“Psst … have you heard about Dave Balter’s new book?”
Dave Balter has just released his new book The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II. It’s free. High quality, well-written, and fantastically illustrated. If you want you can buy a shiny water resistant version with a hand-signed piece of art by Seth Minkin (Amazon: $45!).
In case you haven’t got time to read the ebook, the application for us mere mortals is create something that’s worth talking about. And give lots of good stuff away, it’s how business ought to be.
What should I budget for an ecommerce start-up?
It’s a good question that gets answered in lots of different ways. I’ve got £30k to spend on this site, and it should be better than Amazon.com is a quite frequent approach. Your web agency will always want to know what your budget is - in some ways it’s a fair question; how else can they know what they’re going to build for you.
But when you budget, you’ve got to think way beyond the site build. You should see the site build as opening the door of your new office. More often than not, clients come with an expectation that they’ll spend £8k on the website, and their Adword budget for year 1 is £2k. I’ve seen this 80/20 approach operate at all levels. It’s wrong (not Pareto, he’s never wrong). You’ve got to flip it. Spend 20% of your budget on the site build, and 80% on Adwords, link building and content work (spread this over twelve months, and don’t expect a return in year 1 - you’ll get one, but it’s nice to be surprised).
So, you’ve got a £10k budget. Spend £2k on the site, and £8k Adwords. Or, £20k on the site, and £80k on Adwords. That’s how it works.
Is hypertext important to Google?
It sure is. Hypertext is ordinary text with hyperlinks embedded in the copy. You should never see instructions to click here. Hypertext content is not meant to be read lineally. Instead, reading hypertext is random, chaotic, slightly disorientating as you hop around from one text to another, gleaning the bits you want, as you build your own story.
Older readers really struggle without the prop of a linear structure, and they also struggle with the notion that there isn’t a closed text (if you print out your emails, or your favourite web pages, you belong to this group).
But hypertext is foundational to the web, and so Google rewards texts (content, blogs etc) that have rich internal contextual linking. These are texts that have been well crafted, and also texts that encourage readers to hop off somewhere else; they are texts that want to help; not to sell. You should always encourage readers to hop off to a site that might be more helpful, if you’re site isn’t helpful, make it helpful, don’t encourage a buying decision that is invalid.
Funnel Analysis in OS Commerce
Google Analytics has a great tool which enables you to analyse how your sales funnel is functioning on your website.
Ecommerce sales are just like any other sales. You fill the funnel, lots fall out, and at the end you get a sale. The trick is to make sure that you’re funnel is a funnel, not a leaky colander.
Google Analytics lets you chart each stage of the funnel for analysis. Here’s what a funnel should look like if you’re using OS commerce. I’ll post shortly on the results of this analysis.
How to eat an elephant, (how to make an online mega-brand)
Making a new online store really work often feels as unachievable as eating the ubiquitous elephant. The answer, of course, one mouthful at a time. Here’s a selection of tasks you could consider as a mouthful. You just need to do one of these a day:
- Negotiate or create a meaningful hyperlink from an external website to your site (ideally, on a content link from a site with appropriate context, e.g. Rosehip. Reciprocal links (where the other site links back to you) are not worthless, but have less value.
- Add new and compelling content to your site. If you keep improving the content on the site, the GoogleBot will revisit more frequently. And frequent content changes are a powerful signal to Google that your site *must* have relevant content.
- Make a tweak on an adword campaign (but do remember to split-test, and pull weak ads quickly).
- Read your Analytics Data, find the most exited page, and change it!
- Write a blog entry that someone will want to share
- Approach a possible affiliate partner
- Make a cheese and ham sandwich
- Drink a cup of coffee
- Will be at ten soon, all good blog lists come in tens
- Remember to forward this post to a friend.
How to achieve a 25% conversion rate on Google Adwords
Does this headline sound impossible to you? Generally speaking we consider a 10% conversion rate to be a good cross-industry average, but if you get everything just right, it’s possible to exceed 10%.
The key to achieving stellar conversion rates is rigorous testing and analysis of the data. First of all, make sure you’ve got the right tools to hand. You need Adwords Conversion Tracking set-up, and you need Google Analytics set-up, and then you need to link both accounts. When you’ve done all that, you’re ready to play.
Run your Adwords for a few days. Make sure your Adwords follow the usual rules. Now you’ll have some meaningful data to play with. Analytics will tell you exactly what’s going wrong with your landing page. The first thing I look for is the bounce rate. The bounce rate measures what percentage of visitors leave the moment they enter. You can expect a reasonable amount of organic traffic to bounce, it’s the nature of the web. But if you’re bouncing +50% of your paid traffic you’ve got one of three problems:
1. Your Adword is misleading. You’re offering a £7.99 Adword, but landing them at a £12 product page.
2. Your Landing Page is uncompelling - the visitor likes the Adword offer, but is unconvinced upon arrival.
3. There is a technical problem - 404 - page not found sites don’t sell much.
Your next port of call is the exit page analysis. Analytics will tell you how long people are spending on your site, where they enter and most importantly where they leave.
Back to 25% conversion rate on Healthspark. As you will recall this is a start-up store which is best described as in beta release. We’re doing loads of testing, and landing page analysis. We currently have PayPal and GoogleCheckout, but are waiting for the bank to provide a Merchant Account so that we can have an integrated payment system. My gut feeling was that payment was hindering sale conversion. This is often the case, customers are fickle, and a slow site, or anything slightly unusual will spook your potential customer.
However, Analytics revealed a high bounce rate on the Rosehip page, and it turned out that the default offer was putting customers off. The Adword itself gave a specific price offering of £7.99, but the options on the landing page defaulted to a 2 for 1 offer at £12.99. Switching this default option off lifted the conversion rate from 5% to 25% with a cost per customer acquisition of £1.50.
What this anecdote reveals is that micro-testing, and daily improvements on both your Adwords, and ecommerce platform are crucial if you want to win.
How to choose a domain name
Don’t worry about choosing some snazzy brand name. Choose the country extension for your primary market (e.g. .co.uk) (don’t be tempted to create duplicate sites at different country extensions).
Choose a URL that contains your target keywords, and if necessary break it up with dashes. (See this post from Matt Cutts - Google does not penalise URLs with dashes).
Browsers are searching for their target product, not your brand name - give them what they want!
AdWords viel zu teuer?
I’m in Berlin this month working on a consultancy project and my forthcoming book. You would be amazed at how much work government agencies are putting into small businesses.
There are small business agencies like the Industrie-und-Handelskammer zu Berlin - they are a well-funded agency that provides practical consultancy, and funding for websites and emarketing. Then there’s the Bundesministerium fur Wirtschaft und Technologie (BMT) that provides high quality research papers for businesses of all shapes and sizes. This is a nation that is taking the internet and its opportunity very seriously.
And now to this post, the BMT reckons that B2B Ecommerce in Germany is more advanced than any other EU state (twice as much as the UK), and that B2C ecommerce is expected to be worth 580 billion Euros.
Imagine my surprise then when I created Healthspark’s first German Adword campaign.
The average price per keyword, I reckon is 50% lower than UK counterparts, and many target keywords aren’t even being competed for. Furthermore, many Adword advertisers are producing Adwords with atypical Adword gaffs, namely:
- no specific product
- no price information
- generic campaign
- generic landing pages, with no specific opportunities for action.
Internet Detox
Are you wishing the internet was never born? Like a newborn child that gives joy and misery in equal measure, you can’t stand the noise, but find the noise irresistible?
Do you really care that your close friends are ‘waiting for a Facebook friend invitation’ or Twittring that they’d like a coffee?
10 steps to a better life:
- Delete your inbox. Do it now. Delete it all. None of it matters.
- Set your out of office to : “I’m not reading emails until 4pm everyday. If it’s from someone I know, addressed to me (and not CC’d) I might read it, but can’t guarantee because I get 3000 emails a day. If it’s an emergency, call my cell phone + xxxxxx. Please note an emergency is an emergency, not please can you check out my facebook profile.
- Limit your internet activity to 3 dedicated tasks per day - no mindless browsing of daft things - max time 20 minutes
- Leave all Web 2.0 sites (Facebook etc) - wait for web 3.0! Web 3.0 will be so smart, you won’t have to tell anyone you’re sitting at home there’ll be a Googlebot telling the world you’d like a cup of tea.
- Look at your partner when you’re talking to them, no texting or emailing. They don’t like it.
- Don’t upgrade your phone when the contract’s due for renewal. Ask for a cash refund - you don’t need another phone, let alone one with 3G, 10 Megapixel cameras and 50GB of MP3 storage. To be honest you don’t need this phone. Talk to the person next to you.
- Don’t ever signup for a monthly subscription for anything. If it’s that useful, pay for it when you need it.
- Change your email address. You don’t need all the spam you’ve signed up for.
- Reply to your emails with firm instructions - don’t allow a conversation to emerge.
- Never text anybody, it hurts your fingers too much.
37Signals rejects Photoshop
Great post on the 37Signals Blog - Photoshop and elaborate mockups just don’t work for building good UI (user-interface). And they should know Basecamp etc are benchmarks in UI design.
Don’t accept the finished item from your web designer, insist on getting launched straightaway, and then iterate and iterate.