Percentage of Spend

You typically will pay the agency a fixed percentage of whatever it is your spending on adverts. Often this is around 10% – so if you’re spending £10,000 a month, you’re being billed £1,000 on top.

Pros – Your bill reflects the size of the account.

Cons – There is an incentive to increase your spend, regardless of the merits.

Percentage of Sales

Like the percentage of spend, you pay based on the percentage of revenue driven by your adverts.

Pros – You are only paying for adverts that are directly generating sales.

Cons – Attributing sales accurately to first click is between difficult and impossible and you’re likely to overlook important top of the funnel opportunities.

Baseline

The agency runs the campaign without any changes being made for a period of time. From thereon in, they take a cut depending upon an agreed improvement in specific metrics, typically Cost Per Click.

Pros – It’s sounds great so you feel good when you sign the contract.

Cons – The agency tends to concentrate on specific metrics, rather than performance and your business. If they make just a small improvement in month one, they don’t then have to do anything else whilst still they get paid.

Fixed Fee

You pay X amount a month and the agency runs you’re PPC activity. Usually the bigger the size of the account (either in spend or in keywords) the more you pay.

Pros – It’s a fixed fee which is good for planning and the agency is able to concentrate on doing the best they can without perverse billing incentives.

Cons – It’s difficult to understand just what is being done – an agency can easily do nothing month to month and still get paid.

Hourly Rate

You pay based on how much time has been spent managing your account. Usually that means the bigger the account, the more work is needed (and thus billing is higher).

Pros – You only spend money when work is being done. And like a fixed fee, there are no perversion of incentive for doing a good job.

Cons – There are no guarantees that the work being done is helping. Doing work for the sake of it won’t help you to sell more but will create costs.

The post How Much Should Businesses Spend On PPC (Paid Marketing) appeared first on Eventure Internet.

An AdWords certification allows individuals to demonstrate that Google recognises then as an online advertising professional. You can only receive this accreditation after successfully passing the AdWords Fundamentals exam and either the Search Advertising, Display Advertising, Mobile Advertising, Video Advertising or Shopping Advertising exam administered by Google Partners.

There are several benefits to being accredited such as:

• Validate your expertise – Ideal for showing current and prospective clients that you’re a certified online advertising specialist with a personalised certificate. A Google Partners public profile page listing your certifications will also be made available.
• Help achieve your Google Partner badge – Agencies need at least one of their team members to be AdWords certified in order to achieve a Google Partner badge.
• Appearing in Google’s Certified Partner Listing – Google have now made it even easier to see what trustworthy certified partners are available in your post code range. Now if you’re looking for a company in Nottingham who knows their stuff when it comes to advertising, marketing and Google we’ll show up!
• Satisfaction of being recognised – It’s OK to say you can do something but it’s not quite as good as being certified.

By being Google Adwords Certified you can put your trust in us when we say we know how to handle your AdWords account. Within our Marketing department we have years of knowledge working with Google to achieve the best results for our clients so they don’t fall at the many hurdles Google throws at them.

The post What Does Google AdWords Certified Mean? appeared first on Eventure Internet.

I want to rank for these keywords…tell me what you’ll do, how you’ll get me links and when do you think I’ll be on page one and making money.

Every time that happens, inside we die a little. Especially as it’s often followed up with “and I’ve only got £#insert-costs-here budget to spend till you’re making me £#insert-value-here”.

So, after a few deep breaths the conversation must move on. It is folly to explain that high rankings these days are an outcome of good holistic marketing; that high rankings are as much to do with a their activities across the four marketing (or seven if you wish) P’s and that even then, in a digital age those 4 p’s are probably more like the 4 E’s…

See, that’s gobbledegook to most folks and I did qualify that mentioning it was folly…

So other than explaining that it’s not just about SEO and that we offer a holistic digital marketing and that it’s not just about organic traffic, a better way to start the SEO conversation is with these four questions.

Question 1 What is it that you make or do that people want?

More specifically for SEO purposes: What is unique about your proposition and/or What are the expertise that you have that people want?

This obvious comparison here is that first P or E from the marketing mix and from a traditional SEO perspective, it’s the keywords you’ll be targeting.

But here’s the rub – It is not a wish list of what you want to be on page one for! It’s the cracks in the pavement where you’re able to offer something truly unique. It’s unlikely that you are a leader in any mass market – so the answer to this question is as good as your understanding about the personas of your specific customers.

It’s how we work out, at that specific moment of search, when the user really need an answer to their problem, are you going to be there for them?

Question 2 – What is the unique value that you provide that no-one else does?

Think about that for a moment – if you’re offering a “we also do that” website, then you are offering nothing new. In a competitive environment, to get a spot on page one, then you have two options. Either do a MUCH better job at offering what you do, or just offer something different.

There is a superb video that we’ve shared in the past about how to provide unique value. This is a powerful part of any modern successful SEO strategy. However, do not underestimate the amount of time it takes to do. The costs may be high, but the value is even higher!

Question 3 – Who will amplify my message and why?

SEO used to be easy – this amplification of message used to be done by link building en masse. That meant link farms, article marketing, directory submissions etc…Social media didn’t even exist! That’s a fantasy land now and post Penguin, we need amplification from real people.

So there are two parts of this question – the Who and the Why?

Why someone will share your website/webpages is simple. It’s about the reward they get for doing so. It’s not always money, (and see this post about THESE LONG TAIL SEMANTIC KEYWORDS) and in fact, it’s better if that is the case. But sometimes, it is about paying a person or publication to link/share you or either directly or by investing in PR to do so.

Without a doubt, what helps with this process though is having a solid social media strategy already in place which in itself requires an investment of your time as well an investment in content. At this point, you may notice why taking a holistic approach to digital marketing pays dividends in the long run.

Question 4 – What is the process going to be from turning visitors into customers?

This in essence is what is referred to as Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). It is the analysis of the behaviour of users that reach your site, considering how and why they interact with your site the way that they do in a way the helps you achieve your goals.

Far too often, we hear clients just questioning how to get more organic visitors. All they want is to see that specific number going up as an indication that their “SEO is working”. No.

What you should be wanting to see is more people doing what you want them to do – and they usually do that after multiple visits to your site. So they may first arrive from an organic visit, but then next time they come back directly and sign up to your newsletter and then next time they come from that newsletter and buy.

Funnel marketing has been around long before SEO. But any strategy needs to critically consider how and why someone would move along the funnel from awareness, to consideration, to conversion and then onto advocacy. Assuming it all happens in a single visit, the organic funnel would need consideration of…

• How you appear on Google
• The clarity of message on your website
• The merchandising of your products
• The simplicity of your checkout
• The incentive to build loyalty

So part of any successful SEO strategy should involve an investment in CRO as well as the development resources it takes to build an amazing User eXperience (UX).

So next time you start a conversation about SEO you’ll know how to get the best for your business!

The post 4 Need To Ask Questions For All SEO Strategies appeared first on Eventure Internet.

Customer Phone Calls

There should be no doubt that calls to a business are important events in building the relationship between it and the customer. Amongst other things, it is the moment when they enter into a “conversion funnel” and to a degree, everything after that point is about selling to and retaining the individual as opposed to awareness and enticement.

That raises an important question – if calls to your business are one of the best opportunities to convert, isn’t it sensible to know how that person got to that point?

Making people aware of your business and enticing them onto your site is a challenge. That challenge also has a cost attached; whether it’s the money spent on PPC adverts or an advert on local radio. No matter how they discovered you, attributing success to the right channel makes sure you’re more likely to invest in the marketing activity that generates the greatest ROI.

How To Do It

The simplest way to set up call tracking is through a third party provider. Typically, they will provide you with several unique telephone numbers that allow a website to pick and display alternative options: Users will not notice anything different.

For every source of traffic, those different numbers can be displayed dynamically. This means someone who has just clicked a PPC advert sees a different number to someone who has just arrived from Facebook for example. It is indeed possible to have a different number for every marketing channel. For most, that’s overkill and having just a single trackable number (displayed to all users) at least allows you to capture the fact a call has been made.

Any calls now made have their Meta information (time of call, length of call, whether the call was answered etc) recorded by the third party – who will offer their own suite of analysis tools as well, but most importantly, they in turn communicate to analytics.

Benefits

What you end up with is a report in analytics that breaks down which marketing campaigns are providing you with the most phone calls. This is especially useful to any business that relies heavily on telephone calls as part of their conversion process as well as providing a better idea of ROI to organisations who want to maximise the efficiency of their paid marketing campaigns.

What Does It Cost

The costs to the merchant can indeed be zero. The costs of setting up telephone tracking in Google is mainly determined by the type of number you require. There are plenty of options, but at their most base you can opt for:

• An 084 number that is free/low cost to you but has a per minute cost to the caller
• An 080 number that is free to call but you pay for the call duration and may have to pay for the number.

Any costs need to be balanced out against the amount/type of marketing activity being done. It’s a quick easy way to save money if you see the traffic you’ve spent X hundreds/thousands of pounds on generating that year hasn’t made the phone ring enough.

Long To Set Up

It only takes a couple of hours to set up call tracking. There is a small amount of code change needed on your website to make the numbers appear and a bit of nerdishness needed to connect analytics.

Long term, the only time needed is the additional analysis of phone activity within the analytics program.

The post Tracking Phone Calls in Analytics appeared first on Eventure Internet.

Look at Email as a Channel

Once you’ve logged into Analytics, pick a suitable timeframe that you’re interested in and then, using the menu on the left, scroll down to Acquisition, and click on All Traffic > Channels.

In the main window, you will now see information separated out between all of the different standard Google Analytics channels. Interesting on its own merits I’m sure, but here you will see just how dependent you are on individual types of activity as well as opportunities for additional reach.

To drill down to just Email’s though, click on Email under Default Channel Grouping and lo and behold, we’ve filtered out all other traffic sources. (We didn’t say this was hard btw)

Tweak The Data

What you will likely be looking at now, are the pages that received the most traffic from your emails. This is often useful, but for the purposes of this exercise we want to see how each email performance, rather than which pages have received the most traffic.

Across the middle(ish) of the page is the Primary Dimension that we are looking at – probably set to Landing Page. Click on other, and type in and select Campaign. This should now group your information into individual campaigns – ideally, these should be named in an understandable way, allowing you to easily see which of your email have performed the best.

A campaign is usually set during the sending of each individual email. It basically works by appending information to the end links contained in your emails– you don’t need to know how that works, but it’s widely used all over the web for nerds (like us) to understand how users behave.

Rank & Compare

What you can know do is use the filters in Analytics to look at your date in different ways. By clicking on the checkbox and then “Plot Rows” you can see visually in the chart how those selected campaigns have performed.

You can also click on the column headers, to rank the data accordingly. Which emails sent the most traffic (you have to bear in mind the size of the send of course) and which emails generated most sales.

The trick is not to just consider absolute numbers. An email may not always convert directly (Multi-channel attribution is a big topic!) so what we’re most interested in is comparisons. Which emails you’ve sent have performed better? Take a look back on those mail shots – what was it about them that you can attribute to success/failure.

Why did X do better than Y. Is it the message, the offer, the timing etc. Was it a seasonal product? If so, should you do the same next year. This type of critical thinking will help you determine how to improve in the future. It means that even emails that bomb, are useful as they help you to adapt your future messaging/strategy.

The post How To Review Email Traffic in Analytics appeared first on Eventure Internet.

First off, relax. Admittedly, easier said than done, but even if there is a major problem, it should be tackled with smart decisions rather than knee jerk reactions. Nothing will be fixed in the next 5 minutes after all. But after taking that deep breath, run through these quick checks and you might just find out that there is no problem at all.

Most businesses have a natural cycle which will differ between organisations, but can (and will) have major implications for your sales cycle – make sure your cash flow forecasts reflect this! Each business will be different, but common cycles would include changing consumer behaviour based on things such as seasons, school terms, holiday periods or national events. Something sun cream salesman and pumpkin farmers would be perfectly comfortable with.

Check Your Traffic Against Last Year

It takes just 30 seconds to view your traffic as a comparison against previous years. Even if your traffic volumes are much higher or lower in total, the trends from one month to another are likely to be similar and it is these, rather than absolute figures that we are concerned with.

For example, if you can see that between August and September of last year, your traffic dropped 20%, it’s a good bet that this year’s drop is perfectly natural and in fact, should have been expected. To check whether this is the case…

1)    Select a Date range of 6+ months leading up to the current day
2)    Click the compare to box and choose “previous year”
3)    View the data in the month view
4)    You will now see two lines, one for this year and one for the previous year. If they are both heading south, then you have found a likely seasonal variation.
5)    By clicking on the e-commerce button, and then transactions or revenue, you will see the same time periods but with different data metrics.

How you deal with this will be on a case by case basis. But using this method, the reverse scenario, (ie uncovering periods of high activity) should be the times where you need to be most active in your marketing efforts to maximise the periods of plenty.

Check For Drops in Branded Terms

Direct Traffic

If you do not have historical data, or if your first check is inconclusive, you can always segment your traffic into various types, in particular, your branded and direct traffic.

Direct traffic is people coming (unsurprisingly) directly to your site. This is will be through bookmarks or through the use of browser histories.  This sort of behaviour has nothing to do with variables such as your Search Rankings, your PPC spend or any other marketing channel. These are existing users (no-one bookmarks a site they’ve not already visited) that simply aren’t coming to your website this month.

1)    Choose a suitable period of time
2)    Select Sources > Direct

You will now clearly see the trend in this type of behaviour – if it’s down 20% month on month, it’s a fair bet that every other channel will be down a similar amount. If your existing customers aren’t buying your goods, then neither are the people who have never heard of you.

Branded Organic Traffic

But not everyone uses bookmarks – a lot of the time we all simply Google the name of the business we want and visit the top organic link. Again, this sort of behaviour is driven by existing users of the site and is almost equivalent to a direct visit. There are a lot of caveats with this particular method (eg changes to brand related PPC may affect it) but it still a very useful check that most analytics users will utilise often.

1)    Choose a suitable period of time
2)    Select Sources > Search > Organic
3)    Include only search terms for “Your Business Name”

You will now see the volume of people looking for your business coming directly to your site. This particular metric will usually be similarly up or down, in line with your direct traffic. But it will also get distorted by things such as PR, which can cause spikes in brand related searches.

If these figures are down month on month, it is a fair hypothesis that there is a drop in demand for your goods/service, unless it was the case that the previous period saw a spike based on one off events (eg a radio advert or press coverage).

Still Not Sure?

If your existing loyal customers are still arriving at your site, but traffic and sales are still down, then yes, you may have a problem. But you can still easily find out where this problem could be with a few more clicks. That will funnel you down to the right areas of concern, be it organic, paid, social or email channels so you can contact the right person.

1)    Choose the past 30 days (or week/fortnight as deemed appropriate)
2)    Select

If it’s none of the above is pinpointing your issues, then it could well be a technical issue with your site’s health or one of the services you rely on (payment gateways, servers etc). It’s still no reason to panic (yet) but unless you are proficiently technical (in which case you probably won’t be reading still) you will need to talk to your web developer or digital marketing manager for help.

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