ROI & Results

Clients always want to know how much it would cost them to implement a Search Marketing plan involving Pay per Click (PPC) Investment Whereas it is a simple question, it is not as easy to answer it. I usually give them ballpark figures and I hope it makes sense for them. When you think about it, it is the equivalent of asking a web designer or a web developer on how much it would cost to build a website? It varies a lot. In terms of Search Marketing though, we are fortunate enough to have Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools that can help us define the search volume for your targeted search terms. The relationship between search volume and your targeted geographic area will help us come up with Cost (investment) estimates. Google Trends is one of them.

Simply put, Google Trends gives us a snapshot of the search volume for a given search term (or terms), over time. It provides seasonality search volume information which help us understand how we should spread your Pay Per Click (PPC) budget over a 12 month period and therefore get the most out of your investment.

For example, as we all know, Whistler is both a winter and a summer destination. More people would go to Whistler in the winter of course, but the question remains: if you would get the traffic during the winter months anyway, when the search volume is at its peak, wouldn’t you get a better return on your PPC advertising investment during the summer months, when the online competition (and average cost per click) is at its lowest? Wouldn’t make more sense? This decision is in relation to your yearly PPC budget. You would be surprised how important it is to run a summer and a winter PPC campaigns year-round in order to capitalize on this seasonality factor. See the graph below, showing the search volume for the search term “whistler”:

As you can see, the search volume drops in summer months but not as much as you might think. Use it for your own search terms and define peaks and valleys to help you spread your PPC budget over time and get the most out of your PPC investment.

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Every week or so, a client would ask, why is it that my bounce rate is so high? What is it that my site is not converting all that hard earned traffic into sales? According to Bryan Eisenberg, Chief Conversion Officer at Future Now, since it is far easier to build a better site that converts than to drive more traffic to it, the law of numbers favors the use of usability studies. As such, Darcy Foster from VKIstudios.com has a very interesting blog on website usability and I find his latest post particularly helpful. It talks about Steve Krug’s and his book called “Don’t Make Me Think”. According to VKI (and Steve Krug), “Don’t Make Me Think” represents the most common attitude with regards to usability and I am guessing they think it needs to change.

According to VKI, certain other authors delight in making the process of improving usability appear as complicated as possible. It’s an age-old trick: inflate weak ideas by propping them up with quasi-academic language and unnecessary jargon. Steve Krug - whose corporate motto is “It’s not rocket surgery” - takes the exact opposite approach. He explains, in everyday language and with vivid examples and analogies, how achieving good usability is largely a matter of common sense.

As a result, if you’re looking for a highly readable, witty, insightful and actionable guide to improving website usability, “Don’t Make Me Think” seems like your best bet. You can buy the book here: Don’t Make Me Think.

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It is summer time and everybody is on vacation (or almost). Here is something that will chill your competitors. A few weeks ago, I was browsing around in You-Tube and I found this SEO tool video which presents a very helpful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool that can help you spy on your competitors and get a better idea of their traffic level and daily Search Marketing (PPC) budget. 

Because understanding your competitors’ traffic, keywords and Pay Per Click (PPC) budget has always been key to benchmark your own Search Marketing successes & goals against your competitors, any tool that can help get the job done is welcome. As such, take a minute to check this video on how to use Spyfu:

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I was intrigued today when I saw this title: 21 Reasons Why You Do NOT Need Web Analytics. I read this from Manoj Jasra’s blog on Web Analytics which is the reference on the subject. Here is what he had to say:

If you believe Web Analytics is overrated and your business could succeed without Web Analytics, then you’re absolutely correct. Below are 21 reasons why you don’t Web Analytics integrated into your online campaign.

* You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.

* You don’t care how much time visitors spend on your website.

* Most popular products? Who cares, you already know what your customers want.

* Tracking hits is perfectly sufficient.

* Dead Content? There can’t be any dead content on your site.

* Site overlay is overrated because you can pretty much guess which links visitors find appealing.

* Bounce rate sounds like a make believe metric.

* Your time is better spent elsewhere rather than crunching data in order to measure the performance of our website.

* You love the plateau in your website’s traffic because concentrating on branded keywords is good enough.

* Podcasts are the hippest thing, if you record they will come, so why measure the number of downloads.

* Your development team should be adding enhancements not implementing web analytics.

* Top Exit pages is a non-issue for your website, once visitors arrive they are going to purchase.

* Who cares what paths visitors take or the length of their paths, as I said earlier, once they arrive, they are going to purchase.

* Everyone understands English so it doesn’t matter what country your visitors originate from.

* 3 words: Log File Analyzer.

* If you leave a form up long enough someones bound to fill it out eventually.

* Your site’s probably not going to have repeat visitors anyways because they’ll find everything they need the first time around.

* You know that a PPC campaign’s success is completely based upon click-throughs and impressions.

* Internal Search? That’s just there for show.

* If you take $50,000 that you would need for an analyst and spend it on PPC you’re probably going to get better return.

* You don’t need to track newsletter registrants because bulk email lists are very inexpensive.

He was being ironic, of course.

If you do not have a Web Analytics software in place for your site and have a hard time understanding the results, you should get in touch with me in no time and I will hook you up with Google Analytics, free of charge. 

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Last week, I was talking with Andrew Spoeth from Enquiro.com who phoned me personally to make sure I am fully aware of the latest B2B research study on purchasing behaviors they recently published. During our conversation, Andrew asked to take a look at Manoj Jasra’s blog on Web Analytics. His blog is great and I strongly suggest to add it to your favorite reader. As I was reading through it, I found something very valuable that you might like. Manoj compiled the ultimate web analytics comparison list along with features on each web analytics tool.

2 weeks ago I met with David Salinas from Google Analytics team out of Boston, and he assured me that with the new interface, Google Analytics is becoming one of the strongest products on the market. As I am a big fan of Omniture SiteCatalyst, I wanted to know which tool between Google Analytics & Omniture SiteCatalyst is the best, regardless of price. Manoj points to Bart Gibby’s site on this comparison and the results he makes clearly points out that the complexity of Omniture SiteCatalyst (and the price) do not work for him and the businesses he represents. Keep in mind that a common yearly price tag for Omniture’s tool is $30,000. As a result, for most companies, even the ones looking for an enterprise solution in web analytics, the product of choice, according to these experts, remain Google Analytics. 

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There are quite a few interesting news in the world of Web Analytics these days. First their was the announcement last week of the new Google Analytics Interface, which is, in my opinion a significant improvement over the last interface. In a nutshell, the new Google Analytics interface is more graphical, faster, easier to use and allows you to have a greater level of customization and collaboration. I especially like how easy it is to compare data sets between different time periods as well as sharing web analytics reports through the new email feature. You can find all the information you need on the new Google Analytics Interface on the Google Analytics Blog. Contact me if you want me to hook you up with it or create a Google Analytics account yourself. Google Analytics is still available for free so there is no reason not to use it.

Here is a snapshot of the Google Analytics Dashboard:

Also, this week, WebSideStory and Visual Sciences have consolidated under the Visual Sciences brand with a unified mission: to deliver real-time analytics that enable business optimization through fast answers to hard questions. You can learn more about their new technologies on their website.

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My awesome & very talented friends Monique Trottier and James Sherett from Work Industries have just started to publish their newsletter called Underwire: Full Support for Non-Techies.

Since we talk the same language and have similar audiences, I strongly recommend you subscribe to their Underwire newsletter. It covers numerous topics in the area of Web Analytics, Web design & development 101, Web strategy, online promotion, search marketing, podcasting, blogging etc. Last month, Monique & James talked about the basics of understanding your webstats, which I think is an awesome piece. I am pointing to it every time someone asks me a question about terminology 101 in Web Analytics. 

Here are the complete March Underwire News and the April Underwire News. The latest edition explains how to use photos on your site. It is very helpful. There is also a Monique’s pick of the month in every edition.

Feel free to give her some feedback about the newsletter as she is tuning the content to what you guys like.

Here they are in their Think Salmon attire:

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