Do You Know What Your Customers Say About Your Business?

Do you ever read reviews of companies you do business with? Do you read product reviews before buying a new camera, vacuum cleaner, or computer? If so, you are not alone! According to Lynn Terry on Clicknewz.com, 90% of consumers use reviews at least some of the time when planning purchases. That being said, as owner of a SMB, you want to help your customers recognize the merits of your business and the products you offer. And beware of the unhappy customer. An unhappy customer may post reviews that can damage your company’s reputation and persuade potential customers to shop elsewhere. Do not let this happen to you!

This column addresses the customer feedback process. Part 2 (in a future issue) will discuss loyalty programs and their benefits to your business.

Unhappy customers: they’re everywhere!

The immediacy of the online environment requires you to monitor blogs and other forums for criticisms of your business or services you sell. Damaging postings can be blasted across the blogosphere with blinding speed. Before you know it, your company can be trashed in dozens of locations. Repairing the damage is very difficult. Restoring your company’s reputation is time-consuming, and the financial setback from negative reviews may be long-lasting. As Pete Blackshaw pointed out in 2008, awareness of customer satisfaction is essential to long-term profitability. Instead of waiting to fix the wrongs, take pre-emptive measures to assure your customers are happy and anything written about your business is positive.

Tell us how we’re doing

I think of customer relations as a two-track system consisting of the following:

• Managing customer feedback

• Rewarding loyal customers

If you do a great job with customer support and satisfaction, the feedback process ought to be fairly painless. You should be able to count on positive feedback from your customers, which is always nice! The logistics of setting up and monitoring a feedback mechanism would be the only pain point, depending on your resources.

Feedback can be as simple as sending out emails asking for customer responses, ranging from a survey of questions with multiple choice answers to an open-ended “tell us how we’re doing” sort of email. If you want, you can even provide a perk to the respondents, similar to Borders.com, which offers a discount coupon if the online survey is completed within a set time frame. Offers such as these encourage customers to submit their assessment of a business and its services or products.

If you’re not sure where to start with a survey, look online. There are numerous online providers of surveys, many of which gather your results in a user-friendly format. There are online providers of guidelines for surveys which recognize the importance of how your questions and reply choices are phrased. After replies arrive, what do you do with the information?

Now what?

All the feedback in the world is of no use if you do not take the comments under advisement, examine criticism, and determine solutions for any frequently noted complaints. The point of customer surveys is to determine weaknesses your company may have and make repairs that ensure your customers are happy with the products, services, and treatment they receive. If you find repeated topics of complaint, you have a problem that you must tend to.

While negative responses are never pleasant to read, remember that “knowledge is power!” Use this knowledge to fix the sore spots. Nip the problem before it becomes insurmountable. By doing so, you may forestall these types of complaints in the future. And that will help retain customers you did not know you might lose. Remember, keeping existing customers is easier than gaining new customers!

A simpler approach

If you are not prepared to create and conduct surveys for your company, you still can tap into customer sentiment by seeking out posts on industry blogs, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) site, Yelp, or Finding Dulcinea, which has a section providing a clearing house for rating sites, including online rating and reviews of stores, online stores, and product reviews. It also has links to Bizrate and MySimon, Reseller Ratings, and online stores like eBay.

Chances are that among all the options, you may find reviews or ratings of your store or business. Unfortunately, people are more inclined to post when they’re unhappy, rather than when they’re satisfied with a product or service. So it’s up to you to cultivate happy customers and encourage them to offer positive feedback for your business.

How to make happy customers

Among the ways to do this is by establishing a loyalty or rewards program. There are many methods available for a rewards program, and I intend to discuss some of those in a future column. In the meantime, the way you handle customer comments, complaints, and criticism can do much to enhance your reputation; it’s important to note that reputation management is gaining a lot of buzz! By ensuring that your customers know they’re being heard, you gain credibility and support from them. Doing so bolsters your reputation as a caring company – one that cares about satisfying customer needs.

Taken collectively, listening, attending to customer requests and responding to their concerns all contribute to improving the positive image that all businesses want. For those customers who are especially loyal and effusive in their support, a rewards or loyalty program can provide a forum for publicizing their positive experiences with your business.

Google Now Personalizes Everyone's Search Results

Beginning today, Google will now personalize the search results of anyone who uses its search engine, regardless of whether they’ve opted-in to a previously existing personalization feature. Searchers will have the ability to opt-out completely, and there are various protections designed to safeguard privacy. However, being opt-out rather than opt-in will likely raise some concerns. The company has an announcement here. Below, a deeper look.

How Search Personalization Works

The short story is this. By watching what you click on in search results, Google can learn that you favor particular sites. For example, if you often search and click on links from Amazon that appear in Google’s results, over time, Google learns that you really like Amazon. In reaction, it gives Amazon a ranking boost. That means you start seeing more Amazon listings, perhaps for searches where Amazon wasn’t showing up before.

The results are custom tailored for each individual. For example, let’s say someone else prefers Barnes & Nobles. Over time, Google learns that person likes Barnes & Noble. They begin to see even more Barnes & Nobles listings, rather than Amazon ones.

Of course, people will be clicking on a variety of sites, in search results. So it’s not a case of having one favorite that that simply shows up for everything. Indeed, Google’s other ranking factors are also still considered. So that person who likes Amazon? If they’re looking for a plumber, Amazon probably isn’t close to being relevant, so the personalization boost doesn’t help. But in cases where Amazon might have been on the edge? Personalization may help tip into the first page of results. And personalization may tip a wide variety of sites into the top results, for a wide variety of queries.

Privacy Issues

To personalize results, Google has to record what you’re doing — and that rings privacy alarm bells. Can people see what you’ve looked for? How long is the material kept? Can you just turn it off?

You can turn it off. A history is kept for 180 days. You can delete that history at any time, but even if you don’t, it can’t actually be viewed.

In particular, we now have two “flavors” of personalized search, or “Web History” as is the official Google name for it. There’s Signed-Out Web History and Signed-In Web History.

In Signed-Out Web History, Google knows that it has seen someone using a particular browser before. Behind the scenes, it has tracked all the searches that have been done by that browser. It also logs all the things people have clicked on from Google’s search results, when using that browser. There’s no way to see this information, but it is used to customize the results that are shown. It only remembers things for 180 days. Information older than that is forgotten. Google doesn’t know your name. If you use a different browser, Google doesn’t know your past history. In fact, you can’t even see your past history.

In Signed-In Web History, Google knows that a particular Google user is using Google. Behind the scenes, it has kept a record of all the things that person has done when signed-in, regardless of what computer or browser they’ve used. If they’re using the Google Toolbar with the page tracking feature enabled, then it has also kept a record of all the pages they’ve viewed over time. This information can be viewed by the user at any time, and the user can selectively delete info. They can also delete everything, if they want. If they don’t, then Google forgets nothing.

Let’s do a chart:

Google Search Results are Personalized

Can’t View History

An important aspect to the change is understanding that there’s no way for you — or anyone — to see what you’ve searched on or clicked on in the past, if you’re using the signed-out version of web history.

Google Now Notifies Of “Search Customization” & Gives Searchers Control goes into much more depth about how last year, Google began notifying searchers if it changed their results based on their previous query. Clicking on the notification would show the previous query, which might be embarrassing or worse if you left your computer and someone else saw it. To limit exposure, only the last 30 minutes of previous query information was shown.

With the change, Google’s storing much more than the last 30 minutes of previous history. However, that’s not being shown.

Let’s do some pictures. Here, I’ve done a search for spain:

Notice the arrow pointing to Web History. This is effectively a default notification that results are being logged for personalization. Clicking on it leads to a notification page that in turn allows for opting-out.

Now here’s another search I did right after that, for travel:

Notice I’m pointing at the “View customizations” link that has now appeared. This is another notification, an explicit one where Google’s saying effectively “Hey! You searched for ‘travel,’ but I’ve altered the results I’ve shown you based on things I know about you personally.”

So what’s Google know? In this case, if you click on the link, you get shown:

I’ve highlighted the key part. Google’s saying that it used your search history to alter this. Almost certainly, this means it saw I had just search for “spain,” and so added that word to the query “travel.” In the past, it would have told me this specifically. But now that data is being kept longer, it’s not showing any previous query or past search history material.

Don’t like the idea of your searches being recorded, even if you’re not logged in? Keep in mind a few things for perspective:

• All the major search engines have long recorded what you search on. Google’s simply using it to refine your results, in addition to what the others do, show ads

• Your browser itself records what you search on — and often, people fail to clear their browser histories.

• You don’t have to use it.

Remember I mentioned that opt-out page? Let’s see what it says:

See the link I’ve pointed at? Click on that, and you’ve turned off logging. Google will no longer keep track of what you’ve searched on in the past. All that data is now disconnected from your browser. In addition, Google remembers that you don’t want to be logged in the future. For the technically inclined, this is nice. It means you can have a Google cookie that knows you don’t want to be logged, rather than having to access Google without a cookie at all.

Change your mind? Click on that Web History link I mentioned earlier. It will oddly still show, even if you’ve opted out and nothing is being logged (plus, “Web History” is a bad name, since for signed-out users, it’s not really tracking what you do on the web). Click Web History, and you can enable custom search.

What About Diversity?

Interestingly, I’ve spoken on the subject of Google’s preexisting search personalization feature three times over the past week, and each time, a key question has arisen. If Google rewards the sites you like, does that mean eventually you’ll only see stuff you like? Would a conservative see only conservative web sites? A liberal see only liberal web sites?

No, Google says. Annoyingly, the company will not give any metrics about what percentage of results a typically searcher gets back that are personalized in some way nor the percentage of the results themselves that are changed. IE, are 85% of queries personalized? And if you get a page of personalized results, are 20% of the links on that page personalized? I couldn’t get any such figures.

Man Cannot Live By PPC Alone. Can He?

Much has been written lately about the value of combining text ads with display/image advertising online in order to boost visibility and brand awareness. This trend is not necessarily a new one: Yahoo/comScore issued a study in 2006 showing an increase in “online and offline purchasing by consumers who are exposed to integrated campaigns” that combined search and display. It struck me that using only search ads or display ads or even a combination of the two needn’t be the only method by which small businesses tap into their potential customer pool. I would suggest that there are a variety of other products that can also help connect a customer with a business that meets his/her need. Among those: call tracking phone numbers, video ads, and splash or jump pages.

Let’s take a look at how some of those options can assist local businesses in promoting themselves.

Give 'em a picture!

Back in the day, display or banner ads were the basic format for online advertising. Standard 468×60 banners were found on publisher sites and were the launching pad for businesses seeking online visibility. As time passed, other display units – buttons, pop-ups, rectangles, and skyscrapers – appeared and were standardized by the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). Banner ads were the most common online ad format until peaking around 2000-01, when the dotcom crash led to a re-evaluation of the most effective online ad format. The result was paid placement in the form of Yahoo, Google, MSN, and all the other providers who were gobbled up by the big players in the space.

Due to the emergence of search, display or banner ads lost caché and before long did not get the attention once afforded. However, recent recognition of display ads in conjunction with search ads has lent display a new credibility. There are many display networks (ValueClick, Burst, Adify, etc.) that can fulfill the need for online advertising, and Google has made a new commitment to combining search and display via AdWords.

How did they get my number?

While it has been suggested that using call tracking numbers (CTN) can be problematic for local search, I would contend that when used wisely, call tracking numbers can provide a very useful means for measuring the effectiveness of ads. If used with a call recording feature or a whisper element prior to answering, businesses can gain insights on how well their ad campaigns are performing. Callbright, Ifbyphone, eStara, and Marchex VoiceStar among others provide various services depending on merchant needs.

If, for example, one call number is used for a campaign in conjunction with a splash page, the merchant will know that any call reported from that CTN is a result of the ad campaign with which the number is associated. Regarding concerns over using multiple call tracking numbers a merchant could be advised to use the same CTN in each medium: one for search, one for print, one for display. That way the number can help evaluate success of each ad medium.

On special this week

A great way to focus user attention on products you want to emphasize or promote is by using a splash or landing page in your campaign. Sometimes called a jump page, this one-page site allows users to see just the information for a product on which the advertiser wants to focus sales. If Best Buy is offering a discount on plasma televisions for the month of October, a jump page can be the destination showing the info on the special offer with ad copy created for the campaign that mirrors the special offer on the page. This provides a specific connection between the ad copy and the jump page that draws users to the product discounted. The direct correlation between ad and page can reveal efficacy of campaign features. Going forward, as other products are spotlighted the same process may be employed.

Almost like being on TV!

Online video is one of the newer ad formats available to advertisers. Advertisers have used video on television for decades, and now video format can be viewed online. If a small business already has a local commercial running on television, the video from that television commercial can be linked to the online campaign for a dynamic means to convey the ad message. If an advertiser website has no video, Windows Moviemaker and Jivox are just two sources available for creating video for online ad campaigns. If your ad campaigns are outsourced, have your provider create a video for you!

Online marketing provides a myriad of ad types and formats, all of which can boost exposure for a business. For the small business that is not ready to jump into the effort using all of these suggested methods, adding one at a time and measuring the impact of the new ad type can provide important insight regarding how to allocate ad budget. Some of these may be more useful than others; it depends on the type of business. The point here is that small businesses should not limit their exposure by using just one sort of online ad format. Multiple points of interaction increases exposure to potential customers, which is what all advertising is about!

SomerMedia™

Google's Additional Discovery Method:

RSS and Atom Feeds

For years, Google’s discovery of web pages was solely based on links. If a page had no links to it, Googlebot had no way of knowing about it and therefore, would never index it. Along the way, Google provided an option for submitting individual pages, but that wasn’t really a viable option for site owners with large sites. In 2005, Google launched XML Sitemaps, which was a much more scalable way for site owners to let Google know about pages of their site that Googlebot may not otherwise discover through links. Today, a Google Webmaster Central blog post discusses another way Googlebot may discover pages: feeds. They say that using RSS and Atom feeds to discover pages helps them learn about new content quickly.

New content is key for Google since freshness is a vital component of relevance for some queries. Convention wisdom is that it’s not all that useful to ensure Google knows about pages of your site if they don’t have links to them, because without links, Google won’t see them as valuable. But current ranking is much more complicated than the original PageRank formula describes. And new content with no links may very well trump content with an abundance of links if it makes sense for the query.

Of course, site owners have always been able to to submit RSS and Atom feeds as Sitemaps, but this post describes using these feeds even if the site owner hasn’t submitted them via the Sitemap system. Instead, they are scanning other feed submission systems, such as Google Reader and ping services for the feeds.

It’s unclear from the post if the feeds are being used solely for discovery or if the content from the feeds are being used in place of crawling as well. The title of the post references “discovery” but the post itself notes that they are able to “get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods” and to directly crawl feeds. If Google is using the feeds in place of crawling, this would be another argument in favor of full rather than partial feeds — you’d get more of a page’s content indexed more quickly. Google Blogsearch initially crawled feed content rather than the actual pages, which led to partial indexing in Blogsearch, but this changed late last year.

The post notes that in order for Google to use a feed as a discovery method, the feed must not be blocked by robots.txt.

SomerMedia Blog SEO

PPC Tips For The Holiday Season

The fourth quarter is “the most profitable time of the year” for many retailers, and managing paid search programs well through this period requires particular attention to detail and work from a position on integrity.

Let’s take a look at some of the common trends we see in Q4 data and discuss how to, and how not to address these effects through anticipatory bid management.

We’ll use actual data from one of our client’s first holiday season with SomerMedia™ to highlight some of the common phenomena. The first holiday season is always challenging, because we don’t have data to use to help us anticipate the timing. As such, this data reveals some missed opportunities that we can model the next time around.

On each chart 100% means the average week between mid-September and mid-October. Lifts above or below reflect the week’s changes from that norm. We’re using “sales dollars” as a proxy for value because it is the most widely used. A better metric is margin dollars with frauds and cancels knocked out.

Newsflash: Sales go up at holiday!

Weekly PPC Sales

This happens for two reasons:

Traffic volume increases. More people search, more people buy => higher PPC sales and advertising costs.
Shopping behaviour changes. Not only are there more consumers in the market, their propensity to buy and how much they buy fluctuates throughout the period.

It is this second factor that allows us to bid differently, and makes anticipatory bidding imperative. An increase in the volume of traffic by itself does not change the value of the traffic or what we can afford to pay for each click; it is the changes in the traffic’s value that allow for bidding adjustments.

So, yes traffic volumes spike:

Christmas Season Clicks

But it’s the change in conversion rates and average order sizes that is interesting and actionable:

CRV and AOV

(There is undoubtedly social commentary to be made over the fact that AOV dips at gift giving season—we spend more on ourselves than on our loved ones?—but it’s also important to recognize that discounting leads to thinner margins which may in turn demand different efficiency targets.)

When we roll these phenomena together we get the true picture of changes to the traffic value over time.

Sales Dollars per Click

If the goal is to maximize sales during the period at the same efficiency as normal then we should push/pull bids proportionally to the changes in traffic value. That way we maintain constant efficiency, and generate the most sales possible. (SEMs who budget search instead look to spend the budget at the lowest cost to sales ratio possible. This is a totally different problem, and, we think, the wrong approach to paid search.)

So, how did we do?

Not bad, given that we didn’t have good data to use to help us anticipate the changes. From this perspective it looks like we may have overspent just a touch the first two weeks in November, and may have underspent a bit the week of the Christmas holiday and the week after.

But hold on! This view ties the clicks and costs on a given day to the sales that happen that day. We know because of order latency that many of the orders placed today came from clicks on ads long before. This suggests we might have actually underspent during the ramp up and left opportunity on the table. So, let’s instead tie the orders to the time of the clicks that drove them and see what that reveals.

Order Latency

PPC Sales and Latency Efficiency

Well, it’s not an entirely different picture, but it is slightly different. By this view we were pretty much on target for those first two weeks in November, and it was the two weeks after that where we may have left a bit of opportunity on the table. Good to know! We’ll use these insights this year to do our jobs that much better.

Some folks out there will suggest that you should push the gas much harder early on to catch consumers in the “early phase of the consideration cycle.” I’ve heard folks say they’ll increase their cost to sales threshold by 50% or even 100% prior to the real increase in conversion rates, arguing that those “inefficient” weeks will appear very efficient when viewed by the orders those clicks seeded. I say: if the data from previous year supports that, go for it! But we haven’t seen shifts that dramatic, or anywhere close.

One other pitfall to avoid: Black Box bidding systems that don’t allow for anticipatory bidding. We see data that looks like what’s below every year from agencies that allow the algorithms to do it all, and every year the algorithm reacts too late during the ramp up and overspends greatly after the holiday ends.

Black Box Bidding

These folks didn’t fish enough when the fish were biting, and fished too much when they weren’t. Overall, they may hit their efficiency targets, but they won’t end up with as many fish as they would have had with a smart analyst at the controls.

No two retailers will show the same trends, so let your data be your guide.

Here’s to a profitable Q4!

Get Rid Of Unwanted Clicks With Keyword Management

Every search marketer shares one important goal: get more of the traffic you want and less of the traffic you don’t. One of the best ways to manage your traffic quality is by focusing on keyword selection. By selecting the right keywords you can reduce the number of untargeted clicks you get, reducing your costs. But it doesn’t stop there. Eliminating unwanted clicks increases the click-through rates for your ad groups, leading to higher quality scores, lower CPCs, and increased conversions.

Better keyword management is becoming critical to your campaign's success. According to Jupiter Research’s US Paid Search Forecast, 2008 to 2013, average keyword prices are set to rise more than 25% over the next five years. With keyword costs rising quickly, it’s critical that every keyword in your portfolio delivers maximum value. You can save thousands of pounds per month, and re-allocate that budget to better uses by following a few best practices around keyword targeting. These inside tips, detailed below, include pruning under-performing keywords, using match type refinement and negative keywords and evaluating raw search queries. The goal is to ensure your ads show on every possible search that provides a good ROI and to prevent your ads from showing for searches that won't return any of your invested capital.

Some Tips

Prune your under-performing keywords. The first step in keyword management is to search for high-traffic keywords that get no conversions. See if you can eliminate some or all of these terms. By removing keywords that drive untargeted traffic you can free up pounds to spend on existing terms that perform well or buy traffic on completely new terms.

Add new terms using keyword research. Adding new terms that are not included in your campaigns today can be a great source of new, profitable traffic. One of the best sources for new keyword ideas is raw query logs and reports. These logs/reports show which terms users are actually searching and converting on, and in many cases will provide you with insight into terms you should be buying but are not today.

Refine broad match terms with phrase and exact match. Once you’ve done your basic pruning and expansion, the next step is to view your raw search query logs again. Focus on the high-traffic keywords on broad match that actually convert, and try to determine the user queries that are driving the conversions. Replace these broad match terms with the raw search terms using the phrase or exact match options provided by the publisher. This will help refine the traffic associated with your keywords, increasing conversion rates and quality scores.

Use negative keywords to eliminate irrelevant and non-converting terms. Once again, check your raw search queries, but this time look for queries that are irrelevant to your brand or not converting. Add these terms to your negative keyword list to remove your ads from irrelevant searches.

A Client's Example

Let’s look at an example of how keyword management can deliver impressive results. Tipped Guitar Store bought the keyphrase “steel guitar” on broad match below. They bid $2.00 on the term, which provided a good return on average across the conversions that resulted from search clicks on their ad.

Looking at their raw search query logs, however, Tipped Guitar Store found that people were clicking on this ad and purchasing more than just steel guitars. In some cases they were buying low margin items such as steel guitar Strings, which didn’t justify a $2.00 bid. Even more concerning, they were paying for traffic on queries related to products and services they don’t even sell such as “guitar repair” and “guitar lessons.”

Based on this analysis Tipped Guitar Store decides to change how it manages keywords. By shifting “steel guitar” from the broad to the exact match type they are able to reduce the number of unwanted clicks coming through on this term. Based on the raw search query data, they also add new keywords related to steel guitars such as “used steel guitar” and “steel guitar strings” and bid these terms appropriately to reflect the margin of the products associated with each keyword. Finally, by using negative keywords they are able to eliminate clicks on keywords associated with products they don’t sell, such as “songs”, “repair” and “lessons.”

The net effect is more traffic on relevant terms, and less traffic from visitors looking for products Tipped Guitars doesn’t sell. More importantly, because Tipped's keywords now match user queries more closely, the company will see a boost in quality score, which further reduces CPC and boosts traffic. Through simple changes like this, marketers can make a big impact on sales and ROI without having to increase spend.