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Why relying on conversion values can be bad

Usually the advice of online marketing is to measure and measure and measure and seek to increase conversions or decrease cost per conversion.

In theory this is 100% correct. If we know what we need to measure then this is 100% correct. If we can measure everything we want this is 100% correct. But in practise things are very different.

Firstly we do not know exactly what to measure; in  time we can improve this, but initially we do not know what exactly is a conversion. This is explained more below. But secondly we cannot measure everything and we have  a bias towards being able to measure contact forms and sales from the online shop. We are less able to measure phone calls, recommendations, referrals and multi-stage processes.

Why is it difficult to decide what to measure? There are several reasons:

  • Sales are relatively easy, and ideally you record the sales value. A sophisticated analysis would record revenue – cost of sales, or net profit. But what about loss leaders or products which have many repeat purchases? Errors in the analysis are greatest if your product range has a variety of different types of product.
  • What value do you attribute to a brochure request? Especially if large orders tend to come only via phone or fax from brochure.  It is easy to ignore this, but you could be optimising the PPC for lots of little Internet orders and not the large brochure based orders.
  • What value do you give to a contact form? Many businesses (including our own) have contact forms which we encourage people to fill in to get a quote or enquire about our marketing or design services.  But we get a lot of completed forms from offshore developers offering their services, or ‘guaranteed top places on Google’. These are not useful at all, but there is a danger that a PPC campaign could be optimised to generate lots of rubbish forms
  • Do you record phone calls? Many B2B companies state they make more sales from incoming phone calls than from contact forms. The incoming calls are the most important, but these are often not tracked. This in fact need not be the case, and you can adapt your website so show dynamic phone numbers according to source of enquiry. Combined with a whisper number this allows phone calls to be tracked and lead source recorded. This is not often done.
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The Impact of the world cup on Internet Search

The World Cup has had a major impact on Internet Search patterns and this has impacted businesses in different ways. Some have gained, others have had fewer leads.

The obvious winners are the news sites and sports sites who saw huge increases in traffic during World Cup matches due to people viewing online. By huge, increases of over 200% have been reported on news related websites (from sources such as Akamai ).

By contrast B2B websites had a sluggish June in terms of numbers of search visitors to the website as many of the usual searchers were too busy looking at the World Cup. This had meant the usual drop from June to July and August in B2B website visitors due to summer holidays  has not happened. Indeed many B2B websites have seen increasing traffic in July compared to June.

The above is a simplistic view; for businesses who advertise on the Internet there were opportunities from the World Cup viewing; advertising on these websites was key and provided larger volumes clicks, so it was possible for B2B or more usually B2C websites to buck the trend.

The World Cup was a world event, with the search impact being felt  across the world. Other events are more local . For example the UK search markets were affected at the start of the year by snow. The impact of the snow across the UK  in early January was more workers staying home and the holidays became 1-2 weeks longer than usual. So B2B websites has a bad January as well.

All in all 2010 has not been the most predictable for B2B websites; forget the recession, other factors such as snow and football can have as big an impact.

What does this mean for Internet Marketing Strategy?  It makes simple comparisons of one year with another difficult, and even month by month comparisons need some explanation to see what is really happening,

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SEO for Magento

Magento is an ecommerce platform that can be installed to be very search engine friendly, and an ecommerce store built using the Magento platform can do exceedingly well in the search engines.

So what are the secrets to carrying out successful SEO on Magento stores?

Meta tags

The Magento store allows you to customise the meta tags so these can be optimised  and made as SEO friendly as possible

Free format text entry for products

The more recent Magento installations give freedom to add custom specific text to your products, allowing you to incorporate links and other useful SEO features, provided you are happy writing in HTML. The TinyMCE editor on the latest versions helps no programmers to add useful copy as well.

SEF URLs

SEF stands for Search Engine Friendly! So SEF URLs are Search Engine Friendly URLs and Magento stores have modules that allow these to easily be implemented. Unfortunately many designers think installing this module is sufficient. It is not. It needs careful application based on keyword research to be successful.

Sitemaps

Most installations of Magento will auto generate sitemaps which are usually helpful for SEO. More advanced Magento SEO may partially turn these off to allow more control over the way the sitemaps are shown to the search robots, but having this module is better than nothing.

The secret weapon

The above are all good an relatively standard, so what is the real secret of successful Magento SEO? The most important aspect is not some bolt on module, but the very core of the code, the template. The most successful ecommerce shops will have been built with SEO in mind and optimised at the build phase, not get built and then handed to an SEO company to tinker with. Unfortunately this rarely happens, and most Magento stores we are asked to optimise have already been built.

The best advice we can give anyone is to get your SEO agency actually building the  ecommerce store; if they are not skilled in PHP development, then they are probably not best to tackle the SEO on your Magento store. The visual design can be done by your favourite design agency, but building the core Magento templates is ideally done by your SEO agency.

We have provided successful online marketing (SEO and PPC) for Magento ecommerce stores.

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Magento PPC

What is behind successful PPC management on Magento ecommerce stores?

There are several factors which might be important:

  1. A system which automatically publishes your products onto AdWords  (or Yahoo and Bing CPC) as product based ad groups
  2. A bid management system which automatically updates your bids
  3. An experienced PPC manager who has passed the AdWords exam
  4. A PPC agency who have built and managed Magento ecommerce stores and have the technical knowledge to understand what is possible

The first factor sounds great for a store with many thousands of products. And if and when you advertise at the product level for several thousand items such a system will be used. But this sounds better than it is as it only deals with products. What about categories or generic terms? What about  company brand name? The product itself is not always the most important part of the campaign, and relying on an automated product system has the danger of this being forgotten.

The second factor sounds great too; a system which can update bidding all the time, based on rules. But there is a catch. Experienced PPC managers love it when competitor campaigns use these bidding tools; discover the rules and you can beat them. In fact you can drive your competitors campaigns. The rules can get changed on a monthly basis, so discover your competitors review dates and work around these.  Looking at it from the other side therefore highlights a danger with this approach.

The third factor sounds great. But there are two provisos. Will this experienced manager be looking after your account or will it be delegated to a trainee? And what happens when they are on holiday skiing or scuba diving? A single AdWords professional, however experienced is not sufficient.

The fourth factor is surprisingly often neglected. The best racing drivers understand how the engine works, and they work with the mechanics to get the best performance. It is a team effort which works best if both driver and engineer understand each other. The most effective PPC agency for our Magento PPC management will be one who develops and maintains Magento stores. This gives them the expertise to know what is possible ‘beneath the bonnet’. It enables tailored system for semi automatic upload of products to be used when beneficial.

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Why are AdWords and Analytics statistics so different?

This is a common question we get asked by clients who assume they measure the same thing, which of course they do not do. This misconception has arisen because of the claim that Google Analytics can be used to measure the effectiveness of  different marketing channels.

This claim is partially true; Google Analytics can be setup to accurately measure marketing channel effectiveness but this requires the cooperation of your website developer. The quick methods of setting this as defined in the Google help sections will not achieve this at all, and are in fact dangerous as they give very misleading information.

This article will explain some of these differences.

Firstly AdWords (or most PPC reporting) will report on clicks (taking account of repeated clicks) and conversions within a month. This reporting is subject to the restriction of the user having javascript and cookies enabled.

By contrast Google Analytics reports on visits to your website and will look at the latest source when assigning a  conversion.

The differences between the two are therefore:

  1. Multiple clicks by one user may only be reported as one click in AdWords.  In Analytics this will also be one visit with separate page views.
  2. Detected fraudulent clicks from obscure IP addresses will be discounted by AdWords but not by Analytics. This is not normally an important issue when dealing with conversion data.
  3. AdWords will record a conversion if someone clicks on the ad and then makes a purchase  on the same computer without deleting cookies. In practise this usually means within one month. There may be a gap of several days and they may re-find the website using natural search, but this will still register as a conversion. By contrast Analytics takes the latest source. This will tend to undervalue the first method of finding the website (often a generic search) and over value the last method of finding the website (product or company name)
  4. If your website has redirection then the gclid parameter (by which Analytics knows the referrer was AdWords) get removed and the subsequent pages visited will not be counted as from the AdWords referrer.  This is a major issue with some shopping carts which ‘lose’ some of the AdWords leads in the shopping cart process and these are incorrectly attributed to direct or organic search.
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Joomla SEO

Joomla is a popular open source content management system which can be made search engine friendly, and in this regard is a great improvement on older content management systems. Joomla websites can do exceedingly well in the search engines.

So what are the secrets to carrying out successful SEO with Joomla websites?

Meta tags

There are modules you can add on to the basic Joomla install which allows customisation of the meta tags. Most of these modules do just that, they allow for customisation, but do not make it very quick and easy, and many users do not always fill these in.

Edit with care

The standard editor provided with Joomla allows a user to make all sorts of nasty code changes without them realising it. Simple changes are fine and can be done in a search engine friendly manner. This is better than some old CMS systems where all changes a user made actually harmed the website code through poor editor coding.

SEF URLs

SEF stands for Search Engine Friendly! So SEF URLs are Search Engine Friendly URLs and there are modules for Joomla that allow these to easily be implemented. Unfortunately many designers think installing this module is sufficient. It is not. It needs to be used, and on a large website many of these modules are awkward and slow to use.

Sitemaps

Most installations of Joomla will auto generate sitemaps which are usually helpful for SEO. More advanced Joomla SEO may partially turn these off to allow more control over the way the sitemaps are shown to the search robots, but having this module is better than nothing specially at the start of any work.

The main secret of successful Joomla SEO

The above are all relatively standard features, so what is the real secret of successful Joomla SEO? The most important aspect is not some bolt on module, but the very core of the code, the template. The most successful Joomla websites will have been built with SEO in mind for your particular set of keywords and optimised at the build phase, not get built and then handed to an SEO company to tinker with. Unfortunately this rarely happens, and most Joomla websites we are asked to optimise have already been built, often before a detailed keyword research is done.

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In Analytics how can there be zero visits for a recorded keyword?

Analytics is a superb tool with a wealth of analytical data. But some data is not as it may seem.  And you can discover this by looking at the ‘tails’ or low volume searches, an area missed by those just analysing the ‘top ten’ of anything.

Many good websites will have a large number of keywords in the Analytics report with zero visits. So what does this mean?

Firstly for those not familiar with the keyword reports in Analytics you can see this by selecting Traffic Sources > Keywords from the left column of options. This will give you a list of many (perhaps many thousands of keywords if you have a good SEO agency) of keywords. Click on the Visits column header to sort by visits. You may have to click twice to sort with the zero visits at the top. This will show you a list (maybe of several hundred) keywords with zero visits!

This looks mad, and is. It is Google’s attempt at solving the issue of one person repeatedly visiting a website within a short space of time (one session). The first will appear with  zero visits and the second with one visit.

There have been some misleading articles of advice regarding the above indicating it is the same as impressions in AdWords. This is not the case at all. Linked accounts can show impressions (keywords with zero clicks) and this is an entirely different set of figures with no direct link to the observed zero visitor keywords in most Analytics reports.

In summary Analytics is a fantastic tool to help you get the most from your website, but some data does need careful interpretation to understand exactly what it means.

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Choosing domain names for SEO

We often get asked for advice on choosing domain names. Some basic information on domain names is available from www.cornishwebservices.co.uk/domains and this article looks in more detail at how to choose domain names for SEO benefit.

In general the best domain names are short, memorable,  include the company name, include major keywords and are also available for purchase in the useful domain name extensions. It is clear that satisfying all these conditions is not possible unless your business name is a short description of your product.

There are many good domain names made up of two or three short keywords joined together, and another question we are often asked is the difference between the hyphenated and no hyphenated forms.

  • The following is useful advice on choosing a keyword rich domain name:
  • Try to avoid two hyphens as this looks poor and can do less well in some search engines
  • Certainly avoid three hyphens as this looks very much like a string of keywords.
  • Have a look at your domain name typed out all in lower case; An energy website called “Fuels Expert” looks a good name, but this would require the hyphenated form to be taken seriously.

With the exception of word combinations that look poor together, in general the non hyphenated form is preferable as this is easier to say.

Finally what does the domain look like? Domains that look good get more clicks and do better in the search engines because of this. Some combinations of letters just look awkward when shown together online.

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