Track PPC Conversions to Reach Your Goals

I recently read an article which suggested that many small businesses aren’t successful using Google Adwords. One of the reasons for this was because they couldn’t track their ROI, or when they could the results were not as expected. Does this mean Google Adwords is not for small companies?
Put simply, no. It’s often down to the problem of smaller companies trying to manage everything themselves in house when they don’t have the expertise to do so.
Google Adwords can be extremely profitable, but you have to know what you’re doing in order to make sure your money is wisely spent.

A top PPC tip for tracking and increasing ROI is:

Conversion Tracking

How do you know something’s working unless you track it? True, you can tell to some degree at face value whether your phone calls, leads or sales have increased. You can use Google Analytics to tell you which landing pages had more visitors. However, it’s far more beneficial if you can track EXACTLY what happened as a result of someone clicking on your PPC Advert. Then you really know if it worked or not. You might say that you don’t have any conversions on your site. Everybody has a conversion. That’s why you want them to visit your website.  It all comes down to your business goals and what you’re trying to achieve by running an Adwords campaign  Here are some examples of Adwords conversions:

• Fill in a contact form
• Make a purchase
• Inquire about a product or service
• Sign up to your newsletter
• Call you
• Visit a specific page you’re promoting

The great thing about Pay Per Click is that it’s measurable. Once you’ve decided what your goals are, you can decide what your conversion/s should be. Setting up your conversions is easy. Just follow the steps in Google Adwords Blogspot.
Once you’ve had you conversion tracking set up for a while, you can really start to analyse the data. Use this data. Which Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords produce the most conversions? Focus your attention and budget on these. Which Adverts work best? Turn off poorly performing ones and create new ones based on your successful ones.

PPC doesn’t have to be a failure for smaller companies. Just know what you should be doing and do it successfully.

Do You Go The Extra Mile for Your Customers

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about poor customer service experience, the damage this can do to the reputation of a business and how it can negate innovative marketing efforts.

I now want to share with you a recent personal experience of how going the extra mile in customer service can go a very long way to rescuing what could have been a very negative experience.

Last Friday we went out for a meal with some friends (coincidentally the couple who were involved in the previous experience).  We took a taxi to Portishead, about 6 miles from us, to a restaurant called Larsens that had been recommended to us.  We had checked out their website and found that it very helpfully includes all their menus.  In this current difficult economic climate, I believe restaurants who make good use of Internet marketing and go to the effort to put their menus online gain a definite edge over the competition.

We already had a positive view of the owner, because when we had originally tried to book and she did not have a table, she took the trouble to ring back a day later to let us know a table had become free after receiving a cancellation . Our table was booked for 8.00 but we arrived a little early, so we were invited to take a seat near the entrance until a table became free.  It soon became clear though that this was not going to be for some time. Whilst we were in no particular hurry, we did have a taxi booked for 10.20 and our local taxis aren’t the most flexible.  Anyway, by about 8.30 we insisted on explaining our concerns to the owner, Sharon, who as head chef was in the kitchen.  She was absolutely charming, totally apologetic and we were all on first name terms straight-away.  She explained that one or two parties had brought along extra diners without notifying her and this had caused considerable logistical difficulties in her very small restaurant.  She was doing her best to get us seated as quickly as possible.  Whilst we were prepared to accept the delays we emphasised there could be an issue with the taxi.  Her response was to offer us a lift home if need be, which took us by surprise

We eventually sat down to eat at 9 and Sharon treated us like VIPs and personally oversaw every aspect of our meal.  As expected, when we rang the taxi firm to request a delay, they said they couldn’t collect us until after midnight, so we cancelled.  Sharon waived all corkage fees on our BYO drinks and offered us all second helpings of the delicious Goat Curry we all had ordered.  I took this offer up and virtually received another meal!  When it was time to go, she personally drove us to our homes, the last of which was over 8 miles from her restaurant.

In stark contrast to the pub in the previous article, instead of alienating four customers, Sharon’s efforts to retrieve the situation produced four advocates for her restaurant, who have all indicated they will return again.  Perhaps we’ll book an earlier table though next time!

Capture and Retain the Attention of Your Customers

I’ve been away lately trying to escape the so-called British Summer, but found decent weather in short supply on much of the continent too.  This, combined with major effort into an exciting new website project has meant I have neglected my PYC blog.   I usually write about ways to attract and retain customers through Internet marketing, which is PYC’s main focus, but this time I want to share with you a recent customer service experience that illustrates to me how businesses can be good at both offline and online marketing, but if they don’t follow through and deliver a quality product and service to match they will ultimately suffer.

A pub not too far from where I live has recently changed hands yet again and reopened in a fanfare of publicity.  The new owner has spent a lot of money on refurbishing it inside and out and has marketed the new venture in the local press and via a new website.  He has recruited an enthusiastic team to run the place and even went as far as to hold a launch party during opening week, where all and sundry were invited to partake of free wine and sample tasters from the food menu.  The evening certainly encouraged us to revisit the pub and mark it down as a place to go for a meal out in an area that quite frankly is not over-endowed with great food pubs.  I was also sufficiently impressed with the tasters at the launch event and the positive and attentive staff who were evidently proud of the place to recommend friends to try the place out.  So far so good.  It was a good move by the pub owner to garner good publicity by providing local people with the chance to sample in advance of buying a meal there.

Now comes the bad news.  A few weeks later I asked a good friend who eats out regularly whether he had eaten there yet?   He had and he and his fiancée were not impressed.  After they had finished their meal the waitress asked whether everything was OK and after hearing their negative response, instead of taking helpful action, she ignored their complaint and just asked whether they would like a dessert!  So, because the the pub did not deliver on food quality and good customer service they have lost two potential regular local customers.   And if this experience is replicated to other customers, the pub will join the long list of other pub failures, because in today’s economic climate consumers will not accept inferior quality, poor value for money and bad customer service.  My friends gave the pub an opportunity to put things right and they ignored it.  In most cases in this country we don’t complain if we receive poor food or service, we just don’t go back and we tell all our friends to avoid the place.  So, if the owner of the pub wants a return on his considerable investment he had better ensure his staff sharpen up their act.

One session I attended was called ‘Ads In A Quality Score World’ and the majority of the session focused on what factors effect your Quality Score the most.  (For more information on Quality Score, please see this previous post).

Your Quality Score is based on the past activity of your overall account and is effected by the following in this order:

Click Through Rate (CTR)

• What is the historic CTR of your keywords and adverts?
• What is the historic CTR of your overall account – all of your keywords and adverts?
• What is the historic CTR of the display URLs in that Ad Group?
• What is the historic performance like in the region you are advertising in?

Relevancy

• How relevant are your Keywords and Matched Ads are to a searcher’s query?
• How relevant are your Keywords to the Adverts within its Ad Group?
• What is your Bounce Rate like?

Relevancy is also based on the performance of other advertisers bidding on the same Keyword.

Landing Page

This is affected by such factors as your:

• Content
• Privacy Policy
• Load Speed and
• Editorial policy guidelines

So you may ask yourself, well that all sounds very interesting, but how can I increase my Quality Score and why does it matter?

Remember – Google rewards relevancy.  The more relevant your keywords and adverts are to the person searching for your product or service, the higher the chance of the person clicking on your advert will be.  This will increase your Click Through Rate and as a result your Quality Score should improve.

A key way to increase your Quality Score is to consider the structure of your Keywords and Ad Groups.

If you are having problems increasing your Quality Score, have a rethink about your Campaign structure and the Keywords you’re bidding in.

In a future post I’ll help you consider how to build successful PPC Campaigns by considering your target audience.

Does your flowing Social Networking turn to drip?

I have had a deluge of copy to write over the last week or so for clients and all to tight deadlines.  What with the workload and the fact that every other day seems to be a public holiday, I’ve had virtually no time to engage with Twitter.

Question.  What does this reveal about me?  Do I take social networking as part of marketing my business seriously?  How can I write blogs encouraging others to “do it properly” (whatever that means!).  Should I have foregone some of my time off to keep up with what’s going on and tweet about it?  I’m open to comments and/or criticism.

I often marvel at some of the prolific tweeters I follow.  They are usually busy, successful people, travelling around meeting others and making presentations.  And yet, they find time to continually discover useful information to tweet about, or produce thought-provoking articles of their own to share.  OK some of their tweets may be a bit inane such as “sitting outside hotel waiting, about to go into  xx conference”, but mostly they have something useful to say.

Am I beating myself up too much though?  Last week was an exception, but usually I write regular, hopefully useful, blogs and tweet regularly as part of a busy working day.  It’s interesting that since I’ve started writing more about social networking trends relating to business marketing I have gained quite a few more followers.  It seems that there is an insatiable desire to keep up-to-date in this area and not surprisingly from companies directly involved in social media and Internet marketing.

I have read warnings that if you don’t send useful tweets so many times a day or week you will lose followers and I expect that is true in the long term.  Most of my followers have been tolerant of my brief absence (or they may not have noticed!).  In any event, notwithstanding forthcoming holidays, I plan to continue to do my best to share useful content via Twitter as regularly as I can.

Ad Sitelinks

Ad Sitelinks enable you to include additional links on your adverts.

What are the benefits?

• You can direct people to different pages on your site.
• You can show additional content and other links for multiple search queries.
• You can update the links with relevant timely offers.
• You are appealing to a wider audience.

Google claim that Ad Sitelinks can increase the Click Through Rate of your adverts by over 30%.

Ad Sitelinks

We were advised to:

• Make the most of the additional character space – view the sitelinks as an additional 140 characters of advertising space.
• Test and refine your message
• Add differentiation to boost your Click Through Rate.

Some other great take-aways were:

• Roll out temporary promotions in your adverts – e.g. sale, now only £x.
• Use seller ratings – show your great reviews in your adverts to increase credibility.
• Link to Google checkout to reinforce security and help generate seller ratings.
• Be creative – do something different with your campaigns.
• Be flexible and willing to change with the landscape.
• Above all, make sure your strategies and goals are aligned.

Seller Review Ratings

A good calculation to remember to ensure you’re not making a loss is to divide your Cost Per Click by your Conversion Rate.  If the answer is more than the unit you’re selling, you’re making a loss.

The main things I took away from this session are the need to constantly keep up with the changing landscape of PPC and be willing to move forward and try new things to ensure you keep ahead of your competition and get the best Return on your Investment.

Over the last year Google has certainly began to take more notice of social media.  Not so long ago it did not take Twitter and Facebook into account in its search engine rankings, but things are progressively changing and SEO experts have been closely following these developments.

To get things into perspective, Google uses over 200 criteria in its algorithm to rank pages in its search engine results.  Perhaps the most well-known are:-

• Anchor text pointing to a page;
• Quality of website linking to your site;
• Keyword search phrases appearing in the HTML title tag.

The SEO world has been trying to find out from Google whether social media criteria are now part of the overall equation.  Google introduced “Social Search” last year and factors such as having authority or trust on Twitter are known to count in those results.  However, SEOs have been trying to clarify whether this extends to wider web search.

In recent months Google has confirmed that it is now taking account of Twitter and Facebook in its search engine rankings and that your social media reputation could have an influence on how a page ranks in web search.  However, it is still the case that if Google’s crawler cannot see a page it cannot assign it a PageRank.

So does that mean that you should be trying to collect as many reciprocal follows as possible to boost your rankings?  Not really, because just as in link building for traditional SEO, it’s all about quality not quantity.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Google’s stated position is that use of social media signals is at present relatively light in determining search engine rankings.

Approaching Social Media Correctly is Essential

If you talk to some social media advocates they will tell you it is now the only show in town and that traditional SEO is dead.  I don’t know whether they say this to be provocative or if it’s wishful thinking.  Sometimes I get the impression they do it to provoke debate.  Certainly when they blog along these lines it usually get lots of strong comments left on their blog post, both agreeing or disagreeing.  I have observed cynics argue that some who write such articles don’t really believe what they are saying,  but are merely being controversial as a marketing ploy.

I’m not going to question their motives, but I believe a more balanced view is that social media marketing complements traditional Internet marketing approaches like SEO, PPC and email marketing.

The thing that businesses dipping their toes into the social media marketing arena need to remember is that it is just that – social.  And the various manifestations of social media online, be it Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin, for example, all have their different cultures or vibes.  Furthermore, the sorts of people who inhabit these worlds are pretty switched on and don’t take kindly to hard-sell commercial marketing approaches.  Adopting this approach is not just likely to turn them off your business, but they may actively and publicly revile you and your business.  In other words, treat social media marketing carefully and don’t shoot yourself in the foot.

To be successful in social media marketing you need to focus on quality, useful and engaging content.  Your objective should be to build proper relationships, not superficial ones.

To get started on most social media sites you will need to set up an account and access it through an email login.  It can be practical to create a specific email address just for all your social media accounts.  This way you avoid clogging up your main email inbox with social media messages.  You may find it convenient to set aside a specific time each day to go through your social media messages and manage your marketing campaigns.

Look out for more on social media marketing in future posts.

Predicted Social Media Trends For Businesses

I was recently asked to give a talk entitled “Making Your Website Work Harder For You” at a Federation of Small Businesses networking event in Bristol.

I had given the talk previously (presentation available here) and it covered the following topics:-

• How traffic arrives at your website;
• Ways of driving traffic through search engines;
• Retaining website visitors;
• Web copywriting;
• Landing page design.

The event was well attended and a lively discussion ensued at the end of the presentation.  It was interesting that using social media like Facebook and Twitter to promote their businesses online was very much on the minds of many in the audience and it was clear that they needed some guidance.  So I will giving more emphasis in my posts to social media trends and tips on how you can beneficially use it.

At the beginning of the year social media experts made various predictions on trends and developments for 2011.  Here is a summary of some I found interesting:-

• Paid search traffic and conversions will continue to decline and become more expensive and businesses will turn increasingly to social media;
• Greater allocation of corporate resources on social media will bring greater focus on measuring its Return on Investment;
• Social media will become a mainstream marketing activity for many companies;
• Many businesses will jump on the social media bandwagon in fear of being left behind and losing their competitive edge;
• Companies conducting campaigns using Facebook, Twitter and geolocation networks will measure them carefully to determine their effectiveness;
• Integration of email marketing with Facebook and Twitter to enable companies to better segment their social communication;
• A refining of social media players to leave Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin as the main platforms for business;
• A greater use of social media by business, but companies will move away from trying to use it to sell, towards sharing of useful content;
• Content sharing through social media channels having greater influence on search engine rankings;
• With the huge increase in the volume of social media content and the challenges of managing it, the call for the development of smarter tools to track and filter relevant content will become more urgent;
• Corporate brands will make more use of social media to listen to consumers and there will be more human interaction between large companies and the public;
• Social media interaction will be more about level of engagement and influence, rather than volume;
• Companies that personalise their social media interactions, rather than applying outsourced, scripted approaches will distinguish themselves positively.

What trends do you observe?  Please feel free to leave a comment.

Conversions are Paramount

In my last post I said that offline shopping may be your biggest competitor and in certain circumstances no matter what information you give your website visitor, they will still buy offline. So then, is having an informative website all a waste of time and effort?

Not at all. Remember much of your competition may come from other websites. Having a website with plenty of useful and informative content gives you an edge over your online competitors. Visitors are unlikely to spend much time on websites with little content. Another factor is the availability of products you sell offline. If your website visitor lives miles away from good shopping facilities, they may find purchasing online to be the only viable option. Even in large cities with many shops, it is often difficult to find the specific make or model you may have researched on the web and decided to buy.

Whilst these principles apply to businesses with websites selling physical products, those offering services online will usually have different goals for their website to bring them increased business. This is understandable because there is a world of difference between selling a widely available commodity online and a highly specialised, high value service that requires specific skills and professionalism. Your website visitor’s evaluation will be far more qualitative and much less quantative, which makes it more difficult for them to make a decision to buy from you.  No matter what information you may provide on your website, it is highly unlikely that this alone will persuade your visitors to use your services.

Service providers are likely to find the goal of generating leads through their website to be a more effective way of gaining new business. The aim should be to build relationships and, in turn, trust. This can be done by capturing email addresses, but avoid spamming them with hard sell emails. Rather, let them have regular, useful information, links to helpful articles or blogs on your site. Your website might primarily be a stepping stone to conversions by getting your services on your visitors’ radar.   The actual conversion could be by means of a follow up telephone call, a meeting or whilst networking.