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

AdWords One-on-One Coaching

Site Consulting

Email Marketing

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:

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.

Actually, I have established a circumstance where this is beneficial. During the last week, I was revising a campaign. One particular ad was consistently achieving #3 or #4 spot. On increasing the bid price to put it in to the top spot, the ad actually achieved less clicks and cost more per click, but remained in the #4 position.

The advantage is this: with these changes, assuming your ad and landing page fulfils the required quality score, you can now get to the top spot much more easily. Before, you had little control over your average CPC; you do have control over your max bid price, although it may be more than you’re willing to pay.

Inside AdWords: Improved top ad placement formula now in effect
Beginning today, the actual CPC you pay for an ad in a top spot will continue to be determined by the auction, but subject to a minimum price. The minimum price is based on the quality of your ad and is the minimum amount required for your ad to achieve top placement above Google search results. As always, your actual CPC will be discounted and the higher your ad’s quality, the less you will pay.

And yet, I still think this move says profit, not (e)quality. What do you think? Comment below.

See more AdWords comments here, or learn how to achieve AdWords excellence.

It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out. Right now, the placement of your ad is not just based on how much you bid for particular keywords, it is also based on a quality score (relevance of your ad and landing page to the keywords, and the Click-Through-Rate). This means that when someone searches, they are more likely to get the most relevant results – damned good practice, I think.

So, the current calculation is a mix of quality score the average cost per click that you paid. The post correctly points out that how much you pay is defined by all the other advertisers around you, something over which you have no control. I guess the easiest way to explain it is that if your average CPC is £1, and another advertiser averages £1.10, their ad will appear above yours, even though you might have set your maximum bid to £3.

In addition to the quality score, the proposed change will be based on your maximum CPC, not your average. This appears to me to be a good strategy to increase the average CPC. If ads are placed higher based on maximum CPC, surely advertisers will just increase their maximum CPC? In turn, this will increase the average CPC.

And Google’s profits. Watch this space.

Inside AdWords: Upcoming change to the top ad placement formula
The key change to the formula will be how we consider price. Today’s formula considers an ad’s Quality Score and actual cost-per-click (CPC). The improved formula will still heavily weight Quality Score, but instead of actual CPC, it will consider an ad’s maximum CPC. Here’s why:

Actual CPC is determined, in part, by the bidding behaviour of the advertisers below you. This means that your ad’s chance of being promoted to a top spot could be constrained by a factor you cannot influence. By considering your ad’s maximum CPC, a value you set, you will have more control over achieving top ad placement.

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Not least the whole Harry Potter thing, but we appear to be in a wizard-driven society, or at least much of the online experience is. That’s all well and good and many times, like this, it can work well. What it doesn’t do, is give as much flexibility – it’s a quick win.

1. It suggests additional keywords that you might want to consider, along with the bids, too. Be careful though, the keywords won’t necessarily match your ad copy. (Get the free guide for more on that).
2. It analyses your current keywords and suggests increasing your bid price to increase the ad position. (Hey, I thought Google rewarded relevance, not paying more to be at the top!?). It won’t give you the opportunity to define your increased bid, just to select the suggestion, or not, which is a little tedious. Interestingly, it suggested that an increase on a bid on one obscure keyword, although the search term had never been matched and the ad never displayed.
3. It suggests changes to your ad copy and displayed URL. Quite a useful exercise, actually, but I’d recommend cycling the ads for a short while to see what difference the changes make.

In all, it might well throw up some useful tips, but it’s not going to set your campaign alight. Remember that your business is about people, not about the technology which won’t know your customer as well as you do.

Original Story: Inside AdWords: Campaign Optimizer now available

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This is only part of the story, of course. If done well, AdWords will get you visitors. Without putting as much effort in to the rest of the strategy, you’ll end up just paying for visitors to land on your site, and disappear without engaging with you, without buying anything, without giving you an opportunity to sell them what they are looking for.

Sound like a good deal? It does for Google – but not for you.

Get the free guide here.