One of the most difficult things for business owners to get a handle on is the true perspective of the needs and desires of their clients or customers. Because we spend so much time working on, perfecting and promoting our products or services – over time we get caught up in how awesome our product is rather than how awesome the client will be once he’s used it.Continue Reading
Search volume, click volume, impressions, number of calls – whatever it is they watch it like a hawk and sadly make a lot of decisions based on it alone.
I think it comes from the common idea that marketing is a numbers game – so if you want more sales, you simply pump up the volume of impressions, clicks, calls, etc. and eventually a certain number of conversions will take place.
While that may be true to a certain extent, a few highly qualified, highly interested leads are way more valuable than thousands of unqualified leads that you have to wade through over and over until you find the one that may be in them.
It makes you think whoever is making your phone ring is doing a good job. It also gives you hope because if there is a high volume someone has to convert soon.
But the problem is, while it is an important metric, it is the wrong metric to measure to determine the success of any campaign.Continue Reading
Pay Per Click is probably the most valuable and effective marketing medium in the history of the world. But it can be extremely costly if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Google has what my friend Perry Marshall calls “a stupidity tax” which means that every way that you misunderstand your customer and their intent costs you money – every way in which you misuse Google’s tools, interface or advertising network costs you money.
Google is not out there to save you money, they’re not your friend, instead, they’re out there to give the searcher the best, most relevant information possible. That means that if you don’t understand your customer Adwords will cost you more and more money until you just go away. Yes, go away. That’s exactly what Google is trying to do. Google is designed to weed out the junk. Period.
For years it was near impossible to get on the phone with someone at Google about your Adwords account. Only a few advertisers had access to a Google rep. I had one early on and quickly discovered that they were quick to dispense bad advice – always relying on the system’s default settings to figure things out for you. Bad idea.
Letting Google take care of the details for you, is like paying for valet parking when there’s a space for 50 cents across the street.
The way to compete in Adwords is to know how to avoid the pitfalls that others don’t. If it costs you less to obtain a customer, a sale, or a conversion – and it costs your competitors more, you’ll be able to outlast them – doing more for less, while at the same time it costs them increasingly more.
The chart above is an example of a client campaign that had thousands of keywords lumped together in one campaign when I took it over. After months of sifting, sorting, testing, and optimizing you can see where the cost per conversion drops dramatically while at the same time the conversions jump up at the same rate.
This kind of optimization shift in cost and conversions enabled the client to reach further into the market for the same cost. The effect on the competitor is the reverse – it costs him more to compete in the same space.
This chart (above) shows two things. First, similar to the first chart the costs and conversion rate invert – then after months of consistent performance there is a huge dip, the conversion rate slowly drops, then suddenly at the end the two invert again. This is an example of the client relying on Google’s suggested settings. Starting at the dip.
This chart shows another variation of the same client. The beginning of the chart you see low conversions and low cost per conversion. Then after campaign optimization you see the numbers again invert, the cost dropping to almost nothing while the conversions consistently rise (costs staying the same.) Then at the end, you see the hard inversion – cost per conversion spike astronomically, while the conversions plummet to almost zero as the client adjusted Adwords settings to Google’s suggested values.
The longer you’re in the middle of it all, the sooner you’ll get kind of a pulse on your competitors. It’s easy to see who’s paying too much because the rank #1 at the first of the month, then disappear until the beginning of the next. The bottom line, if you don’t know what you’re doing, the system is designed to make you learn or go away.
I’ve managed more than $1M per year in pay-per-click advertising over my career.
I’ve seen the Adwords platform start out as simple as a 1970 Chevy truck and grow to the complexity it has now – the complexity of a space shuttle. It used to be that you could just jump in and “do” AdWords. Not anymore. Adwords is so complex, entire businesses are built around the mastery of just parts of what it does.
Because 99% of the time they’ve never learned Google AdWords by having to support a profitable business by spending their own money. And if they haven’t done that, they haven’t learned AdWords.
I find it’s almost impossible for a person to become a great marketer learning entirely on someone else’s dime. Just like it’s almost impossible for a person to become a great salesman working on straight salary with no commission.
Unlimited traffic? It sounds like a pipe dream or only a theoretical concept, but in fact, it is not only an actual possibility – it will always happen in any online market when someone does a few simple things just a little better than their competition.
When it comes to traffic, 90% of advertisers fighting over scraps – the traffic left over after the 10% takes their share. This is why most Google AdWords management companies measure their success by reducing the average cost per click and cost per conversion for their clients month after month.
When you’re on the 90% side of things, you have to worry endlessly about reducing cost per click, cost per conversion, and every way possible to take as much money out of the process as possible.
But, when you’re on the 10% side of things, your goal is to be able to afford to spend more than your competitors and put as much back into the process as possible.
I know this sounds bass-ackwards, and even blasphemous to a lot of ad management companies – but keep with me, and I’ll explain how it works – and why.Continue Reading
I often hear techie marketers boast about how they are “data driven” so they don’t get caught up in the errors of human judgment – as if it is possible to make complex decisions based solely on what their computer model, formula or data shows them.
The idea is seductive because with large data sets over a large period of time it is possible to predict patterns, narrow focus and eliminate waste by optimizing marketing efforts and budgets to the predictions of the data model.
Too many “data driven” marketers begin relying so much on what the data says, that they ignore glaringly obvious real world indicators that what the data tells them is incorrect, misinterpreted, or just wrong.
In general consumer markets with huge volumes of searches, transactions, and conversions along with a relatively few possible search phrases or keywords used to find the product – such as in the t-shirt market, it may be possible to see from the data that the majority of sales come from women between 18-35 during the months of March through June, using the keywords “cute tee shirts”, “cute sayings tee shirts”, and “cut t shirts women’s” – then confidently limit spend to women of that age, during those months, and for those keywords to reduce waste and increase ROI.
This is because the overall volume of searches is low, the cost of clicks is extremely high, and spread over nearly 3,000 keyword variations used to search for a solution for a child’s issues.
More than 60 years ago, Peter Drucker dramatically influenced the foundations of the modern American corporation. His words are as true today as they were then – maybe even more in the digital age when we’re all more easily and directly involved with marketing our businesses.
One of his most significant and profound observations was that innovation and marketing are the two most important functions of business – all others are costs.
Business owners and entrepreneurs probably agree in principle, but few put this precept into practice. Surveys of businesses across the board reveal that the top priorities are usually finance, sales, production, management, legal and people.
If a meeting is scheduled with the most important department heads in your business, who would have a seat at the table? Legal and sales would be there, the CFO certainly, perhaps the CIO and HR. Would the head of marketing or R&D get an invite?Continue Reading
One of the most important things of any Google AdWords campaign is to continually test and refine. The best practices for Google AdWords is to continually test and refine keywords, text ads, display ads, placements, ad extensions, target locations, and on and on.
When testing so many things, it is easy to test things that don’t matter (yet) before testing things that really matter – or will have a big impact more immediately.
Perry Marshall would always tell me that in each of those things you could test is an 80/20 grouping. There will be a few things that will have a big impact (the 20%), and the rest a minute impact on your results (the 80%.) BUT, he would also say:
“Before you test the little stuff, test the big stuff and work your way down. Test the Forest, then the Trees, then the Branches, then the Leaves..”
People often get hung up on testing the punctuation of an ad when they haven’t tested multiple variations of drastically different ads first.
The punctuation will have an effect, and has proven to produce big results in many cases, but how much bigger would the results be if you first identified an ad that is %30 more effective than the current ad?
The idea is to make sure you are in the right forest, with the right trees, before you climb the branches and begin polishing the leaves.
Tweaking the leaves of the wrong kind of tree in the wrong forest just uses a lot of time and money for nothing.
One of the greatest aspects of digital marketing in comparison to traditional marketing methods is the amount of reliable data we can collect in a short period of time.
Like no other marketing medium, we can track just about every aspect of every component of the ad and the people who respond to it.
This is great, but if we’re not careful this flood of data can cause us to draw incorrect conclusions to patterns and correlations we find in the data itself.
In 1924 a study conducted at Western Electric on employee productivity concluded that employees were more productive when they changed the lighting conditions. Years later it was realized that the employees were more productive not necessarily because of the new lighting conditions, but because they new they were being observed during the study.
Another example often cited in statistics classes show the trends on a graph of annual murder rates and ice cream sales. Both have identical seasonal curves on the graph – they correlate, but does this constitute a cause-effect relationship? Of course not.Continue Reading
Every idea is only as good as its execution. It doesn’t matter how great the idea – for an advertisement, a website, a sales letter, or ad campaign if its execution detracts from the intent or purpose of the idea itself.
For example, a poorly designed website communicates volumes to the visitor that the owner or designer never intended – or even thought of. The dated design, the confusing user experience, the encyclopedic copy keeps the visitors focus on the lamentable execution rather than the message or intent of the site itself.
An overly designed or decorated website or advertisement is often an attempt to mask the lack of content or creativity. Often designers will overuse fonts, colors, and other design elements to try and make their work look more professional, but in reality it only highlights an amateur design.
Effective ideas in design and in writing always come from taking away everything that doesn’t help or add to the communication or purpose of the work itself. The most effective ideas are those that are reduced to the simplest and most essential elements required to achieve its purpose.
[endorsement cite=”Antoine de Saint-Exupery”]A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.[/endorsement]
The speed of life is shortening the window consumers have for analysis. Nowadays people are so overloaded with information, resources, and options, they no longer take the time they once did to evaluate every option – especially online.
People are moving so fast that they really don’t have (say- take) the time to think. They’re so busy clicking, tweeting, sharing, and liking that they are conditioned to move quickly to the next thing for the slightest reason.
We now consume so much information so quickly that we’ve learned how to make snapshot judgments of even the most important things in our lives. That’s why most marketing material, most advertisements, and most websites just don’t work. They’re built with the best of intentions – to give the consumer the facts they need to make a good decision. But what they overlook is the fact that you have about 6 seconds to capture the attention of your audience or they’re gone.Continue Reading
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