Online Marketing Blog

The customers, webmasters or owners of an online business want quality traffic. We already spoke about quality traffic and all the subjective and relative of it.

The thing is that a website that is designed correctly to sell should be able to sell its product no matter where the user comes from.

The web needs to be ready to sell either if the user came into the website from a brand keyword, from searching an specific product, a general one, from a banner campaign, written notes on blogs, email forwards or from social media sites such as facebook or twitter…

We fell into the mistake of thinking that the user is unique, when we really have or are so many different users with needs of that product that you may have. I hope am clear, because I think I have said something really freaky

We don’t have the same behavior when we search for shoes over the internet without knowing for sure what we are looking for, I mean, I search for information/inspiration, that I know for sure when I find the product that I am searching, how I want it, when I know the brand and price of the product that I want to get.

We can set an online marketing strategy with a great design of landing pages with the different kind of users and traffic source. But the users can come to us in 1000 different ways. And those 1000 different ways are the ones that we need to have ready to sell.

We should have a great website design of the “brand”, a good design of our product, and a good design of the advantages and utilities of our product. Therefore, if I sell shoes, and on top of this I said that my shoes are of milk, and explain why it is necessary to have shoes that are from milk and Wow! What a coincidence, we also sell them.

The internet gives us a huge advantage so we can be flexible with making decisions and be able to modify the way our online business is going in a couple of days, or knowing if a campaign is not going to work after a couple of hours of launching it.

And is this flexibility the one that we need to take advantage of to read our statistics fast and take decisions.

I have the opinion that there’s no such a thing as low quality traffic, I believe that there are websites that aren’t ready to monetize any user that they get.

When we launch or design a website we need to be clear on which the objective is (sell, leads, and impressions) and how we are going to get them, surveys, attractive images, videos, wide catalog…

But from the moment the user comes to a website to till the moment this makes what we want, there’s a click space that we need to take advantage of to adequate the page to our objective and needs that the user has based in the traffic source this came from.

For example if a user comes from a banner, the landing should be correlatively alike to the banner design, if it comes from PPC, the used message should appear in the landing, and if it comes from a brand keyword should be offered in a very cleared way the brand that is looking and the right brand.

It may happen, just as it happens in blogs, that the keyword traffic that is not directly related to the business object or product that want to market, for example, in my case I get a lot of traffic from “ vistaprint fraud”. Is this low quality traffic? I don’t think so, what is of low quality is that I am not able to monetize this traffic.

There’s only one week left for the e-commretail show, the I electronic commerce fair and online business, that will be held on April 15 and 16 in Barcelona

For now you may enter for free and you can get your entry here: Free Pass E-commretail.

I think it is an even that anyone that is into this kind of online business should go, either for the networking, and to learn new things, understand the reality of this industry that is growing each day.

The program is very wide and it highlights the main problems and structures of any online business need to keep in mind:

- SEO forum: with the Elite of the national organic ranking.
- Web Analytics Forum : Table full of cracks.
- Marketing Results Forum: where I have the great luck of moderate the tables with my high weight people of affiliation.

These are some of the round tables related to online marketing directly, but in this Fair, they will be having some direct topics related to the online business and how to develop them, for example, ecommerce forum, forum, hosting, payment options, industries like adults o gambling,… Come on! Is a very complete fair for all those who want to start with the online industry, as for experts that already are part of the topics or sector.

I hope to see you at the Fair

Meanwhile I leave you the promotional video of the Fair
Ecommretail Promotional Video

Of the visits you get, how many leave you money? Simple question, simple and direct, would you ask it yourself?
I imagine and hope you do

The thing is that what we want are visits, traffic, users, therefore they will come from SEO, PPC, Banners, email… and these all will send traffic and more traffic and if we don’t know what to do then we will just stay there looking at them like fools and won’t make any money.

But how can this be, if I hired a great SEO person that filled my website with visits, why don’t I sell?

An easy way to check if we are profitable is by calculating the effective CPC (eCPC). This is only the calculation of:

[Traffic Acquisition Cost]/[nº of visits “purchased”]

And we can compare this with the number of enters of visitors:

[Entries of the Buying Visits]/[Buying Visits]

If we make the calculation of the Entries per visit of our website we will see that although weh have thousands of visits, we only win 1 cent or less for each one. If in the previous example we are talking about SEO traffic, it doesn’t mean that the SEO is the one that brought us the low quality traffic or that the SEO as strategy is not good for our business.

What it means is our website the one that is not well designed to market our products and get those users to buy.

What happens if we have a site that is ranked between the 30 first places and make strong online marketing campaigns with banners, email… etc?

Let’s count that internet users population percentage that when they make a search, looks the internet until the 3^rd page. Let’s imagine that we have a site ranked there, but we have invested a lot of money in banners, therefore when the user gets to the result and sees it, there’s a bigger chance to be clicked in other site that haven’t done a good campaign.

If this happens, with a personalized search, this page will get more ranking and because of this it could make an influence in the organic ranking, its online marketing budget.

Let’s avoid information that will confuse us, like the population that search up to page 3 is low or that a good snippet “makes a lot”…

Two search results, with similar snippets, but one with the results of a company that invests a lot in online marketing in front of the other that invests less, it may happen that the one that invests may have more clicks, and because of this better personalized ranking.

If this was the case, we would find that if we implement the search results, that by defect were personalizes, and the best positions would be given to those websites that invest in their brands, to get this as familiar as possible from the side of the user and to get the clicks.

I believe this is one the first posts that I write based in a thought /supposition

I leave it there… if someone wants to take the word and comment, you are invited to do it.

One of the most common mistakes that we find these days is to use Google Adwords as a Brand strategy. If we don’t have clicks, we don’t pay for it, and a lot think that showing in the searches and not being clicked is good.

Some years ago probably it was ok, or part of it, but from a year ago until now or more, with the appearance of a strong quality score, this strategy is inevitable.

Let’s remember that Google states very very clear that the CTR is one of the ways, not to say its maim way, to know the quality for our own, our campaign, ads group, adtexts and keywords. If our brand strategy consists on appear without being clicked you can imagine now the result… low CTRs => less traffic + High CPCs.

In adwords or in PPC strategies, the brand, the strategy of the brand is done inside our website, not in the Adtext. Offering the user a quality website, and with clear and direct messages of “we know what you want and we are the best so we are going to give it to you” (for example) it can work really well.

I am very happy to be able to write this post.

I see it with the illusion of commenting that my very good friend Maribel Morales just released her first Web Analytics book. .

By only reading the first phrase in the description of the book, I already know how different this book is going to be: “The web analytic should be seen as an ATTITUDE.”

Attitude, not unique visits, bouncing percentages, manage frames… attitude, without this precious good, all the definitions that follows aren’t good at all, simply are pure knowledge, they will be part of our mental hardware.

According to comments in the same book description:
“This book pretends to cover many objectives:

• Evaluate the different online measurement systems and the maturity levels of the web analysis of the company.
• Define the objectives of a website and generate highlights or key parameters for the performance.
• Study the tools that will allow you to know the opinion of your customers, competition analysis, etc.
• Analyze the results you got from the Analytic Web in a quantity and quality way by the usage of manage frames.
• Define the strategies based on these results: ranking, optimization and promotion of a website.
• Create a mental map of the “Web Analytics” that will reflect graphically the processes and actors that are described in the book. The web analysis is an art, cleverness and anticipation, “art” to be able to manage this knowledge, “cleverness” to take the best decisions and understand the behavior of the user and “anticipation” to a future of interpreting the results.”

I already have read the book, I can only say that it is really good, dignified of having it on my night table, if not, then on hour work table to check some information while working, some aspects of analytic web that may be coming up day by day, this is the common book that you use more than once, the kind of book that have the pages ready to paste post-its on it.

From my side I can’t explain more things of the book, because honestly, I can’t be objective, because there’s more than a professional relation the one that bonds me to Maribel, we are friends.

But what I can comment is that I have loved t and it reflects how an author is a 100%. This is the first phrase on the description of the book: The Web Analysis must be seen as an ATTITUDE.

This word resumes many labor conflicts, professional projections, and even our personal life, attitude. Maribel precisely was my first “boss”, working 5 years and a half with her besides learning not a little, but a lot, I learned something that even 5 years later of leaving OJD I have that fire, the attitude.

Is because of this that I needed to say that you are not going to read a simple and plain analytic web book, instead you will read concepts of web analysis, usability… with great knowledge that 12 or 13 years of experience of this online sector, together with a way of working with success, either for her and for the members that day by day are part of her team. This is not a theory book, or a book that someone that isn’t complaining about open logs to analyze them line by line.

What can you expect from a book that puts together concepts, experience and… professional attitude?

For me this is an indispensible book, I am not a hypocrite that says something and leave it there, I have very clear that I need I will use it, it’s a book will help anyone, no matter the level we have.

If you are interested in this book here is the link: book Maribel Morales