How to Use Negative Keywords with PPC

by Gabriela Serrano on December 15, 2011

in Pay Per Click (PPC)

Negative keywords are a core component of a successful PPC campaign. By including the right negative keywords to better target your audience, you will generate more qualified traffic, increase your Click through Rate, and therefore lower your Cost per Click. However, if used incorrectly, negative keywords can deprive your website of a huge amount of relevant traffic.

Negative Keywords Checklist

For those of you managing your PPC inhouse, I’ve put together a checklist of best practices for using negative keywords. The checklist assumes you already have a negative keyword list and are refining it for maximum impact.

Are there any obvious keywords that should not be in the negative keyword list?

This is important to ensure that you’re not blocking qualified traffic. For example, if you sell baby clothes, “baby” and “clothes” would be good negative keywords because they are too broad, but you’d probably want to keep the traffic for searches such as “baby accessories” and “infant clothing”.

Are you applying negative keywords at the ad group level?

It’s common for people to add negative keywords at the campaign level, because it’s faster than applying them to individual ad groups. However, this universal approach usually doesn’t achieve the best results. It’s much more effective to allocate negative keywords to each ad group within your campaign, according to the target audience for each.

To continue with the baby clothes store example, you’d want to keep “newborn baby clothing” as a negative keyword for an ad group targetting toddler clothing, but remove it for your ad group targetting newborn clothing.

Have  you introduced any new products or services?

Let’s say your baby clothing store has recently started selling a new designer range. Make sure you take “designer baby clothes” off the negative keyword list, because this keyword is now relevant to what you offer.

Are the match types being correctly applied?

A common mistake is adding negative keywords in the wrong match type. For instructions on how to use match types to best effect, please visit Google’s help page on the subject.

How often should I revisit my negative keywords?

You should review your negative keywords list every 2 to 3 months, to make sure that your product offerings, ad groups and qualified traffic opportunities are all up to date and in alignment.

 

If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments! :)

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Mission Australia: Giving Back

by Michael Laps on December 14, 2011

in Company News

At E-Web, we’re lucky. Lucky to be surrounded by loving friends. Lucky to be surrounded by people who care. Lucky to be surrounded by people who want to help.

At Mission Australia’s Charles Chambers Court, they are not so lucky.

Many of the people who’ve turned to Mission Australia for help have no family, no home, and no means. Most of them are elderly, and incapable of looking after themselves otherwise. But thanks to the generosity and kindness of Mission Australia, they have a comfortable bed and a warm meal. With over 70 beds, they provide the services required to keep many off the streets and in a safer environment. They have a dedicated and caring team who look after them every day. They finally have a home – some stability and permanence in their lives.

So this Christmas, E-Webbers decided to give back to the community some of the positivity and joy that we seem to constantly be surrounded by. We joined them early on Saturday morning, bringing cookies, cakes and huge smiles to serve early morning tea to the elderly and less fortunate.

It was inspiring to look around the room and see every single E-Webber talking to somebody, sharing a joke, and listening to their remarkable life stories. Many of them had so much to share, and finally somebody to listen.

There were many people sitting in the cafeteria that day, waiting to tell somebody about all they had seen and experienced. I spent my time with a man named John. He’s 73. Once upon a time he was a carpenter. He regaled me with stories of what it was like to be in the Australian work force back then, working for $5 per day due to a lack of opportunity. He told me that it was “take it or leave it”. Sadly though, he badly injured his shoulder and was forced to start working in factory production lines. He’s a good man, with a sense of humour and a big smile.

The more I listened to him, the more I was thankful that he had a roof over his head and someone to look after him.

Many may not have heard of Mission Australia or the work they do on a daily basis. But they should. They depend on the generosity of Australians to look after those who can’t do so themselves. They depend on the generosity of Australians to provide a home for those who need it. We, who take all of these bare essentials for granted, should constantly do our utmost to assist organisations like Mission Australia.

They make people’s lives better.

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Are You Maximising All That Online Marketing Has to Offer?

by Tristen Tan on December 12, 2011

in SEO

Even in this enlightened Information Age, too many companies try to promote their products and services through too few online channels, because they don’t understand how valuable using multiple online streams can be for compounding their marketing ROI. It’s a wrench to see hundreds of businesses miss out on easy pickings by being too conservative with the scope of their campaigns.

Let’s look at some examples of how different online marketing streams complement each other to achieve enhanced results.

Search Engine Optimisation

There is nothing comparable to SEO when it comes to driving qualified visitors to your website. It is a long-term strategy and you won’t get high rankings overnight, but once you’re at the top, the ROI can keep coming in for years – even indefinitely. SEO is the most sensible option in the long run, and should be the cornerstone of your online campaign. I like to think of SEO as putting a deposit down on your dream home and paying off the mortgage over time.

Pay Per Click

PPC advertising gives you a presence in the paid search section of the search engine results. It’s often said that PPC is a useful short-term fix while you’re waiting for your SEO keywords to start ranking on the first page. While it’s true that PPC provides a great instant traffic boost, that doesn’t mean you should turn it off once your SEO kicks in! Studies have shown that overall traffic drops when a PPC campaign is deactivated, even if your SEO campaign is going great. Also, consumers have more trust in a brand that appears in both the paid and organic results, which definitely won’t hurt your conversion rate. If those weren’t compelling enough reasons to invest in both SEO and PPC, another major benefit is the valuable SEO keyword research data you can get from running a PPC campaign.

Google Places Optimisation

What if your company operates in 2 different locations? You’ll definitely want to appear in the Google Places results. Not only are local searchers highly qualified, Google Places are often the first things that appear on the search results page. And let’s not overlook the fact that with SEO and PPC, your business is now showing up in 3 different areas of the results page, tripling your brand exposure. That’s 3x the opportunity to get clicked!

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Now that your traffic is booming, you need to ensure that all potential leads are converted into sales. Using Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is actually one of the simplest ways to increase website revenue. CRO identifies and eliminates “conversion blockers” like confusing enquiry forms, offputting colour themes, difficult-to-read site copy, slow loading speeds, annoying shopping carts, and hard-to-find contact information. Most websites are afflicted with at least some of these blockers. Ready for the good news? If getting rid of them results in 2 out of every 100 visitors converting instead of 1 out of every 100, you’ve just doubled your revenue. Imagine if you got to 3/100 or 4/100, and there’s no denying that CRO is an essential part of the holistic online marketing picture.

Social Media Optimisation

A new adage for online marketing is “You can’t have search without social“. With search results becoming more personalised and increasingly influenced by social factors, the effectiveness of your SEO campaign is directly linked to your business’ online social presence. Basically, the more active you are on networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google Plus, and the more people are talking about you online, the more relevant and rank-worthy your website becomes. Social media also builds trust, increases your overall web presence, and allows you to engage directly with your customers. Market research, brand loyalty, thought leadership, and customer relationship management are all avenues opened up by using social media, so jump in!

I hope this post has given you some food for thought on how to leverage multiple online marketing channels. If you agree or disagree with any of my opinions, please let me know in the comments.

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How to Paginate Your Website for SEO

by Theodore Hatzi on December 12, 2011

in SEO

Content pagination exists all over the web to categorise the data on resource-heavy websites such as e-commerce stores, blogs, and article hubs. If you have a website with a lot of information, how should you handle pagination with regard to SEO? Leave what you have as it is and let search engines figure out the rest? Or should you provide some simple HTML mark-up to give them a helping hand? This post will teach you how to paginate for SEO, as well avoid a few of the common pagination mistakes.

The Google Way to Pagination

A few months ago, Google introduced a way to help webmasters implement proper, search engine-friendly pagination. By using the rel=”next” and rel=”previous” link tags within the head section of your web page, you can tell Google if there is a page which follows the current page, or if there is a previous page before the current one. Basically, this puts your pages into a nice, easy-to-understand series.

Let’s look at an example. If you are on page 3 on a website (URL for this example would be http://www.examplesite.com.au/category?page=3), the link tags in the head section should look something similar to the below:

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.examplesite.com.au/category?page=4" />
<link rel="next" href="http://www.examplesite.com.au/category?page=2" />

Of course, there are exclusions where the first page in the series will not have a previous page, just like the last page will not have a following page, in which case you’d leave out the appropriate link tag in the head. For more information on using these link tags, please reference Google’s blog post on the subject.

Some Common Pagination Mistakes

On many websites, and e-commerce websites in particular, there are many filters which help sort out the list of pages in a particular order or price value. For search engine optimised websites, these pages will usually use the rel=”canonical” tag to avoid duplicate content issues and possible keyword cannibalisation.

However, some people make the mistake of pointing this canonical tag to the first page in the pagination series - a big no no! Doing this tells Google to redirect to the original page, instead of continuing to crawl through the pagination series. If Google is not allowed to crawl all the pages in your website, you can’t be sure that all your pages are being indexed and that PageRank is flowing correctly through your website. You should not rely solely on an xml sitemap to get all your pages indexed and given their proper authority.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t use the rel=”canonical” tag, because it’s definitely useful. Many e-commerce sites have the same snippets of content duplicated across many pages - after all, not everyone has time to write a unique description for each product, especially if their online store stocks thousands of items. It’s just not the best way to handle pagination for SEO purposes.

More Ways to Handle Pagination Content

Once you have implemented the rel=”next”and rel=”previous” link tags, you should look at a few more on-page factors.

The Title Tag

As we all know from SEO basics 101, the title tag is a hugely important ranking factor. It can also assist pagination by telling search engines what page in the series it is visiting. All you have to do is append the page number to the existing title.

<title>Stylish Red Shoes - Page 2</title>

The Meta Description

As with the title tag, appending the page number to the meta description is helpful to search engine crawlers.

<meta name="description" content="View our selection of red shoes online at discount prices for the Christmas Season - Page 2">

We hope this helps you with handling pagination on your website. Let us know what your views are on pagination and how you usually use it to help your crawlability and indexing. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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E-Web a Winner at Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2011

by Stefan Chan on December 8, 2011

in Company News

Deloitte Technology Fast 500Last week the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for the Asia Pacific region awards ceremony was held at the world’s tallest hotel, the Ritz Carton in Hong Kong. This prestigious award recognises technology companies that have achieved the fastest rates of annual revenue growth over the past 3 years.

With companies spanning from all around the Asia Pacific, Australia managed to rank 4th with 53 companies ranking in the Fast 500 this year. Australia should be extremely proud of this achievement, coming in just behind Taiwan, South Korea and China.  Other countries represented included India, Macau, New Zealand, Japan and Malaysia.

E-Web Marketing had the privilege of coming in at 370 of the Fast 500, in recognition of our 122.2% growth over the past 3 years. We were the only Australian company in attendance on the day, so we got to collect our award in person. We were also lucky enough to be the first company to be called on stage as a winner. We were thrilled and proud to represent both Australia and the online marketing industry at the awards ceremony!

Some highlights and interesting statistics from the Deloitte Technologyh Fast 500 awards ceremony:

  • The Store Corporation (Yihaodian) came first of the 500. Yihoadian is a Chinese e-commerce company that started with only two people renting a single room, and now have more than 4,200 staff only after three years, and achieved a growth rate of 19,2188%. We think this achievement deserves special congratulations!
  • The top 5 companies saw an average growth rate of 9,910%
  • The Semiconductors, Components and Electronics industry led the growth charts with 166 companies, followed by the Internet industry (that’s us!) with 92
  • Taiwan took the lead this year from China in the Fast 500 with 133 companies
  • 53 companies from Australia received a Fast 500 award in 2011
Ranked Companies by Locations

Ranked Companies by Locations

For the full winners report click here (PDF).

Everyone at E-Web Marketing is extremely grateful and proud of the growth we’ve enjoyed over the last few years. We could not have done it without the support of our fantastic clients. That’s why we’re so excited about the upcoming opportunity to celebrate this and other achievements with our clients and partners at our Christmas party on Friday 16th December. See you there!

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Goal Flow Visualisation in Action

by Jesse Cai on December 1, 2011

in Analytics

In a previous post I gave you a general introduction on how to use Visitors Flow visualisations, a new feature in Google Analytics that lets you view your online marketing campaign data via interactive graphs and charts. Today, I’m going to go over another powerful feature: Goal Flow visualisations.

If you have an e-commerce website, you’re probably familiar with setting up a destination URL as a goal for checkout success. In this scenario, you’ll also want to know exactly how your visitors work their way through your site pages, so you can identify any drop-off points in your online sales. In the past, you may have tried out the Funnel Visualisation feature. The limitation with this was that sometimes visitors don’t complete the checkout process in a clear, step-by-step manner. Funnel Visualisation is a general overview of the conversion process, and doesn’t show details such as visitors adding products to the shopping cart, going back to browse some more, changing their minds about what they want to buy, etc. Without a clearer picture of the conversion process, it’s very easy to miss the spot of weakness that costs you those crucial sales, and damage the conversion rate of your whole campaign.

Now, thanks to the introduction of Goal Flow, you can get a much better understanding of the conversion process. Let’s break it down step by step (I’ll assume that you have already set up a goal with several steps involved -  if you don’t know how to start with this, the Google Analytics team is hosting a webinar about this topic today).

Goal Flow is located under Goals subsection of the Conversion tab within Google Analytics’ side navigation. As you can see, the interface is pretty similar to the Visitors Flow section.

Goal Flow Interface

Goal Flow Interface

From the picture above you easily see the flow of the checkout process. You can get more detailed stats with just a simple click on any flow section, and also adjust the zoom in/out bar and connection option to to change the scale of the visualisation.

Going beyond the basics, I’m going to show you how to use the powerful combination of Custom Segment and Goal Flow to get a visualisation of top search keywords that successfully achieve goals.

The first way to try to achieve this would be using the Non-paid Search traffic segment with the Keyword dimension selected. Let’s see if it works:

Default Segment

Default Segment

A good result, but unfortunately the top keywords are mostly brand-related, so the valuable SEO keywords are all hidden. How can we solve this? Let’s try creating a Custom Segment to filter out all the brand-related keywords. Here’s how to do it:

1. In Standard Reporting, go to Audience -> Overview and click Advanced Segments.

Advanced Segments

Advanced Segments

2. Choose to exclude the Keyword dimension containing your brand name. Just type in your brand-related keywords to the required field.

1st dimension

1st Dimension Filter

3. Next, click “Add ‘AND’ statement” and add the “Medium” dimension to contain “organic”.

2nd dimension

2nd Dimension Filter

4. Name your Custom Segment ”Non-brand Organic Visits” and save.

5. Finally, lets go back to the Goal Flow section and apply your new Custom Segment with the dimension Keyword. Now your brand name will be filtered out, and you can see which keywords brought the most conversions!

Top Keywords

Top Keywords

I hope this tutorial has given you a better understanding of how to use Goal Flow visualisations successfully. Please let me know if you have any questions, or any new ideas on this topic. You can also read more about this exciting new tool at the Google Analytics blog.

Thanks for reading!

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Join E-Web in Celebrating the Festive Season!

by Lorraine Owens on November 30, 2011

in Company News

With the Christmas season upon us, E-Web is gearing up for a BIG December!

Each year we always have a staff Christmas party to celebrate the the year’s accomplishments. In previous years we have done things such as Human Foosball, Karaoke and even an Amazing Race around the city. In keeping with tradition, this year’s upcoming Christmas party is top secret, with staff having to wait until Saturday 10th December to find out what is in store for them this time around.

 

E-Web Xmas Party 2009

 

On top of this exciting day, E-Web is also planning for the first time a second Christmas party to thank our clients and partners. On Friday 16th December, we’ll be throwing a bash especially for our loyal clients and partners to eat, drink, dance and be merry, so we can thank you properly for the amazing year that was 2011. The exact details of this event are also under wraps … but here is some teaser information:

  • Food – What sort of Christmas party would it be without a delicious buffet of holiday favourites?
  • Drinks - Likewise, there’s no such thing as a Christmas celebration without a few beverages … perhaps even a cocktail or two?
  • DJ and a dance floor – We LOVE getting our groove on… and hopefully our guests will too!
  • Games – Ping pong, poker, karaoke, trivia and all that good stuff.

 

E-Web Client and Partner Party Invitation

 

If you can come, RSVP to the email on the invitation above by Friday 2nd December. We hope to see you there – and Merry Christmas!

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Visitors Flow Visualisation in Action

by Jesse Cai on November 29, 2011

in Analytics

A couple of weeks ago my colleague Annie brought you a general introduction of an upcoming feature in Google Analytics: Flow Visualisation. This week saw the new feature finally show up in our Google Analytics interface, prompting me to put together this simple tutorial about the Visitor Flow Visualisation.

To start using the Visitors Flow tool, you must first go to the new version of Google Analytics. (Incidentally, I highly recommend everybody to switch to the new version, since the old version will be gone very soon.) Click and expand the Visitors section on the left and you will find Visitors Flow at the bottom of the list.

Visitors Flow Visualisation

Visitors Flow Visualisation

The image above shows the general interface of Visitors Flow. Although it’s pretty straightforward, there are a few sections I’d like to elaborate further on.

The “Select a segment” drop-down menu works as a major filter by using different segments such as “New Visitors”, “Search Traffic” or “Non-paid Search Traffic”, to show you the activity of certain types of visitors. Just as in the standard reporting, you could also apply your custom segments to the visualisation to meet your individual requirements.

The “Connections” bar on the right of the “Segment” menu is used to adjust the scale of the details for visitors. Dragging the bar to the right most side will provide you the most detailed data. Working together with the zoom in/out bar on the left, you can literally see the activity flow of any single visitor.

The most useful option in Visitors Flow for me is the Dimension filter. Let’s use “Keyword” as an example to see how it works:

Keywords

Keywords

By applying the “Keyword” dimension to the chart, the visitors are divided by the number who arrived at the site by searching for a certain keyword. For example, if you want to see more details of the visitors searching for “seo” (a big traffic driver for E-Web Marketing’s site; your site will get different keyword traffic depending on your industry), just click on that section and choose “View only this segment”:

Keyword Highlight

Keyword Highlight

By highlighting the traffic that comes through ”seo”, we get a basic understanding of where these visitors enter the site, which pages they visit, and on which pages they drop off. This information is invaluable for improving the conversion rate of any website, and has many other useful applications.

The above example illustrates a basic operation of Visitors Flow Visualisation, but the analytical possibilities for this new tool are endless! I’d love to hear how you are using it for your online marketing campaign.

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Test Your Site Speed with Google Analytics

by Tristen Tan on November 29, 2011

in Analytics

Site Speed is important, this much is not new. We wrote about the importance of site speed back in July. I won’t go into much more detail about why as you can refer to the previous post, however, I will summarise for you just in case you are not interested in making that extra click.

Important Reason #1 – User Experience

  • Poor user visitor retention and visitor loyalty
  • Loading time affects conversion friendliness
Important Reason #2 – SEO
We know for a fact that Google has been using Site Speed as a ranking factor since way back in April 2010 when our SEO correspondant, David, quoted from the Google blog stating, “Google is speeding up the internet for all users, as faster sites create happy users, and happy users are users that stay online longer.”

Robot says, "Web analytics are cool!"

So what? After you ask yourself if users, conversions or SEO are important success factors to your online activities, and realise that they are, the next logical step is to ask, how fast does your website go?

 

Not sure how to find out? Well as always, Google has the answer. In a previous post, I discussed the new page load speed reporting features being offered by Google Analytics and also some cool questions you can answer with this data. The good news is that this feature no longer requires you to modify your GA code or activate anything – it’s just there!!

 

Now what do I do? I advise you log in to your Google Analytics account and assess how your website is performing. You will see three tabs listed under the Site Speed report: Explorer, Performance and Map. The Performance tab will give you awesome insights into what speed brackets the majority of your web pages fall.

 

In conclusion. The data that can be gleaned from this new feature will help all areas of your online campaigns. I encourage you to get your team involved in utilising this data for the greater good!!

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What is a Good Conversion Rate?

by Dan Jebamony on November 23, 2011

in Conversion Optimisation

One of the most overlooked factors when it comes to the success of an online business is how well their websites convert. I have found that the reasons for this are mainly that most decision makers are too focused on simply generating a high quantity of traffic, are ignorant of the possibility of conversion rate optimisation, or simply don’t believe that the content and presentation of their marketing creatives can actually influence their success.

If you’re one of the non-believers, let’s try an experiment. Log into Google Analytics and find out the conversion rate of your website. Go on, I’ll wait for you.

…

Got it? No really, go and check it right now!

…

……….

Got it? Good.

Now, take that number and compare it to the top 10 published conversion rates for online retailers.

Website Conversion Rate
Proflowers 14.1%
Coldwater Creek 13.3%
FTD.com 13.0%
QVC 12.8%
Office Depot 12.4%
eBay 11.5%
Land’s End 11.5%
Tickets.com 11.2%
1-800-Flowers.com 10.0%
Amazon.com 9.6%

How does your conversion rate compare? If you’re like 99.9999% of all online businesses, your conversion rate is below 3%, and quite likely below 1%. Imagine how much more you’d be making of your conversion rate was as high as Amazon (the lowest conversion rate on that list at 9.6%), even if you were not getting any more traffic.

What Factors Affect Conversion Rate?
Now, if that got you licking your chops – hold your horses. Not every website can get a conversion rate that high. And the ones that do have a number of things in their favour:

  • Website design and content – This is the easiest factor to change. Simply put some time/effort/budget into how well designed your website is and how compelling your content is.
  • Product – This is one of those simple-but-not-easy cases. The better your product, the more likely it is to get more sales.
  • Exceptional offers – People buy based on great offers, either real or perceived. Having a free trial for a service or free return shipping (a la Zappos) will dramatically lower a potential customer’s barriers to convert. Also, remember that it is all about perception – the never-ending “offer ends soon” hook works as well now as ever before.
  • Business model – This is similar to the product, in that it is all about how compelled people are to buy your product or service. A website that sells books or last-minute flowers will convert much more easily than a furniture website.
  • Brand name – No-one doubts the integrity of Amazon, so they have no qualms about purchasing something off their website. A brand is built on both awareness and perception. A brand with a legendary reputation for low prices, exceptional service or amazing products (eg Emirates or Singapore Airlines) will always outperform one that has a shoddy track record (Jetstar or Tiger Airways).
  • Generate super qualified traffic – Your website will convert higher if your traffic generation strategy focusses on pulling in only super qualified traffic. This can be done by focussing only on long tail buying keywords with a PPC campaign. The downside of this is that you potentially lose a lot of short tail sales (and brand awareness) from sheer volume driving keywords.
  • Repeat business – people that have bought from you before (and are happy with you) will return to buy again. So don’t ignore the traffic that you have worked so hard to get in the first place. Keep them engaged with you by way of email marketing, follow up calls, social media and any other creative outlets you can think of.
How Can I Get a 10% Conversion Rate?

Based on the factors above, the first thing you should realize is that a 10% conversion rate isn’t possible for everyone. Even if it’s possible for you though, the 10% conversion rate won’t happen overnight. It will take time, a huge investment in evolving your entire product offering and business and a lot of expertise. That may seem daunting to you, but always remember that progress is better than perfection. If you improved your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, that would double your online business. Isn’t that progress worth it?

So set some short and medium term goals and start picking off the lowest lying fruit – improving your conversion rate through relatively simple website re-designs, restructing of content and A/B testing. These are also easy to outsource (to a degree), so get cracking!

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