ConversionWorks specialise in leveraging the power of web metrics to improve the performance of your website and are one of our Google Analytics Authorised Consultants. "We perform best practice Google Analytics installs that ensure the data within your account is accurate and then analyse this data to identify and correct any problems that prevent your websites visitors from converting into sales and enquiries. The result is a substantial uplift in your site's conversion rate and profitability."

Our guest writer for today's post is Russell Sutton, Managing Director of ConversionWorks, and his article below provides some recession proof advice for improving your conversion rates without adding to your online marketing budget.

Recession busting tips – how to improve website sales in a recession

Feeling the pinch? Use our simple recession busting tips to get more sales for less money. Sounds too good to be true I know but we’ve used the same tips time and again to increase sales without increasing advertising budgets.

1. Stop worrying about traffic.

Chances are you already have plenty of it. Or to put it another way – chances are you probably already have plenty of people visiting your website who end up buying elsewhere.

Our first recession busting tip is to stop for a second and take a look at how much traffic you receive versus how many sales (or leads) you get. This simple metric is your conversion rate and it’s crucial.

If your conversion rate is low – let’s say 1% then doubling the number of sales by improving your conversion rate to 2% is much easier, quicker and cheaper than doubling your traffic.

2. Measure, measure, measure.

Now you’re focussed on conversions rather than just hits or visitors you need to get smart about measuring. Our second recession busting tip is – measure, measure, measure.

With modern website analytical tools you can get phenomenal insight into what’s happening on your website and this insight lets you make informed decisions on how to get more of what’s working and less of what isn’t working.

What’s more, some of the best tools such as Google Analytics (which we unashamedly love) are free. They just need configuring properly and some time spent reviewing the data.

3. Segment your traffic.

Knowing your website’s conversion rate is one thing but knowing the conversion rate of your PPC traffic vs organic traffic vs rich media ads vs brand traffic is infinitely more powerful.

Overnight you can discover that one type of traffic converts twice as much as another type of traffic. And by the morning you can switch your budget to the traffic that works.

If your Web or SEO agency are only giving you feedback on your overall conversion rate make sure you’re pushing them for the conversion rate per traffic source.

4. Find the barriers
   

Ever been in a shop or restaurant and waited ages and ages to get served? Ever got so frustrated you’ve left and taken your money elsewhere? That’s a barrier to conversion and your website is full of them.

Sorry for the bad news but it’s the truth. But at least now you’re aware of this you can find those barriers and hopefully do something about them. Your website analytics can help you do this with amazing clarity.

Please don’t think this doesn’t apply to you, because no matter how good your website is, and now matter how well designed it is, you will have barriers to entry.

5. Act.
   
   “It is not the strong, nor the intelligent who survive, but those who are quickest to adapt.” - Charles Darwin.

By now you should have a clear understanding of how well your traffic is converting, the performance of each of your individual traffic sources and where your barriers to entry are. Now you need to act.

Optimise your traffic and remove those barriers and you will start seeing big improvements in your sales or leads. Even just making minor modifications to your Adwords key phrases based on a better understanding of which ones sell and which ones sink can be immensely powerful.

Posted By Ruth Brennan, Google Team

Have you ever thought of having an expert manage Google Analytics for you, to ensure you get more from it or to save you time? Or maybe you are an Analytics expert and have considered providing technical and consultancy services for other businesses? In either case, you may be interested in learning more about the Google Analytics Authorised Consultant Program with us this week.

Why use a GAAC?

Google Analytics is a valuable tool for helping you understand and interpret visitor interaction with your website. Unlike other web analytics programmes, Google Analytics is free of charge and therefore available for use by website owners everywhere (no matter how big or small). Most of our users manage their Google Analytics set-up and reporting very successfully themselves. However, there may be times when working with a consultant could help you get even more business value from Google Analytics. Consider whether any of the criteria below might apply to you:

• Time is precious: you'd like to get more from the 80+ reports in Analytics, but you don't always have time to prioritise what data to look at or to review it in detail.

• Technical needs: you'd prefer to have someone else work on the implementation and set up of Analytics.

• Customised implementation: Analytics is not fully compatible with your site, due to dynamic content, or third party shopping carts/booking systems. You'd love someone to customise Analytics for your needs.
  

• Making a business impact: you'd like help interpreting Analytics data so that you can take the right action to maximise on your current traffic and improve conversions.

• Personalised training: Your team would benefit from in-person training on key aspects of Analytics from setting up goals to incorporating e-commerce data, to taking action on reports.
  

If this sounds familiar, and you'd like to investigate outsourcing Google Analytics management for your business, check out our global map to locate your nearest Authorised Consultant.

Why become a GAAC?

If you're an agency or third party that already uses Google Analytics to help grow clients' online businesses, you may be interested in earning the accreditation that comes with being an Authorised Consultant. Does this sound like you?

• Analytics experience: you have expertly deployed Google Analytics for clients in the past, and they would rate your services highly.

• Technical know-how: you are comfortable with multiple web technologies (flash, jsp, asp, php) and have expert knowledge of javascript, cookies, http headers and redirects.

• Conversion focus: you are passionate about providing solutions to clients, using Google Analytics data to identify new site design and conversion opportunities.

• Business resources: you represent an incorporated business and have a support team to work with you (your team analyses online data, pitches to clients, and can advise on site design and development).
  

To become an Authorised Consultant and reach new clients for your business services, find out more.

In our next post, we'll introduce guest blogger and Google Analytics Authorised Consultant, Russell Sutton. Russell will share tips and know-how he's gained from working in the online industry on how to improve website conversions, no matter what the economic climate.

Posted By Ruth Brennan, Google Team

As an online marketer, have you ever wanted to know what people are searching for online? If you could see what search terms people are using on Google, which cities these searches were coming from and at what times of the year, you could plan your advertising campaigns to match consumer trends and capitalise on your marketing budgets.

With Google Insights for Search you can do just this! Insights for Search is a free tool that allows you to see what the world is searching for. It provides flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand online search behaviour and adapt their messages accordingly. Features that you may find useful include:

• A world Geo Heat Map to show volume of traffic from different locations
• Ability to search trends by location, time frame or category
• News Headlines which may have impacted search volume for a specific time
  
• Top searches - highest searched terms by category or by region
• Rising Searches - fastest growing trends by category or region

In the first of our series of posts on Google Insights for Search, we are going to look at how the Top Searches and Rising searches sections can help you understand search behaviour within your industry. By using the results you find, you can ensure that the keywords in your marketing campaigns really match what your audience is searching for.

Search trends within your industry

From the Insights for Search homepage, choose a category using the drop-down menu without entering in any search terms. You can also apply a location filter, such as the United Kingdom, or a time frame using the appropriate drop-down menus. Then, click Search.

The Top searches and Rising searches towards the bottom of the page show you what searches are most prevalent in your industry or category, given the selected time frame. The Rising searches are a good indication of any changes or patterns that are emerging that you should be aware of. Simply add these terms as keywords for one of your PPC campaigns and you can be sure not to miss out on any traffic from these new trends.

Also, try using some of the results within your advertising messages, or ad texts, if you are not doing so already. This will also help to push your message to a more receptive audience.

Check out this 60 second video on how you can capitalise on search trends to create relevant advertising messages.



See more results!
See more than 10 results by simply downloading the results as a CSV file from the top right corner of the screen. When you open the CSV file with whatever spreadsheet application you choose, you'll be able to see more than the top 10 searches and rising searches. Just a note, you'll need to sign into your Google account to see numbers or download results to a spreadsheet.

This is just an example to get your ideas flowing. Look our for more instalments about Insights for Search in the coming weeks or if you can't wait, click on the button below to get started and see what you can find out about search trends for your business.

Posted By Ruth Brennan, Google Team

If you missed our recent webinar on the Conversion Optimiser, or you would like to learn more about how to use Conversion Optimiser to boost profits from your AdWords campaigns, then I am happy to announce that our own Andrew Silverman, Product Manager for Conversion Optimiser, will be hosting an extra early online webinar from Mountain View, California for us here in Europe.

The webinar is on Thursday, March 19th at 7am PST, which is actually 2pm GMT as the clocks go forward in the USA two weeks before Europe, so there will only be a 7 hour difference on March 19th between the UK and California. The presentation will take about 30 minutes and will be followed by an open Q&A session for another 30 minutes or so. During the webinar, Andrew will offer more insight into how Conversion Optimiser works and he'll share some inside tips for success with you.

This free webinar takes place online and all are welcome to attend. You will need to register in advance and will need access to the internet and some headphones to attend the event. You will have the option to submit any questions you would like covered in the session during registration and you will receive an email confirmation to ensure you are all signed up.

We hope you can attend and look forward to seeing you there.

Additional information and times available from this Inside AdWords Blog post.

Posted By Ruth Brennan, Conversion Optimiser Product Marketing

In today's economic climate, data-driven marketing and website decision making is increasingly important. If you have solid Google Analytics skills, more than ever, your talents are needed. But, even if you're just starting out learning Google Analytics, we have some good news for you.

We have just launched an online course in web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools. The course is offered free of charge to everyone who is interested. In addition, we're also offering a test you can take to prove you are qualified in Google Analytics -- the Google Analytics Individual Qualification -- or IQ test.

The test costs $50 (USD), and the learning material and test are currently only available in English. Once you pass, you'll be registered as Google Analytics qualified. You must receive a score of at least 75% to pass, so even if you already consider yourself an expert, be sure to at least review the online course before taking the test. For more details or to start the course, simply visit ConversionUniversity.com (only in US English language setting). There's a FAQ with all the details and a link to the Google Analytics IQ test.

Best of luck!

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

(Originally posted on analytics.blogspot.com on March3rd)

This week we are looking at how you can get more conversions at a lower cost from your existing AdWords campaigns with the Conversion Optimiser. The Conversion Optimiser is a free AdWords feature that manages your campaign costs based on your cost-per-acquisition goals.

Whether you want visitors to fill out a form, sign up for an account or buy a product, you want the people who click on your AdWords ad to complete some action on your site. More importantly, you need this action to occur at a cost-per-conversion that is profitable to your business. The Conversion Optimiser can help ensure that more of your visitors convert into customers at cost below the maximum which you set.

How it works: The science bit!

The Conversion Optimiser helps you get the most conversions for your ad spend by using your Conversion Tracking data to improve your advertising efficiency. It does this by optimising the placement of your ads in each auction based on the probability of a sale or lead occurring at that time.

For example, say you advertise on the keywords 'coffee' and 'rich roast coffee’. If the Conversion Optimiser finds that historically people who search for 'rich roast coffee' buy more often from your website than people who search for 'coffee', it will adjust your bids so you can appear higher on the page for the more profitable term and lower for the less profitable term. In this way we try to get you a conversion when 'rich roast coffee' is searched for and save you money when 'coffee' is used.

Why use the Conversion Optimiser?

You may already adjust your keyword bids with the goal of increasing your conversions, or decreasing your costs, but the Conversion Optimiser is able to adjust bids using additional factors that are otherwise unavailable to you. For instance, the Conversion Optimiser looks at the actual search query used and whether this is a broad match or exact match to one of your keywords. It also looks at the searcher's location and the particular search or content partner sites where your ad is appearing. And it does this each and every time your ad shows!

This helps you to avoid unprofitable clicks and gets you more conversions for your budget without requiring you to spend as much time managing your bids. This affords you more time to spend on strategic efforts such as campaign optimisation or website analysis. The Conversion Optimiser enables many advertisers to achieve double-digit percentage increases in conversions while paying the same price or less for each conversion, with minimal effort.

“After the first month, we got things running well and saw an increase in sales and it more than halved our cost-per-conversion. Twice as many sales for the same cash has got to be good.”

- Jonathan Barber, UKTights.com Read more

Great! How do I sign up?

It is really easy to get started using Conversion Optimiser. All that is required is that you are using Conversion Tracking and you are getting at least 30 conversions in the last 30 days for one of your campaigns. In order for the system to correctly predict whether a conversion is likely to occur, we need to have at least this level of conversion history for your campaign. If you meet these criteria, you will be able to select the option to use Conversion Optimiser within your bidding options, under your campaign settings.

If you are familiar with the Conversion Optimiser, you may be happy to hear that we have recently reduced the number of conversion needed to use it. So, if you were previously unable to use the Conversion Optimiser for some of your AdWords campaigns, you may now be eligible.

To find our more, check out http://www.google.co.uk/conversionoptimizer for FAQs, success stories and more.

Posted By Ruth Brennan, Conversion Optimiser Product Marketing