NOVEMBER 2012 IN THIS EDITION

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1 Hi there, A poorly performing website can remain hidden from view for a very, very long time. This month I cover some pointers to help you see if your site fits within this category. My first article Website Crowd Control is there to help you better imagine the number of visitors to your web pages. Some may think that 2378 unique visitors is not that many. For them I recommend sitting in a packed Auckland Civic Theatre and looking at the crowd around them. It s a fair number, which you would expect to produce a fair response if they were presented with your message. We believe that managing a website is similar to managing a sales person. Both have the ability to grow a business by generating a steady stream of new clients. But like the real world, where there are good sales people and not so good ones, there are well performing websites and poorly performing websites. My next article helps you interpret your Google Analytics data to see which group your website sales person fits within. This month s customer coaching call was on Google AdWords. We recently updated our site to include some video content explaining how our service works. You can see this run here - Our last article is one published previously but still applies to those looking to avoid some common issues that can cause problems for first-time users of this great system. And to wrap up, here are a few books that I ve read over the last month that may prove interesting. Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become Michael Schrage One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way Robert Maurer Ph.D. goo.gl/muuzt Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential Carol Dweck Switch How to change things when change is hard Chip and Dan Heath gl/6nh64 NOVEMBER 2012 IN THIS EDITION Website Crowd Control Product Introduction Video Pay per click advertising in 90 seconds New Permission Team Member - Abby Shepherd October Customer Coaching Call - Google AdWords: Your Ideal Marketing Bank Call Reports for Your Website Google AdWords When Speed Isn t Always Your Friend Calendar of Events November 22 Customer Teleconference Call All the best, Chris Price Director Permission NZ Ltd facebook.com/permissionwebsitemarketing twitter.com/permissionnz Permission Website Marketing Update Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved

2 Website Crowd Control Imagine this scene. You have just spent the whole day walking up and down Auckland s Queen Street trying to find people interested in learning more about your product or service. Most said no, but a few were keen to hear more. To these you handed a ticket to a free show you had running at the Civic theatre, just up the road. You worked hard and by 3:00pm you had the place full to capacity. All 2378 seats had an interested person sitting on them. This was looking good. So come 3:01pm, the lights dim and the curtain rises. Show time. For just 15 minutes the crowd is treated to an interactive presentation on all things good about what you offer. You tell them everything new about what you do, customer videos are presented, and a whole range of valuable tips are imparted to help those buying for the first time. You have their attention for the full 15 minutes as the content really hits the mark. The house lights come up and you stride onto the stage and thank everyone for coming. You close by telling the group that your sales people are stationed by the exits ready to get the details of those interested in knowing more. How many business cards would you expect your team to collect? Now remember, this is a qualified group of people. They said before that they were interested in learning more, and they took time out of their day to listen to what you had to say. And finally, your sales people weren t there to take orders, just to collect their details so a conversation could happen later on. So what would you expect? 100, 250, 50, or even a measly 10? I think that 10% would be a reasonable expectation. This would leave your team with a credible 240 prospects to follow up on. (And leave you with a feeling of some good work done, sore feet and a desperate need of a cup of tea and a sit down.) But what if you only got 10, or say, just 1? Now that would be a completely different story. All that work, all those interested people and just 10 said yes. You would be left struggling with a whole host of questions. Did we bore them with the wrong message? Perhaps we don t know our market? Or even, did I mumble my last instruction about cards by the exit rows? No doubt there would be a list of things to fix and a willingness to get them sorted ASAP. Which is all very interesting, especially when I expect the same result occurs each month to many websites in New Zealand with very little done to fix it. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 2 of 8

3 It doesn t take a lot to get to 2378 unique visitors each month. And of those that do, very few would achieve anywhere near a 10% lead conversion rate. The difference is that a) those that don t achieve 10% conversion probably don t have any analytics running off their website so they are blind to the numbers or b) they know the visitor count but for some reason they don t relate this to a vision of what these figures represent. For instance, a website that attracts 6000 unique visitors seems to be an OK, busy sort of website. That is until you sit in a packed Aotea Centre and realise that this count relates to the number of people around you - multiplied by three. Or how about you visit Westpac stadium in Wellington on a rugby sevens event when it is full to the brim. Think of this number of people times by two and you have a count close to the 75k of unique visitors that most medium-sized websites receive. And finally, my current favourite a client website that brings in the population of Dunedin each and every month yep, around 115,000 unique visitors. So job #1 should be to translate these analytics figures into real world counts. Think in terms of packed nights at the Aotea Centre or Eden Park Stadium filled with your website visitors. Then I want you to do something very simple. Expect more from this group. Just as you would if you were distraught after presenting to 2378 people and receiving only 10 leads. Ask big searching questions like those I offered at the start. Does our website show that we know our market? Are we presenting what they are looking for? What can we do to turn the 10 into the 240 it should be? Product Introduction Video Pay Per Click Advertising In 90 Seconds Last month we updated our site with a 90-second introduction to our Google pay per click management service. It s a brief, but detailed, intro into how we manage campaigns on behalf of our clients. New Permission Team Member Abby Shepherd Abby has joined our team as an online marketing campaign manager. Abby recently moved to Auckland from Christchurch where she completed her bachelor of Commerce in Business Management and IT at Lincoln University. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 3 of 8

4 October Customer Coaching Call - Google AdWords: Your Ideal Marketing Bank Set up correctly, a Google paid advertising campaign can produce a reliable stream of profit-producing results. Think of it like using a really nice bank. One where you deposit your marketing dollars and it returns a multiple-fold increase in either sales leads or actual sales conversions. Sounds almost too good to be true? Well for many advertisers it is. For them, their deposit is lost each month with zippo in return as their campaign takes all the spend it can and delivers nothing in return. This is something this session will help you avoid. During our time on the call I covered: When a paid advertising campaign makes sense and, conversely, when it is the last thing you should attempt. Why Google is the only game in town the good and bad parts of this news. Who should own your advertising account and the benefits this affords those that do. And finally, five principles that, when applied, will dramatically increase your chances of success. As a customer you should have received a recording of this call. Please let Tom know if this is not the case. Call Reports for Your Website Hands up if you employ sales people? Keep your hands up if you have absolutely no problems convincing them to create call reports. Yep, thought so. This was the bane of my life when I was a managing a sales team. At every Monday morning sales meeting I would give the same talk about the importance of completing their reports. All we needed to know was who was spoken to, what was said and the success of the meeting. Nothing too detailed and all in lovely paper form. It should have taken them a maximum of 10 minutes per call but it still needed policing to make it happen. Now if you have been reading these newsletters for a while you will have seen how we frequently refer to your website as having the potential to be your best sales person ever. And thankfully your website has the ability to solve the call reporting problem in a very smart and reliable way. Google Analytics is its secret weapon here. So let s go through some of the core stats this product reports on and interpret these into call reporting value. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 4 of 8

5 Let s start with how they found people to talk to. This is an interesting one because a website will find people and will also get found. For instance, there will be those prospects that find the website within their Google search results. Then there are paid ads a company can place so the website can find prospects. Thankfully Google Analytics shows you each stream of traffic split out so you can see how many came from each and if your web sales person was overly busy last week or just spinning its wheels not talking to many prospects. Hopefully your site was the busy one of the two. So let s move into disecting these visitors a bit further. Knowing if these people have been seen before could be a good start. New and Returning visitor counts will help you here. I once had a sales person who hated seeing existing accounts but loved breaking ground with new companies. The only issue was that a whopping 70% of their budget was to be made from current customers. We were extremely lucky to have another sales person on the team who had completely the opposite way of working. So we swapped some accounts around, re-aligned some budgets and kept moving forward, making best use of the individual skills available. Unfortunately, you don t have the same luxury of flexibility with a website. If your site is receiving a minor smattering of new visitors each month then things need to be fixed. At the top of this list is usually Search Engine Optimisation and/or paid search advertising. Likewise, if your business relies on a steady stream of repeat business but your repeat website visitor count is super low then strategies like marketing are the first things to roll out. So that s how your website sales person found its audience. But how did its message fare? Your site s bounce rate is one stat that will help you find this out. A bounce is when someone arrives on a page of your website and decides to look no further and leave. They literally bounce in and out of your website using a single page as the trampoline floor. This is OK if your website sales message is on one page but next to hopeless if, like most, you tell your sales story over a few pages. I see this as someone arriving, looking and then quickly leaving. You have probably done it a hundred times while shopping. The shop window looks appealing so you step in, realise that this is not what you are looking for, complete a very quick sweep around so as not to look rude, and then make a beeline for the exit. In a shop you can probably do this is in 3 minutes; a web visitor can achieve the same in less than 30 seconds. Streams of traffic will have their own bounce rate attributed to them. Ideally you want your paid advertising stream to have a value as low as possible. Individual pages on your site will have their own value too. Some pages will naturally have a high value for instance, your Contact Us page. Here people look for your phone number or postal address and then leave. Your home page should have one of your lowest bounce rates as it works to move people around the other pages of your site. When things are going well your bounce rate will be low and two other stats will trend upwards time on site and pages per visit. Think of these as the questions your website sales person is answering. And just like in the face-to-face world, the more questions a prospect asks and the longer they spend asking them the greater their percieved interest in what you offer. This leads us onto the next natural step closing the sale. For your website this is the same as achieving a conversion, whether it is someone completing a Contact Us request, downloading a Free Report, or calling the phone number shown on the home page and starting a conversation. All are valid ways for a website to convert an anonymous browser of your web pages into a human wanting another human to talk to them. I have employed sales people who closed more sales than their peers due to one simple fact. They asked for the sale more often than the rest. That was it. They all sold the same product to the same type of companies but these winners just asked for the order more often. Naturally these people received more objections, which they could then work on carefully answering and then delicately moving the prospect closer to the sale. The same applies to a website. One with no obvious conversion option for a prospect will struggle compared with a site that has a myriad of ways for interested visitors to offer their details to move the discussion ahead. Once these are set up and correctly tracked, you can access details like the percentage of those presented to who said a virtual yes and closed the sale. So there you have it. Website call reporting is available to us all once we have a correctly configured Google Analytics account. Now you will have at the touch of a button answers to a) how many people found us last week, b) how many did we manage to find, c) how well was our online sales message received and, finally, the bit that matters, d) what percentage actually said yes and agreed to move the discussion forward? Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 5 of 8

6 Google AdWords When Speed Isn t Always Your Friend As Google AdWords was the subject of our customer coaching call this month I thought this article was a worthwhile addition. It was published last year but is still worth a review for those thinking about using this channel for the first time. Google makes starting a new AdWords campaign a very easy task indeed. Within minutes you can gather together a selection of keywords, write an small text ad, load up your credit card details, and baboom start sending them money and your website traffic. Most should achieve this in 30 minutes or less. At first this seems like good news for the time-starved executive. You are now advertising online on the country s most visited search engine. Time to sit back, relax and just wait for the phone to ring or the inbox to fill up with contact requests. Ideally both. This must happen for a few. Otherwise, those happy images of satisfied customers Google portrays on its AdWords home page would be false. Nevertheless, the Google advertisers who walk through our doors for the first time rarely share stories of drowning under a torrent of leads as a result of their 20 minutes of campaign set-up. A few turned up at Permission with different stories last month. Well established and successful business people who were spending hundreds of dollars a day with Google and were a) not seeing much benefit from it, and b) not sure if this was typical of the experience of others. Fortunately, each of them had agreed to complete our initial online marketing review process and because of this we had the necessary time to take them through their AdWords account, pointing out the good and not so good parts. The bits that were great for them and Google and likewise the bits that were not so friendly to their wallet. Now, I firmly believe that Google has the interests of the advertiser at heart when they designed their account setup process. They had to allow for a time-starved user with limited attention and, based on the complexity involved, the process does a great job. So all the big things like keywords, budgets and ads decisions the advertiser HAS TO INCLUDE to get going are covered in an easy to understand way. Meanwhile, what seem to be relatively small things like keyword match types, choice of advertising networks and optimal account structure well, Google decided that these are best done AFTER the account was live. Unfortunately, it s these AFTER bits that can make all the difference. Which was why I found myself and my client peering into a web browser at an AdWords campaign, picking over a campaign that had been removing thousands of dollars from his bank account each week and providing very, very little in return. Fortunately, we had this under control after a day s work, but still, the money that was already spent was wasted. So, in the interests of ensuring readers of this newsletter avoid such a situation, here are some of the fundamental AdWords Campaign Set-Up basics that apply to any campaign that is successful (for both Google and the advertiser). Fundamental basic #1: Take control of your keywords The underlying resource of any AdWords campaign is the keywords you chose to bid on. The Google Keyword tool is a free resource (just Google it) that will help you see which keywords attract the highest search volume for the regions you want to advertise within. So if you are an Auckland-based mortgage broker, after you have used this tool you may find that Mortgage Brokers Auckland is a keyword worth bidding on. Google enables you to bid on this keyword in four different ways. These are called match types. There is broad match, modified broad match, phrase match and exact match. (For the sake of accuracy there s a fifth type called negative match that I ll cover later on.) When you set up your account for the first time, broad match is the default option. Remember the set-up process is all about speed. So the time taken to educate you on the other match options and then let you pick which suits is put in the AFTER bucket. This is a shame because the default option can cause a lot of problems. You see, broad match allows Google to present your ad for terms like these: Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 6 of 8

7 Mortgage Brokers Auckland Home Mortgage Brokers Auckland Mortgage Refinance Brokers Finance Brokers Reviews Mortgage Brokers Auckland Mortgage Brokers Auckland Business Set Up Some of these are good, a few not so. The other three match types help you refine the way in which your keywords match against what the searcher types in. It starts with the highly refined exact match. Then it gradually becomes more flexible as each match type is used until you arrive at the last option, the broad match choice, which opens your keyword up to a mass of terms that may or may not suit your business. To follow is an image from Google that helps to show you all this in a friendly graphic for the search term mens formal shoes. Fundamental basic #2: Know your negatives The fifth keyword match type is a negative match. This is for keywords that people may use within the phrases you want to bid on but by doing so automatically discount them from being valid search terms. So in the previous graphic from Google, perhaps you didn t sell any black shoes, or your shoes were just for men. In these cases, the terms black and women would be in your list of negative keywords. These types of keywords can be applied to your whole campaign or to just one Ad Group. So when we see a campaign that only uses broad match terms and has no negative keywords then there are problems ahead. Fundamental basic #3: Don t mix networks or regions Google can place your advertising next to their search results and also on websites that host their advertising. One key difference between the two is that one audience is actively searching for what you offer, while the other is passively reading about it. These are two very different environments to advertise within. Nevertheless, when setting up your account (again, in the interests of time) your Google AdWords campaign is set up to run in both. This is usually not the best option for those starting. Our recommendation is to always focus on searchers first and then, once you have figured out how to make this traffic stream work, begin work on convincing passive readers to click your ads. Trying to do both will muddy your results and make what is already a hard task even harder. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 7 of 8

8 Fundamental basic #4: Carry on the conversation, deliver people to the optimal page This brings me nicely into how the underlying structure of your account can either work for or against you. Think of it like the commonly used house foundation analogy build on solid foundations and you improve your chances of future success. The foundation for an AdWords campaign is the ease with which it allows you to carry on the question raised by the searcher. For instance, say they type in the keyword black formal shoes male. Just by chance they see your text ad that includes text like their keyword term. And, when they click on it, they are taken to the page on your website that presents them with your full range of black formal shoes for guys. So easy for them a bit of work for you. To achieve this experience your campaign needs to contain a lot of Ad Groups. An Ad Group is a Google term for a distinct collection of keywords and the text ads that work for them. Most new campaigns set up at speed have just the one. This will be filled with lots of keywords and perhaps only one or, if we are lucky, maybe two ads. When clicked, these will most likely take you to the home page. If you run this type of campaign and the searcher types in black formal shoes male or even brown formal shoes female or possibly white formal dance shoes male, they are shown the one ad that talks generically about formal shoes. If they click this ad they will arrive on the home page of the website and have to find the right shoes for them selves. People rarely do. Fundamental basic #5: Track how well your money is being spent My final fundamental basic. The online marketing space is littered with opportunities to track and measure. The problem is usually the vast amount of data available, not the lack of it. The Google AdWords system is no different. And while, once again, setting up conversion tracking is something missing during the speedy sign-up process, it s in your account waiting to be turned on. Once engaged you will be able to see how much money you spent to achieve whatever conversion you want to measure. This could be newsletter sign-ups, e-commerce sales or contact requests they can all be counted. Some of the data may make you smile, others may not but at least you will know what does and doesn t work. So there you have it. Five fundamentals that are missed during any super speedy new account set-up. Yes, it will take you time to do all five BUT, once done, your account will work so much harder for you. 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