FAQS

In this section we’ve tried to answer some of the questions that are often asked about online marketing.

If you have a question that you think should be featured please get in touch with us here.

Landing Page Testing and Conversion Rate Optimisation

Search Engine Marketing

General Online Marketing

Are my landing pages working as well as they should be?

You never really know whether your landing pages are as effective as they can be unless you test them. Even if you’ve been involved in landing page design for quite some time it’s hard to get it right.

You might think that your pages are exactly what the customer needs with all the information needed in order to move the customer towards your conversion goal. But wouldn’t watching a recording of users visiting your site or delving deep into your analytics be a better approach to understanding how visitors actually use your website and what they like and dislike.

Landing pages are the highest traffic pages within your site, sometimes this is your homepage but it could also be a campaign landing page such as a page that you use for your paid search campaign or for your display advertising. A small difference in the conversion of that page can often result in a magnified difference in revenue per click that pages drives over a month.

Why do so many people visit my site and do nothing?

If you have an analytics package on your site like Google Analytics then you will be able to see a measure call ‘Bounce rate’ this highlights the % of people who came to your site and didn’t make a click. They may have read your homepage but they didn’t see anything there that encouraged them to go deeper into the site and explore further.

In order to understand this then it’s important to understand that not all channels that drive traffic are the same. Visitors that do nothing were clearly not so interested in your site, as some in our industry say ‘they came, they puked, they left…’. (I’d like to think of a more genial line but one isn’t coming to mind at the moment!).

To start to understand this it’s important to use your analytics package to your full advantage – you can slice your data to start understanding more about the bounce rate for each of your main channels. Which is your ‘stickiest’ channel, which is your best traffic? Is it paid search, natural search, traffic from your banner campaigns or your affiliate marketing activity. Which traffic then goes on to take the desired action that you were looking for?

It is important to work on having two views of the traffic in order to truly understand how to leverage these channels for your business:
1. A helicopter view – where do my best leads come from?
2. A granular view – I know that a few of my best affiliates drive sales each week but how can improve the journey for visitors in that come from those sites – for example, should I create a landing page that recognises where the visitor has just landed from?

Why use Pay Per Click Advertising?

Pay per click is simply a type of advertising that helps you increase the number of visitors who arrive at your site from the main search engines (Google, MSN Bing and Yahoo Search) than if they just found you through the natural search listings. In a perfect world every visitor would be just as valuable to you as the next one but in real life that never happens and since you pay for each click it becomes important for you to optimise your campaign to get the best results.

Pay per click campaigns require you (or your agency) to come up with full lists of possible keywords and variations that will drive the right visitors to your business. These variations can be extremely important as bidding only on more common variations tends to be much more costly.

But that doesn’t mean that you should continue to bid on keywords that don’t work for you. Your aim should be to test your keywords in line with your average conversion rate, so if you convert on average at 5% from click to sale then you know that you need to buy at least 20+ clicks for a keyword in order to test it.

Google ads are now a core part of promotional activities for many businesses. However, should all businesses use them and how much paid search is too much? With PPC there is often low hanging fruit that business’s can take advantage of but it’s also true to say that there is a real possibility of having an inefficient search campaign that eats into your marketing budget without getting the return on investment you were looking for.

How do I know whether my current agency are as efficient as they can be with my PPC campaign?

There is a tendency for many media agencies and even some of the best Search Marketing agencies often fall into the trap of spending the budget you ‘sign off’ and only get as far as attempting to maximise the ROI within that budget. They often don’t offer to discuss whether they are spending at the right level of budget in the first instance and what the optimum spend should be to maximise ROI or in fact often a better measure is the marginal return that you can achieve on each sale.

Here are some areas you can work on to make you PPC campaign more efficient:

  • Tie up your PPC campaign with Google Analytics so that you can see what the traffic you buy does when they reach the site.
  • Aim to uncover practical insights from your data, such as keywords that have a high bounce rate. There might be a reason why they have a high bounce rate but your agency can’t see this by simply looking at their adwords report alone.
  • Set your agency targets for your major keywords and make sure that you have in place a plan for testing copy in a number of positions until you find the most efficient approach
  • There are other areas you might need to consider such as how and when to pause keywords that are not generating an effective return and how to split test different creative without being tied down to Google’s auto optimize solution.

Should I bid on my own brand keywords?

This is quite an important question in digital marketing, and one that is actually rarely tested fully. Many Media or Search agencies will have run a few tests and will often tell you that they know what to do for you sector but how do you know if they are right? It’s always better to run your own test and make sure, even if the agency has to do more work to make it happen!

Google’s official research is that bidding on your own brand creates an up-lift in the number of visitors that reach you via either paid or natural search. This works out well for Google as you pay for traffic that was on its way to your site anyway!

It’s therefore best to design a test with and without brand bidding (depending on your brand you could be spending £00’s or £000’s per month so it is worth it in the long run). You have to set up a test that works out what drive the highest return on your investment.

The key metrics to compare when you run this test is like-for-like sales figures, and if that’s not possible then you should look at overall should look at overall site conversion rate for a pre-determined period with and without brand bidding.

How do I get my business listed on Google Local Business Listings?

Listing your business on Google Local is easy! Google to Google.com/lbc and follow their online form.

Once you have submitted the form then Google need to verify that you are who you say you are, they do that through contacting you by phone, text or postcard. They pass you a five digit pin that you need to enter into the Google Local site.

If you have multiple business listings that need to be updated then it can be quite time consuming we are able to help you out with this process. Find out about our local business service here.

How will I know if I am getting the most out of affiliate marketing?

affiliates netted more than £4bn in revenues. How do you know if you are getting value for money and whether your affiliates are actively promoting your programme or if they are chasing the benefits of another merchants programme.

It also difficult to know if you are getting the most out of your current agency/affiliate network combination and if they are doing a good job. This is why some of the most successful companies operate their affiliate programs in-house. Agencies have a habit of letting their clients down by:

  • Not doing enough leg-work to vet new affiliates
  • Not checking that affiliates have the correct offer and copy
  • Not citing your campaign correctly or having enough knowledge about your conversion rate (which is very important to affiliates!).
  • Not promoting your campaign actively to your affiliate networks or organising events to have face to face meetings with your affiliates (they are after all your business partners!).

Done well affiliate marketing can also be a powerful tool to promote content about your company in a more traditional sense. Many affiliates will be happy to put up a whole page of original content about your product if this will help them to rank in the search engines.

Check that they are doing these things as a minimum to ensure that you are getting the most out of your campaigns.

How do I optimise my website’s content?

There isn’t a short answer to this question and there many areas that we would urge you to consider. What we can say is that optimising your website is fundamentally about making it easier for your customers to use your site, make it a better experience and the chance are they will come back and it won’t be just a case of ‘they came they saw they went’.

Here are our top tips for optimising your website:

  1. Write clear and concise copy – you don’t have to keep it short but it has to be interesting. Before you write your copy write down in short-hand what you want to say, if you have got your point across then don’t say more than that.
  2. Use keywords in your copy but don’t get stressed about it! Using keywords on your site is important but you don’t need to use them more than a few times.
  3. Run splits test to verify that things you hold to be true on your site really are true. Test buttons, colours and page layouts until you know what works best for your business. Once you have defined your test use Google Website Optimizer to help you ascertain the best variation across a large number of variables.
  4. Use point-of-action assurances! You are probably familiar with calls to action like ‘Click here to buy’ or ‘Add to cart’ but have you thought about also using assurances to give your user a good feeling about using your site. A point of action assurance might be something like ‘You can always remove items later’.
  5. Always have in mind your Unique Value Proposition (UVP). Just because you are creating an Internet site does not mean that you have to start from scratch and remove what makes you unique, the trick is getting that across to customers within the first few seconds of them being at your site. They need to know what makes you unique and you value proposition should flow throughout the site.

What is multivariate testing – do I need to use it?

As the name suggests multivariate or multi-variable testing is where you test more than one variable on a page at the same time. You might test your ‘call to action’ whilst simultaneously testing the positioning, colour or other attributes of content at the same time. This is distinct from an A/B or a split test in that those tests have only look at one variable, you might for instance test five permutations of your sites headline in an attempt to work out which headline works best.

How can I buy ads on Facebook?

One way to buy as on Facebook is the route that is now being adopted by many bigger businesses who buy ads through the Facebook sales team via their media agency. The other way is to buy them via the Facebook website found here – www.facebook.com/ads/manage/.

It doesn’t always make sense to go directly through the Facebook sales team, even though there are some clear advantages to doing that. The reason for that is that when you go via the sales team you are not entered into the bid system and you may find that they charge you more than you would have otherwise paid using the bid system.

To find out more about our process for Facebook advertising click here.