It is quite easy to bring hundreds or thousands of visitors to your website; you can simply purchase ads and write enticing copy and people start clicking to your site. It is an entirely different matter to convert these visitors into customers.
One customer came to us last year having spent over $20,000 in search engine advertising without realising a single lead. Their site attracted lots of "traffic" but no sales. So what went wrong? In a nutshell, poor targeting, lack of testing and measurement and finally a poor offer.
Search engine marketing is relatively new, but it follows the classic rules of marketing. Namely AIDA:
- Attention - Making sure that your product, service or message gets noticed (i.e. a high ranking page or advertisement in a search engine)
- Interest - A combination of getting the click-through to your site and maintaining that interest once the visitor has arrived at your site.
- Desire - Generating a real feeling of need or want in the visitor where they understand that your product or service is absolutely what they need.
- Action - Spurring the visitor on so that they become your customer.
Unfortunately a large number of businesses limit themselves to just the "attention" element. All their energy goes into getting visitors to the site by displaying the site in the search results. Too often the only performance indicator used to evaluate the results of these campaigns is how high the site ranks or how many people visit the site.
This is like purchasing the best retail position in a large shopping mall or on the top end of the high street shopping strip, but paying no attention to how long people visit your shop or whether they even purchase at all. This is obviously a very short term strategy.
In my opinion there is only one criteria for a campaign; the number of sales or actions it generates. Obviously, achieving high search engine rankings is the start of the process, after all if you are not seen at all then your site won't be visited, but they are merely the means to generate "attention".
It's all about the keywords
The key to effective search marketing is to locate the keywords that generate the most sales or other outcomes on your website and focus on these. These keywords form your most important assets, in effect your "A-list".
Once developed, this list is crucial to your future business success and needs to be monitored, guarded and measured constantly to maintain your position. Other keywords will come along and these must be evaluated in turn. Some will make it to the A-list and others will go on the B- or C- lists.
So how do you identify which keywords make the "A-list"? By testing of course. There are a large number of quality tools on the market with which you can do this.
Time on site
It's easy to use a basic statistics program to put a figure on website visits, but that's not enough to tell you how relevant a keyword is. You also want to know if a keyword is bringing the right kind of visitor, and the best way is by looking at how long each person stays on the site.
If it's less than 10 seconds, chances are they weren't a qualified lead. If they stick around for a matter of minutes, they probably were. It's a fair assumption that if they choose to take the time to look at your site in some detail, it's an indication that you have something they are genuinely interested in.
Pages viewed
The number of pages a visitor views is also a good indicator of a keyword's effectiveness. Low-interest visitors typically don't go beyond the landing page.
Some analytics software enables you to track a visitor from where they arrive to where they leave. It's called ‘funnelling' because the idea is to set a target of where you want your visitors to end up - for example, the purchase or download page.
If you bring visitors to your site intending to sell them something, you need to be able to determine exactly where they lose interest. If a large number of people visit but never make a purchase, you have everything to gain by working out why.
Refining your campaign
Looking at "pages viewed" and "time spent onsite" may reveal that certain keywords are bringing a lot of traffic, but not the right kind. There are many possible reasons, including:
- The ad copy does not accurately describe the product.
- The keywords are not relevant for your specific product.
- The web site's navigation is not user-friendly.
The message is to look beyond "attention" and start looking to "action".