Posts in ‘Internet Marketing’

My apologies for this article being late off the press: two new staff and being asked to author Practical Ecommerce’s Conversion Report Card has meant a bit of overload during the last two weeks. But here it is now…

So you’re spending all this money on your Google Adwords, but are they really worth the expense? I often have people tell me they’ve cancelled their PPC spend because they’re not getting a justifiable return. So what could be going wrong?

Let’s run a test search for one of your campaigns. Hopefully your pay-per-click ad shows up OK: now, click on the ad. Where does it send you to? Please don’t tell me it’s your home page!

In the previous article, I explained how landing pages designed for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are very different from the landing pages designed for search-engine optimisation (SEO). To recap, landing pages built for SEO live inside your website’s main structure and are designed to get noticed by Google. Landing pages for PPC, however, are specifically designed for conversion and not for getting noticed by Google.

PPC Landing pages have one job: to get you a conversion! You’ve just paid for a warm lead, so now’s the time to make the most of it and not leave it to chance.

Here are some ideas that can help you get more respondents to convert.

It sounds obvious, but how do you really know the value of something if you don’t measure it? Think about your website for a moment. Do you really know how efficient your pay-per-click campaign is? Do you really know how well your website converts visitors into buyers?

If you’re anything like the majority of e-Business owners, you’re probably using tools like Google Analytics to measure basic information such as visitor numbers or demographics. But have you considered using these tools on a more granular level to optimise your website and campaign management, to get more sales and enquiries?

As an example, half of your pay-per-click campaigns could be working well and sending you large numbers of qualified traffic. However, the other half could be costing you more than what they’re worth to your business. If you’re just looking at aggregated figures, then you’re masking the areas where you’re losing money. The same goes for your website. Overall you may be quite pleased with the numbers of sales and enquiries you’re getting. But what if there are various obstacles hidden within your site that are causing prospective customers to leave and head straight off to your competition? You can only begin to get a clear picture of these if you measure the things that are important.

We had an interesting discussion recently with an e-commerce business owner who asked whether they should be concentrating on driving traffic to their site or improving conversion rates.

This really is a chicken or egg type question, if you think about it. One the one hand, e-business owners don’t want to invest heavily in driving traffic visitors to their site if the people they attract are leaving dissatisfied in high numbers. On the other hand, conversion rate analysis and optimisation doesn’t come cheap, and so e-businesses owners can be reluctant to spend thousands in this area if they don’t have sufficient numbers of people coming to their site.

In an ideal world, you need to work on both. You need a cart and horse to be connected properly and working together to move forward and the same applies to e-business websites. Your site is likely to be a significant, if not the primary, channel for your products and services, and failure to reach your market and convert people into customers simply means that you’ll be running well under full steam.

In a recent press release by Internet Information company comScore, it has been suggested that audience sizes could be overstated by up to 2.5 times. This is largely due to the regular deletion of cookies by around 3 out of 10 internet users.

For internet advertising, reach is a key measure which determines the value of websites or web pages. The measure of reach is unique visitors. Web analytics software like Google Analytics tracks unique visitor numbers by using cookies. The cookies are used by the analytics software to identify the site user for tracking purposes.

There is a growing trend for internet users to limit the use of cookies on their machine as modern browser technology makes it quite easy for people to do this. The problem for analytics software is that a user who visits a site regularly but also regularly clears their cookies will appear as more than one unique visitor, even though they are the same person.

The comTest study examined the degree to which users cleared cookies from their computers and found that server logs that count unique cookies to measure unique visitors are likely to be exaggerating the size of a site’s audience by a factor as high as 2.5, or an exaggeration of 150 percent.

We’ve been made aware recently of an interesting brand-damaging phenomenon arising from the placement of affiliate content within e-commerce websites.

We’ve been testing a number of websites in the travel industry recently and these sites are commonly signed up to one or more affiliates that provide the website with the ability to add functionality and earn revenues.

Typically, these sites will insert some code into the body of their site and that code will run an external call that presents certain information or functionality to the user. For example, a tourism site may have an embedded control that allows people to search for and book hotels.

Here’s an example:

Apart from obvious problems with usability and user-experience, we’ve found that a high number of people expressing a sense of distrust in BOTH the company who’s site they are visiting and with the affiliate site as well.