eTips is back after a short break. Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits! Here's to a sunny Spring.
Robin Houghton
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From the Eggblogg ... |
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It's search, Jim, but not as we know it |
Why one man never uses search engines any more.
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Things we've read... |
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Staff first, customers second |
It's a bit like the advice you get in the safety instructions on a plane, about putting your own mask on before trying to fit one onto a child.
From eConsultancy.
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Passion Play
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How to get motivated about your work. From Quick and Dirty Tips.
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Inside Google Zurich
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Watch as employees slide down firemen's poles and hold meetings in converted cable cars.
A fun video from the BBC.
Watch it here ...
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Starting points for online presence
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Hot tips from a man who knows, Chris Brogan.
Read the full story here ...
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We have traffic, where are the sales?
Last week I was looking at the New Media Age Marketing Services Guide 2008 and it struck me that search marketing is huge, much bigger than email marketing, with the top search agency in the UK turning over £88 million.
That's a lot of money being spent on search. Of course, there's no point having a website if nobody visits, but then again, there's no point having visitors if none of them turn into customers. So I wonder how much is being spent on making sure websites actually do the job they're supposed to? Somehow I don't think it's £88 million.
Andrew Walmsley in Marketing magazine once illustrated the point like this. (I've scaled the numbers down a bit to make it more realistic for small businesses). Let's say you spend £20,000 on search and get 50,000 unique visitors, converting 3% of them, that's 1500 new customers at a cost per acquisition (CPA) of £13.33. Now what if you could raise the conversion figure by just 0.25%, taking £500 from the budget to do so? The £19,500 that's left would bring you in 48,750 visitors and converting at 3.25% would give you 1,584 new customers at a CPA of £12.62. That's 5% more customers for a lower cost-per-acqusition.
Now I realise that many small businesses tend to spend more on website design than on website promotion, especially as search engine optimisation is sometimes seen as a cheap 'add on'. But factor in the cost of the web design in that case (as the company's main online marketing cost) and the principle still holds.
Whatever way you cost it out, spending a relatively small amount on usability and customer experience testing makes commercial sense, and it doesn't have to be large-scale. Jakob Neilsen once said testing on no more than 5 people will flag up the majority of issues with a site.
So if your search marketing is going well, but you're still wondering where the customers are, maybe your website's trying to tell you something.
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