Search Engine Optimisation Results

Major Fashion Retailer Starts to Kick Ass

Over June and July me and the guys have been developing links like no ones business. Not in terms of quantity but in terms of quality. So far we’ve managed to increase the terms generating traffic by about 600 in under a month. Leading to more than 25% increase in sales and more than 20% growth in revenue YOY (word to the wise keep selecting your keywords based upon the user intention and you’ll get even better financial results).

Zero to Hero for Movie Blog

I love movies and I love comics so what better way to mess around than to start integrating the two loves. Duly I’ve been involved with the Watchmen Film Blog for a wee while now. We’re now upto over 2,000 uniques a week which shows the growth that can be achieved within specific niche markets. If you want to have a look at how the films starting to shape up you can see the Watchmen Film Trailer Here.

Caravans Still Selling this Summer

God I hate being an affiliate – I feel so dirty every time they send me a cheque :p Anyway this Summer has been OK this year. I’m still waiting for an account manager at BuyAt to send me new links for the Butlins programme – as they changed their tracking links which killed the dynamic booking component I developed. But all in all its looking pretty good. Visits are up, CTR is up, sales are up and by expanding the range of merchants its all going pretty well.

Anyway hope everyone is enjoying their Summer – its like the South of France up here in Scotland just now: excepting the girls are all orange or seriously pale. But as I jet out to Greece for a week I will no doubt have time to plan a new set of strategies for when I get back. See you when I get back.

Bugger and before I forget Colin (who used to work at Equator) has moved to Drive Business. Ok so he left me in the lurch and you know how hard it can be to get experienced SEO staff these days but Andrews now developing links like no ones business. On which subject check out andrews fashion blog here I love his post on Cheap golf Chic.

Anyway one of the things they do which I really like, and I’m thinking of doing in the next couple of months, are their PDF handouts. For their Internet marketing services they provide small PDF documents for clients, prospective clients and anyone who wants them. Today I got sent a link to their new affiliate marketing guide.

I’ve stuck links below to the docs I know of that they’ve made so far – there are more I’m sure but I dont have all the URLs to hand. I list them not because I think it’ll change how you think about your marketing online but because they may help you develop your own ‘soft sell‘ documents. If you’ve got a new service what better way to announce it than by sending all your clients a nice little doc that’s a bit fun. Or if you’re in pre-sales mode with a new lead arises send them the bundle by email – it’ll be cool, branded and keep you in their thoughts.

Bignmouthmedia PDF Links

• http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/downloads/files/bmm_top-secret.pdf
• http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/…/search-engine-optimisation-check-list.pdf
• http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/downloads/files/search-engine-satellites.pdf
• http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/downloads/files/booklets/Affiliates.pdf
• http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/downloads/files/booklets/PPC.pdf

Have fun.

Direct Links from PPC Ads

Many merchants have in their terms and conditions that you should not direct link to their website from PPC ads. Its a logical step as the advert then becomes part of the advertising that the consumer sees as being paid for by the brand. If its misleading its the brand that’ll get flamed – not to mention all the stuff related to the Google quality score for the merchants running PPC campaigns.

But no one @ a network level seems to care. They should be monitoring this to help protect merchants from this online. The only way a click can go to a merchant through an affiliate network with a referrer being MSN, Google or Yahoo! is if the click is through PPC. If the network got the document referrer and cross referenced this with the program details they could easily choose not to set their cookie on these programs – that said they’d lose money on it.

PPC Affiliate Bidding on Brand

In some cases where direct linking to the merchant site is allowed bidding on the companies brand terms is not allowed. As to do so would allow affiliate to force up click costs on what are likely to be the merchants best converting terms. Why should merchants be forced to pay more for clicks and then also pay the offender a comission!

All you have to do is again strip out the search engine query from the referrer string and cross reference this against a pre built list of terms – if the term falls within the offending list redirect consumer to website but dont set the tracking cookie.

If affiliate networks did these things the days of merchants having their brands raped by affiliates would be one day closer. But we all know they have no intention of doing so. It would not only cripple their business but would also lead affiliates to simply join networks where they could get away with these things.

Here endeth the rant & sorry for the poor english (I’m having  a bad day)…

It’s something we’ve been developing for about three months. It’s kinda low level but it takes information about a user and then uses this to intuit their intentions when they reach a website. We thought it was great little thing and the more we’ve got into it the more excited we’ve become.

The problem with your website is…

Your website talks to each consumer as if they wanted the same things.

Every user gets the same experience – irrelevant of intention. It’s not great for the consumer and it’s not great for your business. You can go to Google, or a click on a link on another website, visit somewhere from an email and get the same experience as every other user. Inspite of the fact that I may not have the same intent as every other user.

In essence all that marketing budget you spend online is to ‘engage’ prospective visitors and get them to click to your website. And once they get to your website they will be given content/information/pretty pitcures and with this information they decide to buy your services or your products. But often a website can’t cope with the myriad of expectations which your website has. It just can’t.

If you think of it channel by channel you’ll see what I mean:

SEO: you optimise your website titles and content, get great navigation, get great images and you test and refine till you get great positions for your brand terms and some core generics. For a simple example have a think about a hotel chain. If you type ‘ramada jarvis hotels‘ into Google.co.uk you get the Ramada Jarvis homepage – makes sense that you’d find it in top position.

If you type in ‘weekend break hotels’ you’ll find them at about position 4 in Google.co.uk, you’ll get the same webpage and the same experience as someone who entered the brand term. Inspite of the intention of you, the user, being completely different you get the same experience as someone who is brand aware and knows what the site does. With the ‘weekend breaks’ query resulting in traffic the psychological link between the query and the resulting website are incorrect – in effect the website has led the consumer to ‘lose the scent’.

This is often unavoidable due to the way that search engines rank pages: Ramada should be relevant for ‘weekend breaks’ their hotels are affordable and useful for trips away – but the search engine result isn’t 100% appropriate, and developing a new page for every term under the sun would make their SEO campaign hugely more expensive (and their SEO campaign is good – this was the third hotel chain I tested and the only one to have a generic term on the homepage that ranked well). If only the search engines were able to intuit more and give better results for the website owners they’d make more money.

PPC: Every man and his dog is (OK should be) using landing pages and deeplinking in their PPC campaigns. Specifically targeting pages with content relevant to the query drives better conversion. But with broad match on, even using a ton of negative keywords, you’ll find some irrelevant or unexpected traffic coming through. Try something like “Holidays in Scotland” – the result set you get may be different from mine. But if you click on the link to Hoseasons you get this page. (Yep we’ve just skewed up their PPC stats for the month as their onsite trackings just been given a dunt judging by the URL). But I can’t see anything on this page which is relevant for this query – they’ve probably bid so high on the term ‘holidays’ that they’re popping in all over the place. Their PPC agency should be shot but it highlights the point that the bids are going to waste.

Again the traffic you’re generating – what’s more you’re paying for – isn’t quite going to the page that is most appropriate for them – reducing your sales, reducing your competitiveness and making your online return on investment lower.

Affiliates: Affiliates help you make more money from your website. You pay them to get you clicks and should one of those clicks turn into a sale you pay them commission. But affiliates can be lazy – affiliate networks can be lazy – and your affiliate agency can be lazy. Take the Butlins affiliate program it has nice banners that say stuff like ‘Altogether more fun” but takes you to a page advertising “The big deal” – the disconnect is huge. You as a consumer had experience A in mind and what you get is something altogether different.

This is a bad for you – you’re not making the sales you could, for your affiliates – who will leave your program if its not making them money and ultimately , and most importantly, for the consumer.

The solution for your website is…

Make your website respond to what your customer has asked from it.

Let the behaviour of the customer before they reach your website and during their visit allow you to enhance their experience. I’ve heard people talk about website that do this as ‘Web 2.0′ websites, I call them ‘Direct Response’ websites and some call them ‘behaviourally adaptive’ websites. It’s not important what you call them it’s what they do that’ll help change your online thinking forever.

We’ve developed a very small system that does this – it uses three things it learns from users and enters beta testing in two weeks, we’re really pleased with it. The alpha tests were going well and then yesterday I attended a meeting in London. Was great – I got up at four, flew from Glasgow at 6.15 (which I only just caught), endured trains across london, got to conference venue at about 9.30 (I’m late), register (find that the early morning sessions are in one big hall and there are no seats left, the coffee doesn’t get served till 11.

I’m not a happy bunny at this point.

And then I go to one of these early morning seminars and from the first moment I felt like everything we’d been messing with to get cash out of our sites had been trumped. I was expectiong some stuff about how to target and test your website to make more cash. You know the usual A/B testing, multivariate testing that we all promise we’ll do and then I saw how strong a product from Omniture called “Test& Target 1:1” was.

It does your A/B and multivariate testing on the fly – to work out which configuration of your high traffic pages is best for users. When I say high traffic I mean really high traffic pages – you know the blue chip, high street, brand name webistes that we have probably all used at least once. It takes about 40 things about a user and seeks to derive their intention.

I’ll show you one cool little example of this – go to Google and do a search for “car insurance” – click on the directline.com result in natural search and the homepage will have the leader image below.

Direct Line Homepage image called in by Omniture Test& Target for the natural search traffic from ‘car insurance’:

Go back to Google and search for “home insurance” and again click on the directline result. You get the same page URL with different image presented.

Direct Line Homepage image called in by Omniture Test& Target for the natural search traffic from ‘home insurance’:

It’s cool – a huge UK brand is changing the content based upon your query. Not only that the system has probably tested three or four versions of that graphic to work out which one leads visitors to complete the goals most often.

What other ‘behaviours‘ can Omniture use to target websites?

If you think that this message can be changed by looking at your IP (to determine your location), your browser (as your browser can be a social calling card), you connection speed (Flash movie or animated gif depending on how fast teh files likely to download), which pages in the website you’ve already visited in the session, which pages you visited in previous sessions and its after midnight so I’m not going to put them all in. You can see, even from this short list, why I went WOW!

It was a bit dissapointing that during the Q&A that their seemed to be a lot of things that teh account handlers were ghetting batted back – as they hadn’t fully informed clients of what this ‘Test& Track 1:1′ could do for them. This thing should be flying off the shelves. Maybe it is maybe it isn’t how do you tell when the level of intimacy with the website is so subtle that you can’t see it unless you know that it is there.

Getting Test& Target isn’t going to be cheap (they never said as much). But when you think that you may need a set of 60 creatives for your homepage alone – rather than just one, the system itself will no doubt have a highish cost and you’ll have to mess about with your code a bit but if you’ve got enough traffic and your conversion rate is poor (they talked about conversion rates of below 4% at one stage being poor!!!!) it could be a viable way to go.

Until we have such a website @ mercurythread we’re gonna keep pluggin away with our little system and get better ROI for our clients by spending budgets effectively and efficently. And then when we go and sign up Sony/BMG or Hilton I know right where I’m going to be looking to get them to invest. I just hope by this stage Omniture have an affiliate program…

PS: Sorry for the epistle about behaviourally targetting websites but I think it’s damn cool. If you’ve got any comments – or know of any other systems that do this – drop us a line in the comments below.

So, understandably if it comes to pass that for one reason or another the decision has to be made as to whether or not we should close a program down on one network and re-launch on another, I become a bit hesitant and in all honesty begin to cringe a bit – ok a lot. I’ve had some bad experiences with tracking problems (known to a few of us as shhhhhhhh problems), and the thought of moving a perfectly functioning and performing program from one network to another fills me with dread. What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, besides the obvious tracking problems that can arise and fill my days with much hair pulling, there are other factors as well.

Factor number one: taking a perfectly functioning program in mid-run is kind of like suddenly stopping mid-marathon – you lose momentum, rhythm, you feel rather sickly, and it takes a long time to get back into the swing of things. Affiliates will have to be informed, and more importantly convinced to switch their links over to the new network and continue promoting the program. There are two problems that may arise here – the affiliates involved may lose confidence in the program and more importantly in the agency or merchant managing the program. A second problem is that there may be a number of affiliates who bring in one or a few sales a month which on their own isn’t fantastically amazing, but collectively are important and make a big difference to the performance of the program. These affiliates may not see the point in taking the time and effort to switch their links over to the new network and could drop the program altogether.

Factor number two: some affiliates – big and smaller – may not like the new network that’s been chosen for the program. Don’t knock this point – while affiliates like to spend time on profitable programs, they are independent and can chose to take up or drop a program – and if they’ve had bad dealings with a particular network, or have fallen out of love with them, affiliates may chose not to promote a program. This is such an important point, that many merchants tend to have their programs running on a couple networks.
Factor number three: transitioning the program from the current network to the new network seamlessly and with minimal impact on sales and revenue generation. This is a lot easier said than done – first and foremost is setting up the new network’s tags on the merchant’s confirmation page and test to make sure they work. You’ve also got to ensure that the new tags don’t interfere with the existing ones and in essence causing all hell to break loose. This is definitely not an exaggeration – I speak from great and insane experience that this can and will happen. Then you’ve got to try to migrate the affiliates over to the new network – this is no easy feat either. The issues that may arise from this could include a drop in sales and revenue while affiliates spend the time changing their links and testing, and potentially the loss of some affiliates in the transition – whether they’re the big hitters or smaller sales generating affiliates, losing productive affiliates will impact terribly on a program.

And so there ends the counting and listing of all the issues and problems that swirl around my head when I consider what can and will happen when programs switch networks, etc. I’ve only had to shut down a program on a network and open it on a new one in the case of a badly performing network – so I am understandably apprehensive about the above. Whatever the reasons that force you to face a similar situation, at least I’ve hopefully armed you with a list of all the things that could and probably will go wrong. It isn’t all doom and gloom though – it’s dealable and doable, and just requires a little foresight and planning. But it isn’t something that should be taken lightly – consider the impact on your program, on other programs on the fallen network, and most importantly the impact on your client’s business.

This is a guest article written by Miss Kerry Kasim, of Equator Internet Marketing

So far I’ve talked Ana and Kerry into doing it – a few double vodka’s a bit of begging etc.

That said their SEO team were asking about putting links into their posts – hmmm wonder why

On which subject I’ve also blagged Bill Marshall from Oyster Web to do some bits and pieces on Search Engine Optimisation which will probably  involve a tirade against microsoft oh and complaints about website validity!

All good stuff coming soon