It’s more common than you might expect. Luckily, tools in the AdWords account help to understand, measure and resolve the problem; budget.

Example A:

There are 5 keywords that get 1,000 searches a day, a 5% CTR at £1.00 per click (let’s keep the maths simple). This uses all of the £50 per day budget.

Also, for these keywords, we’re getting 90% impression share (ads are showing almost every time for the keyword set).

We want to increase traffic and generate more sales but we’re buying all the clicks we can, so what do we do?

Usual optimisation steps; split test ads to increase CTR, find more relevant keyword variations, increase bids to improve ad positions and CTRs.

The result? More traffic. Excellent.

But wait, conversion rates went DOWN! What happened?

Example B:

As example A, but improved ad copy gets a 10% CTR. Again, keeping the maths simple, the clicks still cost £1.00 and we still have a £50 per day budget. There are still 1,000 searches per day, so we’re using the budget much faster. In fact, we’re now doing so well on CTRs, we could be buying £100 worth of traffic per day.

Here’s what happens (at least sometimes); Search Funnels.

People don’t always buy, enquire or register from the first search or on the first click. Analysing your Search Funnel will reveal how many impressions, how many clicks and how much time it takes from the first ad impression (or first click) to the conversion. Pretty powerful stuff.

Now, let’s say your average conversion needs 3 ad impressions and two clicks to convert and this process takes two days, on average.

Because we increased CTR in Example B, the budget is now too low to show ads for every search. The impression share is now 50% rather than the 90% enjoyed in Example A.

Which means; the customer only has a 50% chance of seeing ad impression #2 and a further 50% chance again of seeing ad #3 to complete the average conversion path. That’s a 25% chance of completing the Search Funnel, in case you’re not paying attention.

Because there’s only 25% completing the impressions and clicks required to convert, the conversions drop.

Now here’s a difficult decision. Conversion costs went up and to fix it needs some guts; increase the budget. It sounds counter-intuitive. It sounds insane. But it’s necessary if you want to convert those clicks in to sales.

An alternative might be to reduce geographic coverage using location targeting for a short time to prove the theory. A higher impression share for a limited audience would also work, gradually increasing the budget and the geography together whilst maintaining high impression share.

The same result occurs if the keyword set is increased, or search volume naturally increases because it’s Christmas or Summer or some other reason.

If keyword increases are the cause, there’s a solution that requires less of a leap of faith; reduce the keyword set a little, gradually increasing the budget and the keyword set to prove it as you go.

We take a look at an additional free traffic source that’s working well for our clients, Google Shopping Results.

Why List on Google Shopping Results?

• Listing and clicks are currently free – although we suspect that this might change at some point in the future.
• A high ranking would get you on the front page of Google for some search terms.
• You can hook up a good quality feed with your AdWords account and show products in your Google AdWords ads.
• Once you have a feed that works well, there’s more traffic available from other shopping engines using similar methods.

What you need for a Shopping Feed

• Either a dynamic feed output from your eCommerce store or a CSV file in the correct format. A dynamic feed works best as this should update the shopping feed with any price or product changes on your site rather than changing a file and manually uploading each time.
• Suitable access to your site to add validation tags.
• A Google Merchant Centre account.
• Preferably a Seller Rating from previous transactions on Google Checkout – although there’s a lot of conjecture about this improving ranking in the results, most of the top results do show a Seller Rating (draw your own conclusions).

How to Set Up a Google Shopping Feed

1. Open an account. There’s a site validation process that’s a little cumbersome, but bear with it.
2. Check the feed formats you can use and select the one that suits you best
3. Download a sample file if you’re not a techie.
4. If you’re automating the process, have your site output your products to your server and enter the file location in to Merchant Centre. If you’re doing it manually, upload the file.
5. Wait for Google to validate the format and products you’re listing. This might take up to 24hrs.
6. For manual uploads, remember to upload a new file at least once per month – it will expire and your products will stop showing.

As with any online medium, there are techniques and strategies for improving just where your products rank based on a relevance algorithm. More on optimisation techniques in another post, but suffice to say, make sure your main search terms feature in the Titles and Descriptions of your feed.

It can be done, but you can’t rely on AdWords or organic placement alone – a web site and more specifically the pages you land a visitor on need to work hard to convert that visitor in to a sale or an enquiry.

We use Google Website Optimiser to test landing page variations to improve conversion rates. This is a free Google tool that does the hard work for you.

You’ll need the ability to add some code and make page changes on your site. Your friendly developer or coder should find it easy enough.

How To Implement a Website Optimiser Experiment

Firstly, you need to create and upload at least one variation of your original landing page to your server (we’d recommend 2-3 variations for the best results). Try different headlines, or different copy, or different images, or even a different layout. We’d recommend testing just one element at a time though, otherwise it might be difficult to isolate the reason why one variation performed better than another.

Next, create an experiment specifying the original landing page, the URL of the variants and the conversion page. Website Optimiser then provides the codes that need to be installed on each page. Once added and verified, start the experiment.

How it Works

When a visitor lands on your original page, the code will redirect them to one of the variations, spreading the traffic evenly amongst them during the experiment. The source of this traffic isn’t important, whether it’s from AdWords, Facebook, Yahoo!, Bing, organic placement or your email marketing.

It takes some time. Depending on how much traffic visits the landing page you’re testing, it could take days, weeks, or in some cases, months, particularly if you’re testing minor variations. Wait until enough data has passed through the experiment to pick a clear winner or a clear loser.

A graph illustrates the conversion rate of each page as the experiment proceeds. This is annotated with the percentage chance of that page beating your original. Eventually, you will find out which page performs the best and produces the best conversion rate.

Once you have the data, knowing which page performs best is great, but it is more important to understand the reason why, so take care when creating page variations. Finally, make this page your original and you can start testing new variations to improve performance further.

Website Optimiser: The Point

The point of the Website Optimiser is to test and measure variations of web pages to see which produce the best results. You can experiment with different fonts, images, text, videos and more. The aim is to increase your conversion rate, thereby decreasing your cost per acquisition.

In a recent project, we’ve seen a 20.9% improvement in overall conversion rates after two experiments on a single landing page.

What it Means for Profitability

Getting a higher conversion rate means a lower cost per conversion, which means more sales or enquiries for your budget.

It also means that you can afford to bid more per click than your competitors because you know that your cost per conversion will still be lower. Your ads will be in higher positions where there are more clicks and more sales and enquiries.

With a predictable conversion rate, you can afford to increase your budget to buy more quality traffic and you’re on your way to dominating your chosen market.

There’s a lot more science and sales psychology behind visitor behaviour, but here are the most common visitors turn-offs that you should be able to address.

1. Navigation. Make it easy and clear for me to find what I’m looking for. Too many options is no option at all, so keep it short and logical and use sub-sections if necessary. If you’ve 1001 products or services, why not let me navigate by problem, not your solution – I may not even know what the solution is yet.
2. Search - if there are lots of products, give me a neat search box so I can type, but give me some sensible results. The search function needs to be intelligent enough to understand that boxes=box and even that 12mm might well mean the same as 12 – if you have no results give me some other method of finding what I need, perhaps a product filter or maybe just get me to pick up the phone and ask.
3. Page loading times. Those pretty images might look great full screen, but squeezing them in to a small frame means my browser will have to download the whole image (5-10secs) and then resize it – 10 images would take over a minute! Resize the images before you put them on your site and include larger versions that I can view if it is important.
4. Broken links. Nothing worse than clicking a link and finding that it’s dead is a surefire way to get visitors to leave or at least begin to mistrust you. Check links on your site regularly, or find a broken link checker online to do it for you.
5. Too many similar products. Giving me too many options will most likely confuse me. If I can’t tell the relative benefits between two or three different products, I’ll probably buy none of them. How about you let me order those products by price, or size or filter according to some criteria?
6. Too little information. I found the product I need and now I’m ready to buy. Is it in stock? When will I get it? And the number one pet hate, “How much is delivery?”. Please don’t hide it away and make me search for it, I’ll tire in my search and leave. Putting it in the checkout process won’t help either, I’ll just feel like you’re trying to cheat me and leave anyway. Be clear about your shipping policy and price and honour your promise.
7. I need some help. How do I contact you? Where’s your phone number? If your primary goal is for me to pick up the phone and talk to you, don’t make me search for your number on a contact page somewhere. If you want me to pick up the phone, make your number big and prominent (top left of the screen and at the end of your content as a call to action are usually the best places). There’s a rule that fits most situations: tell me (succinctly) why I should do something, show me evidence of why and then make it easy to take action.

Ask a Marketing Professional about this

AdWords Analyst, Antony Potts explains how this helps you.

A “View Through Conversion” occurs on the Content Network when your ad is shown, but not clicked, and that person then returns to your site through a Google Search/Search Partner campaign and converts within a 30-day period.

Think of it this way. There’s an old adage, “we waste 50% of our marketing budget. If only we knew which 50%”. This arises because there is a lack of ability to measure how some advertising media influence your customer’s decision to buy. Let’s say you place an ad on the side of a bus, sponsor Coronation Street or your local football team – very difficult to accurately measure the impact this has on your sales and enquiries.

View Through Conversion Tracking delivers more accurate measurement of the customer’s journey across the web (only for Google ads, remember!) to demonstrate where your ads have displayed and perhaps should be credited with ‘an assist’ in generating that order or enquiry.

View Through Conversion Tracking

This measurement may help to indicate that your Content Network account is performing well, but it unfortunately can not be as accurate an indicator as we’d all hope. Remember that although your ad may have been rendered on a web page that person is viewing, it may be in a position off-screen and they may not have physically seen it.

However, the trends it illustrates are more important than the numbers – even if it accurately measures only 50% of the traffic, improvement trends would still prove valuable data. You can now measure the benefit of Google Display Ads on the Content Network with more confidence, knowing that you’ll have some method of calculating the return on effort and the budget you spend.

This is a valuable metric to analyse and understand, but like View Through Conversions, use it to influence your decisions rather than build your entire business strategy around it.

Much better than not knowing which 50% you’re wasting, but won’t get that waste to 0% just yet.

Want more from your campaign?

Call our AdWords team free on 08000 474714.

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:

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.

Sure, it made the house look great. It completed the appeal of the property amongst it’s neighbours. The finish of the property was awesome inside and out.

The problem though, is that this makes a promise to a potential buyer and then fails to deliver. It’s a big damned lie, one that might just convey the wrong message and kill your potential sale. The buyer may not have even wanted a garage, but the seeds of doubt and mistrust are already planted.

There are many examples of simple untruths out there on the web too. Buy now, in stock! Click the ad, and land on a page all about the product you want to buy and guess what: awaiting stock! If you promise next day delivery, deliver it next day. Again, the customer may not even demand next day delivery – but you promised.

Don’t make promises you can’t fulfil – it WILL cost you sales and customers.