As poor Filipe Massa proved at the Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend, having the pace to overtake and lead the race almost all the way to the chequered flag just isn’t enough - you have to have all parts of your game on song to beat the competition; the right driver, so many small performance parts that all have to work in unison, the right strategy for each track. But most of all, you need the right team, all working together to achieve a common objective.

Winning business online is a very similar proposition. You might have the best web site in the world that converts 35% of your visitors to hard cash. But, with the wrong visitors, or too few of them, that’s just not going to get you over the finishing line.

There are multiple parts to your strategy that all need to work in synergy to squeeze every last drop of performance from your race car;

• the right strategy
• quality visitors landing on your site that are looking for exactly what you’re selling
• landing those visitors on the absolute sweet-spot on your site that addresses their need immediately
• good copy that reinforces your ability to fulfil their need or desire
• obvious calls to action to motivate your visitor to buy, pick up the phone, sign up for a trial, or whatever it is you want them to do

…and we’re still only at the second pit stop!

The ‘conversion‘ isn’t the end of your race - you still need more to reach the chequered flag of success.

1. Qualifying: Getting the right traffic.
2. Stint one: Making sure your visitor lands in the right place and stays
3. Stint two: Converting that visitor to a sale
4. Stint three: Maximising your return on that customer
5. Chequered flag: 10 points in the bag, the glory and a big bottle of champagne

To discover your winning strategy and avoid a Massa-style blow-up three laps from the end of your race, have us join your pit crew - 023 9223 0361.

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But there’s a little-known element that’s really beginning to annoy me and a lot of the other search community: the Search Network.

You’ll be familiar with the two primary networks; Google Search - essentially, the Google you know and love, and then there’s the content network where your ads are showing alongside some forum or blog that contains the keywords on which you’re bidding.

The Search Network is somewhere in the middle of these two and relates to sites that technically are search engines like Google, and merely send the visitor’s search query off to Google, and then get Google’s data back. And your paid for ads too. And yes, you’re still paying per click the same way you do on Google Search.

It’s good idea in principle, at least for sites like www.sky.com and www.orange.com. These are search engines where the audience will behave in a very similar way to the audience on Google.

However, this is where it starts to get a little concerning. Google doesn’t publish a list of its “Search Partners”, so there’s no way of knowing in advance which sites will be carrying your ads, and where your money is being spent.

Depending on your market and your product, for example, you might not really want your ads to show on www.ebay.co.uk, or Amazon.co.uk. Or perhaps you do? Either way, you really want to be able to measure the effectiveness of each of these sites carrying your ads and the clicks that come from them - how many Amazon clicks does it take for you to achieve a sale?

Right now, the only way of knowing this is to use Google Analytics or similar software to check the source of visitors to your site, how they behave, and if they convert to a sale or not.

It isn’t currently possible to run a campaign only on the Search Network, or to see where your ads are showing, or which site individual clicks are originating from. You can’t currently calculate your Cost Per Aquisition, the average ad positions or the average cost per click. All of these stats are rolled up in the stats for Google Search in your campaign.

So what happens if you don’t want your ads showing on a particular property like www.FreeIndex.co.uk or www.DoorOne.co.uk? A nice simple site exclusion tool like the one provided on the Content Network? No, I’m afraid not - you have to actually call Google and request that they manually exclude your ads from showing on those sites.

Maybe some of these sites perform really well and have a great CTR and awesome CPA figures. And maybe they don’t. But without the ability to individually target ads for the audience, without the ability to measure it’s effectiveness, it’s difficult to make a case one way or the other.

You could always opt out of the Search Network, of course, but there’s definitely some good quality traffic in there you’d be missing out on.

If only we could tell which traffic it was.

If you really want to be able to measure performance and optimise your campaign effectively, there’s a little more to it.

Example

Dennis and Steve run a garden landscaping business in the South West of England.

Their campaign uses location targeting, of course. There’s a main ad group, already bidding on all the relevant terms; landscaping, best landscaping, landscaping experts, landscaping company, landscaping firm and so forth.

There are also other ad groups with keywords and ads relevant to each geographic area that services are offered; an ad group for Bristol, and ad group for Somerset, and ad group for Bath. All great practice that will demonstrate relevance to the audience and improve their CTR.

What They Missed

But here’s something they hadn’t considered:

Keyword 1: landscaping company - shows a generic Landscaping ad

Keyword 2: landscaping Bristol - shows a Bristol Landscaping ad.

When a searcher types in “landscaping company bristol“, Google has to guess which of your keywords is most relevant. Remember, Google AdWords is a piece of software that measures words, it has no idea that the word Bristol is more important than the word company in this example.

Clearly, this is a very simple example to demonstrate the point. The obvious remedy is also to bid on the keyword “landscaping company bristol” in the Bristol ad group, of course.

But your campaign is going to be a whole lot more complicated, with a whole lot more keyword variations, so the most effective solution (for this example, anyway) is this:

Use each of the locations as negative keywords in your generic ad groups.

Therefore, it would be good practice to use Bristol as a negative keyword in the main landscaping ad group. This tells Google that if the searcher is looking for landscaping services in Bristol, their search matches only keywords in the Bristol ad group and the searcher sees Bristol Landscaping ads and nothing else.

Lower Cost Per Click

This practice will improve your Click Through Rate (CTR), and improve your overall quality score and lead to a reduced cost per click and therefore a reduced Acquisition Cost.

• Get the AdWords Success Guide
• Learn How to Turbo-Charge Your Campaign
• Have Us Manage Your Campaign

It’s a subject, like many in the world of marketing, that is completely subjective - it will depend entirely on your business, the market sector, your product, your prices, competitors and a whole host of other things. But there is a common thread with many sites that you may want to consider:

Is your visitor ready to convert?

If you’re selling commodity items like CDs or DVDs, or consumable products, the chances are that your buyer has the budget, their hand on their credit card and may just be looking for the cheapest price. Comparatively easy pickings.

However, for many businesses (for example, those selling services, fashion products, interior design products, expensive jewellery, cars, property etc.), visitors clicking on Google ads are a different proposition; sure, they may have a budget, a desire or a need, but it’s likely that they haven’t quite decided exactly what the solution is.

We’re talking about buying cycles, and their length and the stages in them vary significantly for every business.

Let’s use the example of buying a fashion handbag. I’m not talking about a £20 bag from a supermarket, I mean several hundred pounds on a designer bag.

There will be a small segment of this market that will make an impulse buy when they see the right bag on a site, and there are those that are in the latter stages of their buying cycle when they land on a site, but the majority of the traffic is still pondering, still deciding, still browsing.

• Some are dreaming of buying, but don’t have the budget yet.
• Some have the budget, but aren’t quite sure what they want - they’re looking for inspiration.
• Some are planning to buy for that special occasion, and will save up.
• Some are looking for a gift idea, and want to suggest that someone else buy it for them.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help your conversion tracking data. Google only tracks when someone clicks your ad and then buys during that visit, there’s no simple way of knowing if that person returned bought later.

For many Ecommerce sites, a visitor has but two simple options: buy, or leave. Most will leave.

But there is a better way - choice. Give your visitor a choice, make it easy for them to browse similar products that might interest them. Engage them in a discussion, offer some help, some advice. Make it easy for them to tell a friend, or add it to their wish list and email them a reminder, or some other products as they come in to stock.

Become a companion through the buying journey - and you’ll still be there at the end when the purchase is made.

The quality of the traffic that you’ll get will also depend on the keywords that you’re bidding on for both pay-per-click and SEO; a search for “handbag” would typically identify someone early in their buying cycle, still browsing. Whilst a search for “red leather handbag”, or a search including a specific brand and model name or number would indicate someone later in the cycle, more clear about their need and closer to making that purchase. Find out how to improve your PPC traffic quality.

You can get an objective site review and learn how you can improve your conversion rate - talk to me about how this works:

From: Google AdWords [mailto:reactivation@google.com]
Sent: 25 March 2008 02:58
To: [removed]
Subject: Please Update Your Billing Information

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
——————————————————————————–

Dear Google AdWords Customer,

Please sign in to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update your billing information.
Your account will be reactivated as soon as you update your payment information.
Your ads will show immediately if you decide to pay for clicks via credit
or debit card. If you decide to pay by direct debit, we may need to receive
your signed debit authorization before your ads start running,
depending on your location.
If you choose bank transfer, your ads will show as soon as we receive your
first payment.


We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,


———————————————————————————-

The Google AdWords Team

The link, were he to click on it, actually goes to http://adwords.google.com.0k8ujd.cn/select/Login/ - nothing to do with Google at all and is just trying to harvest personal financial data from you.

My advice; don’t click links in Emails like this - just log in to your AdWords account in the usual way. If Google needs money from you, you can guarantee that authentic messages would be in your online account too!

Send me a note about this or learn more about AdWords success.

1. I’m selfish, only interested in me. Right now, I don’t care about your business, I care about me and whether you can deliver the product, service or solution I need. I’m not interested in the 400 other things you sell or do, just the one thing I need.
2. I’m impatient. Get to the point quickly, demonstrate to me that you know what I need and that you can deliver it. I don’t want to go trawling your site for more information until I know I’m in the right place.
3. I don’t trust you. I landed on your site because you matched my search on Google, and it looks like you have what I need. But I still don’t trust you - now I’m going to browse around your site and find reasons to confirm my doubts; ah, jack of all trades, huh? Not for me! Ooh, only started up three months ago? No credibility. Spelling mistakes or broken links? Do they represent the shoddy way in which you’ll deal with me, too? Maybe.
4. I’m confused: What do I do now? How do I contact you? How do I order? Why is it so difficult to find this information on your site? There are so many options, I don’t know which to click.
5. I’m suspicious. Is your payment gateway secure? Can I trust you not to spam my email address or sell it to someone else who will? Will my order ever arrive? Who have you worked with before? Did you do a good job?
6. I’m looking for a reason to leave. I’ll need lots of reasons to stay, but just one will make me leave.
7. I really need to be told what I need and how I can get it. Please make it easy for me.

In the last few days alone, business owners have told me that sole objective of their site is to get someone to pick up the phone, and have then been shocked by the revelation that their telephone number isn’t on every page - it’s buried somewhere on a contact page. It’s a simple thing, but easily (and frequently) overlooked when you’re viewing your site from your perspective, not that of your visitor.

Achieve a greater perspective. Call me on 023 9223 0361 or send me a message:

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the content network is a bad strategy, far from it. But remember that to be successful you need to test, measure and refine what works and what doesn’t, and mixed together in one campaign, you’ll find it tough to understand where keywords are generating clicks and turning in to sales.

Google search is simple; it’s Google. You type something in to it, you get results, and sponsored links across the top and down the side. The audience here is specifically searching for a solution to a problem or to fulfil a need. If it’s a product or service, they probably have a budget and are ready to part with it.

The Google Search Network is a little different. The same principal applies; someone has a need and they are actively searching for a product or solution and have already identified their budget. But search network partners include Amazon and e-bay, Sky.com, Orange and many others, no doubt. A different audience, right? Firstly, you’ll appreciate that ads are shown in a different way on these sites, in different positions on the page. Secondly, this is a different audience: yes, they are searching, but a searcher on e-bay isn’t compelled by the same messages in your ads as a searcher on Google. Ditto for Amazon.

Let’s put it this way: identical products are sold in some swanky boutique in London and in your local car boot sale or market. They will be sold for a vastly different price. I appreciate the argument about overheads, but that isn’t the driver here - if your market trader could sell for the same price, he surely would! The audience’s perspective and expectations are different, and so is the surrounding competition.

Thirdly, there’s the Content Network, also known as AdSense. AdSense is an easy program to sign up to for any blog publisher or site owner to monetise their web site through displaying and generating clicks on Google ads. You’ve seen them all over the place, and probably ignored them, mostly.

The main principal is the same though, you bid on keywords (much broader ones) and Google matches your ads to pages that feature those keywords. So the mere fact that Suzie reads Helen’s blog about Helen’s friend who bought a Prada bag at the weekend means that Google might just match your keyword bid on ‘Prada bag’ and show your ad.

That’s OK? Sure, it’s OK. Will Suzie click on your ad? Well, perhaps, but unlikely. That doesn’t really matter, Google doesn’t measure your CTR here or judge your overall campaign performance on it either. What does matter though, is that what compels Suzie to click your ad will be a different message to that which compels someone to click it on Google Search, or its Search Network. It will achieve a different CTR, and more importantly, a different number of sales, or conversions for the cost of the clicks.

Even if Suzie were to click your ad when it appeared on Helen’s blog, do you think she’d be more, or less likely to buy than our friend who searched on Google?

The best way to tackle this is to split your campaigns. You’ll then be able to test, measure and refine what works for each audience, what you’re spending and what’s converting to sales. Depending on your product, service or market, you might want to split it three ways for each media network, or perhaps just Search and Content.

Learn more stuff like this.

Or turbo charge your AdWords campaign.

I’ve known plenty of people that called themselves ‘Sony men’. That is to say, they bought in to the brand in a big way, particularly years ago. They’d only buy Sony hi-fi gear or their TV had to be a Sony. Personally, I’ve never considered myself a Sony man, but you’ve really got to respect the strength of the brand that makes someone want to only buy Sony products.

I discovered one of the methods they use to maintain that brand strength.

A slight contradiction here, but I’ve always owned Playstations. I had two of the first version (one got stolen), and two of the PS2s (one scratched discs until they were unusable) and Father Christmas kindly brought my son and I a PS3 this year.

So here’s the lesson; the PS3 was bought from Amazon and yesterday, it just stopped reading discs altogether. After searching a few forums, I established that it’s probably a problem with the laser. I called Amazon, who took a whole bunch of details and then said I needed a reference number from Sony and gave me their telephone number.

The number turns out to be a generic one, and there’s another, dedicated number to speak with the Playstation team. A tiny bit irritated, I redial the Playstation team.

Another guy takes a few details about the fault, I’ve already tried all the options he suggests, so he registers the unit and then simply says:

“That’s fine. We’ll have our courier deliver a replacement to you tomorrow and collect the faulty one at the same time”. No repackaging the box with the accessories and cables - just the unit on its own.

What a pleasant surprise. No grief whatsoever! I really don’t mind stuff breaking down if that’s the service I’m going to get.

The alternative version of this story, full of grief and endless form-filling, tests, paying for shipping it back, being without the unit for days or weeks, would almost certainly have affected my decision to buy the next generation of Playstation. As it happened, the outcome of it breaking has actually made me even more likely to buy Sony again.

It’s a sad state of affairs when this level of service is extraordinary - surely this should be the standard level of service anyway?

So the lesson is this: your customer service doesn’t have to be extraordinary, it just needs to fulfil (or exceed) expectations - and you’ll have a customer for life.

Even if you don’t want to target specific demographics, there could be an incredible amount of value in the new reports you’ll get to measure and compare your success across a demographic spread.

Inside AdWords: Demographic bidding beta test

Google says:

Demographic bidding and reports are available to advertisers who run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns (with CPC or CPM bidding) on certain sites in the Google content network. Here’s how it works: Some publishers in our network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing us to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups. (To protect user privacy, AdWords receives this data only from publishers that have permission from users to share their data according to the site’s terms and conditions. Users are never identified personally, but only as anonymous aggregated data in the demographic reports. And to protect the privacy of minors, users under 18 can’t be targeted demographically.)

Bear in mind that this only applies to the Content Network, not Google Search or the Search Network.

Sure, it made the house look great. It completed the appeal of the property amongst it’s neighbours. The finish of the property was awesome inside and out.

The problem though, is that this makes a promise to a potential buyer and then fails to deliver. It’s a big damned lie, one that might just convey the wrong message and kill your potential sale. The buyer may not have even wanted a garage, but the seeds of doubt and mistrust are already planted.

There are many examples of simple untruths out there on the web too. Buy now, in stock! Click the ad, and land on a page all about the product you want to buy and guess what: awaiting stock! If you promise next day delivery, deliver it next day. Again, the customer may not even demand next day delivery - but you promised.

Don’t make promises you can’t fulfil - it WILL cost you sales and customers.