Posts Tagged ‘conversion optimization’

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Conversion Tips

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Conversion Tips

Get started on making some changes today and starting seeing results tomorrow

A funny thing has been happening lately. It used to be that all anyone could talk about was about how to drive more traffic to their websites. Nowadays, it seems everyone is way more interested in improving their site’s conversion rate. Credit Google for this Industry shift, as the reintroduction of much improved FREE Google Analytics tool has people finally talking “performance” over rankings.    

Below are some ideas on how to get better mileage out of your website now:

Brochure site

1)      Credibility – how “professional” is your site? Would you do business with you? Turns out web site design does matter and if you are not transacting ecommerce over the web, your site had better look good. Here is where a cheap, inexpensive template site can destroy the integrity of a company. If you must, and you must, hire a professional web designer who will customize your site and tailor it to your unique strengths, content and differentiation points

2)      Content – Is your site all about you or do you actually set out to meet your prospects needs. Reread your site today and find out. If you say “we” more than three times per page, you should think about rewriting your site immediately. Remember, people are coming to you to get information or to solve a problem. How can they do that when you don’t provide them with any dialogue except the one about yourself.

3)      Ask for the business – Do you ever wonder why people are not contacting you?  Perhaps it’s because you haven’t asked them. Adding calls to action on every page of your site (both written and in graphical form) can improve your results quickly, and inexpensively. Furthermore, make sure your contact information is on every page not just your contact page and you should see improvements right away.

Ecommerce site

1)      Add a Gift Center – Many shoppers do not have time to browse all of the pages of your site. By adding a gift center, you’ll take all of that work out of the equation and provide them with gift options at a glance. Allows customers to browse for suggested gifts by gender, price, occasion, or category (think Red Envelope). Doing so will make an immediately impact.

2)      Suggested Items – Lets you list multiple pieces of merchandise on a page specifically for cross-selling (complementary products). Chances are if your customers are interested in one product, they may be happy to hear about other similar or relevant items. Amazon built an empire out of this one simple up-sell feature and you can too.

3)      Bargain Shopping – Online shoppers are savvy and will leave all loyalty behind to save a buck or two. Adding a clearance section is a smart thing to do to keep these shoppers feeling smart about buying from you.  

4)      Featured Sale Items – A featured sale item is a great way to sell merchandise at a discount without relegating these items to the bargain bin. When used in conjunction with special sales like seasonal merchandise, featured sales items eliminates the stigma of closeout items and keeps your shoppers happy.  
A final thought.

Before there can be any conversions you must have site traffic. So, if you aren’t participating in any online marketing initiatives, we ask… why not? Online marketing is the most efficient and effective way to bring quality, highly targeted traffic to your website. Then and only then can you begin to make improvements

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Bold Predictions in Online Marketing for 2010

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Okay, so I’ll admit I was wrong about a few of the predictions I made last year. Yes, Google is still the King and Mobile Search has still not yet hit the big time. Still, I enter 2010 with a renewed passion for what we do and where our Industry is going. Many of the changes that were made last year and many that are coming only strengthened the case for building better websites. In 2010 the best sites that best meet the needs of their target markets are those that survive while spammy sites go by the way of the dinosaur.  So, that said, below are my bold predictions in Online Marketing for 2010:

Link Builders Go Bye Bye – As a major algorithm cleanup, Google and other engines will drop or purge sites that artificially bought their way to top organic SEO rankings via buying links. Link building companies will start to become obsolete as link building for SEO becomes ineffective. The financial impact is felt as far away as India and the Philippines, where many of these link building companies were stationed.

Shady SEO Companies Go Bye Bye – The search engines will move away from “seo tactics” and instead rank sites based on their “quality.”  Sites that best hit their target markets, judged by low bounce rate and audience engagement will be the sites that rank well across all platforms.  Shady SEO companies that built their success based on “fooling the search engines” will be exposed and will eventually vanish from site. Good SEO companies that focus on all facets of a web site (web design, web development, web marketing) will become the new “go to” companies. The financial impact is also felt as far away as India and the Philippines, where many of the shady optimization companies were stationed.

Google Increases Market Share to 80% – In 2010, I predict Google will increase it’s market share from currently about 72% to 80% of the market. Their continued growth comes at the expense of both Yahoo! and Bing, where audience share will decline because Google (as a result of algorithm changes) will be providing it’s audience better search results.

Mobile Search – I know I’ve been saying it for years but this is finally the year when Mobile Search hits the big time. Already with staggering growth, it is shocking that mobile search is still not a major part of most people’s marketing mix. In 2010, I predict that mobile gets into the mainstream of all marketers alike, both global and locally-based.

Conversion Optimization Gets Its Due- Finally, conversion optimization will not be just for serious marketers but instead will be a tactic and a topic of discussion amongst everyone who markets online. Brought on by last year’s recession, the business of “improving your bottom line” just by tweaking your landing pages, your messages, etc. will get a serious look. Budgets for conversion optimization in 2010 will be allocated accordingly.

Change is Coming – Something, somewhere, someone is lurking around the corner waiting to capture the hearts and minds of Internet users much like Twitter and Facebook did in 2009. Whether it be a new social media site, a change in technology, or the way that we market ourselves online, one prediction we can count on each and every year is that there likely will be a major change to look forward to in the coming year.

Will any or all of these bold prediction turn out? Only time with tell. One thing for sure is that everyone, from peers to customers, are looking forward to a better year and more prosperous 2010.

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Profit Optimization is the Future!

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Over the past ten years, I’ve been struggling to find a term that truly defines what it is we can do for our clients. We’ve tried terms such as ACR (aka acquisition, conversion, retention) but that described our process to online marketing more than it did the benefits. We also tried going after specific optimization terms (search engine optimization, ppc campaign optimization, conversion optimization, etc) but that approach always left us too niche and “type-cast” with our clients when we could do so much more for them beyond these single services.  Now more and more, however, I have been speaking about “profit optimization” and have come to realize that this not only accurately describes what we can do for our clients but it is the future of our Industry.

So what exactly is profit optimization? Profit optimization, simply put, is where you boost your return on investment by coordinating your search data with your conversion/sales data . In other words, not all conversions are created equal. Some conversions will actually cost you money while others will generate healthy returns. Yet, all this time, we’ve been allocating equal priority to every conversion. With profit optimization, however, we can start making better choices about our marketing thresholds and spends. 

So how do you start profit optimizing? Here are some tips:

  1. Establish a way to integrate search data with conversion data so you know which keyword drove the sale. Some simple ways to do this involve custom tags, unique phone number tracking, and dynamically generated landing pages. A more advanced way of doing this is through automatic data sync’s via API’s.  
  2. Improve your reporting so that you know which conversion are of high value and which ones are of lesser quality. This is an extra step but the most crucuial. For example, a high value sale may have cost three times as much to acquire but the ROI is much better. The only way to know this is with this extra data point.
  3. Optimize your campaigns -Now that you have these critical technologies and reporting pieces in place, you can now make better decisions optimizing your SEO, PPC, and Online Advertising campaigns, your conversion optimization campaigns, and your retention campaigns. Once you know the high value targets, you can aggressively go after them, while minimizing the spends on the lower value ones.

While we are excited about all of the changes happening in the online space, we are most excited about profit optimization. Here, we finally get to the root of what online marketing is all about – the bottom line – and now we have the tactics and the technologies to make this a reality for all clients.

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Google’s Conversion Optimizer: Proceed With Caution

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Every once in a while, a new featureis announced by the Google team that helps improve the experience and the results you get through the Google AdWords Pay Per Click Advertising Console. Recently, in fact, Google started implementing a new user interface that allows their advertisers to more easily, more readily, and more efficiently manage their campaigns. This, in fact, has been a very positive change (although the new interface takes a lot of getting used to after so many years working with the old platform). 

Google Conversion Optimizer, on the other hand, has not been something that seems to be working for a lot of advertisers.  A recent google search for ‘google conversion optimizer review’ brings up a number of web posts, blogs and case studies that do not exactly paint the optional service in a very positive light. Below are quick links to a few of those reviews. 

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3858558.htm

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords/thread?tid=1b46b2064debcd8c&hl=en

http://www.marketingmorgan.com/ppc/google-adwords-campaign-optimizer-review/

Google Conversion Optimizer has been in beta testing since 2007. Now, released to all advertisers that qualify, it represents a chance to bid on a “cost per action” versus a “cost per click”. In theory, this is all great but what happens in reality? My own results over the past few weeks for a client did not perform well at all. In fact, our cost per conversion went from less than $20 per conversion to over $35 per conversion. Obviously, not a good thing for me or my client.  I have now turned the service off.

How does Conversion Optimizer work? The Conversion Optimizer is an AdWords feature that uses your AdWords Conversion Tracking data to get you more conversions at a lower cost. It optimizes your placement in each ad auction to avoid unprofitable clicks and gets you as many profitable clicks as possible. To begin using the Conversion Optimizer, you must have AdWords Conversion tracking enabled, and your campaign must have received at least 30 conversions in the last 30 days. Also, the campaign must have been receiving conversions at a similar rate for at least a few days.

The “Conversion Optimizer” option is a tempting one… and Google does its best to make sure you know that your ad group is “eligible” for this option. Instead of taking the bait, however, you are better served perhaps working with the proven Google Website Optimizer, which in essence allows you to take better control of your landing page experiences. This truly is a better way of managing your conversions anyhow. True marketing and testing of headlines, offers, photos, etc. should always give you a better lift than trying to do it from the acquisition side. In other words, the “post-click” environment (landing page) is always more important than the “pre-click” environment (traffic) in my humble opinion.

Still, optimizing both pre-click and post-click environments are important tasks to the overall scheme of things and that is precisely what makes Conversion Optimizer something that should make sense to all advertisers that qualify…but just a word of warning to all… proceed with caution ! There are better ways to optimize your traffic, including key word analysis, analytic review, and writing better, more targeted ads. If you don’t heed my advice…well, you’ve been warned.

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It’s May 2009, What Now?

Monday, May 11th, 2009

With a deepening recession and a swine flu pandemic upon the Nation, perhaps 2009 has not gone as planned for many of us. Because of the uncertainty out there, we felt that now is probably as good a point as any to reflect on the year that’s gone by to see if and how these events (and others) have played out against online marketing plans. Below I will review a list of some top Internet Marketing strategies to see how they are still stacking up this year.

  1. Search engine optimization- Still the number one requested service we offer, SEO can offer an alternative to highly-priced pay per clicks. Predictably, economic conditions (and plethora of information out there regarding how to optimize) have turned many companies in wanna be SEO’s. Impact: Our customers are now competing with many more people for the same real estate (first 10 spots) and SEO has now become ultra competitive.  For those websites that do not have  large budgets for link building and content development, SEO is now becoming “out of reach”. For clients that cannot compete with the big budgets, we suggest going after long-tail keywords that may not have as much traffic but are less competitive and may produce better conversion rates. 
  2. Pay per click marketing-  Again, like with SEO, there are a larger number of customers competing for the same real estate and costs are now going through the roof for many keywords across many Industries. Impact: We see many customers reducing budgets here rather than staying the course. Best practices with pay per click such as landing page testing and conversion optimization take additional budgets but  many times the conversion rate is not a matter of reducing your marketing spend but about being more effective with it.
  3. Social Media Marketing-  Since there often can be little to no cost to launch a SMM campaign, we see a lot of our clients jumping into SMM head-first. Impact: While social media can be great for many brands, many people do not know why they need a Facebook page and/or why they are “twittering”, for examples. As a result, many clients are not finding the success they are wanting with social media marketing. We suggest “listening” first to what customers are saying about your brand before diving in with a half-hearted strategy.

There are, of course, many more strategies that have been impacted in 2009. However, the overall trend seems to be about trying “less expensive” tactics and strategies versus being more effective with current spends. The rest of the year should be an interesting one, whether the economy bounces back or not. Our advice to you is to simply stay the course..!

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Content Your Way to the Top!

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Why you need a content strategy, pronto.

It is a well-known fact amongst SEOs these days that content is the primary way to get to the top of the search engines.  Don’t get me wrong, on-page optimization and link building and all the other hundreds of seo tactics and strategies still matter a whole lot..it is just that now unless your website is content-heavy and can be seen as an “authority” website, these other seo variables won’t make much of an impact.  So, when did content start to matter so much and what can you do to get into the content game?

While you were sleeping….your competition went out and built larger websites. The size of your site has always mattered but never so much as it does today. The reason being, there are billions of websites out there and everyone wants the coveted first page of Google. The more competitive the landscape gets, the more important it is to be seen as the leader in your field. And simply put, you cannot be a leader, i.e. “authority” if you only have a 10-page website.

Now that you know the importance of content building, the next is to know how much to produce.  Since every website is different, the answer will depend on the competitiveness of your primary keywords. To find out where you stand in relation to your competitors, simply type this query into Google:  “site:www.yoursite.com”.  If you have 10 pages and your competitors have 200-300 pages, you know where you need to go.

So, what on earth could you possibly write to fill up 300 pages of content? It is actually easier than it sounds. Below are a few ideas:

  • Blog – Writing a blog-a-day would increase your web presence by 365 pages at the end of a year.
  • Glossary of terms – Place a glossary of terms on your site that lists and explains the verbiage and nomenclature specific to your Industry.
  • Tips and tricks – Easy to write and your customers will fancy pages filled with how-to’s.
  • State or city specific pages – Does your service cover many unique locales? If so, write specific pages targeted to each of them. Doing so can add many pages to your site quickly and will make your users feel unique and special.
  • User generated - Give you customers a voice, and they will respond. One of the fastest ways to content your way to the top is by offering user generated content tools such as the ability to blog, write reviews, start forums/discussions, etc.

Content will make or break you site in the coming year(s). Someday soon, I predict that only sites with 1000 or more pages will be able to crack the top ranks. Best to address your content needs today! If you need help with a content strategy, please do not hesitate to contact us at admin@sdinteractive.com.

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Do You Want Better Online Marketing Results?

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

How To Get Better Online Results!

Do you want to get better results from your online marketing efforts? We’ve got an easy solution. Why not ask your customers?? I know this answer seems obvious, simple, even down-right ridiculous, but truly it is the most forgotten way to gain quick and valuable insight that just may help you improve your marketing results.

So how do you “ask your customer” exactly? For starters, information can be collected from surveys, focus groups, direct mail and phone calls. When it comes to Internet marketing, however, none of those options are as immediate or as effective as onsite testing.

Onsite testing, meaning running live marketing experiments on specific landing pages of your site, will take the debate out of what you think your site visitors want and tell you precisely what you know your site visitors want. To get started, all you need is a website, an analytics program, and a willingness to experiment with your site (all in the name of higher conversions, of course).

Onsite testing can take the form of A/B testing (testing one variable at a time) or Multivariate Testing (testing several variables at a time). Each method has their pros and cons but both can give you an immediate boost in your conversion rate. 

So what items should you test? For starters, try these:

• Test Headlines – Headers occupy a prominent space on your page.  Often overlooked, testing headlines can make a large impact on your bottom line. 
• Test Graphics – Your image may be fine but perhaps another will connect better with your audience. See if you can create a boost with changes in your imagery.
• Test Punctuation – Use different types of punctuation to see how your customers react. The difference between “Buy Today.” And “Buy Today!” may seem minor to us, but could dramatically improve your results.
• Test Design/ Layout – Perhaps you need an entirely new look/feel to get the message across. Try an A/B test to see if the updated look/feel increases sales.
• Test Buttons – There are many factors to consider when choosing buttons including the size, color, and text used in your button. Experiment and see what happens.

A final thought
While most people are now comfortable running ad campaigns, a surprisingly low number of these marketers are engaging in online testing. And if you aren’t trying to test your site for improvements, you aren’t taking advantage of the inherent benefit of online marketing – the ability to listen to your customer. Everything is measurable and your customers are telling you what they want with the behaviors and click-streams.

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How to Lower Your CPA

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

In my last blog, we talked a lot about why you should start paying attention to the average cost it takes you to acquire a new customer. In this blog we will discuss the many ways you can start to lower this average cost. By doing so, you can obtain much better results within the same marketing spends. AND given this current economic climate… who wouldn’t want to do that?

Below are the top 5 things you can do today to lower your cost per acquisition (CPA).

1) Track your results- Without conversion tracking in place, there is no way to accurately determine your true CPA. There are free website analytics available to you; and if you aren’t currently tracking your site visitors from entry point(s) to conversion point(s), we strongly urge that you do so starting now.

2) Always be testing – If you are happy with your current CPA then this step is not for you. BUT for the rest of us, we must always be testing. By testing, I mean testing everything. From your keywords and your pay per click ads to the creative on your banners ads and your landing pages.  Testing is something that the majority of online marketers fail to do. Yet, testing is the best way to see exactly what creative recipe’s works best for your customers.

3) Always be testing II - There are many testing methods (A/B testing, multivariate testing) for you to try out your creative ideas and concepts. The truth is that nobody knows what your customers will respond to best except your customers. Even your best creative talent and your best marketing talent can only guess whether or not people will respond better to a red button or a blue one. Better yet, let your customers tell you via their clicks and purchase behaviors. Testing lets you take the guesswork out of design and gives you real honest customer feedback. You’ll know if your design is a winner or a loser, real quickly.

4) Use Customer Retention Programs - the old adage, that it is much easier to keep an existing client than to attract a new one has never been more appropriate, especially in regards to our CPA discussion. The easiest way, by far, to lower your CPA is to bring your old customers back through your sales channel. Your former customers already know you, trust you, and are likely more willing to buy from you again. They just aren’t being asked.  Most Marketers get excited about the strategies and tactics used to attract new business and it is in the retention area where marketers usually fail.

5) Use Customer Retention Programs II – Most people know that email marketing to existing clients is the most cost-effective way to maintain a customer retention program. Most email marketing services providers offer very inexpensive platforms that literally cost you pennies per email to reach out to former clients. There are other programs, however, that can help! Other “retention” ideas include daily content updates (give people a reason to come back to your site), points/loyalty programs and personalized website experiences (like Amazon.com) that will keep people engaged with your brand.

CPA is a hot topic and likely will be for the foreseeable future. For marketers that can lower their effective CPA’s the sky is the limit. Literally. When you lower your CPA, you can gain a distinct competitive advantage and can actually put yourself in a position where you can make it financially impossible for your competition to play in the same sandbox with you.

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CYA with a Focus on CPA

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

 Cost Per Acquisition
Definition = The average cost associated with acquiring a new customer.

 

Move over CPC, there is a new metric in town . . . and its name is CPA. The acronym, of course, stands for “Cost per Acquisition” and for Online Marketers CPA is quickly becoming the only metric that matters, especially in these currently foggy economic conditions. Of course, I exaggerate, CPA is neither new nor is it the only useful performance metric. Still, many smart marketers today are paying extremely close attention to the costs associated with acquiring customers; and by focusing on reducing those costs they are beginning to thrive while their competitors flounder amidst higher click prices and abundance of advertising supply.    

 

Below are 4 tips you can use today to make sure you are properly set-up for measuring your CPA:

 

1) Track your campaigns – The best and only way to ensure that your data is reliable and accurate is through conversion tracking, i.e. measuring your site visitor from site entry point to site conversion point. In fact, you won’t be able to measure CPA until you take this step. If you haven’t already done so, Google offers free analytics and easy instructions for setting up conversion (goal) tracking at http://www.google.com/analytics/.

 

2) Have different values for different conversion points – If have more than one conversion metric (and hopefully you do) then be sure to assign different values to those conversion points. An average lead, for example, may be worth $250 to you but an average value of someone opting into your email database may only be worth $10. Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, Average Score, and other metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. If, for example, your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your “Contact Me” goal. In contrast, if only 1% of mailing list signups result in a sale, you might only assign $5 to your “email sign-up” goal.

 

3) Your CPA is different from my CPA - Acquisition costs vary across industries and mediums, so make sure your CPA’s are meaningful and relevant to you. When acquisition data is available, try to determine if you are comparing apples to apples, so to speak. This is not always easy, as customer acquisition data can be rare, and the methodology is often shaky. Better to make sure that your CPA’s make sense for your own thresholds.

 

4) Calculate your CPA – Customer acquisition cost is calculated by dividing total acquisition expenses by total new customers. However, there are different opinions as to what constitutes an acquisition expense. For example, rebates and special discounts do not represent an actual cash outlay, yet they have an impact on cash (and, presumably, on the customer).

 

My next blog will focus on ways you can lower your CPA. But first things first, I wanted to make sure the process was started by focusing on the ways to set up and measure this key metric. While the CPA topic may be old news to many of you, still only 20%-30% of all online advertisers use their full tracking capabilities. Surprising but true.  It’s these same advertisers that aren’t paying attention to their CPA’s that are driving up your click prices. This is why now, more than ever, it’s so important to pay attention to your most crucial metric.

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Why you need Conversion Optmization

Friday, January 2nd, 2009
Why you need Conversion Optimization

A few weeks ago, I predicted that “conversion optimization” would become a significant factor in 2009 for most online businesses. Now, only a day into the New Year, I am even more convinced that 2009 will be the year conversion optimization gets its due.

Conversion optimization, simply stated, is the process of improving your site’s conversion rate (visitors to sales, visitor to leads, etc.). There are a number of ways to do this from the basic (a/b testing) to the complex (technologically-based landing page optimization programs) but your efforts put here can significantly impact your bottom line.

Below are reasons why I think you need a conversion optimization program and why I believe this will be the web’s next big thing:

1) The numbers make a lot of sense – For most organizations, small increases in conversion rates can mean giant increases in revenues. A customer selling $1000 widgets, for example, with 10,000 visitors and a 2% conversion rate makes $200,000 per month. If the site’s conversion rate goes from 2% to 2.5%, for example, this same customer makes $250,000 without any additional increases in expenditures (all things being equal). With dramatic increases like this example portrays, these numbers are too hard too ignore.

2) The cost of traffic is increasing – Almost everywhere across the board, customer acquisition costs are rising. Pay per click costs are rising…SEO costs are rising… comparison shopping engines costs are rising…blog advertising costs are rising…online PR campaigns are rising – the list goes on and on.  Blame the economy if you will but these increases are due to more competitors entering the market competing for your same clicks. AND these costs are only going to continue to rise. Conversion optimization, however, will help you “off-set” those rising costs. As soon as businesses figure this out, I am convinced more attention will be placed in conversion optimization programs.

3) Marketing budgets are shrinking. – Unfortunately, one of the first things to go in a down economy for most businesses is their marketing budgets. What marketing directors will be tasked with this coming year is to get more out of the same (or smaller) budgets…aka do more with less. With this is mind, those marketing directors that pay attention to conversion optimization will become the heroes of their organizations.  

4) Why lose 99% of your audience? – The old “one size fits all” method of web design and development may have worked in 2005 but it no longer is sufficient in 2009. YOU have many types of customers that come to your website and each has a different personality, profile, and need. Studies show that conversion rates are shrinking (to 1%, on average). With all of the knowledge we have and all of the advanced analytical tools, this is mind blowing to me. We, as an Industry, can not accept losing 99% of our audience. With a conversion optimization program, you can serve up different experiences to different profiles of people and reverse this trend!

5) It is cost effective – Many conversion optimization programs take the guess work out giving your audience what they want. Some tools are free but will demand a lot of your time and resource, while other programs offer performance guarantees. Either way, your efforts will be rewarded for spending time on improving your sites conversion rate.

In a way I feel like I did ten years ago when I was talking about ”search engine optimization.” Most people looked at me funny and had no idea what I was talking about. That is the look I now get when I mention Conversion Optimization. Yet, this time, because money is issue #1 for most Americans, I believe 2009 will be the year of conversion optimization!

If you are interested in learning more about a conversion optimization program, please contact Christine McKibban @  760-481-4626

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