With that being said, I attended 4 sessions that were designed to help marketers and webmasters with their SEM campaign:
PPC Marketing 101
I knew that this was a 101 course, but I attended anyway in hopes that there would be some hidden gems I could extract from the session. Christine Churchill, a friend, lovely human being, and president of KeyRelevance, started things off with 15 effective PPC ad writing tips. One of the tips that stuck out to me was to create a sense of urgency, such as include phrases like "limited time," "offer ends soon," "today only," and "the first 50 visitors." I wonder, however, if this sort of ad needs to be rotated or changed frequently because it's time sensitive, or if you can keep the ad up indefinitely because new eyeballs will constantly be seeing your ad and thus won't know that your "offer ends soon" really means "offer never ends--we just want you to click on our ad."
Friend and Lovely Lady #2, Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media, who wrote the book on Yahoo! Search Marketing (uh, literally), talked about some differences between Google Adwords and Panama. At this point we're only running campaigns on Google, but we'll most likely expand to Yahoo and MSN after I get the hang of PPC and am able to garner some success with our current campaigns. I did find it interesting how YSM allows you to have 40 characters in your header vs Google's 25. I wonder if the extra characters makes a difference in clickthroughs, or if the limited characters forces marketers to craft their campaigns for optimal clickthroughs and thus extra characters wouldn't make much of a difference. I think I could be more creative with more characters--I can't tell you how many times I've come up with a headline I've wanted to use, only to get as far as "12 SEO Tools That Kick As" (kidding, though our tools do kick ass).
Lastly, Andrew Beckman, president of SearchAdNetwork, talked about bidding on misspellings and having an ad that incorporates misspelled words because it's likely that you're the only one bidding on the misspellings; thus, your ad will be the only one showing. I asked him how effective this strategy is because I know that when I search for something and get a "Did you mean blah blah blah?" prompt, I go "Oh yeah, I did," immediately click on the corrected search query, and don't even see the search results page long enough to notice any paid ads displayed. Andrew said that he gets clicks and conversions from misspellings as long as there aren't any competitors doing the same thing, so I guess it does work.
Quality Score Management
The second SEM session I attended was Quality Score Management. Mary Berk from MSN talked about some general quality score stuff, but the really interesting thing she touched on was that she wanted feedback from the audience and attendees about how much information MSN should share about their quality score formula. Currently, MSN displays information about your ad quality, your total quality on a numbered scale, your minimum bid, and your mainline reserve, but she said that MSN was mulling over the option of having a drilldown menu that provides the following information:
- ad text
- landing page
- ad performance
- consumer engagement
- keyword choice and bidding
- aggregate information
Mary contended that the potential problem with the second route is that it leaves the system vulnerable to gamers/spammers, so she wants feedback on what type of quality score metrics to divulge/expand on. I personally think that more fleshed out QS metrics would be really valuable to marketers, as it leaves out the guesswork and helps marketers better tweak their campaigns to get better results faster.
Geoff Price from Efficient Frontier talked about some common myths and misperceptions about quality score, including the following:
- There is only one QS. Geoff said that there are multiple math formulas, one for each of the following:
- ad position on search
- minimum bid
- eligibility and position on a content site
- other relevance factors
- The QS is updated daily. I'm not sure how often the QS is updated, but he did mention that the Adwords Blog said on September 18 that QS changes will no longer be pre-announced.
- You can 100% control your QS. At this point, a man in the audience disagreed with Geoff and said that you can completely control your quality score, but I'm inclined to agree with Geoff. The search engines can make changes to their QS formulas at any given moment, and you can't control what their metrics are, so one factor could take into account a metric that's completely beyond your control.
- Restructuring an account kills your QS history. This just doesn't make any sense--why would the search engines penalize you for tweaking your accounts? Nobody can strike gold on the first try, so it's silly to think that you'd get dinged for not having a perfect account from the get go.
- QS is about improving the quality of your ads and nothing else. Obviously, your QS is about a multitude of factors, such as your landing pages, your keywords, your account structure, etc. Also, your quality score isn't just good for the advertiser, but for the consumer and for Google as well.
Landing Page Optimization
Mona Elesseily was back in action, and this time she had some tips on catering ads to different buyers' needs. She recommended testing pricing on your ads, information that reassures your buyers (e.g., "Official Site" and "24/7 Phone Support"), and, like Christine Churchill recommended, time sensitivity ("Offer Ends Soon," etc). Mona also mentioned that "Get Thermal Oxidizers" performed much better than "Need Thermal Oxidizers?" for her B2B client, which I found interesting because I wrote "Need _______?" for a few of our ads. I'll have to test a few "Get ________" and see how well they perform.
Lily Chiu, senior strategist for Offermatica (which we're running on our landing pages), suggested analyzing your sources when altering your landing pages, such as your search queries and geolocation. She also recommended considering settings like screen resolution and language.
Lastly, Janet Driscoll Miller, president and CEO of Search Mojo, gave the audience some landing page best practices. She recommended keeping information above the fold and to avoid scrolling if you can avoid it. I personally prefer shorter, more succinct landing pages, but conversely, our winning landing page for our Landing Page Contest was a long form that was ~25 pages long, so obviously scrolling converts for some people for some weird reason.
Janet said that a simple landing page layout is a logo and headline followed by a "hero" shot (a graphic of some sort) on the left, a caption on the left, and the content and/or form on the right.
Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking
Glenn Alsup, the president of Viewmark, said that one of his clients added a "There are X matching accessories" line at the top of his landing page, which correlated with the number of accessories the page displayed. This line acted as a continuation of the ad that advertised accessories, and the result was a 53% success rate and 400% less clicks (meaning that users were finding what they wanted quicker and easier). Jeff and I thought this tactic was really interesting, and we're thinking of testing the "search result" line on our landing pages.
Tom Leung, product manager for Google, discussed Google Website Optimizer. He reminded us that your pages may lose more than half their visitors in mere seconds, and most of the people who do stay choose not to convert. This fact was supported by an interesting chart that showed the total number of visitors who enter onto a page and the sliver of those visitors who end up converting. Tom said that the industry average is around a 2-3% conversion rate, so if you're hitting those numbers you should be doing fairly well.
Tom recommended testing a small number of variations and wait for about 100 conversions per combination. He also stressed testing big changes. If you can't see a difference between two combinations in 8 seconds, chances are that your visitors won't notice anything, either. Run the tests for around a month and don't jump to conclusions--instead, focus on an absolute conversion difference.
The three biggest things to test are:
- The headline
- The image
- The call to action
Philippe Lang essentially talked about LivePerson's features, so check out the website and poke around if you feel so inclined. Lastly, Boss Man Rand Fishkin talked about SEOmoz's Landing Page competition (I'll add a link to his presentation once he gets it to me).
Conclusion
Overall, I'd say that I did get some nice takeaways from each of the sessions, despite most of them being fairly 101 in nature. I think that people like me who are either starting out in the sordid world of Conversions or have been tasked with being the Conversions Guru at their company have a nice selection of sessions to attend that flow logically and complement each other. Obviously, all of the tracks stressed basic information and highlighted the importance of your keywords, testing, and landing pages, but that just means that those facets are the most essential takeaways and thus should require most of your attention. The specific means and tips to tweak your keywords, testing, and landing pages is what truly interested me, and I hope that future panelists will keep that in mind and share their secret sauce with the audience.
Nice compilation, Rebecca. One thing in the conversion session that really got me thinking was the notion that we have to abandon best practices and test everything. I absolutely believe in testing, as a usability guy, but I'm concerned that some of us are starting to view testing as a kind of magic. The widespread use of testing is in its infancy, and I think we're at a point where it looks like magic because we don't understand the nuances of what makes people do what they do. I test religiously for my clients, but I also try to use my testing to inform future decisions and set customized best practices, and that's an achievable thing.
On the other hand, for every talk I hear about how one little tweak upped conversion 300% in testing, I'll do 5 tests that have virtually no impact. It's great that people are talking about testing, and I love that conversion is a hot topic (since it's my bread and butter), but it's going to take another year or two before we settle down and start to look at testing sanely as an industry.
Sorry, now that I hit submit, that sounds a bit like a mini-rant...
Conversion testing is magic. I was just telling the dragon that lives in my closet how I made one small tweak and created thousands of sales in two seconds and he chuckled at me as he flew away which is okay by me because the less dragons that believe me, the more success I get for me.
(psst Dr. Pete: After what I wrote, I don't think anyone will see what you wrote as odd or "ranty")
Glad to hear your makebelieve dragon finally came out of the closet, Pat. He wasn't kidding anybody...
lol...
Nice one :)
You're still in Vegas, aren't you?
I am in Arizona now, and heading back to Hawaii shortly
When I first glanced at the title of this post I read
"Pubcon Conversions from a Conscious Perspective"
I would suspect that by friday Conscious Perspectives were definitely the minority of all the raging SEO's.
The conversion from sober SEO to gambling maniac must be exponentially higher than Google's reported 2-3%
Haha...I am inclined to agree seeing some of the pictures ;)
Of course you never actually catch the dragon, you just keep chasing it.
Someone's been playing Heroin Hero...
Yeah, it's hard to distance yourself from a change that you personally don't agree with (because it sounds corny, looks atrocious, etc) yet clearly improves conversions. I know that it was hard for us to implement the long form landing page, but the numbers indeed don't lie, and in this sense it's a necessary evil for the improved conversions.
It's also hard to test big differences like you did and then figure out, after the fact, why the winner was the winner (especially without going crazy on post-hoc rationalizations). That's the part that often frustrates me and is still more art than science: trying to use each test to inform future tests and best practices.
Of course, I've also seen numbers lie more than once, so I'm constantly suspicious of my own test results. It's really hard to set up a clean test online (even with solid knowledge and great tools), and I think we have to remember to take any given result with a grain of salt. Each test is just a page in a longer story, and 95% confidence, even if it's done right, still means you've got a 5% chance of being wrong.
Hi Rebecca
You may remember me from such atrocious looking, corny sounding landing pages as the SEOmoz landing page contest winner!
You have a good eye, because both the design and the tone of voice (in certain places) are factors holding my landing page back from achieving higher response… the design and tone of voice are not the reasons why my landing page converts. Far from it.
So why not make changes to reduce the "Ugh"?
If you would like to have a chat as part of your ongoing research into increasing conversion rates then feel free to get in touch. I'd welcome a discussion with you.
All the best,
Paul
Hey ya Paul! Rand mistakenly gave someone else kudos for your winning landing page during the Multivariate Testing session, so I apologize on his behalf.
To answer your question, we are currently implementing a new landing page design and are testing it, but I'm happy to hear some of your tips/suggestions if you have any.
Poor guy/girl. I hope that my landing page is a stain they will one day be able to wash from their reputation.
Don't want to force my views on you, but feel free to email me the links sometime and I will share my wacky thoughts with you. It's an open offer.
All the best,
Paul
Firstly, if there were ever an area of internet marketing that demands split testing - this is it.
Secondly, if ever there were an area of internet marketing where "everything holds true", to a certain extent - this is it.
Thirdly, if ever there were an area of internet marketing that everyone has an opinion on (and you know what they say about opinions), this is it.
Finally, if ever there were an area of internet marketing where the best solution will make Rand's blood boil (because of the success associated with what any seasoned marketing executive would consider absolute brand destroying tactics), this is it.
Seriously, in terms of highest conversion rates - those fat ass long landing pages (the ones you can land a 767 on), are the best converters - but here's the kicker - they make many people barf. Not so good.
There is however a simple and highly effective solution within a single landing page - one that serves both communities. In other words, a strong above the fold message that abides by the following tactics:
Finally, just above the fold, include this little ditty:
"Still not convinced that SEOmoz will provide the best value for you r investment? Just read what hundreds of other Highly Successful Professional SEO's have to say."
Then launch into your runway pitch. Do the whole schpiel with the POWER words, Bolded and Highlighted Fonts, etc...
This way, you will be sensitive to the needs of your "Keep it short and professional please" folks, while also catering to the hard sell folks that you want to have make a decision in the moment.
The folks at MarketingSherpa have put together a great handbook on Landing Page conversions that I could send to you, but then they would have to kill me. So, that won't work.
However, here's the landing page to buy that handbook! At the very least, you can get the 20 or so page free excerpt from that handbook that still has some very valuable information. Rebecca, I would imagine someone with your celebrity and prestige could get it as a freebie for the asking.
But if you really, really, really want to convert alot of folks, give them a free 3 day pass to the Premium section, albeit without the SEO Guides. Then you can sit back and watch cause you'll be converting like a SEOtch!
What did it for me was :
#1 : I was qualified
#2 : I saw (or the article showed me) the need for SEO Content I could learn from
#3 : It called me to action
Great post, Rebecca. Very informative - I'm bookmarking it now. Thanks for sharing all of this.
I also agree about the shorter landing pages - I think the winning landing page for the SEOmoz Land Page Contest, while well-written, struck me as too close to those "get rich quick" marketing emails and pages I have such a distaste for. Obviously that's not true for everyone, but my own prejudices against that style would tend to push me away from that page rather than pull me through to a conversion.
Haha...why do I feel like you wrote that with a lot of emphasis on "Everyone"
Because you're overly defensive?
J/K - I tried to word my comment in such a way as not to sound pointed or judgmental, but I think in light of your comment just above that may have been impossible.
I was just pointing out my own prejudices and tendency to agree with Rebecca on that issue - but nobody can argue with the numbers. That page won the contest fair and square, so obviously a great deal of people disagree with me. Probably even most people.
Haha...no offense taken big :) I just found it funny when I read it ;)
As far as the misspellings go (no, I've not read the whole post yet but I wanted to comment on this before I forget), I'd have thought you'd do pretty well with misspelling less-common words that are less likely to elicit a "did you mean" and also might be more likely to convert due to being rarer.
The problem is, the search engines appear to be getting better and better at figuring out what we were meaning to say when we hit all the wrong letters or were simply too dumb to spell our search terms correctly!
I always click on the correct spelling before looking at anything else, unless it's wrong. Like this :P
Thanks for this post - I have yet to attend a conference because my sole focus is PPC management. I read a lot of SEO blogs and I was wondering whether or not there is a big PPC presence at any of these conferences...it does appear to be 101ish but it's nice to see some sessions popping up for PPC here and there. It will be exciting to see some advanced PPC sessions in the future. I will definitely attend a few conferences next year - looking forward to meeting a bunch of mozzers!
Most conferences I've been to have a Marketing or Paid Advertising track, and I've just now started to attend them because I now have a vested interest in the sessions aside from blog coverage. :)
So, no one will believe me on this one, but I am going to mention it anyway. If your site can't get a decent quality score (i.e. your minimum bid requirement is over 10 cents) even after you have changed your ad text to be highly relevant, changed your landing page to be spot on, dialed in your ad group names, campaign names, dialed in everything you can think of . . . then what do you do?
You call the Google's Adwords team and you say this exact phrase
I need to have a manual site review and quality score assessment completed on xyz site.
What happens next is simply amazing. Google will manually review your site (takes about 72 hours) and make a quality score adjustment. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ALL YOUR DUCKS IN A ROW BEFORE YOU DO THIS. You get one shot . . . that's all, so make it count.
Brent David Payne
Confirm anyone? Not that onecallguy isn't credible :)
LOL. Now you are a sign of a good SEO. You confirm before you run off and tell 100 other people.
;-)
Brent David Payne
That's friggin right :)
Hey, if Matt Cutts is on SEOmoz giving site reviews, then anything is possibly with those crazy kids at Google these days.
Hey, don't discourage Matt from sharing with us.
Not at all, that was great when he was in here sharing. I hope to see it more and more. It actually seems, from that incident and some conversations I had with Google staff in Chicago last week, that the direction is to become more transparent and partner-minded (if that is a word) with the SEO / web marketing industry. That's just from things I've seen, but that would be terrific and I think very mutually beneficial.
Funny, I just submitted a Youmoz post covering a related topic. I think the conversion issue is going to be the big thing in 2008. A/B testing will be one of the most used terms next year because of the push to optimize conversions. Well written post summarizing a lot of these important aspects.
Hi Rebecca ,
Its great brief for someone like me who is starting a small website. But I was wondering about this line "Tom said that the industry average is around a 2-3% conversion rate, so if you're hitting those numbers you should be doing fairly well."
That's 2-3% for someone who already working on conversion and is doing good. But say I convert 1%.
If say I sell a product worth £20 and I am making profit of £10. I will need to have 100 visitors from PPC campaign to sell one product because my conversion is 1%. Say if each click costs me 15p , it will cost me £15 to get 100 visitors. So I am in loss instead of making profit.
Have I miss judged anything ? If not then do you suggest I should increase first conversion rate and only then try PPC? Any ideas for coming out of this situation?
Thanks
You've hit the most obvious secret of PPC (in other words, it should be obvious but no one wants to hear it): if you do the math and you're losing money, PPC may not be right for you.
PPC's profitability really depends wildly on not just your effectiveness at it, but the industry space and margins on your product. I have a couple of clients for whom we've clawed our way up to break even, and they're happy with that, because they think PPC is important for their branding. Unfortunately, their margins are small and they're in a competitive space, so making big money on PPC for them may not be realistic. You may be in the same boat, and kudos on running the numbers.
On the other hand, you shouldn't necessarily dump PPC, and you've got a few options:
These depend a bit on whether you're already running campaigns or are just considering using PPC. I'll also add that the often touted 2-3% conversion rate is, at least in my experience, above average.
Thanks Pete for your reply. I was just thinking that its only me who can not make money from PPC. But as you said , I need to keep working for strong landing page and try for long tail phrases for which there is very less competition.
Just keep in mind that long tail should be easy to optimize organically. I disagree with focusing on long tail as a PPC strategy in most cases.
I don't mean to over-emphasize it, and long-tail PPC can be very difficult to track performance on (because it doesn't produce enough total conversions), but sometimes Step 1 is to cut the lowest converting keywords and do some PPC triage. Often, I find that the lowest converters are also the most generic terms, leaving longer-tail campaigns behind.
Of course, that's just Step 1, trying to stop the bleeding; after that, you reintroduce those more generic keywords gradually and try to figure out why they were performing poorly.
Sahota,
Great input from all of these guys. However, when you are calculating your ROI from a PPC campaign, while it's fine to use raw numbers (i.e. revenue - cost of goods sold (cogs) - campaign cost), to see the real picture, you need to also look at the Lifetime Customer Value.
Very rarely can you justify a PPC campaign without it. It is no surprise that the first purchase from a new customer is always the most difficult and costly.
After that, if you're providing a valuable product or service - you should be able to convert them to long term customers.
Good luck.
Sean
Seanmag,
You sound like 100% of the SEM companies that have called me through the years trying to get me to use them versus doing it myself. No offense, I normally agree with everything you say, but not this time. If you have to crank out the smoke machine in order to get an ROI, then I don't think you are getting a true ROI.
I judge everything on Net Profit ROI, period. My goal is to make a higher Net Profit than I spend. Some say that isn't good enough but as long as you can spend a dollar to make a dollar (and be strict about it, not spend a dollar to make 90 cents) then you are gaining an advantage with PPC. If you can't do that, then force a consulting firm to guarantee those results or you aren't paying them a damn thing.
Branding, customer lifetime value, etc. are LONG term benefits but we live in a quarterly budget world.
Brent David Payne
Amen!! And don't let any SEM sway you one little bit. You should be able to make a positive Net Profit after ad spend after COGS in PPC. If you can't then you are doing something wrong. There are nearly a hundred different ways to improve your Net number but we won't get into those here.
Stick to your guns on this.
Brent David Payne
Brent,
With all due respect, your view is very one dimensional, which is fine. You deal in consumer electronics - just about the most competitive commodity in the world and your approach and mindset is valid for that sector.
However, as a consultant I serve a broad range of customers, most of which determine ROI based on LCV.
Case in point - If I'm SEOmoz doing a PPC campaign, are you going to suggest to me that I should base my decision on the value of the campaign based only on the revenue generated by the initial single isolated transaction? That would be ludicrous.
Rand will tell you himself that the typical SEOmoz premium account will typically sign up for one month ($49.95), go away for a few months and then come back and re-sign. If they stay as a premium member for two years (at the best discount), you're looking at ~ $900.00 in revenue - a far cry from the original $49.00 Are you suggesting that you shouldn't consider that?
In a more extreme example, for some consultants, I run PPC campaigns where the most wanted response (mwr), is getting an email address to send a white paper. Sometime down the road, depending on the sales approach, sales cycle, etc., this may become a $1million per year or more customer, but the initial PPC response only garners initial interest - not immediate revenue.
My point being, not everyone that runs a PPC campaign is selling a TV. If that were the case, I would say your logic holds true. Therefore, I would caveat your response with the industry or type of sale that you are referring too.
If, after considering what I've just explained, you still feel your mindset holds true across the board, well, I don't know what to tell you.
Seanmag,
If I could give you 5 thumbs up I would. I was off-base and spoke way too broadly (which is a pet peave of mine, so that's kind of funny I did it myself).
I will caveat and state that indeed, I speak from 10 years of ecommerce experience only. And my mindset is that of selling hard goods that have a fixed cost and profit associated with them.
Thanks for pointing this out and sorry for being too damn overbearing and self-focused with my comment.
My sincerest apologies . . . Brent David Payne
(Hey, I know when I screw up at least.)
Absolutely no apology needed. First of all - I love your passion. Second of all, as I stated in my P.M. to you - you clearly know your $#%@! Third of all, I love a spirited exchange of ideas. So, no offense taken.
I just wanted to make the point that outside of the commodity industry, different rules may apply. One thing I can assure you is that if I ever was to guide someone to a person that knows how to convert commodities - whether using PPC or any other form of marketing - you would be one of the first I would think of.
Cheers!
That's one hell of a compliment. Thanks!!!
Hi all,
thanks for everybody's comments and suggestions. Actually for time being I would go with brent, as----NUMBER 1: I don't have great cash to just spend and build brand and just get one customer and try to sell him/her in long term.
2. We are a small website selling just women fashion accessories. So its not kind of membership thing like seomoz.
I think I first need to find what key phrases convertign well and then build slowly on those. Might be just doing PPC in break even initially.
Thanks guys for your comments and suggestions. It helps a lot.
So where can you which conferences should the non-beginner/non-expert attend? Is there any that focus on us?
As for Adwords & Yahoo's PPC marketing we have really had a hard time getting Yahoo to convert, and I just don't get it? Organically Yahoo traffic converts really well. But when it comes to the Yahoo PPC ads, we just can't get a good ROI? Has anyone else had the same issues?
The Google website optimizer is a pretty amazing tool that I pretty much am to much of a dumbhead to use right. I would warmly warmly welcome any case studies on it or descriptions. I hope that someone who is familiar with the tool will do a Youmoz entry with some examples.
I talked a bit to Tom Leung after the session, and he mentioned that they know it's really confusing and are working on some solid documentation. He told me a few things Google Website Optimizer could already do that I had no idea were available (and are part of the reason I'm not using it more). Multivariate testing is crazy complicated, and I've got to give Google credit for trying to develop that tool for such a wide audience (not to mention for free).
(It was hard to type this, as I was still laughing from your magic dragon comment)
In all honesty Pete the reason I was intrigued by the Google optimizer in recent weeks was not due to the tool itself,, but to the amazingly small amount of "partners" google has in it.
I see this as opportunity. I would contact them if you have clients using this tool (or you using it for clients) I think you would have a good shot at partnering as there are so few. It would be interesting to know how to be a "authorised consultant".
I'm actually working on Google AdWords Professional certification right now, as it's surprisingly easy to get (I suppose I shouldn't tell anyone that). You've got to take an online test ($50) and manage a budget of at least $1,000 for 90 days. That's not much, even if you have small clients.
Thanks, though; I'll check that out.
I did notice the "partner" group is very small right now, but people may be scared off by the number of warnings that go along with GWO right now. Things like - 'your site could be maliciously attacked' seem to make people think twice right now. Not me, of course, but most (sane) people.
We've got a short shot at that having been accepted into the gaac club (actually I think all we have to do is get a couple of more clients on-board and give them a case study).
I'll kick Oggy's ass into writing something on website optimizer in the not too distant future - he did go to mountain view for training after all - maybe he actually learned something.
"I personally prefer shorter, more succinct landing pages, but conversely, our winning landing page for our Landing Page Contest was a long form that was ~25 pages long, so obviously scrolling converts for some people for some weird reason."
HEY! That was the page that convinced me :)
This has been very interesting because we HATE doing landing pages and calls-to-action and A/B testing and all that other stuff.
I guess we make money despite outselves.
But what we do is spend a lot of time thinking about what our target audience actually wants/needs/spends and then try to cater pretty tightly to that.
One of our sites has an astoundingly low conversion rate - it's embarassing. But we have an almost 0% return rate, a high referral rate, and 80%+ renewals. (It is a very profitable thing for us!)
So our conclusion is that we are only converting people who will be happy customers.
I would love to be able to get our collective heads around this because I feel like we're bloody limited in what we can sell because our our peculiar aversion to selling.
Perhaps the real question is: what is the best consulting firm to make us smarter?
-OT
OliverTaco,
The landing page is the best part of SEO. It's the page that makes all the traffic worth something. Increasing traffic is fine and dandy but being able to convert it is the coolest damn thing about online marketing.
The most difficult thing is to have the decision makers throw everything they think about what people are searching for and how they are searching for it, out the window. People don't search like they the decision makers at a company do, or I do, or you do. They search like they want to search like. Use as many resources as possible to nail how everyone is searching for and then build the landing page around that.
When I worked at Targus I never could convince them that people don't search for a notebook case online. They search for a laptop bag. The money we spent on laptop bag in paid search could've been avoid had we built our landing pages around the term laptop bag. So . . . some people never get it (or in Targus' case they simply had a brand image to uphold with notebook case).
Brent David Payne
Hmmm.
We worry a lot that we don't do a good job thinking like our customers, though we do talk to them a fair bit. And of course we see what they search for and click.
It's not that we're scard that they might find us looking for "cheap red plonk" instead of "value priced vino." No pride here on that sort of thing.
I just worry about a 'too close to the forrest to see the trees' problem.
I also agree 100% on the traffic. I guess if we had 10 visitors a day and converted two I'd be happier than with our 1,500 visitors a day that convert 2.
It's not the 2 sales/day part (that is on plan) it's that somehow 99.7% of the people who hit the site weren't buyers.
Or that we didn't convert them b/c our landing pages aren't working right.
Man, our next business project is gonna involve big fat government checks!
-OT