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:

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the content network is a bad strategy, far from it. But remember that to be successful you need to test, measure and refine what works and what doesn’t, and mixed together in one campaign, you’ll find it tough to understand where keywords are generating clicks and turning in to sales.

Google search is simple; it’s Google. You type something in to it, you get results, and sponsored links across the top and down the side. The audience here is specifically searching for a solution to a problem or to fulfil a need. If it’s a product or service, they probably have a budget and are ready to part with it.

The Google Search Network is a little different. The same principal applies; someone has a need and they are actively searching for a product or solution and have already identified their budget. But search network partners include Amazon and e-bay, Sky.com, Orange and many others, no doubt. A different audience, right? Firstly, you’ll appreciate that ads are shown in a different way on these sites, in different positions on the page. Secondly, this is a different audience: yes, they are searching, but a searcher on e-bay isn’t compelled by the same messages in your ads as a searcher on Google. Ditto for Amazon.

Let’s put it this way: identical products are sold in some swanky boutique in London and in your local car boot sale or market. They will be sold for a vastly different price. I appreciate the argument about overheads, but that isn’t the driver here – if your market trader could sell for the same price, he surely would! The audience’s perspective and expectations are different, and so is the surrounding competition.

Thirdly, there’s the Content Network, also known as AdSense. AdSense is an easy program to sign up to for any blog publisher or site owner to monetise their web site through displaying and generating clicks on Google ads. You’ve seen them all over the place, and probably ignored them, mostly.

The main principal is the same though, you bid on keywords (much broader ones) and Google matches your ads to pages that feature those keywords. So the mere fact that Suzie reads Helen’s blog about Helen’s friend who bought a Prada bag at the weekend means that Google might just match your keyword bid on ‘Prada bag’ and show your ad.

That’s OK? Sure, it’s OK. Will Suzie click on your ad? Well, perhaps, but unlikely. That doesn’t really matter, Google doesn’t measure your CTR here or judge your overall campaign performance on it either. What does matter though, is that what compels Suzie to click your ad will be a different message to that which compels someone to click it on Google Search, or its Search Network. It will achieve a different CTR, and more importantly, a different number of sales, or conversions for the cost of the clicks.

Even if Suzie were to click your ad when it appeared on Helen’s blog, do you think she’d be more, or less likely to buy than our friend who searched on Google?

The best way to tackle this is to split your campaigns. You’ll then be able to test, measure and refine what works for each audience, what you’re spending and what’s converting to sales. Depending on your product, service or market, you might want to split it three ways for each media network, or perhaps just Search and Content.

Learn more stuff like this.

Or turbo charge your AdWords campaign.

Even if you don’t want to target specific demographics, there could be an incredible amount of value in the new reports you’ll get to measure and compare your success across a demographic spread.

Inside AdWords: Demographic bidding beta test

Google says:

Demographic bidding and reports are available to advertisers who run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns (with CPC or CPM bidding) on certain sites in the Google content network. Here’s how it works: Some publishers in our network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing us to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups. (To protect user privacy, AdWords receives this data only from publishers that have permission from users to share their data according to the site’s terms and conditions. Users are never identified personally, but only as anonymous aggregated data in the demographic reports. And to protect the privacy of minors, users under 18 can’t be targeted demographically.)

Bear in mind that this only applies to the Content Network, not Google Search or the Search Network.

Anyone who is a subscriber to the ‘long tail‘ principal will know that generating variations and combinations of keywords is good practice to find lots of niche little terms that will build a strong click through rate, a lower cost per click and help you beat your competitors with a stick.

If you’ve read my free AdWords paper, or taken part in one of my online consultations, you’ll also know that a well-structured account improves your quality score and reduces your cost-per click.

Given these two principals, it’s usual practice therefore to create an ad group for ‘widgets’ and then variations of that ad group for additional qualifying keywords like ‘best widgets’, ‘cheapest widgets’, ‘cheap widgets’, ‘small widgets’, and further still for ‘cheap big widgets’ and so forth. Obviously, this strategy leads to thousands of potential combinations of keywords and ad groups.

So, here we are with our tens of thousands of keywords and hundreds of ad groups – and we’re stuck. An AdWords account can’t take them all. For reference, the advised limits are 3,000 keywords in any one ad group, 100 ad groups per campaign, and 50,000 keywords per account. If you want more than that, you’ll need more than one account.

However, if you want to keep just one account to make it easier to manage, Google suggests that they match broad terms on singular and plural – so there’s no need to bid on ‘widget’ and ‘widgets’. Really? I’m not buying that at all. The whole system is based on relevance, and some plurals invite a whole different kind of traffic, producing better (or worse) click through rates than their singular counterparts.

Following on from that little gem, how about other variations of a word? Does bidding on cheap, also mean that you’re bidding on ‘cheaper’ and ‘cheapest’? Google declined to answer that one.

But know this: if you do bid on the variations, they’ll generate different results. Some better, some worse, but different.

My advice? If you’re near those account limits, bid on singular and plurals of your core keywords and perhaps keep the qualifiers down to singular only and expand on those that generate impressions.

Another little gem popped up in my conversation with Google too – one I’ve not seen officially published anywhere: having lots of keywords that generate no impressions has a negative impact on your campaign. Logical? No. True? Perhaps. But it’s difficult to find out what doesn’t generate impressions or clicks until you try, right?

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Web Sites that Work

We live in an exciting age. In some ways it has never been easier to communicate with people and a lot of that is thanks to this T’interweb thingy. Blogs, websites and e-shots are cheap and relatively easy to set up, even for techno numpties like me.

But therein lies one of the problems — how, amid this plethora of words and images can you stand out and get your voice heard?

Websites are funny beasts. One of the common traps businesses fall into when they commission a site is to concentrate exclusively on how it looks NOT what it says. Flash images, break beat sounds and pictures of the chairman’s cat are all well and good but somewhere along the line the fundamental purpose of having a web presence appears to have got lost.

They’re potentially great communication and marketing tools but you have to remember the basics: what you are trying to achieve with a particular web page and what you hope the reader will do next.

So what’s the answer? Easy. Combine dazzling eye-catching design with fresh and original content. Don’t get blinded by the look. Instead, commission copy that’s well written and easy-to-follow and then keep it fresh by regularly updating it.

If you can manage that then you are probably in the top 10 per cent bracket already. Unfortunately, a lot of what is churned out these days is poorly constructed and chock full of spelling and grammar errors. Like sloppy service in a shop, these errors are offensive to the potential customers because they say, “we don’t care about your experience here in our cyberworld”.

Another cardinal sin is a failure to do regular updates. Once the novelty of the communication tools wears off, too many firms leave their website or blog to fester.

So please don’t have news pages that haven’t been updated for more than a month. What message does “Latest News — November 2003” convey about your business?

Another thing to keep in mind is that — thanks to Pay Per Click campaigns — a visitor to a website might arrive anywhere in the site. For example we do some work for a solicitor who has a number of specialities. The bulk of his traffic arrives via his Google Adwords campaigns, but it is directed to a page linked to a particular service. The visitor may never see the ‘home’ page.

So, it’s worth pausing here and thinking what that means. It means you’ve got a number of different entry points or ‘home’ pages. We’re getting a bit technical here, but it’s simply a case of putting yourself in the shoes of the visitor and working out how and why they’ve landed where they have on your site.

I’ll close this little rant by revealing our own office pet hate when it comes to B2B copy. It applies to copy we see both online and offline. Sadly, we see it daily. It’s when a company refers to itself in the plural. We lost count of the times we have read Firm A are expanding. The firm is one. It’s singular. It’s Firm A is expanding.

Here endeth the lesson.

No, actually, here endeth the lesson — don’t lose site of the most precious marketing tool you have – words! There are millions of them and they’re mean, moody and magnificent.

Tony Garner
www.vivapr.co.uk

Tony Garner is a media relations specialist and a student of my AdWords success programme.

Big Bubble? Maybe. Big Trouble? Definitely.

There’s nothing like a bit of Google-bashing, huh? Bill Gates must love it! It certainly takes some of the usual negative attention away from Microsoft.

If Google is squeezing the AdSense partners, and I don’t especially advertise on the content network so I wouldn’t know or be too bothered, there are competitors in the marketplace like Yahoo and Microsoft that will happily take their advertising real-estate. If sites have any decent level of traffic, they’ll actually be able to sell ad space on their sites through an agency anyway, or at least those smart enough will enter in to affiliate programs to monetize their sites.

Pay per click is the same as any sales and marketing tool – if the ROI doesn’t stack up, dump it. This is true of telemarketing, direct mail, billboard, TV or radio advertising or even your humble sales guy or gal.

There’s also some confusion of the facts here – AdSense isn’t search, it’s the practice of Google displaying ‘relevant’ ads on a site based on a page’s content. Most visitors to these sites aren’t actually searching for a solution to their problem. This is incidental advertising, not the ‘qualified customers’ that this article mentions and Google search produces.

With AdSense (the content network), ads are displayed to a viewer that might be interested in what you’re selling, but far more often than not isn’t: just because the term ‘cat food’ is mentioned on a page a viewer happens to be reading, doesn’t necessarily mean that the viewer even has a damned cat, let alone looking for some food for one!

Is the economy a bubble about to burst? Well, perhaps and perhaps not – but advertisers will keep using a medium that generates a good return on investment, and dump it when it doesn’t. And if web publishers are getting a raw deal, the smart ones will always go elsewhere for a better deal too.

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.

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The result of Google and the prevalence of search means that people are far more forgiving of things that need to be sought out, and less patient than ever with selfish marketers that insist on showing up in your face.

Search marketing works for precisely this reason, if it’s done well, of course. You audience only gets your message when they are searching for what you do, or they have a problem that you can fix.

In case you missed it, there’s a free paper on how to get the best from AdWords available here.