Winning Results with Google AdWords Second Edition_14 pot

Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates 327 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Be wary if your developer seeks to reinvent the wheel by throwing together his own “homemade” search engine. Product search and the ability of a site search tool to suggest related items can be a complex matter. Amazon.com is one of the world’s top search technology companies. The ability for users to browse their huge catalog without getting lost is an important driver of Amazon’s current profitability, since this increases the average order size. If you want to maximize your conversion rates and you have more than a few pages on your site, you need quality site search. Some low-cost and free site search options are offered by companies like Atomz and Google, but make sure that you investigate fully. The lowest-end products might not be sufficient for your needs. Unfortunately, Google’s dominance in search makes the average manager think that site search is easy. A strong domain-specific vendor or developer (someone well versed in e-commerce) can build good site search relatively easily. But as you stray into open source platforms and custom programming for a variety of more complex types of website, don’t underestimate the complexity you may face. Search is a cost, and searching a large database well may require programming resources as well as a budget for improving site performance, database performance, and server capacity. Factors Outside Your Control Don’t confuse luck with brains. Sometimes, you don’t have total control of how users will behave from day to day. However, while you may not be able to control these factors, you can plan for them. Seasonality Every market has up and down seasons. Housing, taxation, and retail gifts are three of the most obvious examples. Unless you have at least two years’ worth of conversion data at your disposal, it can be difficult to know whether your site is converting well or not, adjusted for season. What appears to be a drop-off or an increase might simply be normal activity. How well do you understand your own business? Hot Sectors If you’ve begun working on a campaign for a product that is just hitting the market and is hard to find, you could wind up reaping windfall profits, because that’s what search is really good for: connecting users with niche areas quickly. GPS phones were hard to find not long ago. One site owner in this area reaped windfall profits as a result. The design of the site had very little to do with the high conversion rates, and the drop-off in ROI that will inevitably occur as more competitors move in can’t be blamed on AdWords campaign techniques or site design. 328 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Hot sectors will eventually cool off. Users in more mature industries know that they can comparison shop. You need to allow for that. The reason people don’t comparison shop when something is brand new is likely because early adopters come to the table with a status-driven “must have” mentality. If the iPod cost $1,500 and sold out very quickly from retail stores, you can bet that there would be a few bleeding-edgers who would buy from the site that could promise them fast delivery regardless of price. 360-Degree View: Create a Good Conversion Environment The popularity of the TV show What Not to Wear has convinced a certain segment of the population that no matter how comfortable you may be in ripped jeans and a 30-year-old hairstyle, your career could suffer if you wear these to work. I wish more site owners—especially smaller businesses— understood that principle as it relates to the conversion rate on their paid traffic. Online, more than anywhere else, you suffer from a need to prove yourself to skeptical prospects in an environment that feels very “cold” to those prospects. They haven’t met you face-to-face. They may not have heard the positive word of mouth that you’ve generated. They haven’t sampled the quality of your products. They can’t see the line of customers outside your store. In short, unless you take particular steps to position yourself as a business with some kind of status, prospects may assume you’re third rate. A large part of how status is conveyed online is visual. Recall that in the studies by Fogg’s Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, a “site that looks professionally designed” scores as one of the strongest means to increase “surface web credibility” for an online business or organization. 19 That’s obviously a very general goal. “Professionally designed” means different things to different people. In Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith argues, “Prospects look for visual clues about a service. If they find none, they often look to services that do have them. So provide clues.” 20 Beckwith’s examples include visible company “front men,” which can be real men such as Joel Hyatt (Hyatt Legal Services) and Dave Thomas (late founder of Wendy’s Restaurants), or the pillars at law offices, an accountant’s conservative attire, or a financial adviser’s prosperous- looking leather portfolio. I’d prefer it if we didn’t stick with the dated examples of Beckwith’s choosing, so let’s add the late Anita Roddick of The Body Shop to the example list. Online, though, what people see is not just images, but how those images are presented. They see your design. Good design isn’t cheap, but you should buy as much as you can afford, rather than as little as you can get away with. Leveraging Feel and Brand in Small Retail Operations Let’s look at an example of how small companies can create a brand with a quality feel, in spite of not having a nationwide chain of retail stores or the budget to hire a top ad agency. Jeff Braverman is a savvy businessperson. His site does very well, and has become a leading online provider of nuts, confections, and specialty snack items. There are two primary reasons. Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates 329 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 First, Braverman has humanized his site and injected web credibility into it. NutsOnline is “real.” The site contains not only contact information, but a whole history of the family business, a roasted nut stand in New Jersey (Figure 11-15). “In 1929, on the brink of the Depression,” begins Braverman’s heartfelt sales copy, “my grandfather Sol took a bold step.” There’s even a picture of Sol in front of the shop in the 1930s. It would be hard to say that the Braverman family doesn’t care about nuts. Braverman also obsesses about the quality of his site. The checkout process and other details are important to him. If you’re lost and use the site search box to look for almonds, you’ll be served a page with a couple dozen product options. Everything on this website seems to work the way it’s supposed to. Perhaps the most impressive detail Braverman has obsessed over is the look and feel. It looks simple and straightforward, but that doesn’t mean it was easy to put together. Rather than posting stock photos of nuts, he hired a food photographer to take proper photos of the products the Bravermans actually deliver to their customers (an example is shown in Figure 11-16). Nothing keeps it more real than accurate photographic images. But more than that, a professional food photographer knows how to make food look appealing. FIGURE 11-15 Web credibility and personal accountability create a good backdrop for customer loyalty. 330 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Summing Up To improve conversion rates, think in terms of four broad priorities. First, make it smooth. Remove the most obvious barriers getting in the way of the user performing a desired action. Clutter and lack of focus are the subtlest, most insidious barriers. Broken links and nonworking checkout processes will literally kill any chance of a sale. Second, test copy and layout elements that may serve to persuade a skeptical prospect that you deserve her business—but do so with a valid testing protocol. That includes overall page feel; matters as basic as improving product descriptions on a retail site; testing different sizes of “purchase now” or “add to cart” buttons; or expanding on and clarifying too-brief, jargon-laden sales copy on a business-to-business site. Don’t use the “aimless tinkering” method. Rather, employ powerful methods: best practices or A/B/C to start, and multivariate testing only if you have high volumes of sales. Third, make sure that you don’t blow your web credibility when a hot prospect starts to scrutinize you more closely. Have contact information available; spell everything correctly; don’t look desperate by hitting him with pop-ups; keep the material fresh; and so on. This whole area FIGURE 11-16 Jeff Braverman employed a food photographer to convey the quality of his products. Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates 331 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 is now part of Google’s Quality Scoring algorithm, so stay in tune with the zeitgeist on areas such as disclosure and privacy policies. Fourth, be image conscious in the broadest sense: heed Harry Beckwith’s advice in Selling the Invisible. In business, companies have always been judged on superficial matters. Beyond mere web credibility, the visual impact and basic architecture of your site can make the difference between becoming a real player with brand appeal, or just another peddler with a story to tell and stuff to unload. If taking control of your image means you need professional design or professional information architecture advice, you’ll need to go out and find some. Don’t let your business suffer just because you’re afraid of offending your loyal “web person.” There is always someone local, or in your family, willing to give you “web” advice. But are they bona fide professionals? Conversion science can’t fix it if your product or service stinks. At a certain point, your marketing will fail if you don’t deliver the goods. If people don’t seem to embrace your sales pitch or your page layout, it may be time to stop worrying so much about pitching and formatting, and “get better reality.” 21 Endnotes 1. Jakob Nielsen, “Do Interface Standards Stifle Design Creativity?” Alertbox, August 22, 1999, archived at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990822.html. 2. In Survival Is Not Enough (Free Press, 2002), mDNA is Godin’s term for the makeup of ideas in your company; he is following scientists in the tradition of Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976) positing cultural ideas or “memes” as similar to genes, in that they are “replicators.” Memetic (similar to genetic) mutations are seen as a positive by Godin insofar as they prevent companies from stagnating, and closed, hidebound, or hierarchical corporate cultures don’t produce enough mutations. 3. For background try Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Doubleday, 1999). 4. The real answer seems to be that it was discovered and developed by researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. According to Spool et al., these researchers hypothesized and proved several elements of a theory that posited searchers in “a large information space” such as a website as “‘informavores’ on the hunt for information.” See Jared Spool, Christine Perfetti, and David Brittan, Designing for the Scent of Information (User Interface Engineering, white paper, 2004), 1, available at www.uie.com. 5. A grandiose economic philosopher might at this point attempt to caution against the diminution of national potential that might accompany any reduction of the marketing and web production communities to a mere “nation of shopkeepers,” given the growth potential associated with the full capabilities possessed by creative classes of our ilk. Or to state it another way, the danger of putting snobs in charge of marketing, design, and online experience production is that the snobs will dismiss the task of marketing 332 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 to consumers as “creating a big ol’ catalogue, and making it more accurate,” precisely because they think of marketing and consumers as afterthoughts, and do not much care for them. If snobs work on complicated things, then it must follow that they rule over lesser beings and require those lesser beings to work on things less complicated and less sublime. 6. Persuasive momentum is a term coined by Bryan Eisenberg et al. 7. Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg, Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results (Wizard Academy Press, 2005), 175. 8. Eisenberg and Eisenberg, Call to Action, 175. 9. For some interesting perspectives, see Holly Buchanan and Michelle Miller, The Soccer Mom Myth (Wizard Academy Press, 2008). 10. Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (Simon & Schuster, 1999). 11. In And Now a Few Words From Me (McGraw-Hill, 2003), Garfield writes: “In the ordinary course of events, the effect of advertising falls smack between Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and Randy Rothenberg’s scenario of extraneousness; it influences our buying decisions but by no means dictates them. For every ‘Where’s the beef?’ deployment of poison gas there is a benign bicarbonate like Alka-Seltzer, which provided campaign after delightful, memorable, hilarious campaign and lost market share the entire way” (p. 191). Although the discussion in this chapter considers your landing pages and website as a whole, rather than just your ad, the argument seems fair to apply to your entire sales process. The original and current (lazy) critics of advertising, from Vance Packard to Adbusters magazine, probably should have been considering the entire sales process, too. When I see an ad for Harry Rosen’s menswear in the newspaper or on TV, no matter how bamboozled I am by the promotion, I still need to go into the shop and interact with a suit salesman, find a garment that fits, and budget enough money to make a purchase. By rights, then, the “hidden persuaders” critics ought to be going far beyond looking at the ads. They should be following me into the store and watching as I take a follow-up sales call on my home phone six months later. By that time, though, they might have to conclude that I actually like the suit I bought and appreciate the service provided to me by this retailer, including the time the sales rep offered to drive to the airport to deliver my recently altered overcoat. 12. Thanks to Mona Elesseily for contributing to this pocket summary of landing page planning. Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates 333 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 13. “Web Analytics 2.0: Putting the Marketer Back Into Marketing,” keynote address to the Canadian Marketing Association National Convention, May 12, 2008. 14. For this, see Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar, Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer (Sybex, 2008). 15. Jamie Roche, “A Redesign Worthy of Google De-listing,” iMedia Connection, March 13, 2007. 16. B. J. Fogg, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003), 149. 17. Persuasive Technology, 152. Fogg notes that the 2002 study was a “snapshot,” conducted in collaboration with a private research lab. He is not as clear as he could be about the methodologies or sample sizes of various studies. This area cries out for more funding and more definitive, up-to-date research. 18. Persuasive Technology, 156. 19. Persuasive Technology, 168. 20. Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing (Warner Books, 1997), 187. 21. Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible, 3. “Get better reality” is attributed to Guy Kawasaki. For a deep exploration of this theme, see Seth Godin, Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea (Portfolio, 2004); Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World (Portfolio, 2005). This page intentionally left blank Chapter 12 Online Targeting 1995–2015: Fast Start, Exciting Future I n recent years, the practice of “futurism” has inspired oft-deserved derision. An IBM commercial, wherein the consultant has supplied the cantankerous CEO with “business goggles” that require the user to “put in another quarter” if he wants to see the future, comes to mind. My personal favorite is The Simpsons’ portrayal of the Epcot Center as how “people in 1965 thought things would look in 1987.” In this chapter I’ll be trying to take a look at Google’s future, in particular. Given the size of the company and the pace of their innovation, this is a little bit like trying to film a speedboat race by running after the boats with a Flip video camera around your neck. On one hand, you can only run about 29.7 miles per hour before your quadriceps muscle tears off the knee tendon; on the other, you’ll sink before you even get going that fast. Given the lightweight nature of the video camera, at least you’ll be able to swim back to shore. The only phenomenon that regularly attracts as much scorn as futurism is futurism coupled with bullishness about the contributions the Internet will make to the economy. It is indeed possible to oversell the contributions made by the Internet as compared with progress in other fields. Because I don’t work in those industries, I find the ability of BMW to use more and more robots to build cars with fewer and fewer design flaws more mind-boggling than I find a client’s ability to find a customer. I’m more impressed by the huge increases in the survival rates for some types of cancer than I am in an e-commerce site’s ability to sell a tooth whitening system. But let’s not underestimate the contribution of online functionality to the global economy, either. Internet models can either add layers to the economy or remove them, making it possible for a buyer to work through an intermediary or an aggregated form of information if they choose, or to gain more direct access to information related to a transaction than they might have had 20 years ago. The Internet offers a postmodern form of choice, which means we needn’t feel trapped by a particular unidirectional macrotrend in any given industry (getting rid of intermediaries versus the rise of new intermediaries, for example). Increasingly, we can actually choose more or less of a given attribute (such as how “raw” or “packaged” we want information to be). 336 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 12 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 12 Halfway into the writing of this second edition, I became deeply involved in HomeStars, a website that offers user reviews of home improvement companies. In this process, which involved far more in-depth planning than my usual routine of marketing project implementation, it became evident to me just how radical the shift is in the way that consumers access information. Those of us who participate in actually shaping new ways of accessing trusted information, and new ways of completing transactions, hold just a piece of the online future in the palms of our hands. It’s all too easy to trivialize the shift in how we spend our leisure time and our workdays, and changes in the forces and communications media that shape our beliefs and choices. Isn’t it all just killing time? Of course not. Frankly, it’s mind-blowing to think about the rapid growth in usage of something like Facebook. The joy of creation is what drives innovators like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to dream up entirely new patterns of interaction that will transform social patterns and information retrieval and advertising as we know them. It’s been a long time since Marshall McLuhan was quoted as saying the medium is the message. We know that’s not literally true, perhaps, but we downplay the rapid shifts in communication patterns at our peril. The focused intellectual curiosity that leads developers like Zuckerberg to build new ways of disseminating and sharing knowledge is no less revolutionary than the innovations in developing a computer operating system and taskflow environment by Apple and Microsoft in the 1980s; no less worthy than the invention of the “back and forward button” dashboard design of the Netscape web browser in the 1990s; and no less economically powerful (potentially) than the laser focus on clean, fast, accurate search and targeted ads perfected by the Google guys in the period 1998 to date. Zuckerberg didn’t need maverick cartoonist Hugh McLeod to tell him how to be creative. 1 He just built a system he thought would be interesting for Harvard and other college students to use. But for those of us a fair bit older than Zuckerberg (he’s 24 as I write this), McLeod’s reminder is worth listening to. If you have a vision and it’s something you truly feel strongly about, you can make it come alive. You. You can do it. You don’t need a million dollars or the most elaborate tools or the flashy lifestyle of a Soho artist or Web 2.0 hipster. You can build something that changes the world—by just getting started, and continuing to pursue it. What world-changing stuff am I talking about? In my state of heightened awareness honed by investor pitches for HomeStars, I’ve come across a lot of interesting statistics. Citizen trust in the information found in mainstream media is at an all-time low. Nearly more Americans believe in UFOs than believe that CNN and the Washington Post provide unbiased information. Part of the reason for this is that for all of the admirable big media investment in investigative reporting and thoughtful analysis, the “professionalization” of journalism feels to the public like the media elite talking among themselves or siding with the subjects of their stories. 2 Even online “influencers” like “well-known bloggers” are losing their luster. Survey data also shows us turning more to peer groups and trusted sources that we can really verify, to access opinions, hard data, and experiences. Some of the subject matter is of a political or medical nature. Other times, it’s more practical, relating to getting things done, or making a purchase. Some of the buzzwords for describing these phenomena include the “Wisdom of Crowds” (James Surowiecki), or the “pro-am movement” (Chris Anderson). [...]... description to a single word It is their turf that Google is now stepping into on many fronts, so the spotlight battle has shifted from Google vs Yahoo” to Google vs Microsoft” 351 352 Winning Results with Google AdWords now that Microsoft is investing on many fronts in order to strike back against massive Google encroachments on its territory It’s not so much that Google may steal market share away from Microsoft... users It’s also very much integrated into search results, depending on the user’s query Google s pace of development of Maps has been admirable They’ve integrated “pedestrian-friendly” or “public-transit-friendly” estimates 343 344 Winning Results with Google AdWords FIGURE 12-1 Many projects that lurk quietly in Google Labs ultimately become important Google services of travel times in some cities,... insignificance while taking Google s VP headcount up another notch, the creator of A9, Udi Manber, left Amazon for Google in February 2006 Because A9’s ranking technology actually ran on Google s index, consider it a showcase effort in a fairly elaborate job application process that had the intended effect: getting Manber a top job at Google 349 350 Winning Results with Google AdWords Reading these particular... 25 and 34 At present, the demographic targeting options in Google AdWords are relatively 341 342 Winning Results with Google AdWords weak (they are based on some reported data from some content partners in the content targeting programs), but given Google s increasing diversity of demographically rich properties, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Google approached or surpassed Microsoft and Yahoo on this... could threaten one another In the world of books, Google has gone through several experiments with projects called Google Print and now Google Book Search One promising element of Google Book Search is My Library: the ability to create your own personalized library (see Figure 12-3) You can annotate books with reviews, and share your favorites with friends Google Book Search offers CHAPTER 12: Online Targeting... seems likely that Google will someday offer advertisers access to deeper demographic targeting options Projects like Orkut not only create a potential revenue stream for Google, they give Google “users,” along with all that entails Google is stealthily increasing its global footprint But it has to be unsatisfied with its current lack of traction in the social space I’d expect all of Google, Yahoo, and... try to offer our advertisers more tools that will help them manage their campaigns in less time.” 339 340 Winning Results with Google AdWords The advent of an increasingly integrated, ever-more-powerful (and free) Google Analytics platform ushered in an era of a “total Google marketing experience.” Google s main competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo, have followed suit Yahoo, which already offered conversion... available from Google s in-house barbershop From the standpoint of economic progress and quality products, we can all hope that the parties thrown by companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple will continue to be equally boring They should be at work creating the frameworks so the rest of us can enjoy better parties Hopefully, like it’s 1999 347 348 Winning Results with Google AdWords eBay and... and productively use that information, and how to connect with trusted peers and virtual friends whose opinions we truly value The first wave of this trend was clumsily called “peer to peer” (or P2P) search, but 337 338 Winning Results with Google AdWords we weren’t quite ready for it yet The next wave will tackle the peering and sharing issue with renewed vigor The old media will let out a few remaining... to be reckoned with, and the best proof yet that Google plans to trade blows with Microsoft for as many rounds as it takes In the browser wars, of course, the only cost to the user is a few seconds of download time, and a brief learning period Accessing a superior product’s speed doesn’t come with the same financial tradeoffs as, say, considering a new Porsche Google Product Search and Google Checkout . loyalty. 330 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords /. marketing 332 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords /. be). 336 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 12 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords /