First Australian Google AdWords Certified Partner
Following on from news this week from our good friends at Rocket Clicks & Redfly Marketing, we’re delighted & humbled to announce that WebSavvy is the first Australian company to be awarded the coveted title of Google AdWords Certified Partner
What does this mean for you dear reader?
Well, the new exams that have to be passed test more than theoretical knowledge… they test real-world practical skills. And with our main AdWords account about to reach it’s 2000 day birthday (!) it’s pretty safe to say we’ve been doing this longer than almost any other company in Australia.
Important? We think so. Because we’ve seen inside hundreds of AdWords accounts we can help you improve your account faster & increase your ROI – that’s what online marketing is all about, measuring & improving results.
Certified Partner Exams
It’s great to see more advanced exams (some questions are very tricky!) and to see that Google have plans for many more exams in the near future
Because the managed spend threshold to become qualified has dropped considerably, we’ll see many more companies with Certified Partner Status over the coming months… we’re just stoked to be the first.
Thank you!
Thanks to Steve, Justin, Issie & Steve for all their hard work over the past few months – it’s been a big year already & it’s about to get even bigger!
Thanks also to our wonderful clients – without you we’re nothing.
Create a Minisite for Your Business
Fabian wrote this week to ask me for some ideas/guidelines for creating minisites – I thought I’d share my answer to her with you:
Typically the reason for the minisite is to create a segment of the main business website. This might be to laser-target a particular niche, or it might be to create a special offer that you wish to keep separate from the main site (eg discounts, added value, time limited offer etc)
Another reason is typically to improve your SEO results.
If the main site doesn’t rank well for a particular term (or group of terms), then a minisite may be a solution.
Because the domain name is a major factor in how well a site ranks, choosing an keyword-rich domain will often prove to be a shortcut to better rankings.
Guidelines for domains:
Obviously the main thing is to include the main words of the niche you’re targeting!
Keep it as short as you can (1-3 words is best).
Don’t use dashes, hyphens or underscores if you can avoid it (particularly if you’ll be advertising the site offline)
Only consider using dashes IF you’ll only advertise the site online (ie people will click a link, not have to remember or spell the domain) AND if the domain without dashes has been taken (& isn’t for sale)
Do some basic keyword research to determine the phrase(s) that most people use when searching in the niche & choose the domain accordingly (contact us if you’d like us to do that for you)
We recommend using DomainFace if you want to look for domains for sale, or domains about to expire.
The goal of the minisite …
will typically be to capture a visitor’s email address, or possibly even create a sale.
Either way it will usually be some sort of direct response offer, so the site should contain:
- some sort of form to capture the information & send that through to your email/CRM
- a static ‘thank you’ page. That is a second page that the user is directed to after they’ve successfully completed the form. This is then used to track how many users managed to complete the form – which gives you your conversion rate… a VERY important number to know
- Analytics tracking installed on all pages (we recommend Google Analytics NOT AWstats)
- As few form fields as possible. Preferably you’ll only require the user to give you an email address. Every field you ask for in addition to this (eg name, mobile, address) will reduce the conversion rate (in almost every case – although of course there are exceptions to this)
Additional pages to consider for your site:
Don’t just build a site with the landing page & a thank you page.
Users (& Google) won’t like it as much as something that offers plenty of value
At a minimum you should also include: a privacy policy page (essential if you’re collecting personal information), an about us page, a contact us page & possibly an FAQ page
You might also want to consider 5-10 pages of relevant, unique & valuable content that the user would find helpful in making their purchasing decision
Each page might contain 300-500 words & be about one particular aspect of the targeted niche.
How to build the site:
There are literally hundreds of ways to build sites these days & no shortage of bespoke systems to help you do so. The problem with those systems is that once you use them, you’re beholden to the owner of that system forever more – which can mean costly changes down the track.
Far better to use open-source software such as WordPress - as this is not only free (!), it’s also being continuously improved by a world-wide army of geeks!
WordPress (WP) is also very easy to use & is very well optimised for SEO without you having to change anything – it just works!
And because it’s open source, there are no shortage of helpful how-to videos on the web explaining every aspect of how to use the platform.
Where to build the site:
You can of course use your usual web development team & pay accordingly
But increasingly it’s getting cheaper & easier to use web designers from around the world.
Sites like elance.com, odesk.com, rentacoder.com & guru.com make it easy to find, work with, then pay a freelance designer anywhere in the world
The huge benefit of this is cost – you might expect to pay ~$500 for a complete site, assuming that you provide the copy & images to be used
Stuck when it comes to finding images – head to iStockPhoto.com & choose from millions of shots for a few dollars each (the medium size is fine for website work)
That’s it.
Once the site is built, we can help you ‘split-test’ the site… for example testing 4 different headlines to see which works best.
Small changes to headlines (and other copy, the offer, the colour scheme & other elements) can have a massive impact on your conversion rate.
It pays to test!
Let me know how you go with your site & good luck!
Typically the reason for the minisite is to create a segment of the main site. This might be to laser-target a particular niche (eg ducted air-conditioning), or it might be to create a special offer that you wish to keep separate from the main site (eg discounts, added value, time limited offer etc)
Another reason is typically SEO
If the main site doesn’t rank well for a particular term (or group of terms), then a minisite may be a solution.
Because the domain name is a major factor in how well a site ranks, choosing an keyword-rich domain will often prove to be a shortcut to better rankings.
Guidelines for domains:
obviously include the main words of the niche you’re targeting
keep it as short as you can (1-3 words is best)
don’t use dashes, hyphens or underscores if you can avoid it (particularly if you’ll be advertising the site offline)
consider using dashes IF you’ll only advertise the site online (ie people will click a link, not have to remember or spell the domain) AND if the domain without dashes has been taken (& isn’t for sale)
Do some basic keyword research to determine the phrase(s) that most people use when searching in the niche & choose the domain accordingly
The goal of the minisite will typically be to capture a visitor’s email address, or possibly even create a sale.
Either way it will usually be some sort of direct response offer, so the site should contain:
- some sort of form to capture the information & send that through to your email/CRM
- a static ‘thank you’ page. That is a second page that the user is directed to after they’ve successfully completed the form. This is then used to track how many users managed to complete the form – which gives you your conversion rate… a VERY important number to know
- Analytics tracking installed on all pages (we recommend Google Analytics NOT AWstats)
- As few form fields as possible. Preferably you’ll only require the user to give you an email address. Every field you ask for in addition to this (eg name, mobile, address) will reduce the conversion rate (in almost every ca
- se – although of course there are exceptions to this)
Additional pages to consider for your site:
Don’t just build a site with the landing page & a thank you page.
Users (& Google) won’t like it as much as something that offers plenty of value
At a minimum you should also include: a privacy policy page (essential if you’re collecting personal information), an about us page, a contact us page & possibly an FAQ page
You might also want to consider 5-10 pages of relevant, unique & valuable content that the user would find helpful in making their purchasing decision
Each page might contain 300-500 words & be about one particular aspect of the targeted niche.
How to build the site:
There are literally hundreds of ways to build sites these days & no shortage of bespoke systems to help you do so. The problem with those systems is that once you use them, you’re beholden to the owner of that system forever more – which can mean costly changes down the track.
Far better to use open-source software such as WordPress – as this is not only free (!), it’s also being continuously improved by a world-wide army of geeks!
WordPress (WP) is also very easy to use & is very well optimised for SEO without you having to change anything – it just works!
And because it’s open source, there are no shortage of helpful how-to videos on the web (YouTube) explaining every aspect of how to use the platform.
Where to build the site:
You can of course use your usual web development team & pay accordingly
But increasingly it’s getting cheaper & easier to use web designers from around the world.
Sites like elance.com, odesk.com, rentacoder.com & guru.com make it easy to find, work with, then pay a freelance designer anywhere in the world
The huge benefit of this is cost – you might expect to pay ~$500 for a complete site, assuming that you provide the copy & images to be used
Stuck when it comes to finding images – head to iStockPhoto.com & choose from millions of shots for a few dollars each (the medium size is fine for website work)
That’s it.
Once the site is built, we can help you ‘split-test’ the site… for example testing 4 different headlines to see which works best.
Small changes to headlines (and other copy, the offer, the colour scheme & other elements) can have a massive impact on your conversion rate.
It pays to test!
Are You Going to Fast Web Formula 2?
James Schramko‘s excellent Fast Web Formula is now in it’s second year.
I highly recommend going – there’s a great lineup of speakers:
- Ed Dale
- John Carlton
- Kenny Goodman
- the guys from Flippa.com
- me
- and many many more…
I’ll be revealing some cutting edge AdWords Strategies & some very cool new ideas.
James is one of the Internet’s good guys, 100% genuine and totally focused on delivering value. This will be an awesome event – make sure you’re there.
Sydney, September 10-12 2010.
And keep your eyes peeled for some great bonus content coming out in the coming weeks…
Fantastic improvements to Google Analytics
Analytics has long been a great tool for small business. Not only does it give you the power to see what’s happening on your website, but it’s 100% free.
We all know that you can’t manage what you don’t measure – so Analytics (or some sort of stats package) is vital if you want to improve your website over time.
Well it just got a lot easier to do so
Google have just announced a number of improved features for Analytics, such as:
- better engagement metrics. eg you can know count a goal as someone that stays on the site for over 2 minutes
- up to 20 goals for each profile (at last!)
- filtering of results. eg don’t wade through a list of thousands of keywords, now you can filter say those with a low bounce rate & high time on site. sweet.
and many many more
check it all out here
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-analytics-now-more-powerful.html
eg. setting a goal that a visitor stays for over a minute
Google AdWords Bid Simulator
In it’s quest to continually make the bidding process more transparent, Google is rolling out a new tool – Bid Simulator.
Look for a little icon 
next to the keywords in your account & give it a click (you’ll only see it for keywords that have a decent amount of traffic & clicks)
Now you see what will happen if you change your bids & get a feel for exactly how different the traffic levels will be if you bid more or less.
It works by looking at your Quality Score (QS), the QS & bids of your competitors (which you of course can’t see) & the probability of your ad getting clicked when in various positions on the page.
You’ll find some graphs are very flat, but others are skewed dramatically – those skewed curves offer plenty of potential to change your bids (often quite a bit) without huge affects on your traffic levels.
Have a play – don’t worry, you can’t break it!
User Ratings + Google Maps
Making sure your business has good reviews is now more important than ever as there’s now an option on Google Maps to “narrow results by user rating”
Over time it’s very likely that more & more Google users will choose this option to refine their search results – so the sooner you can gain some 4 and 5 star reviews from your clients the better.
Just ask them to navigate to Google Maps, type your business name & click the ‘reviews’ tab. It’ll only take them a minute or two – and maybe you could reward them with a voucher, discount, freebie or some personal time – whatever makes sense for your business model.
Advanced Google Analytics
Two links for you today.
Firstly this post by Justin is absolute genius. (It’s worth reading all 4 parts to the series)
In short: use ecommerce reports in GA to track lead generation – not just online sales.
Why? much deeper insights using more detailed data. Brilliant idea.
Now follow that up with this detailed post by Michael over at ROI Revolution – which gives us 5 ways to slice & dice those ecommerce reports to get even more actionable data… which is what it’s all about: ACTION.
The pretty graphs are nice. But ya gotta use that data, make changes, tweak your site & increase your leads & sales.
If you’re too busy, talk to us & maybe we can do that for you & your site – for less than you might think.
Does Google Trust Your Ads?
If you’ve been running Google ads for a while, you know that Quality is vital. And your Quality Score (QS) depends heavily on your click thru rates (CTR) & to some extent on your Landing Pages.
BUT – do you realise just how much is dependent on how much Google trusts you?
Here’s a real life example:
Background: Brand new client – ads have been running for a week now. Client is a fairly new business with no established brand.
Network: Google Search only, running in just 1 Australian State (for the campaign we’re looking at here)
Budget: reasonable, but not huge until we’ve got numbers to prove it’s positive ROI (about $150/day for now)
Quality Scores: Excellent! 6 out of 264 keywords have a QS of 7, 50/264 = 8, 175 have QS of 9 & 33 have QS-10 (there are no brand names in this campaign)
Bids: most are higher than we’d normally go for as client wants to be in position 1 when possible (yeah – you get that now & then), but with the margin they’re making it actually does make sense!
CTR%: off the chart! Nevermind the keywords, 29 out of 39 AdGroups have a CTR over 5%, 11 groups are over 10%. This is a targeted campaign!
Results: over 600 clicks at about $1.30 each & a stunning number of conversions (sales, not forms completed)
So what’s the problem?
And yet with all this – great quality, high bids, huge click thru rates & a good conversion rate
The Impression Share lost to Rank is still averaging 30-40% most days! Why?
Well most likely it’s due to the lack of trust Google has in a brand new advertiser with a fairly new site (1 year, PR2). Despite some truly stellar results, this account is still only a week old & therefore Google wants to roll out the ads over time, so that it can be sure the ads & the landing page offer a great user experience.
What is Impression Share?
Simply your share of the available impressions on a daily basis. so if there were 100 possible impressions available (100 people searched for one of your keywords) & your ads showd 56 times, yep – you’d have a 56% impression share.
You can lose Impression Share (IS) in two ways. Either your budget isn’t high enough, or your AdRank isn’t high enough.
Budget is obvious – if you can only afford to spend $100/day, then Google will slow your ads to match that as closely as possible.
AdRank is a little harder to understand – for now all you need to know is that your bid & your QS determine your rank. So shouldn’t a high bid & high QS mean you’ll show on page 1 all day long???? No.
History Matters.
Don’ think that because you set a high budget, or a high Maximum CPC that your ads are necessarily going to show on Google. Google doesn’t work as many people think – with the big bidders automatically showing their ads at the top of the page… it’s all about Quality.
So if there’s an established advertiser in position 4 – who’s been there for ages & is trusted by google… then that advertiser isn’t going to get forced off the page just because some big fish swim into town & start bidding high.
Instead Google will only show ads from some of those big fish & continue to show ads from the trusted, long-term advertisers in their usual spots.
In a way Google is protecting the long-term advertisers, but it’s also protecting it’s users from the newer, unknown advertisers – that it doesn’t yet trust.
And of course trust is built up over time, so the history of your account is now a huge factor.
So what can you do?
In a word: patience! Have some patience with your new accounts – don’t expect to go straight to the position you want & then stay there all day.
It takes time to build up that trust with Google.
Concentrate on getting an excellent quality score for all your keywords & writing great Ads to get high CTR (don’t worry about the ad position so much as making sure the copy is great)
Delete keywords that don’t help you (QS of 6 or lower) & try to think of more keywords that would be highly relevant to your product/service
And above all – keep testing!
ClickTale Review
ClickTale rocks!
Try ClickTale Now
If you have a form on your website – a form that makes you money by bringing in leads or generating sales, then you’re going to want to trial this wonderful piece of software.
We’ve just started using on a client site with 25,000 pageviews/week – most of which revolve around a fairly complicated form.
So I’ll update you soon with the full review, for now I can tell you it’s well worth installing, it gives:
- details about which form fields take too long to complete (ie where are your visitors getting stuck)
- a heatmap that shows how far down the page your visitors scroll
- movies that allow you to watch exactly what a visitor did (like looking over their shoulder!)
- more than just normal link analysis… you can see where they hesitate, did they try to click an image that’s not even a link & more
Try it today. There’s a free version for bloggers, but the bronze program is only $99/month & let’s you do a lot more + there’s a 30 day money back offer. Give it a go.
Don't be a Weasel
The Weasel Clause – that’s what Seth Godin calls it when you hide something nasty in the fine print. Offer one thing & then sneakily hit them with something else when they’re not looking. A sucker punch to the head!
As you may already know how much I don’t like GoDaddy & am not a fan of their practices… which is why I cancelled all of my domains with them months ago…
So you can imagine my surprise to wake up this morning to an email & a charge on my credit card from GoDaddy “according to our agreement”….The cheeky buggers!
Yep I know, I agreed to the T&Cs, I should have read the agreement more closely, 10% my fault. I get it.
BUT – as the master Godin points out in this Influence economy, trust is a fragile thing. Mess with it once & it goes away. Forever. And the disgruntled talk!
FYI I highly recommend namecheap for .com domains & netregistry for .com.au – neither company is sneaky.
