The Top 4 Mistakes Made by Internet Marketers
Often there are strong signals why the campaign didn’t work. Our research shows that there are four main reasons why internet marketing efforts fail, are inefficient or non-functional.
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Lack of Measurement
– Web analytics are readily available and extremely cheap to get running on your website. If you are doing any sort of marketing that brings traffic to your website, you must have analytics running in the background. Analytics allow you to tie your marketing dollars, optimization efforts and social media efforts directly to revenue produced. If you don’t know your average order size or individual visit value it is impossible to make educated decisions about your business. The web provides the ability to track conversions and other relevant metrics in a more precise way than ever before. There is valuable information in the details, even if your website does not directly produce revenue. Measure, Measure, Measure!
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Relevancy Issues
– Often a business owner or webmaster is being pulled in several directions while trying to get revenue flowing. A common website mistake is not having enough content on the page. Content quantity and relevancy affect your quality score for the individual terms you want to advertise. This makes the cost of running a PPC campaign increase and it also can affect your ad position or even block the ad from showing altogether. Be aware of quality scores especially on your converting keywords. You should work to improve the content on those pages as long as it helps your conversion. But, remember that anything on the page that doesn’t help the conversion… hurts the conversion.
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Not Meeting the User’s Expectation
– You have carefully crafted your ad. It has great calls to action and matches the keywords that users are typing to find your product. The user clicks the ad and it sends them to your homepage. Best practices indicate that this is a no-no! The user is expecting to see the product advertised. They need to see testimonials and a call to action on where to click next to buy! But you have sent them to the wrong spot. Creating landing pages for each of your adgroups (ad concepts) is one of the best ways to meet expectations, and also get high quality scores for your chosen ad phrases. Google likes relevancy because users like relevancy. Meet user expectations when they land. Landing pages also allow you to run multivariate testing on several page elements – or simply A-B testing two different pages. Your homepage is not the place for this experimentation, especially after carefully crafting your graphics, spiel and overall message about your site and brand.
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No Optimization
– Internet marketing does not work if you set it up… let it run… and leave it alone. How will you know if you are paying too much for those non-converting ads? How will you know if you are meeting user expectation? You need to actively take part in analyzing what is happening when a user comes to your website. Your relevancy scores and bounce rates will indicate if the keywords you have chosen are the right ones. Take your highest performing 10 keywords and put them each in their own ad group. Seek to define browsing versus buying terms for your product and advertise accordingly. Your brand should be present and accounted for at every stage of the buying process.
- #5 is a bonus! –
Persona development
is an overarching strategy that can be employed throughout your business and website. Persona development involves creating imaginary customers based on your target demographics. Once you have the characters developed, you are able to build a framework that supports their needs, interests and desires by using psychological and physical ques on your site, content and branding.
Business owners need to realize that while they know their business, they don’t necessarily know how to best market to their target audience. We help businesses connect the dots, measure and WIN with Internet marketing. An astounding 80% of product searches start on the web!
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