Q: Using/Have Used AdWords?

Q: Using/Have Used SEO?

James Spittal (Me)

• Digital marketing consultant• Built first HTML website at age 7

• Some of the companies I’ve worked with:

• Spoken at:– CPA Australia, Swinburne University, Hub Melbourne and a few other places

• Consult/advise on digital for a number of different businesses• I also own and operate a number of different eCommerce websites

and online web properties

James Spittal (Me)

• What are I’ll be talking about today are all strategies I’ve directly implemented for clients of mine or things that I’ve used in my own business.

• There’s a lot of ‘theory’ out there about digital or social media .. And sometimes I find there is a bit of a gap between the theory and the application.

The things we’ll be covering• The biggest drivers and cause factors for success with measurably

growing your business with digital marketing• What’s actually working and why?• How some companies are doubling their leads month on month with

Google AdWords [with worked examples]• How companies are utilizing SEO to increase lead volume• How companies are effectively utilizing conversion rate optimisation

to increase and test the success of each of their online marketing campaigns

• A step-by-step break down on how one of my companies used Facebook Advertising, SEO, A/B testing, landing page design and Google AdWords to double our leads every month for the last 5 months. And how this will work in most industries.

How this talk is relevant to you & outcomes

• What I’d like you all to walk away with is a clear understanding of how you can:– (A) Generate more leads online; and/or– (B) Generate more sales online;– Drive (or increase) business growth by using (A) and/or (B);

• See and understand some real examples to stimulate some ideas for testing within your own organizations;

• Be able to walk away and begin developing a digital marketing strategy to generate leads and drive sales online;

• Can’t teach everything in an hour, but I’m hoping it’ll still be the best primer you’ve had in digital marketing!

How this talk is relevant to you & outcomes

• What I’d like you all to walk away with is a clear understanding of how you can:– (A) Generate more leads online; and/or– (B) Generate more sales online;– Drive (or increase) business growth by using (A) and/or (B);

• See and understand some real examples to stimulate some ideas for testing within your own organizations;

• Be able to walk away and begin developing a digital marketing strategy to generate leads and drive sales online;

• Can’t teach everything in an hour, but I’m hoping it’ll still be the best primer you’ve had in digital marketing!

Google AdWords [examples]

How some companies are doubling their leads month on month with

Google AdWords

Google AdWords Basics

How to double the number of leads you get from Google

AdWords (and then do it again)

Typical Example

• Monthly Google AdWords Spend $4,000• Google AdWords Cost-Per-Click $4• $4000 / $4 = 1000 clicks per month• ‘Typical’ conversion rate of clicks ->

conversions: 6.8%• 1000 clicks = 68 conversions• Sale price in this example: $100• 68 x $100 = $6800

A/B Testing

How could we change the original website (‘landing page’) to increase the conversion rate?

(The number of people signing up on that page.)

A/B TestingGoogle AdWords Visitors

50% visitors to the ‘original site’

50% visitors to the ‘new test site’ (optimised)

In a scenario such as this, it’s realistic to expect a 15% - 150% increase in conversion rate on Version B over Version A.

Before & After

• Monthly Google AdWords Spend $4,000

• Google AdWords Cost-Per-Click $4

• $4000 / $4 = 1000 clicks per month

• ‘Typical’ conversion rate of clicks -> conversions: 6.8%

• 1000 clicks = 68 conversions• Sale price in this example:

$100• 68 x $100 = $6800

• Monthly Google AdWords Spend $4,000

• Google AdWords Cost-Per-Click $4

• $4000 / $4 = 1000 clicks per month

• Increased conversion rate: 13.6%

• 1000 clicks = 136 conversions• Sale price in this example:

$100• 136 x $100 = $13,600

Net result:

100% increase in sales revenue generated via Google AdWords without spending an extra cent on advertising or marketing.

Best of all, in most cases – A/B testing can be setup in a couple of days.

Real examples

• Over a pool of approximately 500 A/B tests and approximately 100 clients, I’ve seen increases in conversion rate of 15% - 600%

• I’ve never seen an example where there wasn’t opportunity for at least 15% improvement in conversion rate, and the average over 100 clients is around the 150% mark

• Average length of engagement was approximately 12 weeks – but those that had the highest increases tended to be closer to 12 months (diminishing returns)

Lessons learned

• The tests that you think are going to increase conversion often don’t! (Consumers don’t always behave the way we’d expect or the way we’d hope.)

• The most important thing is to test.• If the test produces a negative result, come up with a

hypothesises why you think it did and repeat another test.

• Continue until you see a positive result.

The Process: Continuous & Never-Ending Testing Loop

How can you get started?

• There are a lot of great A/B testing tools out there (including Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely and Omniture.)

• Check out http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ as a starting point (I use it a lot)

• Start simple and start small – try with a different headline or a different colour button

• There’s some good reading material out there.• I’ve got a book coming out on the more advanced stuff

coming out in the next couple months

SEO as a tool for dramatically increasing lead volume

According to research by Google –15% of browsers click on the ads whereas 85%

click on the ‘organic’ SEO results.

Why? Because a lot of internet users are aware that the others are paid advertisements and there is a perception that the organic ranked businesses are more trustworthy or ‘better’.

Take-away: If you’ve got a Google AdWords campaign that’s already working for you and generating revenue/profit –

search engine optimization (SEO) can (usually) increase your volume of traffic by 100% - 560%

How to do SEO (101)

Google PageRank Formula

Google PageRank Formula (In Simple English)

• 1. (Off-page SEO) The more (quality & relevant) links there are to your website (and the pages on your website), the better!

• 2. (On-page SEO) Your website should tell Google exactly what it’s about and what kind of searches are relevant to your website. It should also contain words that are relevant to what people are searching for.

• Combine (1) and (2) well and you’ve got the basics of SEO right.

What you probably need to know about SEO

• It’s constantly changing (Google are updating their formula all the time, often with small updates every month and major updates every couple months.)

• The majority of SEO agencies and SEO consultants struggle to keep up with the rate of changes.

• Keeping your SEO agency honest can be really hard. (I’ve had the unfortunate task of having to do it for some of my clients.)

• There are some SEO agencies and SEO consultants out there that are fantastic. They tend to be the ones that are constantly reading SEO blogs and changing their approach to SEO based on the latest formula changes.

How can you get started?

• In most cases, if you’re not using Google AdWords successfully yet, I wouldn’t bother with SEO (yet).

• If Google AdWords is working for you right now, look into SEO as a way to multiply what you’re currently doing.

• Interview a range of SEO companies – both Australia and international.

• Ask them a lot of hard questions. (Google ‘questions to ask before hiring an SEO agency’)

• Don’t be afraid to switch around agencies if you’re not seeing the results you’re after.

• Understand how to measure what your SEO agency is doing so you can keep them accountable (‘metrics’)

0 leads per month to 150+ leads per month using all of the

strategies above

0 leads to 150+ leads per month in 6 months

• Step 1: Launch Google AdWords campaign and Facebook Advertising campaign• Step 2: Landing pages for each relevant Google AdWords campaign and

Facebook Advertising campaign• Step 3: Turn off all the keywords that aren’t working, increase all the ones that

are.• Step 4: A/B test the landing pages. Test the things that are most likely to have

the quickest impact in the shortest time. Start with headline, offer, words and then move onto big stuff - dramatic changes in layout, style, videos, complete rewrite, etc. I had two designers working part-time just creating new landing pages to test.

• Step 5: Keep launching new A/B tests every couple days and constantly coming up with new ‘test hypothesises’ to improve conversion rate.

• All the way through – measure, measure, measure. You need to track closely how your conversion rate is changing and the most important thing to track is your cost-per-lead and you also want to understand/measure your lead quality (which can be determined by asking pre-qualification questions and also indicated by measuring your sales closing ratio.)

An example of a successful A/B test (100% uplift)

Control (Original Home Page)

Variation #1 (Winner)

100% increase in leads without increasing advertising expenditure

• Visual Website Optimizer screenshots, etc.

Where a lot of companies fall over in implementing these strategies

Where a lot of companies fall over in implementing these strategies

• Who’s responsible for this stuff again? (Is it the marketing manager? Is it the digital marketing manager? Is it the IT guy? Is it the website guy? Is it the agency?)

• Do we have the ‘know how’?

• Are we getting bogged down with other things?

Source: Conversion Rate Optimization Report 2012

Recap

• We’ve seen how companies are using:– Google AdWords to generate leads and sales

online– A/B testing and conversion optimisation to

increase their online revenue by 15% - 600% in less than 12 months

– SEO to multiply the volume of traffic and leads– How I used a range of these strategies to generate

150 leads per month in my own business

Q&A

• Questions?

Thank you!