Everyone loves making a sale, right? Well, pretty much everyone reading this blog does.
As for me, I’ve built a business around helping you do that. For all the different things Ark Advance does – help you climb up the search rankings, make it easier for visitors to take action on your website, increase the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns – it all points in one direction. Sell more.
So what I’m about to say may sound like heresy. But stick with me as I explain myself.
Here goes. Trying to close the sale, whether directly or by generating leads, may be doing you more harm than good. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is back off a little.
I know that flies in the face of some sales philosophies. Power closing, the art of pushing through objections and resistance to a final sale, has its share of successful proponents.
But the best sales people, in my view, recognise that a successful sale is more than someone buying something. It includes the buyer being satisfied with their decision, and feeling happy about the pathway they took to get there.
How does that relate to you? Well, let’s say you have a landing page that’s all sell, sell, sell. Features and benefits are there in big, bold type, and the Buy Now or Submit button is not only a bright, garish colour, but it also flashes on and off like a neon sign outside a cabaret.
And let’s say that landing page really has been working for you. It’s been selling like crazy or generating more leads than you dreamed possible. Why on earth would you mess with a winning formula like that?
To answer that, let me tell you about a client who come to us recently from another agency. They were used to pushing traffic onto the kind of landing page I just described (admittedly, I exaggerated a bit, but you get the drift). We said, “while your landing page is delivering results, we suspect you could do better – and do it without undermining your brand.”
That client boldly allowed us to create an alternative landing page that wasn’t designed to sell directly. Instead, it encouraged visitors to have a wander around the website, a bit like someone browsing in a store, checking out the merchandise. The risk was that once people had finished browsing, they’d simply wander out the door, without having bought anything or even given their contact details.
But that didn’t happen. What did happen was a 50%+ increase in lead conversions and a big reduction in cost per lead.
How come? Simply because people often need more time or information or both before they feel comfortable committing. If they’re a website visitor, that means the opportunity to interact with your website – to “wander around the store” – first. Not always, but sometimes.
It’s worth testing. Worst case scenario, you build engagement, reduce bounce rates and increase time spent on your site – much like a good sales person asking questions and listening to the answers does.
And the best case scenario? Well, who wouldn’t love a 50%+ increase in lead conversions?
If you’re a Go grand master, you may not like Artificial Intelligence right now. Not since the Google-designed AlphaGo trounced the world’s top player, Ki Jie, by 3 games to nil earlier this year. That came after it handed out a 4-1 beating to another top ranked player, Lee Sedol, in 2016.
Or maybe you will. The matches, while not good for the human ego, demonstrated something far more interesting and useful than that a powerful computer can out-think a puny human brain. I mean, that’s no longer news for anyone, right?
What they also demonstrated was that well-designed computing can also find whole new ways of seeing and thinking about problems. During the matches, AlphaGo played a number of moves that, to an expert, were obviously weak, or even bad. Except they turned out to be really strong moves.
And they were moves that a strong player wouldn’t even consider.
Now think about that. Mostly in business – mostly in life, in fact – we look for solutions in the same places we have in the past. While we may not know what the best solution to a problem is, at least we know where to look for it.
But AI is teaching us that that assumption could be totally wrong. And that has serious implications for Google Adwords.
See, most of the work you and we do in Adwords is based on refining what we already know. It’s a good approach: start with what seems sensible based on fundamental principles, test it, refine it based on results, test that, refine some more, and so on. If nothing else, it pretty much guarantees incremental gains over time.
But what if what we already know is only a fraction of what’s possible? “There are huge variations in a Go game,” said one expert after the Sedol/AlphaGo match. “We can’t even read 1% of them.”
Google is taking this result very seriously. It’s now seeing itself as an Artificial Intelligence company and transforming the way it delivers the right advertising to the right device for the right prospect. Its systems are learning (and it’s time to stop using quotation marks when we talk about machines learning) what approaches are likely to deliver the best results.
What are the implications for you (and for Ark Advance, for that matter!).
One important implication is that to take advantage of AI, you need to allow for a period of learning. This will take as long as the amount of lessons your data can provide. For example a website using AI to optimise its advertising to deliver phone calls will learn faster if the site delivers 1000 a week compared to 10.
The old adage “garbage in/garbage out” can now be updated to “insufficient data prevents meaningful results” (with apologies to Isaac Asimov). Many Kiwi companies fall down in this area, and if you’re among them, you’ll want to chat with us about how we can help you build volume where currently none exists.
A second implication is that we humans – Ark Advance included – will have to get used to not being the smartest “machines” on the block. But that doesn’t mean we’re not needed. AI can and does outperform us on many fronts, but humans are still needed to manage the technology and to ask the right questions in the first place.
The lesson here? The future belongs to those who embrace AI without fear, and with a willingness to learn what it does and doesn’t offer. That applies to website optimisation companies and their clients as much as anyone else. Yes, it’s confronting, but it’s exciting too.
Ready?
It takes guts to be in business. That applies regardless of whether you own the business or are responsible for some aspect of it.
I see clients display that courage often. It typically happens when we’ve conducted a review of Google rankings for a business that hasn’t been active in this area. In those cases, the results can easily come as a shock.
Your first reaction to bad news like that might be an urge to run and hide. Somehow, it evokes memories of being graded at school – and learning that you’ve bombed a really important exam. You might experience disbelief. You might decide the news is so bad that doing anything about it is futile. I have seen both those reactions.
Here’s what I say to clients in those moments: “What if your competitors are also performing as you are, and what if they also react as you just did when they learn the reality?”
Here’s the fact of the matter. Most businesses in any given sector are performing badly in Google search rankings. What’s worse, their owners either have no idea this is happening, or show no interest in finding out. What’s worse still, when they do find out, a good number of them will decide the situation is beyond saving and then do precisely nothing.
So back to you. You’ve discovered your Google search rankings are crap. I say that’s great news! You had the guts to look, and you can now do something about it!
And here’s what you do.
First, start from wherever you are. Instead of focussing on whether you want to be in that place or not, you begin measuring your performance against that benchmark, rather than some ideal you think you should already have achieved. While you’re at it, stop beating yourself up about being where you are. You have the guts to be in business and have your performance measured objectively. Hats off to you.
Second, adopt a long term view. Life, business and high Google search rankings are all long games. Small gains add up to massive gains over time. And small gains aren’t hard work; they just take a little persistence. Given you’re in business, I think it’s safe to say persistence is one of your strong points.
Third, have an expert (hint, hint) support you in mapping out a way forward. If they promise the earth in seven days, they’re not an expert – just someone with a god complex. Choose someone who not only knows their stuff, but is willing to be transparent and straight with you.
Then roll up your sleeves and crack into it.
As I said, I’ve seen many clients do just that, once the initial disappointment has worn off. Some of them are now killing it in Google search rankings, and their businesses are screaming along.
All because, one day in the past, they heard some bad news. Which turned out, thanks to their courage, to be great news indeed.
In my last blog, I talked about the importance and value of visitors who return to your website having not engaged with you on their previous visit.
Having those people return is generally a good thing, since they’re more likely to buy or engage with you than even existing customers. And that means you want to know, as far as possible, the journey they took that led to them returning to you and which interactions played how significant a role in their decision to return and even buy. This takes us into the complex world of attribution modelling. Basically this is correctly identifying the traffic source responsible for every conversion your website receives.
Now you might be thinking that the ad that was most effective was the last one a visitor clicked on to return to your site. But that ignores the important role of all the other clicks this person made before that. For instance their journey could start with a paid click (from a product based campaign), followed by an organic search click, a social media remarketing click, with this torrent of clicking ending with another paid click (now from a brand name campaign) before they visit and buy.
The default attribution model Google AdWords applies places the conversion in the bucket of traffic responsible for the last click. That being the brand name AdWords click in the last example.
Obviously this causes inaccuracies when people are bouncing in and out of your website through various streams of traffic before they convert. By analysing conversions through the lens of Last Click those responsible for kicking off the buying behaviour are naturally de-optimised over and above those which close the sale. And you can’t close what you don’t start so revenue slides – downwards.
Thankfully Google AdWords offers several more attribution models to pick from. To compare to Last Click there’s First Click attribution. Here there’s total emphasis on what starts the journey. It’s another extreme weighting but now at the other end of the journey. Which is why the next four are where the money is.
Linear attribution shares the credit for the conversion equally across all clicks. Whereas Time Decay gives more credit the closer a clicks occurred to the moment of conversion. Then Position-based gives 40% of credit to the first- and last-clicked ads and corresponding keyword, with the remaining 20% spread out across the other clicks, while Data-Driven (the geek option) distributes credit based on past data for this conversion action (assuming enough data is available).
Confused yet?
Remember this discussion is a non-discussion if your traffic behaves and arrives and converts all within the same session. In that case, you can use Last Click Attribution and feel comfortable living in the land of the default setting. For the rest of us it pays to pick a model away from the two extremes to see how it alters your conversion reporting. Google AdWords allows you to compare a couple of models at a time. More often than not, the most suitable attribution model for those with bouncing /cross channel traffic will be Position Based.
So to recap. Let’s say a customer finds your site by clicking one of your AdWords ads. She returns a week later by clicking over from a social network. That same day, she comes back a third time via one of your email campaigns, and a few hours later, she returns again directly and makes a purchase. The Position Based attribution model may assign 40% credit to each of the Paid Search and Direct channels, and 10% to each of Social Network and Email channels.
Two last points. First, with greater insight comes greater precision. So if you do make the switch out of the extreme choices then get used to measuring conversions to at least one decimal place (24.8 vs 24 or 25).
Second, this can be as mind bending as it sounds. While the effort’s well worth it, you should definitely call us for a reliable guide through this difficult, yet highly rewarding, jungle to find the attribution path best suited for you and your website.
Everyone loves regular customers, and rightly so.
And if someone comes to your website but doesn’t do business with you, you at least want them to engage with you in some way, surely? By giving you their email address, for example, or requesting a free ebook. All of that’s true, but it can obscure one other critical aspect of effective online marketing. You see, people who return to your website a second time, after initially leaving without engaging with you, are far more valuable on a per-head basis than even your existing customers.
Here’s one example: Returning website visitor transactions made up 48% of all US e-commerce sessions in the fourth quarter of 2015. The likelihood of a returning visitor actually buying was 15%, vs 7.6% for existing shoppers.
That’s right. Non-customers were twice as likely to buy as existing ones!
So here’s a question. What’s your strategy for converting unconverted website visitors into repeat visitors? And what’s your strategy for then converting those returning visitors into buyers or leads (that is, someone who gives you their contact details)? If you have a strategy, congratulations! You’re among a select minority.
If you don’t yet have a strategy, here’s a place to start. Ask yourself:
There are no obvious answers to these questions, and they’ll probably vary depending on your industry, your website, the services you offer, and a lot of other variables. That’s where we come in. We can help you track and understand visitor behaviour, even when those people are not on your website. Then we can work with you to develop strategies for increasing return and conversion rates over time.
Keep in mind that when someone returns, you must have done something right in the first place (otherwise they wouldn’t have returned!). So you’re not trying to fix something that’s broken; you’re out to increase its effectiveness. As always, if you’d like to learn more about this opportunity, call us and we’ll be delighted to explore it with you.
One last thing. According to RJ Metrics, the top quartile of worldwide e-commerce companies receive most of their revenue from repeat customers at the two-year mark. At three years, repeat customers account for more than 60% of revenue. So whatever you do, keep loving your existing customers!
Energy companies know that one of the best times to acquire new customers is when they’re moving home. The problem is, every energy company knows that, so every energy company targets people at this time.
But what if you could target people a few weeks or months before they move home?
Google, who know a thing or two about how to mine data to gain a marketing edge, recently introduced a tool that allows exactly that. In essence, Life Events interprets people’s search activity to anticipate what they’re likely to do in the near future. For example, someone who’s likely to move house in the next 12 months, say, will investigate mortgage rates or houses for sale. Someone likely to move much sooner than that might investigate moving companies.
This is a serious addition to a marketer’s arsenal. The vast majority of people who use Google search results to drive business take a literal approach. That is, an energy company looking for new customers may devote a lot of its search spend to keywords like “energy company”, “power pricing”, and so on.
With Life Events, that approach will now come too late in many people’s decision making process. Marketers using only literal keywords will be gazumped by those using keywords that identify people earlier in the famous “pathway to purchase”. Those using Life Events will be able to use this targeting option in their YouTube and Gmail Ads.
Does that mean a literal keyword approach is about to become redundant? Not yet. Life Events has limitations, not least of which is that it only tracks data for people who are logged into their Google account when they’re conducting a Google search. That’s far from everyone – for now, anyway. I think Life Events is a potentially powerful tool well worth exploring, particularly if your product or service tends to be connected to particular life events. Travel agents and weddings, for example. Car companies and people about to graduate. Appliance retailers and people approaching retirement.
As always, talk to us for more information or if you’d like to test whether this is something you should take on. In the meantime, check out this two-minute video for a quick rundown from Google on Life Events, and this case study about how one Australian energy company achieved dramatic results by using Life Events intelligently.
Google has rolled out two important updates to your Google My Business Account. When I say important, I mean potentially life changing. But before I get into that, a quick word for anyone unsure of what Google My Business is.
Google My Business is a free Google (what else?) tool that lets you manage your online presence across Google. For example, you know those sidebars with maps that you often see on the search result page when you google a business? That’s Google My Business at work.
Google doesn’t make that information up out of the blue. You can verify and edit your business information, which means you have some control over what appears in those results.
Right now, Google’s trialling an extended version of this tool. Called Google Home Services, it allows certain types of businesses to:
So what’s the big deal? If Google rolls this programme out globally, every aspect of your online marketing will be affected. Based on the trial, PPC ads will be replaced with Google Home Services ads, and local business will not feature in organic search results. It goes deeper. Once you click on one of the listings in the Google Home Services section, you are taken to a new page where you can select three different suppliers to send a request quote to. If you’re not on that list, you don’t get to submit a quote.
If you’re thinking Google is moving toward a “pay to play” model, you’re right! And while you may not like that, you’ll probably need to play the game if your business provides home-based services such as plumbing, building, electrical services and so on.
If you haven’t already, chat with us about the implications for your business. We can help you claim your Google My Business space if you haven’t already, and have you prepared for the rollout of Google Home Business, if and when it happens. Or check this link for how you can post content to your Google My Business account.
In related news, You can now send SMS/text messages to customers from your Google My Business Account. Check out details here.
Apply the strategies of the America’s Cup Winning ETNZ to your online marketing through the use of a well known but underutilised feature in Google Analytics here.
Are there days of the week and times of the day when people are more likely to look for what you provide? Just think how you could focus your advertising to make the most of the “highs” and avoid costly expenditure during the “lows”. This video blog reveals :-
Find the video here 8 mins
Somehow you have heard of others growing their business by buying clicks on Google. Deep down you wonder if this could be the trick to give you the growth you want. However, you are stretched for time and drowning under a deluge of tasks. All of which means you are suffering from some serious Google advertising FOMO (fear of missing out).
Thankfully you have three minutes to read this short note and get a quick business-owner-focused primer on the key parts of Google Advertising and whether it could work for you.
First, some background on my experience with Google clicks. My company started buying Google advertising on behalf of its customers way back in September 2003. Thirteen years managing hundreds of different campaigns has helped us see what does and doesn’t work for this channel. So here are my top four reasons to either slay or nurture any FOMO feeling you may have.
1. You have a product or service that people search Google for.
If you sell a product or service in a category that no one knows about, it follows that few people will search for it on Google. Basic, I know, but easy to trip up on. Let’s say, for instance, that you develop new software that analyses a Xero account and reveals what’s required to double the profit of the business.
You start a Google campaign, bidding on the search terms “profit”, “improve profit” and the nebulous term “business software”. One search term you don’t bid on is “Xero Accounting Software Profit Improvement Add On” – because nobody is looking for that. So you’re stuck with your three choices. And you struggle to produce results because behind the search terms “profit”, “improve profit” and “business software” are dozens of different types of searchers all looking for very different things.
Compare this to someone who sells sisal carpet. People will go to Google looking for sisal carpet with the phrase – you guess it – “sisal carpet”. Their chances of success are better – but profits are still not guaranteed.
2. They followed the dollars they spent
Profitable clicks are those that convert. For your business, converting could look like someone arriving at your website and deciding to call your office, fill in your quote request, purchase an item from your shop or even book a meeting at your clinic. By doing any or all of these great things your click visitors become click prospects or, even better, click customers.
Unfortunately, buying clicks doesn’t automatically mean you will be able to track their ability to convert. Tracking may well require some setup in your website analytics account. Not a lot, but still some. And it’s important you do that so you know if spending your hard earned advertising budget with Google is working or not.
3. Money was invested in the juiciest of baits
I can assure you that Google will help you spend any budget you have in lots of different ways. So the smart advertisers go where the returns are the greatest.
There are two main places your Google dollars can go: the first is above and below the Google search results, and the second is on websites that support Google Advertising. Thinking about the different customer dynamics at play in each case will help you choose where to spend your money.
Consider that people generally go to Google to solve a problem. This week, for example, I’ve been looking for some new trail running lights to help me deal with the dark evenings. Last week it was to find a piece of equipment to help us improve our printing at the office. In both cases I went to Google and hunted down the solution.
During my quest I was taken to a range of websites that included Google Advertising in the form of banners around the text. I was hungry to get information, so I just screened the banners out – they had little effect.
It’s easier to sell to people who are searching to solve a problem. The bigger the better. Therefore, we always suggest you buy search clicks before buying clicks from banners. Think of Google search being the land of problem solving, whereas banners is the land of interruption.
Of course you can test this yourself by setting up a test to try both types of advertising and seeing which delivers the best results for you.
4. Control freaks have more fun
The thought of running a test like the one I just suggested could feel utterly repulsive for some. Dealing in that level of detail for such a small part of your business may not make sense. Unfortunately, detail is where success lives for Google advertisers. Like it or not, you, or someone in your business, or someone you pay needs to focused on it.
Avoiding detail can cost you when buying Google clicks. For instance, when you set up a new advertising account with Google, by default they’ll display your ads around the search results and also on websites. What’s more, the default search term settings when you build your campaign allows Google maximum interpretation in how they are displayed.
For instance, you may want to bid on “computer servicing”, intending to reach businesses who need a mobile service like yours that can come in, solve a problem, and leave. Google doesn’t have to worry about that. It’s free to show your ads when someone types in “service my computer at home” or “computer service training” – neither of which are relevant to your business.
As to whether you should experience FOMO at all, here are three questions to ask:
Answer “yes” to any one of these and you can rid yourself of FOMO for Google Advertising. Feel better?
For everyone else, contact us today and we will help you turn your Fear into Action – perhaps some AdWords group training could be a good start?
I wrote these three-minute FOMO guides for the frantic business owner who hates to miss out but also has a to-do list as long as their arm. For this person, adding one more task – like email marketing – requires careful consideration.
I have a bit of history with email marketing. I received my first colourful HTML email message in 1999 when I helped establish an email marketing software provider. Since then, and with the advent of Ark Advance back in 2002, my team and I have assisted in the successful deployment of hundreds of campaigns to many millions of subscribers for a multitude of business owners.
With this in mind, here are my four reasons why successful yet busy business owners spend their precious time with email. If none of these seem compelling to you then you can feel confidently ditch any FOMO feelings you might have for email marketing.
Reason #1 – You control the channel.
Let’s say that three years ago you added 500 prospects to your newsletter list through online marketing. Each subscriber will happily continue receiving your messages unless one of two things occur. First, they could get bored with your messages and unsubscribe. Or you could suffer the same malaise and fail to send anything out.
Now let’s compare this to your natural rankings within Google. And let’s assume that instead of investing in growing your email list, you paid someone to work on your website so it achieved some strong page one rankings. This delivered a bump in traffic, followed by a lift in prospect enquiries. How confident are you that three years on, given all the changes from Google as well as the optimising efforts of your competitors, you’ll still enjoy a page one ranking?
Better yet, what about social media? Instead of investing in email marketing or SEO three years ago, you paid a Social Media Expert to grow your “likes” on Facebook to 500. Three years on, can you communicate to all those people without having to pay Facebook for the privilege?
Investing in email marketing – specifically growing your subscriber list – gives you control over a communication channel that is thankfully beyond the grasp of Google and Facebook, the two advertising powers of the Internet. And that, my friend, is very, very valuable.
Reason #2 – The cost of entry is low.
You don’t need to spend thousands to send a message that looks a million bucks. While a great, highly functional e-commerce website needs some solid investment, the email messaging platform that supports it could cost a tenth or less.
And while you may need a team of web developers to deliver the website, you may be able to adapt a standard email template with your branding to enable your first campaign.
As for your mobile audience, whereas your website may need a complete rewrite to ensure it works for them, your email marketing template could take just a few alterations to achieve the same result.
Which all means it’s really easy to get started.
Keeping going, however, is another issue…..
Reason #3 – Frequency builds success.
We all know that remaining top of mind with our customers makes sense, especially in a crowded marketplace. But how many visit your website each month of their own volition? Probably only a few. A great email marketing newsletter points customers to your website every month.
That regularity and frequency is exceptionally powerful. I was once told by an expert in radio that it can take up to two years of repeated advertising to build a brand via that medium. I believe the time frame with email is a lot less; six to twelve monthly editions of well-written content can go a long way to bind people to your company.
Reason #4 – You can see what works.
The fourth reason for dedicating precious time to email marketing is that you know when your efforts have paid off. Nearly all email deployment tools will tell you who opened the message and clicked on each link within it. If those links take people to your website, then you can configure them so your Google Analytics account will treat those visitors as a distinct campaign. Then you can allocate sales or website conversions directly to specific emails.
That’s real power!
So, which of these reasons resonate with you and your business? Add them to your list of things to learn more about. Better yet, contact Ark Advance so we can guide you on your first steps 🙂
Hands up if you have enough hours in the day to deliver all the online marketing campaigns you want when you want?
Thought so.
For most there is a conflict, with too much required to be done with too little resource. Which leaves the challenging task of deciding which tasks will produce the greatest return when none have been deployed yet.
But what if there was a way to deploy a selection of campaigns without any manual intervention? You know – marketing campaigns running on autopilot, each focused on achieving its own little “win” for your business with little, if any, time “loss”?
Welcome to the land of online marketing orchestration. Think of this as a “techo buzz phrase” for configuring your online and offline marketing tools to achieve business benefits without the need of any human interaction.
Sound too good to be true? Over the years we have helped set up and configure a range of orchestrations for clients wanting to achieve just this. Here are three examples:
Orchestration #1: Welcoming the new email list subscriber.
I’ll start with the most basic of options which avoids the “black hole” experienced by so many website visitors completing subscription forms – receiving a “Thank You” web page and then … nothing. They then have no idea if their address made it through to the right place and if they are actually on the list.
The simple orchestration automatically sends the subscriber just what they were expecting – a “Welcome” email letting them know all went well. Because of their inherent level of expectation, you should expect an open rate that’s well above your standard baseline. What happens after that first message then depends on the frequency of your messaging and the complexity of your content.
For instance, for a large New Zealand FMCG company we configured orchestration to deliver five messages over two weeks. This dovetailed nicely with their newsletter delivery schedule and allowed them to point new subscribers to specific areas of their vast content library that the subscribers could find interesting.
Orchestration #2: Welcoming the new customer
Now let’s ramp up the complexity a bit. Let’s assume that sales and marketing have done their job and a freshly minted new customer has joined. The task now is to use a selection of online marketing tools to properly “Welcome” them into the fold. There are lots of ways to go about it – I’ll highlight a couple of projects we have worked on.
The first was for a medium-sized service business which chose email and phone as their primary channels of communication. To begin, a series of emails explained the ins and outs of how the company would manage their new piece of work.
The emails were orchestrated to drip feed out over the first few weeks. They were supplemented with a sequence of phone calls from the account management staff. The type and timing of the call was driven by how the clients had engaged with the emails. For instance, someone who wasn’t opening or interacting with anything was called earlier and by a more senior person than those who were.
My second example relates to a card-based loyalty scheme. Here, how the card was used determined the sequence and content of messaging for new customers. This requires a close technical link between the messaging technology and the client’s transactional system. Once the link was formed, the possibilities opened up and orchestration could be designed to respond to card holders’ behaviour.
Orchestration #3: Using email to complete stalled web behaviours
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone who put something in your shopping cart actually purchased it? Or how about those who came to your service-based website, browsed your pages multiple times across many days, BUT STILL failed to pick up the phone or complete your online quote request?
Unfortunately, neither scenario can be completely solved by deploying orchestrations – but they can be improved upon. For instance, an abandoned shopping cart could prompt a follow up email or a tailored piece of creative in your remarketing advertising.
If the person has previously subscribed to your email newsletter (and is now a prospect), and they then return to your website many times over the next few days – all without converting – then it may be an idea to automatically schedule a phone call from your account management team to check in on their requirements.
There are many more possible orchestrations. All require effort to set up and configure; however, the effort invested has the potential to keep on giving, as orchestrations run on autopilot 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Sound interesting? Contact us today for a discussion on how orchestrations could help your business.
(As published in the Sunday Star Times, July 5th ,2015)
Last month I spoke to a group on “How to Grow Your Business Through Google without Buying them a New Plane”. It sounds like I’m being a bit dramatic with that title, but I’ve crunched the numbers: inefficient Google advertising by numerous small NZ businesses adds up to – guess what – the cost of a new Airbus A320a.
At first I was pleased with myself how well the numbers worked and what a great speech premise it made. Then I realised the waste this represented for a group who could least afford it. You can avoid the “Buy Google a Plane Fund” by using Google Analytics – Google’s free website analytics product that helps you tune your website to become a high-performing virtual salesperson.
The product is free, but using it does require an investment in your most valuable of commodities: time. But it’s worth it. Master your Google Analytics account and you will get ROI. Here are just three exciting, juicy insights that make this hard work worthwhile:
Learn what advertising works for you
How much would you spend to “buy” a new customer? The quick response is, “as little as possible”. But, really, what would the ideal amount be? For some businesses it could be under $20; for others with high value products and great sales processes the amount could be greater than $2000.
Whatever the figure for your business, it’s smart business to continue with any advertising that delivers customers for your target amount or less. It’s a no-brainer. If correctly configured, your website analytics can tell you which of your online advertising fits into this category. And if your lead conversion rate is the same across all campaign types, then it’s a simple case of increasing your spend in channels that cost you the least per lead.
Plot prospect behaviour
It’s invaluable to learn what it is that turns your browsing visitors into strong leads or customers (and what it is that turns them away). Google Analytics can help you track the behaviour of your visitors – once you spot a trend or pattern in behaviour, you can work it to your advantage. For example, one business may spend a lot of money bringing traffic to their website, without an understanding of why some of these visitors buy and some don’t. As such, the only thing they can do to increase sales is increase their visitors to the site – by spending more money. Compare this to another company who know their customers generally visit their website twice before they reach out for information. Know how your potential customers act and you can work on strategies around their behaviour to drive up their lead conversion rate.
Keep your leads hot
Not all sales are instant. For example, not many people will buy a car simply by viewing it once online. With bigger ticket or complex items, you’ll need to nurture your online leads, gently nudging them along the sales process.
Step one could be to entice them to sign up for your email newsletter list or to download something of value, such as a buyer’s guide or industry checklist. Then you’d construct a series of clever emails, each message building on the actions of the one prior, growing their knowledge of the product and your company while subtly guiding them to request a quote or more information. For instance, if they clicked on a certain link on message two, the content of message three slightly alters to reference this fact. Here your analytics tools are effectively “listening in” on those being nurtured, letting you know who is highly engaged and potentially open to direct contact.
Could any of these help your business? Why not spend some time this coming week looking at your web and email analytics tools and reviewing these three sections? Warning: there’s some learning ahead – but also some great business outcomes as a reward for your efforts.
This is my last article in this series. Thank you for all the great feedback I have received.
(As published in the Sunday Star Times, May 24,2015)
Last week we covered how you can use Google Analytics to track positive stuff happening on your website, including sales leads, online purchases and newsletter subscriptions. We did this by configuring the “Goals” section of your Google Analytics account.
Now that you have goals in place and are tracking the right things, you can use the numbers to measure and monitor how well your website performs, based on the traffic it receives.
For instance, you may now see that just five percent of your visitors take up your option of requesting a quote. Or that a measly two percent actually whip out their credit card to buy from your online store. Not great.
How can you improve these numbers and the success of your website? Uncover all you can about those who DIDN’T make a purchase or become a lead (ie those who didn’t get in touch for more information). Use your Google Analytics account to learn who they were and what pages they clicked – doing this will hopefully help you figure out what it was that stopped them from becoming a customer.
In the “real world”, this bit of the process is a bit like having someone standing outside your bricks and mortar shop and asking those that leave empty-handed a few questions.
Google Analytics can tell you some good stuff about your website visitors, including:
Learning these things about visitors who fail to become customers will give you helpful insights you can use to tweak your website. Depending on your results, your actions to improve may include: fast-tracking your mobile website project knowing that people arriving from a mobile phone are twice as likely to convert compared to those using a desktop computer; reevaluating your spend of a specific marketing channel because so few visitors from this group end up as buying customers; or making your newsletter subscription option on your website even more prominent because you can see what a good job it does “warming” subscribers up who then go onto request a quote.
The more you know about the “who” behind those who don’t convert, the easier it can be to understand why your results may be struggling. Use your Google Analytics reports to do some detective work on your non-converters and see what valuable – and profit changing – information you can uncover.
Next week I’ll cover how Google Analytics can show you the paths these non-converters took around your website before they left without buying – very helpful indeed.
Chris Price owns Ark Advance, a web optimisation business that specialises in online marketing. www.arkadvance.com
(As published in the Sunday Star Times, June 07,2015)
I believe that websites can be optimised to act like vibrant salespeople rather than boring one-dimensional brochures. But, like the best salespeople, they need to be measured, monitored and have their performance and progress tuned in order to work at their full potential. Google Analytics is the ideal tool for this job – even better, it’s free. You just need to learn how to drive it.
Last week I explained how to use Google Analytics to uncover as much information as you can about those who visit your site but fail to convert into anything exciting, like revenue or leads. Information like where they were physically located, their gender and age, and what part of the Internet they were at before they clicked on your site. I likened this to someone standing outside your shop with a clipboard, questioning shoppers for similar information.
This week I’m on the quest for more answers to help you uncover the real reasons why so few of your website visitors do what you want them to. This time we want to find out why they left your website, empty-handed or without leaving their details for more information.
In a bricks and mortar store, you could get some insight into customer behaviour by surreptitiously following someone around your store, recording where they walk, what they look at and for how long. Doing this may alert you to why some customers leave without buying anything.
You can do this for your website, too, by checking out what order visitors browse your web pages.
There’s a great report inside your Google Analytics account called “Behaviour Flow”, which you’ll find in the “Behaviour” section. This is a cool graphical view of what pages people see and the order in which they see them.
The 80/20 principle applies neatly here: 20 percent of your pages will capture 80 percent of your visitors’ attention. The Behaviour Flow report will tell you which pages are in the small but powerful 20 percent group – you’ll find the home page generally falls into this category. Since these pages are so popular and make so much impact, you want to make sure they are working as hard as they should be. You only get a few pages to make a first impression, as such – this report will show you which of your pages are failing on the good impression front.
Now, you would expect (or hope) to see people moving seamlessly through your website, from page to page, before they eventually convert into a customer or lead. But if that’s not happening, you need to figure out which is the problem page. Looking at your report, which of those powerful 20 percent pages do visitors most commonly exit from? What’s the last page they view before they disappear off your site? If you can see a pattern here, you need to tweak or rework that page in order to stop losing potential customers.
It’s a bit like discovering the sales assistant in your popular jewellery area of your store is putting customers off – once you’ve found they’re a problem, you need to performance manage them.
For example, do visitors check out your home page then your “Services” page but disappear after looking at your “About us” page? You need to do some work here. Look at reworking your copy, design or images on the page – is it something you’ve said, or not said? Does it read badly or not have enough information and credentials to convince people that you’re the best? Get the help of a copy-writer if you need it.
You also need to ensure you make the next logical step for the visitor more obvious – where are they meant to go from here? If you want them to head to your “Book an appointment” or “Sign up to our newsletter” page, make it clear. Website visitors respond very well to clear direction.
Chris owns Ark Advance, which specializes in online marketing and website optimisation, helping businesses sell more online. See www.arkadvance.com
(As published in the Sunday Star Times, June 14,2015)
Google Analytics can tell you some really helpful stuff, including where your web visitors were before they clicked onto your site. Liken this in the physical world to someone standing in front of your store and asking people why they chose to visit your shop. Some may tell you they were already customers who read your recent newsletter, others may have noticed your ad in the newspaper and a few may have decided to visit after noticing your post on Facebook.
Why is this good to know? It can help you discern which of your marketing and advertising brings you website traffic and which of those avenues is the best at providing a reliable stream of high-converting leads. (Not all marketing is equal – you might do something that drives hoards of people to your website, but not one person buys something or becomes a sales lead. This may show your marketing choice is attracting the wrong audience for your product or service.)
There are five main streams of traffic that Google Analytics focuses on:
1. Direct traffic
These people know your website address and have typed it into their web browser. Regular customers will do this, but so will those who see your web address in a printed ad, hear your ad on radio or see your domain name on TV.
2. Referral/Social traffic
These visitors were browsing another website and followed a link to yours – it may be from a news story about you, a comment in someone’s blog or directory websites. Your social traffic comes under this category too, such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Facebook traffic is further broken down into desktop and mobile sites, so you can tell if they’re viewing your site from a phone, tablet or computer.
3. Search Engine Traffic
These are the visitors that came from a Google search – those who click on organic results, not your paid Google ads. GA will show you how much traffic came from this area and how it performed but it won’t tell you the actual keywords they used to find you ie what they typed into the search engine. (If you buy advertising with Google you can access this keyword data.)
4. Email newsletter traffic
This is where a few people trip up. Let’s say you spend the afternoon crafting and sending a cool customer email newsletter filled with links back to content on your website. If those links are set up to be exactly like they are on your website, this traffic comes under your Direct Traffic category. Not so good. Not only does it warp your idea of how many people know your URL or website address, it also thwarts you from being able to tell how effective your newsletter was on delivering highly engaged visitors to your site. To avoid this, you need to configure your email tool to add in some extra bits to each link to allow GA to place these visitors in their own newsletter “campaign”. This will give you an accurate picture.
5. Paid advertising traffic
Your GA account will treat your Google AdWords advertising in a very special way (of course, considering they’re both Google entities). GA places all the data that relates to it in its own AdWords category. Here you can drill down into the exact keywords that were clicked (so you can see which are working) and the outcomes they delivered (ie did they deliver profitable leads).
Look at your different traffic types and you can make business decisions like:
– Noticing with glee that your direct traffic gets a sizable bump when your ad plays on radio – and that this traffic also delivers a bump in conversions.
– Reaching out to a website owner who is sending you great traffic via referral traffic, to see how you can advertise on their site to entice more visitors.
– Realising that only 20% of your Google Adwords keywords are converting so deciding to pause the other 80% and switching your budget to those that are working.
This week, dig into your different traffic types and see how they perform on your website. You’ll find all this in the “Acquisition” part of your account.
Chris Price owns Ark Advance, a web optimisation business that specialises in online marketing. www.arkadvance.com