WhyCommunicate?

Google recently announced an upgrade to the Google Adwords tool for advertisers; Enhanced CPC (http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/08/increase-roi-conversions-with-enhanced.html)  Google is promoting this function as as a way to ‘turbocharge your ROI’.

How does it work?

In campaigns where you have Conversion Tracking enabled (or you’re importing Google Analytics Goals) you can enable Enhanced CPC. It works for both Search and Display and it can also be used if you are utilising third party bid management tools.

Once activated, the system will use historical account data and factors such as users’ time and location to analyse on-the-fly the likelihood of specific search terms converting, raising or lowering your bids accordingly. Initially 50% of traffic will have bids modified, with the other 50% held back as a control. Over time and with success, the control ratio will decrease.

You’ll find the option to switch it on in your Campaign settings. It works with both manual and automatic bidding.

The Caveats?

Firstly, Google Adwords reports do not currently show any reporting data to indicate how Enhanced CPC has directly affected performance, or indeed which bid-upon keywords have had Enhanced CPC applied and when. You can obviously look at top-level conversion volume and CPA but this doesn’t really give you the visibility needed.

Secondly, if you use Adwords Editor frequently for modifications, bear in mind that with Enhanced CPC enabled in any campaign, you will not be able to use Editor to modify anything in that campaign. This is a significant oversight at launch but we believe Google is working on this.

So does it work?

Well, it’s still early days, but having tested it since launch in a selection of campaigns with a long history and a good volume of conversions we have indeed seen more conversions at a lower CPA, after an initial drop in performance.

Overall, we’d say approach with caution and don’t simply assume that the tool will provide that turbocharge without any input from you. Some commentators have called it a charter for the lazy manager but we say why ignore something that can improve your ROI?

If you want to test it then give it time to settle in. Don’t see it as a reason to not to continue keeping a close eye on optimisation. And before you switch it on, if your CPA is at the top-end of your target range, you may want to adjust some bids downward, given that Google will bid up to 30% higher than your current bid.

Trendstream’s recent research evidenced what we’d long suspected – that one of the best ways of improving brand image is to interact with customers online. And not by a small degree either – a 29% increase in reputation on average.

Flip this round and it’s easy to understand the effect failing to interact well with customers online. Example, I’m in the market for a new boiler. Valliant and Worcester Bosch are the two makes I’m looking at. The Valliant website looks slicker but runs you into the equivalent of a road block. It’s smooth sailing on a nice looking site all the way up to boiler recommendations and then you can’t click on them to get more information, or phone them. The Worcester Bosch site by contrast, while lacking in design, functions well and gives you the information you need including a good phone service.

So when it comes down to making a decision between them, I’m going to go for the Bosch, even though it costs around 20% more, because the brand experience online makes me trust it more over the long term.

Incidentally, it’s not just boiler makers that need to be aware of online brand perception. We asked a plumber to recommend a boiler and when we looked up the brand he mentioned, it had a poor reputation but was known for giving the largest commission to plumbers. Needless to say this had a negative effect on our perception of that plumber’s brand value.

There’s really no excuse for badly designed websites online these days as there’s a raft of inexpensive tools available to test where the roadblocks are in the customer journey. Two tried and tested ones are Kampyle which makes it easy to ask visitors what they think about the site and Crazyegg which shows you where they are clicking with a ‘confetti’ map, so you can move important text up to that area.

It’s easy to end up snowed under with website analytics data so keeping it simple enables online businesses to make big improvements to customer journeys quickly and easily.

It’s the season for cultural stereotyping. As legions of Brits head over the channel, we’ll once again hear stories of how rude foreigners can be – especially if you ask them a simple question slowly and loudly in English.

It’s not really our fault, because English is the world’s favourite language we’ve been tricked into thinking that speaking English abroad is OK. But of course just because people in other countries can speak English, doesn’t mean they want to and of course it’s presumptuous of us to think that they would, which is most of the problem.

Online retailers can fall into the same trap. For example, figures from Forrester show that while 60% of UK shoppers prefer to pay by credit card, only 35% of French and 26% of Germans do. In the Netherlands it’s only 19%. So presenting primarily credit card options at checkout will end in a high drop out in those countries. And this is just one of many differences you need to adjust for when trading internationally.

How online customers regard brands also varies massively from country to country. French & German customers are far more venerable in their attitude to brand than their UK counterparts. They are thirsty for information, especially about forthcoming new products and will avidly read newsletters and blogs about their favourite brands. UK consumers on the other hand are much more motivated by discounts.

And in a reversal of this seasonal stereotyping, if you were to speak to the call centre of one online retailer we know who deals with French, German and UK customers, they’ll tell you that it’s actually the Brits who are the rudest – by far.

With summer holidays upon us, the global phenomenon that was croc shoes will be in luminous evidence in beaches and resorts across the world though its star is in decline if you read the business press – one analyst described the company as ‘zombie like’ – dead but doesn’t know it yet.

As Helen Rumbelow pointed out in The Times recently, it’s a seeming miracle that these garish, ugly, plastic shoes caught on in the first place, but caught on they did, and how. At their height, croc shoes were generating $168 million in yearly sales.

The croc shoes phenomenon is something most manufacturers and retailers dream of and understanding why such a product catches fire has long been debated, perhaps most famously by Malcolm Gladwell in Tipping Point.

While the answers to each case are different and complex, in the day to day world of online retailing many of the secrets of ‘shifting product’ are readily available. Differentiation is an important one. In a market where a product is freely available, at a similar cost how do you mark your site out as the one to buy from?

There are many elements to this but one of the most basic and often overlooked is customer service. You may have the best technical site in the world but does it work for your target audience? If you make life easier for the customer simply by adding a telephone number (see previous blog) or responding to an email enquiry promptly, you’re already likely to be ahead of your competitors.

In Tipping Point Gladwell talks about how it’s often these small and seemingly trivial elements of an idea or message that give birth to an epidemic.  While etailers can’t necessarily expect to have a croc shoes on their hands every year, paying attention to the many small details of customer engagement online deliver consistent results over the longer term.

Something counter intuitive is happening on our e-commerce site

A bit of background: our site (selling reading glasses) is essentially a test bed for assessing e-commerce optimising software before we recommend it to clients.

Although it’s not a fully fledged commercial website, we attract enough customers to make some useful discoveries, for example that customers often don’t know they can click on images so you have to be more explicit about where the links are.

As part of the testing we’ve streamlined the order process, minimising the number of inputs a customer needs to make but despite this, we’ve started getting a lot of phone calls. You’d think the number of calls would go down if the online ordering process had got easier, but no.

The phone calls are from customers in their 50s and 60s – as you’d expect for a site selling reading glasses – who are happy to order from us but simply prefer to complete the transaction on the phone.

Fair enough, so we’ve responded by adding a telephone booking line and are now tracking that to see what difference it makes to our orders.

It’s a reminder to us and other e-commerce operations out there that ultimately your audience will tell you how they want to transact with you (if you’re listening) and while you may think you know what your customers want, the reality may surprise you.