Last month I turned 50. It’s a scary number and a time when I can see why others head into their own personal crisis. You definitely get the feeling the clock is counting down rather than counting up.
Anyway, to soften the blow I decided to feed my passion for mountain biking and head off to the Redwood Forests of Rotorua. This time for a change, and as a birthday present to myself, I thought I would invest in three hours of coaching from Annika – a local guide and expert rider.
The way things panned out illustrated how all good coaching experiences work.
First up, a bit on me and my riding style. I am not the fastest nor bravest of riders. I ride for the benefit of long term health rather than short term excitement. So if there’s a jump or a steep drop ahead I’ll scoot around the edges just to be on the safe side.
However, on saying all that, with the clock counting down I thought it was time to scoot a bit less and push the excitement levels up a little notch.
I got onto Annika from her website via a Google search (surprise, surprise!) Annika is about half my age and rides a bike worth twice as much as mine. She enters the same type of events I do. The key differences being she ends up on the podium and has had a good few hours of rest before I turn up at the finish.
We met in the carpark and I told her I wanted to learn how to ride faster around corners and dare to do the occasional drop off. (Think of a drop off as a step down between 30 cm to a scary 300cm.) She listened and then followed me as we rode to the trails from the carpark.
After 20 minutes of following me she pulled us to a stop. Apparently, learning how to corner would have to wait – there were more urgent matters to work on.
First up, there was a problem with how my bike was set up. My seat was too far back and my handlebars were too high. By riding alongside she could see how my back was the wrong shape and my knees were not above the pedals properly. So while I waited, she got out her trusty tools and in 10 minutes the adjustments were made.
We continued on. Riding felt weird, but in a nice way.
Then we came to our first hill and she chatted away while I panted and struggled to keep up. We stopped, and again she adjusted the seat to move me forward as the adjustments were still not right. However, now I was pushing down with the proper amount of force with my legs and things became a bit easier.
Nevertheless, the hill became steeper, my breathing harder and frustration was growing. When were we going to do the cornering thing? Fortunately, things flattened out and she rode behind me as the trails moved into the classic winding, well-groomed state they are in Rotorua. Annika stopped us again and explained how my legs needed to be straight and my ankles fixed with my heels down. (Apparently, I have bendy legs and even bendier ankles.)
Onwards we pedalled with Annika yelling in her lovely Swiss accent, “straight legs”, “keep those ankles fixed”, “straight legs”. After 30 minutes of this I was starting to get it right. Just.
So an hour in and no cornering. But things were OK. We were making progress and I could feel a bit more confidence growing in my riding. Another hour of the same, with lots of yelling from Annika, and progress was being made.
We finished with her explaining how to ride down drop offs so deep that they would have easily classified themselves in the “ride around at all costs” group. And no, I couldn’t have attempted them without mastering the bits we covered way back at the start of the session.
So how does this experience relate to a success experience with an online marketing coach?
Firstly, the process your coach follows can be more important than the actual knowledge they impart. Annika had her way which started with ensuring the bike was set up properly AFTER watching me ride it on live trails. Once this was completed then she could move on. Without this, I couldn’t have attempted the things I did later on in the day.
We start out our online coaching process in a set way too. With us, it starts with a focus on Google Analytics. If we can’t get past this stage then we can’t proceed any further. It’s a methodology that has been used successfully dozens of times before.
Secondly, what you want may not be what you need. An astute coach should be confident enough to tell you this and ensure you get the most from your time with them. Customers come to us wanting to drive more traffic to their website. Frequently, we find out that’s not the problem. There can be tons of traffic but few conversions – and improving the site’s conversion rate is where we need to invest their money.
I booked Annika wanting to corner faster. I couldn’t do this without changing bike fit and my overall stance by straightening my legs and locking my ankles.
Thirdly, a good coach will see failure as signposts to more learning ahead, not reasons to hit the panic button. My first attempts at riding down some steep drop offs with Annika were quite comical. I was either too fast or too slow, or both. Luckily it wasn’t too deep so I just picked myself and my bike up from the floor and walked back to try it again. We didn’t give up – Annika just took out her iPhone, shot a video of my next attempt, and showed me what I was doing wrong so we could fix it.
Failing to get Google’s Paid Advertising to work is not uncommon. Good clean traffic being placed on exactly the right landing page, but still no conversions coming through. With my riding I stopped falling over by leaning forward more. With AdWords it could be about re-working the landing page copy to better match the desires of the visitor.
And finally it’s a lot easier if you have fun along the way. Seeing me disappear into the blackberry bushes for the umpteenth time in my failed attempts kept a smile on both Annika’s face and mine.
Here at Ark we enjoy what we do. Sometimes it’s tricky work that requires a sizable amount of left brain thinking but we still try to make progress something to smile about.
Why not contact us today and see if our coaching style suits your online marketing needs.
After many checks and proofs, your latest email newsletter has been sent. But did it work? Good news for most involves finding that your subscribers clicked from the message through to your website, either buying more product or contacting a sales person.
So how does Google Analytics report on this? Unfortunately, it doesn’t, unless your email marketing application has been configured correctly. In the unconfigured state traffic from your newsletter is hidden inside traffic sources like Direct Traffic or referred traffic from the web mail domains like Yahoo.
For email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp this configuration is a few clicks away. Once completed, all the links to your website used in your email messages will come with special codes on their end. These codes mean something to Google Analytics so that it takes all the traffic it receives and places them in their own separate campaign. The name of the campaign is usually linked to the name of the newsletter – so you can see how January’s newsletter results differed from December’s.
Just remember the cookie that is set to link them to the campaign remains by default for six months. (This can be configured by altering your Google Analytics tracking code.) They move from one campaign to another as they click on links from other newsletters. Plus, if they click on a paid advert they then hop across to the Paid Advertising campaign.
So just so you know, if they click on a newsletter and a month later visit you by typing your domain name into their browser – normally showing as direct traffic – then instead they will still be attributed to the initial campaign.
Once you understand that little cookie life ‘gotcha’, then all is fine. You can use the Traffic Sources report to find the email campaign and see how well it performed compared to all your other traffic.
You should expect to see some good news. Higher engagement rates and improved conversion rates are all ideal outcomes of an email marketing strategy that is working well.
Contact us today if you would like to get your Traffic Sources report configured correctly to show your email marketing efforts.
How much time does your website need to convert its next visitor into a sale? A minute? Two – perhaps three or even six? What are we dealing with here? Now how much time does your visitor have? And what happens if they have less time than you need to convert them?
I know – lots of questions for this early in the year. Nevertheless, I believe that most websites need to offer their visitors more time in order to make the essential visitor conversion. This is in part due to some fundamental errors made in online marketing that end up chewing through valuable visitor time.
This short article will guide you through making the best use of all the time you have. I’ll also share some ways to actually create more time – so giving your next visitor a greater chance of converting than ever before.
Sound good? OK – let’s get started.
So how much time do you actually have to make that conversion? Dig into your Google Analytics account and:
For instance if the average session is 1.5 minutes and those converting take 6.5 minutes then we have a sizable 5 minute gap to work with. Figuring out what they are doing or thinking for those extra five minutes it takes them to convert is the first job.
Are you asking them to take too big a step to become a conversion?
For instance, the website may require them to fill in a detailed quotation request form which asks for a myriad of details, some of which they may have no idea of. Perhaps a simple contact form that just asks for their phone and email may be super easy for them and just enough info for you to start the process off.
Or perhaps your e-commerce website is gobbling up too much time for first time shoppers. It may not allow for guest-only purchasing. So they HAVE to go through the new user registration phase – including perhaps coming up with a dastardly complex password that only your system requires.
Aarrgghh – all too much and too hard and taking way too long to make purchasing that nice little Art Deco lamp from your site just a distant memory.
Your website copy could be a problem too. Maybe you take an age to get to the point, describing exactly what you do and why you are so much better than the rest in your market. Technology service companies can struggle here. Distilling all that clever stuff into a headline and top of page body copy is never going to be easy. But it could pay big dividends.
Video can be a lifesaver here. A well-written and well-produced 60 second video can get very complex theories across with total clarity. We added another 30 seconds to ours to get our Pay Per Click advertising and Search Engine Optimisation services across in a “hefty” 90 seconds. It works – results show that those who play the videos are far more likely to buy.
Misconfigured advertising can chew through valuable visitor time too. For instance let’s say you are using Pay Per Click advertising and your ad places the person looking for a new set
of dress shoes on the homepage of your shoe website. Time would have been saved if they’d gone straight to the dress shoe section of the site. Hopefully, they will navigate from the home page to the right page – but as they do they will chew their through valuable session time which could be spent picking the colour and style they want, falling in love with the
shoes, and ensuring they complete the purchase.
Which leads me nicely onto the concept that the visitor time you have to work with is relatively fixed.
We only expect to spend so much time to buy or make contact with your sales team. And the more we all get used to searching and shopping online, the more I believe this time will dwindle. Super-fast and slick websites like Amazon make owning an electronic book something you can do in seconds, not minutes. And closer to home, websites like MightyApe make the whole e-commerce experience super quick and easy.
So what can you do this year to keep up with players like these and slash the time it takes for a visitor to convert?
Firstly, see how large your gap is between the average session times and those that convert. Track this gap each month as you roll out some of the strategies below.
There you go. Your time may be fixed and possibly falling during the year – nevertheless apply some of the ideas I list here and you will make the most of the time you have.
Give us a call today or complete our speedy contact form if you would like to chat through how these strategies could be tailored to work with your business.
There you go. Your time may be fixed and possibly falling during the year – nevertheless apply some of the ideas I list here and you will make the most of the time you have.
Give us a call today or complete our speedy contact form if you would like to chat through how these strategies could be tailored to work with your business.
Someone once told me that there are two things that will drive change in your life – the people you meet and the books you read. I freely admit that when it comes to running a business after 12 years there are still a lot of questions I am looking for answers to. These six books I read in 2014 helped make this list a bit shorter. They are all available on Kindle.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Ben Horowitz
This book was a quick, fast and enthralling read. Ben tells the raw story of his time as a CEO of a tech startup that ended up a success but diced with disaster many, many times along the way. Ben is now a partner in one of Silicon Valley’s prime venture capital businesses. It ended well. But his honest description on what worked well and what didn’t make for great reading.
Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love
Richard Sheridan
Who doesn’t want a business people love to work in? Richard Sheridan explains how this seemed like an impossible task for his Software Development Company at the start and the steps he took to make it work in the end. Now people come from around the US to tour his company to learn what worked and why.
Problem Solving 101: A simple book for smart people
Ken Watanabe
How do you go about solving problems? Or do you hide from them, hoping they will go away? This book is ideal for those who hide or those without a reliable method to solve whatever comes their way. Originally written for Japanese children, it has gone on to become a business book classic.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Greg McKeown
This book challenged my belief that everything in business carried the same level of importance. That belief was replaced with the concept of the “The Vital Few” – those limited pieces of work that produce the maximum amount of difference. I wrote a review that digs into more detail. You can find it here.
Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future
Blake Masters, Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel was a founder of PayPal who cashed up when the business was sold and then decided to back a relatively young company called Facebook. He is worth squillions. His writing is deep, clear and worth the time to work through. This book covers some interesting theories on the merits of competition and what the business owner can do to avoid it at all costs.
Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less (Revised third edition, 4th printing, September 1, 2014)
Sam Carpenter
Yes, I admit the title is not short of hype. Add to this a structure that seems at times to meander and things are not looking good. However, cut through all that and you’ll find gold in here. First you need to believe that a successful business is a series of successful systems, rather than a magical mix of good intentions with staff who take action based on gut instinct. Get the system correct, and the rest falls into place. Not an easy read, not that compelling, BUT apply what he suggests and the title could become a reality.
Conversion Attribution Model Comparison Tool
Conversions > Attribution > Model Comparison Tool
Credit should be given where credit is due. This report ensures you can achieve exactly this when it comes to allocating Goals / Revenue with the right traffic sources.
First, let’s step back a bit. Most people think their visitors convert in a linear fashion. They see your paid search ad, click it, read your website’s content, and either become a lead or purchase a product.
For sure, there will be some websites and website visitors that do operate like this. But many other visitors take a very different pathway to conversion.
For instance, they may click on paid ads, leave the site, then come back by clicking on an organic listing, then leave the site again, and – finally – convert to a sale after visiting the site by typing its name directly into their browser address bar.
By default, Google Analytics attributes the desired action to the last channel of traffic. This is called Last Click Attribution.
There are a few attribution models you can pick from. This report makes it easy to swap between them and see how each changes the appeal of your traffic streams. To make it simple, the illustration below shows the difference between Last and First Click Attribution (in other words, the channels responsible for starting the sale compared to those responsible for closing it).
Here you can see that organic traffic was by far the largest traffic stream that started the sales process – the leader in the First Interaction list, and direct traffic was the largest stream that completed the sale. Paid search and social media also started more than they finished, which could make them more appealing than if you just viewed them through the Last Click model.
These models are just two of the many that Google Analytics makes available. Picking the right model to suit the way your prospects may decide to purchase is part of the challenge ahead. Let us know how you get on.
The holiday season is just around the corner but does your marketing need to hit pause too?
Here are a few tips to keep your online marketing working while you don’t. Yep you read correctly. It toils away doing all that you want, while you enjoy sun, sand, sea and, of course, the mandatory socialising.
Keeping in touch with those that matter is first up. By using email as the medium and any effective software solution as your tool (options for automation are aplenty). Let’s start with keeping your prospects updated.
Few sales people convert everyone they present to. To keep prospects thinking, how about a regular series of polite messages with a friendly gap between each and a sizable dollop of valuable content in them all? Nothing too wordy – just enough to keep them really thinking about your proposal as opposed to everything else that has since arrived on their desk.
Just staying in touch keeps you ahead of the pack. For “bonus points” and the bits to put you into the top 10%, why not also monitor who opens your messages and then further customise your content to suit those who are engaging a lot or very little. (For super bonus points, why not fire off a task to the sales person of the prospect when they click on a link and visit your website for a sizeable amount of time.)
Staying in touch with your customers over the break could be worthwhile too. Perhaps those who have purchased for the first time and need to be schooled in the hows and whys of what they have purchased. Again, small snippets of content with a way to track engagement is a smart way to proceed here.
Now let’s move up the sales funnel. What automation can your lead generation take? Google AdWords can help here. For instance, advertising campaigns can be built and scheduled to start or finish at predetermined dates to coincide with when someone is around to answer the phone.
You can also configure AdWords so that two search ads run against each other, with the winner picked based on its engagement performance. So while you sit back and enjoy the break, your advertising is getting smarter and smarter. Sound nice?
Another option is to let Google AdWords count people down to an offer that ends on a fixed date – for instance, shipping deadlines or Boxing Day sales. In each case, some recent ad copy automation enhancements could be handy. See the example below, which show some smart ways to incorporate this into ads. Set the date and let Google alter the ad copy until it ends, after which it will switch out the ad with another that’s best run when the date either ends or starts.
Remarketing is another “set and forget” piece of Google AdWords marketing that’s ideal for your holiday plans. A quick recap for those new to remarketing: This is where people arrive on your website and then either do or don’t do something that interests you. (Say they don’t purchase but do look at your latest online catalogue.)
By meeting certain criteria they are placed within advertising “audiences” which you then set up to be advertised to through banner ads placed around selected internet sites (like the NZ Herald or Youtube, for example). Once the rules are set up, those who qualify as your audience begin to see your banner based advertising without any involvement from you.
Finally, let’s talk about improving your natural rankings within the Google search engine while you enjoy the sun. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well, unfortunately this one is impossible. Improving your SEO requires deliberate work.
All I ask is if you want to change things here is that you spend a few moments of your well earned break brainstorming what new pieces of content you or your team can produce in the New Year. Sometimes hard work is the only way forward – and this is one of those situations.
BUT don’t forget the points I’ve raised here. There’s a good few in here that will keep things moving while you are are doing the opposite over the holiday period.
From all us here at Ark Advance, have a good break.
The approach required to successfully sell services online is vastly different from that needed to sell products. Since we started in 2002 we have helped dozens of service-based organisations achieve more online.
These seven tips are a selection of strategies and tactics that we apply through our standard implementation process. By following any or (ideally) all of these points you will be well on the way to transforming your website into the lead generating machine it can be.
Tip 1: Pick your ideal audience(s) and produce your content to suit just them
Let’s get the hardest task nailed first. Whilst your website’s images set the scene, it is your words (through either text or video) that move people to make a decision. Writing them with a specific person or group of people in mind is much easier than writing for a broad, nebulous group of web users.
You have probably visited websites that do this well. They may have talked about the exact problem you were experiencing or the ideal goal you were looking to achieve. The more you read, the more it felt like the service was crafted for people just like you.
Compare this to content that totally misses the mark. Then, you switched off after the first paragraph. It contained a list of features which were applied to a wide range of possible applications – all to produce nonspecific improvements. Boring, boring and more boring.
But what if your service is relevant to a wide range of customer groups? No problem – just avoid slamming them all together with the one boring, nebulous message. Do the harder work and split them into separate pages, each one written with a specific group in mind.
Let’s say you’re a smart accountant. You might write three separates pages on how your services can be customised to suit businesses in Auckland who are: 1) a small tech service start up; 2) a medium-sized manufacturing company, and 3) a company in either group who wants to trade in Australia.
Each group would have a page of 800-1000 words, say, talking about the love and attention your accountancy practice provide to solve its specific problems and opportunities.
Conversely, your not-so-smart competitor, who wants to take the easy road to website creation, produces just one page of generic copy which lists the needs all three in a page of boring, non specific “grey suit talk”. Yawn.
Do the hard work and write for each of the audiences you want to appeal to.
Tip 2: Ensure all your “content prerequisites are met” – but then go further and highlight what makes you different
People come to your website with an existing expectation of what they’re about to or should experience. For instance, if you’re an architect, people expect your website to show beautiful pictures of finished houses complete with glowing words from happy clients. The more the merrier.
If you’re a web design company, they are looking for links to sites you have created and, again, paragraphs of praise on how delightful you are to work with.
A branding company? The natural thing would be plenty of “before and after” shots of shocking brands that have been transformed into sexy logos and type faces. A business coach? Words from happy clients and a simple way to “try before you buy” your service (more on this later).
All these I call “content prerequisites” – content that will count against you if they’re missing, and ensure you are part of the “consideration group” if they are present.
All well and good. But what moves you from mere consideration to that happy state of confirmation is content that shows how you stand out from the rest.
So what does make you different? Imagine you and your competitors are all sitting on one side of a table and the prospect is facing you all on the other – what would you say to ensure they pick you and not the rest?
Let’s tackle a short list of differences that you may think differentiate your company: great customer service, super product knowledge, excellent post-sale follow up. Unfortunately, all fall flat as bullet points on a page. All are subjective and a challenge for prospects to actually experience.
And do they really differentiate you? If I was engaging an architect, I wouldn’t want one who had great customer service skills but produced designs that left me cold. I’d be more tempted by someone who spent their life focusing on producing great design for tiny spaces of land – just like I have.
Your challenge is certainly to deliver the prerequisite content but then quickly present a point of difference that appeals to a sizeable part of the market and can be easily described and proven.
Tip 3: Make it easy for people to “experience” your knowledge
Let’s say you are looking for a lawyer to help you set up a family trust. The last time you used one was when you purchased the family home a few years back and it seems trusts is not one of their specialties. So you head over to Google and start searching.
Imagine you find three possible choices. The first two include a few pages on their trust services with nice shiny pictures of the partners who specialise in the space. They look OK. The third, however, has this stuff too but also a page of free PDF resources available for download.
You click on a PDF that catches your eye, open it up and are pleasantly surprised by its easy-to-read plain English style. This informative but short document explains what you need to do (and why) in order to set up your trust. It doesn’t solve the complete problem but it does answer many of your initial questions.
It all ends with a picture of the partner responsible, their email address and a reason to call (more on this later). “Why not?” you think, and the email is sent and the two companies that made it too hard are quickly forgotten.
See how it works? I’m not advocating you provide a complete “step by step plan on how to solve the problem that people are dealing with. Just a tidbit of advice that provides enough value to make you seem as smart as you really are. 🙂
Tip 4: Provide social proof of your abilities
So your website says you provide excellent customer service – that’s the easy part. Going ahead and proving it – now that’s a different matter!
Maybe you survey your customers each quarter on this exact metric and share the results on your site. Or your customers write in and talk about how great your staff are in dealing with them. You may even mention how smart your team is. All of that’s good stuff – but even better would be to prove what you’re saying with links to partner programs they belong to or awards they have won.
Any opportunity you have to back up your story with social proof is well worth taking. The more the merrier.
Tip 5: Make your service super easy to buy by focusing on outcomes and transforming them into products
Let’s get one thing clear: your customers are not buying the service that you provide, but the outcomes your work delivers for them. I don’t buy legal services; I buy peace of mind that my assets are properly protected. And while buying accountancy services could well put me to sleep, receiving advice on the best way to grow my business while staying onside with the IRD – now that has me hanging on the edge of my seat.
So we need to describe our services based on the great outcomes they deliver. However, this can can be a challenge (especially compared with selling products).
For instance, let’s say you want to splurge out on a new large screen LED TV for Christmas. First stop could be a local retailer to see what looks good and what makes one model better than another. Perhaps this trip is followed by a visit online to check some reviews. Then it’s back to the store and, with your masterful negotiation skills, within a few minutes you’re done and dusted.
Let’s compare this with buying legal conveyancing work to help with the purchase of a new home. You hop straight online this time, look at the websites of a few local firms that come up in Google, and start comparing.
Some make it hard by just listing the service and the name of the relevant partner and recommending you contact him or her for more information. Others tell you exactly what you get for the service – even offering three levels of cost (bronze, silver and gold) – tell you how long it will all take, and let you know what documents you need to kick the process off.
Which ones make it super easy to engage with them?
And that’s the benefit you offer – you do all the hard work by “productising”, thereby making it easy for buyers to compare and decide.
Tip 6: Sell the act of picking up the phone
So you have the right audience defined, the content is tuned just for them, and it’s littered with nice social proof of your super-talented team. Services are addressed as outcomes and packaged up as handy products that anyone in this industrial segment would be a fool not to own.
All you want them to do is pick up the phone and call you. Which is exactly what they are not doing. So what gives?
Well, my friend, you need to “sell” the act of calling you. Remember, prospects have to take their hands off the keyboard or mouse, place it on their smartphone or office phone and dial those numbers. This takes effort. Seriously.
So why should they? What’s going to happen to make their effort worthwhile? Perhaps a bribe? Like a complimentary 30 minutes of consulting. Or a chance to share their problem with an expert willing to listen.
Think what you can provide to them to make placing that single call a win in itself. Just placing the phone number at the top of the page and expecting them to call will not be effective.
Tip 7: Know what happens when they call – it’s time to script the experience!
All going well all the last six tips have been implemented (clever you!) and the phone decides to ring (good phone!).
But uh oh! You are out of the office and someone else picks it up. Then what happens? What’s that first conversation like? What questions do you or your team ask and, more importantly, which ones do you leave for later? And how do you ensure the customer’s called back anyway?
How many times have you been in this customer’s shoes and had no one call you back – or call back weeks later after you have already made a decision?
Don’t let this happen. Put a system in place to reliably manage the process from that first call through to the sale. Ideally, it should also be a system that is followed by everyone who is part of your customer-facing operation.
A good system will include somewhere for all leads to be stored, some way to track what has been said or sent to whom, and a way to define what should be said and when. It could be a simple spreadsheet or it may be one of the many sophisticated CRM applications available to small businesses.
Bonus Tip 8: Record your success
Think of all this, Grasshopper, as a journey, not a destination. At the start, you know you will be a mess across many stages of the service sales process. That’s why you are starting. But still, you will record how many people visit your site, and how of those become leads, and who then end up as clients.
The percentages could be scary at first – few conversions from prospect to client. But over time things change – perhaps on the content creation side – so the conversion rate starts to lift, little by little.
Customer testimonials are then added to your website at the same time as you productise some of your popular services. Suddenly, a big bump in lead conversion rate takes place. Then you write down the script for that first phone call, practice it, and start using it instead of your previous “wing it” non-script Sales conversion takes another lift.
On and on you go – adding a few tweaks here and there to make things even smoother than before. Until you reach that Zen like phase of having so much new business coming across your desk that you can pick and choose the projects that appeal the most.
Sound like a plan?
If you would like to learn how Ark Advance helps companies achieve such heightened states of enlightenment, contact us today here.
You will find this report here: Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.
First impressions count, and this report answers the question “What was the first page people came to when entering my website”?
The ideal would be for the first page to either solve the visitor’s problem or show them which page does. Pages that struggle here have a high bounce rate, something you don’t want (with the exception of your “contact us” page), especially for your first-impression landing pages.
Most people incorrectly assume the homepage would be the only page in this report. However, if Google has understood and indexed your content well, or you have a paid advertising account that sends visitors to exactly the right page for the keywords they use, then you should see a long list of pages in this report..
When looking down this list for the first time, I’m on the hunt for poor performers, especially when I segment the traffic by paid advertising efforts. A high bounce rate on visits you have paid for is a sign that trouble is brewing. Your keywords may be wrong, or your ads may be sending visitors to the wrong place, or the content may be struggling to meet the intentions of the visitor – or all three.
Time spent tuning the performance of your landing pages is always time well spent. Creating the best possible impression brings those next steps of the sales a bit closer.
“So what can I expect from working with a company like yours?”
It’s a common question I get asked. Sometimes it comes at the very start of the sales process and sometimes at the end – just before the person commits. I can understand why it gets asked. Most who ask it have never engaged an online marketing partner before and are unsure about what comes next.
From taking dozens of companies through the process I can answer by outlining four simple but key stages clients work through with their account manager. Get to the end and the chances of success are greatly enhanced. Faulter mid way through and – well – things become harder.
Here’s the list
Stage #1 – Lots of exciting new knowledge to understand.
Stage #2 – A similar volume of information delivered from the client to us.
Stage #3 – An even greater volume of information regarding their markets coming to both them and us.
Stage #4 – All three information sources producing a task list to be completed in a set sequence.
Let me go through each stage and add some detail.
#1 – Lots of exciting new knowledge to understand.
The process starts with creating a bedrock of reliable website analytics data. In some cases, we tune what already exists; other times we are producing something for the first time. Whichever path we take, one outcome is certain – a bucket load of information on what is happening within the current environment.
For instance, we may uncover paid advertising campaigns that have been running for a while, costing plenty but delivering few sales or leads. Or an email newsletter campaign that is contributing the most to e-commerce sales, but thanks to resource limitations is being sent only on an ad hoc basis.
Then there’s the fundamental issue: nobody has trained those that matter in how to read the relevant reports. So they may have noticed the 80% bounce rate on their website’s homepage, but not realised that it was such a big issue.
All this represents a steady stream of new information and insights coming at you from the Ark Advance team. Some insights may prompt quick action – for instance, pausing the advertising campaign that is producing nothing, or ensuring that newsletter is sent out each month.
Other issues may take longer to resolve – the 80% bounce issue, for example. Nevertheless, think of those first few months as lots of “stuff” coming your way as our team teaches you more and more about how the Internet is reacting to your website.
#2 – The tables turn – your turn to give back as good as you got.
The more we know about your business the better. That’s why at times during the kick off process we will shut up and listen while you answer questions we’ve posed in order to pull the good stuff out of your head and into our planning system.
Half an hour doing this across multiple meetings gives us a good understanding of what you offer to whom. But on its own, this time is rarely enough to make a sizable difference.
So as we dive deeper into your keyword selection, or work to uncover the real cause of a poorly performing landing page, we will need to know even more. For example, what are the benefits most people are looking for? Or, what problems are prospects trying to solve with these benefits? And even, how do you differ from your competitors?
These can be dastardly difficult and annoying questions to answer. Especially when all you want from us is a simple Google ad next to your competitors that will drum up some business NOW.
However, now is the time to flip the tables and send more information our way. This will allow ads to be re-written to include your point of difference for a particular service, or even landing pages to show why to purchase this product over another. We need to get through this stage so we can properly enter the next phase – where the fun really starts.
#3 – The market speaks – ready to listen?
So we have given it our best shot. Every piece of content is now in alignment with your key messages and is being presented to the right audiences. This just leaves us to sit back and “listen” to what the market has to say.
Silence is one possible result. A muted response is another.
Yep, prospects may not be as interested as you are in what you offer and how you do it. How your competitors present their services could be way more appealing. Insights like this can be a hard to take.
And some will believe that, given enough time and money, they will convince the market to want what they have for the reasons they believe are important. These people tend to have both lots of time and money.
Others might go into denial with statements like “online marketing is not for us,” or “let’s find another online marketing company so they can make this work”.
If you see your competitors using online marketing that’s tempting evidence that it works. And finding a new supplier? They will most likely bid on the same keywords as your current one, sending traffic to the same web page and providing you with a similar result.
Nope, now is the time to listen to the market and discover what needs to change in your marketing. Doing this also has you enter the final phase of the process.
#4 – All three information sources producing a list tasks that are completed sequentially.
So now the magic begins.
Information from all parties – you, ourselves, and your market – is mixed together. From this, a list of tasks is created. Some will be simple; for instance, we may stop bidding on one keyword because you get a better return from another.
Others will come with a challenge. Let’s say a specific service after much promotion through advertising just doesn’t generate any new business. Kill it, or rework it – what’s the best option? Working these tasks one by one – over the months ahead – is the focus of your online marketing.
If this sounds like a lot more work than you originally envisioned, you are probably right. But I can assure you it does get easier as you live in the final stage each and every month. With time, you will develop a sixth sense of how the online market reacts to your products, your messages and their engagements with you.
Give us a call today if you’d like to start the process.
Last month I wrote that in order to improve your site’s conversion rate you need to avoid the illusion that there’s just one type of prospect visiting your website, and they are looking to fulfill just one set of needs. This illusion has many website owners create only one advertising message that pushes people to one landing page.
In reality, multiple groups want to solve a range of problems. Your best opportunity to serve them is via a range of marketing messages leading to a range of targeted landing pages.
This month I’m going to take a crack at another illusion of simplicity: the journey the customer takes to reach your front door.
Let’s say a hypothetical someone wants to buy a sofa for their living room. They start their hypothetical journey by walking into a furniture store near their home. They then meander about, sitting on everything on display (sofas, that is). A very helpful salesperson helps them choose a delightfully retro model in leather and chrome (and talks them into a faux leopard rug while he’s at it) and in a matter of minutes they walk out $2500 poorer but excited about the extra comfort and style coming their way when their sofa and rug arrive the following weekend.
Enough hypothesising – let’s do a reality check now. Would you buy a sofa this way? Probably not.In fact, few people would. To emphasise the point, here’s a picture from a 2011 Monash University study that shows the journey through different advertising channels that a purchase like this can typically entail.
At first, I was surprised by this model’s complexity. However, when I look back over some of my recent purchases I can see this “dance of channels” clearly.
For instance, a few weeks back I needed to find a place to stay in Melbourne for a couple of nights. It had to be within walking distance of the conference centre, clean and with good WiFi access. In this case, I didn’t use Google or Tripadvisor. Nope, I texted my mate Martin who visits Melbourne a lot and asked for his recommendation. In a few minutes I had a message with three options. I then visited the website of each. One I liked, and set up a live chat session to ask about the WiFi. They answered my question and the booking was done and dusted in 10 minutes. Channels used: SMS, web, chat, and then the sale.
Then there’s my little portable GPS thingy. I bought this a year ago to counteract my directionally challenged nature – ie, it’s easy for me to get lost :). So when I decided to take up trail running – well, you can see the problem, right? So I needed a relatively inexpensive way to find my way back to civilisation (ie, coffee) from places with no cellphone signal.
A quick internet search helped me gather a list of options. Then I walked into a shop to see how big these things actually were. Then I spent the next few weeks watching umpteen Youtube videos of Americans explaining the pros and cons of each option. Only then did I find the one for me, upon which I walked into PB Tech in Penrose and made the purchase. The person behind the counter had no idea what I was buying and didn’t really need to. I had used a price comparison website and knew the price was good.
So how do you think your customers find their way to your door?
Is it as simple as typing in a search term into Google, ending up on your site and making a purchase or requesting a quote? I would hazard a guess that it may not.
Here’s another slide from the Monash study that helps connect various channels with different stages of the purchase cycle. Knowing that mobile, for example, is commonly used about a month before purchase, how might that affect your thinking about the messaging you deliver through the mobile channel?
The more you understand the journey your customer takes, the more you can influence them along the way. To get started, this month why not ask a few customers about their journey? Then start to map the typical customer journey – or journeys – that you see emerging. Good luck – and do share with us what you discover along the way.
Most people think more Google traffic will solve their online marketing performance problems. “If I only had more visitors, then we would sell more, have more leads, produce more buyers (insert your most desired outcome here) ”.
That’s probably why the search engine optimisation search terms like “SEO” and “Google AdWords” are so costly to bid on and challenging to rank for on Google. Most people see them as a panacea to their website’s woes.
If only it was that easy. Let me explain.
I frequently refer to websites as sales people: it makes the whole online marketing story so much easier to explain. In this case, the traffic your site receives from Google or any other space is the “people” your website sees.
That leaves the site’s content as the sales message. And it is in this area that a poor performing website almost always needs work. Fixing content is a lot harder than buying more traffic. Let me show you why.
The Queen Street shuffle
Imagine you’ve been tasked with selling home alarms to Aucklanders. (Quick FYI: if you need one then visit Ray at Garrison Alarms – they have been a Permission client for a while and will not let you down).
On your first day you walk down Queen Street and approach everyone to pitch your offer. Young, old, male, female, those in suits, those in jeans – it doesn’t matter. Just rock up to everyone who walks towards you and pitch them the same sales script in the hope that someone will buy.
The script is simple. Just the technical features of your alarm – its colour, alarm sound and perhaps a few alarm buzz words thrown in.
What do you think your chances of success are? Low!
The big, bold billboard
Let’s now change things with a massive billboard advertising swanky new home alarms strategically placed on the corner of Queen and Wellesley. This time you stand under said billboard wearing your uniform and and wait for people to approach you.
Gradually, as people notice the huge sign – which points to you below – they start to approach. Elderly, young, casual and business people – a steady stream of interested souls come towards you. You meet them with guess what? The same script you read to everyone before. Lots of technical stuff all about your product.
Now your chances of success have moved from low to medium. You are now talking to interested people but still they get the same boring spiel.
The Tiddles approach
Finally we get to the “enhanced version”. In this one you leave the billboard and visit Burger King opposite. You grab a coffee, sit at a table and scribble out a number of sales scripts for different types of buyers. The critical difference here is that the scripts focus on the benefits the customer receives rather than the product’s features.
Each script describes the unique benefits that would appeal to its audience. For instance, the elderly want a system that is super simple to operate and is monitored when they head away on the occasional cruise.
The technically inclined, on the other hand, want a solution that allows them to check from their smartphone exactly what’s happening back at base. Those who were burgled last night want speed – a solution installed right now. Those who are moving house want an alarm that is easier to use than the one they own now. Single women want a solution that allows them to arm certain areas of their home while they are asleep upstairs. And those with pets want the alarm to still work – but not work, if you know what I mean – when Tiddles is inside.
So you finish your coffee and walk back to the billboard armed with customised sales scripts. When some rocks up now you don’t start selling until you know which group they belong to. Then you take out the script that works and walk them through the benefits that best suit their needs.
Now your chances of success are probably the best they will ever be.
Now let’s relate each situation to the online world
Walking down Queen Street and pitching to anyone with a pulse is like placing a banner ad on The NZ Herald website for 50,000 visitors to see. The most likely outcomes are a hefty bill, lots of unqualified traffic and few results.
The billboard plus single sales script is like running a Google AdWords ad. While you’re now getting qualified traffic coming your way, your single, feature-driven sales spiel doesn’t relate your product to their various worlds and desires.
The optimum experience? That’s a series of landing pages written with each audience in mind. Sure, they should include some product specs, but their real focus should be the benefits that appeal to each group.
Now how do you do that when you can’t “see” the people visiting your website? You set up your site content to make it easy for people to find the page that is most relevant to them.
The key is understanding that people buy based on what the product does, not on how it does it. Pet friendly sensors are a waste of time for households without a Tiddles. Smartphone access only appeals to those with the technology and desire to check up on their home.
Struggling to know what benefits your product provides? Sit down and brainstorm all the reasons people use your service or product. The list should be long and varied.
Then look at your web pages that attract the most visitors and see how many of these benefits are mentioned. If your website suffers performance issues, I guarantee you’ll find large gaps.
Having many different customer types can make web content a challenge. However, sometimes you’ll find that the benefits most customers want are common across many groups. You’re lucky: for you, just one “script” really will appeal to nearly all your website visitors.
We came across a situation just like this a while back after surveying every lead for a business over a three month timeframe and asking them to answer just three questions. Out of this came a completely redesigned home page that replaced some “feature laden” text and a picture of a van with the franchise owner’s smiling face.
A version of this page is still running now, many years later. That’s it below.
Your task this month: sit down and create that benefit list I mentioned earlier. Include the whole team in its creation. Even ask a few customers for their input. Then compare this with what your content shows and see what comes up. Welcome the gaps that show up – they represent new business opportunities.
We have some experience in laying out these benefits in the right order and uncovering those with the widest appeal. Contact us today if you would like to learn more.
Last month we took the plunge and set Sky up at the office while the Price family were in residence. No television during our 14 week stay was too much to ask. So I rang the call centre, took up the no-contract offer, and next day we were up and running.
I never realised how much choice we had bought. We passed on Sport but added Rialto and Soho. This gave us what seemed like hundreds of channels to pass away the winter evenings. Add this to the My Sky box that we rented, and the entertainment opportunities seemed limitless.
And that was the problem.
We had gone from having just four channels of normal TV to now having a cluttered list of many. The Sky magazine was supposed to help us pick out the gold. But have you seen the thing? It’s chocka with content that makes choosing even harder, not easier.
To get us going I navigated through a few channels and created a few “series link“ things to record. But I still think there’s more in there – I just need to find a way to find exactly what we want without it all becoming too hard.
Making the most of your online marketing can be like that. Just switch channels for keyword choices and you move from say a hundred options to thousands. How do you navigate through this?
Creating a Zappos moment
Thankfully there is a way. It’s called focusing or, as I prefer to call it, creating your own Zappos moment.
Let me tell you why.
This brilliant e-commerce site was bought by Amazon five years ago for over a billion dollars. And they achieved it by starting small – in this case selling shoes.
Only later did they expand into a wider apparel range. And when they expanded, they expanded at a feverish pace.
At the start they set out to answer a very simple question – would people buy shoes online? To do this they created a website that advertised a small range and advertised it on Google’s paid advertising network. When the first orders came in, they purchased the shoes from normal store shoe retailers, had them delivered to their factory, then forwarded them to the client.
Yes, they lost money on every order. But that wasn’t the point. They quickly learnt that people were fine with measuring their feet at home, matching it with the online sizing chart and purchasing shoes they’d never tried on from a store they have never been to.
If the strategy worked for Zappos it can work for you.
Let’s say, for example, that you sell mortgage advice in Auckland. This is a cluttered market, as you can see from the search results below.
Now there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of keywords that you could use to market this service. Mortgage Advice, Finance Broker, Mortgage Services, and many more. But that doesn’t fit with the plan of focus. So let’s pick one – Mortgage Broker Auckland. The task is to now create an ad based on this term and get prospects clicking on it.
While this sounds simple, Google’s default bidding method will have your ad shown for a whole range of terms – for instance Mortgage Broker Advice Auckland, Mortgage Advice Brokers and even Mortgage Broker Courses Auckland. Which is great for Google – but for that last keyword option – not so good in this instance.
So we would use an option that has our ad show just for the term we want. Notice the lack of plural – we are bidding on one term and one term only. Then we would put two ads on perfect rotation (that is, 50% for each) and wait.
Is the ad clicked?
Write a boring ad, and no one will click. That’s a problem, so we write more, and more, until we tune our copy to suit the market and clicks appear.
Now we need to worry about how much action these clicks this generate? Do the clickers arrive, spend a few seconds on our page, then disappear? Or do they meander around the site for above average times then contact us for more information.
Turning clickers into leads is all about serving up the right content in the correct way. Rarely is it about writing better ad copy or choosing different keywords hoping they will convert.
This is the optimisation part – few websites are built with visitors in mind.
Most websites are “tuned” to traffic from a limited range of keywords, but rarely do they address the wide range of keywords people actually use. As a result, after spending $500 on Mortgage Broker Auckland and generating no leads, our business owner may conclude she has just blown $3500 on a website that does a rotten job of converting a highly popular and lucrative* search term.
Not so fast! Let’s tune the website so that those visitors do become leads (yes, it can be done!). Assuming the cost per conversion is palatable, this, my friends, is a Zappos moment. You have proved you can attract visitors with good ad copy, and turn those visitors into leads. The growth of your business is now linked to the growth of that keyword search term.
Let that last sentence sink in. The growth of your business is now linked to the growth of that search term.
Doesn’t that feel nice?
It should. And you can also begin to see the effort needed to get that one keyword working? Ad copy had to be written again and again.So did the web copy – in fact, it needed multiple iterations. But the outcome made the effort well worthwhile.
Each month we help dozens of clients achieve victories like this. Contact us today if you would like to join them.
* How do you know a search term is lucrative? Let’s say the average cost-per-click is a relatively high $4.00. This amount is not set by Google but by those bidding on the search term. People don’t bid that amount for long unless they can convert it into a lead at a favourable cost. If you can’t, then your conversion rate is well below the industry standard.
Check out Permission Website Marketing’s October Newsletter Update.
For more website marketing information, take a look at our online marketing services, or give us a call on 0800 893 477.
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.
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.
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.
