Archive for August, 2008
The cost of dead clicks
It’s 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon, the peak period of the week for sales on your website.
Something obscure is happening: Your inbox is empty, and your phones are not ringing. A quick check of your website shows a page could not be displayed error message.
Panic!
Your web host has gone done yet again. The third time this month.
For some businesses, this is an encounter they can afford, but when your business relies so heavily on the Internet for sales leads, not to mention other operational functions of the business, you can’t afford a minute of downtime.
The impact of having your web host go down is not only costing you from leads that are unable to convert, there is an immeasurable non-financial impact of damage to your reputation for having your site down all the time, and let’s not forget the cost of a dead click.
If you have a google adwords or yahoo search marketing account for online advertising, you’re paying each and every time someone clicks on one of your ads.
If you’re running a new campaign or product launch and have allocated a large budget to online marketing, and your website is offline whilst countless number of potential customers are clicking on your link only to find your website is down, you’ve just wasted a lot of money and lost a lot of sales.
Here are a few tips from Search King few tips to minimise the potential for dead clicks:
- Pick a good web hosting company, and avoid cheap hosting plans
- Check the hardware specifications of the hardware you’re hosting on, make sure your hosting provider has redundant internet connections, power supply and most importantly good uptime.
- To ensure maximum uptime, ask your hosting company for an SLA, or service level agreement. This means they’re agreeing to give you a certain level of service (ie 99% uptime), and if they fail to meet this expectation, you can lean on them.
- Make sure your hosting company has upgrade options. If you start small but begin to grow, your server needs to keep pace with your traffic. Make sure if you have disk or bandwidth quotas, that they can be increased
- Keep an eye on your website,
Don’t stick around listening to the same excuses from your hosting company. Downtime costs you money, so vote with your feet and make sure you move to a quality web host.
You may also find that a standard web hosting package just isn’t enough for your very busy website, and this is when it’s time to make a decision on buying or renting your own server, but these are things you should discuss with your hosting company, do your homework, and shop around for the best options (remember, don’t always choose the cheapest!)
This article was brought to you by SearchKing.
Google Suggest Tool
Google Suggest is a new feature by google that will use a predictive text to automatically complete your input search data as you type.
Google Suggest - Key Word Suggestion
Say for example I begin typing audi, Google uses ajax browser technology to look up it’s key word database while you type, and makes suggestions for search phrases it thinks you’re looking for.
It is a web 2.0 experience which essentially auto-completes the search phrase which might save you time typing, or recommend a search term that might help you find the information you’re looking for.
This is a feature some SMS-crazed mobile phone users are used to whereby the keystrokes they enter begin to form a word it predicts you’re trying to type in (which search king personally finds annoying). Anyone with auto-complete or Google Toolbar turned on in their browser will also see their saved input data from previous searches.
Whilst it may be new to Google, they’re not ahead of their competition with this feature, as most search engines have already added this feature, such as Cuil and Yahoo (see screens below), the major advantage that google has over the others is that it also shows you how many search results there are for a given term, which can be very handy.
Key Word Suggestion from CUIL
Predictive Key Word Search from Yahoo!
It is definitely a feature that may be considered overdue from the world’s most popular search engine, but we feel it may remove Google from it’s minimalistic, fast browsing experience to a slower, bulkier experience that will be noticeable by those with slow internet connections or lower spec computers.
This feature is not currently default, and it might only be used if you turn it on, so it remains to be seen if it will be a default or optional feature. Either way, it adds to the user experience, which despite our criticism has to be a good thing.
Yahoo offer Free Online Advertising
Yahoo have been offering a limited run of free advertising accounts for it’s search marketing network.
The offer is worth $199 and if you’re curious about trying out PPC, or even if you are putting your PPC via Google, and always wondered what Yahoo’s search network was like, now is the perfect opportunity to give it a go Free * (check the Yahoo website for conditions).
This offer has been on rotation on foxtel of an evening over the past few months, and despite supposedly ending a few weeks ago according to TV, is still available as of August 28th 2008.
The deal:
- Go to http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com.au/tv to redeem
- You cannot redeem if you are already a member of Yahoo search marketing
- Signup, and enter the promo code supplied, and you get $199.00 for free
- Follow the setup proposal assistant
The catch:
You need to pay a $99 upfront fee, so the old saying rings true:”There is no such thing as a free lunch”. Even so, this is an offer worth checking out if you’re wanting to look into setting up a Pay Per Click Campaign with Yahoo.
Presumably this is to weed out tyre kickers and the like
Getting the most out of your PPC Campaign
So, your boss has told you that Google is the great new channel for sales, or so he believes, and as the IT guy, it’s obviously your job to manage a new online marketing campaign.
Your boss has given you a budget, and an expectation that he’s going to see some return on investment, so where to from here?
There are a few things you need to ensure you get the most out of your PPC Campaign:
- You should setup landing pages and ensure they are well laid out and presented with good information. If you’re running a particular campaign, then directing your customers to a landing page tailored to the search results will produce far better results than pointing them to your general homepage and making them try to find what they’re looking for, give it to them straightt up.
- More importantly, your landing page will need to have an order process, or some way of contacting your sales team, otherwise your leads will never convert.
- Try a different mix of advertisers. Remember: Google has around 50% of all web traffic in Australia, so a Google Adwords account is a no brainer, but Yahoo and MSN also represent a large proportion of the SEA Market where web surfers are searching outside of google, so if your budget allows, you may want to experie
- Setup Google Analytics to monitor your conversions, this will be give you indications of success.
- Keep a tight leash on your campaign. Monitor your spend, and see which search terms are giving you the best return on investment.
- Monitor the terms that give the best ROI, and cull the terms that aren’t performing.
- Turn off your campaign when you’re not getting any return. The term tyre kickers is used amongst salesmen to describe potential customers who look around, and ‘kick tyres’ (referring to a potential car sale) and essentialy waste the salesman’s time. If your core operating hours are 8am-6pm, and your customers do most of their browsing of your site and purchasing during these hours, it’s likely that anyone who clicks on your paid links in non-peak times will be less interested in purchasing, and therefore increase your cost of acquisition whilst reducing your return on investment.
- Wherever possible, monitor your sales performance before the campaign and then reflect after a week or even a month into the campaign to see if the online advertising is having a positive impact on sales. If it has, this is where the IT guy goes to his boss to show the benefits of online marketing and asks for a payrise.
This article is brought to your by SearchKing, Specialists in SEO, Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Advertising.