• Of course you want greater ROI from paid search
• And of course you want to make more money from paid search and spend less time worrying about it, right?
• And how about an unfair advantage over your competitors?

First Rate has teamed up with SearchIgnite to deliver you exactly that.

As Australasia’s leader in Search & Performance we have been appointed as the exclusive licensee in New Zealand and Australia for the Search Engine Marketing technology offered by SearchIgnite™, one of the world’s leading providers of SEM bid management.

This arrangement provides First Rate with an advanced suite of tools to manage, optimise, track and report on your SEM campaigns. And when you combine this advanced technology with our talented team of Adwords qualified professionals, you’ll get even greater results.

The main benefits include significant operating efficiencies, more in-depth campaign reporting and improved digital media ROI.

The same technology that is currently used by more than 500 clients world-wide, optimising over 50 million keywords and delivering $6 billion in online transactions annually is now available to New Zealand advertisers.

Key Features of the SearchIgnite™ Technology

Here is a list of some of SearchIgnite’s best features:

Predictive and Automated Bid Optimization

Optimise your search spend using automated and predictive technology based on results:

• Optimise against a fixed budget to maximise revenue, conversions, profits or clicks
• Optimise against a business metric with no budget constraint to maximise results against a set CPA/CPS or ROAS target

Cross Channel Tracking and Attribution

Integrate data from multiple marketing channels (SEO, Display, Email, Partners, etc) to understand the whole picture and how each media channel is affected (assisted) by any others.  This goes beyond first click or last click tracking and leads to holistic campaign optimisation (not just search).

Ad Creative and Landing Page Testing and Optimisation

Easily identify, optimise and test both creative and landing pages to generate maximum conversions.

Cross Engine Efficiencies and Keyword Recommendations

Expand keyword lists and upload changes to multiple engines quickly and easily. This operating efficiency means more time is available for strategic decision making and allocating media to those channels that return the best ROI for your business.

Enhanced Reporting and Analysis

Easy to understand reporting tools complement existing web analytics packages such as Google Analytics with better channel-specific insights.

Don’t take our word for it

If you are investing  $10,000+ per month on paid search, you’ll not only see your results improve but you’ll get more sales at a lower cost just by using SearchIgnite™ technology.

There are plenty of SearchIgnite success stories such as E*TRADE who increased conversions by 299% as can be seen in the graph below. Please take 2 minutes to read the full E*TRADE case study.

Call us on 09 920 1740 or contact us via email to arrange for a no-obligation SearchIgnite presentation.

Related Posts:

• IgnitionOne Launches, Offering Industry-First Digital Marketing Suite

I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times this year have I been asked “how do I turn more visitors into customers, more orders and more conversions..?”

Strange that in a world where there’s much more pressure than ever before to be more efficient and costs have been cut in all areas of the business that this isn’t happening online.

I know of one large corporate who, in an attempt to cut costs got rid of the evening office cleaners and instead issued staff with cleaning products – but to the very best of my knowledge didn’t try to be more efficient by turning more of their visitors into customers. I know which of these things would have likely had a better impact on the bottom line – not to mention office hygiene!

In the last couple of years we’ve all heard more than enough about “doing more with less”. Usually that’s meant fewer staff, less marketing budget, less time and overall – fewer resources. And this was often accompanied by depressing projections, budget cuts, staffing cuts or if you’re really (un)lucky, management demands for the undeliverable within impossible timeframes! (No, Forsyth is not talking about First Rate here – Ed.)

But it doesn’t always have to be that way. You probably have a pretty “good” website for your organisation – it’s been signed off by the agency, the marketing department, finance and the CEO’s wife – and everyone who gets a say in it is pretty happy with the site.

And many of you have then gone on to solve the first major hurdle, the “we’ve spent all this money on our site but no-one comes to it. The internet doesn’t work for us” – problem through intelligent SEO and/or PPC strategies. And some of you are even looking at bounce rates and exit rates to better understand “where” and more importantly “why” visitors are exiting your website.

From this point there are 3 options to get more revenue from the website:

1. Expand your SEO efforts
2. Improve your PPC programme
3. Or – Start turning more of this traffic into customers. Do Conversion Optimization.

So what is Conversion Optimisation?

So what does it mean? Without being flippant the short version is that it means you find ways to get more customers without spending more on advertising. Or put another way, increasing sales for the same budget spend, along with experimental learning that will benefit all areas of your website.

Essentially it’s about testing different versions of the same page to see which one converts more visitors into sales or newsletter sign-ups or enquiries or whatever the various goals of your website are.

It’s about something as simple as looking at your conversion rate – let’s say it’s 2% – and understanding that if you can increase it to 3% that’s the same net effect as adding 50% to your online marketing budget.

In fact, as your traffic is driven by all your offline activity too, you could argue that it’s the same as adding 50% to your total marketing budget. And you don’t need expensive software or complex tools to do this, the nice folk at Google have created Website Optimizer which is completely free. Obviously, you need to know how to maximise the benefits this tool brings, and how to implement and configure it correctly. We do – and we’d love to help (contact us to have a chat).

Why Should You be Doing Conversion Optimisation?

So you can test different versions of pages again and again and get detailed reporting on what’s working and what’s not. Do you think your website is so unbelievably good that it converts the most amount of traffic it possibly could?

If not, you should be doing conversion optimization. If you honestly think your website is that good, think again.

Unless you’ve been doing conversion optimisation on every page that’s part of every conversion point or funnel then it isn’t that good. I know that whoever built it and designed it probably told you it was, but chances are that it’s not I’m afraid.

To get an idea of how fickle conversion rates can be, take a look at this, one of my favourites for real-life testing examples. It’s amazing to see which variants get the best conversion rates and if you can guess the winner 100% of the time then let me know!

It’s easier to turn more traffic into visitors than to buy more traffic. It’s more efficient, it’s cheaper and frankly it’s just plain sensible.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether your marketing department like your website or not, and it doesn’t matter how clever your creative agency is, or how well the site design matches the CEO’s curtains. Instead it’s about ensuring that visitors get everything they need from your site – and that as many as possible convert to customers.

Conversion Design – How to Get Started

The staff in your call centre know what your customers want, your sales people and account managers do too – they talk to your customers and potential customers more than anyone. But were they involved in the website design?

Or let’s turn the question around: Did the people who designed your site ever go out and try to sell your product/service? If they didn’t, then how did they know what the potential customer objections are or indeed what your customers or prospects want?

Your customers are a particular group of people with a particular requirement, they’re not “everybody” and understanding them is an important step in getting more out of your website. This is one of the first steps in starting the conversion optimisation process.

Getting more customers without spending more on advertising is not an instant fix but it has the potential to make a huge difference to your business. If you want to find out more about this, drop me a line (forsyth @ firstrate.co.nz).

Related Posts:

• No related posts (yet).

The time it takes to load a page has always had a big impact on how visitors navigate around your website, and more crucially, how long they stay on your website. 2010 will be a turning point for your website if it loads slowly.

Visitors won’t endure slow loading pages anymore

In 2006, Akamai commissioned Jupiter Research who interviewed over 1,000 internet users and produced a report entitled “Customer Reaction to a Poor Online Shopping Experience“. The main takeaway from the report was that the average time a visitor would be prepared to wait for a website to load was 4 seconds – any longer than that, would see potential customers abandoning the website and going elsewhere.

Akamai again commissioned a report which was published in September 2009 with the objectives of understanding how customer expectations to online shopping have evolved.  The results were astounding – the average time a user would be prepared to wait in 2009, has halved to only 2 seconds!

Source: Every Second Counts: How Website Performance Impacts Shopper Behaviour – www.getelastic.com

Wow – 2 Seconds! Does your Homepage load in 2 seconds?

The respondents in the Akamai Report stated that website load time is second only to high prices on a customer’s list of pet hates.

Have you spent all that time and money making your E-Commerce website look as exciting as possible, featuring products with competitive pricing on a website that has been conversion optimised, only to find out that your customers are leaving without buying because you haven’t put the time into making your page load any quicker…?

It has been proven that you can increase your conversion rates and decrease your bounce rate simply by moving all your javascript externally, building your website with CSS, Gzipping, removing whitespace and utilising low latency server architecture. Why not fix this today?

Page Speed as a factor for Organic Search Engine Rankings?

This is where page speed will get interesting in 2010!

Yahoo recently filed a patent that explores the ways a search engine considers the time it takes pages to render, for example how quickly that page is loaded directly after clicking on a natural listing from a search engine. Basically they’re hinting towards the fact that those sites that are the quickest to load will get a boost in the organic rankings.

Since that patent was launched, Matt Cutts (Google’s head of Web Spam) has been interviewed and he said that Page Speed will be a part of the Google algorithm (if it’s not already). We have known for a while that Page Speed has been a part of Quality Score in Adwords, and we should start to see it making a difference when Caffeine starts to go live on the rest of Google’s data centres in early 2010.

Here’s what Matt had to say:

Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Just this morning, Google blogged about released an experimental tool in Google Webmaster Tools called Site Performance. It takes the aggregated data from Google Toolbar regarding actual page load times, example pages, and more interestingly how your site compares to other sites. Although it’s still in labs, it is an interesting development and indicates where SEO is moving towards.

Finally, Microsoft’s Patrick Harris mentions Page Speed as the most important on-page factor to focus on for SEO in the recent webcast “Search Engines: War Stories from the World Tour” (Dec 1 webcast, 6:50 in the video).

As we can see, in more ways that one, the speed at which your website loads should be a major concern to you in the next decade…

How can you improve your Page Speed?

Other than the Google’s new Site Performance feature in Webmaster Tools, there are plenty of tools available to help you monitor and improve your page load speed:

www.WebPageTest.org

WebPageTest is an online tool to show you what parts of your site take the time to download. It provides a useful waterfall feature to give you a visual pinpoint as to exactly where the bottlenecks are.

Google Page Speed

Google have released their Page Speed Firefox plugin (also need to install Firebug, but both tools are extremely useful). This is similar to WebPageTest but you need Firefox and Firebug to be able to use it. It also provides a useful timeline of how your page renders.

Google Closure

An interesting add-on to Google Page Speed is called Google Closure. This plugin can compile all your Javascript into compact, high performance code. It basically checks and optimises your code which helps to make code that is cleaner and easier to maintain.

Related Posts:

• Using a Custom Google Analytics Configuration to Understand Online Marketing Performance
• Google to Update Ad Quality Scoring
• How Google can make – or break – your company

So what does it take to win the SEM war against your competition? Extensive keywords lists? Award winning creative? Clairvoyant bid management system?

Keyword lists, creative and bidding technology are all fairly well understood and relatively easy to deploy. So, if this is the case, what is to stop your SEM strategy deteriorating into a bidding war against your competitors where the choice is to either buy traffic at a level that is not profitable or have your ad pushed down into obscurity?

Of course you need to develop best practice keyword lists and creative and, where appropriate, deploy technology to assist in the creative, ad management and bidding processes. However you will only win the SEM war if you can gain a competitive advantage over your competition.

Your competitive advantage in SEM comes down to two key factors often over looked by advertisers, traditional agencies and technology driven SEMs. The two key factors are Quality Score and Site Conversion.

Let’s examine each of these factors in turn:

Quality Score

Originally, paid search engines offered a simple model where the highest bidder was ranked above all others. Google improved on this model where the popularity of an ad was also taken into account, so an ad with a high click through rate (CTR) could rank above a less popular ad even though it bid a lower maximum cost per click (CPC). Google has further developed this Quality Score over the last few years to take into account a range of other factors including; click through rate (CTR), relevancy, landing page quality and geography. Although search engines also use similar quality methodologies, and although not as sophisticated as Google’s system, the basic principals are still the same.

The CTR of individual keywords, your ads, the individual display URL and your whole account are all taken into account and, when placing ads on the content network, the CTR on similar sites is also taken into account.

Google even checks the popularity of your ad based on location and calculates the quality score for each individual executing a query. Google search, network search and content network sites also all generate different Quality Scores based on your performance on each channel.

The quality of landing pages is also taken into account and can have a big impact on your minimum Page 1 bid threshold set by Google. Key factors include page load time and page content.

Relevancy of individual keywords to the rest of the ad group and to the actual keyword query are important factors, but Google also checks the relevancy of your ad copy to the user’s query.

How Placement and CPC is Calculated.

So, in general terms, the Ad Rank = (CPC x Quality Score). The advertiser with the higher Ad Rank is placed first. They then have to pay 1 cent more than their competitor’s Ad Rank divided by their quality score.

The example above is extreme but it does illustrate the importance of taking into account Quality Score when grouping keywords, writing copy and designing landing pages. Your search marketing consultant should have a deep appreciation of Quality Score and should be devising campaigns that take this into account. They should also be running reports to identify any ad groups or keywords that appear to have Quality Score issues.

Site Conversion

The most effective way to gain a competitive advantage is to operate a site that has a higher conversion rate than your competitors, and to ideally make more margin per lead or sale as well. These conversion factors will enable you to bid more than your competitors while still making a sizable profit. You will find that competitors come and go launching aggressive, but ill conceived, campaigns that ultimately burn out as the poor ROI becomes clear.

Site conversion is a lot more that a flash landing page and a high initial conversion rate. There are a range of subtle factors that all need to be addressed to ensure that your online business truly has a comprehensive commercial advantage when it comes to bidding for keywords. These factors include:

1. Targeting
2. Pre-Qualification
3. Bounce
4. Site Conversion
5. Incremental Conversion
6. Margin
7. Word of Mouth

We will review each in turn to understand how it plays its part in site conversation and how it relates to your paid search campaign.

Different keywords, sites and locations will all offer different rates of conversion based on how targeted the audience is to your core offering. It is therefore important to develop a detailed understanding of what works and what does not. Using a site stats package like Google Analytics, which has been configured to track conversions from all traffic sources, is an ideal way to develop this knowledge. This can then be applied to your search campaign.

Most search campaigns are focussed on increasing CTR to improve Quality Score and overall traffic generation; however it is also important to only pay for traffic that is likely to convert. To achieve this, ad creative needs to pre-qualify searchers by using the limited available text to communicate the offering and who it is suitable for, in as much detail as possible. By turning people away before they even click will increase overall conversion rates and will minimise cost per click fees.

The first conversion barrier to overcome is the “bounce”: visitors who click on an ad and then hit the back button when they do not like what they see. Minimising bounce rates comes down to the page load time and the relevancy of the content of the page to the users query. This often means that keywords, or groups of keywords, need to be linked to ‘deep’ pages within the site that cover the topics specifically. However simply being ‘technically’ relevant to the users query is not enough – the page must communicate that it is relevant through design and clear copy. As an extensive search campaign could link to hundreds or thousands of pages on a site, specialist landing page technology, design and consulting expertise is required.

The main challenge once a user has ‘stuck’ to the site (not bounced) is to persuade them to take the desired action. Landing page design and conversion process optimisation is a project in itself and it is vital that all the landing pages follow landing page conversion best practice. This should then be followed through as the user starts and finally completes the conversion process. In addition to an experienced internet marketing consultant’s expertise, there is also a range of landing page optimisation tools that allow pages to be tweaked and evaluated quickly in order to find the best configuration.

However, many sites can’t close the deal on the first visit and so a truly effective site offers a range of conversion paths that can spread over multiple user sessions. It can take days or even weeks to convert a prospect, but ultimately this more holistic view to conversion produces a site and campaign that generates more business value per click than other less sophisticated models. Users should be encouraged to download (via email) documents that will support their research and evaluation process. Users should also be prompted to register to receive personalised and relevant information from your company. This allows your conversation with the prospect to continue after the first visit, with the goal of ultimately driving them back to the site to take the final step in the conversion process.

As previously discussed, your search engine marketing consultant should also understand how your business makes money and which products or services offer the best margins or business value. By fully understanding what makes your business tick, search campaigns can be devised to push these high margin products and to minimise exposure by controlling marketing costs for less profitable products. Lifetime value and up-selling potential further increases the complexity of your search marketing strategy.

Finally, the best source of leads and revenue is not through your search campaign but is achieved by converting the customers you do get through search into repeat customers and advocates, spreading the word about your site and offering to others. Online the most effective way to build a brand is through happy site users and customers.

As we can see gaining a competitive advantage in paid search is a combination of understanding how the paid search placement and payment model works, and by implementing the fundamentals of online business best practice.

First Rate has built a team of internet marketing consultants who understand the search engines and how to use technology, campaign strategy and site design to allow you to gain a competitive advantage and drive leadership in your category online.

Related Posts:

• Why SEO & PPC?
• SEO is Still the Most Effective Online Marketing Tactic