It’s almost always the case that businesses will spend much more to acquire a new customer than to get an existing customer to purchase again OR to stop an existing customer from defecting to the competition. (My theory is that customer acquisition marketing tends to be a lot “sexier” than followup communications, so acquisition gets more of the attention).

In much the same way, I often see people mothballing their BEST marketing methods in favour of risky, untested lead gen tactics that produce anything from half to 5% of the results of other strategies.

Of course, this isn’t done with any masochistic intent to deliver sub-par results.  It’s just that we humans seem to have a “love of the new” and think we have to be constantly re-inventing our marketing approaches in order to gain traction.

If you take your eye off your metrics, even for a minute, this is a very easy trap to fall into.

Case in point: I recently consulted with a retail chain with a fairly substantial web channel.   We analysed where all new customers and sales had come from over the last few years and found the metrics somewhat lacking in detail.    Most of the “active” lead generation activity that had been conducted appeared to be rather expensive, requiring at least a year of loyal custom by the new customer to pay the initial marketing expense.

One method that had been tried, but didn’t have any hard metrics associated with it, was enclosing printed referral request cards with orders.  I asked the client about this and the general consensus was that the referral cards were producing a few leads but that the cost was probably not worth it — that’s why they were discontinued for a year or so.

I persuaded the client to try another batch of referral card marketing, and the results were staggering — it was about 500% more cost-effective than ANY of their other active lead generation methods currently in operation.

I had to agree — this simple referral card marketing techniques was one of the most “un-exciting” marketing strategies they were deploying (not a “2.0″ to be seen anywhere!).   But it was also the most profitable.

Having got a handle on firm metrics associated with lead generation, the client is now sending referral request cards to customers no less than 6 times per year.    We will continue to monitor the results on an ongoing basis, but the campaigns will continue until there is something better to replace them.

What about you? Have you become bored with the lead generation methods that worked well for you in the past?  Try resurrecting some old favourites — you may be pleasantly surprised by the results!

A client in the B2B consulting area recently asked me what a “typical” unsubscribe rate is for an email or autoresponder list. Here’s how I replied (paraphrased of course — I don’t actually speak in numbered points).

1. Unsubscribe rates can vary enormously. The main factor that influences your unsubscribe rate is the VALUE you offer your list on an ongoing basis. There is a delicate balance between education, value and selling - and the general rule is it’s much more effective to demonstrate value first before selling.

2. You’ll notice I didn’t actually answer the question above ;). If I had to give a figure, I would say that typical unsubscribe rates for “Special Report/White Paper + followup” sequences are in the 5% to 30% range.

3. Your unsubscribe rate is cumulative — it will tend to climb over time so in order to maintain a robust list size, you have to add new members faster than they unsubscribe.

4. Some messages in your autoresponder series will trigger many more unsubscribes than others. If you know which message(s) are the main culprits, you can edit accordingly. Take a look at the Followup Status - Unsubscribed report from within the Aweber autoresponder system (highly recommended, by the way):

As you can see, message 7 is the main offender — responsible for a massive proportion of unsubscribes!

A quick check of message 7 confirmed that the subject matter switched from good information and education to a “buy now” pitch, with some fairly clear-cut “disqualification” criteria. In other words, “buy now or go away”. Many subscribers obviously “took the hint” and hit the “unsubscribe” button.

Should you really care if list subscribers unsubscribe?

Making your unsubcribe rate as low as possible is NOT optimal in most circumstances. If your unsubscribe rate is very low, that MAY indicate your offers are too weak or you are not qualifying clients and/or setting appropriate buying criteria.

Autoresponder series are not only a powerful education tool but also a powerful QUALIFCICATION tool. Let me give you an example:

One of our clients is involved in property development project management in Brisbane. Their marketing had been quite effective at generating enquires, but of a very low quality. The result was that the sales team was forced to pick through the pile of low-quality leads to get to the hot prospects.

They solved this problem by publishing a targeted Special Report on their website, backed up by a series of autoresponders, educating prospective property investors about new property development options and how to put a deal together. One of the main purposes of the sequence is to DIS-qualify “non-buyers” BEFORE they call and start consuming salespeoples’ time like hyper-absorbant sponges.

So in this case, a certain number of unsubscribes from the list are a good thing.

Although not all unsubscribe patterns are as pronounced as the one in the image above, if you at least know how users are responding to each stage of your lead generation process, you can test new approaches to get improved results within only a few iterations.

Here’s to YOUR success!

Will Autoresponder Marketer

P.S. I highly endorse the Aweber Autoresponder system because of it’s very reasonable cost and raft of useful features, including the ability to SPLIT TEST multiple emails to the same list and track the results — that’s instant leverage.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

How Well Are Your Natural Search Campaigns Converting?

Once the fat has been trimmed from your paid search campaigns and your website content is performing well, the next step is natural search engine optimisation.

Most Search Engine optimisation campaigns deal with the question of how to generate more traffic to a website and this is certainly a worthy goal. But it’s just as important to remember that you also want to target the right kind of traffic. That is, traffic that leads to more opt-ins, leads and sales.

Another useful application of Google Analytics is that it allows you to distinguish between traffic generated via natural search and paid search.

When deciding which keyword phrases to target in your SEO efforts, it’s useful to know which keywords are already converting via paid search. You can use conversion tracking within Google Adwords (and/or more advanced tools within Google Analytics) to establish this.

The next step is to establish how competitive your target keyword phrase is - are there dozens of well-ranked competitors in the space already, or are there no strong competitors?

Assessing the strength of your competition can be complicated, but one of the best resources for simplifying the process is the SEOmoz Page Strength Tool.

If the websites who already occupy the search engine rankings you’d like to occupy have high Page Strength scores, it may be wiser to start with less competitive key phrases and work your way up.

Above: output from a “CPC vs Organic Conversion” report within Google Analytics. [cpc] refers to paid search and [organic] refers to “free” search engine traffic. In this example, two conversion goals called G1 and G2 are being tracked. The system also allows drilling down to get a clearer picture of what’s going on.

N.B. This screen can be accessed via the Marketing Optimisation > Search Engine Marketing > CPC vs Organic Conversion menu within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a surprisingly powerful platform, especially considering that it’s free! The danger lies in falling into the trap of thinking that data = knowledge.

Conclusion

In a previous post I wrote about the democratization of web technologies. In years gone by, companies spent their online optimization budgets on either media or the “widgets”, software and systems to drive their website. Now, those technologies are becoming freely available - now smart organisations are shifting their focus to invest in clever people.

Converting analytical data into actionable strategies is why companies retain consultants such as Marketing Results.

This article concludes this 7-part series. What did you think? What did I leave out that you think should have been included? Leave a comment and I’ll respond to your feedback.

Will Swayne Website Optimizer

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Visualising Where Website Visitors Are Clicking

In a previous post I commented on a service called Crazy Egg which allows you to visualise where users are clicking on your website. This post expands on the use of Crazy Egg as a data visualisation tool.

Above: Crazy Egg generates an easy to understand “heatmap” image of the Jay Abraham Asia Pacific website, revealing exactly where visitors are clicking.

Why do you want to visualise data anyway?

The first thing you may want to know is - with so many analytics packages and tracking tools on the market, who needs one more?

Here are 4 reasons:

1. When an easily identifiable “conversion” is difficult or irrelevant to track.

On many types of website that you may wish to optimise (e.g. a blog), an easily identify “conversion action” such as a sale or enquiry doesn’t occur. Crazy Egg provides meaningful information by showing you where users are clicking - what’s how and what’s not.

2. When you want a detailed picture of how users are engaging with your content.

Many services including Google Analytics offer some visualisation functions that reveal where users are clicking. Crazy Egg’s output is much more detailed than other services I’ve seen. Rather than just telling you that a graphic or link was clicked, it shows you exactly where it was clicked. It also reveals when unlinked content was clicked (e.g. a graphic with no link).

3. When you want to decrease bounce rates and optimise clickthrough rates.

One effective technique of website conversion optimisation is to use your homepage bounce rate as a proxy for the effectiveness of your homepage in general. (Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your site without clicking onto another page. An ineffective homepage will have a high bounce rate.) Crazy Egg allows you to quickly identify what’s working and what’s not on your homepage so you can optimise accordingly.

4. When you want to quickly understand and communicate what’s happening.

Let’s face it - a picture is worth a thousand words. Not everyone thinks in terms of figures and data. A visual summary of user behaviour is a useful way to communicate what’s working and what’s not without resorting to long reports or reams of data. (This can come in handy if you’re forced to engage in internal battles about what content to have on your company website).

Generous “free” plan plus paid plans

Crazy Egg offers a number of service plans, starting with the free plan, which is more than sufficient to test drive the service (or as a complete solution for relatively small or low-traffic websites). The fee-based plans are big enough for enterprise applications.

Conclusion

Many companies have no formal process for deciding how content is organised on their website (often it’s either by decree or by committee). Tools such as Crazy Egg give you the power to make informed decisions on what works so you can optimise accordingly.

Crazy Egg is also a simple, visual alternative to data-driven tools that many people find either too boring or too difficult to interpret.

If you could get just 10% more visitors to click deeper into your website than they are now, what would that mean to the profitability of your online channel? For many websites, this would translate into a significant increase in results.

Will Swayne Data visualiser

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Optimising Your Site Content To Convert More Visitors

Most attempts to increase the effectiveness of websites that I have seen revolve mainly around increasing traffic volume. While increasing traffic volume is undoubtedly an important factor, it ignores the other side of the coin - the percentage of website visitors who convert into qualified enquirers and customers.

In the short term, there is normally more leverage in improving your site’s conversion rate than in Search Engine Optimisation.

One technique for improving conversion rate is to serve different content to different visitors, then trace conversions back to the content served. Multivariate testing platforms can be used to handle the technical side of this process, provided that you know what page components to test and how to test them. The following case study illustrates what some of these factors are.

Case Study:

Australia’s leading speed dating service Blink Dating asked us for assistance to increase their already impressive conversion rate. We set up a multivariate testing schema that included the following elements:

• 4 headlines
• 4 photos
• 3 versions of the main call to action
• 2 registration form headlines
• 2 registration form designs
• 2 privacy policies

In total, this makes 4 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 384 page combinations organized into an experimental design that allows relatively fast and accurate testing of the different versions using Taguchi multivariate analysis.

Above: 384 landing page combinations were tested, increasing the conversion rate of Blink Dating’s online client acquisition process by 20% within 6 weeks.

This process resulted in a conversion and sales improvement of 20% within 6 weeks by identifying which page elements were most effective at encouraging visitors to sign up.

Recommended Tool: Google’s recently released (and free!) Website Optimizer is a huge advance on many previous multivariate testing platforms. You can think of this tool as “Free Money”.

Conclusion

For some reason, most business owners and marketing managers I talk to get very excited about search engine marketing and search engine optimisation, but are far less enthusiastic about website conversion optimisation efforts. Why? Increasing website can be equally as effective and often faster than SEO efforts. Give it a try and let me know how you get on.

Will Swayne Website Conversion Geek

Tracking Multiple Traffic Sources With the Google Adwords Cross Channel Tracker

In part 1, we looked at how to use conversion tracking to optimise your paid search results. But how do you track the results of other traffic sources such as banner ads, ezine ads, Yellow Pages Online, TrueLocal ads, text links, directory listings and so on?

There are many tools available that can do this, but one I like because of it’s ease of use and free availability is the Google Adwords cross-channel tracker. According to Google, cross-channel tracking…

…gives you quick and easy access to the performance data for all your online advertising channels - including pay-per-click ads on search, email, banners, and more - all from one convenient location. From your AdWords account interface, you’ll learn which campaigns are producing the highest conversion rates so you can make more informed decisions about where and how to spend your advertising dollars. As an added bonus, this tool is available free of charge.

Reliable third party tool

Many media sources are unable or unwilling to give you reports on how many clickthroughs your ads received.

Others are only too happy to provide you with a summary report of how many clickthroughs you received, but this has two limitations:

1. You know how many clicks you received, but have no idea how many converted.
2. I have found the reliability of reporting from some 3rd party services to be, shall we say, questionable (and it always seems to overestimate click volume).

The cross-channel tracking tool solves this problem. It’s easy to use - just follow the prompts within the Google Adwords interface.

Cross-channel tracker vs Google Analytics

The other day a client asked me about the relative merits of cross-channel tracking and Google Analytics.  My take is this: Cross-channel tracking gives a simple, all-in-one-place overview of important traffic sources.  Google Analytics duplicates (and expands on) much of the functionality of CTC, but is slightly more complicated to use and work with.

Conclusion

While it’s probably not necessary to track the clickthroughs and conversions of every traffic source (if that were possible), cross-channel tracking is a useful tool for understanding the ROI on key expenditures.

If you’re spending money on online traffic and lead generation, then why not keep an eye on how your investment is paying off?

Will Swayne Cross-channel tracker

Here’s Part 1:

Advanced Conversion Tracking of Paid Search

This post on the Unofficial Google Analytics Blog got me thinking about the importance of conversion tracking as a tool for optimising your paid search results.

This article will cover the basics and move on to more advanced concepts, so feel free to skip through to the juicy bits if the first part is too basic.

Conversion Tracking 101 - Cost/Conversion

If you spend money on Pay Per Click search engines such as Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, it’s imperative that you know where that expenditure is leading to desired actions (e.g. enquiries or sales) and where your budget is underperforming. A feature called “conversion tracking” allows you to do this.

Above: Conversion tracking within Google Adwords. The two columns on the right show conversion rate and cost/conversion for each Adgroup. The system also allows you to drill down to the keyword and ad level.

This is elementary, right?

Installing conversion tracking is Adwords 101 stuff and you may well be using it now, but I include this information because I have seen clients with Google Adwords budgets in excess of $100K per year who are not using this invaluable tool.

How to use Conversion Tracking to Boost The ROI of Paid Search

Once you have conversion tracking set up, the next step is optimising your results. The Google Adwords platform offers a range of testing and tracking tools that facilitate rapid campaign optimisation. These tools allow you to determine:

• Which keywords are producing desired actions and which keywords are wasting your money.
• Which ads are not only generating traffic but also desired actions (conversions).
• Which landing pages are generating the best conversion results (it’s seldom optimal to direct all visitors to your homepage.)
• Which hours of the day or days of the week tend to produce high returns justifying higher budgets, and which time periods tend to be associated with unproductive clicks.

Knowing this information is the first step toward optimising your paid search campaigns. By excising unprofitable pockets of spend while optimising what’s working, it’s possible to dramatically increase the ROI of your Adwords account within a few weeks or less.

Conversion Tracking 201 - Multiple Conversion Goals

For a long time, one of my frustrations with conversion tracking within Google Adwords was the inability to track multiple conversion goals at the same time.

For example, let’s just say you sell a high-priced product or service such as termite control. And as part of the conversion process, you also offer a free report on termite control.

Well, conversion tracking within Adwords won’t allow you to track both types of conversions simultaneously.

It’s easy to imagine a situation where your Google Ad does a good job at “selling” the free report, but not such a great job at driving actual enquiries.

Enter Google Analytics for Google Adwords

Adding Google Analytics to your site not only provides you with all sorts of analytical bells and whistles but it also provides you with advanced Google Adwords testing capabilities.

For a start, you can track multiple conversion goals (e.g. free report signup and enquiry form submission).

Above: Analysing multiple conversion goals within Google Analytics. This screen can be accessed via the Content Optimisation > Ad Version Testing > Overall Ad A/B Testing menu.

The only downside, as pointed out in the ROI Revolution blog post cited above, is that ads are listed by headline only within the Google Analytics interface. To differentiate between different ads, you either need to use different headlines OR manually tag ads (for Analytics uber-geeks only!). But there’s still plenty of useful info you can glean from this process without setting up manual tagging.

Clicking on the purple “buttons” just to the left of each headline pops up a menu with more regions to explore. Of particular interest are the “Cross Segment Performance” options which let you slice and dice the data in a variety of new and interesting ways.

Conversion Tracking 301 - Closed Loop Tracking and Beyond

Conversion tracking can be taken as far as you like. By manually tagging ads and adding conversion values, this system can be made very powerful indeed as you build up a fuller picture of how prospects and customers are engaging with your website.

“Closed loop tracking” comes highly recommended if your CRM system can handle it (or your entire business is online and running via Google Analytics). This is where you import Google Adwords data into your CRM system and track results right down to actual sales.

This level of tracking allows you to find the 20% of factors (keywords, ads etc.) that are driving 80% of your sales and then laser focus your energies on those factors - profitable stuff!

At the next level of abstraction, you can look at the Lifetime Value of customers, either using the “To Date Lifetime Value” reports within Analytics or standalone tools. This can yield some very interesting results. For example:

• You may find that the Lifetime Value of customers differs significantly depending on the initial product purchased.
• You may find that the time of day of the initial purchase also influences LTV - this may be particularly relevant if you operate an online store. You will probably find that people who order in the early morning hours have higher return rates and a lower LTV than people who order during other time slots.

Summary

Conversion tracking is an essential tool of good paid search management. As you can see, there’s no limit to how far you can take it. The size of your business and your online spend are two factors to consider as you choose how serious you want to get. If a 1% increase in sales means $1 million dollars to your business, you’ll want to go straight to Conversion Tracking 301!

Will Swayne Google Analytics enthusiast