5 Reasons Why You Should Invest In Website Performance
Investing in the performance of a website is usually the last thing most companies consider when deciding how they will invest their marketing budgets. Most companies allocate budgets to advertise their website using Google Adwords, SEO, online advertising, offline advertising and social media but few companies think about how important their website is to their overall success.
Your website is the single most important component of your online marketing strategy – it will literally make or break your success online. Here’s why…
1. Your Website Determines How Many Sales You Achieve From Your Advertising Budget
When you run advertising online, or offline for that matter, you’re driving prospects directly to your website. You might be spending $2,000 per month on advertising, or you might be spending $100,000. In either case, the number of sales you achieve from your advertising is directly related to the performance of your website.
Let’s take a quick look at the numbers… if your website converts 1% of website visitors into customers you will generate 10 new customers from 1,000 visitors. But if you can increase the performance of your website to convert 5% of website visitors, you’re generating 50 new customers from the same advertising budget, or 5x as many sales without spending a cent more on advertising.
Many companies we speak to are happy to spend $10,000 per month on advertising but baulk when we suggest investing $10,000 one-time on improving the performance of their website – this is one of the biggest mistakes a company can make… just take a look at the numbers.
5 Ways To Drive Sales During Difficult Economic Times
With the current state of the global economy, more and more businesses are diverting their marketing budgets online to maximise sales and their return on investment. IAB Australia recently announced that the online advertising market is on track to surpass $3 billion in 2012.
Simply having a website or an Adwords campaign is no longer enough to keep up with the increasingly fierce online environment. Your online marketing strategy needs to be robust and multi-pronged to ensure you are successfully reaching your target market (wherever they are) and then effectively selling your products or services.
Here are 5 ways to drive sales and grow your business during these difficult economic times.
1. Develop a website that sells for you 24/7
What member of your staff would work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Certainly no-one I know. An effective website should be viewed as part of your team, it’s there 24/7 and allows you to sell your products and services even whilst your company sleeps. Spending money on your website to improve or update it is a long term investment and pales in comparison to the annual wage of one of your staff members. Potential customers and clients can instantly assess, judge and act without you having to lift a finger.
2. Engage with prospects on their Smartphone or Tablet
It’s predicted that in only six months time 1 in 2 people in the USA will own a Smartphone (Inside Retail). In Australia we’re not quite at this level yet however a day does not go by without seeing people on the move connected to their smartphone or iPad… browsing, shopping, sending emails or sharing photos. Not having a Google places listing, or a mobile-friendly web design, a Facebook page or for that matter simply zero online presence will impact your business’ ability to effectively deliver to the growing market of mobile search users.
How To Split-Test Your Way To Higher Profits
Your website conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for your online marketing. Your conversion rate becomes even more important if you are running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. This article starts by highlighting the relationship between conversion rates and profits and will go on to show you 5 different ways to improve your conversion rate.
First let’s look at an example that shows how small improvements in the conversion rate can result in greater increases in profits.
How Your Conversion Rate Affects Profits
Example: Assume you are an online retailer buying traffic on Google AdWords. Your average profit on one sale is $100 excluding advertising cost.
Scenario 1: Your monthly advertising budget is $5,000 and your metrics are:
- Cost per click: $0.50
- Clicks: 10,000
- Conversion rate: 1%
- Sales: 100 (= 10,000 clicks x 1%)
- Cost per sale: $50 (= $5000 budget / 100 sales)
- Profit per sale: $50 (= $100 sale amount – $50 cost per sale)
- Overall profit: $5,000 (= $50 x 100 sales)
5 Things You Should Know About Your Online Marketing
The Internet has completely revolutionised not only the way businesses operate but how businesses market and connect with their customers. Yet according to the latest eMarketer report, 33% of B2B marketers don’t track their return on investment through their online marketing initiatives.
So, how well is your business doing online? And just how effective is your online marketing strategy?
Here are 5 questions you should know the answer to…
1. What Keywords Are You Ranking For And Are These Of Value?
Are the keywords you are ranking for on Google high value keywords for your business? And do these keywords bring traffic to your website?
There are three keyword types that people refer to in regards to search engine marketing. These include:
- Navigational: this keyword type is used to define when someone is looking for a specific web page and has some knowledge on the result they want their search to find.
- Informational: this is a keyword people will use when researching or looking for information on a particular topic.
- Transactional: a keyword commonly used by consumers when they are looking to purchase a product or service.
An effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy will focus on keywords that are relevant to your business, are transactional keywords (rather than informational) and have the highest monthly traffic volume on Google. There is no point ranking on Google for keywords that are informational and have no search volume as it will not drive traffic to your website to convert into sales.
TIP: Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to gain insight into the monthly traffic for each keyword you are optimising for on Google. Make sure when you do this that you look at the ‘Exact’ match keywords rather than ‘broad’ match. Exact match looks at the traffic for that exact keyword phrase. Broad match will display all traffic for the exact phrase as well as other similar or relevant variations.
How Will Google+ Affect Social Media And SEO?
Google+ is Google’s latest attempt at developing a social media network to rival Facebook. After failed attempts with Google Buzz and Google Wave, early success has been found (so far) in Google+. The new social media platform, which launched in late June, has since been the hot topic for online marketers and consumers alike interested in the Facebook vs. Google debate.
The wide spread release of Google+ also saw the platform gain a massive 10 million users signed up after mere 2 weeks of the network being live.
So, how will Google+ affect social media? And given Google’s dominance in terms of search, what will be the affect of Google+ on search engine optimisation (SEO)?
Here are 5 areas to watch as Google+ functionality further develops…
1. Integration with Gmail
Before Google+ launched, Gmail received a makeover in preparation to integrate Google’s mail service with the social network. Given that there are 250 million people with Gmail accounts worldwide (as at July 2011), this gave Google+ a powerful starting point to build the 10 million users they gained in just 2 weeks. To add to this, after Google+ beta moved from it’s ‘invitation only’ stage, the integration with Gmail made it easy for people to invite their friends by using Gmail contacts and Google verified email accounts.
The Google+ navigation bar is present when logged into Gmail and therefore Google+ is accessible through:
- Gmail
- Google Search
- Google Documents (Google’s online cloud infrastructure)
INTERESTING FACT: While it only took Google+ 16 days to reach 10 million users, Facebook reached the milestone after 852 days, and Twitter in 780 days.
