November 30, 2011
Google Adwords, Website Analytics
No Comments
We’ve been working on a Google Adwords campaign for an American client recently and the results have surprised us.
The campaign is targeting people in the US who are searching for phrases like ‘free apps’, ‘free apps for my cell phone’, and numerous variations. Although the focus of the client business is very much ‘apps’, our original thinking was that we would be attracting potential buyers searching from desktop/laptop based computers. After all, if you want to get ‘free apps’ then it’s usually a lot easier to search and view via a larger screen (than a mobile phone).
The screenshot below shows a very different picture. It shows that the vast majority of people used Android to search on those phrases (e.g. ‘free apps’). These are people who then clicked on the Adwords adverts …
The screenshot shows only the top 7 of browser/operating system combinations but it’s noticeable that Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox (all on Windows) between them only made up 302 of the 1,890 people who clicked on the Google adverts. That’s just 16%, meaning that 84% of Adwords adverts got clicked by people using mobile devices.
OK, there are two key points screaming out here:
- The business focus is very much ‘mobile’ and so it’s perhaps natural that people would search on their mobile devices and click through on the Adwords adverts.
- The campaign is running in the USA, which is, to be fair, much more ‘mobile’ in its attitude than here in the UK.
- The target market for the US client is people born in the 1990’s.
The reality (for now) in the UK is that PC/Mac based searching, is going to remain dominant for quite some time (in most business sectors). However, in some business sectors searchers will lean more towards mobile (e.g. consumer brands).
Every business, regardless of sector, should be keeping an eye on which browsers/operating systems people are using in order to find their website. The reality is that, for now, the ‘mobile’ type searchers are going to be low and so it’s perfectly acceptable to check such things once every couple of months.
How do you check which browsers/operating systems people are using?
The answer is Google Analytics. It’s free, easy to get set up on your website, and for certain types of information like this, it’s useful. By monitoring which browsers and operating systems your website visitors use, and mapping it out (e.g. on a graph) from month to month, you’ll start to see changes in trends and, at the appropriate time, may want to adjust your online presence to cater for the mobile market in a better way than it currently does.
November 29, 2011
Google Adwords
No Comments
That was the search phrase used to find the Custwin website recently, as you can see in the screenshot below …
Because the person had taken the time to look through our website we took the time to contact them (they had signed up for the email newsletter) to help answer their question because it’s a very good question.
A Google Adwords consultant can cost from a very small amount per month through to a ridiculous amount per month. However, there is a recommended path to help whittle them down to a shortlist, having identified a few to contact …
- If they jump in straight away with a cost to work on Adwords campaigns then discard them immediately. They will be purely interested in getting the business from you.
- If they ask you some important questions, then consider them further. Such questions would include:
- Do you know how many visitors you get to your website each month, and how many of those convert into enquiries?
- Have you had your website fully analysed to identify weaknesses that would stop Adwords clicks from adequately converting into enquiries/business?
- Are you prepared to make website changes that will help convert more visitors into enquiries?
Yes, an Adwords consultant could set up a campaign, working within a clicks budget, and it could convert clicks to enquiries. But if the website isn’t strong enough then the conversion rate is going to be low. The end result of that is:
- The Adwords consultant gets paid for their work and they’re gone.
- Google gain revenues from the clicks.
- The website owner feels robbed because their perception is that “Adwords doesn’t work”.
In my view, a good Google Adwords consultant shouldn’t consider themselves to be an Adwords consultant. Instead they should look on themselves as being a website profitability consultant because Adwords doesn’t work effectively without website strength.
Many many times we’ve spoken to people who want Adwords campaigns and we’ve (nicely) referred to website weaknesses that should be strengthened before spending any money at all on Adwords.
It’s the same rule as with organic SEO – if someone wants to charge money to raise positioning in Google then run a mile if they haven’t asked the same important questions that you should ask a potential Adwords consultant. Whatever the traffic source, if it costs money then that traffic needs to convert into business. And if that means holding back on advertising a business while the website is strengthened then so be it.
The costs of an Adwords or organic SEO consultant need to be recouped over a period of time. Maybe not instantly but over a period of months. If a consultant is willing to work with you over a longer period of time, rather than earn a big wedge of money upfront then that makes them much more accountable and so potentially of more value to you.
November 26, 2011
Website Analytics, Website Strategy
1 Comment
People new to me often say: “my website doesn’t get me enough business – how can I make it a success?”.
The answer to that starts with some simple maths that works as follows …
Add up
… all your website visitors during a period of time (typically, a month). Google Analytics and other website statistics packages will give you this figure.
If the total is less than around 300
… then your website doesn’t really have enough traffic to expect results from. Focus on targeted, but gradual and inexpensive, promotion of your website to raise numbers.
If the total is more than around 300
… you at least have some figures to be meaningful. So ….
Subtract the rubbish
… this means look through all the individual visits to your website and subtract all those who don’t look like being ‘useful’ visits. For example, people you can identify as competitors, students doing research from college, search engines visiting your website, you or your staff on your website. There are many types of ‘not-useful’ visitors.
This bit isn’t quite so easy with most basic website statistics packages but a free trial of A1WebStats will help you here by showing you the information that you can subtract.
Determine the ‘useful visitors’ figure
… meaning: see how many of your overall website visitors were potentially useful to you (based on what they searched for and which pages they looked at on your website, plus also companies they visited from).
Divide enquiries gained by ‘useful visitors’
… however many enquiries you gained during the month, divide those by the number of ‘useful visitors’ (NOT by the overall visitors because that gives a false figure).
If the result is anything above 5% then smile
… based on work we’ve done over the years, if you are getting at least 5% of your ‘useful’ website visitors converting into enquiries then you’re on the right path. For some sectors/focus areas we set an expectation of at least 10% Anything above about 15% useful clicks to enquiries ratio is pretty much unheard of.
Equals
Enquiries gained divided by Useful Visitors equals your starting point. Do this for 2-3 months to build up a proper picture and then consider getting help to raise the success of your website (if you need it).
November 25, 2011
Google Adwords
5 Comments
No, I’m not talking about when you speak to Google, I’m talking about the Google Adwords system providing a poor service to the customers, i.e. those people who are searching for anything within Google.
This is right at the top of my list of annoyances with the Google Adwords system and it flies in the face of Google’s so-called ‘quality’ message they keep spouting on about.
The wish
To use Google Adwords to advertise a product/treatment called Dermal Fillers so that when people are searching for them within a geographical area, they can see the advert and hopefully click on it.
The process
Create a series of keyword phrases such as:
• Dermal fillers Bexley
• Bexley dermal fillers
(and similar)
Link them to a relevant advert such as:
Dermal Fillers in Bexley
We’ve Been Delighting Our Dermal
Fillers Clients For Over 10 Years.
Give it a budget and let it run.
The result
Google rejects the keyword phrases because they are apparently ‘Low search volume’. According to Google, if they consider a keyword phrase to be low search volume then they won’t allow the advert to be displayed, regardless of how much budget is being offered.
End result: a campaign that can’t run because Google won’t allow it.
So, let’s see what adverts Google WILL allow if someone searches on a phrase such as ‘dermal fillers Bexley’ (i.e. someone who actually wants dermal fillers in the Bexley area) …
First, those in the yellow box …
And then some of those in the right-hand column …
See anything glaring about them?
That’s right – not one of them refers to Bexley! So, for the person searching for ‘dermal fillers Bexley’ they see Pay Per Click results that are generic and don’t refer to Bexley. Are they going to click on those adverts? Possibly, but after clicking on a few they’re not going to bother looking at others if there’s nothing catering for Bexley.
What happens in reality
Google is effectively saying to the advertiser:
“I know that your advert is highly specific but hey, we’d rather stop you from being visible and instead allow you to go head-to-head competing against other advertisers who all want to be visible under the much more generic ‘dermal fillers’ phrase”
You could type into Google ‘dermal fillers for my dog’ and you’d still see those same adverts appear, which shows that they’re all visible because of the ‘dermal fillers’ that the advertisers have chosen to be visible under (obviously, no-one would need dermal fillers for a dog!).
So the person searching for ‘dermal fillers Bexley’ may click on a few of those adverts but they’ll be disappointed because they don’t cover their geographical area of interest. The searcher feels cheated and the advertisers have paid for irrelevant clicks. So the searcher thinks that the adverts are rubbish and is less likely to click on those adverts in the future – which means that Google lose out.
What should happen
The Google Adwords system needs a good shake-up.
If an advertiser wants to be visible under ‘dermal fillers Bexley’ and accepts that even though there may not be huge searches for that phrase but they’re accept that, then that should be their right to be visible when people type that phrase!
The Google Adwords system should see such a keyword phrase and effectively think “ok, if someone searches for that phrase then we’ll make the advert visible right at the top because:
a) there’s a good match between the search phrase, the advert, and the website, and;
b) it’s more relevant than the other adverts that could display.
However, IF the ‘dermal fillers Bexley’ advert doesn’t get a strong enough level of clicks then we’ll penalise it”.
That is a completely fair system for Google to adopt.
But Google won’t do that. Why?
Because it’s much more profitable for Google to stop advertisers from having their niche keyword phrases triggering highly-specific adverts. Those advertisers are then forced down a path of using generic phrases (such as ‘dermal fillers’), which are more expensive per click.
The ultimate effect of all this
Searchers have to take longer to find what they are looking for in Google (which takes up their valuable time).
Searchers also think that the pay per click listings are poor, which makes them less likely to click on them in the future.
Potential advertisers can’t advertise under niche phrases, instead having to pay higher costs per click competing against everyone else who has to advertise generically. This makes the advertisers cost per acquisition higher, which damages their business strength.
Google win in the short term (people feeling as if they HAVE to abide by Google’s Adwords rules and so paying for expensive clicks) but long term will, I feel, take a right kicking if something seriously competitive comes along. Are you listening Bing.com, you ’slow-to-wake-up-to-opportunities-beast’?
November 24, 2011
Google Adwords, Website Development, Website Strategy
No Comments
Sometimes it may feel that you have the worst website in your industry. Day to day the visitor enquiries are non-existent or very low, and you think things are bad with your website.
We’ve reviewed and helped literally thousands of websites in our time and although there’s little excuse for having an underperforming website, it can sometimes be comforting that there are people out there with a worse website and focus than yours.
This one will appeal particularly to people in the holidays industry. There are some brilliant websites in the holidays industry, particularly the niche holiday websites. Then there are those in the middle ground. And sometimes you find something that is spectacularly off target.
We had an enquiry come in recently and it said:
“i run a travel agency ..i do advertising on google. i want to buy 50 to 100 keywords for a year and i want them to be on top..can you please tell me how much it will cost me for a year?”
Apart from it being one of those ‘how long is a ball of string?’ questions (and actually impossible to answer even if knowing what keyword phrases were wanted), the focus was very much on advertising.
A bit of dialogue later and it turned out that the person wanted to be visible under various ‘holidays’ type phrases. So I looked at their main navigation bar as there was nothing else jumping out from their website saying ‘holidays’. I won’t name the company because that would embarrass them (no, they’ve not become a client – they ran very fast when they were told how much work they’d need to do in order to justify using Google Adwords). That navigation bar displays as:
Nothing about holidays in there.
Eventually I worked out that if you click on ‘Flights’ it takes you to what is their holidays page and you can see a sample below …
Putting aside me wondering whether ‘Adeliade’ is anywhere near ‘Adelaide’ (I have a degree in being pedantic about website errors), I thought “hmmm, Adelaide for £811 – let’s look at that” and I clicked on the box.
Well, I tried to click on it. But it doesn’t go any deeper.
On discussing that with the website owner they were surprised that anyone might actually want to look at details of the holidays on offer and “surely they’d see the price and ring up to find out more?”
So, we’re at the point where this company wants to spend money on sending Google Adwords clicks to a website that is woefully inadequate. In fact, it makes even mediocre holiday websites look good. At that point I (nicely) said that I wouldn’t be prepared to set up such an Adwords campaign and that they’d be advised to run a mile from anyone who would be prepared to (before the website is strengthened).
I suspect that they’ll do exactly that. God forbid, they’ll go directly to Google who will quite happily help them set up an Adwords campaign that links through to a rubbish website (they have a department dedicated to doing just that). It was very clear from the conversation that they had an Adwords tunnel vision and nothing mattered more than sending traffic to the website. Unfortunately, this is a common disease that can lead to financial death.
Maybe it’s time that we had some sort of central system where business owners can submit their website details and ask for people to grade it on various factors (design, content, depth, etc.). Just a quick 2 minute appraisal ticking boxes and maybe adding in a few comments. Everyday people could respond, as could website professionals. The intention wouldn’t be to sales-pitch services on offer but to give just a small bit of time to website owners that need a collective view (rather than one opinion) of where their website needs to be stronger.
With such a rating system in place, people like me would be less likely to get enquiries about Adwords from people who are clearly not yet ready to line the pockets of Google.
November 11, 2011
Website Development, Website Strategy
No Comments
Any excuse to come up with some website success tips, in recognition of today being the 11th of the 11th 2011, here are 11 tips that will help you gain more business from your website if you spend just a bit of time on one or more of them …
- Increase your blogging frequency
Blogs that are useful to people help to keep you in their minds for when they may need your products/services, or may be able to recommend you onto others. If you don’t blog, then create just one a month. If you do blog, then increase the frequency. If you’re completely stuck on how to get started then take a look at http://jododdssocialmedia.com/op/business-blogging-2/business-bloggers-manual/ – a real bargain.
- Follow up with 11 website visitors who didn’t make contact
If people from companies visit your website but don’t make contact then it makes sense to see if you can salvage something (by making contact with them). If you don’t have the ability to identify companies that have visited your website then take a look at http://www.a1webstats.com/what-is-a1webstats/a1webstats-features/companies-visited/ and take advantage of the free trial.
And if you’re asking yourself the question “how do I know which person within the visiting company came to my website?”, the answer is “you don’t”. However, using systems like LinkedIn and your existing contacts, you may find a route into that company. If nothing else, a cold call to that company, trying to get through to someone who may have been interested in your products/services, has got to be worth a try. Following the ‘11’ theme, if you contacted 11 companies who you know visited your website, and only 1 of them came to anything, you’ve still won more than you would have done by not doing anything.
- Boost your testimonials
How many testimonials do you have on your website? Do you have testimonials related to specific products or services that you provide? Do you think that potential customers could be more likely to make contact with you, having visited your website, if you have more testimonials from happy customers?
Boosting the number of testimonials on your website by even just one is a step in the right direction.
- Analyse the competition
Select a phrase that you want to be/are visible under within Google. Type it in and spend a bit of time looking through the websites of competitors. What are they doing on their websites that make you think “that’s a nice touch”? Replicate it and then beat it in some way.
- Make a small website change
If you know how many enquiries your website typically generates as a percentage of website visitors, then you’ll probably like to increase that. By making just one small website change you can improve the website visitor experience. For example, you could put in some fresh graphics, add in a video, offer something for free, or change the font to be nicer. If you’ve followed tip 4 above you’ll probably have plenty of ideas for making changes. Then sit back and see how that has an impact on visitors vs enquiries. If it’s successful then make another small change.
- Analyse your biggest landing page
Apart from your home page, see which page of your website has most people landing on it (e.g. from search engines). Analyse how each of those visitors then navigates through your website. What did they type (e.g. into Google) to find that biggest landing page? How many of them moved beyond that landing page? Do you think their visits were a success for you?
Don’t know how to dig deep into people who land on certain website pages? Take a look at http://www.a1webstats.com/what-is-a1webstats/a1webstats-features/entry-exit-pages/ and feel free to sign up for the free trial.
- Write something fantastic
What could you write, as an article/blog within your website, that you think is the best article on that particular subject? If you invested the time to create such an article and then made it visible online (e.g. get involved in online discussions about the subject and refer people back to your article), then surely that would bring traffic and interest back to your website?
Everyone has at least one world-beating article inside them – it’s just a case of putting fingers to keyboard and start typing. Create the article, promote it online, and then monitor it (see tip 6) to see when people click through to that page of your website.
- Highlight your contact details
People are short of time. When they look through your website they may get to a certain page that interests them the most. If your contact details (phone number and email are sufficient) are highly visible on every page of your website then it makes it easy for people to make contact with you (instead of having to go to a contact details page, where they won’t be able to still see the page that was of most interest to them).
- Offer a guarantee
What can you offer as a guarantee related to one or more of your services or products? If you had a big bold ‘Guarantee’ type graphic that links through to a page that explains the guarantee, could that give people more reason to buy from you/make contact? Be big and bold and show people that you’re good enough to offer a 100% no quibble guarantee. You will notice your enquiries to visitors ratio increase as a result.
- Pick a poor performer
Identify a page of your website that doesn’t get much traffic (see http://www.a1webstats.com/what-is-a1webstats/a1webstats-features/visited-pages/ for how to do this) and ask yourself whether it matters that the page doesn’t get much attention. If you think it’s a valuable page within your website then consider how you could adapt other parts of your website so that they point to that page in a better way.
- Set a figure-based goal
Just because of the blog subject, pick a number as the figure to base a goal on. For example, if you have 50 people who contact you via your website, over a 3 month period, set a target of an 11% increase over the following 3 months, and do whatever you need to in order for that to happen. Or, if your website traffic needs to be higher, set a percentage (11%?!) increase that you want to achieve within a certain timescale.
Whatever the goal it needs to be related to you gaining more business from your website and it needs to be written down and measured at milestones along the way.
Keep watching for a similar blog on 12/12/12.
November 3, 2011
Google Adwords
No Comments
You’ve got to hand it to Google because they will innovate all the time that they think it’ll bring more money to their pockets via PPC advertising.
The search view for Google has recently changed and while on the surface it’s a cosmetic change, there’s always an agenda that financially benefits Google. The screenshot below shows a search for ‘private schools’ – can you spot the difference to how it would have been viewed before?
The ‘on the surface’ difference is that the map graphic on the right is much more of a rectangle, which looks kind of good.
The real difference though is that the organic search results don’t appear to have as much space and the PPC adverts now have a huge chunk of white space next to them. This has the effect of drawing more attention to the PPC adverts.
It’s all very clever stuff from Google and I’m sure it’ll get more people clicking on the PPC adverts (and less people clicking on the organic search results). But it’s yet another example of Google trying to force people into PPC advertising which can only ever push up the costs per click (as more advertisers compete for positioning). Google win of course but for companies who want a presence in Google it’s going to become increasingly costly.
I continue to wait for Microsoft to finally wake up and work out that they can corner the ‘small business’ market with a more intelligent way of advertising via Bing.com PPC solutions.
Smaller businesses are suffering in the current economy but they have the potential to give things a kick start once they start succeeding more themselves. A mass of smaller businesses doing better for themselves can have a much stronger impact on the economy than the bigger businesses can. If someone (e.g. Microsoft via Bing.com) makes it easier for small businesses to advertise, cost-effectively, then Google will find itself out in the cold trying to retain advertising revenues from a search system that would have lower numbers of people using it, having started using Bing.com more and more.
If Microsoft don’t seize the opportunity then something else will come along and eat up chunks of what is currently a Google-dominated world. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the online directories (e.g. Applegate) really up their game to attract people to them for their searches, instead of going to the major search engines.
For now, expect to see Google continue to do whatever it can to push companies down the route towards having to use PPC advertising.
November 3, 2011
Google Places, Online Reputation Management
No Comments
Sometimes I wonder who is looking after the web presence of some companies/organisations because sometimes it appears that there’s either no management at all.
One web-related area that needs management is Google Reviews and the following example shows why. If you search Google for ‘private schools Canterbury’ this is highly prominent in the results:
Within that listing you can see a link to ‘4 Google reviews’ and if you click on that you get taken to the King’s School place page, which includes the reviews as shown below:
Those reviews can be best broken down as follows ..
- One 5 star review with no text to back it up. That has little value at all.
- One review (Koo) that appears to be from a staff member, who hasn’t grasped that Google Reviews are for other people to post, not the school!
- Two very negative reviews.
The nature of Google Reviews means that anyone with a Google account can provide a review. It’s an open system and so people can review in any way that they like. The issue here is that there appears to be no system in place that reviews what’s being said about King’s School. This means that either:
- A staff member has ‘web’ as a job and isn’t on the ball.
- Whoever looks after ‘web’ for King’s School either doesn’t have a brief to keep an eye out for such things, or if they have, aren’t doing it.
What’s surprising here is that there’s no excuse. King’s, being a private school, will not be short of money. They presumably want to be gaining new pupils and so you’d think would be aware of what is effectively negative publicity that’s highly visible in Google. The costs of getting someone to keep an eye on such things (plus keeping track of other online visibility) are negligible compared to the business they must be losing from such poor reviews.
What should they be doing? These are the basics for any company/organisation that could potentially have Google Reviews written about them …
- Have a diary note to regularly check the Google Reviews.
- Build up a portfolio of customers who would be willing to post positive reviews when needed.
- Having ensured that there are many positive reviews initially, if a negative review happens then use step 2 above to create an influx of positive reviews so that the negative starts to get lost.
King’s School is just the example here. Many companies/organisations will have numerous people who could provide positive reviews about them, but who don’t take the initiative. It’s stunning that King’s School has only 4 Google Reviews out of the thousands of pupils (and parents of pupils) who have been in and out of their doors over the years.
Let’s fast forward in time to roughly 2013. A search for something like ‘private schools Canterbury’ will bring up more Google Places listings and those listed will have numerous Google Reviews, the majority of which should be positive.
Now is the time for geographically focused organisations/companies to be waking up to Google Reviews and capitalising on what is still a relatively untapped way to be visible in a positive way.
November 2, 2011
Blogs, Branding, Twitter
No Comments
This is for those who doubt the power of using Twitter AND have something that people want to hear about.
It started with a Custwin blog about using keywords in a domain name for SEO benefits that was picked up by Jo Dodds and tweeted onto her own followers. You can see that tweet below …
Jo has a strong following (and if you’re interested in social media and blogging then you should follow her on twitter – @jododds and via her website http://jododdssocialmedia.com/).
That tweet brought 38 eyeballs to the blog during that day. That’s 19 people (assuming all those people had two eyes). Some of those 19 people went on to look at other blogs and a few went deeper into the Custwin website.
What’s been achieved there is an increased awareness of the Custwin name. Although we don’t expect any of those people to be rushing to sign up for our services, we know that if they see the Custwin name in the future, then they may become receptive to interacting in some way (perhaps via signing up for the newsletter or maybe more).
What we see here is someone (Jo) who is very much known to be a ‘giver’, i.e. she shares her knowledge to many people, typically via social media, which builds trust in her own brand. When Jo then expresses agreement with something someone else says (e.g. our blog) then her followers can view that as being an endorsement, which makes them more likely to click through to the blog than if such information was presented to them ‘cold’ from another source.
There are three key points here …
- Blogging useful information is what builds trust.
- Using systems like Twitter to impart that information is common sense.
- Being linked to people who have a similar mindset leads to further views of the material you’ve produced.
Putting figures on it we know that most people are happy to grab free information but that very few actually go a step further to use the products or services on offer. However, the more that trust is built up, the higher the potential to gain business from just the small percentage of people who could become business at some point in the future.
Whatever type of business you’re in it’s likely that you could have something worth blogging about, even if it’s fairly infrequent (e.g. 2-4 times a month). If it’s useful and not a sales pitch then people will want to keep reading what you produce.
If you’re producing blogs at the moment and are tweeting those out, are you measuring the numbers of people who click through to look at what you’ve written? If not, you should be – it will tell you a lot about how well you’re engaging with your audience.
October 30, 2011
Website Analytics, Website Promotion
No Comments
QR codes have been around for some time now but how do you know what you’re getting from yours (if you have one)?
And if your QR code acts as a link into your website, do you link it to a specific page or does it just go to your home page?
There are many ways (some a bit techie) that you can automatically analyse what you gain from your QR codes visibility but there is also a very simple way of analysing:
Link the QR code through to a website page that is either dedicated to it or has virtually no people entering the website via that page.
So, take the QR code below for example …
If you scanned it you would be taken to a page about tree houses. A page that has been created to use as a landing page from a QR code. Therefore, the business owner, through some basic website analytics, will be able to see how many people landed on that particular tree houses page and will be positive that the visits came from the QR code.
Where this becomes important is in advertising, particularly in print media. Let’s say you put an advert in a magazine and it costs you £Xhundred for a few editions. That advert includes your QR code linking through to one particular website page. You will know, after a period of time whether people have been using the QR code. If you’re really clever you’ll make the magazine advert have some sort of special offer that encourages people to type in a url that goes to a different website page so that you can determine whether that brings more visitors to your website from the advert than the QR code (which may also have the special offer).
The good thing about QR codes is that they’re free to create. However, if you’re not linking them through to a unique website page (and you haven’t implemented a more techie way of tracking them) then you’re going to find it hard to measure what benefit they bring you.
« Previous Entries Next Entries »
