So far so good, but when I hit “Continue” button I get

Which I guess is Russian for “Computer says no”

Further attempts resulted in German, more Russian and every now and then English!

It turns out I was trying to use an account that already has access to AdWords, but you’d think that would be easy enough for Google to cope with.

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

Red Eye- Mark Patron CEO

Why is conversion so important?
Google does most efficient job of generating leads and driving traffic what do you do to maximize this traffic?
Average conversion rates on good day are between 2-3% which is poor
Money on search marketing in most cases could much more well spent by increasing conversions

Conversion Stats:

-39% of businesses not satisfied with conversion rate
-70% of businesses report an improvement in last 12 months on conversion rates

Techniques which have proved highly valuable:
Ab split testing
Customer journey analysis
User test
Cart abandonment analysis
Segmentation

There are over 20 different techniques to improve conversions

The first step to increase conversions is: Testing
Companies who are happy with there conversion rate test 4 times as much as a business dissatisfied with their  conversion rate.
Testing is the best investment you can make- things change over time so continue testing
Test the big things- be brave test the buying process : You can do this by asking for less data, or shortening the buying process
Brainstorm and priorities possible tests- with 7-8 people then prioritize them
Don’t test to many things at the same time you may miss key things
Use control where campaign value is high, otherwise use a champion challenger test
Ensure you have valid sample size 40 people minimum
Test one thing at a time
Importance of testing pry-maid: 1.targeting, 2.segmentation, 3.offer, 4.timing and 5.creative

It is more cost effective to find out what bottle necks are in the way of conversion first rather than testing by adding more call to actions. Once the bottle necks are removed the results will flood in

Identify KPI – analyze inappropriate traffic which is basically those which bounce of site straight away

Test using compelling and effective call to actions

Align sales funnel- keyword terms, ads, landing page, call to action with the same message tip: (if they click cheap, don’t tell them about quality on landing page)
More segmentation mean more conversions
Conversion in many business is hindered by a lack of ownership- 40% of companies have no one responsible for website conversion rates these companies will not see major changes in conversions anytime soon

Tacticks;
Align keywords and landing pages
Segmentation
Behavioural analysis
Funnel abandonment

This is a continual process there’s more than one issue and it can always be improved

Case studies:

Always use email to increase conversion: (retention is key) Repeat visitors 8 times more likely to buy

With email you can get prospects to buy at a later date when you reach them with the right email at the right time

The more disengaged a customer  is you will need to send them an email less frequently, However for the lowest engaged customers put heavy offer in subject line.

A behavioral based email can improve open rates by up to 50%

Looking at a customer journey will show you where and what pages you will need to re-construct

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

Rusty Waner – vice president, Product marketing & strategy

-It’s all about delivering value to your consumer and getting right message to them at the right time

-Build an enterprise view of the customers information
-Have multiple views of information, with consistency across all, one in depth integrated database isn’t always needed

-Interactional and transactional details are needed, we need to go beyond contact info

-Use customer intelligent analytics – which is basically segmentation and personalization, trends, and predictive scoring

-Doing it right requires:
Value engagement combined with good management
A good relationship between online and offline data

-Here are some problems companies have faced related to analytics and how they resolved it ;

Companies have encountered problems with acquiring new customers, up selling existing business, and the recruitment cost related to data analytics

What they did in a general sense to resolve such issues was to employ data warehousing, then pull in data from all different business sources and finally using predictive modeling

In most cases companies by doing so have been able to reduce direct marketing cost by up to 30% and achieve goals of maximizing Roi and up-selling more customers

These companies learnt that direct mail and email needs to be sent out through and to integrated segments collated from cleaned data in a database

-Around 10 years ago Euro Star; required help to understand who their customers are, they wanted to know who were their business user, and tourist user, they seeked good data that would provide this information – The reason being is that previous strategies of sending out mass direct mail or emails related to one subject or topic to all recipients delivered poor results.

-Figures show you have 24 – 48 hours to take action on a significant event in the business environment i.e customer sign-up or transaction, however in most businesses s to identify a significant event you need good historical analytics

-Figures show good analytics for targeted emails is essential
Take for example Love film- they send out emails with dynamic content for each individual
They have complex analytics in place for their  massive film library, as a result the suggestions they provide for recipients are based on a history of their selection and similarities

Common analytics errors:
Marketing not aligned with customer demands
Processes and metrics matter more than customer
Marketing not aligned across business units
Customer defect while you figure out who they are
Marketing not aligned with operations
Customer engaged but you can’t service their needs

Use your data-warehouse on your customer to avoid these common mistakes- especially by continually looking for key trends, data mining

Marketing needs to be lined up with the overall business goals, stock level and on-line promotion

A campaign to resolve some of these common analytics errors should begin with;

Define agreed quantifiable analytics metrics- I.e click through rate, transaction rate
Apply business performance benchmarks- how much % increase
Define achievable goals and objective- maybe based on competitors rate if you can find it out

—-

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

If you add words to AdWords (frequently adding new keywords from any source such as your server logs or the search query reports is good to find new opportunities) and re-word your ad words (always be testing new ad variations) then AdWords rewards (improved return on investment) will be yours!

Normal service will resume tomorrow.

——

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

Keynote speak: Optimizing your digital marketing mix

Dave Chaffery – Insight director, Smart insight

BBC documentary on Internet 2010 is one to watch

Web marketing overview:
-90% searches done in the UK are done using Google

-Reaching out to bloggers could prove very effective for your business

-Growth of mobile has been huge- now emails and social networking increasingly accessed by mobile- therefore you should consider ways to engages prospects through mobile

-Their is a smaller proportion of creator’s and critiques in social media within the UK compared to America

-Work hard to get good quality testimonials on PPC landing paged they help dramatically

Do we really understand our customer?

Consider what a customer will search for first to start of and then later after they have bit more knowledge on a subject

Information on relevant and related searches with links on the homepage will help

Editorial links are of growing in importance in Google

Research the agency toolkit, helps on and with search

To identify your search impact you need to exclude your brand searches, terms and the resulting conversions for them

Learn from your conversion rates, CPA and ROI  stats

How much budget for digital?

20% advertising budget up will better reflect consumer and competitor behavior

Should have a mix of static content and dynamic content which changes to meet latest demands in industry

Simplified landing pages for ppc converts better

Think about ways to engage people who come to your landing page who are less likely to not fill out the form- maybe provide a why us link or more information link

10-15% of conversions had prior display through display advertising, as it builds online brand presence and trust therefore helps

Click to call new feature of Google is seeing good results for early adopters

Growing investment trends have seen more budget being allocated to blogs and social such as twitter
Where-as less budget has given to affiliate marketing

Search marketing still growing even among ever increasing and growing interest in social media

ingredients of digital marketing mix;
1. What will cause a buzz, what content will generate others to link to your content or talk about it- use tests to drive engagement, eg game, e card, quiz try and get a viral buzz

2. Momentum- because Internet marketing is relatively low cost you can have a rolling campaign – releasing new video every 2weeks that’s makes others want to get involved

20-30% of c level executives engage better with video

3. Multiple channel email campaign
Time limited offer in email will increase response rate
Joint send with direct mail increases response rate

4. Blog marketing, reaching out to bloggers, doing something for them that will aide them to write about you

5. Networking on social websites

6. Offline channels still helps

Social media tactics employed:
Twitter; 78% was the top tactic

Online pr and social strategy will help with search-

Vertical search marketing measures: Geo targeting Ads, or maybe YouTube promoted video as will help

With online Pr, Twitter, and blogs it is essential to have a well timed publishing schedule

Your web content should help people to learn, have fun, engage with your business

Have segmented landing pages as it is important to increase your conversion rate

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

This feature allows local storage of your adwords data to make the experience more responsive.  The AdWords help page on the subject is here. This could be a very nice feature but is rather strange.

Google recently announced that they are no longer developing Gears. AdWords is the financial engine that drives Google. I am suprised that anything that improves the AdWords experience (which gears certainly would) could be abandoned like this, especially given the timing.

Is this strange? What do you think?

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

State of the U.K. Industry Discussion Panel

Co-Moderators:

• Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, SES/Search Engine Watch/ClickZ
• Helen Alexander, Chairman, Incisive Media, Sr Advisor, Bain Captial and President, the CBI

Speakers:

• Kirsten Mangers, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, WebVisible, Inc.
  Bill Staples, Director of Search, GroupM UK
  Jonathan Beeston, Client Services Director, Europe, Efficient Frontier
  Edward (Teddie) Cowell, SEO Director, Guava

- There was an 11% rise in companies spending over £11000 or more per year on search marketing

- 15% of companies spent over half a million a year on paid search

- Organic positioning has been perceived as having the biggest impact on consumer brand perception

- On-line Pr and copy-writing has been growing dramatically

- Many have been saying that social media is the new seo but really it is the new Pr

- Relating to seo analytics’s, there was a 20-30% increase in people tracking there on-line trends

- There has been a shift towards companies doing both in house seo and outsourcing

- These sectors have been increasingly spending more on seo: Solicitors, Landscaper’s, Digital

- Google lost a 0.4 percent US market share in past 2008-2009

- Research shows that for businesses or individuals who invest in seo its takes them an average 45 days before they get frustrated with results

- It’s estimated that 31 hours can be taken away from the core focus of the owners business to do paid search properly every month

- CPA and affiliate marketing, increasingly growing in effectiveness and as a marketing channel, however as it’s classified under performance media it and is therefore hard to scale and manage it’s expectation.

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

SES – Adwords Tips – if it’s not helping it’s hurting

Introduction by:

• Judith Lewis, Search Director, i-level

Speaker:

• Erica Schmidt, SES Advisory Board & Global Search Director, iProspect

The two AdWords campaign settings ‘accelerated’ and ’standard’ – Generally research shows accelerated is better

Good ad-texts requires – Good imperative verb, call to action, benefit one or more

You really want your ad’s to be displayed on the exact match terms (Google will see your ad as more relevant), so you should have equivalent negative keywords for both the broad and phrase match keyword terms, but not the exact match terms

You should only have one goal per landing page, learn your prospects intention and just lead them down that one specific path.

The landing page design should be different from rest of your website design.

You should remove all distractions you don’t need on the landing page – i.e the shopping basket, company phone number ……

The Conversion button should be in lower right of page

The Company Logo should be in the upper left of the page

A benefit in headline is good start to advertisement – Essential information such as ‘only takes 14 days….’ usually works well

If you have got one of the lowest prices among competition ensure you put your price in your ad-text

Targeted ad’s locally gives you ad an extra row of text- Makes it stand out

It is important you include punctuation in ad’s -(especially comma’s) – as if as appears in on the top of organic listing in a straight line will look very unprofessional

Capitalizing certain words helps, it will help by doing so in the display URL as well as the ad copy

Ensure that the text on the landing page re-enforces that the promise you made in the ad, leaving them confident you can and will deliver.

Bid of miss-spelling of most important keywords,

Ad groups should be small, having a couple of keywords with 1/2 related keywords for each keyword

Relate something from search query in your ad-copy headline, put benefits not features in ad copy

On a landing page you must avoid poor colour schemes – no double dark colours- I.e. dark text and background

In your ad-text talk about how the customer will feel after/while using your service/product, the impact of service/product on them – and a call to action which needs to be clear and easy for them to participate

A PPC landing page and an equivalent SEO page should be separate, and given non index tags so no duplicate content can be found.

Words for success: free, advice, experience

You need to understand what the person searching is worrying about and meet their need

Never dilute your click through rate as it will lower your quality score

Landing page bot: will see page load time back and forward (from Google to your page and from your page back to Google) The bot doesn’t really look at the content

A Good SEO ad- will address the issue of the searcher- many want a new company as the last took their money and didn’t so anything so something like ‘we wont waste you budget like the last….’ might perform well

It may help to capitalize certain words in the display URL

Start landing page talking about how they will benefit then how easy it is to set up and to use

You may benefit from a learn more button or hyper-link button the landing page as some people always want more information before they make a decision, but this must come after the conversion or ‘try now button’

Some people have more confidence or trust in an ad or landing page which has a phone number

Dynamic landing pages, based on keywords can really be beneficial

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

Successful Information Architecture

Moderator:

• Heather Lloyd-Martin, CEO, SuccessWorks

Speakers:

• Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive
  Alan Perkins, Head of Search Marketing, SilverDisc Limited
  
  Click to close

  Speaker Profile

Landing Page Critique Tip

• Remove any ‘product features’ and ‘about/ contact us’ options from top right of page

• Make it seem like less of a commitment on landing page (remove the terms/conditions boxes may it seem the consumer is making a big commitment)

  Analytics seminar

  - Offside metrics are essential to drive traffic to your website, etc, Hitwise

  -Brand engagement. Done by filtering our non-brand terms and see how many people visit our site by searching on our brand terms

  UK SEO seminar

• It is essential to identify your competitors and there keywords

• Identify your niche by using keyword search in Google and your top results in Google are your main competitors

• Data mine top 30 for industry phrases till you get all their keywords

• Score yourself on all the top 30 keywords discovered that your competitors use, by using your traffic driven from those keywords compared to the number of searches on those words derived from Google

• Basic SEO tips: Re-write web page URLS
  Let all pages containing your most competitive keywords be indexed
  Avoid blank category pages- add data to scripts as soon as you can
  Don’t 404 It
  Keep all SEO tags
  A more structured and semantic website structure

• Look at keyword sub types and alternatives keywords and keyword variations to attract more traffic

• Cross link across your website to numerous neighbouring pages- this can make a huge difference in page rank- e.g most popular tool/ most popular or latest blog post

• Flatten your sites structure

• Use tags the same way bloggers do to pass page rank into fellow/other pages

• To target different countries it’s just best to set it up in Google Webmaster

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

SEO: Where to Next? and Web PR

Moderator:

• Dixon Jones, Managing Director, Receptional LTD

Speakers:

• Lisa Myers, CEO, Verve Search
  Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google
  Dan Cohen, Global SEO Lead MSN, Microsoft
  Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, Telegraph

Website critique tip

Add a couple of latest blog snippets on homepage to satisfy customer fear and show we know what where talking about.

Search strategies seminar

Re-direct can sometimes block search engine crawlers, however you can check impact by doing a header check (http server/ header) from free header checker

Some sites with flash/ movie may mean Google doesn’t find all web your pages (the one with flash)

Search engine will only see pre-loader flash- So you should integrate the flash movie into a HTML page

Sell people your benefits on your website, the benefit keywords will help your website rank better

Ensure keywords are in both in page URL and page title

If one page gets a lot of traffic but doesn’t convert don’t shut of traffic just place more advertisements to try and sell them on the page- testing different ways to get traffic converting

Separate paragraph headings are good and make content easy to read

Google ‘insight for search’ ( Good tool check it out for Pr and traffic reasons) search alternative keywords – e.g. for business plan, these could be… sample, template

Bounce rate: seo is about getting the right people to your website not more people – less traffic could sometimes means you have used your long-tail keywords to pre-qualify traffic = more conversions and sales

Focus your attention on the traffic which is converting well

H1, h2 are key seo mark-ups

Not being specific enough about what you offer could mean you get the wrong traffic and even higher bounce rate – go big long tail sometimes is essential even 5 or 6 words when there are many variations.

Pr web tips:

Google search trends will show you what you should consider writing on- From the search trends you should choose a subject there is a lot if buzz around.

Try to utilize the keywords which are currently regularly in use- look at blogs, news other Pr releases

Keep the article focused on the two or three keywords through for seo purposes

Include images in your press release as research shows Google result with an image in the organic listing will increase the click through by 15-20%

It is always better to include an image usually means bloggers will pull in your article, helps in credibility and rankings

If you use unique image, you will also get traffic from search engine image results

Video; is expensive but however increases interaction – it will increase time spent on the site by 500%

You can and should also send your release to social sites, clients, and prospects

FUTURE OF SEO:

More personality on twitter- conversational creation is going to be essential

Google placing less importance on h1 tags.

Key: is the content and title tags, the links to your content externally, and the internal linkings i massive, inbound linking is very important

Google focuses in on: HTML h1 and h2 tags, however title tags are most important

Product search and real time search is set to grow in demand

The Google Linking algorithm is of growing importance

Google’s wants to make the web more app enabled, more competition pushing Google to make the web and its search network open access

Google make more than 400 changes a year to their algorithms

Google won’t tell us exactly what they change all the time

SEO forums such as search engine strategies, web master world/forum, will identify what Google have changed in most cases

Google claim the changes are to improve things- and are only little changes, however it is important to keep an eye out for changes and their effect – therefore you will have to research and prioritize is which seo changes are going to need your immediate attention.

Hidden text and paid links- is violation, and they will notify you first prior to removal.

Product search and local search and news search, image search and organic- all have their own algorithms,

Look up real time search – According to Google it’s going to be big.

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Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog