Customer Intent

How many people do you pay to touch your web presence? Nowadays, anyone who changes your site or outbound communication has the potential to derail your hard-earned search marketing progress.

Sure, your staff and consultants are smart - and well intended. But this isn’t enough today. Anyone with access must now have a basic knowledge of search marketing. If you have a large staff, I’ll bet you’re starting to get the picture.

Are you already familiar with some of the following mistakes? Perhaps your:

• Writers didn’t include your top keywords in the main copy
• Design team blocked your top content from the search engines via JavaScript and Flash.
• IT group copied robots.txt from the staged server, blocking all search robots
• PR group has no idea how distribute online or measure the success of a release
• Boss doesn’t understand why you need to pay for web analytics help
• Advertising manager misses the chance to A/B test the latest campaign
• Web team thought it was someone else’s job to submit an XML site map

I’ll bet there are dozens more. Have some infamous ones to add?

In the end, it’s your responsibility to make sure that each person who touches your site, ads, content, or analytics has some level of search marketing education. This includes contractors and consultants!

The rewards are great. We’ve observed significant competitive gains when base-level training is required for all staff that touch the company site, advertising or outbound copy. In fact, it’s why we started Market Motive in the first place - to get the training to the masses.

Where to start?

Get your staff into sessions at Search Engine Strategies, Online Market World, Pubcon, SMX and other quality conferences. Can’t fly everyone out? [pitch] Sign your staff up for online Market Motive training and consultant access for $299/month [/pitch]. Ask your expert consultants to run workshops on-site to teach optimization techniques. Hold weekly topical lunches discussing SEO, web analytics and site structure. And lastly, reimburse your staff on purchases of books covering search marketing topics.

Did you know that your web analytics system can be applied to your search engine optimization strategy? The keywords your visitors used to get to your site are prime candidates for optimization. But don’t just look at visit counts for each keyword, because that’s only a small part of the story.

To take advantage of this process, you will need three things in place:

1. You must reveal the goal of your site to your web analytics tool. For example, your “Thank you” page, or your email-sign-up-page might be a goal. If you have an e-commerce site, your order confirmation page is usually your goal. Most analytics tools give you the opportunity to indicate one or many “conversion” or goal pages. Take advantage of this.
2. You’ll need a few months of data that reports at least 20-30 of your search engine keywords with more than 200 visitors each.
3. Write down the “average conversion rate” and “average time on site” numbers for the time period that you are going to measure. You’ll need these later.

Now, get a cup of coffee and plan on 20-30 minutes to get your answers.

Find the reporting area of your analytics tool and list search engine keywords by visit count. Use a date range long enough to see more than 200 visits for the top 20-30 search engine keywords.

Using the reporting interface, or an export to Excel, sort the keyword list by conversion percentage descending from highest to lowest - but only for the keywords that brought in more than 200 visitors. If you don’t have conversion numbers, sort by the highest average time on site.

For this report, ignore your brand keywords (your company name, domain name and obvious product names) and double check that all keywords on your list still have more than 200 visits.

Scan the list and highlight the keywords with higher than average conversion or higher than average time on site. Some will be familiar, but often, a handful of phrases stand out as unexpected sources of engaged visitors.

Take these keywords and include them in your SEO and paid search investments make them more prominent in the search results pages. Promoting these keywords will increase your visitor engagement and conversion rates on your website, and you owe the discovery to a simple web analytics session.

Most of the Market Motive Faculty attended and/or spoke at the recent Search Engine Strategies New York. I believe this is the first full SES conference without Danny Sullivan. Though he is missed, the Incisive management team put on an excellent conference attended by over 8,000 folks looking to learn about online marketing.

Market Motive did a co-promotion with Incisive, so while I try to avoid shipping booths & staff cross country, we took a space on the show floor. Honestly, I’m glad we did.

I jot down notes on each day’s experiences at these events, so here are a few things I learned while at SES NYC:

Web Analytics is in a cycle of high popularity.

I witnessed standing room only in each session that covered web analytics. Perhaps the distribution of Google Analytics has caused this. True or not, site owners are starting to grasp the power of seeing visitor behavior on site and are looking for ways to interpret the data into action.

Regardless of the analytics tool, I know most new analytics tool users hit “The Wall” after about 20 minutes of use. I talk about this more in my “Stop Wasting Time with Web Analytics” series.

Testing a message in real-time is fun:

OK, we’re analytics folks. So multivariate testing is our genetic destiny. And this extends

beyond the web to the trade show floor. At SES, one of my goals was to reduce the TUTLGO (time until the light goes on) to less than 15 seconds booth visitors who ask, “So, what is Market Motive?”

To test, we systematically responded with short phrase combinations until we found the grouping that elicited the fastest enthusiastic response. We wanted to convey 1) the on demand video sessions, 2) the call access to faculty, and 3) the Q&A forums. (We learned to leave out #3) What was the winning phrase grouping? Skip the next part if you are pitch averse! It went something like this:

“We provide online classes, just like the sessions here, through a membership web site. After viewing any video, you can call in and discuss it with the presenter.”

[here, we’d pause and wait for the “oh!”, then…]

“So short of hiring the top 6 consultants, or flying out to a dozen conferences, you can catch any session on-demand, and then talk to the industry authority to check your strategy or get advice.”

[Pause… Light goes on, and the next question would
fall roughly into one of the following four groups:]

80% “Seriously? What does that cost?”
10% “OK, How often do I get to talk to [faculty name]?”
8% Other
2% “Do you take American Express?”

Good fish and Greek food is around the corner from the hotel.

The company made it even better, which included Richard, Jeff, Jim, Emily, Karen Lea and Matt. My favorite topics of our private-room dinner:

• How many domains do you (not your business) own? (my answer: 18)
• How many saltine crackers can you consume at once? I’m up to four… Jeff.
• What was the outcome of Jim’s 2006 expose “click fraud allegations” from late 2007?
• What the heck is a lavraki?

How Many SEOs can you fit into a Irish Pub on Saint Patrick’s Day?

About 20. The rest of us conversational types worked the pub crawl backwards from #6 and met the other crew in the middle.

One bonus find: You can buy a decent 10×10 trade show booth for $499 on ebay

It was also my pleasure to meet Stoney, and Scott and Duane and hope to see you all at eMetrics SES San Jose or Pubcon.

Lastly, while at SES I learned from Jennifer Laycock about the upcoming Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference in Houston on April 21-22 backed by my friends Search Engine Guide. $975 for two full days of well known speakers sounds like a great deal to me.

Or: Three ways to get around misleading paid search reporting:

Most of us feel good when we see a positive ROI on our paid search campaigns. And most analytics tools give us plenty of opportunity to feel good about our campaigns.

But there is an inherent lie in the majority of PPC reporting tools, and that lie is based on the assumption that you have zero cost of goods. With few exceptions your products DO cost you something and thus any ROI analysis should be influenced by profit which in turn requires knowledge of margins.

When your campaign performance is measured by raw revenue, you won’t know which campaigns are making profit and which are losing money. Base your campaign measurement on profit and you’ll know very quickly which campaigns to adjust or cut.

Many measurement tools, like Google Analytics, IndexTools and ClickTracks, report ROI based on raw revenue. We can’t really blame them because profit is hard to expose (and collect) in the analytics tool. However, Google goes a step too far when they add a column to the campaign report that pretends to be “Margin” While the help tip says, “Margin is (Ecommerce revenue + Total Goal Value - Cost) divided by Revenue,” the only “cost” reported here is the ad cost and not the cost of goods, which makes the ad performance look far better than it really is.

ClickTracks reports ROAS or “Return on Advertising Spend”. For every dollar you spend, this is how much you get back.

At least ClickTracks acknowledges the need for margin markups in the help text: “… for a full cost/benefit analysis, you need to consider not only the revenue which a group of visitors brings in, but also the profit which you make from that revenue…”

How does this affect you? An Illustration:

Let’s say we bought 100 Marshmallow Shooters at $11 each and sold them all for $16 each. We spent $800 in Google AdWords to close $1600 in sales. Google Analytics will show this at 100% ROI and 50% margin. According to this report, we made 50 cents on the dollar and should invest even more in AdWords. This is how most advertisers (and some agencies) react to the report.

In reality, we’re operating at a loss. Our cost of goods was $1100. With the $800 spent on advertising, our COGS (cost of goods sold) is $1900. With $1600 in sales, the business has lost $300. Actual ROI is -38%, not 100%. The business is losing 15.7 cents on every dollar spent. Run a business this way and it won’t last for long.

How do you really measure ad performance? Solutions fall into three categories:

1. Rely on gut instinct to tell you which ads are generating profit. Many marketers do, so you won’t be alone.
2. Expose profit rather than revenue to your measurement (analytics) tools. This is the most accurate method. Implementation requires that your revenue collection system be modified to calculate margin on the fly and expose it to your analytics tool. This makes sense for catalog and retail businesses, but for many advertisers, a simpler solution will suffice.
3. Use the tools as they are and adjust for inaccuracy. After doing a small calculation, you can know what the reported ROI must be to indicate a performing ad campaign.

Let’s expand on the third solution. You’ll need to know your average margin and plug this into a simple formula. There are already great pages that discuss the definitions of margin, but for the purposes of this example, we’ll use profit divided by revenue, which looks like this: (sales-costs)/revenue. (Also for this example, we’ll leave advertising out to the ‘costs’ and focus on basic product costs.)

So, if I sell a product for $10 that costs me $6, my profit is $4. $4/$10 = .40 or 40% margin. Once you’ve got your own margin number, apply it to the following formulas to find your ROI break even point (as reported by your analytics tool).

To translate Google Analytics ROI , use the formula:

(1 / margin)-1

For example: If your margin is .3125, then (1/.3125)-1 = 2.20 or 220%. So, any Google analytics-reported ROI above 220% are performing ads.

To translate Google Analytics Margin column , use the formula:

(1 - margin) * 100

For example: If your margin is .3125, then 1 -.3125 = .6875 or 68.75%. So any Google Analytics-reported margins above 68.75% are performing ads.

To translate ClickTracks ROAS , use the formula:

(1 / margin) * 100

For example: If your margin is .3125, then (1/.3125) * 100 = 320 cents or $3.20. So all campaigns generating $3.20 or more ROAS are generating profit.

To save you some time and paper, here’s a simple tool that will do the calculation for you and display the rates for each analytics tool covered here.

Understand the real value of your ad campaigns, and you’ll be able to focus your investment on ads that are truly performing for your business.

I just returned from Pubcon 2007 Las Vegas. After every conference, a few events stand out as particularly good.. or particularly bad. Here are mine:

To the speakers who still reveal how it really works. Neil, Rand, Aaron, Todd, and others kept the spirit of Pubcon by sharing some raw, unfiltered truths of how things really work in SEO, social media and SEM.

To Joe Morin for arranging for us to see Blue Man Group. If in Vegas, go see the long-running classic at the Venetian. Joe also hosted some nice parties in the Wynn Tower Suites. Very classy Joe. Thanks.

To bad advice. The web analytics advice I heard from the podium was sparse, and often, just plain wrong. I can’t believe people are still teaching that accuracy is the most important factor, or that tracking a single visitor’s path is useful in analysis.

To Microsoft (yep). AdCenter’s Mary Berk came out to ask the advertisers what type of quality score information they preferred. Extra recognition to Geoff Price of Efficient Frontier. For a sales VP, he delivered fairly meaty stuff in our Quality Score session.

To Microsoft (yep again) for the party at the Palms Ghost Bar. Extra smiles to Jessica for suggesting we stay longer and to John Marshall and Heather Lloyd-Martin for keeping us all dancing.

To the door guy who checked badges. This gentleman turned a thankless job into a pleasure for the attendees. Sure, he enforced the rules, but somehow made me smile every time I walked by. A rare find.

It seemed every cab driver we had was a character. We had a movie critic and later, a comedian: “Yeah, they just found my ex-husband. How was I to know they’d build that far out West?” Kind of raw, but still entertaining. What do you expect in Vegas?

For scheduling overlap with Chicago SES. Perhaps it couldn’t be avoided. But again, it’s like asking a kid to pick a favorite parent on the holidays. Some good speakers were missed.

To attendees who asked for more detail on the Quality Score techniques I presented in my session. The level of process and technical understanding at this show is inspiring.

To friends and acquaintances who made the sessions and evenings rich with anecdotes, tech-talk and just plain fun. I particularly enjoyed spending time with Dan Thies, Jill Whalen, Craig Paddock, Jay Berkowitz, Mike Black, Jessica Bowman, Rob Snell, Shirley Tan, and Mark Jackson. Lyndsay Walker knows her web analytics - even though she’s from Canada ;). Matt Tuens patiently explained some techniques on quality content creation even though he’s in sales :). Matt Harper offered promotional contacts within one minute of meeting for the first time. It’s these types of folks that make this industry so special.

You’ve decided you need consulting help, but don’t want to lock in a contract until you know more about the consultant’s work. It’s a Catch-22. Solution: Get an initial audit. It’s a great way to get a glimpse of the quality of intuition and delivery from your prospective consultant.

An initial audit should contain observations and recommendations in each significant service area that may be provided by your consultant. For example, we cover Web Analytics, SEO, Paid Search/PPC, Email Marketing, Conversion and Online Publicity in most audits. But the weighting varies according to the need of the client. It’s a sampling of intuition, experience and actionability that you can expect in an ongoing relationship.

Why is an audit a win win?

You probably know your online marketing could be better but don’t know where to start. A good audit should indicate the efforts necessary in each service area.

The audit helps the consultant to get to know you and your infrastructure better and suggest service areas that you may not have considered. This can improve the likelihood of a long relationship as well as the accuracy of quotes for ongoing services.

The audit keeps your risk low. If the consultant delivers actionable recommendations, you can now choose to implement them yourself, hire the consultant, or hire someone else.

We deliver our audits in a simple, editable Word document, from 10-18 pages, that follows a template of Data->Observations->Actionable Recommendations. Recommendations must be actionable even if we are out of the picture. We then follow up with a one hour conference call where we explain each section and answer any questions. It has worked well for us and our clients.

Here we have SES Chicago and Pubcon in the same week. It’s like asking a kid to choose which parent to live with. So the Market Motive faculty will be speaking at both events.

This Tuesday, John Marshall will be speaking at WebMasterWorld PubCon Vegas

Analytics, Tracking Performance - Beyond the Page View

The same day I’ll be sharing my favorite four ways to game AdWords Quality Score at

Quality Score Management

At the same conference, Todd Malicoat will be covering

Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies

Interactive Site Reviews - Focus - Social Media

SEO Tools of The Trade

Bryan Eisenberg is listed as a PubCon speaker, but I can’t figure what session he is in!

Greg Jarboe will be moderating at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago on

Strategic Development Workshops: The Human Equation: Giving Back Internet Style

Introduction to Search Marketing

Retailer Track: Meet the Bloggers Who Can Make Your Cash Register Ring!

Getting Found in all the Right Places

Matt Bailey will be speaking at the same SES conference in Chicago on

Hybrid Track: Analytics: Data Into Action

Fun With Dynamic Websites

Interactive Site Clinics

Search & Analytics Workshop: Using Analytics to Increase Search Effectiveness

Just a few days after we leave Las Vegas, Avinash will be speaking at NCDM on

Using Web Analytics to Optimize the Customer Experience

I’ll be sharing four of my favorite ways to ‘game’ AdWords quality score this next Tuesday at WebMasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out how to fool the Adwords Bot into thinking every page was relevant (I’ll show you how). But (warning, spoiler ahead) in the end, this exercise simply came back to a clever way to create relevance among keyword, ad copy, landing page and adgroup semantic grouping — which is good marketing in the first place. So there you go. It’ll be informative, I promise.

But what might make this really interesting is the make up of the panel. Honestly, I expected to see Graywolf on the panel or Brad. Instead I’ll be sharing the table with

David Karandish from the Martha Stewart Apprentice Show
Geoffrey Price, Vice President, Sales - Wester Region, Efficient Frontier
Mary Berk, Senior Program Manager adCenter

Martha Stewart? adCenter? This promises to be an interesting session, purely from the mix of folks on the table.

How many of us have gone to a search marketing conference, listened to a big name speaker, and thought, “What if I could get that guru to spend 15 minutes on my campaign?”

For me, the big-name speakers included Bryan Eisenberg and Alan Rimm-Kaufman and I’m pleased to announce that they both have joined the Market Motive faculty.

Bryan Eisenberg      Alan Rimm-Kaufman

Bryan and Alan fulfill the vision of the “Internet Marketing Dream Team” whose purpose is to teach our members how to be successful in online marketing.

So here’s the lineup

Market Motive faculty and staff are passionate about providing everything marketers need to understand how to get a competitive advantage through online marketing. For $299 per month, members get:

1. Fresh training videos on each area of Internet Marketing: SEO, PPC, analytics, online publicity, social media, site conversion optimization, marketing processes, down-and-dirty how-to’s and more
2. Monthly conference calls with each Market Motive Faculty (experience site clinics, and discuss strategies specific to your business)
3. Recordings of monthly conference calls (Your questions are answered even if you cannot attend)
4. Discussion areas where members, staff and faculty answer your specific questions

Compare this to the costs of a consulting engagement and you see the economics of success. We are so confident that members will find value in our services, that there are no long term contracts to sign. Members can cancel anytime and we will refund the current month dues. We love what we do and we hope that you’ll check us out.

Matt Bailey of SiteLogic has agreed to join us as Market Motive faculty covering social media marketing. And we couldn’t be happier. There were a handful of other worthy candidates and I’m convinced that Matt is the best choice for our subscribers.

Matt Bailey: Fast Rising Star

At a dinner after Search Engine Strategies An Jose, Matt described himself the “Scrooge of social media”. That might confuse folks who have heard Matt present. He’s an authority on the tactics and still eschews the sensationalist “flavor of the month hype” that drives folks to one or a handful of latest media sites. It’s about strategy, and Matt gets that. And it’s this type of thinking that makes Matt the the top mind when teaching social media marketing mid-size to large businesses–which happen to be our primary customers. Interestingly, the DMA agrees and has appointed Matt the director of DMA training and certification.

I know you will gain plenty of knowledge of from Matt’s teaching in Market Motive. If you’ve seen one of Matt’s presentations, you know what I’m talking about. See you inside the site!

-Michael