The Bounce Rate Crystal Ball

The official Google Analytics blog makes a great point about the importance of bounce rates to your marketing efforts. They are a simple enough metric that can be applied to nearly any kind of website.

It is a metric tailored especially for landing pages...where a high bounce rate can tell you almost as much as a defined conversion funnel.

If you need a resource for understanding which metrics provide the most insight, check out the new book Web Analytics an Hour a Day.

clipped from analytics.blogspot.com If your site conversion rates are low, Bounce Rate can help you understand why. If your Bounce Rates are also low, your troubles are likely due to site design and usability issu es. In this case, you might focus your efforts on streamlining your conversion funnel or making your site easier to navigate. But if your Bounce Rates are high, you can focus your efforts on redesigning entrance (landing pages), improving the quality of traffic to your site, and doing a better job of pairing landing pages with ads.

6 Ways to Increase Your PPC Traffic

A great post today from the PPC Hero blog...as I stated in my previous post, this is a great search marketing resource.

Whether your goals are to drive sales, leads or sign-ups, increasing traffic to your site is one action you can take to get closer to your goals. Below I’ve described six ways I was able to increase traffic for my clients without spending additional money. And in turn, I was able to generate more leads and revenue for my clients.

1. Stop Ad Text Testing, Temporarily - If it’s near the end of the month, one way I increase traffic for my clients is to pause my ad text testing and only use the ad with the highest click-through rate to get maximum traffic. Then, at the beginning of the next month when goals and budgets start over, I un-pause my ad text and begin re-testing.

2. Separate Content Network - After speaking with my Google rep, she said that one way to increase traffic to your site is to turn off the content network in your sponsored search and create a new campaign where only the content network is being used. The keywords you should put in your content only campaign should be very general keywords. General keywords are more likely to be picked up by publishers versus specific keywords. She also suggests that you use the content network placement performance report to see which sites are driving the majority of traffic and which are not.

3. Add All Match Types - If you’re currently not running all match types in Google, I strongly recommend it. I have one keyword with all three match types (exact, phrase and broad) in a separate ad group in Google and all three keywords get clicks and conversions. It’s not always necessary to keep your different match types in a separate ad group, but you might find a higher click-through rate if you do. It’s something you’ll have to test on your own.

4. Keyword Tools – Keyword tools are not only important when you’re setting up new campaigns and ad groups. You should be using the keyword tool at least once a month to add new keywords to your ad groups. The more people type that go to Google and Yahoo and type in new search queries, the more new keywords will show up in the keyword tools. I recently used the keyword tool for one of my accounts that I haven’t used for a while. I managed to find tons of new keywords to add into my ad groups.

5. Site Related Keyword Tool – This is a relatively new tool for Google and I just started using it for my accounts. You type in your landing page URL and the tool will find relevant keywords according to that page. At times when I have used this tool, I have found it helpful most of the time. Even if there’s one or two keywords that the tool brings up that you didn’t think of or didn’t have in your ad group it could possibly bring a significant increase in traffic.

6. Set Daily Budgets, Lower Bids – Everyone knows that raising your keyword bids will increase site traffic. But if it’s near the end of the month and you don’t have the extra money to spend, set a daily spending limit and if you begin to hit that limit consistently, lower your bids. This will allow more traffic to come through at a cheaper cost, and in turn you’ll increase your traffic without spending additional money. Make sure you don’t lower your keyword bids too aggressively at first, or you could end up losing traffic if you go below your daily spending limit. I check my accounts at various times throughout the day to see if and when I’ve hit my spending limit. At one point I found that my account was hitting it’s spending limit at 10am. So I began to lower my bids and saw a significant increase in traffic yet didn’t go over my budget. If you don’t have a daily spending limit set up on your account set one, then gage whether or not you should need to lower your bids.

Source: PPC Hero: 6 Ways to Increase Your PPC Traffic

Pay-Per-Click Hero

I have a friend who is an extremely successful pay-per-click marketer and as he has grown out his business his team has taken to blogging on the topic of PPC. After checking out the posts for a few months I have to say that I am impressed. I have worked directly with Patrick and his company Hanapin Marketing in the past and can attest first hand to their expertise and success in the search marketing arena.

So if you are doing any paid search marketing go check out PPC Hero, it has some great tips and advice.

Catching your competition with their pants down

Imagine if you knew when a major competitor came to your site and what pages they were spending all of their time on? Wouldn't it be great if you could catch the bastards spying on you?

I read a great post from the WebAnalytics.be blog that did a simple walk-through on how to do some pretty cool competitive analysis using Google Analytics.

This is a great idea if you are worried that you might have competition lurking in the weeds. Once you know a competitor (or multiple competitors) are eyeballing a particular product - you can begin asking yourself why. You may find that you can turn the insight into a competitive advantage...

Who doesnt like catching the competition with their pants down?

Targeted bigotry from adsense?

I was shocked when I went to my blog tonight and saw this adsense ad combo on my top banner...



I clicked the link to see what nonsense was being linked to from my site and I was taken to an online quiz to assess your gayness or stupidity.

I have to say that I was personally offended by the ad appearing on my website especially the two of them together which implies that being gay is indeed stupid. While I do not plan to bring my personal politics into this blog I will state for the record that I am adamantly opposed to stereotypes and bigotry of all kinds and apologize to anyone who took offense as I did.

I will be notifying Google to see what they have to say about this kind of "targeted messaging" appearing on a small business marketing blog ...

(If you have any advice on how to protect my site from this crap I would appreciate your comments.)

Landing Pages That Work

I have created a lot of landing pages since I joined the internet marketing community. I was trying to keep track for awhile and eventually gave up - my last count was somewhere around 5 hundred individual landing pages that I designed, maintained, and tested. ..all for various employers, companies, and clients.

The reason that these pages were so important was because they were the gateway from all of our internet marketing efforts. If you clicked on a banner, search listing, affiliate link, press release, or anything else we used for online promotion - you were taken to a unique landing page. We even tracked print response by driving activity online. There was no campaign we ran that did not have its own landing page to test and measure its success.

So at this point I can say that I am somewhat knowledgeable about landing pages. Lets have some fun and check out two LED sign manufacturers that use pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic.

Here were the top two listings...

LED Signs by BigBrite
Free Shipping, Low Price Guarantee
Order Signs Online or Call
BigBrite.com

Watchfire Digital Outdoor
LED billboards designed and
manufactured to last. Free paper.
www.WatchfireDigitalOutdoor.com

(I removed the google tracking so it wont charge them if you click)

There are obvious differences. Lets start with BigBrite.

The first problem is that BigBrite pushes everyone to the homepage. While there are instances where this may be suitable in this one it is not. None of the information from the ad is reinforced on the homepage where there is no coherent message other than to BUY NOW!

If you aren't ready to purchase - then what? I guess you can aimlessly navigate around the site to find what you are looking for but my guess is that you would most likely leave before you found it.

Lets contrast that with Watchfire.

This is a landing page that reinforces the message from the ad - encouraging those visitors to sign up for the white paper. They aren't trying to sell you a sign right away - instead they want to help you inform yourself on making the decision - and open the line of communication. They realize that you aren't going to pick up the phone right now and tell them to "Sign me up! And while your at it heres my credit card info!" Their interest is to persuade you over time to make the purchase. (BTW, these signs are NOT cheap)

Watchfire also minimizes noise on the landing page by removing all navigation and links. While they do not intend for you to buy today they still need to capture some return from your visit so they are not taking any chances. You can only take the action they intend. This is a fair trade since they are not bombarding you with anything you didn't already expect from the ad.

When thinking about landing pages keep in mind that most of the traffic coming to your site are first-time visitors, all coming at different stages of the buying process. Very few are looking for the immediate purchase so understanding that most likely wont sell to them on this visit will probably drastically change your approach. If you look at this as more of an opportunity to begin a relationship with your customer you will most likely see more long term rewards with a more responsive customer when you go to re-sell, up sell, or cross sell.

Google Website Optimizer Open to Everyone!

I have been testing this tool for a few months now and I am excited about its release to the public!

This finally brings sophisticated split and multivariate testing to the small business marketers that don't have the budget for an expensive tool like Offermatica. The beauty once again is that Google provides it for free.

My personal experience with it has been great.

The power of Website Optimizer tool is evident. It is very easy to set up simple test right away - it took me 30 minutes to get my first one set up. You can test simple page elements or entirely different layouts - the choices are entirely up to you. All that is required is a little knowledge of html and what makes sense to test. Everything is available to you - long term and short term tests, A/B splits, or large multivariate tests.

Once note: Some people may run into issues if they are running a fairly sophisticated content management system or don't have access to the back end. However this shouldn't hinder using it for landing pages unless they are tied to your CMS as well. Landing pages are arguably the most important pages of your site so it makes sense to begin there. Detach them and begin testing!

And for most websites the implementation will be simple across all of their web pages.

What is cool is that combined with Google Analytics, this is extremely powerful. Now you not only have a place to measure traffic in aggregate, but a easier way to do testing. No more having multiple landing pages to keep track of - just set up your tests and the data comes pouring in.

You will still need to know what to do with that data, however. Check out this post for a little help.

So with the launch of this new product you no longer have to spend thousands of dollars to compete. The playing field is leveling and the small business marketer can rejoice. Now its time to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with testing and analytics!

Why I chose Google Blogger

The decision to start blogging had come to me a long time ago. I had developed blogs before but did not fully understand the shear amount of time involved with creating and posting to one regularly.

After shelving my ambitions for a year and doing more research/reading I decided to pull the trigger and fully devote myself to blogging on a topic that I am passionate about. I have to admit that I am excited and slightly intimidated to put myself out there.

Unlike a lot of bloggers who begin on a whim - choose a blog publishing solution and move on, I actually evaluated a handful of them for a year before deciding on my choice.

I looked into typepad, blogger, wordpress, and social network blogs like myspace and xanga. I also tried open source content management blogs like Joomla with varied results for each.

What pushed me over the edge was the new Google Blogger.

The first conclusion that I came to was that I did not want to mess with hosting if I didn't have to. I fully understand the implications with not hosting my blog myself - but it would actually be a hinderance to me. I would probably end up spending all my time customizing the application instead of writing anything.

Another conclusion that I came to was that I didn't want to pay anything. I like free applications and open source software - so being a cheap ass definitely played a part.

The social network blogs were weak in their extensibility...and the content management was overkill.

But I wasn't sold on blogger until the "new blogger" came out.

The first (and obvious) benefit was the integration with my Google account which is great because I hop between my google apps quite frequently.

But the most impressive changes were the way in which a person with html experience can build out their own blog templates and edit the styles from within the interface. This is great if I decide I want to change colors or fonts of particular content - I can specify the variable in my blogger template and update it anytime without having to edit the css again. This may come from the fact that I have a graphic design background and get bored easily with the look and feel - so this was a nice feature.

I also love that I can use my own domain. I didnt want a blogspot address (there was no way I would have that) and I was going to go with a different application based solely on that fact. But new blogger beat me to the punch and fixed it before I had come to any definite conclusions.

The widget options were nice and suited most of my needs. I rarely found an app or widget that I could not easily integrate into the new blogger. And most 3rd party widgets are custom configured for blogger and wordpress which made extending the template very easy.

Overall, I found that the new blogger was more than suited for what I wanted to accomplish. It provides me the freedom to build out cool, custom templates and add new features on the fly. The functionality is what you would expect and provides very few limitations.

Now I understand that pro bloggers out there will decry me for placing my uptime/downtime into google's hands, but some of the best blogs I read are good old blogger blogs with the blogspot address. And I have seen both uptime and downtime for blogs from every stripe. I am not looking to become a powerhouse blogmaster with 10 blogs...I dont have that kind of time and I if I did I would be golfing instead.

So I chose the new blogger and I have to say that i am very pleased with it so far.

Let me know what you think - do you use blogger? or did you come to a different conclusion?

Google Reader and Blogging

I have to say that most of the fun in building out a blog is evaluating the shear amount of plug-ins, widgets, components, ect that you will find available to you. I have to say that I could blog for months on just that topic alone because I must have evaluated over a hundred of them, but I only want to bring the most relevant ones to topic here...so I digress.

One that I find particularly cool is the widget for sharing your google reader articles. While you dont actually need the widget - you only need a reader that allows you to create a shared feed and a blog that reads RSS feeds, its actually a great little tool.

It allows me to quickly post links to great articles without having to think twice about it. I just click on the shared button and the link instantly appears on my blog in a content area on the right...awesome! For me this is all about the flow of information and any time I can easily share it I get excited!

So check out the little gray box on the right for some great content from around the web!