custom programming to send Google Analytics the interaction data. Think expensive and time consuming. With Google Tag Manager it’s a breeze.
We have been using Google Tag Manager at Ark Advance for a few years. In that time we have developed a range of techniques for tracking specific behaviours and are adding to them all the time. Tracking YouTube-hosted video plays and page scrolling are just two.
Keen to upgrade yourself from Starter to Savvy Business owner? Give us a call today and we will get you started with Google Tag Manager and its magic box of code.
Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns
Let’s talk about measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns – specifically those driven by email marketing. Done well, email marketing should entice prospects to buy and your customers to buy more. Where does this good stuff happen? For most clients, on your website.
So one thing you want to do is distinguish the “buyer” traffic coming to your site from all the other traffic. If you can do that, then you see if all your efforts in email are worthwhile.
That, friends, is why we have Campaign report in Google Analytics.
By default this is one place where your Google AdWords data can be found. And if your Email Marketing tool has been properly configured, you should also find your email campaigns here. (Configuration requires the addition of Google tracking codes to each web link within your email messages.) Without proper configuration your email traffic will remain hidden in either your Direct or Referral traffic areas.
The Campaign report shows you who visits your website by clicking links within your chosen campaign. Users “live” in each campaign for a full six months (the default setting of the GA code) or if they click on a link from another campaign. Let’s say, for example, that they click on a link in your June email newsletter and join that campaign. Then they come back to your site in July by typing your details into Google and clicking on an organic result link. This visit is still attributed to the June campaign. However, if they click a link in your July newsletter then they hop from the June to the July campaign. Got it?
Why not check out your Campaign Report this month and go hunting for your email marketing campaigns to see how well they are performing compared to your other types of traffic.