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Posts Tagged ‘Conversion Rates’

Each day, The Marketing Technology Blog sends out an email via MailChimp that automatically converts the blog’s feed to nicely formatted HTML email. There’s only a couple hundred folks that take advantage of it – a fraction of the readership of this blog on a daily basis. That’s okay… it’s a niche and feeds those who want it. I don’t try to artificially grow the list, it’s got great retention and does the trick for those who want my blog in their inbox.

Email is a push marketing channel. I’m a huge advocate of permission-based email marketing but I believe the majority of companies utilize email ineffectively.

• Email marketers don’t measure their email list retention, they only pay attention to how many are on the list at any one time. Your list acquisition may be outpacing your retention. If you’re getting a lot of unsubscribes, you need to fix something sooner rather than later.
• Email marketers believe that incredibly low open and conversion rates are good when they’re above industry averages. Folks, a 4% click-through rate off of an email is a 96% failure rate and not something to celebrate.
• Email marketers often have a calendar that requires them to publish, regardless of whether or not the content is crap or not. I get emails in my inbox every week and I seriously wonder how the company possibly thought there was something intriguing enough to send it.
• Email marketers believe in email math: If 10 people purchased from my list of 1,000 on my weekly email, I can double sales with 2 emails per week. It’s like printing money. No… it’s not. More lackluster emails may initially provide an increase in sales, but ultimately you’re going to lose valuable subscribers.

Although the cost of email marketing is plummeting, it still costs companies a lot of time and some money to send email. I haven’t tried to push my email or dress it up because I’m not sure it will do well with readers. Perhaps if I can have dedicated content in the email down the road – but I’m not going to send out crappy emails for the sake of trying to get a few more eyeballs.

The best thing you can do for a company who sends a crappy email is to unsubscribe. Don’t wait for the email to get better – send them a message today. Clean up your inbox.

Related articles by Zemanta

• HTML email campaigns – is sending them a waste of your time? (inklingmarkets.com)
• How to get the attention of inactive subscribers (b2bemailmarketing.com)

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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One thing we do regularly for our clients is run search query reports from Adwords and MSN, pull all queries that are resulting in unqualified impressions or clicks, and add those in as negatives.

Doing this can really help narrow down your keyword list and prevent unqualified traffic from seeing your ad and not clicking – which prevents your impressions from skyrocketing and therefore lowering your click-through rate. But negatives also can prevent people from clicking on your ads, costing you money and lowering your conversion rates.

However, if you’re only relying on the search query reports you’re really only being reactive in preventing your ad from being shown and clicked on by irrelevant traffic.

Before you even start a PPC account, you should be running basic keyword research reports to find potential keywords that could cause irrelevant traffic from seeing your ads and/or clicking on them before it even happens. This is a more proactive approach in keeping unqualified traffic out and therefore increasing click-through rates and Quality Scores. For example, you could be doing PPC keyword research on ‘vacation in Paris’ but find keywords that have search volume for, ‘weddings in paris’, or ‘paris movies’. At this point you would want to add in ‘weddings’ and ‘movies’ to you negative keyword list to weed out that irrelevant/unqualified traffic.

You can run keyword research reports in Google, Yahoo, MSN and several other free keyword tools to find potential negatives.

Every PPC firm should have an on-going list of potential generic negatives that could be used across all of their accounts. Some of these terms can include:

Free

Sex

Comparison

Reviews

Diagram

Pictures

Career

Job/Jobs

Bargain

Discount

Cheap

And much, much more. **Note that some of these generic keywords may be relevant to your business.

Really, the search query reports are for finding negatives that you miss from your initial keyword research. Get in the mind of searchers and find those negatives before they find you!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Last week we talked about the Google content network and automatic placements. I completely ignored the fact that managed placements exist because they didn’t fit in with my description of the ways in which targeting automatic placements is just like riding a flaming motorcycle, but I’m fixing that this week with an even more convoluted metaphor for the content network.

So play along with me for a minute. You are a lion! There are lots and lots of cute little bunnies hopping around your savanna. Whenever you come across one, you can probably reach your paw out and swipe it without much investment. But you have to catch so many to eat well. You might have to spend your whole day munching on rabbits just to feel well-fed. It’s one of nature’s balances: low risk, low reward. Automatic content placements: they are the rabbits of the search marketing world.

But what if you look up and see: a wildebeest? Now that’s 600 pounds of respectable animal. Those things are scary. They can hurt you, and it’s an enormous energy expenditure to try to catch one. If you’re unsuccessful, it’s has the potential to be a huge loss for you. But if you succeed: Wow! 600 pounds of meat! Your whole family can eat for a week. Managed content placements: they’re our wildebeests.

When you launch a content campaign and ad groups based on keyword themes, it’s like waking up in the morning surrounded by delicious bunnies. Google automatically matches your ads to sites they think are contextually relevant, and you’re supposed to start converting! But Google knows a few things. There are millions of sites in their content network. Some of them convert well, some of them don’t. They try to balance this out for advertisers and improve our ROI with a system called smart pricing, which basically boils down to: on sites Google thinks will have lower conversion rates, you pay less for your clicks. You don’t have visibility regarding what sites you’re getting smart pricing on, but overall, it can help lower your cost per lead for your automatic placements. For advertisers with a lot of traffic on the content network, this can be a great advantage because if you have a lot of automatic placements, you will sometimes convert on the very low-cost smart priced sites. With aggressive elimination of non-converting, high-spend sites, this can help generate a lot of conversions at a reasonable cost; but as I said last week, it can be a time-intensive process to turn all of those one-off conversions into a viable long-term lead generation strategy.

So you might think: can’t I just find a couple of wildebeests and stop messing around with all of these little guys? Wouldn’t that be nice, to just target a few high-conversion sites with managed placements and simplify your life? It’s possible…you might stumble upon a site and know this is just the audience that will convert for your ads. Or it might be hiding in there with the rabbits, the page Google automatically matched you to that has a CPL 1/3 of your goal and has converted 52 times this month. It’s tempting to want to grab these up, add them to our managed placements or create a site-targeted ad group for them, and let the leads roll in. Which is a great strategy, except for that it doesn’t always work.

Do you know why? Well, because targeting a placement is just like telling Google: this is high value for me. You’re not going to be getting any kind of discount on your advertising for that site. If the conversion rates on a site are really so high that you can afford to pay more per click, then by all means, try to add a managed placement for that site or page. But be sure to increase your bid- you’re probably not going to get away with using the same bids as you use for your automatic placements on your managed placements. You’ve declared the value of that site, and you will have to take on additional risk to obtain that value. It might not work: if your bid isn’t high enough, your ads won’t show often, and traffic on the site will decrease enough that you’ll lose leads rather than gain them as compared to the site’s performance as an automatic placement. Also, if conversion rates on the site aren’t high enough to counteract your increased bid, it’s possible your CPL could go up once a placement is managed as opposed to automatically matched.

Like the lion’s decision about when it’s wise to chase down a wildebeest, you can’t just be adding managed placements without carefully considering your potential for success and expect to win every time. If you’re getting a high number of low CPL conversions on a low conversion rate site because your clicks are high but your CPC is very low…probably not a great candidate for managed placement. A high conversion rate, coupled with a reasonably low cost per click and low potential competition on the managed placement you’re considering (you can go to the page and see who’s competing for that space) are probably the best indicators of potential success. But as always, there are no guarantees in life. You need to follow the data carefully, modify your bids to gain more traffic or lower CPL as necessary, and understand when to give up the chase. Sometimes managed placements you would really like to make work don’t. Delete them, eat some more bunnies, and keep an eye out for the next big one.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Anyone who has been working on a PPC account for a while- whether it be your own or a client’s- probably reaches a point of inspiration deficiency. A new PPC account can be like a new toy (if you’re not as nerdy as us, as I’m assuming you are, and this does not hold true for you I apologize); it’s fun setting it up and seeing what it does and how the world responds. But after a while, you have other new accounts to play with. Or you don’t, and this is the one account you’ll be handling forevermore. Either way, boredom can lead to neglect, and neglect will eventually damage your account’s profitability. So what to do? Get a little creative and find new ways to improve your accounts:

• Use your colleagues! It really doesn’t matter if they do PPC as well (though that helps)- anyone with familiarity with your product or service can give a new perspective, which can be very helpful when your ad texts all start to look the same and you can’t think of one more benefit for your landing pages. If you do work with other internet marketers, you can take this one step further and ask them to review your accounts for anything you may be overlooking, and for new ideas. This works beautifully and I think you should try it. Aside from actually having coworkers review your accounts, if you have access to theirs, you can also get ideas for settings or account structure changes by looking at what works for them and then applying relevant findings to your own clients.

• Remember there’s a world outside of your PPC account. It’s not all keywords and ad texts- don’t overlook landing page testing! Clients, even if wary of website redesigns, often will allocate budget for one-page design projects if you can adequately justify the increase in conversion rates they’re likely to see as a result.

• Think outside the PPC box- luckily, at Hanapin we have both PPC and SEO clients, so we have a bit of an advantage in this area, but if you don’t, you can still look at your website from a non-PPC perspective. Improvements to your site’s structure, updated content or products, and social media integration can all translate into new PPC opportunities. Updated content can give you ideas for new ad texts and landing page messaging. New products translate to keyword targeting opportunities. Understanding who your customer is and what they want from you via social media can help your messaging become more targeted as well. Meeting your visitors’ needs and expectations is paramount to success in all areas of internet marketing, and exploring how you’re doing that outside of PPC can open your eyes to a lot of possibility.

• You can ask search engine reps for help and ideas, particularly if you work at an agency and have dedicated reps for this kind of thing. I’ll just say a) they are extremely helpful, and sometimes have great ideas and b) you should always take their ideas with a grain of salt, because ultimately their first job is to increase their employer’s profit…not yours. If you choose growth avenues wisely, you can find a balance that does both simultaneously: lovely!

One last note: don’t let your desire to try something new win out over your ROI’s best interest…some ideas are more likely to have a substantial impact than others, and you know your account well enough to understand logically what’s most likely to be useful and what is just a pointless waste of time and money. Trust yourself, do your research, and get inspired. Everyone will be better off for it.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

There are some great benefits to the content network like lower click costs, and a large audience base, but like any campaign you need to make sure expanding past search will help you meet your business objectives. Once you’ve done that, it will be easy to get started if you follow this step-by-step guide from PPC Blog.

In his post Review Your PPC Keywords, Jason Tabeling from Search Engine Watch, reminds us to pay close attention to the keywords and match types we have running in our campaigns. Understanding how Google is serving up your ads based on users’ search queries can ultimately be extremely valuable for your account.

Here is a helpful post from Search Engine Watch on Managing Client PPC Campaigns on the Go. This definitely a must read before you book your next business trip! Remember transparency equals trust with client relationships and always have a backup manager in case of an emergency.

Small Business Search Marketing posted a list of the 3^rd annual SEMMY Award winners this week. Be sure to check out the winning post for PPC – oh, hey, look at that, it’s a PPC Hero post! Check out the SEMMY’s Homepage for a breakdown of all the votes.

The RKG blog has been talking about how people shop, and what that means for your conversion rates, this week: the type of shopper your keywords, ads, and landing pages are targeting could make all the difference to your conversion rates. Like George Michie says in the post, he’s not offering data-based classifications, just logical assumptions, but they’re good to think about for your websites in either case.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Tonight I received an email from Panera Bread. Like so many email programs nowadays, my email application automatically blocks images. As a result, here’s what the email looked like:

Not too compelling… especially for a beautiful email that actually looked like this:

I can’t imagine how many people deleted the email without reading it because… there was nothing to read if you didn’t download the images. This is a real problem with HTML emails… but it’s very simple to avoid.

Two Best Practices to Help Open Rates on HTML Emails

• Don’t display text as images… display it as text. Sure it’s not going to be quite as beautiful, but it will be readable – a huge difference. Panera should have broken up the imagery and text in the email.It probably would have taken their designer a few more minutes, but they could have sold a lot more bagels!
• If the designers were absolutely set on utilizing a 100% image-based HTML email, they could have utilized alt tags on each of the images to add compelling text. For the percentage of readers that have programs that block the images, they could have at least read about the new Mediterranean Salmon Salad, Asiago Bagel Breakfast Sandwich, Black Cherry Smoothie and Morning Bagel packs from the contents of the alt tag.

Spending an extra few minutes and filling out your alt tags (alt is alternative text and is displayed when images are not) will improve your open rates and conversion rates on an HTML email like this. It appears these emails were developed with Fishbowl… my understanding is that they have an advanced email editor in all versions of their application that support this.

Food commands imagery… and no doubt that some compelling text will draw more subscribers to download the images and add the email address to their safe list.

As well, I believe many Internet Service Providers flag emails that lack any content and are all images because it’s a means for spammers to send through crap. Panera can probably improve its deliverability rate as well by using more text within the email.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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I have to say I really love my Yahoo! Rep. He calls me whenever there are new features coming out in Yahoo! And, instead of depending on other bloggers for the info I’m hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth.

There have been some new advances made in the Yahoo Network (finally!) that may help decrease spend on non-converting domains and increase conversions are high converting domains, as well as optimize your bids on the Yahoo network or partner networks.

1. Yahoo launches distribution quality report. This report can be found in the reports tab, at the bottom of the reports list.

The distribution report allows you to see all data (clicks, impressions, spend and conversions) broken out by Yahoo! O&O (yahoo owned and operated – all yahoo branded sites) and the partner network.

This report allows you to determine whether you can afford to advertise on Yahoos! Entire network or just yahoo search only or yahoo partners only depending on your traffic and conversion rates.

If you find that you no longer want to advertise on the Yahoo O&O or Yahoo search partners you can adjust your settings so you’re only advertising on one or the other, as well as adjust bids on one or the other.

To change your settings, click on a campaign, then click on campaign settings. Under the network distribution area on the right, click edit. This will allow you to choose which network you wish to advertise on. You can also adjust your bid plus or minus a percentage of your set maximum bid on the yahoo partner sites only at this time.

2. You can also run an ‘ad delivery report’ in the reports tab under Traffic Quality Reports. This report shows you specific domains you’re ads are being served on via the Content Network or Yahoo’s search network. If you find there are several domains that are driving up your traffic and spend but not converting, you can easily block these domains.

To block certain domains, you can go to the admin tab, under the account general information there is an area for ‘blocked domains’ (right under blocked continents). Here you have the option to submit up to 500 domains to be blocked from serving your ads.

If you find that you are exceeding the 500 limit of blocked domains, you can send your domains to your Yahoo rep and they can remove domains that they no longer advertise on any longer, so you can remove those domains and add in others.

My Yahoo rep says though a great way to prevent your ads from showing on certain unqualified sites is to keep track of your negative keyword lists. Negative keywords allow you to not show up for searches that contain that keyword. For example, if you’re offering bridal magazines, you may want to add in the keyword, ‘free’ assuming your magazines are not free. This will prevent your ad from showing if someone types in the keyword, ‘free bridal magazines’.

Another great addition to Yahoo is they have expanded their negative keyword limit from 250 to 500! To add negative keywords you can add them in at the account level by going to the admin tab, then clicking on edit under tactic settings. Or you can add them in ad the ad group level by going to your ad group, click on ad group settings, and again click edit under tactic settings and add in your excluded keywords there.

There are a few more new Yahoo! features or enhancements that I’ll talk about later this week. Stay tuned!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

For the last couple months, I’ve been working on a top secret project that’s pretty fun. Webtrends is a client of mine who we’re assisting with reducing conversion rates and improving online visibility (I know that’s generic… but these guys are in a highly competitive market!). With the high number of enterprise businesses utilizing WordPress, it made sense that Webtrends would provide an integrated offering… so we built it.

The Webtrends plugin isn’t just a crappy little plugin to add your analytics code to your footer – that would have been too easy. Instead, we brought Webtrends incredible analytics into the WordPress dashboard!

The project had it’s challenges! While Webtrends API is one of the best I’ve ever utilized (push a button in your Analytics app to get the API call!), trying to provide a unique user interface that matched WordPress was tough but I think we nailed it. There’s a settings page where you fill in your API details and select your account…. and you’re up and running!

The dashboard is also 100% Ajax driven to ensure pageload time are kept to a minimum. It was a joy to work through WordPress’ Ajax security model (a little sarcasm there, but I recognize the need to have a good one!).

Of course, the plugin adds the necessary footer JavaScript and noscript code (a huge advantage of Webtrends over free analytics is that you can still track folks with JavaScript turned off). It also brings back the pages that are the most popular, as well as Webtrends’ tweet stream, blog posts and support stream. Webtrends is moving to real-time functionality as well… this is great for Enterprise bloggers.

If you’re a Webtrends client and would like to beta test with us, please let me know. Your server will need to run PHP 5+ with the cURL library enabled so that the API calls can be retrieved! We’ll be talking more about the plugin at Engage 2010!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Ole Laursen assisted the team as well. Ole to helped us properly integrate FLOT with the plugin. FLOT is an open-source jQuery based rich charting engine. I’m so sorry I forgot to mention Ole! He was wonderful to work with.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Now that the holiday festivities and hangovers are over with, it’s time to determine whether or not you pre-holiday optimization efforts were effective.

So, what questions do you need to ask and what numbers do you need to evaluate?

Impressions
Did your keywords get more impressions than normal during the holidays? Were those impressions for your standard keywords, or for holiday-specific terms like “christmas sale” or “holiday special?”

Click Through Rate
Since getting more impressions is worthless without being able to drive more traffic to your site as a result, the next question is, “Did your holiday themed ads generate more clicks than the non-holiday ads?” If so, what were the differences? Was it something more than just inserting “christmas sale” into your ad copy? Was there a discount or bonus that was being offered?

Conversion Rate
Increasing conversions is the ultimate goal behind increasing impressions and improving click-through rates, which makes it the most important factor in determining whether or not your holiday optimization was effective. Did your search campaigns see higher conversion rates during the holidays? If not higher rates, did they see more overall conversions? Did you find specific keywords that converted better?

Now that you’ve considered the questions you need to ask about your search campaigns, it’s time to determine which holiday adjustments you can keep to maintain or improve performance going forward.
Try keeping some of the holiday keywords that generated a significant number of impressions. Any term that gets visitors to your site is potentially useful and should be tested further, even if it seems seasonal or specific.
If you saw a significant improvement from your ads, try to incorporate some of the holiday changes into your current ads. No, you can’t run “Christmas Sale” ads anymore, but you can try “New Year Special” offers to try to maintain holiday performance a little longer.
If you saw better conversion rates for specific keywords, look at the surrounding data for those terms. Were there changes in bids, ad position or match types? If so, those are changes that can be maintained and further tested.

It’s great to see improved performance and an increase in revenue during the holidays, but it’s even better to learn something from it and continue those improvements during the rest of the year.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Brad Geddes is one of my favorite bloggers, and he has a really interesting link to a YouTube video that talks about how you can get information at the keyword level in Google Analytics that shows what conversion rates you get at what position in the SERPS. You can view the video here:

I have wondered at times for a particular account that recently lowered its budget if our positions are just too low now to generate the kind of sales we used to. Now, I should be able to find out this information using this report in Analytics.

If you find that you generate super high conversions in positions 4 – 6 over positions 1 – 2, that’s great evidence to your client that you don’t need to be in super high positions in order to convert well. Some people call clicks on ads in positions 1 and 2 curiosity clicks. Curiosity clicks are clicks from people who aren’t ready to purchase yet, but they’re in their leaning phase and click on ads in top positions just to get a further idea of what they want.

To run the report in Analytics, simply follow these steps:

1. Login to analytics
2. Click on traffic sources on the left hand navigation
3. Click on Adwords
4. Click on Keyword Positions
5. From there you can click on any keyword that shows up in the middle of the page.
6. The report by default will show keyword visits by position
7. If you want to get conversion rate by position, simply click on the drop down menu where it says visits, and click on conversion rate. (see screen shot below)

This report is also great to get additional budget from your client to get in higher positions in the SERPS. You can simply show your client that you convert higher in higher positions (if that is the case) and hopefully they’ll increase their budgets to get in those higher positions more frequently.

The more insight you have over your Adwords keywords the better decisions you can make on bid adjustments, etc. I love that Google offers these robust reports and will explore this in all of my accounts!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.