1. All Brand Traffic
2. Non-brand Organic Search (qualified)

Key segments will vary from website to website, but for me these are extremely useful.

All Brand Traffic

Looking at Direct traffic on it’s own is useless, just like Google (organic) doesn’t show a true picture.

This segment includes:

• Direct Traffic
• Branded Search Terms (paid/non-paid)

You simply select direct traffic OR keyword contains [your brand name]. It’s always best to test your keyword usage a few times. My company is called “RedBalloon” so I look at any keywords including “red” or “balloon days” (old branding). But I always make sure it doesn’t include “delivered” which has red at the end of it.

This will give you a true picture of how many people are actually seeking you out.

Non-Brand Organic Traffic (qualified)

As it says – ignores any brand terms and also any bouncing visits. After all, who cares about a bounced visit? You obviously are getting traffic from a person who doesn’t think your site matches their query. This is what I mean by qualified.

In this example we do the opposite to all brand, then make sure it’s organic and then the bounces is 0. To make the branded terms removed check it doesn’t contain what you contain in the brand terms, and then add “Or” statements to overcome terms where that would should be.

I’m surprised Google Analytics doesn’t make it more obvious – Organic traffic shows totally different stories as one, brand terms are the new direct.

As days go by, I’m losing trust in Google’s bidding methods and feeling like I need to use a third party bid management tool. But let’s take a look at the options we have using AdWords:

1. CPC Manual Bidding
2. CPC Manual Bidding with enhanced CPC
3. CPC Automatic bidding
4. Max CPA
5. Target CPA

I’m not even going to bother talking about Manual Bidding (it’s obvious), Automatic Bidding (never, ever use this) or Max CPA (why would you use Max CPA when you get use target CPA?).

Enhanced CPC

You set the bids and Google tries to assume if the actual users search query is more likely to convert (which makes smart bidding).

Advantages

• Individual bids for a lot of different search queries  – your keyword listed in AdWords will match a multitude of user search terms. So instead of setting up a huge campaign with a lot of exact match terms with individual bids, it does that work for you
• It finds patterns it what converts – let’s say your keywords are “gifts”, “birthday gifts” and “gifts for dad”. Enhanced CPC might find that when the user adds “buy” to their query they’re more likely to purchase, and when they add “ideas” then they’re less likely. You might be bidding $2 for “gifts”, but when someone searches “buy gifts” Google puts your bid to $3, or when someone searches “gift ideas” your bid goes to $1

Disadvantages

• You give Google permission to increase your CPC at their will, based on their assumptions (they say it won’t raise for cost-per-conversion, but of course it would for your high performing keywords)
• Google makes assumptions very quickly – they can get it wrong to start with

Target CPA

You set the end amount you want to spend on a conversion at an ad-group level.

Advantages

• You don’t have to worry about bidding and Google “tries” to meet your conversion expectations
• Let’s you focus on things like creating new ad groups & testing new ad copy – where you (as a person) can add real value
• Computers are smarter than humans when it comes to calculation

Disadvantages

• It starts out bad – everytime I’ve started using Target CPA on a campaign my CPC gets massive. It comes back down but overall not all that trustworthy
• You’re relying on Google to maximise your revenue, when they also want to maximise their revenue
• You could actually be better a better cost-per-conversion but the system will push your bids up to your target (meaning all of your ad-groups need

In Conclusion?

I’m testing out Enhanced CPC now on 1 of my campaigns, and will see how it goes. Target CPA needs time to really test out but none of them really match ROAS bidding like you can do with a bid management tool.

The biggest takeaway for me: Don’t hide your “classic hits”

Do you have some blog posts you’re really proud of? How easy can someone find these from your homepage? Perhaps try adding a sidebar widget to promote your best work, or even a feature above your blog posts on your homepage (easy if you have Wordpress). Luckily for me, everything I blog is rubbish so it’s not an issue.

Remember when someone comes to your blog homepage – they most likely want to know about you. It’s not always the most relevant for the first thing they see to be  your latest blog post. What if your last post was a YouTube video of talking animals? What does that say about you?

What should you do now?

I’m not the expert on it – so you should probably just read his article. But my favourite quote (and I admit to being one of this people)

Many weblog authors seem to think it’s cool to write link anchors like: “some people think” or “there’s more here and here.”

I’ve just read a blog post about the value of a Facebook user (the rest of this rant won’t make sense unless you read that).

I have a habit that always makes me want to argue anything that’s come from someone biased, so here’s why I think this “detailed” report was a waste of time:

• It takes 18 pages to make the point that a Facebook fan spends more & and engages with you more. Here I was thinking that if someone was my fan then they hated my company.
• It puts a value on the average Facebook fan and then throughout the report it constantly states the obvious by explaining that every company has a different value for a Facebook fan. To me this basically says “the value is $136, but not really”. It’s merely a number to catch headline and for the social media racquet to pull out and impress in pitches and presentations.
• The recommendations are written as general as a horoscope “Loyalty, Spend, Recommendation, Fan Acquisition Cost, Affinity, and Media Value are the key factors that impact fan value. Brands need to develop strategies that address these areas”. In other words, develop the perfect business and the value of your Facebook fan will be higher.

Of course a Facebook fan is valuable, they’re your fan and they’re wearing it on their virtual sleeve.

But don’t believe the hype. My problem is that reports and articles like this have caused a common mentality of “wow, I need to get a Facebook fan page!!” as if it’s the magic answer, but it can easily turn into a meatball sundae. A lot of companies would be better off using their time thinking about how to make something remarkable enough that people genuinely become fans of.

The real value of a Facebook fan – it’s the perfect medium for your true “fans” to spread the word for you. Your happy customers have been doing this for centuries, Facebook just makes it easier for them to do so and much more effective for you.

The video ties in with their latest ad campaign and strongly communicates the positioning to an extremely captive audience, we weren’t escaping anywhere.

Extremely captivating, you can’t take your eyes off it. Although supposedly no 2 planes are the same, every single safety video is. This video however, is memorable and stands out from the boring stuff we’re used to while impatiently waiting to take off and reach our destination.

5.3 million views on YouTube so far, obviously others feel the same way as me.

I’ve heard plenty of people with “improving rankings” at the top of their list – SEO is one of those things people get caught up with when they don’t even have fundamentals right. It’s an easy trap for small businesses to fall into, but at the same time an easy trap for big businesses to dodge.

Let’s put SEO into perspective – imagine 3 restaurants

First restaurant ranks 1st for “restaurnts in internetville”

They’re going to get a lot of people discovering them this way and maybe even make a few $$$ along the way. Their food is average, nothing exciting and the service makes you yawn.

They’ll do OK but repeat visits and referral business will be lacking.

Second restaurant is invisible in search, but has a great reputation

This is the trendy place you heard about from your trendy friend. Always busy on a Friday night and serves a mean meal.

These guys will do pretty well…until the next trendy place comes along. Repeat visits and referrals will be what they rely on, fresh new business will be hard to come by without an established customer base to pass on the good word.

Third restaurant ranks 2nd for “restaurants in internetville” and has a good reputation

I think it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with my point. The 3rd restaurant of course wins the race.

Without good cusomer acquisition tactics (of course SEO is a big one) your business will peak and die as the trends do. With ONLY good acqusition tactics, you’re never going to grow organically.

So the point is: you do need both SEO & customer satisfaction to be significant. Thanks Captain Obvious.

There are a lot of Dotcoms who need SEO to survive as a business – to me they are the rats of the industry. The dodgy corner convenience stores of the web. Why would you want to be one of those?

With Facebook overtaking Google in terms of traffic, there’s an obvious increase to the importance of recommendations from friends over pure SEO. But Google is definitely not going away, you just need to be more accountable for your product/service.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is a huge factor in any online business and something that can’t be ignored. While it presents a bunch of opportunities, by itself it’s not a sustainable strategy to run a company by.

These guys have been producing these videos for years now. It’s always amazing to see the latest stats, but apart from being cool and having a wow factor, it mystifies “social media” even further.

While I love these videos, they beat around the bush when it comes to business. Social media shouldn’t really make any change to “good” businesses, social media just makes it even more important to run a business well.

The main thing to take away is that you need to be very good at what you do and keep happy customers who are happy to endorse you. Of course this is nothing new, it’s just word of mouth…on crack.

Social media is simply the way the message about your product/service spreads quickly – positive or negative. These stats show just how quick the message can spread.

For websites the 80/20 rule is more like the 90/10 rule.  10% of the project tasks takes 90% of the time – but most importantly though it’s worth 99% of the success of your website.

I wanted to share (and keep a reminder to myself) a couple of things I’ve learned over the course of this website project:

Plan more time for the finishing touches than the actual development

No-ones perfect, particularly not when developing websites. When planning a timeline, allow more time for tweaks, bug fixes and most importantly improvements and optimisation than the core development.

This is the mistake I’ve just made and won’t ever do it again!

Expect that your initial requirements are going to change

In the past I’ve spent a lot of time putting together functional spec docs to communicate to agencies and it just doesn’t work – there’s so many better ways. For any web savvy business this model can’t move fast enough.

I’m now much more keen on the idea of using cheaper dev resources and when you get a new idea after something is done you can actually act on it.

I don’t know much about it but had a bit of a chat to a friend about Agile Development on the weekend and I think it’s something I need to invest some time in learning.

Use as many external sources for testing as possible

When you don’t have the luxury of focus groups or actual user testing, this can be tough. But for testing this website – I’m sending it to as many people around the office as possible that are far removed as well as to some good fellows in Pakistan who are going to spend the hours on testing that we simply couldn’t afford the time or to pay a local agency charging their exorbitant fees.

Don’t lose sight of the results

It’s easy to be burnt out on a project, I’m well over this website but as soon as I remind myself that the most exciting part is seeing the improved results and actually marketing the website I’m excited again.

All of that hard work at the start will go wasted if you don’t give the same attention to detail at the end.

I’m proud to say out of all of the many websites I’ve worked on over the years, this is by far the best. It’s also been the most rushed with the lowest budget and there’s only 2 of us working on it but the fact that we’ve constantly improved it means that it’s something a lot better than we first envisaged.

Plus, doing it so cheaply – with what we’ve saved on development we’ve used on persuasion architecture consulting and marketing.

I’m confident at the end of the day it’s going to be the winning formula. Now I’ve just got to get back to work and get the new site up and running! To my valued 29 subscribers, I will post the link when it’s done.