Hi there,
Last month I published a newsletter with a focus on change. This month I have set my sights a bit lower on the personal development curve – action. Yep, if this newsletter ends up with scrawls of blue ink over it outlining the bits that you can use next week then my work here is done. (And yes, I print it in yellow so all the good stuff is highlight- ed).
Of all the people I work with, it is those in our website coaching group who have the biggest excuses to do nothing. All they get from me is an hour on the phone as a group, followed by 30 minutes if they want some one-on-one focus. Ninety minutes a month – barely enough time to get you to and from work in busy Auckland traffic. But some outstanding gains in online marketing have been achieved from this group.
So what’s their secret? Well, I could put it down to excellent information, but while the content is good, it is not the real reason for their success. Action is the real key here. A little each month is all it takes. An hour here, perhaps 45 minutes there, and over a few months all this builds into a rolling effect of positive online change.
The content in this newsletter should spur some of you to get things moving. Articles featured here talk to those just starting out who have little knowledge in this area and feel that everything they read is Gobbledygook. Plus, I have included some notes worthy of the attention of those who already have some online experience but want an extra edge over their competitors.
We offer a range of services to ensure the time you spend on your website brings strong gains. For those wanting a ’self study and then apply’ solution, our group coaching pro- gram is the best option and offers a logical first step. And if a business can’t support the
$5.95 plus GST trial price then it has bigger problems than marketing.
For others who want some fast ’web action’, then our website support plans are the way to go. These come in various sizes and are not cheap, but they do progress participants ahead at speed.
Whatever your choice, I hope that September brings with it some good outcomes from the actions you take. One step at a time is all it takes. I think this quote sums it up.
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Author: Abraham Cowley Let me know how you get on.
All the best,
Chris Price 09 929 3190
AUGUST 08 IN THIS EDITION
The Multiplication Ef- fect of Testing August Website Coaching Review Improve Your Google Ad Text Today By Looking over Your Prospect’s Shoulder The Bit at the End – When it’s all just Gobbledygook 2
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Calendar of Events
September 9th
Marketing Association Practical Email Marketing Workshop
September 10th Marketing Association Practical Email Marketing Workshop
September 16th
Free Lead Generation Webinar permission.co.nz/webinar September 18th
Group Coaching Teleconference permission.co.nz/coaching September 22nd
Call in Afternoon Gold + Coaching Members September 24th
Call in Afternoon Gold + Coaching Members
The Multiplication Effect of Testing
In this month’s coaching update I took the group through a great tool from Google (which is, of course, free) that makes the task of testing web pages a breeze. You can now set up a test between two web pages in minutes. Your question is – what should I test, and probably more importantly, why should I embark on a testing program anyway?
So, like most people who only have a limited amount of time to spend on their website, it helps to appre- ciate the core commercial benefits a successful testing plan can produce before allocating some valuable time to it. The table that follows helps explain these benefits. I have borrowed this from a recent Google presentation I sat in on. It covers what they call the multiplication effect of testing by showing how some- one who is using AdWords (Google’s paid advertising option) to generate a lead flow could choose between three options when considering creating more customers: they could increase their advertising spend, raise their conversion rates by 50% or, the best of the three, do both.
Do Nothing Raise Spend 50% Raise Conversion Rate 50%
Both
Prospects 10,000 15,000 10,000 15,000
Conversion Rate 2% 2% 3% 3%
Customers 200 300 300 450
Sales Impact 1.5x 1.5x 2.3x
So, by choosing the third option (remember this was a Google presentation so increasing the ad spend was always going to be part of the solution) this marketer is able to increase sales by more than 2-fold (from 200 to 450 customers) while only increasing their ad spend by 50%. Not bad for just taking a conversion rate up by a mere 1%.
The news on testing is even better with lead-generation websites. Here, unlike a shopping site where achieving a 1% increase in conversion requires a reasonable amount of work, with lead generation you can easily push rates upwards by 5–7% without breaking into too much of a sweat. It all comes down to the level of convincing/persuasion you need to apply. Persuading someone to fill in a form to retrieve a free report is a lot easier than asking them to part with their money and buy something from you for the first time.
So we can now see that testing makes good commercial sense – the question still remains, what should I test?
Well, for lead-generation websites the three ingredients that make up the ’conversion cocktail’ are: a) the headline; b) the image used in the header; and c) the first piece of copy below the headline. When all three are in sync then good conversions follow.
So, we recommend you get the whiteboard out and start brainstorming some options. If the discussion becomes a bit heated over what version is best, then just hand the decision over to your web visitors and let them choose. Your creative folk may have a convincing argument on why their image should be used at the top of the landing page instead of the ’boring’ one that is currently there – just test the two and see which one works the best.
This brings me onto to the types of testing you can use. The header image test example I spoke about before would be set up as a simple A/B split test. This is where the web page traffic is evenly split between the two examples. Multiple versions can be tested against each other (A,B,C,D,E, e.t.c) but to start we sug- gest you go with a couple of obviously different pages to see what happens. This last point is quite impor-
tant. One way to decide if the difference is obvious to your visitors is to print each of them out, hold them at arm’s length and see if you can spot the difference.
The next step up from A/B testing is multivariate testing. This is where you test more than one change at a time on a single page. You may want to test three headlines, four images and two different copy introduc- tions. I recommend you head into this territory once you have cut your teeth on its simpler cousin. It’s a bit harder to set up and requires a lot more traffic for the test to run.
The number of conversion actions each of your tests achieves will determine which one is the winner. For lead-generation websites, these conversions are usually represented by prospects successfully submitting a form to receive some sort of report. However, the success of E-commerce websites will be gauged by sales. This last point could be cause for concern. For example, most tests will require about 30 conversions per option before you can start to reliably predict a winner. If you have two options of a shopping cart page running on an e-commerce website that only produces 20 sales a month, you could be waiting three months for your test to run. This is obviously too long. One way to get around this is to test actions that lead towards a conversion action rather than the conversion action itself. For instance, you could test the state at which a person either registers or logs into their account to start a transaction. There will be a lot more visitors doing this than completing sales, and by driving more people successfully through this stage it can only help build your final sales volume.
So there you have it. I hope these few words have gone some way to convince you to allocate some of your
‘website time’ to putting in place a testing program to drive your conversion rates upwards.
August Website Coaching Review
To start the group teleconference session I reviewed the basics of online lead generation to assist those joining the group for the first time. I then took the group through the initial steps managers need to take when optimizing their website, and presented some screen shot examples of analytics systems that have been properly set up, with some guidance on how to achieve this for themselves.
This was followed by an explanation of three new online lead generation strategies that I had seen work well in the previous month, and that I had written about in the briefing document members had received earlier in the week.
The screen-sharing technology we use was a great help as I reviewed each strategy, firstly with a Pow- erPoint presentation I had produced, and then as I took the group online to show them each strategy in detail. (All of this was recorded and supplied on an update CD for those that were not able to make the session.)
We had enough time to allow me to demo an exciting new product I have recently found. It supports a free trial that allows you to achieve a previously unheard of level of understanding of the possible usability struggles your website visitors face with your landing page or website. Most members of the group left the call intending to trial this technology later in the month.
You can trial membership of this coaching group for just $5.95 plus GST per month. Contact us on 09 929 3190 to set up your trial today.
Improve Your Google Ad Text Today By Looking over Your Prospect’s Shoulder
How well you use the 95 characters spread across three lines (25-35-35) that are available within your Google Ad Text can be all that separates your campaign from being an ongoing costly expense or a cost-ef- fective provider of valuable new prospect leads. However, knowing what copy to write can be a challenge when you are starting out. How can you distil your core benefit down to so few words? And should you lead with a benefit or a feature? All this can cause unnecessary concern and confusion, and result in the creation of those first few ads being a rather haphazard affair.
But this doesn’t have to be the case. I want to share a simple process you can follow to make this ad cre- ation easier. All you need is a few moments of concentration and the use of a tidy FREE online tool from Google. Combine the two and you should be scribbling down good copy ideas in seconds.
The true power of this system comes from its ability to show you an ‘over the shoulder’ view of your pros- pects. Remember that your searching prospects don’t see your ad in isolation – it is part of a complete page of results (both paid and organic). Both of these areas can change on a frequent basis, especially the paid area, which can change on a daily basis as new advertisers come into the market. The Google ads that are written with an appreciation of the other advertising and copy that sits around them tend to be the ones that lead onto great things. So how do you ensure you can see what your searcher sees?
Well, if you live in the same area as the prospects that your Google AdWords campaign is targeting then it is as simple as keying in your search keyword and noting what comes up. However, things are a bit more difficult for those advertising in markets outside their own location. Fortunately, this is where the free handy tool I mentioned comes into play.
You can find it here: https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool. You will need to have a valid Google account to make it work, but once you type in the keyword you want to search on, the loca- tion of the Google search engine and the location of your searcher, and then submit the form, all will be revealed for you. For instance, see what I find when searching for the keyword ‘laptop computers’ when looking for the .com search engine for those searchers in the US.
If you run a computer store in New Zealand that sells laptops and are wondering what ad text might work you in your Google AdWords account, you could do a lot worse than taking your ideas from those shown in the hyper-competitive US market. Sneaking a look over the fence at others trying to do the same market- ing as you but in other markets is just one way you can use this great tool to help make your ad writing an easier task. Here are two other ideas you may want to pick up on.
Look for answers to the problems your prospects have. You may have a strong idea of the key problems your prospects want to solve when they start looking for your product/service. Study the paid and non- paid search results behind your top keywords and see if the true benefits behind these problems are being addressed. For example, people don’t purchase walk-in wardrobes, they purchase storage solutions. I
have found that, for some reason, it helps to print out the results page and mark up the areas where these problems are being addressed.
Trick Google into showing you only the high click-through ads. When you are presented with a full page of AdWords ads it can be hard to differentiate which ones are the high click-through winners and as such are worth paying more attention to than the others. You can help yourself here by tricking Google into only showing you the strongest ads. You do this by forcing the Google ad serving engine to show you a broad match result for your target keyword by searching with a term that will always provide a broad match result. For instance, if you are interested in the term mentioned before, ‘laptop computers’, you can reveal the broad match result by entering “laptop 8855hyy computers”. See the image to follow for how these results differ slightly to the ones shown previously.
There are many other ways you can use these ‘over the shoulder’ views to further hone your ad copy. By following these few steps this simple tool should ensure that a) you are never stumped for an idea when kicking off your Google Ad text again and, more importantly, b) you produce ad copy with the same view in mind as your prospect sees. Have fun.
The Bit at the End – When it’s all just Gobbledygook
A good friend of mine runs a very successful retail business and recently decided to focus her mind on im- proving her website. Retailing must be one of the most complex businesses to manage. Stock, staff, leases, all within a fickle economic environment, must make it a challenge for those keen to take it all on. Ingrid has been up to the task of taming this complexity and her business is thriving. However, when it comes to the online space and everything I write, she tells me it’s all gobbledygook to her.
This tells me I have some way to go in explaining the environment I work in. You see, I believe that running a successful portion of any business online should be no more complex – even less complex, perhaps – than
its physical cousin. For instance, just removing the concepts of leases and staff should make managing an online store a lot less complex than its physical cousin. It’s not that the content of online marketing is overly complex; it’s just the industry terms that need translating into some real-world behaviours.
So, with all this in mind, here are my four first steps any business owner needs to follow to make their online presence perform.
Step 1: Firstly, you need to set things up so you can quickly and easily know the numbers of your website.
No-one would try running a business without a monthly set of financial reports to track its financial activ- ity – the same applies to the activity of the company website. Unlike your financial reports, the reports from your website will include nice charts that focus on people (your visitors) not numbers, which can make them a lot more interesting to read.
To create these numbers you will need a good website analytics application installed on your website. If you don’t already have Google Analytics installed on your website, go and get your web developer to set it up for you. In prior articles I told readers to ‘consider’ this package. Now, I think people come to me for advice on how to save time, so my advice is to pick Google Analytics – it’s free and is the best of the bunch for that price point.
Step 2: Invest an hour or two to understand what the figures mean. Yes, there is a learning curve here just as there was when you started your business and looked at your first set of reports. And, like then, the quicker you get up to speed with what the numbers mean, the more in control you will feel over what is happening. In your financial reports, there are some figures that are more important than others (debt- ors, creditors and cash on hand) — the same applies for website analytics, where terms like bounces, conversions and keywords take on a whole new meaning.
Once you become more familiar with what your statistics mean you will be able to quickly and easily re- view your monthly reports and deduce exactly what you need to focus on next month during your website
‘hour of power’.
Step 3: Now, with all this new-found knowledge, you need to make your website accountable. Inside ev- ery Google Analytics application is the ability to set up four ‘goals’ for the tool to track. A goal is an action achieved by your visitor on your website. This could be a sale, an email newsletter registration, or filling in a ‘contact us’ page.
Now you can not only see how many actions your website achieved broken down by type but also which stream of internet traffic was responsible for driving these actions. For instance, did they arrive from the Google search engine? And, if so, what search term did they enter before they came onto your site? Your analytics tools can reveal this information for you, uncovering rich veins of profitable internet traffic.
Once you have these goals being tracked, you can work on increasing their conversion rate by altering the content on your web pages and tracking the resulting changes.
Step 4: Start using email marketing. Now that you have your website all tracked and monitored, you can start to send it good visitor traffic. The best way to do this is to create a list of prospects and custom- ers who are willing to receive your own email marketing, and then send them to your website to have it convert them into sales or leads. As you need to seek permission first before sending emails, the act of building an email list can take time. The sooner you start the better. Bribe staff, prospects and customers to let them receive your emails. It’s one of the top strategies that all good online marketers use and for good reason – it works.
So there you have it. I have mentioned before that website marketing is not hard – but it’s not easy either.
There is a learning curve, but it’s not as steep as it seems once you cast away any confusing technobabble.
Needless to say, we have a whole range of resources to help you through this process. Our group coaching program is the best place to start. Remember, $5.95 plus GST is all it costs to be part of the group for a trial of 30 days. Join us for the next teleconference session and I’ll introduce you to Ingrid on the call.
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.
Email Marketing
• Email design and html set up.
• Spam checking and delivery monitoring.
• Email deployment technology advice, installation service and support.
• Email 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 44 359
Point Chevalier, Auckland Office Address:
Level 2, Suite 8
72 Dominion Road, 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.
Phone Contact:
Chris Price :
Office: 09 929 3190
Email: [email protected]