In a fiercely competitive market, where clicks are £1.50 or more, together we established that he was wasting around £50 PER DAY on irrelevant clicks that had absolutely no chance of becoming sales.

Why? Keyword match-types.

You will hopefully be aware that Google Adwords provides three different keyword match types; broad match, phrase match and exact match.

Starting with the last first, Exact Keyword matching will only show your ad when the search term (what your customer types in to Google) matches your keyword exactly, no misspelling, no typos, no plural, no partial matching.

Secondly, Phrase Match will match the search term if it includes your phrase somewhere; the phrase “red dress” would be matched to searches for ‘ladies red dress’, ‘girl in a red dress’, ‘make a red dress’, ‘red dress design’, ‘red dress lyrics’. Now, of course some of these are relevant, but some are not and potentially waste your budget.

Phrase Matching is quite tightly targeted though, so the same phrase would not match searches such as ‘red evening dress’, ‘red cocktail dress’ or even ‘dress red’ or ‘dress red’. The words are in a different order or do not form the phrase you’re bidding on, so you should thoroughly research and include each variation in your campaign to avoid missing that traffic.

Lastly, Broad Matching is the widest possible match type, and matches any search which includes the words in your keyword, misspellings, plurals, the words in a different order.

This is fine in some circumstances, but we would advise caution; research all possible search variations which might match your keyword. In the example broad match ‘red dress’, this matches; red head dress, dressing in red, red gingham dress, red white and blue dress, red or dead dress, red dressing gown and many other, potentially wasteful clicks which aren’t relevant enough.

Some of the terms may be relevant, and you want that traffic anyway. But matching one broad match keyword in this way will make it difficult to target that keyword with a relevant ad and to land that searcher on the right page on your site, impossible to measure the success of each search term and you’ll pay a lot more for each click.

Worse still, Google AdWords also uses what it calls, ‘expanded matching‘ on broad match keywords, often using synonyms. In a recent example, fujitsu bracket might match ‘mount fuji’ and ‘monitor mount’ matches a search for ‘shower screen bracket’! Completely irrelevant.

So, what should your keyword strategy be?

Depending on your market, budget and your personal preference, we might recommend bidding on phrase matches to begin with, researching as many variations as possible, or using only exact matching to start. In either case, a small number of broad matches should also be included to pick up anything you missed in your research. You can then frequently monitor the search query report for your account to add more phrase or exact match variations, or use negative keywords to exclude the irrelevant searches you find.

CAUTION: if you have been using broad match keywords in your account, removing them all in one go can upset the ecology of your campaign – be very careful before implementing a policy change such as this.

For advanced keyword strategies, try live one on one coaching – guaranteed satisfaction or your money back.

Alternatively, have one of our professionals carry out a free audit of your campaign and tell you where you’re going wrong.

As poor Filipe Massa proved at the Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend, having the pace to overtake and lead the race almost all the way to the chequered flag just isn’t enough – you have to have all parts of your game on song to beat the competition; the right driver, so many small performance parts that all have to work in unison, the right strategy for each track. But most of all, you need the right team, all working together to achieve a common objective.

Winning business online is a very similar proposition. You might have the best web site in the world that converts 35% of your visitors to hard cash. But, with the wrong visitors, or too few of them, that’s just not going to get you over the finishing line.

There are multiple parts to your strategy that all need to work in synergy to squeeze every last drop of performance from your race car;

• the right strategy
• quality visitors landing on your site that are looking for exactly what you’re selling
• landing those visitors on the absolute sweet-spot on your site that addresses their need immediately
• good copy that reinforces your ability to fulfil their need or desire
• obvious calls to action to motivate your visitor to buy, pick up the phone, sign up for a trial, or whatever it is you want them to do

…and we’re still only at the second pit stop!

The ‘conversion‘ isn’t the end of your race – you still need more to reach the chequered flag of success.

1. Qualifying: Getting the right traffic.
2. Stint one: Making sure your visitor lands in the right place and stays
3. Stint two: Converting that visitor to a sale
4. Stint three: Maximising your return on that customer
5. Chequered flag: 10 points in the bag, the glory and a big bottle of champagne

To discover your winning strategy and avoid a Massa-style blow-up three laps from the end of your race, have us join your pit crew – 08000 47 47 14.

PPC Management

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It’s a subject, like many in the world of marketing, that is completely subjective – it will depend entirely on your business, the market sector, your product, your prices, competitors and a whole host of other things. But there is a common thread with many sites that you may want to consider:

Is your visitor ready to convert?

If you’re selling commodity items like CDs or DVDs, or consumable products, the chances are that your buyer has the budget, their hand on their credit card and may just be looking for the cheapest price. Comparatively easy pickings.

However, for many businesses (for example, those selling services, fashion products, interior design products, expensive jewellery, cars, property etc.), visitors clicking on Google ads are a different proposition; sure, they may have a budget, a desire or a need, but it’s likely that they haven’t quite decided exactly what the solution is.

We’re talking about buying cycles, and their length and the stages in them vary significantly for every business.

Let’s use the example of buying a fashion handbag. I’m not talking about a £20 bag from a supermarket, I mean several hundred pounds on a designer bag.

There will be a small segment of this market that will make an impulse buy when they see the right bag on a site, and there are those that are in the latter stages of their buying cycle when they land on a site, but the majority of the traffic is still pondering, still deciding, still browsing.

• Some are dreaming of buying, but don’t have the budget yet.
• Some have the budget, but aren’t quite sure what they want – they’re looking for inspiration.
• Some are planning to buy for that special occasion, and will save up.
• Some are looking for a gift idea, and want to suggest that someone else buy it for them.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help your conversion tracking data. Google only tracks when someone clicks your ad and then buys during that visit, there’s no simple way of knowing if that person returned bought later.

For many Ecommerce sites, a visitor has but two simple options: buy, or leave. Most will leave.

But there is a better way – choice. Give your visitor a choice, make it easy for them to browse similar products that might interest them. Engage them in a discussion, offer some help, some advice. Make it easy for them to tell a friend, or add it to their wish list and email them a reminder, or some other products as they come in to stock.

Become a companion through the buying journey – and you’ll still be there at the end when the purchase is made.

The quality of the traffic that you’ll get will also depend on the keywords that you’re bidding on for both pay-per-click and SEO; a search for “handbag” would typically identify someone early in their buying cycle, still browsing. Whilst a search for “red leather handbag”, or a search including a specific brand and model name or number would indicate someone later in the cycle, more clear about their need and closer to making that purchase. Find out how to improve your PPC traffic quality.

You can get an objective site review and learn how you can improve your conversion rate – talk to me about how this works:

1. I’m selfish, only interested in me. Right now, I don’t care about your business, I care about me and whether you can deliver the product, service or solution I need. I’m not interested in the 400 other things you sell or do, just the one thing I need.
2. I’m impatient. Get to the point quickly, demonstrate to me that you know what I need and that you can deliver it. I don’t want to go trawling your site for more information until I know I’m in the right place.
3. I don’t trust you. I landed on your site because you matched my search on Google, and it looks like you have what I need. But I still don’t trust you – now I’m going to browse around your site and find reasons to confirm my doubts; ah, jack of all trades, huh? Not for me! Ooh, only started up three months ago? No credibility. Spelling mistakes or broken links? Do they represent the shoddy way in which you’ll deal with me, too? Maybe.
4. I’m confused: What do I do now? How do I contact you? How do I order? Why is it so difficult to find this information on your site? There are so many options, I don’t know which to click.
5. I’m suspicious. Is your payment gateway secure? Can I trust you not to spam my email address or sell it to someone else who will? Will my order ever arrive? Who have you worked with before? Did you do a good job?
6. I’m looking for a reason to leave. I’ll need lots of reasons to stay, but just one will make me leave.
7. I really need to be told what I need and how I can get it. Please make it easy for me.

In the last few days alone, business owners have told me that sole objective of their site is to get someone to pick up the phone, and have then been shocked by the revelation that their telephone number isn’t on every page – it’s buried somewhere on a contact page. It’s a simple thing, but easily (and frequently) overlooked when you’re viewing your site from your perspective, not that of your visitor.

Achieve a greater perspective. Call free on 08000 47 47 14 or email:

I’ve known plenty of people that called themselves ‘Sony men’. That is to say, they bought in to the brand in a big way, particularly years ago. They’d only buy Sony hi-fi gear or their TV had to be a Sony. Personally, I’ve never considered myself a Sony man, but you’ve really got to respect the strength of the brand that makes someone want to only buy Sony products.

I discovered one of the methods they use to maintain that brand strength.

A slight contradiction here, but I’ve always owned Playstations. I had two of the first version (one got stolen), and two of the PS2s (one scratched discs until they were unusable) and Father Christmas kindly brought my son and I a PS3 this year.

So here’s the lesson; the PS3 was bought from Amazon and yesterday, it just stopped reading discs altogether. After searching a few forums, I established that it’s probably a problem with the laser. I called Amazon, who took a whole bunch of details and then said I needed a reference number from Sony and gave me their telephone number.

The number turns out to be a generic one, and there’s another, dedicated number to speak with the Playstation team. A tiny bit irritated, I redial the Playstation team.

Another guy takes a few details about the fault, I’ve already tried all the options he suggests, so he registers the unit and then simply says:

“That’s fine. We’ll have our courier deliver a replacement to you tomorrow and collect the faulty one at the same time”. No repackaging the box with the accessories and cables – just the unit on its own.

What a pleasant surprise. No grief whatsoever! I really don’t mind stuff breaking down if that’s the service I’m going to get.

The alternative version of this story, full of grief and endless form-filling, tests, paying for shipping it back, being without the unit for days or weeks, would almost certainly have affected my decision to buy the next generation of Playstation. As it happened, the outcome of it breaking has actually made me even more likely to buy Sony again.

It’s a sad state of affairs when this level of service is extraordinary – surely this should be the standard level of service anyway?

So the lesson is this: your customer service doesn’t have to be extraordinary, it just needs to fulfil (or exceed) expectations – and you’ll have a customer for life.

Work with your customers in the knowledge of the end result. If your end result is a quick sale and no repeat orders, where is the motivation to do a good job, or make sure that they are happy? If the profit in acquiring new customers is in the long term relationship, you’re much more likely to be considerate, helpful, supportive and understanding. You’ll consistently work hard to do a good job.

Seth compares the follow-through to the action required in Tennis or Golf – the ball is long gone, so why keep swinging? The same is true for football, boxing and my personal favourite, snooker – if your cue continues in a straight line after the shot, you know the stroke itself will also be true.

Seth’s Blog: Follow through
If you know that the last two inches of your follow through don’t matter, then you’ll start slowing down at three inches, or even four, and suddenly it does matter. If you draw the line on money back guarantees you’ll keep sliding backwards, bit by bit, until it does matter. If you’re quick to fire the employee who needs a lot of help, you’ll be quicker with those that need just a little, and then, pretty soon, it’s a very different place to work, isn’t it?

1. Be nice
2. Be fully attentive
3. Exceed their expectations
4. Listen to what they’re really telling you
5. Help them understand how
6. Always follow up
7. Stay in touch

It’s a great seven-point plan that will work well, but needs to be implemented in appropriate ways for different products and services.

The purchase of an asset such as a plant, a division, or even an entire company.

What do you do with an asset? Maintain it so that you can get the most benefit from it for the longest period of time? If the asset were a building, you’d ensure that it retained its value, you’d repair it, you’d carry out preventative maintenance to stop expensive things going wrong.

How would you go about acquiring an asset? You’d search and evaluate each opportunity and judge it on its merits. Does it fit well with my needs? How much will it cost me to maintain? What’s the return on my investment? How high is the cost of acquisition?

What if a customer or a new market were an asset?

Before considering any acquisition, you need to consider the cost. How much is that asset worth? If the annual spend for that customer is £1000 and there’s 20% gross profit in it, that sounds OK. But what if that customer was really demanding and you spent a whole day pitching the sale, and three days’ on customer service in the first year alone?

Consider this sum:

Return on Investment (ROI) – Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) = Asset Value

Somewhere below the asset value is what you can justify spending on the acquisition, and this figure differs from business to business and from market to market.

Before undertaking any business development or marketing activity, you need to define what you can justify as the cost of acquisition.

Now, it may be that in your market, customers are buying high value goods and spending a lot of money with you over a three-year period. You might well justify inviting that potential customer to an exclusive sporting event or two, but if your customer is just going to buy one book from you, that isn’t going to work.

Get free advice on business development.

In the cold light of day, it is irrational. But there’s a reason why this happens: in an auction of this nature, whether it’s on e-bay or not, once you’ve bid and you’re winning, you start to feel like you own the item in question. The longer you stay winning the bid, the more you feel like you own it. It belongs to you.

Next, someone bids a little more and you’re not leading: someone is trying to steal from you. Something that you feel that you already own. So you bid a little more to stop the thief. Even if that means you bid more than you wanted to pay, or even if it’s more than the ‘buy it now price’.

The more you feel attached to the item, the easier the sale is and the more you’ll pay.

It’s the same when you buy a house. You go and view a stranger’s house and it’s always more appealing if it’s full of furniture rather than empty. Why? The same reason: you can imagine living here, somewhere in your mind you can imagine your furniture in here, your dog sleeping in the kitchen. Would you buy a friend’s home? Probably not, because if they’d lived there a long time, it would always feel like their home, not yours.

What works better if you’re selling a car? Seeing it sitting on your driveway, or in a showroom? Better with your family in it, or on your own? Better to have a friend with you who’s envious of the purchase, or alone?

If you’re demonstrating a software application, try and do it with some of your prospect’s data. If you can’t manage that, try something from their vertical market, at least. The prospect will start to feel like it’s their application already. Better still, install it and let them try it out, assuming you’re confident that the software is up to the job, of course. The customer will start to feel like they own the software.

I think of this process as an increase in stakeholding. The higher the stake you have in the deal, the harder it is to let it go, and the more you’ll increase the stakes to avoid losing what you already committed.

CRM was supposed to help businesses better understand their customers and increase efficiency. Yet most companies are not getting the return they expected. Why the purchase of software or hardware (which can sometimes cost millions to the company) that enable a company to capture informations and details about individual customers that can be used for target marketing, called by some people “an expensive way to learn what otherwise might be learned by chatting with customers for five minutes”?

from Why CRM doesn’t work « David vs. Goliath

Excellent. Someone else that gets the point!

Coincidentally, I’m currently working with a business that is about to implement a ‘CRM’ system. It turns out, like too many businesses and people, and in all fairness the whole industry, they don’t really understand what CRM is.

In many cases, CRM is implemented on a promise, on the promise and expectation of what it did for another business. In truth, the thing that actually made the difference was the businesses approach to it’s customer, as is pointed out in the post.

All too often, unfortunately this point is missed completely. Who’s going to point out that it’s the strategy that makes this work? The software company pitching for the contract? Conflict of interest. The Sales Manager? Too close to the problem.

CRM can work extremely well and deliver fantastic results. But unless it fits your strategy, rather than your your strategy fitting around it, it’s just going to add more work with little return.

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