The Death of Google

For small and medium sized businesses, advertising via the Google Sponsored Links has been a great generator of business over the years. However, over the past several months Google have signed their own death warrant by failing to focus on the needs of both searchers and advertisers.

Maybe 'death' is too strong a word but 'serious illness' would be fair to say. Everyone knows that people tend to look at one or maybe two pages of search results and so this means that any PPC advertiser in a relatively competitive industry sector wanting to appear prominently in the Sponsored Links has to a) pay a premium price and; b) be supremely confident that their website can convert clicks into business.

Take, for example, the subject of air conditioning. To even get onto the first page of Google Sponsored Links costs in the region of £1.75 per click and a high monthly budget commitment. To get high on the first page currently costs upwards of £5 per click. If a small business offering air conditioning hasn't dedicated enough focus to the strength of their website then paying those costs per click will result in low benefits. So, spending £500 to gain 100 clicks to a website is only beneficial if a good number of those visitors then go on to buy air conditioning.

And this is the problem facing most businesses. Click costs within Google are going to constantly increase because Google will always allow the advertisers with deeper pockets to get higher advertising positioning. This means that the bigger companies, who have more time and resources to spend on their websites and online visibility, will dominate the search results. This will have a big knock-on effect.

Let's say you're a small sized air conditioning company and you focus on Surrey. You want it so that if people type a phrase such as 'air conditioning Surrey', that your Sponsored Link advert will appear. The Google system tells you that it'll cost at least £1.75 per click to get onto the first page of results so you go for it. Then you discover that when someone types 'air conditioning Surrey', the Google system displays numerous adverts that have no reference to Surrey at all. You think "hang on, my advert actually refers to Surrey so why is Google allowing these other adverts to appear and is making me pay a lot per click to get my advert visible?".

The answer, quite simply, is money. If an air conditioning company wants their advert to be visible nationally and are prepared to pay for that visibility then Google will let it. Although Google imply that 'quality of advert text'is an important factor the reality is that they will give priority to the advertisers with higher budgets than those who actually focus on what the searcher is looking for.

What this all means is that smaller companies will get fed up with Google. If you, as a searcher, type 'air conditioning Surrey' and see the majority of Sponsored Links have no reference to Surrey then you're not going to be impressed. If, as an advertiser, you do everything right in your PPC campaign setups and know you have the most targeted advert, then you're also not going to be impressed that Google has given priority to the advertisers who have bigger budgets.

In the end, you, as a smaller company, can't really justify spending so much money on PPC advertising and will look for other methods to promote your company. And who could blame you?!

So why the death, or at least, serious illness of Google?

Very simply, if Google continue to allow short-term profits from advertisers cloud the way their system works then companies within particularly competitive sectors will look elsewhere for ways to promote their businesses. These will include natural search engine positioning (for which Google doesn't make a penny), online directories (ditto), and other forms of marketing.

As we enter 2009, the cost of Google PPC advertising will continue to rise and rise as the companies with more money constantly try to outbid each other for high positioning.� This will make PPC seem like a poor way of advertising for many smaller companies and they will go elsewhere. What Google doesn't understand is that the companies who are currently paying high click costs will soon work out other ways to get free traffic to their websites and will drop out of PPC advertising. By that time the smaller companies will have gone elsewhere and Google will be looking at a big hole in their revenues.

The answer though is simple contact us to get our view on how Google can dig themselves out of the hole they're creating and so keep both advertisers and searchers happy.

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Client Focus:
Hampstead Chiropractic Clinic

At Custwin, the clients we like best aren't necessarily the clients who pay us the most but are the clients who we feel really want to get more out of their websites.

This month we focus on Hampstead Chiropractic Clinic, based in North London.

We started working with Hampstead Chiropractic Clinic in mid 2006, initially creating a PPC campaign to generate enquiries related to chiropractic and acupuncture.

It soon became clear that the website needed strengthening so we advised on that and the client got the changes implemented. This had an immediate effect on increasing the enquiries from the same rate of clicks. As time has gone on we've kept up a regular dialogue of how business is going and are always looking for opportunities to gain more business without spending much more money.

Hampstead Chiropractic Clinic are now at the point where they send us their enquiries log, which we compare to their website statistics and PPC clicks figures. This is the point that we like every client to get to a full understanding of not just what phrases people typed to get to the website, but how they interacted with the website and what opportunities for further enhancements that brings.

The key point here is that the client is keen to keep their business advancing and will continue to achieve that through dedicating time and resources that reap ever-increasing benefits.

Are you happy with the level of business that your website generates? If not, and you're dedicated to getting results, then contact us for a no-obligation discussion about how we can make the difference.

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Using LinkedIn to best advantage

Success for Custwin clients doesn't come purely from our work in analysing website strength and then marketing the website, but from the "little extras" we provide to clients.

One example of this is how to make best use of LinkedIn.com.

For companies that are using a decent website statistics package to analyse which companies have visited their websites it can sometimes be frustrating to discover that someone from a particular company has visited but they haven't got in contact. LinkedIn can help to turn frustration into business success.

Let's say you sell widgets and you discover that someone from Cadbury Schweppes has typed the phrase 'purple widgets', has been to your website, but hasn't made contact. By logging into your LinkedIn profile (you ARE on LinkedIn aren't you?!) you could either type 'Cadbury Schweppes' into the search box (but that brings up too many results, that aren't that well targeted), or can use the 'Advanced' link and type 'Cadbury Schweppes' into the Company field. You can refine your search more than that but ultimately what you'll end up with is a list of people who either work for Cadbury Schweppes or have worked with them in some capacity.

Because you're mainly interested in people who work for Cadbury Schweppes now you focus on those people profiles and look for job titles that are likely to be closely related to your business type (e.g. widgets). For example, a Procurement Manager.

In an ideal world, you'd have created a big enough network within LinkedIn so that you're only a couple of degrees away from the person you want to make contact with (after all, they've been to your website and are interested in widgets so you want to at least try to rescue something out of their visit to your website). If you find that one of your connections is connected to the person at Cadbury Schweppes then you have an easier route in because that person can connect the two of you together. If you don't have that luxury then it focuses your attention on how you can do more with LinkedIn to build up your network of contacts so that you'll have easier access to a future potential customer.

This is one of the benefits of looking through your website statistics each day. What's a 5-10 minute job for most types of business can result in you identifying companies that have visited your website, you going to LinkedIn to see if you can find a route in to that person, and if that route isn't there it does at least focus your attention on using systems such as LinkedIn a lot more effectively than you currently are.

Please do contact us if you'd like more details about how to use LinkedIn more effectively and we'll be happy to help.

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Google scam emails

We often get frantic emails and phone calls from clients who say that Google have emailed them to say that their PPC campaigns are going to be switched off unless they take action to update their details. This usually involves clicking on a link within the email. In the majority of cases these are scams.

In most cases these are easy to detect purely by hovering your mouse over the link that they want you to click on. That link will show a url that, to the trained eye, will usually be a link to a website that is certainly not Google and will certainly lead to pain if it's clicked. These scammers are getting cleverer though and it's not always immediately obvious whether the adverts are scams or not. The simple rules to follow are:

1. If you're a Custwin client then it's highly likely that you pay for your clicks via us (we pay for the clicks and charge them back to you) - in this situation you would never receive an email from Google because they communicate directly with us. This means that any email 'from Google' would be a scam, most probably as a result of your email address being found within your website and added to the scammers database.

2. If you're not a Custwin client, or you're a Custwin client that pays your own clicks directly to Google then you may well receive genuine emails from Google as well as scam ones. If you have any doubt at all then please do ask us and we'll advise you for free.

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Custwin forecast for 2009

It'll come as no surprise that 2009 will be rocky for many types of businesses but there are some simple steps that will help you to weather the storm.

However, you need to be taking action now instead of reacting at a time that your business has got into a really poor position. Here are our tips that will strengthen your business (at least, from a website perspective) as you go into 2009.

Of primary importance is that you're effectively analysing the traffic to your website. By this, we don't just mean counting the numbers of visitors, but understanding what they typed to find your website, what companies they were from, and what route they took through your website. The vast majority of companies aren't effectively analysing their website statistics and our forecast for 2009 is that finally, after years of us advising this, companies will start to take this more seriously. The full details of how to effectively analyse your website visitors is within our free PDF download available from our home page.

Analysing website statistics is one thing but you also need to have a good record of all your enquiries gained during each month. Those enquiries may appear to be time-wasters in many cases, useful in others, but ALL enquiries need to be logged - especially the time and date of the enquiries. When combining enquiries statistics with website statistics analysis you have a vital tool that will help your website move forwards. Again, details about enquiry logging are in the PDF download.

Any company that thinks their website is strong enough has their head very much in the sand because competition is always evolving and it's important to not just get to that point of thinking "our website gets us good results" but to focus on "how can we keep ahead of our competitors?"

Companies that track their enquiries, analyse their website visitor patterns, and make refinements to their websites as necessary, are then in a position to invest more budget in advertising their websites, whether that be through PPC advertising, natural search engine positioning, listing in online directories, or other methods. When a website is analysed and refined to a position of strength then far greater rewards can be gained.

As we head into 2009, companies that invest time in doing it properly will be the winners and our forecast is that those companies that focus less on actively promoting their websites and instead focus more on analysing what results their websites are getting (and then making refinements) will be those who grow substantially when other companies are going to the wall.

Click here to go to our home page and download your free PDF.

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