Online Traction

Before working with Online Traction, our clients (plastic surgeons in Colombia) had never received client leads from their website. Having spent a lot of money on traditional marketing channels (including print, radio and television) they had become frustrated not only by the lack of new business but also with the fact that they could not measure the effectiveness of these traditional media channels.

In discussions with the surgeons at doctortriana.com we agreed that the site needed to be upgraded to reflect a fresher, clinical aesthetic and an appearance that did not alienate men or non-spanish speakers, both of which constituted a significant segment of the target market. We agreed that the old site had become dated and unconvincing and needed to be completely redesigned. We discussed a methodology to determine what information needed to be presented to aid the decision making process of the target market. We prepared an exhaustive questionnaire and spoke to different personnel at the clinic to discuss the surgical procedures, as well as common questions and concerns of the patients.

We designed a wireframe website model that would radically improve the quantity and quality of text. The new site would contain more text that was persuasive, that used targeted keyword phrases (identified by keyword research) and most importantly text that actually addressed the concerns and interests of the target audience.

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I was asked by a client to turn off their ‘Pay-per-click’ campaign in Yahoo today (never generated real business for them) and almost immediately received an email from Yahoo. It was probably coincidental but I was impressed by the email because it discussed a favorite issue of mine: landing page quality and conversions.

The points and explanation by Amy Borowicz are definitely worth reading, amongst which:

. testimonials

. specificity yet simplicity

. call-to-action event - i.e. encourage the visitor to take an action such as request a quote

. highlight the benefits for the prospect

However I would add the following:

. don’t ask for too much information - the web is a low trust zone and people are already hesitant to give away too much info

. graphics that support your writing - most people want to relate and associate; if its corporate use formal symbols and images, if its leisure then depict fun

. fast load time - it matters less and less for most countries but be careful with your flash animations and image sizes; don’t annoy the prospect with a slow loading page

. test, measure, test, measure - in the first instance create a landing page that has distinct areas, then juxtapose the areas, modify the language, make it simpler, make it more informative…you get the idea. Equally important is that you have a reasonable sample of traffic upon which to test your design or content changes; 10 is no use, aim for at least 100 visitors (preferable a lot more) and then test the bounce rate. If the landing page is part of your site then set up your traffic measurement system (e.g. google analytics) so that this page is a ‘goal’ then observe the paths that people take to that page and their relative effectiveness. The objective is to gather information upon which to make design decisions; merely creating a landing page as you see fit is simply not good practice.

This is particularly useful for companies running pay-per-click ads but is also extremely useful if you want to check what search terms your prospective customers are using to find your business.

This great new report from Google’s AdWords allows you to see the actual queries that generated an ad impression for your campaign on Google. Up until now you could only drill down to see data on the keywords you put in your campaign. Now you can see the actual expanded search terms themselves.

Why is this useful?
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One of the key factors affecting where your site ranks in the leading search engines is the number of quality in-bound links to your site.

Like most other factors that affect search engine ranking this has been widely abused and misused by website owners (and SEO professionals) with many sites buying, exchanging and otherwise obtaining links that have no value to the search objectives of real people.

As part of Google’s continuing campaign to improve the relevance of their search engine listings Google’s Stefanie Ulrike Durr last week laid out Google’s position on what constitutes a good link and good link strategy.

In short, links should be earned not obtained. In other words links obtained through exchange or purchase (”spamming tactics”) are of less value to your site than organic links to your site by virtue of quality content, ‘relatedness’ or other forms of user-oriented usefulness.

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Traffick.com has some important advice for new and current advertisers.

In short:

Because of higher volumes of ads for the Christmas season there is usually a long editorial queue for new Google Adwords ads. Anyone planning to submit new AdWords groups should submit them before December 1st or face lost sales during peak season.

Regarding Yahoo Ads…anyone planning to upgrade to the new Ad platform “Panama” should wait until January for similar reasons.

Finally, Christmas shopping season means exponentially higher than normal traffic volumes for some businesses. Those of you with online stores should monitor budget to ensure you are taking advantage of this increased traffic (and possibly increased CTR during this time of year) and don’t max out your daily budgets, causing your ads not being served to potential customers.

All it takes is $5 to open an account and promo code DM-2-1106 to save up to $200.* Just use promo code before 1/15/07. Then pay only when your search ad is clicked. In my experience cost per click prices can be lower than with Google AdWords.

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In the early days of business websites the trend was to convert the print brochure into a web page. Later, for some companies, came the flash movie ‘let’s impress the socks off our site visitors with a little showcase entertainment’ type marketing initiative.

In both cases it was an old model foisted upon the new medium in the absence of a good understanding of how people behave online. Real people are impatient, and fickle and have real search objectives such as ‘does company Y perform service X’ or ‘is company Z located near me’ or simply ‘why should I choose company A over company B’.

Because of the meteoric rise of search engines the new’ish paradigm is ‘how can we be certain that the people who are searching for my product or service can find my site, and how can I satisfy their selection criteria once they get to my site such that they will chose my company over my competition’.

A large share of my clients can be divided in two groupings. There are those that want to wait for their new site to be designed before considering site optimization and there are those who launched their site, saw no traffic or conversions and need to redevelop their site. It is almost always a waste of time and money to design first, market later. Here are a few solid reasons why you should have a good SEO or SEM onboard from the outset:

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Change is hard. Online advertising is new. And Business Week scares the daylights out of companies when they write about click-fraud.

The damage caused to some businesses from click-fraud is probably significant (though nobody can agree on even general figures or costs) but this advertising model is less than 10 years old and the fraudster’s incentive is short-lived and short term when when considered in the context of the resources of the giants on the supply side (Google profits almost $1 billion per quarter) and the fast growing market on the consumer side. Its worth considering briefly how much of a problem it really is and should it deter businesses from advertising online.
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In a few weeks Google plan to launch a new service called ‘Website Optimizer‘. Its associated with Google Adwords and focuses on how to test the effectiveness of the landing pages of your ads. In other words it quickly helps you determine which landing page yields the most conversions, visitors to customers.

This is a really important, and frequently overlooked, aspect of both your online ads and your website generally. When someone lands on your site or your landing page they decide in roughly 3 seconds whether to stay or leave. If there is no compelling content they leave.

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The official Google Adwords blog has a post today that answers a fairly common conundrum for new advertisers:

“You place an ad, and a user types in your keyword - now if the company you are advertising comes up on the first page in the main listings (the ones on the left) does that mean that google won’t show your ad?”

Well the short answer is no, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Read the post for the full answer and a couple of other related questions and their answers including:

• Being an advertiser with a tiny budget does not hurt (nor help) one’s chances of appearing in the search results

What the post omits to say is the value of your site appearing in both the search results and in the sponsored links (aka Google AdWords Ads) for a given keyword phrase. I saw a reputable study* that suggests that it is almost twice as probable that searcher will click on your site (ie. CTR - click thru rate) if your site appears in top position in both the ’sponsored links’ section and organic search results.

This makes sense because searchers are impatient; our eyeballs rest on the top of the page, we don’t typcially scroll down the page because we’re lazy but also because Google does a pretty good job of finding the sites most relevant to what we’re looking for.

This also makes sense because the fact that your site is prominently positioned in two places suggests to the searcher that you have invested in your online presence, are an authority site, that your site ‘is good enough for google, its good enough for me’. As we all know the top of the search results page has the highest CTR in any case.

Of course the same applies to Microsoft and Yahoo search ads and advertising.

* presented at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in ‘06 - focused on the US Hispanic and Latin America markets