The other day I took a phone call from a customer who was helping out a business that was in rather dire straits. My customer called me from a meeting room of the business concerned and in a few seconds they put me on speaker phone and gave me a summary of the story so far. They then peppered me with questions on how I would go about helping them dig themselves out of the problem they were in.

It would seem that over 6 months ago a design company was asked to redesign an existing website to freshen up its rather tired look. A detailed brief was written and within a few weeks some fresh new designs were printed out and pasted onto boards for everyone to drool over. The design presented was an obvious improvement and, with some minor tweaks, some layouts were chosen and the build commenced.

To make the content structure of the design work, the website infrastructure and content management application had to change. Plus, the site was already a successful e-commerce operation, so it there was a bit of work to make the present payment gateway work with the new pages. Neither of these was too hard and didn’t faze the developers involved in the project.

After the usual delays of a build of this size – probably a medium-level site in New Zealand terms – the site went live and those involved in the project bathed in the glory of these fresh new web pages.

The website’s visitors were not similarly impressed. Sales on the new site were slow and way down on the same period last year. The month-by-month reduction fluctuated, but the decrease settled around the 30% mark. At first, this reduction was linked to short-term alterations in the market, linked with marketing promotion failing to fire. But as time rolled on – enough to smooth out any external factors like these – it became obvious to all that, compared with the one it replaced, this new site was a conversion lemon.

The business concerned had spent a few weeks with the problem and were still no closer to solving it before they came to my client, who then introduced them to me. After just 20 minutes on the phone we had developed a list of steps to try to indentify the reasons why the drop-off could have occurred.

A few days after the call, I sat down and pondered the lessons that could be learnt from a situation like this. Subsequently, I have come up with four insights that could help others avoid a similar situation occurring during their own site redesign.

Decide on the conversion metrics you want to improve before you start any site redesign and then gauge the project’s performance against these. Bounces, sales conversion and lead conversion rates are just three metrics that should all show improvements through a redesign process. Knowing what your existing site achieves and which tests gave you the greatest improvements are all facts that you should share openly with any prospective redesign team.

Know where the problem areas are in your sales conversion process and have an expectation that your new site redesign will smooth these out. Frequently, there are a multitude of different web pages a prospect needs to work through when purchasing from your site. Not everyone who starts this process ends as a freshly minted customer. Knowing which pages drive the largest amount of drop-offs can focus your redesign process specifically on fixing these problem areas.

Understand which terms make it onto your ‘golden keywords’ list and know your search performance on each. Some keywords will be more important than others. These are the ones that have a higher propensity to drive new conversions when compared with the rest. Both organic and paid versions of these keywords can be important. Therefore, it pays to track on a regular basis (for most sites this is monthly) how your site ranks for them in the free, organic part of the main search engine plus the minimum cost per click you expect to pay on the sponsored or paid listing area.

As any new site will need to go through a process of search engine re-indexing, you are bound to see some changes in these rankings. Knowing which of these keyword ranking changes are more important than others will help you focus your efforts on any immediate remedial work required.

And finally, if you are not too sure how your new site is going to perform then how about doing an A/B split test for your traffic between the old and new versions? If you have a radically free-thinking design agency, then you may even make your payment contingent on their version out-performing its alternative!

As those who have completed a site redesign and development will know, the process is not without risk. Falling conversion rates is just one problem that can be an unwanted output of a project like this. However, by following these points you should be better placed to a) guide the redesign process so it has ‘improved conversion’ as a measurable outcome; and b) fix any problems that arise quickly and easily.

In previous articles I have commented on how to apply the 80/20 principle when improving the effectiveness of your website marketing. Examples have included Google AdWords, where 20% of your keywords will usually provide 80% of your sales conversions, and landing page copy creation, where a mere 20% of your sales copy will drive 80% of the effects of the page. The principle also rings true when it comes to copy placement, with key copy best placed in the top 20% of your web page.

But when it comes to 80/20 truisms the granddaddy of them all is how 20% of your web pages will be responsible for over 80% of your website’s conversion success. Yep, while you may have a site chock full of well indexed content that does a great job of attracting new searchers, it could well be just one or two pages that do the heavy lifting of converting these visitors into prospects.

In some cases it’s simple to pick out these ‘golden’ pages. For lead-generation websites, it’s usually the landing pages that sit between your visitors and the content they register for. Improving these pages, through split testing the copy and design elements they contain, can have a dramatic effect on improving conversion rates.

However, when it comes to locating the right pages to focus on in a multi-stage e-commerce site, things become a bit more challenging. In this case, there may be several pages a prospect needs to visit during the purchase process. The prospect might pick the product from the selection on offer, add it to their shopping cart, perhaps return to shop some more, and then decide to ‘check out’ what they have. From here, they are asked to either login if they have purchased before or register as a new buyer. Depending on how user-friendly your shopping cart is, they may see any number of pages before finally ending up on the ‘order receipt’ or ‘thank you’ page.

It would be no surprise that not everyone who starts shopping ends up completing the order. In some cases, the drop off can be as high as 85%. Some pages in the process will have a disproportionate effect on dropping prospects from the sales process. Fortunately, when setting up a Google Analytics goal for the completed sale you can register each step as one that you want tracked and reported on.

Once you have a reasonable number of sales worth reporting on (say above 30) you can see which web pages during your sales process are responsible for producing the most unwanted visitor exits. It’s these pages that represent your 20%, and require your focus. It may be only one of your five possible pages that is causing the damage. Here are some examples of pages that I frequently see falling into this group.

Pages that ask for customer information. This is most likely to be a new shopper registration page, where the more personal information you request the fewer registrations you will get. It pays to critically review what you ask for and compare it with what you really need. Is date of birth really necessary to make a purchase? Unfortunately some product categories – say finance and insurance – need more details than others, so if this is the case then employ some clever page design to make things look like they are a bit easier to complete.

One added trick is to place your phone contact details – ideally a free call 0800 number with an image of a smiling person on the phone ready to take the call – in a prominent place. The prospect may look at the form in frustration and prefer the idea of placing a quick call to get the order over and done with.

Pages that ask for money. It’s no surprise that these types of pages find themselves in the top 20%. It’s when your visitors have to find their credit card and enter its details into your page that all their deep-seated concerns can come welling up. They may be thinking ‘What happens if I order the wrong product? Are they going to steal my credit card? Who will help me if things go wrong?‘ Providing copy that answers some, if not all, of these questions will help improve your results.

So there you have just two types of pages that require your focus because they typically fit within a site’s top 20% when it comes to prospect drop-offs. By setting up your own analytics tools properly you will be able to find your own problem pages. Website optimisation work is a lot easier to prioritise once you know which of your web pages are going to provide the most results from your efforts.

I think it was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This statement rings so true with online marketing. You would be insane to expect any changes to your online marketing results without putting in place a whole series of changes. But how does the current economic malaise affect what changes should be at the top of your list? What should you focus on now that 12 months ago you could easily avoiding spending time on?

At the top of most of our customers’ lists over the last few weeks has been the content they are using for lead generation. Specifically, the words and documents they use to tempt prospects who are in the early stages of their decision-making process. Attract prospects who are in these stages and you have a good chance of influencing them during their purchasing process.

Frequently, content offered at this early stage asks the prospect to break the status quo and take some action. This is usually followed with content that overviews the different options available to solve the prospect’s problem. This is all rounded up with additional detail on why your product or service should be chosen above the other options available.

Lead-generation content that challenges the status quo explains in detail the benefits that the prospect will miss out on if they don’t make a decision to progress. A prospect who is pondering the early stages of purchasing a new product or service will weigh up the time and money required to research and find a solution and compare this with the discomfort of doing nothing. If the benefits of finding a solution to their problem outweigh the discomfort of inaction (your content should expose and highlight these discomforts), there is a strong chance they will move one step further along the decision-making process.

However, in challenging economic times, the act of breaking the status quo can prove harder to achieve than would normally be the case. Part of the reason for this is the underlying media commentary that supports the view to sit tight and do very little. A growing level of apathy is your real competitor here. (Also be prepared for a double whammy later in the year, with the election bringing even more uncertainty to businesses.) Therefore, lead-generation content for this stage requires some extra punch to it to make it ‘bust’ a rather resilient ‘status quo’.

One way to add extra power to this content is to have a laser-like focus on the benefits your prospect will receive by taking action and/or the problems they will experience if they sit still and do nothing. You can achieve this level of focus by customising any generic content to be more appealing to your ideal prospect audiences.

For example, say there was a printing and design business based on the North Shore of Auckland. Let’s assume that their website offers a FREE report tasked with challenging the status quo by changing the prospect’s print supplier, called ‘Six ways to shrink your printing costs through better buying’. Let’s also assume that during the last 8 months a number of prospects have downloaded this document and have been nurtured with reasonable success into becoming customers. Everything is looking good so far.

Recently, however, things have slowed down, with the last report being downloaded just 2 weeks ago – and then, by a student researching a project for Uni. What was a reasonably regular online prospect flow has well and truly dried up. One suggestion would be to add more grunt to this content by altering it to better suit certain prospect profiles. For instance, the printing business may research its own customers and find that Motels and Dentists are two groups of loyal and profitable customers that they would like their lead-generation practices to attract more of.

Knowing this, they could then take the report and rewrite it to appeal to each of these niches. Perhaps something like ‘Printing Tips and Tricks for Dentists that Reduce Costs and Drive Patient Numbers’ or even ‘The Motel Owner’s Guide to Profit-Growing Print Procurement.’ In both cases, the core information provided in the report would remain the same but would be supplemented with case testimonials and/or specific print examples that highlight for each segment a) the unique needs of their business; b) the specific problems they experience with print suppliers and the opportunities they are missing out on by not using this business; and finally, c) an understanding that this business has specialist expertise in their industry segment, which is something that they could well will find difficult to locate anywhere else. Any one of these points makes the report itself more valuable in the eyes of those prospects in the chosen segments and therefore has a better chance of convincing them to take the next step and contact the printer for more details.

Yes, winning new business is harder now than it was maybe even just 6 months ago, but with changes like these your online lead-generation efforts can be bolstered to cope with the added demands it is facing. By putting a niche angle to your original ‘status quo’ content, your business can vastly increase the value of this content to your prospect audience and, by doing so, can improve its effectiveness.

Firstly my apologies – this article contains more ‘geek speak’ than normal.

The subject of all this fuss is Google Analytics and the cookies it places on your website visitors’ computers. In these few words I’m going to explain the types of cookies placed and how they are updated and why, if you don’t understand the basics of this system, your Google Analytics set-up could be flawed and your reports full of false data.

OK – let’s get started with a brief introduction to cookies. They are electronic text files that are placed on your visitors’ computers by websites that need to identify these users during their website session to make the site function properly. Each cookie text file provides a specific set of information to make each website that sets them work.

Unless you have cleared or removed the cookies on your computer you may well have dozens that have been set on your machine by various websites as you have browsed your trail across the Internet. Shopping carts are a big user of cookies. Google Analytics needs them so it can see that you are a returning visitor to the website and how long you have stayed browsing. That’s the extent of the quick summary you are getting – if you need to know more, then visit Wikipedia and search under ‘HTTP Cookies’ to learn more (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie).

Cookies can be set as either first-party or third-party cookies. This status relates to the match between the domain name of the web page that the website visitor was at when the cookie was set and the domain name of the cookie. First-party cookies are set to act only on the website domain shown in the address bar of the visitor. For instance, you visit www.permission.co.nz and Google Analytics sets a series of cookies that relate to it working on www.permission.co.nz.

All OK so far? Here’s where it gets a bit devious. Third-party cookies are set by domains other than those in the address bar. For instance, you visit www.sneakysite.com and a cookie is set for www.sneakyothersite.com. This sounds (and is) quite devious and, fortunately, is not something that Google Analytics does. Google Analytics only uses first-party cookies, which can cause issues when your site spans multiple domains – but more on that later.

So now let’s get stuck into what cookies are set when and why. Once you have properly installed the JavaScript code for your version of Google Analytics on each of your webpages then, when a visitor comes a-calling, they will have set on their computer four first-party cookies.

Here’s a screenshot of them being set on my computer when visiting the Air New Zealand site, which has Google Analytics running on it.

The first cookie is called the true geek name of ’_utma’ – this is called a persistent cookie because technically it never expires. The ones I have seen are dated – in the year 2010. Repeat visits and visits to purchase are just two visitor reports that are derived from the use of this cookie.

The ‘_utmb’ and ‘_utmc’ cookies work as a pair to determine the time your visitor remains on site. The first, ‘_utmb’ is set with the exact time the visitor arrives on your site and then expires at the end of the session. Its partner, ‘_utmc’ is a session cookie that waits for 30 minutes of visitor inactivity before it fades away. The time difference between the two, less the 30 minutes, is used to work out visitor time on site.

The ‘_utmz’ cookie keeps track of where the visitor came from. For instance, if they come via a keyword search, it shows what keyword they used and on what search engine. Unless you alter the way this cookie is set, this attribution is set to expire in 6 months. So, if a prospect arrives via a keyword search on day 1 and comes back in month 3 and makes a purchase, the keyword they searched on will be credited with the sale.

The final cookie Google Analytics can set is ‘_utmv’ (not shown in the Air New Zealand example). This one is only set if the owner of the Google account that manages the website wants it to be. Like its cousin ‘_utma’, this one is a persistent cookie and can be quite handy to set if you want to segment your visitor reports into two separate groups. For instance, you may want to set this cookie after a visitor has logged into a members only area or after they have purchased from your site. This allows you to run reports to see how ‘members’ or ‘customers’ browse your website compared with others. Google has some rules over the type of data you can use when setting this cookie, mainly around the use of identifiable information in the way it is set.

OK – so what happens if the visitor decides to delete these cookies? Well, there’s nothing you can do about this. And when they come back to your website, your version of Google Analytics will treat them as a new user. Best you be aware of this fault in the system and treat your reports as providing you with a strong guide to what’s happening, rather than a totally accurate representation.

Now, back to the earlier discussion on how Google Analytics uses first-party cookies and how, when your site spans multiple domains, this cookie status can cause reporting problems. The key point here is to remember that Google Analytics can only use cookies that are set from domains (and sub-domains) that are shown in the address bar of the web page your visitor is on. So, for instance, if your website visitor lands on your main domain www.shopsiteexample.com, where they find the product they want and then decide to purchase it through your shopping cart, all is well if this cart has an address like www.shopsiteexample.com/cart. Things become more complicated when this cart is hosted on a sub-domain of shoppingcart.example.com or, even worse, a hosted cart environment at Yahoo or PayPal, which may have an address of www.hostedcart.com/shopsiteexample.

To make both of the last two environments work, you will need to modify the ‘out of the box’ Google Analytics JavaScript tag. Just doing this will solve the first issue of visitors moving between sub-domains. When they move to completely new domains, you also need to add extra JavaScript code that will pass the person’s cookie details from the first domain to the other one. For instance, your website visitor may go from www.shopsiteexample.com to www.paymentengine.com and then receive their order confirmation on this same domain. To make this all work you need to be able to install your now altered tracking code onto the domain www.paymentengine.com. (I’m sorry to say that if you can’t do this then the tracking will not work.)

Then you can add some extra JavaScript to alter the URL that links the shopping site to the payment engine to now include the cookie details of the person. The example URL below shows some of the cookie information added.

http://p6.co.nz/boston/callmeNew.php?__utma=220047114.103641444.1203475444.121384247
2.1214427694.22&__utmb=220047114…….

Now, once all is working well, your Google Analytics account will follow visitors as they move from your main domain to sub-domains and even across to the externally hosted shopping cart pages where, with luck, they will complete the purchase.

Has this confused you rather than clarified things? If so, then just look at the domains your website works on – if a visitor remains on the same one for all their browsing experience, then all is fine. If they move from domain to domain, then give us a call and we can talk you through your options to make your Google Analytics set-up work.

I have written before about how providing visitors with the option of using your internal site search can increase your visitor site conversion rates. Well, if you still need some convincing, Google has recently released some cool improvements to its own Google Site Search product that should finally tempt those still dawdling to put it to the top of their list of website changes.

But first some background details on what Google offers here. The Google Site Search product is a nifty search tool that allows you to own and customise your own version of the Google search engine. You can tell the tool to index only the pages on your domain or those domains you want results to be pulled from and, in a flash, it returns results displayed in the standard Google format. Plus, if you purchase the business edition (starting price USD 100 per annum for up to a 5000 page index) these results can be placed within their own customised page containing your branding and without any Google advertising.

Google Site Search is relatively easy to ‘plug in’ to your web pages. The top right-hand corner of the page seems to be the Internet standard for search box placement for most websites. Others with a mass of content that they want search to tame, for example Amazon, Barns and Noble, and TradeMe, tend to make the search box more obvious, usually by placing it top and centre.

So, once you have decided where the search box needs to go you can decide why you should pay Google for the privilege of using their Site Search tool as opposed to asking your website developers to build you one of your own.

Here are my top six reasons to pick Google Site Search.

It comes with a quick implementation time. Google takes care of the hard part of creating the index and displaying the results, leaving you with the easy work of altering the design of your site to accommodate the new search box and branding the search results page. It should only take your developer a few hours at most for these design changes. Compare this with the task of building a search engine that has the speed and accuracy of Google. Even with our rather weak dollar, I think this would be above USD 100.

You are able to bias the search index. Google Site Search allows you to bias the results returned. For instance, you can tell the search engine to take the age of the documents into account when presenting them in the results – say, with the most recent first. Plus you can ‘manipulate’ the top results to show, perhaps, your most popular product items from certain search terms.

You can cater for synonyms. Google allows you to upload a custom dictionary of synonym terms to help your searchers use their own unique terms when searching. For instance, they may search for ’aerobics’ while you call the product ‘group fitness’, or ‘FD’ for ‘fixed deposits’.

You can customise the navigation shown on the search results page. Refinements can be added to your results page to help users find what they want. Refinements are guide posts for additional search options when users type in broad category search terms. For example, view the page results to follow.

See how these refinements help the user who searched using the term ‘apples’ further refine what they were looking for with the extra terms of ‘Fruits’, ’Juices’, ‘Frozen foods’ and ‘Trees’?

In addition to refinements, you can add links above the search results. Unlike refinements, which keep people searching, links lead people away from the results page to pages you think they may be interested in – say events or promotions.

You can span multiple sites. You may have a collection of e-commerce sites you want your search results to be based on, or perhaps one e-commerce site and a blog. When setting up your index you can direct Google Site Search to include these domains and they will be automatically added to your index.

The tool integrates neatly into the Google Analytics Site Search option. Once you have configured your Google Analytics account to accept Google Site Search data, it will start to populate the handy reports that live in here. For instance, you will start to see on what pages your visitors choose to search, the keywords they use and their behaviour after seeing the results returned. Note: this integration is not unique to Google Site Search – other site search tools will have the same ability – but Google makes it a quick and easy step to get the two working together seamlessly.

So there you go – six reasons to take the easy path to better site search with Google. Why anyone would settle on developing their own application is beyond me. You can buy the product within your normal Google account. From there it is a relatively easy step to use Google’s checkout services to purchase the version applicable to your page count and you are on the way.

Please let us know if you need help setting it up. We can make the easy really easy and manage the changes to your site: the results page design, the set-up of the index customisation and Analytics integration.

For the March 08 quarter Google’s revenue was USD 5.186 billion, with AdWords advertising apparently making up 96% of this. Now, if they were greedy folk, Google would let market forces alone direct the cost of those clicks and therefore the price of their stock. Fortunately they aren’t.

You see, to them, searcher relevance is the name of the game. The quicker a searcher finds what she is looking for, the greater the chance she will come back again and again to the Google engine. This theory has affected the rankings a website achieves in the organic part of Google for a while now. More recent changes to the Google AdWords system are revealing how this same mantra of improving searcher relevance is being carried across to Google’s sponsored listings.

One important gauge of how relevant Google judges your keyword advertising is your Google Quality Score, which is shown as a rating level (on a scale of Great to Poor) that Google places on each of the keywords you bid on.

A poor Google Quality Score can stop a campaign dead in its tracks as it can push your bid price into the stratosphere of multiple dollars from a previous one of a few cents. And likewise, at the other end of the spectrum, those with high Quality Scores can bathe in Google love with a drop to their minimum bids, allowing them to start enjoying traffic at a much cheaper rate than their competitors.

Here are just a few points to work on to help improve your own score.

Firstly, you need to configure your AdWords account so you can see how you score at present. The data is there, it’s just that Google doesn’t make it that obvious to find. To locate the option to add in your Quality Score to your data, view the keywords section of your account under the option ‘Customize Columns’ – see the image to follow.

Once you have allowed the Quality Score column to show (by default it is hidden), you should see an extra column in your results – hopefully similar to the one to follow.

To improve your results, first take a leaf out of your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) manual and ensure that the pages accepting traffic from your keywords are optimised for the keywords themselves. As normally applies, when it comes to SEO the top areas to concentrate on are Title Tag – META Description tag and then the page copy, starting with the headline and then working your way down into the main copy areas.

For those sending their AdWords traffic to a specifically designed landing page with minimal navigation options (a good idea in almost all situations to increase your AdWords conversions) it pays to help Google see that this is not the only page of the website. You can do this by including some links along the footer of the page. They don’t have to be too obvious – just so that they are picked up when the Google Quality Score Bot comes a-visiting.

Another metric this Bot stores when it comes to assess your Quality Score is the time it takes to load the page your AdWords ad points to. Also monitored is the number of times people click the back button from your page and start searching again on Google. Your Website Analytics reports of average page time and bounce rate will reveal your existing results here and chart your progress as you improve your page content.

Improving your Quality Score can take time and, in some cases, when you are trying to improve a ‘Poor’ result you will need to apply all of these changes and more to make some progress. But for most situations these few suggestions should help you improve your standing with Google.

Google Analytics now allows you to anonymously opt in to share your website’s tracking data so you can benchmark its results against similar-sized sites in either the same or alternative industry categories. All this is great news for website marketers keen to see how they fare against others in the same business category. There are a few fish hooks to be aware of, but generally it’s an option I suggest everyone takes up. Here’s a summary of what’s on offer.

Firstly, here is where you find it in your Google Analytics account. You can opt into the system and find your new benchmarking reports as an option within your Visitors menu. When you access this section for the first time you are prompted to start sharing your data. By opting in, your website data will be made available to Google anonymously and with the removal of all identifiable information. It will then share the data with its benchmarking service as well as with other Google products you may use.

If you click on ‘More Data Sharing Options’ you are shown the second data-sharing option. This allows you to share your raw data (not anonymous) just with Google, to help them improve the use of other Google products you may use such as Ad Sense and AdWords. I am not sure why you would want to show Google your raw analytics data – especially if you are using them for advertising – so I would suggest it is best to steer clear of this one for now. The first default option is the one we need.

Once you have opted in, Google states that it should take about two weeks to collect your data and display some meaningful results. But, that said, I have seen reports display immediately for a few smaller sites I have set up. Your first reports should include your last month’s data. If you decide to opt out, your data sharing is stopped immediately. Once you decide to join, the Google bot will trawl your site to determine a) the size of your site; and b) the business category you fit within. The number of visitors you attract will determine which size range your site sits within. And, while you can pick different categories to compare yourself with, you can’t see how your stats differ from those of larger or smaller sites, only those of equal size to your own.

The category options are quite extensive and allow for some reasonably accurate comparisons. For instance, if you own a website that sells lighting products then you are in luck – see the figure below.

To have enough data to make a category comparable, it requires over 100 Google Accounts of the same type. Each account can contain multiple websites, so the final number of websites in each category will be in excess of this. Sites whose data are at the extreme end of the statistical range – either very good or extremely poor – are extracted from the comparing category so as not to skew the results.

So what can you compare against? Well, for now, you have five metrics to work on: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site and new visits. It’s not a complete list of comparison points but it’s enough to let you know how you fare. Here are a few pointers on how you can use just two of these five stats to compare different parts of your website marketing.

Firstly, let’s talk about the new visit count. This is shown as a percentage of the total visits – see below

With a figure nearly 25% above the category aggregate, this site looks like a strong performer but beneath this result could be cause for concern. For this website, repeat visitors are obviously going to be less than the aggregate and from what past experience has told us about the category this client is in, it is these repeat clients that make up the bulk of the sales. Now, it may be that a strong marketing campaign is the cause for this rise and things will settle down in the weeks to come. Therefore, on its own the statistic is not something you can act on straight away, but when such a large difference from the benchmark occurs, there is reason to dig further into your results to see the true cause.

However, things are quite different when working with the bounce rate metric. With this you can usually take your results and start working immediately on your pages to make improvements. (This is why this great metric is included in all KPI reports we produce.) Here is a quick recap on what makes a visitor ‘bounce’. It’s not good news – they come, they don’t like what they see and they leave – all usually within 3 seconds.

Poor home page design, confusing navigation, inadequate search engine optimisation and even a poorly executed Google AdWords set-up can all be uncovered through monitoring your bounce rate. Using your benchmarking results, you can see how the whole category compares when it comes to enticing its visitors to stay and linger longer than the few seconds that makes up a bounce. For example, in the figure below you can see that the bounce rate for this site is 40% lower than others in the same category. It uses a rather unique way to help people navigate through its content and, based on this result, it seems to be working well.

So, it is quite easy to see the benefit in comparing your statistics against those within your own industry category, but what about from category to category? Why would it be handy for, say, the manager of a women’s retail shop to compare her websites stats with, say, a travel business?

Well, if she was looking to run some joint promotional opportunities then this may be worthwhile. For instance, she could see that in January, while her visitor traffic tends to fall off as people are just starting back at work, the travel website data are on the rise with people booking their next holiday. And, conversely, during the start of summer when her traffic climbs with the new season launch, the travel site traffic is falling as people think less about a trip overseas and more about being with friends at Christmas. In this case, both businesses could do well by working together with some cross online promotions to even out their respective site traffic.

This brings me neatly to some of the misgivings that I have about the benchmarking system. Firstly, the previous example works perfectly well if the sites being compared are within the same hemisphere. There’s nothing I can find that ensures this is the case. I understand that the data need to include offshore websites to create an accurate aggregate value, especially for some of the niche business categories but it would be nice to know if these sites are in the same part of the globe to make season-based comparisons work.

Secondly, I can’t for the life of me find out what category my website has been placed in after I have opted into the benchmarking system. I have a strong feeling that the Google brains responsible for categorising the site will get it right but it would be nice to see in which category my information is being anonymously placed.

These are just two gripes and minor ones at that. You would struggle to find an easier way to anonymously opt in to a benchmarking solution as powerful as this. Wouldn’t it be great if you could compare your financial results in the same way? Once again, the team has added another must use feature to Google Analytics and still the price remains the same – FREE – loving that!

Clicks, visits and page views are nice to know but it’s the intent of the visitor behind this activity that is the holy grail of website research. What do they really want to know? What problems are they trying to solve? And what brought them here in the first place?

A simple website survey used to be the only way for you to piece together this information. But now there’s another way. Internal site search gives your visitors one more way to find your content. And, by capturing what they type where and the actions that follow, you are one step closer to understanding their intent. Google Analytics allows all this search data to be presented through a new suite of reports.

‘More reports – yippee’ I hear you say! As if there weren’t enough in the first place. Well these ones take their place in the handy pile. But don’t let me convince you on this fact – first read through these three scenarios and then draw your own conclusions.

Scene One – An AdWords Keyword Mystery

It all starts with your prospect typing in a keyword in Google that fires up your AdWords ad. The copy is so enticing that they take the chance and click away. Their look of hope is transformed into a worried scowl as the webpage in front of them is NOT what they expected.

But, fortunately, rather than click that back button they notice a search box on the top right-hand side of the page. (Amazon places theirs in that position so why buck the million dollar online research trend?) OK, I’ll give the site one more chance, they think, and use this search option to find what I’m really looking for. Note: the keyword they type into your site search is not the same as the one they used with Google.

Lucky for you they find the ideal page in the first page of your internal site search results. On viewing this, their scowl turns back to hope, then interest and finally contentment as they purchase the product/service/green widget – you get the picture.

Scene Two – Persistence Pays Off

Just imagine that last week there were 250 prospects that came to your website who were not involved in its design and as such found your navigation a pain to use.

Others had told them that you offered what they wanted but could they find it?! Anyway, a sizable number of this group were motivated souls who were not going to let something as basic as a website defeat them. And it was with a gleam in their eyes that they noticed the same search box that the AdWords visitors had spied. Into this they entered what they wanted and, for some, up came the page that was the proverbial needle in the web page haystack. Others were less fortunate – but these were nothing if not persistent people, so a second search did the trick and there it was in front of them.

Still not convinced that this is all worth it? OK here’s my last scenario.

Final Scene – The Lost Lotto Ticket

Everyone has a list of ‘golden prospects’. These are the hyper-consumers – the groups of people that, if they started buying, would melt away all your business problems into one continuous Big Wednesday experience.

Well, what if a few of these prospects use Google to search for what you offer. But this time it is a listing in the middle part of the search results (the organic area) that catches their Ray Ban-framed eyes. A quick click and they have arrived. Oh no – the page in front of them is not what was expected. Luckily, these are search savvy people so they use your internal search option (big ups for having it there to not waste their time) – but this time they use a term never entered before (this being one of the many reasons why you are having difficulty attracting them) and nothing of interest comes up. Faster than you can say ‘gone in a flash’, they are, leaving you to remain an Aston Martin dreamer forever.

The fact that all three of these scenarios had visitors using the internal search option is nothing too amazing. If you make it available, people will use it. The key point though is that all three scenarios would have been shown in the reports presented once it was correctly integrated with Google Analytics.

For the AdWords visitor, you would have seen the keyword that originally brought them to your site and the subsequent internal search term they used when hunting through your content. You may have paid Google for the term ’laptop computer’ but they could have used ’laptop computer repairs’ once on your site.

The confused but persistent visitors? You would have seen the page they started searching on, the term that they began with, and any subsequent terms that helped them refine their results.

And finally, the dream prospects. Like the AdWords group, you would see the organic search result that delivered them to your site, then the internal search term they used, and the sorry news that they left the site immediately after seeing the results you had to offer.

No doubt your website will be able to add to this list of scenarios but these three should pique your interest enough to want to learn more.

It’s not a big task to get site search working – Google even has its own tool you can use for a small annual fee. Integrating this into Google Analytics also comes with a similar low level of complexity. And, once both are working together, you are one step closer to answering those questions of intent that we all would love to be party to.

What started out as the simple task of sending an email message has now morphed into a complex set of actions that seem to grow in difficulty each month. Spam filters, complex legislation and falling email deliverability are all there to trip up your next campaign. It makes the simple ‘print, fold and mail’ option of direct mail seem a lot more appealing. And then there is telemarketing – hey, all you need there is a dial tone and you are away. Nope, when compared with other marketing channels, email marketing is now most definitely in the too-hard basket. Reason enough to go back to basics and evaluate if all this work is focused on the right areas.

So what should be the real reasons to plan your next or even your first email marketing campaign?

For a few it’s the increased tracking the channel now provides. You can now see who opened the message, clicked the links it contained and even chose to end it all by unsubscribing. Yes, these are important measures – but they are just that, important not critical. They represent the attention your marketing is receiving not the true outcomes we want it to achieve.

Others see a reduced campaign cost as reason enough to embark on their first email marketing campaign. When your cost per message shrinks to cents compared with direct mail dollars it’s hard not to be seduced by the channel. Just think of all that money you could save and use on other campaigns. But once again, cost per message is not the metric to focus on – it is cost per conversion that defines the success of the medium.

For instance, I would happily pay $1.00 for a direct mail communication piece that has a 50% chance of convincing my 500 prospects to purchase my $100 product when compared with the alternative email message that costs a mere 6 cents but converts at a measly 2% rate. In this case, I would I spend $500 for the more expensive option but it would provide me $25,000 in sales, compared with investing the pittance of $30 and achieve a similar pittance return of $1000 extra revenue.

All this brings us neatly to our first key email marketing behaviour – sales conversion. It’s a different metric than the one I propose for customer email messaging, but more on that later.

Producing a freshly minted new customer from a prospect email is a big ask from a small 6 cent message. The mere smidgen of attention it receives means it has some tough work ahead to sell anything. And that’s why it’s an impossible task in most industries to expect your prospect email marketing to transform prospect subscribers into customers. But that doesn’t mean it’s a failed option for this type of marketing – you just need to give it tasks that it has a good chance of achieving.

It helps when picking the right task to imagine the process of moving a prospect to becoming a customer as a series of steps up a conversion ladder. The top rung represents the celebration of a new customer, and the bottom rung is the very first chance to communicate your message.

Here’s an example conversion ladder for a business consultancy practice. The first rung could start with a prospect visiting the website and registering to receive a free report. This action could be followed up by a series of emails that ‘sell’ the option of taking the next rung on the ladder – a complimentary 15 minute telephone business check-up. In the closing minutes of this call, the prospect can be told about the $2500 business benchmarking study that comes with a complete 100% satisfaction guarantee. This message can be reinforced through direct mail, faxes and phone calls. Those that take up the benchmarking study are then ready to be introduced to the final rung of the ladder – the full service consulting options.

Expecting a single email message to communicate the value of the full consultancy coaching is just too much. It’s a far simpler job for it to convince those who have read a report to further invest 15 minutes of their time on the phone with an expert.

Nine times out of ten a multitude of communication channels are required to make a conversion ladder like this work. Email, direct mail, fax, telephone and face-to-face meetings can all be employed to move the prospect upwards. Email does a great job in the early stages when you are looking for a low level of commitment to get things moving. Providing an email address requires less consideration than providing a physical address and phone number.

So, while prospect email marketing moves prospects up the early stages of a conversion ladder, what about customer-focused email marketing?

But before I work through the answer, first ponder this. Imagine you sell a consumable product that is normally re-purchased every 6 weeks. Also imagine that a customer purchased from you 2 years ago and hasn’t been back since. Would you still treat them as a customer? How about the customer who has been purchasing from you every 6 weeks solid for 6 months? How valuable would you rate the frequent purchaser against the long lost customer of 2 years back?

The key metric here is the inherent latency of purchase, that is the time taken between purchases. Ideally you want this to be as short as possible. By modeling your own customer purchase data you will be able to calculate your average latency value for your own customers.

From this data you should be able find those groups that are under- and over-performing against the average. You can then target your email marketing towards those with a high latency value – that is those having large gaps in their purchase activity.

Great customer-based email marketing shortens the times between subsequent purchases. Sometimes offers help and, obviously, the top-value offers should be sent to those with longer latency values. For instance, customers who haven’t purchased in 12 months could be offered a 25% discount while those who purchased only last week could get a 15% reduction.

So, to wrap up, while it’s important to track the number of emails that are opened, which links are clicked, and who chose to unsubscribe, these are just measurements of attention.

They do not truly reflect the real behaviours you want your email messages to influence.

Effective prospect-based email marketing moves people one step further up the sales conversion ladder. So long as each step is a manageable one then it will do well – but force it to take a lead from raw prospect to customer in one go and email will struggle to work.

Measuring the effectiveness of your customer-focused email marketing requires access to your sales data. By tagging the links contained in your customer email messages you can see any online purchases at an aggregate value. But it is purchase data at a customer level that reveals if your messages have affected individual customer purchase latency.

Any marketer who owns an email campaign that moves prospects closer to being buyers and convinces customers to purchase more frequently is a happy soul who would gladly struggle through the complexity to launch their next campaign.

It may come as a surprise to learn that Google has some great resources on offer to help you improve your rankings within its own search engine. Presenting your main content in text, correctly using your on-page META data and legitimately gathering links to your site are just some of the areas covered in detail – all to help you improve your ranking success.

But Google goes a step further than just providing content for you to read and implement. Hidden away in the dark recesses of all this is a handy collection of mini applications that every website owner should be aware of and use to their advantage. Aptly called ‘Webmaster Tools’, this online collection of features allows you to interface directly with the main Google search index.

You can find Webmaster Tools here: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. To get going you need a valid Google Account and a website domain you want to work on. Once both are entered, Google will tell you when its robot last visited the site and the total number of pages it found and indexed while it was there.

In addition to this basic detail it also lists additional options such as: Diagnostics, Site Maps, Tools and the goldmine of the solution, Statistics. But before you can start to access all this extra good stuff you need to confirm with Google that you are authorized to act on behalf of the domain you have registered.

You do this by following a process of verification. There are two options available to you. You can either place a unique piece of META data on your home page or upload a uniquely named text file into the website’s root directory, for instance www.example.com/uniquename.htm. When either is complete the Google system will check all is fine before uncovering the complete range of tools and data available.

The Site Map option is one of the first things to set up once you are verified. Once complete this will help the Google robot locate and index all the pages on your site. A site map is a single page that lists all your site’s pages in a format that search robots like Google‘s can read. Most website content management systems create site maps automatically and in a format that is Google friendly. Otherwise, you will need to create one yourself using the many free site map creation tools available online. Soon after you submit your map to Google it gathers the information and advises you if there were any problems processing what was provided.

The Diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools will highlight any other problem areas – specifically to do with how your website content is presented. For instance, the search robot may have found some broken links when it last visited, or there may have been pages that took too long to load. This area also warns you about Title tags and META description content that are too long, too short or are duplicated across pages. All of these content warnings will need fixing to help you improve your search engine rankings and therefore your organic search traffic.

The detailed information made available in the Links section of Webmaster Tools supports the importance Google places on this area when classifying your website. Not only does this section list the number of inbound links your site receives, where they come from and what pages they go to, but it also reveals the internal links you have between pages of your site. Both of these pieces of information are quite difficult to find from Google through other means.

The Tools section includes some features to help you maintain the way your content is shown in the Google Index. For example, if your website set-up allows both http://example.com/index.html and http://www.example.com/index.html, you can use this section to tell Google which of the two formats you prefer. Plus, if you have any content in the index that you want removed then here is the place to make such a request.

You can always control the areas of your website that are indexed by Google by controlling where its robot visits through the use of a simple text file aptly called robots.txt. Usually found in the root directory of your site, e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt, this file is frequently used to tell the Google robot NOT to index certain areas of the site. Google advises that it checks for this file each day so changes made here should be actioned reasonably promptly. Again in the Tools section, you can check that this robots.txt file is being picked up and actioned on.

Of course I’m leaving the best to last – Statistics. This area uncovers for the first time how your website is performing in Google’s Organic listings. Now, like your Google AdWords reports, you can see not only your site’s top searched queries but also those terms that produced the most clicks. And in each case you can segment this data by search type (image/text), geographic region and time (1 week ago, last month and onwards).

The top search query report reveals the top 20 keywords that Google searchers typed in that resulted in your website being shown in their results. For each keyword, you are shown: its rank (from 1 to 20), the term itself, and where in the search results your site was shown. Slice this data by geographic region and you can start to see the effectiveness of any optimisation you are working on.

While this information is handy it’s the next report that reveals the true gold of Google’s Webmaster Tools.

While it is interesting to see where in the search results your site is appearing it is even more valuable to see which appearances generate clicks. Of course in an ideal world there should be an exact match between these two tables – every time your site came up in the results people clicked on the link to learn more. However, this is never the case. But now you can compare the two – the keywords that were presented with those that generated clicks – to see where the gaps lay.

For instance, you may be surprised to find that certain keywords that scored high on searches may not rank so well when it comes to generating clicks. And remember that while high rankings are good, its clicks that bring with it new prospects. To dig further into why this anomaly is occurring, run your own searches for these high-ranking, low-clicking terms and see what else is around your result that could be pulling the traffic away.

Your Title tag and META description tag should be doing the heavy lifting of convincing people to click on your search result. Make some changes in these areas if you see a page that is all show and no clicks.

Website Tools tells us that this storehouse of valuable keyword data is refreshed weekly but for most websites a monthly review would suffice. That way you can allow enough time to make some changes and see the results come through.

So, there you have it – just a few points to hopefully convince you to spare some time this month to familiarise yourself with Google’s Webmaster Tools. Set up an account and verify your domain and in a few moments all that Google knows will be revealed – you may be in for a pleasant surprise.

The majority of lead-generation activities fit into a simple one-step system. A marketer crafts an offer and then uses advertising to present it to their prospect. Hopefully, the timing of this event coincides with the prospect’s eagerness and ability to buy. If this is the case, the cost of advertising is partly or fully recouped depending on the value of the offer and the target audience of the message.

It’s a simple process for the marketer to follow. Create offer – find audience – dispatch campaign and wait for response. The less decision- making involved for the customer at purchase time, the greater the chances of success.

This process performs well for food, but not so well for professional services. This is an issue because most of us buy food at our local supermarket but if we were going to purchase something as complex as professional services we would most likely start by heading online to review our options. And that’s where the problem is.

You see, the Internet is a fantastic resource for those wanting to research purchases but it’s a challenging one for marketers wanting to use it for lead-generation purposes. Here, the single-step system (an offer presented to the prospect) is prone to fail. There are a couple of reasons why.

Firstly, when online, your prospect’s attention is at a premium – you just don’t have the time to tell them your whole story. For instance, while some websites are adventurously called brochure sites, prospects treat them like one-page flyers – flitting from page to page, forming their own opinion based on the content they scan.

Secondly, you have a limited number of times to deliver your offer message. Offline media, e.g. radio, allows you to use repetition to your advantage. In contrast, how many of us go back to a website five times an hour to read the same offer?

Nope, the single-step system struggles to work on the Internet. So, smart online marketers are replacing it with the two-step process.

The first step involves providing the prospect with content that they perceive as being valuable. Valuable enough in fact to ’trade’ their contact details to access it.

The second step is the lead-nurturing process, which includes a series of follow-up communications. These have two purposes. Firstly, they deliver the prospect more content of value and, secondly, they allow the business to slowly convince the prospect to move along the buying process.

Sometimes marketers struggle to come up with content that prospects want to receive. To help out, here are two case examples that do a great job with content.

Example 1: Bay of Islands Immigration Consultancy (BOIIC)

Sometimes all it takes is being woken up by the cold steel of a burglar’s knife at your neck to make you stop procrastinating about the decision to move to another country.

New Zealand has a lot of appeal for South Africans wanting to make such a move. (And yes the knife reference relates to a true life story.) But while the desire to leave is there, the prospect of all the work ahead can be daunting enough to hold people back.

This report (http://tinyurl.com/2vba8t) includes content to help those in the early stages of considering a move. It was produced based on some extensive research completed by the team at BOIIC on the types of questions South Africans wanted answered. It was further helped that Lyndsay (part of the BOIIC team) had made the exact same move herself less than six months before and could easily relate to those looking for a similar change.

Example 2: Owning a Walk-in Wardrobe That Works

Frequently, the design and construction of a walk-in wardrobe is last on the list when building a new house or renovating an existing property.

In these situations, the space that is left in the corner of the bedroom is deemed to be all there is to work with. This often means poorly designed shelving, no space to swing a cat let alone a dress, and a light switch that has you grasping in the dark to find your way around.

This report by Boston Wardrobes (http://tinyurl.com/3dsors) has been written to help those either renovating or building to plan out their wardrobe BEFORE walls start to be built.

There is still some work a Boston consultant needs to add to ensure the right storage layout is chosen but it ensures the common mistakes are avoided along the way.

These two reports are working well as the first stage of the two-step process. Next month I’ll present some examples of how others are managing the nurturing process necessary for the second stage.

Some marketers view the whole two-step process as a lot more work. They are right – it is!

Yes, it takes longer to set up than a normal one-step offer would and, yes, the follow-up processes take even more time to produce and roll out. But, once complete and fully optimized, you are the proud owner of a two-step system that has some underlying traits that nearly all one-step systems don’t have – repeatability and dependability. And it is on these two words that businesses are built.

When used properly the Google AdWords system can resemble a very nice investment account. You give it $100 and it returns $250 in sales or prospect lead value. Take out your costs and you have a healthy return left over. Add to this the ability to complete this transaction on a daily basis and the overall annual percentage return makes it look on the edge of legal.

Unfortunately, not everyone has this same experience. Some people spend $100 and the story ends there. No sales, no prospects – just the chance to spend the same amount the next day.

And while I applaud the US$16 billion plus that Google booked in revenue for 2007, I also want more for the average advertiser who makes up the bulk of this result.

So, here are my seven steps to follow to ensure that your experience with Google AdWords resembles the investment account I mentioned before rather than the bottomless pit it may look like already.

But first a primer on the basics of AdWords.

The home of the Google AdWords system is the area of the search results that is headed up ’Sponsored Links’ and which sits on the right-hand side and occasionally on the top of your search results screen. (AdWords ads can also be seen live on web pages – more on this in a later article.)

‘Nobody clicks on those things’ is the response I usually get when I point them out to any new online marketer. Well, US$16.59 billion bets they do. Google tells us that 99% of their revenue comes from advertising – AdWords makes up a lion’s share of this. So someone is clicking somewhere.

The act of clicking your ad is quite important. You see, as an AdWords advertiser you are only charged when it is clicked – not when it is shown. This is one of the points that appeals to advertisers – only paying for traffic that decides to visit their web pages.

Your AdWords ad allows you just four lines of text to tell your story: a headline (25 characters), two description lines (35 characters), and a display URL (35 characters).

The online advertising management system you receive when you set up your AdWords account lets you set up each ad so that it is triggered by search keywords or key phrases.

This leaves you to determine what geographic region you want to target (country, city and even suburb, depending on the region you are targeting) and how much you want to spend per click and as an aggregate total value per month for your campaign. Then you are done.

That’s the barest minimum of the basics I have room to cover here, so let‘s move on to the five steps I want to share on how to master the system.

Step 1: Know where your dollars are going before you start spending them

No surprises that this is No 1 for anyone who has read any of my recent articles. Just a few minutes spent setting up your website analytics to accept AdWords traffic will tell you which keywords are performing for you and can save you days of unnecessarily spending (for some this is $100s, for others $1000s) on keywords that are just not performing. Your tracking must show you statistics at a keyword level. You will find that a lot are duds and others are just barely paying their way, leaving a few gems for you to nurture to financial success.

Step 2: Let your ad follow the intent of your searcher

As I have mentioned before, your ad is shown when people type in the keywords that you bid on. These searchers are on a quest for information – the copy in your ad should follow on from what they started with your keyword. Once your whole campaign has run for a week or so you will start to see which keywords are attracting the most searchers and therefore which require specific ads to help carry on the searcher’s train of thought.

Step 3: Allow your landing page to continue the story started with your ad

The web page you take your prospect to after they have clicked on your AdWords ad is called your landing page. It makes sense to take your searcher to a landing page that continues the story they started with their search term rather than hoping they will find their own way from your home page.

Remember, you already know the keyword or keyword phrase these people are searching with. Use this information to take them to the exact landing page on your site that best matches that term.

Step 4: Test each step of the way

For each AdWords ad you write, Google allows you to have another by its side. These two (or more) ads can now be set up to share the traffic the keyword generates. This can be either as an even split or to favour the better performing ad. It always pays to write a minimum of two ads to see which one hits the spot. As you progress you will start to see what types of words and emphasis your ad copy needs to help you maximise both your click-through rate and, more importantly, your conversion rate.

Step 5: Set and forget at your peril

A Google AdWords campaign is not something that once set up can run on unattended for ever. It needs regular tuning to get the most from your investment.

As other advertisers jump onto the system your bid prices will need to increase – otherwise your ads may move down and even off the first search results page. (Have you visited page 2 of Google recently?)

Plus, the results in the organic area (the main results area that is free) change on what seems to be a weekly basis. What may have been missing in this area – causing people to look right and click in the sponsored zone – could well now be there, resulting in falling click rates.

A few hours of AdWords attention per month is all it needs. Something either to ad to your list of online marketing tasks or to subcontract out to our team.

So there you have it – a few steps to take that will get you a bit closer to owning a Google AdWords campaign that resembles a very lucrative ATM, which delivers more money than you put in, rather than a bottomless pit that swallows all you give it.

Linked to the continued rise of SPAM (recent figures have it representing 70% to 90% of all email) is the similar rise in complexity of the email filtering tools being produced to stop it from arriving in your email inbox.

Unfortunately, this does not bode well for legitimate email marketers as they experience, with increasing regularity, these same filters incorrectly blocking their solicited messages thinking they are of the unsolicited kind.

If you are lucky and have a newsletter that has formed a tight bond with its subscriber base, the first indication that this is occurring is when subscribers contact you complaining that they have not received the latest edition.

However, if you publish on a less frequent basis and/or don’t have such a connection then all you may notice is a subtle but ongoing drop in open and click-through rates.

The tasks involved in solving email deliverability problems range from the simple to the complex. Here are five tasks that you can complete before requiring some professional help with those that are more complex. Each task has the goal of ensuring that your message content and the way it is dispatched makes them look more like legitimate email marketing and less like unsolicited junk.

Firstly, it pays set up systems so you, not your subscribers, know when you have a problem. Usually the faster you can react to the problem the easier it is to find a resolution.

Make time to create your own set of seed addresses across the top New Zealand ISPs. Use this list for test sending of campaigns. Also include these same addresses in your live list so that you can confirm both tests and live messages made it through OK.

Establishing these email inboxes across the various ISPs will take time. But it’s time well spent when compared with the amount of effort you put into your content creation – only to have this wasted when the message fails to successfully arrive to the bulk of your list.

Once your seed list sending confirms that you have a problem, you can work through the following actions.

Make sure that you are sending both formats of email content in the one message. Most subscribers will be able to receive your colourful HTML format but also include the TEXT version. These need to be sent in the industry standard multipart format. (Most commercial email marketing sending applications do this by default – Outlook doesn’t.) Spam messages are predominantly sent in just the HTML format.

The ‘cleaner’ your send list, the greater the chances your messages will make it through. A ‘dirty’ list includes a high proportion of invalid and bounced email addresses in the send. When spammers target a domain, such as xtra.co.nz, they use tools to automatically create options for the name of the email account. For example, autogen.name@xtra.co.nz. Not surprisingly, a lot of these options don’t relate to valid email boxes and show up as bounces. Your send could well mimic this behaviour if you are not diligent in removing previous bounced or invalid email addresses.

If you have completed both of the previous tasks and messages are still being blocked then you have to look at your message content.

Send a message to your seed lists with just a few lines of non-promotional style text including hyperlinks to the websites you want to link to in the live message and using images in the HTML version that are hosted on the image servers that you will use in the live send.

If the message still fails to arrive, you may have an issue with some of your domains being on a black list. You can confirm this by visiting the following site and signing up for the trial to see if the IP addresses of your domains have made it onto any black lists: www.blacklistmonitor.com. If this is the case, you will need to work through the removal process to prove your case with the list manager.

This may sound scarier than it is – most list managers are keen to ensure they are blocking the correct type of email and when notified of any errors will make the necessary changes to remove you from their list.

If your message does arrive then the problem is with the content of the message and not so much the reputation of the domains behind its creation.

The quick way to solve this problem is by using one of the range of SPAM checking tools on the market. These tools will scan your message and then email you back a report telling you exactly which part of your email content is causing the problems. (Contact us at Permission and we can send you a price list of what’s on offer.)

Without such a tool you have to meticulously work through your content, removing all but the first few lines of text, testing this with a send to see if it comes through. If you strike success then you can gradually reveal more content in your message until you find which words are causing the issue.

Your cause is helped by having a reasonably equal balance between the number of images and amount of text in the HTML version of your message. Spam messages tend to hide their ‘problem text’ that automatically triggers filters by replacing it with images. This has the knock-on effect of producing a message with a high image to text ratio. (If you are completely stuck and need to include a word that has the same triggering effect in your legitimate messages then you can do the same, remembering to do this for only occasional words rather than complete paragraphs.)

Tried all these steps and are still having problems? Then try to find out what – if anything – has changed between when your messages seemed to be delivering OK and now. New creative guidelines, an implementation of a different email sending tool, perhaps a new hosting platform for your images – all of these can be linked to possible deliverability problems. And, if you are able, try to revert to the old way just to get the current campaign underway to allow you some time to work through a more permanent fix.

For those making it to this stage without any noticeable improvements, it’s time to call in some professional advice. We offer a complimentary 15 minute delivery assessment service – just email us at deliverability@permission.co.nz to book a time.

Another twelve months of email marketing lie ahead but should you carry on in January just as you ended in December?

The start of a New Year is a great time to take stock of the last 12 months of email marketing statistics to determine what trends, if any, signify the need for an email marketing strategy review.

To start this process I suggest you tabulate the key email messaging statistics for last year’s campaigns including invalids, bounces, opens, clicks and unsubscribes.

Firstly, let’s start with invalids and opens. Any trends you see in these two values should match any changes you have made in your data collection and management methods.

For instance, if you collected a large number of new email addresses through a trade show in June by asking prospects to write their details onto a card then, when you emailed them with July’s newsletter, both invalid and bounce percentages should have risen due to this quick but notoriously unreliable method of data collection.

Likewise, if you started to collect permission for your email newsletter online by asking subscribers to fill in a form on which they confirmed their email address twice then your invalid and bounce rates should have been seen to slowly fall.

If the values of both invalids and bounces have remained relatively flat, with your bounce rate being below 2.5% and your invalid rate below 2% then all is fine. Your work here may be on finding new methods to re-activate those already in these two groups.

Managing the re-activation of bounced email addresses is not the easiest of tasks in which to achieve and as such is frequently missed. Perhaps this is the year that you instigate a process that helps to find these lost subscribers?

When tracking your open rates you may see a slow decline. Don’t be too concerned – this is due to an increasing percentage of subscribers using email clients that suppress images by default. (The open rate statistic is gathered by tracking a subscriber’s ability to download an image that is specific to them but otherwise hidden in the email content.)

However, if the last 12 months’ figures show a falling open rate that is greater than a 5% change then your issues may lie with your content rather than any industry-wide issue and further investigation will be required.

For those with a relatively consistent email list, e.g. a monthly newsletter, I would advise reviewing each email send with a view to splitting subscribers who have opened the message into two groups – new and existing subscribers. (New being those who see this month’s edition as their first.)

The data may show a disproportionate number of new subscribers opening the message compared with those already on the list. This reveals content that appeals the first few times it is received but then quickly wanes as editions continue to roll out.

If there is no conclusive evidence based on splitting the open rate by the recency of subscription, try to look further into the make up of those opening across multiple editions to see if there is some sort of common ‘opener subscriber’ profile.

Conversely, for those not opening – are there any specific characteristics in this group, e.g. high value customers, low value customers? For some reason the communication is not continuing to resonate with a specific audience segment(s).

If one of the common components of your ‘non-opener profile’ is the ISP they are using to collect their email through then you could be having issues with successful deliverability to this audience. Check to ensure that you have a number of seed addresses for this ISP and run some of your own tests using the content of prior editions to see if this is the problem.

For those newsletters that rely on a website to hold most of their content, click-through rates are strong gauges of content comprehension. These statistics are not artificially deflated by any outside technology trends and as such can be viewed as a true reflection on the success of your email communication methods.

A twelve-month review of what content generates the most click throughs will help to further cement your understanding of the content your email audience finds the most appealing. Likewise, the converse statistic will guide you on what not to include in your next edition.

Falling click-through rates are a concern. As for falling open rates, it helps to find any common subscriber profiles among those doing more or less clicking.

To help you some email dispatch tools automatically show the percentage of existing and new clickers as individual tools for each campaign. In this case editions that show an even split between new and old clickers reveal content that is appealing to both subscriber groups. Other tools just bundle your clickers into the one aggregate group for you to split out yourself.

I see the unsubscribe action as being somewhat like the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff of inattention. Falling open and click-through rates are the precursor to people taking up this option. A high proportion of those not opening or clicking will have mentally unsubscribed to your communications well before they choose to click on your link to confirm their status.

That said, after plotting your twelve-month unsubscribe trend you should see a relatively steady set of unsubscribe figures – any sharp increases are strong cause for concern.

So there you go – just a few quick ways to ensure your email marketing efforts for 2008 are built on your learning from 2007 allowing for any tweaks, where required, to your overall communication strategy.

In the last edition of this newsletter I challenged you to make 2008 the year that you sit down, put pen to paper and document some goals for the 12 months ahead.

Well for those of you who have yet to find the time, or a pen, to complete the task here are a few simple ways for you to configure your Google Analytics account so that it takes the lead in your new path of goal setting.

Previously, I have discussed how the Site Overlay feature in Google Analytics allows you to ‘see’ the pathways visitors take when wandering through the pages of your website. By setting up goals for your Analytics account you can now record when these visitors end up viewing the most important pages your site provides.

These pages are usually the ones that say ‘thank you’. Thank you for registering, thank you for contacting us, thank you for your order – all pages that ideally every visitor to your website should see.

A standard installation of Google Analytics allows you to track four of these pages as goals. The goals area of your account can be found with its own navigation area, on the left-hand side of the screen.

Goals are quick and easy to set up – but don’t let the speed of their creation fool you. Once established, Analytics goals, and the subsequent data they provide, can uncover a whole new level of understanding when it comes to determining the behaviors of your visitors and the true value of the alternate streams of Internet traffic your website attracts.

To create a goal you need to know the URL of the web page you want to track. This page also needs to have your Google Analytics tracking code on it. If you are not sure if the page you want to track has the code, and you know people have found it before, then just search for it in your Analytics content reports. If it is not there, then check that the tracking code is installed properly.

Usually, the URL of the page you want to track is the same for all visitors who find it. If this is the case then you can just copy it directly into the Goal URL set-up field.

However, if the page URL is different each time your visitors find it (as is sometimes the case with some content management system URLs) then you will need some help to describe the URL in such a way that Analytics can track its use. Just make contact with us if this is the case with your installation and we can advise on the work required to set up a goal for a page like this.

When setting up your goal you can also configure it to track the expected pathways you imagine visitors will take when arriving at your goal page. For instance: look for product; add to shopping cart; login or create account; agree to delivery terms; confirm delivery address; and finally, confirm sale.

What’s more, your goal reporting will show you how effective your site is in moving people from stage to stage as it plots the relative percentage drop off in visitor volumes along your configured paths.

Once your goal is set up, I suggest you complete some test actions so you can expect to see some data in your reports in the next few days. (Remembering Google Analytics reporting is not live.) When you check back, all going well, your account will show your goal reports with both test and – if you are fortunate – some live actions.

So what now?

Well, here are just a few ways I use the Google Analytics goal data collected within my own account.

Firstly, it helps me keep my Google AdWords costs down. One of the key tasks when running an AdWords campaign is determining which keywords are delivering the best conversion rate for their click cost (or even better cost per conversion).

Finding this data is a breeze once I have linked my Google AdWords and Analytics accounts. Now with goals set up for the actions that need tracking I can quickly and easily find a cost per conversion at an AdWords campaign, ad group and even keyword level.

Plus, if you dig slightly deeper in the reports you can start to see how your keyword bidding affects your ads position and its relative conversion cost.

Goal tracking also helps me see the different behaviours that occur between new and repeat visitors. For instance, you may have a website whereby visitors come once to research, leave for a few days and then return to purchase. The Fireclick index I have mentioned in previous newsletters will provide you with benchmark conversion rates for these types of visitor actions.

And as I mentioned before, you can start to evaluate how different types of traffic effect your goal completion rates. As an example, you may be tracking a newsletter sign-up process as one of your goals. Your reporting may show that traffic arriving directly to your site has an 8.9% completion rate for this task, while visitors arriving from referring sites that carry your article content show a healthy 18% conversion rate. While the referring traffic may be lesser in volume the net growth in new subscribers it produces could make it more valuable. But what about using Analytics goals to track e-commerce transactions?

Well, you can configure a goal for this task but then you wouldn’t be able to know the exact transaction value for each sale.

Fortunately, with a little bit more work building the Analytics code on your order confirmation page you can pass directly to your Analytics account, which captures all the order summary and product detail information you want for future tracking.

I’ll cover this in more detail in next month’s update. Suffice to say there is a ton of valuable data that this extra work unlocks for those using their website for direct sales.

So there you have it; have fun with this great feature and why not take some time today to set up some simple goals in your Google Analytics account and begin to learn even more about your website’s ability to convert visitors to customers

Like the seven strategies that I will carry across to 2008 there are also a few software tools that have proved their worth so much in ‘07 that they will remain on my desktop for ‘08. Here are just two that will end up saving you hours of needless work.

This first tool paid its way in the first week I had it running. We manage a lot of different website accounts on behalf of clients – AdWords, Analytics, email software – they all require separate logins and passwords to be remembered. We tried storing these data on a central Intranet, but it quickly got out of control – then we found RoboForm.

This great tool securely stores all this data in one place and integrates cleanly with both Firefox and IE. Now we just pick the site we want to enter from the list RoboForm provides and let it do all the hard work of finding the page, entering the correct details and submitting the form, and then returning to us the client web page we want to start working on. It’s best to check out the site and download the free trial to see it for yourself – go to www.RoboFormTool.com.

My last tool pick has been on my Toshiba Laptop for at least 2 years and as far as I can see it will remain there for a very long time. We are in the business of imparting information and sometimes a picture of what we see onscreen with some highlighting and text to draw the eye to the area we are discussing is all we need to get the message across. SnagIt from TechSmith allows us to capture screen pictures in seconds, highlight them with extra colour and then annotate the parts that need more text. From here we can do a quick copy and paste into an email message and the job is done – now everyone can see what we are talking about. Again there is a trial version – go to www.techsmith.com to download it.