Google Trends for Websites
The latest incarnation of Google Trends doesn’t just give you trend data on keyword searches, it also gives you great analysis of where else your target customers are going. Take a look at this analysis for MyMemory.
Not only will this analysis show where else your customers are going, but it also shows the keywords they’re also searching for. This kind of data usually costs lots of money (HitWise), and now you can have it for free. Enjoy!
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.
The joy of payment (gateway providers)
If you’re making money online, you could be raising revenue through Amazon Marketplace, eBay or affiliate traffic. It’s a doddle, you’ve got no exposure to credit-card fraud, no chargebacks, no settlement periods to worry about, you just collect a cheque or watch an electronic transfer go kerching in your online account.
But sooner or later you will make the jump into a full ecommerce store (get the book!), and when you do you’ll need to get a payment gateway provider (PGP). Well actually, you’ll need a few pieces in the jigsaw.
Last month, we launched Healthspark. Healthspark is an OScommerce site we built for £200, and it broke even on day 2. When we launched the site, I tried to bypass the PGP route, and went instead for just PayPal and Google Checkout (see earlier post on Google Adwords Checkout).
Both PayPal and Google Checkout are not PGPs - they’re complete payment solution providers. You don’t need an SSL certificate (the thing that gives you a padlock on your site). You don’t process credit cards, you don’t keep the data (in fact with Google Checkout you might not even get the email address of your customer).
The Paypal/Google checkout thing has worked well for HealthSpark in its infancy, until Google Checkout decided that the natural remedies for male problems might infringe its stringent policies. I don’t mind Google having anti-gun, anti-natural remedy policies, anti-everything but their response was strange. When Google complained, we pulled checkout. When we removed the offending items, Google wouldn’t re-instate Google Checkout until we’d put the buttons back (even though they didn’t work) on a LIVE SITE! Long story short, Google Checkout is back, but now we push on with a PGP.
If you want real control (and better credit card commission rates) you’ll need to process credit cards using a payment gateway provider (PGP). Your bank (Merchant provider) will give you a Merchant account. You then need to look at a PGP.
Your website can interface with the PGP in two ways. First (and best) it can transmit credit card details from a secure page (SSL - padlocked), the customer never leaves the site, and the PGP handles everything in the background. Second, you can pass your customer from our site to a branded page (hosted on the PGP’s servers), the payment is handled, and the customer returned to a thank you page on your site. This latter route is a good alternative, there are no SSL costs, no security risks, and the brand of your PGP can help secure the deal (e.g. NatWest).
Your bank will be keen to push their own PGP - most high street banks are now running their own PGPs, but look at the small print carefully, you need to consider commission rates and payment terms.
The joy of payment is a joy often deferred, whichever route you choose.
Apple’s 2nd generation iPhone
Embarrassing isn’t it? Apple’s uber-cool iPhone is already to be replaced with the 3G version that should have been released in v.1. Any other company would be giving the replacement to its customers for free, with sheepish grins and much apologising. But the iPhone is much less a business tool, and much more a great MP3 player with some good (in a 2.5G sluggish sort of way) web browsing and communications thrown in.
Steve: here’s my plea for your big speech. No more world-domination Microsoft-like tied contracts and closed-systems. Open source the operating system, make your money from the hardware, and do no evil. That would be even better than 3G (well almost).
Google Checkout - time for revolution!
There is a real trojan horse in the otherwise wonderful Google Checkout. It’s so bad, and dumb, that I’d like this page to serve as a protest vote to Google. Google has to change this.
Google checkout is a really easy to use payment system, and its integration with Adwords gives you a better CPC and customer conversion rate. The downside is Google knows too much about your business, and will charge you more for your Ads, because it knows *exactly* how much the lead is worth to you.
But that’s not the really bad thing about Google checkout. The unpardonable sin is that *your customer* can withhold his or her email address.
Now let’s get this straight. You’ve got a prospect to your site. They’ve reviewed your site and your product, and they’ve made a buying decision. At checkout they decide to use Google for handling the payment. You’ve got a customer, right? NO! Google has won a customer, and Larry and Serge intend to keep it that way. Your customer opts out of sharing their email address. So you’ve won a sale, but you haven’t won a relationship.
Google’s determination to deny you direct contact with your own customer is so un-Googleish, I can hardly believe its true.
If you think this should change DIGG it now. Comment here, and make your voice heard!
What Google knows about web spam
Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google who blogs. He specialises in preventing spam in the Google index. His recent presentation at Web 2.0 is a must see.
Key points
- Good content always wins
- Backlink quality is important
- Search engine optimization is not considered as spam - good companies using SEO are determined and valid in Google’s eyes.
- Spammers leave footprints by accident - <!– insert your hidden text here –> so Google knows its a spammed template website.
Google Analytics Data loss
You may have seen this recently on the Google Analytics login page:
System Message: Analytics Processing Delay from April 30th to May 5th
Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.
The trouble with free software is that you can’t really complain when you get this kind of loss, it just goes with the territory, and at least Google are sorting it out, almost. The worrying bit is the loss of e-commerce data, because these are the sites who live by this data.
I love Analytics. I’ll do a post shortly on how to get the most of its impressive integration with Adwords, but I can’t help but feel frustrated (and a bit paranoid) about how Google handles the data. For example, when you set-up conversion goals, you won’t see any real conversion data for 24 hours. Why is this? Are Google’s servers so slow, they can’t cope with the request for 24 hours? Nope, they’re slow enough to make sure you have to experiment with your campaigns to achieve success. Experimentation = Adspend.
Google Adwords Checkout
The number of Adwords carrying the checkout symbol is on the increase. For those of you who don’t know, Google Checkout is Google’s answer to Paypal. The incentives for using the checkout go way beyond a secure transaction, as the presence of the Google Checkout badge has been know to increase the clickthrough rate by 23%. Also, the brand identification increases the probabilities of customer conversion, and retention. Google’s sales spiel looks like this:
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Increase sales. Google Checkout users click on AdWords ads 10% more when the ad displays the Checkout badge, and convert 40% more than shoppers that have not used Checkout before. |
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Process sales for free. For every £1 spent on AdWords each month, merchants can process £10 in sales the following month through Google Checkout for free. For all other sales, the charge is a low 1.5% + £0.15 per transaction. |
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Protect yourself from fraud for free. Our fraud prevention tools stop invalid orders from reaching you. And our Payment Guarantee policy helps protect you from chargebacks. |
So the economic benefits of clear, but it’s surprising how few people know how to integrate Google Checkout into their store, and into their Adwords campaigns. Here’s how:
1. Get a Google checkout account here : http://checkout.google.com
2. Now the tough bit; integrate with your store. Most mainstream providers already offer checkout integration, and Google also provides code for most of the open source platforms. (OS Commerce integration is very easy). If you’re interested in getting the Adwords bit rolling for a few products, you could simply produce a buy it now button and slap it on the page.
3. When you set your account up, in the merchant profile, place the root of your domain (e.g. webreality.co.uk, not www.webreality.co.uk).
4. In Google Checkout : settings : Adwords, add your Adwords Customer ID (when you’re logged in to Adwords this is displayed top right).
4. Run your Adwords campaigns as normal.
5. Initially, nothing will change, after the first Google Checkout transaction, there is a delay, and then your Checkout Badge will be active on your campaigns.
You can set your Adwords Checkout badges to Inactive but it will affect all campaigns. It’s worth running tests to ensure that the Checkout badge does actually yield a higher conversion rate.
Great mash-up
You’ll like this: Addictomatic mashes up Ask.com, Technorati, Addicto top blogs, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, Twitter, and more all on one page. No faster way to see what the web’s saying about anything. Bet Google buys them.
Baldy goes carbon free (for an afternoon at least)
The Jersey Electricity Company invited me to test-drive a new all-electric Smart Car today. As an unashamed petrol head, the experience came as something of a revelation.The Electric Smart Car is identical to an ordinary Smart Car. The give away is the curly yellow cable leading from a 13amp plug to the place where you should stick petrol in. Inside, there’s a gear-stick that shifts between drive, neutral and reverse. That’s about it. You turn the key, press the accelerator, and then you silently waft away on a gentle hum. The near silent operation is the biggest revelation, and I think one of the biggest benefits to a defined road network like Jersey. Imagine all road noise and pollution gone over night … Driving the SmartCar was surprisingly good. It’s nimble, torquey, responsive, goes up hill without looking like a milk float. With a range of 70 miles, it would be more than enough for 90% of the journeys carried out in Jersey. At £20k it’s not a cheap option, but if the States get into gear with cheap parking and free charging for electric cars, it would look very viable. At £20k however, I’d expect the user interface of the car to look better. 
SmartCar really needs Apple to do it’s UI. Then I might have a go, but for now it’s back to burning petrol.