FEBRUARY 2013 IN THIS EDITION

Transcription

1 Hi there, Where is your online marketing heading for 2013? This month our customer conference call was tasked with helping customers answer this rather involved question. Over the next 11 months you can guarantee that there will be as many shiny objects to distract you as there were in This space seems to be littered with them. FEBRUARY 2013 IN THIS EDITION 2 Conversion Attribution Following the Journey Not the Destination So knowing what needs focusing on and what can be passed by is a great time and money saver. During the call I covered the three areas that all website marketing improvements can fit within: Attracting being found for those looking both online and offline directly and indirectly Converting turning anonymous website visitors into known leads or sales Mining converting prospects into customers and / or one time customers into repeat customers Usually it s one area that can hold back the rest. Once again it s the theory of constraints coming to fruition. This being the fact that one roadblock along the whole selling process can hold back everything else. Learn more on this theory here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/theory_of_constraints. It s very common for businesses to think the solution to all their website marketing problems lay with the first option attracting more traffic. That s probably why SEO and Search Engine Optimisation are such a highly searched keywords especially when compared to words like conversion optimisation or website conversion analyst. Nevertheless I would pick that finding more traffic - or attracting it - is probably the best option in only 40% of situations Thanks for Helping us Make Someone s Christmas Customer Conference Call Creating Your Competitor Crushing Online Marketing Plan for 2013 When another SEO consultant is the last thing you need Videos of Interest QR Code Heaven This month I write on a situation firmly placed in the other 60%. Here we came across a website with enough traffic, but very few leads to show for it. I show you three of the standout issues that caused this to occur. Our first article follow the journey not the destination explains some of the new conversion path reports now available in your Google Analytics account. In my eyes these reports are one of the most substantial updates in a while so worth a few minutes to work through. Calendar of Events February 21 Customer Teleconference Call That s all. Have a great February. Chris Price Director Permission NZ Ltd facebook.com/permissionwebsitemarketing twitter.com/permissionnz Permission Website Marketing Update Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved

2 Conversion Attribution Following the Journey Not the Destination People behave in mysterious ways. For instance let s imagine the expected path someone takes when noticing your paid advert in Google. This is how you would think the series of events would play out. First search Google looking for what they want. Second see your advert. Third read your ad and agree silently to themselves that this is worth investigating more. Fourth click your ad. Fifth read the copy on your web page and decide whether to take action. Sixth either take action and complete form or leave and start looking again. Six logical steps that you would assume many - if not all - would take when clicking away on your paid advertising. Now let s look at a relatively new report from Google Analytics that shows the actual paths this group took. Please note the graphic to follow. On the left you have collection of traffic sources that the group used and on the right the conversions each delivered. The first thing you should notice that there is no group that did what you thought it did, e.g. visit from paid advertising one time only and then convert (line 2 is the closest but these people came into the site after clicking on two paid ads). Also take the time to look at line 7. Here the visitor arrived from an organic search (the middle non paid area of Google) then returned to the site by clicking a paid ad in Google AdWords and finally returned to convert from another organic search result. Think of it as an organic paid sandwich with a nice conversion at the end. Or how about Line 5. The visitor starts with coming directly to the website so they must know its URL but then returns to convert from a paid advertisement. It seems that visitors are using every traffic stream available to them to come and go before making a decision and converting. You can find this report in your Google Analytics account under the Conversions area in the section marked Top Conversion Paths (be aware that nothing will show if you don t have any goals set up on your website for the paths to relate to). So other than disproving our original theory of how paid advertising visitors behaved, what else does this information reveal? Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 2 of 8

3 First off is the obvious one of how different types of traffic can work together for a visitor to help them convert. Digging further into this as we did in the earlier graphic can be especially handy when reviewing the merits of paid traffic streams like Google AdWords. For instance Lines 1, 8 and 9 are all instances where paid traffic went onto boost both organic traffic and organic conversions. Likewise lines 3 and 10 show a boost in direct traffic and direct conversions that come from a paid campaign. Secondly, reports like these reveal how some traffic sources are great at starting the sales process while others do their best at the end. Here s a snapshot from another report from the same area in analytics that helps to explain this a bit further (for client confidentialities sake I have removed the $ values but kept in the parts that we are discussing). This chart is found in the Conversions Multi-Channel Funnels Assisted Conversions part of Google Analytics (no doubt as soon as I publish this Google will change its location :) ). Anyway, let s look at the data for Paid Search traffic stream again. This shows for the period reported on that this channel assisted 84 Conversions but was the Last Interaction on just 37. A channel can assist a conversion when it is included in the journey of the conversion but not at the end. Likewise a Last Interaction is exactly that, when the channel is the last one used before the conversion is made. In the paid advertising area the Assisted / Last Interaction value is 2.27 that means it assisted 2.27 times more than it converted. It s a great channel for starting the sales process but does a lousy job of closing the sale. You could conclude from this that paid traffic is more likely to attract those at the start of a multi-stage buying process whereas direct does a great job of completing the hard part of closing those final stages. And finally if these two points weren t enough, this type of data reveals the search keyword progression prospects go through across both paid and organic traffic streams. For instance let s look at the image below from our own reports. For lines 3, 4 and 6 where you can see the paid search term seo, it is then followed by organic search of seo marketing, online marketing and website marketing and line 5 where you see the paid search of seo followed by another paid search of online marketing then a direct visit before the conversion. So there you have it. Google s conversion attribution tools are a smart way to follow the journey your visitors take on their way to completing your conversions. There s a ton of data in here so take your time to devour all you can find. And of course don t hesitate to give us a call if you need any help understanding what you find Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 3 of 8

4 Thanks for Helping us Make Someone s Christmas This news just missed the cut off for December s newsletter. Each Christmas we donate $1500 towards a charity in need. Deciding which charity is always a challenge. Last year we took the easy route and asked our customers to help us decide through a simple little survey. Thank you to all those that gave us their feedback. The three chosen were: Kids Can Multiple Sclerosis Society Cancer Research through the Cancer Society Customer Conference Call Creating Your Competitor Crushing Online Marketing Plan for 2013 For this month s coaching call I chose to provide you with a framework to create a competitor crushing online marketing plan for During the 45 minutes call I covered details on : Why planning is so important for this space The first thing you need to do BEFORE planning starts Looking for the right facts to build your plans upon How you can create leverage from the planning process The three main areas you can affect change in your online marketing and how to know which one is best suited for your situation Designing your planning process so it has a good chance of being implemented Three example business scenarios of the planning process in action Summary of the process covered Yep there was a bit in here. Who said that planning was a simple case of grabbing a whiteboard, a marker and bucketfuls of coffee to make it all work? Fortunately I kept it fast paced and it should be a relatively quick skip through the CD you should have received as a customer. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 4 of 8

5 When another SEO consultant is the last thing you need Sometimes delivering more traffic to your website is the last thing required to finally make it work. Last month I completed a website marketing review for a website that highlighted this exact situation. They came to us complaining of a website delivering very little in the way of leads and on the hunt for a SEO consultant to help fix the problems. For them the answer was very clear more traffic. I wasn t so sure. Fortunately they had Google Analytics installed so job#1 was to get stuck into some facts and figures of what was happening and where. Quickly it was apparent that traffic wise they were doing quite well. When we ran keyword searches for high volume terms in their market they came up well. Nevertheless, after a while I gradually created a list of a dozen or so issues that pointed towards the real underlying problem. Here are just three that are worth a few words: A high bounce rate on the sites main landing pages And an imbalance in the type of content they offered No Goal Tracking set up Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 5 of 8

6 High Bounce Rates on main Landing Pages Most think their homepage is the only way through which people enter their website. This is very rarely the case. Google s indexing machine does a great job of crawling around a website classifying each and every page and all going well showing these in their results for the keywords they were optimised for. So by looking at the top landing pages page within Google Analytics found by Content > Site Content > Landing Pages you can see these pages that people land on when entering your site. Yes, your homepage will be there but also will be a cluster of other pages from deeper within your site which are the first thing visitors see. In this case the report showed five landing pages with bounce rates that were well above the site s average. Remembering a bounce is someone who visits one page and then leaves something you definitely don t want to occur for these first impression pages. An imbalance in the type of content they supplied Broadly speaking there are four classifications of content a site needs to create conversions namely who you are, what you do, why you are different and finally what needs to be done to learn more. In this case the first and last content categories were OK standard however the middle of what they did and why they were so different was a problem. The main issue being there was nothing that exactly spelt out why they were different from the rest. They were not alone here either. When I reviewed five of their competitors websites and looked for the same content they all were all very, very similar. I m sure if I swapped the imagery between each you couldn t have picked one from another. Which was all very interesting especially when the client told me three really specific, solid benefits why they were different from the rest! Which would have been fine if this great content had made it onto their website. No Goal Tracking Established Goal tracking is one of the most valuable features available in Google Analytics. It allows you to track actions taken on your web pages that show visitor conversion intent. These could include forms being completed, PDF reports being downloaded or even videos played. Now I realise that a visitor that completes a Contact Us form is warmer than someone who downloads a FREE PDF report, but nevertheless if the latter isn t being tracked then you have no idea if it is having any effect in convincing visitors to convert later on. In this instance nothing was being tracked. Fortunately we managed to tweak the system to come up with an effective conversion rate to share with the client. It was less than a third of the industry standard. All of this added up to a classic problem of a website looking for traffic to improve its lead count when really it was its conversion rate that needed fixing first. Then, once we had this sorted, we would grab as much traffic as we could. Need to know if your website is in the same situation as this one? One quick way to find out is to call in and have a quick discussion with one of the team here at Permission. Videos of Interest Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 6 of 8

7 Content Reports in Google Analytics Explained by Justin Cutrini QR Code Heaven January Coaching Call Video - What s New and Worth Talking About 90 Second Video - Permission Website Marketing Service Explanations - Google AdWords Management Search Engine Optimisation Free Report Beyond the Website Black Hole, The Website Transformation Experience Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 7 of 8

8 Not all of our customers use all of our services so as a refresher here is a short list of the key areas of our capability. Marketing design and html set up. Spam checking and delivery monitoring. deployment technology advice, installation service and support. content to RSS transfer. While we don t build websites per se, we have expertise in blog design, creation and marketing (Wordpress platform only). Postal Address: P O Box Point Chevalier, Auckland Office Address: 60B Surrey Crescent, Grey Lynn Auckland, New Zealand Online Lead Generation Strategic planning. Landing page design and creation. A/B and Taguchi testing tools. Website analytics installation and support (Google Analytics only). Website marketing support. Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing paid advertising set-up and support. Website search engine optimisation (SEO). Phone Contact: Chris Price Office: sales@permission.co.nz Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 8 of 8