Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) is one of the most common and visible forms of online marketing. Most people know these as “Google Text Ads” since the search giant is by far the biggest player with in that arena. The vast majority of their billions in revenue comes from those text ads, which is a great indication of how easily their seemingly low cost can spiral out of control. It’s easy to get carried away when a click costs only a few dollars but without proper targeting, management and analysis your PPC campaign may well cost more money than it brings in. There are many critical points to consider before jumping in and entering your credit card number.

Are prospective clients online?

The first, and arguably most important, question seems ridiculous – are the people willing to buy your product or service actually online and using search engines? If your business serves a demographic that isn’t online very often and doesn’t know what a Google is, your money may be better-spent elsewhere. As the population in general becomes more tech-savvy this will be less of an issue, but for now it’s still an important consideration.

What are they searching for?

Once you’ve determined that there are customers to be found online, you have to figure out how to reach them. Since text ads are contextual, i.e. show ads that are relevant to the user’s search, you have to determine what your customers-to-be are searching for to give your ads the best chance of showing up. There are a number of tools you can use, most notably Google’s Trends and the Keyword Tool built into AdWords (Google’s text ad service).

It’s easy to get lured into vague, untargeted keywords but that will usually prove to be a money pit. Target specific queries and design multiple ad variants rather than a generic one – it’s more work upfront but it will save you (and make you) money in the long run because you’re going after people who are searching for very closely related terms rather than overly broad ones that won’t convert.

Landing pages

Far too many PPC ads suffer from the elementary mistake of pointing the visitor to the target site’s homepage. While that may seem like a good idea at first glance you’re wasting money by not using a targeted landing page.

Let’s suppose you sell plumbing supplies online and you nave PPC ads for “buy copper pipe”. A user has clicked your ad and made it to your site – great! Now he has landed on your homepage where he must get his bearings and find his way to the copper pipe section. Will he bother? Maybe not.

The better approach would be to build a page for each PPC ad group – copper pipes in this case – and point the ads to that page. At the very least, point the ads to the “copper pipe” section of your site. That’s far more relevant to the user’s search and he’s much more likely to find what he’s looking for.

Optimize the website and landing page

If you’re paying Google to get people to visit your site, don’t burn that money with a website that’s confusing and hard to navigate. Make sure your website – and the landing page in particular – have good content, a nice design, and most importantly a clear call to action. Once the visitor is on the page, don’t leave them wondering what you want them to do. That’s essential in web design in general, but it’s doubly important when building a successful PPC campaign.

An email newsletter is one of the most effective online marketing tools with possibly the highest conversion rate of any alternative (pay per click, inbound marketing, etc). Admittedly that isn’t fair to the other methods because email is farther down the funnel – people had to sign up for your newsletter from somewhere, after all, in most cases through a form on your website.

Email converts so well because people already know you. They went to your website, read a bit about who you are and what you do, and willingly gave you access to their inbox in return for something special.

Disclaimer: Talking about how great you are isn’t special. Linking out to your TV commercial on YouTube isn’t special. If you don’t think anybody would pay for what’s in the email, it probably isn’t worth sending.

That may seem excessive – why give away something people would pay for for free? – but that’s what marketing has come to. Think of those few lost dollars as a part of your marketing budget. Rather than paying for direct-mail pamphlets or a billboard you can use that money to send out something really useful to people on your email list.

Most email newsletters are either educational or provide some kind of discount (e.g. coupons). The latter is generally easy to implement (and sell!) but good educational content is more challenging because it can be difficult to avoid excessive self-promotion. A well-crafted how-to video is a perennial classic, but it should be more “documentary” than “infomercial” if you don’t want people to unsubscribe en masse. Don’t squander that precious mailing list once you’ve built it!

The search engine world had quite a shake-up two weeks ago with the news that Google+ profiles of people linked to your Google account will now shop up in a little bar above search results. They call this “Search Plus Your World“. It hasn’t rolled out completely yet – seemingly not at all on google.ca – but that’s just  a matter of time.

Unsurprisingly this has caused an outcry from Facebook and Twitter (among others) since the only social media platform that benefits from this very preferential placement is Google+. A review of the legality and anti-competitiveness of this is pending.

Setting aside the questionable ethics of this move, Google have opened up a solid opportunity for people (and businesses) to get more exposure in search results. The feature’s future remains unclear – Google may be forced to remove it altogether, or they may blend in other social media – but either way it’s worth your time to use it.

Basically, it means a small picture of you will show up atop the page if your profile contains information relevant to the user’s search. You must have some kind of connection to that person on Google+ for that to work.

Say we were in each other’s circles and you searched for “moncton logo design” – you’d see my Google+ profile pic at the very top of the page with the label “in your circles”. It’s subtle, but it’s prime real estate. The catch-22 is of course that you need to be in people’s circles if you want this to work, but you should already have a solid social media strategy in place before thinking about Google Plus Your World anyway.

Adobe’s (or Macromedia’s, if you back far enough) Flash was a game-changer back in the day. It allowed far richer content and interactivity than was possible using plain old code. If you wanted any kind of animation or embedded video and audio on your site, Flash was pretty much your only choice.

Many business sites at one point or another used Flash to some extent. Some were even built completely in Flash, where the entire site – menus and all – was basically one huge interactive animation. Glittery graphics and flashy transitions abounded. Having looped background music was very cool (actually, no, it wasn’t).

Now, like horse-drawn carriages or AOL, it has reached the end of the line. The internet has evolved dramatically in a direction almost completely opposite from what Flash does. It has now become a liability to have it on your site and almost all that it offers can be replicated using better, more modern tools. Furthermore, its drawbacks tend to outweigh whatever benefits it provides:

Site speed

Flash animations are almost always bulkier than their alternatives. People may have been willing to stare at a “Loading!” bar for 10 seconds in 2002 but nowadays visitors expect a website to appear almost instantly. We don’t even want to wait for a video to load, much less sit through a gratuitous intro animation with a company logo flying around with fireworks in the background (if you have something similar on your website, please take it offline and email me right now).

Search Engine Unfriendly

A Flash animation is a closed box with a window on it. Google can’t see the nuts and bolts inside, which means it can’t properly index the site. The reasons why that’s bad are pretty self-explanatory, especially if you’re hoping to draw in new customers with a good ranking.

This is especially bad if your whole site is built in Flash – Google will only be able to index the homepage, and it will be almost impossible to rank for any relevant keywords. You may as well have no website at all.

Unnecessary

A lot of things that people have used Flash for should be avoided (like the aforementioned intro animation) and the rest can be done in other ways. If you want a fancy-looking menu with nice drop-downs and colours you can do it with CSS, which is much (much!) more efficient than Flash and still allows your site to be search-engine friendly. If you want video you can use an HTML5 player or embed a YouTube video (which admittedly uses Flash, but at least it’s hosted off-site and has no adverse impact to your own webpage).

So Now What?

If your site was designed in the early ’00s it almost certainly uses Flash in one way or another. Setting aside the fact that if your site is that old it probably needs a revamp anyway, you should especially do so if it makes extensive use of flash. If it’s just a video here and there then you’re probably fine, but if your navigation is all-Flash (or your whole site!) you really aren’t doing yourself any favours and should strongly consider bringing your website up-to-date.

Showing up #1 on Google has become an obsession. Something that didn’t exist 10 years ago – in the days of web directories, or even indifference about the internet altogether – is now the primary objective of most businesses when it comes to their online presence. It isn’t a bad goal but it shouldn’t come to the detriment of everything else, and it isn’t as important (or measurable) as it used to be.

Back in the day (which in internet terms means just a few years ago) everyone saw the same search results. If I (in Moncton) and someone in Florida searched for something we would both see the same 10 results in the same order. If a business was ranking at #7 we would both see it in that same position.

That isn’t the case anymore. In their efforts to make search results more relevant, Google have woven in an a variety of metrics and factors that affect and greatly modify those ten search results (that may not even total 10 anymore). Those factors include your location, your search history, whether or not you’re logged in to your Google account, and who your Google+ friends are – and those are just the factors we know about. Beyond that there are now images, videos and local results crowding that first page, so much so that sometimes you can’t even see the “organic” links. That all means it’s highly unlikely that two people will see the same search results, even in the same geographic area (or in the same house!).

Of course that doesn’t mean it’s no longer important to have a good ranking – the top three still get the lion’s share of clicks – but it’s less important and far less measurable than it used to be. Take a more holistic approach rather than rigging your site to reach that top spot. You can still game the system but it only works in the short term and it probably won’t bring in more money either way.

We’ve already discussed how bounce rate can adversely affect your bottom line (it probably is right now!), and as we move down the old “sales funnel” we come to conversion rate. You probably want the people still browsing your site to do something, whether that’s contact you for a consultation (my goal with this site), sign up for your e-mail list or buy a product through your website. The percentage of visitors that take whatever action you want them to take is your conversion rate.

Conversion rate isn’t relevant to every website, but it applies (or should apply) to most. The notable exception are purely informative sites but even those sometimes include some kind of call to action (Donate! Sign Up!). Wikipedia doesn’t usually have a clear sales funnel but they’re currently asking for donations on every page and they’re certainly tracking the conversion rate of each ad. The creepy ones with its founder Jimbo Wales probably weren’t doing so well and now they have different ads with programmers and contributors.

Conversion is a vague term and you can apply it to pretty much any metric you want to track. For example, on my site I can track how many people land on my home page and how many move on to my contact page. I also know how many have contacted me (obviously!) so it’s easy to see if there’s a bottleneck in that funnel. If I have 500 visits to my home page and 200 on the contact page page but only 1 person actually contacted me, it’s pretty obvious that it’s the contact page itself that is scaring people off somehow.

Conversion is something you should always track and tweak. Split Testing (also known as A/B testing) is an excellent way to optimize your conversion, and the flexibility of the online medium allows us to do that much more easily than other methods of advertising. It’s possible to randomly split visitors into groups as they hit your site and show them different versions of your webpages. That can be something as simple as changing the text on a button (which can have a surprisingly large impact) or showing them a completely different page design. It’s best to test small changes incrementally though – if your test pages are completely different you have almost no way of knowing which specific changes are affecting your conversion.

This may all seem like a tedious process (and in many ways it is) but it’s well worth it. There’s a fair bit of planning and analysis involved but making just a few small changes, whether it’s changing a button’s label from “Call Us” to “Contact Us”, or moving a search box from the right to the left side, can double the leads you receive from your website – and who wouldn’t want to double their amount of incoming customers?

A few days ago I complained about overpriced Tom Petty tickets and how they alienated his fans (well, at least two fans!), but today I want to highlight someone who’s doing it right.

Standup comic Louis C.K. is a pretty successful guy. He has a strong following. Like many stage acts he has released videos of his live performances. These have mostly taken the form of conventional DVDs (or BluRays now) that go through multiple steps of production and distribution. A DVD typically runs between $20 and $30 but the artist only sees a few dollars of that if he’s lucky, or he is paid a lump sum upfront and the profits from individual units are distributed to the people farther down the chain.

What Louis did is brilliant and refreshing in its simplicity. He financed the recording of his show himself (to the tune of $200 000), did his own video editing, and released the show as a download on his website for $5. There’s no DRM – the only “security measure” was Louis asking fans not to pirate the video.

And they didn’t.  As I write this he has exceeded $1M in profit (in 12 days!) from people who paid their five dollars to download the show. There’s no record label and no big marketing machine, just the artist himself who paid a film crew out of pocket, edited the footage himself on his laptop and made it available on his site through a simple storefront. Every purchase is pure profit for him now (except maybe a few cents worth of bandwidth) and his fans are happy – they can watch the video for $5 instead of $20 or more!

And he managed that without treating his fans like criminals by imposing copy protection or anything of the sort. He was honest and upfront, telling people he financed the whole thing himself and to please play nice. He offered people something they want at a good price. He spoke to people directly on Reddit. He was honest and respectful to his fans and they treated him in kind. Isn’t it great how that works?

Tickets for Tom Petty’s Halifax show went on sale this morning, but I won’t be buying any because they’re overpriced (PDF document). Tickets behind the stage are $103 and half-decent seats in the stands start at $183.50. That’s a lot of money for one concert by one band – 200 bucks is VIP seating territory or a reasonable price for a festival with several bands, not just a two-hour set. It’s quite disappointing, really. I have the jangling guitar of “Listen to her Heart” looping in my head as I type this. I’m sure it’ll be a good show.

So why am I posting this diatribe online? I think there’s a business lesson to be learned here.

Some businesses are fortunate enough to grow to a point where they have fans – not just repeat customers but real fans, people who talk about them to all their friends, the kind of people who have Apple stickers on their car or won’t drink anything but Starbucks. Very few companies ever get to that point – like a band, you have to win them over with consistently great songs (er… products or service) year after year, and you need a strong brand. Like Tom Petty (and the Heartbreakers, who deserve more recognition!) you may get to the top of that pyramid where everyone knows who you are and nobody speaks ill of you.

If people like you so much that they put you on that pedestal, don’t piss them off. You don’t operate in a vacuum. If it weren’t for his fans, Tom would probably still be playing his local bar on weekends. I’m sure his first few concert tickets were a lot less than $200, and even accounting for the extra road crew and smoke machines that price seems extortionate. We saw Rush crank out a 27-song, three-hour set a few years ago for less than $80 apiece (in seats equivalent to those that are $183.50 for Petty in Halifax) and I’m sure the latter’s tour doesn’t have much more overhead, especially factoring in the cost of Neil Peart’s drum kit. If fans have stuck by you for all these years, don’t gouge them just because you can. Not only are you alienating your customers, it’s just the wrong thing to do.

Bounce Rate was mentioned in the last post and it deserves further clarification. It’s a simple concept, but like many simple concepts, people often don’t keep it in mind and get distracted by shinier and flashier things.

Simply put, people “bounce” when they leave your site in less than 10 seconds without viewing another page. It’s the internet version of walking into a store and as you’re still holding the door you change your mind and leave. The percentage is calculated by dividing the total inbound visitors with the number that bounced, as illustrated in the lovely diagram to the right.

Like having people leave a real-world store, bounce rate is bad for business. You don’t want customers to wheel around and walk out while they’re still standing on the welcome mat, for obvious reasons.

How Can You Fix It?

The first step is to figure out why people are leaving. Businesses all too often get stuck on a #1 search engine ranking but that’s worthless if most visitors bounce. I’d rather have 500 hits with a 20% bounce rate than 5000 hits with an 80% bounce rate. I’m getting fewer visitors in the first scenario but the low bounce rate means they’re happy with the site and are more likely to eventually convert into paying customers.

People will leave if your site doesn’t deliver what they were searching for (or if it doesn’t deliver it well). That can be for any number of reasons – an ugly design, too many ads, obnoxious pop-ups, or simply that the site’s content is no good (or all of the above).

Not only does bounce rate directly impact your incoming customers, but it can even hurt that precious Google ranking. The all-seeing eye of Search knows when people clicked that search result and it knows when they pop back in after leaving your site. If your bounce rate is very high, they might take a look at that figure and decide you don’t deserve that high ranking because people aren’t finding your site relevant or useful.

That works the other way too, of course. If they stay on the page and click around the site that means they like what they see, and everyone’s happy – Google, your customers, and you.

SEO is a field filled with hucksters and charlatans. I suspect the reason for this is two-fold: one, it requires no particular certification or training, and two, the inner workings of search engines are deliberately kept secret so no one knows exactly how rankings are determined.

This leads to all kinds of pseudo-scientific claims and unverified assertions. Sellers of hundreds of “high quality” backlinks for firesale prices abound, and keyword stuffing persistently refuses to die. “Need a Website Design Marketing Professional in Moncton? You have come to the right place, we offer Website Design Marketing in the Moncton Area and we would be glad to do Website Design Marketing for you”. Nobody wants to read that and it makes you look like an opportunist, not an authority on the subject. You wouldn’t publish that literary atrocity in print, so why do it online?

It’s all in the hope of securing that coveted #1 spot in Google, of course. People will buy any kind of snake oil to get there, damn the consequences. “Bounce Rate”, you say? Never heard of it. You can rank #1 for every keyword under the sun, but if people leave your site  right away because it’s so spammy and awful, what was the point? Your website failed to convert them into customers, and you may have alienated them so much that they’ll never come back.

There are other ways to get a decent Google ranking, of course, but they take more time and require more work. You can write great content that is actually useful to people or produce videos that viewers will share with their friends.

A Real-World Example

Let’s compare two hypothetical restaurants as a metaphor for business websites. The first opened with a bang and a huge marketing budget; it’s #1 on Google and draws in a lot of first-time patrons. Unfortunately it serves only microwaved frozen dinners, which was not mentioned in the advertising. Lots of people went there once, but the content didn’t meet their expectations at all and they will never return.

Restaurant number two only ranks on page 2. It took longer to build up steam because the owner carefully built a menu with fresh ingredients and original recipes. Its growth wasn’t meteoric like the other restaurant, but as patrons drop in they are very happy with what they see (and eat). They keep coming back week after week and they tell all their friends about this great new restaurant.

Google, being quasi-omnipotent, know this is happening. They know that while the microwave restaurant is ranking #1, people are very disappointed with it. They also know that restaurant #2 gets return visitors and they see the strong signals from social media. They will decide that restaurant #2 is more relevant and important to people, and it will creep up the rankings and maybe even overtake the other place.

But ultimately, this goes far beyond search engine rankings – it’s a matter of service and ethics. The million-dollar question is: which restaurant do you think will still be open in a year?