Marketing on the web, in some ways, is still like the Wild West.  It has frontiers and exciting opportunities for profit, labor saving tools, reliable experts, well-intended but inept operators, deadbeats and time wasters, a growing number of hucksters and scammers, and business perils.  There are enough useful features and moving parts to overwhelm anyone who is not actively involved in web marketing — even seasoned traditional marketers.   From our perspective, we have two bits of advice:

1-Have an overall web marketing plan and a person “driving” who understands the components and sequence of how things work together.  We wrote about this in our May 15 blog and won’t repeat it here.

2-For easier understanding, break the big pieces down into smaller parts or steps. We will take six topics as examples of how to reduce web marketing topics into smaller pieces.   For simplicity and brevity, we’ll only divide each topic into only two parts, rather than all the possibilities for further divisions. In internet marketing, some topics have more than one name. One of the main topics, pay-per-click advertising, has more than ten ways to describe it.

What Do You Need From the the Internet, leads or sales?

• Leads: Online inquiries or phone calls for a transaction that will happen later. Examples are complex sales for business services or products,  professional services delivered in an office, services for your home or business.
• Ecommerce: The sales transaction for a product or service that takes place online and is usually paid by a credit card, PayPal, etc.

Your Service Area or Scope

• National: You want business from all over the country, and searchers may not use city names (or other “geodescriptors”) while searching for your product or service.
• Local: Your customers are likely to be from nearby because they come to you or you go to them.  Even so, some of your customer s will not include the name of your city or geographical area in their search.

Types of Web Traffic Available

• Natural (Organic) Traffic: Traffic your website gets without paying the search engines incrementally for it. Examples: Being found by search engines, direct links, and Google Maps.  You can pay, however, to have an expert take action to or for your website that causes you to be found through natural/organic processes.
• Paid Traffic: Online advertising such as that from Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN. Some other names for this are PPC, Pay per Click, Paid Search, etc.

Search Results Page

• Natural/Organic Results: The part of the page in the left /center.
• Ads or Sponsored Links: Found above, to the right of (in a column), and in some engines,  below natural/organic search results.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

• On-Page: Action taken to or on your website to help it gets found through natural search. Examples: adding or changing the content such as meta-tags or page names, keyword rich text, or adding a site map.
• Off-Page: Action taken somewhere other than on your website to be more visible to or ranked higher by the search engines.  Examples include: directory listings, articles written and submitted elsewhere that reference your website.  Links from other websites to your website (called backlinks) also fall into the off-page category.

Pay Per Click/ PPC

• Search Mode: Your potential customer enters a search (query) into a box and clicks “Send”.
• Content/Contextual Mode: Your potential customer is reading something and sees an ad. He/she may be “looking” but they did not just enter a query and hit the “send” button like in search mode.

We hope you find our systematic examples useful to you.  We will write more about each topic and its subdivisions in future posts. If you have feedback or suggestions for future topics, please share them or send us an email.

As we wrote in our May 2008 blog post, there are some very good reasons and best practices for having your company name as keywords to trigger search engine PPC ads.  However,  there are also some potential “gotchas” that online advertisers and buyer of leads should be aware of.  Essentially, you want to make sure your company is making the most of these tactics, but not unknowingly paying for search traffic on your company name, especially at a premium price or mixed in with new customer acquisition reports.

Internet Search Engines - Used Like Telephone White Pages

For some businesses, a significant number of online searches are for the company’s name.  Basically, these searchers use Internet search engines like the white pages of the phone book.  Search marketers call these “recovery” searches (as opposed to “discovery” or “functional” searches where potential customers search for features or benefits of a product or service).  For well-established local companies, we’ve seen recovery searches run as high as 20% or more of the total monthly phone calls or online inquiries.

Example from a Local Search Company

A few weeks ago, while doing research for an upcoming new client of ours, we noticed a tactic being used by a company we’ll describe as “a major provider of local search”.  To clarify this example, we’ll call the local search company the “provider” and their client the “advertiser”. As part of the advertising program, the provider set up a profile type web page for one of the advertiser’s well-established locations.  (Each city’s location of this advertiser had different names that reflect local home services companies they had acquired).

The provider optimized the advertiser’s profile page to be found for the advertiser’s specific location name in natural search results. The result: the provider’s web page came in above the advertiser’s own corporate website in natural search results. The provider also used the company’s name as keywords to trigger text ads.  We find this situation to be significant for the following reasons:

1. If the provider’s profile page had not been there, any potential customer would have found the advertiser’s own page in natural results anyway. The company name was unique with no common keywords in it.
2. The provider’s directory page did not get first page results for functional searches like it did for recovery searches in natural results. (If it had, its presence would have been easier to understand or justify.)
3. In their reporting of results, the provider co-mingled the results (phone calls or online leads) from their profile page in natural results with those from ad traffic.
4. The provider does not supply the advertiser with a breakdown of how many leads (from either ads or natural results) come from correctly spelled recovery searches of the advertiser’s name vs. actual new clients acquired from discovery or functional searches.
5. The example above involves advertisers paying for traffic, but a similar situation occurs when a company is paying by the lead. If you hire a lead generation company to provide customer leads, you should set guidelines and specify reports that clarify if or how much you are paying for leads gathered on your company name.

If you have more examples of useful and not-so-good tactics in this topic, please post them. If you need more clarification, post your question or give us a call.

In explaining website marketing and advertising, we often refer to the search engine results page as being like a split-screen television. The natural , organic results appear in the left/center of the page, and the ad results (called “Sponsored Links” in Google AdWords) display on top center and down the right side column.  While both results are triggered simultaneously by the same search, the mechanisms behind the two types of results have many differences.

For years there has been a third option - other than search engine ads and SEO - that was unique to Yahoo. Recently, Yahoo made an announcement that marks the end to this obscure, but long standing exception to the two better known categories. This category has gone by several names over the years, but the most common is Paid Inclusion. More recent names include Search Submit Basic and Search Submit Pro.  Basically, this program is (soon to be “was”) a hybrid of PPC and SEO.  Traffic from this program was paid for incrementally, like pay-per-click ads. However the cost per click is a flat rate, not a bid system, and the results are mixed in with the natural results in the center of the page.

For more info on this topic, below are links to some related blogs, one on Search Engine Land plus a thorough one from TheSearchAgents.com on the history of Paid Inclusion.

Looking toward the future, we will take this opportunity to encourage readers to always work from a plan and require clarity from their providers of search marketing and advertising, whether they are internal or external.  To us, clarity includes a strategic web marketing plan that will meet client goals and addresses these general elements:

• What tasks or tactics need to be done and why
• The benefits or returns to be expected from those tasks
• The correct sequence, proportions, and time line in which the tasks should be done
• Who will deliver the tasks, and what are their credentials
• The portion of the overall marketing/advertising budget to be allocated for the chosen tactics
• How the results will be measured
• Who is responsible for coordinating the overall project of web marketing

Much too often, we see companies attempt to use one tactic, such as SEO or pay-per-click advertising, as a one-time , isolated event.  In search marketing, taking “seat of the pants” action without planning can miss many of the basic guidelines above. For these reasons, we encourage viewing of web marketing and advertising as a process with interrelated parts. The components of that plan can (and in fact, usually are)  delivered from more than one source, including those inside and outside your company.

Please share your thoughts and experiences.

Have you recently calculated the marketing or advertising cost of generating an incoming telephone lead or purchase? If so, were you surprised? This post explains tracking phone numbers and recording of incoming calls. The three main benefits of call tracking are: 1-to determine the source of business, 2- to monitor lead quality, and 3- to gauge your team’s effectiveness of handling the call. We find these tools particular useful for two categories of businesses: a- appointment based businesses; and b- businesses that have phone representatives answering incoming calls.

Asking a caller how they learned about your company is often not reliable

There are two reasons: 1-Phone representatives often do not remember to do it for every call, especially when the next caller is holding. 2- Even if asked, many customers do not know the difference between an Internet search ad and an organic search result. The solution: tracking phone numbers that forward to your main telephone number.

How tracking telephone numbers work

Tracking numbers forward to the phone number you designate. During the forwarding process, tracking phone technology gathers useful marketing data. Tracking numbers come in both toll-free and local numbers that look similar to your phone number. With most tracking numbers, you have the option to record the conversation. Depending on the requirements of each state, one or more parties must be advised of the recording via an outgoing message.

Tracking phone numbers have long been used by some types of businesses, such as automobile dealers and in print advertising.  They can also be coded or substituted dynamically into your website for tracking calls from multiple sources.

Clients need to know what happens to a tracking number when it is no longer actively used for advertising. It is useful to ask if the tracking number provider you are considering allows you the option to “port over” a phone number you have used. This simply means that you can “move” the tracking number to anther phone service provider.

Tracking incoming calls to revenue

Your goal is more business and profits, not just more phone calls, right?  Then you must understand the source and quality of incoming calls and how effectively your company is handling them.  It’s that simple. Tracking calls combined with improved internal handling allows you to spend less to get the new customers and leads you need and at the time you need them.  There are several ways to correlate incoming call data to customer acquisition and purchases. If the number of transactions is not too many, the comparison can be done manually with spreadsheets. If your business has many transactions monthly, you might need to aggregate leads into a lead management system or CRM. Having one system in which leads from all sources of conversions, such as online leads and off-line phone calls from your website, are collected has several time-saving advantages.

We look forward to your comments and questions.

In our experience with search engine advertising, one of its unique aspects is that, in addition to directly generating online sales or leads, its robust settings provide an excellent tool for business research and planning. In the creation and management of search engine ads, the campaigns, ad groups, and more granular settings gather a great deal of useful data.  This is particularly true for Google AdWords.  When specifically set up for testing, the potential is a marketer’s dream.  For example, we control the following primary variables:

• Who sees the ad (by IP address and the search terms they use)
• What URL, ad message, or offer they initially respond to in the text ad (with the option to drive equal amounts of traffic  for A/B testing)
• What landing page content or secondary offer they view and respond to by converting

For this article, perhaps the best way to describe the potential of these is through scenarios:

Gauging interest in a new product, line extension, or service
If your B2B or B2C company is considering a new product or service, but is unsure of the demand in a specific geographical territory, search engine ads can function as a real-time focus group.  You can post an article, white paper, online questionnaire, survey, or any useful resource on your website that works as an interim/substitute conversion.  The response is a useful indicator of how the proposed product or service will do.  For example, if there is low search volume online, the new effort will likely require a lot of education to generate online demand.   As stated earlier, the click through response can be tested on different offers and messages in text ads.  Finally, the onsite offer or content can be tested, provided there is enough time and search data available.  This data can be compared to deeper conversion data from a known category to help project how the new product or service would impact your business.

Service businesses – considering changing or expanding territories or locations
We have a corporate client whose regional locations provide services to homeowners.  When gas prices rose rapidly, they wanted to consider the benefits and impact on their business of temporarily reducing the geographical territory in which they advertise for new customers.  The goal was to reduce the miles driven, which would save fuel costs and increase the amount of time technicians were performing billable services.  By testing with different custom geotargeting, and projecting the new search and click through data with their previous conversion rates, we were able to accurately estimate how many fewer searches (thus appointments, jobs, and revenue) they would receive if they reduced their service area being advertised.  The same testing process would also work if an expansion in territory is being considered.

Testing messaging, offers or a new domain name
If a company is considering rebranding, creating a new tag line, or microsite, text ads can be used to test the initial response to the proposed change.  Changing and testing one variable with equal amounts of traffic is a simple way to quantify which version potential customers like.  Since impression and click data are initial indicators of interest, to project profitability and overall success, there should be additional tests to see which variables on the landing page get higher conversion rates also.

Retail business – inventory planning, pricing, and more
For businesses that are subject to fads or trends, such as the retail bicycle industry, search data can be used to predict future business activity and needs. For example, we can monitor search/impression data by category, such as generic searches for road bikes and compare it with similar searches for mountain bikes. If a sustained shift in the ratio of searches in the two categories occurs, that could predict the number of upcoming sales of units for first time buyers by category. This data could be used to help with ordering, managing inventory, pricing, merchandising, and more.

The scenarios above are simplified for the amount of space available in this post. In the same way the process works for a retailer, it could be equally beneficial to a car manufacturer as a leading indicator for planning their production.

Why search engine advertising data works as a research tool
Because the data being gathered is actual consumer or end user search behavior, it is free of many of the biases inherent in focus groups or questionnaires.  Why? In situations where participants know they are being observed or questioned, many times their answers are skewed.

Because we control so many elements, Google AdWords allows testing that would be more difficult or impossible with natural, more random traffic to a website.    Many settings, such as the use of negative keyword filters and conversion tracking tools help us dial in the traffic to make Google AdWords a very effective research tool.

I first got into search engine marketing and advertising as an employee for a corporate team building consulting company.  There, we observed a predictable pattern on which teams were more successful in team building scenarios and back at their jobs.

Teams that take time to make a plan before taking action consistently perform better than those who do not.

The same is true for marketing on the web. Having a well thought out plan and executing it effectively is more likely to lead your company to success than trial and error.  As advertising and marketing options become more numerous and fractured, a website owner must have a plan to avoid expensive mistakes. The plan should include clear objective(s), strategies, tactics, timelines and dedicated budget.  The creation of the plan should be relatively low in cost and high in returns.  Assuming that one person will not be likely able to execute all aspects of the plan, it should include the best person, skill sets, or vendor to implement each action point.

Below are five examples of money-wasting blunders that often result from lack of planning:

1. Having a website built (or rebuilt) without including features needed for internet marketing or advertising The structure of the site can cause it to not be found by the search engines or be unsuitable for receiving prospective customers from search engine ads. A website can look good and/or provide lots of content, but still not get traffic or convert traffic into customers.
2. Paying for SEO before using search engine ads (aka PPC, pay-per-click)  to learn about your website effectiveness at conversions and what works in your geographic area. You should have PPC done first, and then consider SEO.
3. Signing contracts for marketing or advertising that is not measurable.
4. Allocating the wrong % of your marketing budget to online efforts.
5. Buying online advertising bundled with other advertising that may not be needed.

We look forward to reading about your experiences and comments.

Many business owners are surprised to learn that a website can look good, contain many pages of original content, and still not be found by the search engines. Or even when it gets traffic, the same site may not be effective at converting visitors from natural or pay per click traffic to customers.   Depending on the category, more than half the visitors “bounce off” the average website. This means they exited the landing page without going deeper or stayed less than a prescribed amount of time, usually 30 seconds for most web analytics programs.  Unless the customer is looking for a telephone number quickly, this means they likely did not “convert” or take the action intended.

The Art and Science of Effective Websites
A website is a prime example of art and science.  It takes many skills to produce an effective website, and it is not easy to find web design individuals or firms that can produce an effective site affordably.  If you rely on one individual, chances are they will come from either a design background or technical background.  Rarely does one individual have the skills to cover all bases well. Some web builders will partner with others who fill gaps in their skill set or work preferences.

Below we will list some aspects of a good overall website & marketing plan.

• Website look and feel that satisfies the site owner and appeals to/quickly engages the target audience
• Stand six feet away from an average computer screen.  Can you tell what your website is about? You should be able to.
• Site structure and content that can be found by search engines (mostly html, limited flash, etc.)
• Provisions for your potential future business needs and uses:  ecommerce, databases, etc.
• Built on a standard platform, so any webmaster can modify the site later
• Reliable hosting account that you have login access to for future needs
• Control of your domain name registrar login info
• Usability and conversion efficiency (number of pages, length of pages, ease of use, what is visible above the fold, length of forms, placement of phone numbers,  etc.)
• Best practices followed for optimization for natural search, aka SEO. This consists of two elements: “on page” elements such as the way the site is built, meta tags, text content of main pages, attached blog, etc; and “off-page” elements such as news releases and other actions that link back to your website.
• Blog attached to inform/engage customers and provide original, fresh content for search engines
• Best practices followed for PPC advertising, conversion tracking, and phone number substitution
• Simple content management system (CMS) so it is easy for you to make changes to text or content yourself instead of having to contact your webmaster
• Regular backup plan for the website

We welcome your comments.

It takes more than an attractive website with a good content to be efficient at converting web visitors to customers.  Lately we are seeing clients put more focus into conversions from their website.

For our purpose, a conversion is defined as the desired action we want the customer who is visiting the website to take. Conversions can be online, such as buying a product on the website, or making an appointment or reservation online. These are relatively simple to track, especially if the website was built with this type of tracking in mind.  When the desired action is completed online, we can track each conversion back to the keyword the customer searched with and the ad they responded to before making the purchase.

Conversions can be offline also
Conversions can also be offline, such as a phone call or purchase at a physical location.  By the use of tracking telephone numbers or coupons, we can separate and count conversions by source. An example would be counting the number of incoming calls that came from search engine ads (as opposed to calls resulting from natural traffic to the website).

Conversions that involve more than one step
For purchases involving several steps, such as those of many business-to- business transactions, we can track the cost of producing a lead, either online or from incoming phone calls.  Dividing the number of leads into the monthly budget gives the “front end” cost per conversion.  For these websites that do not involve online purchases, leads can be tracked through to the end of the purchase.  To determine the return on investment (ROI) businesses can track the leads generated to sales in several ways. These can include correlation of leads with the list of new customers during a specific period of time. Other companies send leads to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system such as Sales Force which track them by source. The later conversion actions go by several names, including “secondary conversions” or “back end conversions”.

Before going further, we should describe what we mean by local businesses.  Some have asked us, “isn’t every business local to some place?”  The answer is yes, however, for this discussion, a local business sells products or services to customers or clients in their local geographic area. In contrast, an e-commerce site that sells products to customers statewide or nationwide does not fit the definition of a local business.

To help clarify the search marketing and advertising options available to local businesses we’ll divide them into two categories: 1) partially automated search packages and 2) fully customized search marketing services. TopSide offers both options, and we are writing about them candidly from our own experience.

Partially Automated Local Search Marketing Packages
This search marketing service typically combines a web page or microsite with advertising traffic from multiple search engines for one fixed, monthly price.  Depending on the provider, there could be other sources of web traffic, ranging from natural search traffic to contextual ads included in the package.  Local search packages typically have a low cost of entry (starting at a few hundred dollars per month) and do not provide the option for lots of ongoing changes to the overall search program.

Since many packages include a web page or microsite, this is the choice for businesses that:

• Don’t yet have a website
• Have problems with their current website such as poor conversion of web traffic to buyers
• Want or need an additional online presence

The type of features that typically are not available in the packages  include frequent changes in monthly ad budget, different geotargeting or changes in the geographic territory of who can view the ads, testing or changing landing pages, etc. The packages cost less primarily because there is less hands-on customization required in the building and ongoing optimization of the settings. The automation allows features that are otherwise not affordable to a local business.

We won’t mention any companies by name, but one issue to beware of is the bundling of offline advertising  you have already done too much of (or otherwise don’t want) with the online search marketing that nearly every local business currently needs.

Customized Search Marketing
In contrast to the partially automated package above, customized search marketing is suited to businesses that need lots of changes and manual attention to the settings that control their ads. Examples of these changes include regular changes to the monthly ad budget (up or down), changes in the geographic location in which ads can be seen (by IP address), changes or testing of landing pages, etc.  Although bid management tools may be used to reduce some routine manual actions, custom services require a great deal more hands-on time to build and maintain.

How to Compare Local Advertising Options
If the criteria listed above do not provide you with sufficient direction on which type of search program is right for your business, then comparing the actual cost or estimates of the total cost per lead or sale is the best first step. Be sure to count online leads and incoming phone calls. Cost per lead (and of course, the percentage of those leads that covert to paying customers) is a way to measure or compare any direct marketing effort.  If you have decided that a local search package is for you, then use total cost per lead to compare one provider of local packages with another. We often see local business owners put too much focus on the process details and not enough on this simple but critical measure of results.

In their print version, November 29th-December 5th issue – page 65, The Economist ran an article on online advertising.  The article predicts that online ads “will be relatively unscathed in the downturn”.   We have seen this theme echoed elsewhere recently. Although we were glad to read it from such an esteemed source, as search marketers this prediction was not really a surprise to us.

In the article, the writer pointed out good reasoning for their prediction, and we found one observation in particular worth our follow up.  Midway through their article, they wrote:

“All this makes spending on advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated as a cost of sales.”

Thinking there would be some grist for the mill here, we asked an accountant about the implications of this statement.  As it sounds to us, the writer’s description applies to business strategy, a bottom line accountant’s way of thinking about search advertising, rather than which general ledger code to use for it.

The Difference in Branding and Direct Response Search Advertising
As an example, sponsorship of a golf tournament is nearly impossible to tie to incremental sales of a car company’s product or service.  During a predicted cash shortage, sponsorships and branding attempts are more likely to get nixed.  Conversely, the results of search advertising for a website can be highly targeted, both geographically and by topic.  For smaller businesses, there are levels of effectiveness within direct response efforts. Unlike a year-long contract in a printed phone directory with declining use, search ads tend to be more flexible and can be customized in ways that respond to business situations as they change.  As we have seen lately with gasoline prices, financial issues, and bailouts of epic proportions, business circumstances certainly can change quickly.

Click based actions on a web page can be designated as a “conversion” and measured, giving online ads an  advantage during a weak economy.  This measurement occurs in close to real time. For ecommerce, the return on investment (ROI) can be tracked to the keyword level.  Additionally, any online conversion can be traced back to the keyword that triggered the conversion. For local businesses (or any business that relies on incoming telephone calls) we can layer in the tracking of incoming calls by source.  For complex sales or business leads, the ROI from all conversions is usually one or more steps removed from the original click, but still can be quantified.

During a downturn, some businesses go away and the survivors gain market share.  Those who have enough cash flow to use smarter tools, such as measurable ways to gain new customers, will survive and thrive. At TopSide Media, we talk about these attributes daily around the water cooler and with clients. It is good to see them written about in layman’s terms, and we tip our Stetsons to The Economist for the well written article.