Whenever Air New Zealand wanted to send an email campaign out to their database a few years ago, it always involved engaging with four or five external suppliers. It was time-consuming, clunky and, of course, expensive. In 2011 they decided to streamline the process by bringing it in-house.
They selected a dedicated internal team, chose an email deployment platform called Responsys, and then started the search for a local company to help with the technical side of using it. Fly Buys, an Air NZ partner, suggested Permission, the agency they use for their email campaigns. Two years on, Air NZ and Permission are achieving great things, says Nicky Ward, who heads up the dedicated in-house team in her role as Planning Manager of Direct Customer Communication, Customer Strategy and Analytics.
The airline company sends anywhere from 15 to 20 email campaigns a month to over 800,000 people. The campaigns are a mixture of retail (sales and promotions, such as flight deals to Australia) and loyalty-based ones, which include personalised Airpoints statements and engagement communications. Essentially, Air NZ comes up with the content and look of the email, Permission codes their artwork to create a html file (the technical bit) and then uses the deployment platform Responsys to send it. Permission also keeps an eye on email deliverability, ensuring the email content renders the same and gives a good viewing and customer experience no matter what device you use to open it, from your desktop PC to your tablet to your mobile.
Nicky says, “Since taking our email campaigns in-house and working with Permission, the number of campaigns we’re deployed and the range of campaigns has increased. We can now provide relevant and personalised communications to our customers. Our return on investment has improved due to the cost efficiencies we’ve had from bringing it in-house, using Responsys and working with Permission.
“I’d recommend Permission to other businesses because they are experts on producing and deploying email campaigns, particularly using the Responsys platform. We’ve been impressed with their ability to help us implement a wide range of different campaign requests. They are smaller than some other agencies, which means they’re flexible, speedy and responsive to our changing business demands – it’s a real bonus.”
The last time I looked, I could see over 75 different reporting options within Google Analytics. 75! All generated from just the one itty-bitty piece of javascript placed on every web page of your site. With so much to choose from, it can make life confusing – where do you find the actual information you need within this mass of data?
One option would be to start at the top of the navigation list and work your way down, keeping an eye out for anything interesting. But I predict a definite glaze will come over your eyes after 10 minutes. You could always head off to Google to see what reports others suggest as being worth your time. This could be an interesting exercise – but possibly also a real time-waster and completely irrelevant for your situation.
So how do you determine the reporting areas that matter the most to you and your situation? Thankfully there’s a simple answer. It all boils down to defining a “conversion use case” for your website and then wrapping an “analytics net” around it to track its performance. Below are two very basic examples of this approach to illustrate how this can work for you. For each, I have detailed the basics of the use case and then shown the ideal analytics net required e.g. what reports from the 75-pluswould need the most attention.
It all starts with prospects using Google to look for what we offer. From there they click on our ranking or paid advertisement and visit our website. Once there they spend 2-3 minutes reading about who we are and what we do. This leads them to fill in our quote request form, which generates an email to our sales team. One of our team will contact them within one business day and make a time to visit them at their home. Job done.
Webmaster tools will tell us if our rankings within Google’s organic listings are being seen first and then – once seen – clicked. Our Google AdWords account will be linked to ensure any paid advertising is correctly separated out so we can correctly track individual keywords responsible for visitors arriving.
All the usual great engagement website stats such as bounce rate, time on site and pages per visit will tell us what people do when they arrive. For example, do they visit one page and leave? If they stay, where they go and how long do they spend on each page?
Setting up a goal in Google Analytics will help us follow the trail from visitor arrival to the quote request being completed. Plus it will give us a percentage take on those that visit and convert compared to the total visitors.
We also need to capture all the leads into an online tool of sorts – even a basic spreadsheet will work – so we can track the difference between those who complete the quote request and those who our sales team are able to
contact (Just in case there are those who don’t answer their phone or return left messages) And finally, of those who were contacted, we can tell which ones became clients, which leaves us with an overall lead-to-customer conversion rate.
And that’s the simple one!
Prospects looking for the products we offer will find us on Google. They will see our search listing or our search ad and visit our website. Here they’ll browse the product they’re interested in and possibly the category it sits within. They’ll do this for between 2-3 minutes. They’ll then either choose to purchase this product now – or decide to visit the site again and buy it later.
Once they’ve purchased their desired item, they’ll opt in to receive our email campaigns/offers. These messages are enticing enough to ensure they visit our website more often and spend longer on it each time compared to those who decide not to buy. All this translates into them purchasing more than twice a year.
The first part of the process is very similar to the situation before. Webmaster tools and a properly linked Google AdWords account will enable us to track all we need at the
start of the journey.
The engagement reports from the last use case will help us here too. Plus, establishing e-commerce tracking within Google Analytics will ensure we can match actual sale values to the orders coming through. So we can see not only the customers but also the products they purchased. We can then build a segment within the updated Google Analytics custom segment application to track visitors who arrive and decide to purchase
after either a single or multiple visits. Another segment will split out customers from prospects so we can see how their onsite behaviour differs.
Our email marketing campaigns will need some extra work too. By directing the links they contain back to the shopping site, we can then split this traffic out as a separate stream for further analysis. So segment #3 will show us
how our email subscribers differ in behaviour from the rest. (We could further categorise these people: segment #3a for email subscribers who are customers and segment #3b for those subscribers who are still just prospects.) This leaves it up to our ordering system to tell us how the purchase frequency changes for those who are opted into our email campaigns compared to those that aren’t. One should be bigger than the other.
As you can see, there are a lot more behaviours required to make a successful e-commerce site work well compared to its lead-generated cousin. Who said it was as simple as placing a shop online then sitting back to count all the money flowing in?! Nevertheless, once the correct analytics net is placed around either site, it will soon be obvious what’s working well and conversely what needs work.
So why not take some time this month to start the process off for your own site? Write out the conversion use case you want your website to achieve. Go ahead and include all the steps that are required – both on-and offline – to create the results you want. Then have a go at creating the right analytics net to wrap around the process. Contact us if you need help.
Every month we hold a customer conference call that all of our customers are invited to join. At the beginning of these conference calls we have a section on what is new in the online marketing world that we believe is worthy of your attention. This is a video of the introduction of July’s conference call 2013.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GEV6AX7mfk
Very rarely do we at Permission come across business owners with an unending stream of ready-to-spend cash to divert to their Google AdWords campaign. In fact, the opposite is generally the case. In which case, the best mantra for every Kiwi business owner to abide by is: get more for your clicks this month than you did last.
Sounds simple, but how do you do it? The first step is to thoroughly understand the way in which Google goes about spending your money. Let’s spend a few minutes pulling this apart.
In most situations your budget is allocated at a campaign level and represents a fixed cost per day. Some days you will be above the spend, some days below. But when you extrapolate this spend over a month, Google does a great job of ensuring you don’t spend more than you expected to – they do this by “throttling” your campaign…
Each day, at midnight, your budget is refreshed with new funds and your ads start to display. If your daily budget isn’t enough to gather all the clicks available for the next 24 hours Google will, by default, limit or “throttle” your
campaigning by exposing it gradually during the day. This allows you to get clicks from each part of the day: morning, afternoon and evening.
However, you have the power to edit this “throttled” setting. You can burn through your budget as fast as possible, if you choose. Or you can alter the time of day and days of week the ads are shown. So if your best leads come during the weekend and you receive poor-quality leads on a Monday, you can choose to stop showing then and move your budget to get more weekend traffic.
How do you know if your budget is so low that your ads are being “throttled”? Google makes finding this a breeze with one of their core reports – see the example below. Here Google reveals the “impression share” of the campaign (that is, the amount of times the ad would have been seen if it was available) due to both budget restrictions and campaign quality.
We all know what a campaign with a low impression share is like – it’s the one where your ad seems to be hiding when you go looking for it on Google. You type in your target keywords and your ad doesn’tshow. Or, even worse:
your boss types in the same keywords and arrives at your desks with print-outs proving the same failure.
Now let’s look at what causes your budget to deplete so quickly before the day is up. People clicking your ads is the simple response – hurrah for response! But let’s dive a bit deeper into how a campaign could be set up to make
Google’s puppeteering a lot less controlling than it needs to be.
Let’s say you run a bakery that supplies venison pies and cream buns. Both of these are available from your website, but it’s the venison pies that represent 70% of your revenue and a sizeable part of your profits. Wanting to
improve your traffic, you start advertising with Google on both keywords (“venison pie” and “cream buns”) and place them within the one campaign. This is set up with a budget of $20 per day and is configured to target Aucklanders.
After two weeks you have spent just under $300 and have sold just one pie and two cream buns. Total sales are a very measly $50 and you’re left with a feeling of distrust of all things Google. Especially when they tell you that there’s a lot more clicks available and that your ads were being throttled. What a waste of money.
Then you take a deeper look into what you got for your budget. You see that the campaign delivered 400 clicks for cream buns and just 20 clicks for venison pies. So an OK conversion rate for the pies but an appalling one for the buns. In addition, you realise the buns keywords were a lot more popular than the meat pies and therefore grabbed as much of the budget as they could. So the first lesson is to split the campaign into two groups– one for pies, one for cakes – and then apply the budget to each in a way that better reflects the commercial benefit of each ie weighted more heavily to the more-profitable venison pie offering.
Now let’s say the bakery owner goes home and tells their partner how they have beaten Google at its own game and are now spending their click dollars so much better than before. To prove this they get out their laptop and, at 6pm, search for “venison pies” – they proudly show their partner that their ads are still appearing at 6pm due to their budget being slowed across the full day. The owner then gets a bit show-offy and logs into their order system to smugly point out all the nice new orders coming from those who clicked and then converted. Good news. But not for long.
The bubble is quickly burst by the partner who takes over the laptop and types in keywords like “meat pies”, “fresh savoury pies” and “fresh meat pies”. Alas, no ads appear.
“Surely more people would be searching for these terms than a very specific “venison pies”,” he queries.
So the next day a rather deflated baker goes back to work, adds these keywords into her venison campaign and awaits for the torrent of orders. You guessed it – it doesn’t arrive.
What does arrive is a bundle more clicks, delivered by the addition of these broader target keywords – but unfortunately they’ve now carved into the budget, stealing valuable budget from the more targeted (and ultimately
more beneficial) “venison pies” keywords. The poor baker’s campaign has been “throttled”.
When it comes to allocating budgets to keywords, there are always trade-offs to be made (unless money is no issue for you). You can’t be seen by all search terms all the time, and nor can you grab all the clicks available. The magic is knowing where to invest the right amount of awareness (think ad impression) for each keyword and at what cost (think cost per click) to capture the optimum return on your spend (think advertising cost/conversion revenue).
Happy bidding.
Check out Permission Website Marketing’s September Newsletter Update.
For more website marketing information, take a look at our online marketing services, or give us a call on 0800 893 477.
Here’s just a couple of the goals a good website has to achieve to pay its way for the business that owns it; be found by those looking in Google and appeal to all that decide to visit -so much so that it transforms these anonymous visitors into either live lead prospects or purchasing consumers.
Pick a simple business selling one product or service and this can be manageable. Replace this with any normal business that has multiple offerings to alternative markets and things become much more of a challenge.
If I was asked to create a list of tactics that can make this work even harder than it should be then the lack of an quality content would be #1. Yep forget about fancy design, super smart traffic building tactics or even the most detailed of analytical tracking. If a website’s content misses the mark then all the rest doesn’t matter.
Creating content is possibly the most snooze inducing subject we can talk about here at Permission. So I would not be surprised if by now if most readers are not feeling their eyelids sink lower and their breathing slowing down. No doubt soon their fingers will be twitching over a mouse button ready to move on.
Look I know that producing content is hard and therefore is the least appealing part of managing a website. Fortunately the giants of online marketing -think Google – are ready and willing to reward you for all your efforts. And when Google dishes out rewards, why not take an unfair share of what’s on offer?
Google’s engineers realise the power that a content laden website can deliver to it searchers, so much so that now they are rewarding those that follow this strategy where it matters most – in their pocket. Now don’t get too excited, there are no actual cheques being dished out. It’s more that a “bonus benefit” is being applied to those who want it.
Here’s just a few ways in which this benefit is being applied.
Many moons ago you could divide the amount of work required to improve a websites performance within Google neatly using the 80/20 principle. Twenty percent of the work applied to a websites content and how it was displayed. The remaining 80% was all about ensuring other websites linked into the site in the correct way. Nowadays it would be fair to say that the same 80/20 principle applies – instead the proportions of work are neatly reversed.
So if you want to rank for the search term of say “Spaniel Training Guides” on your dog training site then you will need a page that includes great content on exactly this subject.
This sounds super easy for product based businesses; however service suppliers have a harder job. For instance let’s say you supply domestic cleaning services. How many different ways do you think prospects would describe this service? Here’s just a few from the extensive list – domestic cleaning, house cleaning, home cleaning, cleaner Auckland and even home cleaning Sandringham. So if this was your business then somehow you need to have a piece of logical and well written content for every search term that makes sense for the reader.
Paid advertising solution – Google AdWords -is also busy rewarding with cheaper clicks those who have the best keyword to content match. So if your paid advertising keywords included the term “Spaniel Training Guides” and your clicking prospect was taken through to the product page then all is good with Google and their advertising Quality Score metric.
It’s a great thing this Quality Score thingy exists. It ensures that the Google bidding system is about providing relevant ads and not big fat advertising budgets. Without it we would be left with those with the largest budgets achieving the highest placements.
Now unfortunately Google doesn’t share all the ingredients of an advertiser’s quality score ranking with us. However the following factors are known to influence it; how long the advertiser has been buying clicks; the % of times an ad is clicked compared to how often it is seen; and the relevant one for our discussion -the ad to keyword content match.
We have all clicked on low quality score ads. You click, arrive and in seconds realise in a few seconds that what is in front of you is not what you wanted. Back you go to Google to continuing your search. The click didn’t work for you and fortunately it wasn’t the experience Google wanted for you either as they subsequently mark down the quality score of the advertiser.
In both of these instances Google is rewarding you for doing the hard work of creating great content. First up it affects your natural search ranking – which should lead to more visitors and hopefully more leads. Secondly it helps reduce the cost of your paid advertising clicks by producing a high quality score.
There you have it, two great reasons to make this next month the month of more content. Give us a call if you are not sure what type of content to create.
This month’s group customer conference call was all about how to use Google Analytics to “track the scent” of your website visitors as they move through your website from page to page.
Here’s a quick list of what we covered during our 45 minute call:
Back in April 2010 Google posted on how they were incorporating a site’s speed as a new signal in their search ranking algorithm. More on this can be found on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. Recently Google Analytics received an update to show a series of recommendations to help webmasters improve their websites speed. To follow are a few screen grabs of these new reports. 
Click on those suggestions and you see a screen like this with a breakdown of performance for both Mobile and Desktop. 
Google Analytics recently updated the way in which users could build segments. The screens got a tweak to make them easier to use and a fair dollop of extra parameters were added. This all sounds super geeky and of little use to most business owners, however because I’m writing about it here I can assure you that the opposite is really the case.
First up let’s get into what Segments are and why they need some attention. I’ll begin with a three stage levels of how people view the traffic their website receives.
This is a throwback to the old ways of tracking websites. Basically it’s a technical term that relates to the type of content that is downloaded from your website as people browse your pages. So a website designed a different way could have more hits than another but its traffic could be lower. Because of this inherent issue knowing your “hit count” is most probably less valuable than knowing nothing about your sites performance.
Now we are making progress. This is a count of actual humans who are clicking on your pages. Visitors have page visits, returning visits and new visits. They are the closest thing we have to measure when it comes to tracking actual people. We can see where they came from -Google organic or paid advertising, directly to your site, or from you last email campaign. And we can see what pages they looked at.
However the illusion in all of this is that everyone is the same wanting the same problem solved the same way. A big bucket of sameness. Which thankfully isn’t correct as the world is made up of very different people wanting solutions to their own different type of problems. This is where Segments come in.
Segments allow you to carve up your visitors into logical groups. Once built, you can see how the groups perform on your website compared to other groups or the overall site average. The latest update gives you a bit more flexibility in how these groups are defined and more importantly lets you look at people, not just the visits they take.
For instance here are three groups that were not available before but are now.
So you run an e-commerce store and want to see how customers who have spent more than $100 over the last two months interacted with your website. Previously this was all done at a visit level.
Previously any customer who completed an order worth $100 or more during a single visit was added to the segment. Now you can define this segment at a user level which allows Google analytics to sum all the sales a user made during this period and if they were $100 or more, include them in the segment. As you can imagine, there’s quite a bit of difference between the two.
Let’s say your ideal user needs to visit your website and look at a landing page for a specific service and then to complete a contact us request form. They may do this over a series of sessions.
For instance, their first session has them arrive and look at the landing page, the next has them completing the form. Now with this update you can define a segment as those who complete both actions whether these were completed across one or multiple sessions.
Previously if they didn’t do both actions within the one visit they were not included.
This could be ideal for those addicted to offering daily deals to boost their e-commerce revenue without knowing the true long-term value these customers have. Now it’s possible to define a segment by those visitors who had their first visit to the site as a result of the deal. Then it would be a simple task to compare how they performed long-term against those who arrived through other means.
To follow are a few screenshots of the new segment building interface. Google has made it easier to create your first segment by offering a few templates to get you started. Spend some time this month checking your Google Analytics account to see if it has been upgraded to this new feature. And if so -then dive in and build some segments of your own. Or failing that – phone the office and one of our team can help you out.
Every month we hold a customer conference call that all of our customers are invited to join. At the beginning of these conference calls we have a section on what is new in the online marketing world that we believe is worthy of your attention. This is a video of the introduction of July’s conference call 2013.
This month we talk about what happens online in 60 seconds, Google Analytics new Page Speed Insights and Suggestions and the Google Analytics Advanced Segments Update.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTxr_sbLTiI
Check out Permission Website Marketing’s August’s Newsletter Update.
For more website marketing information, take a look at our online marketing services, or give us a call on 0800 893 477.
So how profitable is your online advertising spend? Finding answers to this question is not as hard as many business owners may think. In this short note I’ll take you through a fictitious dialog with a prospect to show you the steps we follow to reveal if their existing online marketing is forging a path towards future business profitability or short term loss.
I remember the first time I was introduced to this concept of “creating a path to profitability”. I was employed by a dot com company that was full of promise, investor’s funds and unbridled enthusiasm. We had lavish offices, fancy art on the walls and only the best advertising agencies to work with.
Just to give you a guide on how much money was involved back then. We were part of a larger company that between us shared two floors of a recently built office block overlooking Auckland harbour. So it was decided that rather than use the stairs to move between us we would arrange for a building firm to cut a massive hole in the middle of the top floor and build a marble staircase to link the two. I was OK with using the lift.
Anyway, the company was fortunate enough to hit the market at the right time with the right type of product. Low and behold after three months of trading the financial results were in and we had made a profit. Yippee! I was asked to come into the CEO’s office immediately when the figures were released and was told to sit down as he shut the door behind me.
Yes the result was good. I had apparently shown them a “path to profitability”. Now my job was to widen the trail, hire more staff and open more offices to grab as much of the market as we could. We never achieved the same profit figures again. Fortunately this company had deep wallets and a plan to keep moving while the funds were leaking out of the company.
Anyway, back to applying this to online marketing. Frequently people start a conversation with us when they think they are in situations like this, spending too much to achieve very little.
Within a few minutes of us talking we can generally see where the focus needs to be applied and have outlined a very simple path to profitability to follow. Here’s how the conversation usually goes. To make this work I’ve included a fictitious business owner Mike who runs a service business in Auckland. Mike is struggling to make his online marketing pay its way. He spends around $750 per month with Google AdWords and is not sure if this is too much or too little. He is convinced it’s the former.
CONVERSATION STARTS
Ring ring…. we join the conversation after Mike has told me a bit about what he does and how long things have been going.
Chris: OK, so let’s start with the ideal end result – you making sales. When this occurs, what would be its average amount?
Mike: Well it depends on what they buy. But on average I would say $450.
Chris: Now of this amount how much would you be prepared to spend on marketing?
Mike: As little as possible J
Chris: Thank you. I know that every business owner would want the same so let me put it another way, what would be the most you would pay before the cost of creating the sale exceeds the profits it would produce?
Mike: OK, so I know I was a bit glib with the first answer so let’s go with $50. If it costs me $50 for each sale then things still work. I can pay for all my materials, pay the staff a wage and have a bit left over for a rainy day.
Chris: Great, now just so I’m sure – how many of your clients would you expect to buy from you more than once?
Mike: While our industry should have repeat business I must admit that we are not that good at generating it. However, if we were I would expect 20% of clients to repeat within two years BUT I didn’t allow for it when coming up with my very rough $50. I expect my current leads to be paid for by the money we create from their first sale, not those they may produce in the future.
Chris: OK so working back from the sale being made. How many prospects do you need to talk to before you make a sale?
Mike: Again this all depends on the type of work people are looking for. The quality of our leads really fluctuates – especially from the website. But to break it down into averages I would pick that half of those we talk to will become a client.
Chris: So for every two prospect leads you create – one will become a client.
Mike: Yep that’s true, but quite often we cannot get hold of the leads that are generated through the website. I would say that allowing for this we would need five leads to create one sale.
Chris: OK so the $50 needs to be split between these five, leaving $10 as the most you should pay for a lead. Anything more than this and your marketing costs are looking too high. At the start you mentioned spending $750 per month with Google – which should represent about 75 leads at the average cost of $10. How many leads are you getting?
Mike: Not that many. Probably on a good month we would get around 30. I’m not exactly sure – I’ll have to go back and check my email to count them up but it’s nowhere near 75. Sounds like I might have to put a stop to all that Google advertising… I thought it was costing too much!
Chris: Hold on… Before you jump ahead, instead of checking your email can your website analytics tool provide that lead count?
Mike: What analytics? We don’t have any for the site. I do get a raft of reports from the people who manage my Google advertising. Clicks, and impressions – is that what you are referring too?
Chris: Nope. What about visitor counts and page views? The details giving you insights on how your website is performing with the traffic it is currently receiving?
Mike: Sorry – I don’t have anything like that.
Chris: OK. So let’s not jump into cancelling anything with Google just yet. First off let’s set up some analytics on your site and let it run for a couple of weeks to collect some data. Then we should see which keywords you are buying clicks for that are actually delivering the right types of people to your site who then go on to fill in your quote request form. There could be some that do this for $5 and likewise others that do it for $100 and of course some which arrive and don’t convert at all.
Mike: So I presume we would dump those that don’t convert or convert at too high an amount and focus our spend on those that fit below our target $10 per conversion rate?
Chris: You are on the right track but not exactly there. Yes to focusing on the low cost conversions but no to automatically dumping those that don’t convert at all or do for too high an amount. For instance we may find keyword phrases that are responsible for traffic which doesn’t currently convert but between us we feel should. It may not be a problem with the wrong sort of visitor – it may be that the site is not set up to convert them yet. The same goes for those costly converting keywords. Let’s not dump these as again we could have a content issue. And not wanting to layer too much complexity on it too soon, but there could be leads that cost a lot to convert but represent the best types of customers for you.
Mike: You had me all the way through until that last part. Let’s get some tracking going and then we can dig into what spend is creating what.
Chris: I know there’s a bit of complexity in here but just remember that the path to profitable online advertising starts with your ideal cost per lead and works backwards. We know this so with some analytics running between us we can find out the rest.
CONVERSATION END
Yes, I know it’s a very simplistic view and the numbers were made to be nice and neat. However this short dialog should provide some insight on the steps ahead. Give us a call today if you would like to move forward like Mike did.
“We are not keeping up. There’s too much change occurring within online marketing and I’m concerned that we are not moving fast enough to apply all we learn.”
This remark came from a Senior Marketing Manager who has been a Permission client for a number of years. We had just finished briefing him and his team on the changes recently released from Google that were relevant for their situation. It was not a small list.
Feeling overwhelmed with the pace of change is a sentiment I think that many business owners would share. Google especially seems to be on a fast track of product development this year. Whether it’s from their advertising system – Google AdWords – or their comprehensive Website Analytics offering, it all seems to be in a constant state of updates.
Thankfully there’s a handy piece of management theory that can be applied to help those struggling. When applied correctly it provides insight to isolate which areas of change can be selectively ignored and which require focused attention.
The Theory of Constraints is an area I have talked about before on our blog. However with the pace heating up and with the growing overwhelming feeling I thought it was time to visit the theory again.
(Here’s the link to the Wikipedia article on it to pick up on its history.)
In its simplest form the theory states that there are very few constraints that are responsible for holding back a system from performing at its optimum level. And by very few I mean – one. So while the complete system may be made up of many intertwined parts – such as you find in a manufacturing system (where the theory has its roots), or say an online marketing system – there will usually be just one part of this that will be holding everything back.
Just knowing that one item is holding back the lot can be enough to make most sit back and breathe a big sigh of relief. That’s it – just one – not four, six or thirteen. Everyone can focus their energy on one area at a time. Trying to achieve the same for the remaining six is the issue.
Knowing this, the task moves to locating the troublesome area and then fixing it. And once this is sorted – guess what – another part of the process steps forward to claim the prize of holding the rest back.
Here’s an example of how this theory works in practice. This month we had a client come through who had taken up our initial review process. This is where we pull apart their Analytics, Paid Advertising and overall Website Conversion work and score them out of ten for each. Then we take them through what they need to do to achieve 10/10 scores for each area.
They came to us with an e-commerce store in trouble. It was loaded with thousands of products being marketed to a wide range of consumers across multiple regions. They had been reasonably active in the online marketing space so there was a lot to review. Thirty five slides later we were all ready for a strong coffee.
Their Analytics was in good shape, as was their search engine rankings. Paid advertising needed some help but nothing too dramatic here either. So overall traffic looked good – the right types of people were arriving, but that is where it seemed to come to a halt. Their real problem area was conversions – or lack of them.
So hunting for that illusive single constraint we dug into the conversion space to find what was at fault. We dismissed the shopping cart process itself. A high proportion of those who started the check out process went on to complete it. The problem was further back from there – people just weren’t putting enough products into carts to start with. This was the real constraint of the site. Lots of people browsing but very few wanting to even start the buying process.
Knowing this the client could ignore any tactic that didn’t affect a change here. So off the list comes – Search Engine Optimisation, Mobile Marketing, Paid Advertising, super smart Display Based Re-marketing and even my old faithful Email Marketing. Discount these areas and you naturally remove a good 85% of the noise of change that comes across a desk.
This left items such as product selection, product merchandising, product descriptions and images, and general site navigation. Any research or insight in these areas needed to be poured over in detail to solve this current constraint.
This is not going to be an easy task to solve. And when starting out with a client we usually face big chunky issues like these. However, as these are solved they are thankfully replaced with problems that are less strategic and more granular. For instance going from no one adding any products to a cart to now lots of carts being filled, but a troubling amount not being completed due to the confusing design of the form on the last page of the shopping cart.
The Theory of Constraints works when you have the luxury of looking at the whole process from start to finish. Fortunately our approach to online marketing fits with this well. So when we go hunting for the constraint we look at all facets that make up the complete online marketing system. It’s a different approach from those whose attention may focus on finding the problems just within the area they specialise in – say search engine optimisation. These could be valid problems but changes applied here may not affect the result of the whole system. In comparison we are not really that fussed where the constraint is located we just need to find it quickly and then get to work fixing it.
Call us today if you would like to kick this process off.
Every month we hold a customer conference call that all of our customers are invited to join. At the beginning of these conference calls we have a section on what is new in the online marketing world that we believe is worthy of your attention. This is a video of the introduction of July’s conference call 2013.
This month we talk about AdWords Enhanced Campaigns Bid Adjustments Reporting in Google Analytics, How Search Engines Work, Duplicate Content and SEO a great new Google Feature, the Google Timer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSDzvBz7swA
Check out Permission Website Marketing’s July’s Newsletter Update.
For more website marketing information, take a look at our online marketing services, or give us a call on 0800 893 477.
Like you, I also receive those emails that start with the guarantee of ensuring a top ranking inside Google. The use and style of English prompts leads you to believe they were sent from a far away land. How nice. Someone from far away who his concerned about your experience with Google. And all this for a fraction of what you would expect to pay. How could you resist?
A year ago picking a vendor this way may have had a very slight chance of working. These strategies were especially enticing as they required little involvement from you, the business owner. Vendors like these just did “stuff” on websites other than yours which would magically have an effect on your rankings.
This was a time of creating enough links to your website in whatever way they could. Let’s not worry too much about the quality of the sites those links came from – just get them and move on. I remember meeting the owner of a supposedly reputable SEO company telling me that they purchased all their links. So once their customers stopped paying their fees these links were retired and the rankings with them.
Anyway, surprise, surprise the positive effect that all this type of work used to deliver has finally come to an end. In late May Google went through quite a large update which included a change that specifically negated any positive effect strategies like these had produced.
So with this change, what’s left for Google to interpret when deciding which web page should be at the top of the results and which should sit at the bottom? Well to tell you the truth nobody exactly knows. If they say they do then beware. But all is not lost. Google widely distributes details on the over aching principles that when applied help it to find and successful rank your website. Follow this link to read one of the many documents they have published on the subject area. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en
One key principle they mention highlights the need of producing a steady stream of good onsite content. Links to this work will follow as people naturally find what has been produced and link to it. The last part of letting the links to your site grow naturally conflicts exactly with the previous strategy of manufacturing these links in a very unnatural manner.
Now there are still some ethical things you can do to help push along this natural link building process, but let’s talk about the first task at hand – producing great content.
Remembering that this content needs to be read by everyone – humans and those tenacious Google spiders – the task ahead can seem quite daunting. Especially when the style and quality of this work will more than likely have an effect on it converting “readers” into “sales leads”.
All of this makes the offer of effective Search Engine Optimisation from those in far away land seem even more interesting. Who would you like to produce your content? Someone who can barely produce an email describing what they offer? Or a business that can take the time to learn the business you are in and then work with you to help create a stream of quality content that your audience will want to read?
Now I understand that the road ahead looks a tad more difficult for those struggling with poor rankings. For instance a year ago a business owner could just pay someone to “do something” and their only involvement going forward was settling their account. All this has been replaced by a ongoing time commitment of them to work with a third party to not only produce content that makes sense but also place it on their website in a way that ensures it is read and has the desired effect of improving conversions.
I’m convinced that those with a half hearted level of commitment to the online space will find this all too daunting and will give up. Leaving the control of the organic results in their industry to others who can see the real payoff for their effort.
I liken this change to altering the type of work Search Engine Optimisation is for the business owner. Consider it moving from an “expense driven purchase” – where you bought it each month from someone who did “stuff” you never really understood – into one of creating “search assets”. They take time to create, and probably cost more in the process. Nevertheless, just as assets should, all this investment is rewarded with a positive return over an extended period as they sit solidly within the Google search rankings providing clicks to your website at zero marginal cost.
Last week a client summed all this up with a statement that in their opinion that if was hard to do, and still ethically fitted with what Google wanted to occur, then it was probably a good SEO strategy to embark upon. And conversely if it seemed too easy, and had question marks over the ethics – then there’s a very strong chance that Google will penalise them for using it, if not now then eventually in the near future.
Let me know if you would like to know more about how we can lighten some of the load.