A little background for you: When you develop as many websites and work on as many SEO or PPC Campaigns each month as we do, you start to document trends. Quickly determining which designs convert, which ones do not — and why that is.

Each and every client has his or her idea about what they believe may best work for their brand or in their niche — and in all fairness, most of our clients have a much better understanding of their own market than we ever will.

What we do have, however, is experience and insight on what an end user responds to.

So here’s a short, quick and straight-to-the point rule on how to get your message across & convert more visitors in to leads or sales:

The #1 Rule — Throw one ball at a time.

Picture this:

You’re standing on a football field, and there’s a group of 10 NFL footballers standing about 20 yards away from you. At the exact same moment, all 10 throw a football toward you. You have 10 footballs hurling your way.

How many do you think you will catch? Chances are, with that many footballs heading toward you at the same time: None.

Now let’s change the scenario:

I’m standing in front of you. Just you and I, and I have 10 footballs in a basket next to me. One after another, I throw a football toward you. Consecutively, one at a time. How many do you expect to catch now? Five? Seven? All of them?

The same can be said about sending a message when a visitor hits your website.

If you attempt to throw dozens of messages, Calls To Action and general bits of information to the end user, chances are; they won’t catch anything.

On average, you have about 3.6 seconds (yes we track these metrics) to capture an end users attention & get them to do what it is you want them to do, if they are bombarded with messages, calls to action & a myriad of different attention grabbing page elements – they’re not going to catch anything, nor do what it is you’re hoping they may do.

Need a real world example? Let’s take a look at our own website.

Less than 30% of all visitors will ever use the scroll bar down the side of your website. If you clutter the top half of your website (considered above the fold) with non actionable content, your chance of a conversion has just decreased by 70%.

Again, you have approximately 3.6 seconds to deliver your message and ask for the sale/lead/action.

Many would argue that the web is interactive, and that the “Fold” doesn’t exist in an interactive medium. We beg to differ, and did the research to prove just that. We’re not alone, either — check out the Browsersize Application published by Google Labs:

1. Visit: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com
2. Type in your website URL in the ‘Enter URL here’ field.
3. Click Go.

The page should refresh, and display a colored overlay. The percentages represent how many users will actually ever see your website. Now ask yourself — what % of users are actually seeing your Call To Action?

Repeat the process, and this time put in our website: www.loveclients.com in the ‘Enter URL here’ field.

Notice where our Value Proposition is positioned? And our Call to Action? That’s above the fold, first thing.

The botton line is, the more visitors that actually get to see what it is that you want them to do, and the less clutter you’re pushing out to them, the more those visitors will actually act.
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To learn more about how the team at LoveClients can assist your business in generating more targeted visitors, and more leads or sales visit www.loveclients.com & initiate a Live Chat with a Search Marketing Expert, 24×7 – 365. We never close.

You are a part of one or have seen heaps of buzz about them. Social networks are here to stay and are only going to get bigger.

From an advertiser’s perspective it’s pretty hard to grab someone’s attention and keep them focused on your adverts. So many times have I seen companies pour millions of dollars down the drain on social network advertising, in the hope that people will buy their products or services?

So why doesn’t advertising work on social networks?

All the online marketing gurus say it’s about building brand awareness, and it is to some extent. But if you have been in the business long enough, you’ll know that measuring brand effectiveness can be very expensive and time consuming. There are a lot of companies out there that provide these services such as Nielson Buzz Metrics, but be warned – only if you’re willing to spend the big bucks.
Don’t get me wrong, BRAND is important, but like any sales or marketing person will say “Show me the money!”

So how can we leverage off social networks and actually take some ROI?

I have a theory and as cliché as it might sound, it’s about getting personal and understanding the “4 core elements” of personality groups and targeting them based on their characteristics.

If you are a marketer or not, most companies target their databases into areas that are functional, beneficial and emotionally appealing – which is mostly known as the value proposition. But before that is concluded they break their databases down into segments which are usually based on primary and secondary research.

Online segmentation is however measured differently as other elements come into play such as time spent, bounce rates, etc. This can be very difficult to do and is also extremely time consuming.
But what if there were another way to segment and target a core set of consumers online based on your value proposition? I believe you can – through social networks.

I strongly believe that the future of online targeting will be based on a person’s characteristics.

Here are some advantages:

• Personalised communication strategies for campaigns
• Greater understanding of behavioural patterns
• Making each experience relevant, personal and engaging

Now here comes the cliché part, based on astrology (I know, for all you men out here banging your heads against the wall, there is some logic behind this) you can “assume” all people share common characteristics based on their element sign.

These are broken down into 4 elements:

• Fire = Leo, Aries & Sagittarius
Are known to be; irresponsible, impatient, boastful, positive, extraverted, active, creative, ingenious, dynamic, highly energetic, outspoken, fiery temper, passionate, emotionally intense

• Water = Scorpio, Cancer, Pisces
Are known to be; deeply intuitive, imaginative, emotional, reserved, not gregarious, exceedingly passionate, self pity, sensitive, pessimistic, overly vague, secretive

• Earth = Capricorn, Virgo, Taurus
As known to be; stable, practical, realistic, cautious, hard-working, dependable, highly materialistic, inhibited, introverted, down to earth, calm

• Air = Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Are known to be; free spirited, philosophical, intellectual, open minded, idealistic, adventurous, restless, unpredictable, interactive, extraverted, emotionally aloof, opinionated

Even if you don’t believe in astrology – it’s about finding the right set of ‘people characteristics’ for your product or service. Understanding the personality that wants or needs your products or services is important and knowing how to leverage on that.

Because at the end of the day, they will be your distribution channel when it comes to word of mouth or recommending your product or service to other people online and offline.

So having the right personality representing your brand will be just as important as the way you communicate across all channels.

This mentality is WRONG!!!!! Let me explain why. Before any search marketing campaign starts you should truly consider what your business goals are, some examples would be; Customer Acquisition, Information Requests (customer submitting a request for more information from your company), Click Volume, Revenue Per Visitor. Now there are many more potential positive outcomes from your search marketing but they were just a few examples. The reason why basing your SEM success purely on click goals or cost per click is that it doesnt accurately reflect your businesses ROI and this is where conversion tracking comes in.

Conversion tracking works by inserting code onto your website which allows marketers to track actions on your website and correlate which keywords, ads or adgroups are driving the greatest amount of real value to your business. This isn’t rocket science and let me reiterate what i am saying here; Without conversion tracking or properly defined business goals which allow for some kind of real world measurement of success you are THROWING YOUR MONEY AWAY!

Ok, so now that we have my little rant out of the way you may be asking “what options are there for tracking success on my website?” Who would have guessed that there are literally hundreds of free solutions out there however the two most obvious and most powerful are Googles conversion tracking and Yahoo’s conversion tracking tools. Both of these are good, free, solutions which allow every aspect of your campaigns to be measured against your business goals, optimised to increase the performance in relation to that and also to easily be reported on.

The distinct advantage that Google’s conversion tracking has over Yahoo’s tool is that it ties directly into Google Analytics and then becomes a far more powerful tool for tracking every aspect of your sites performance.

If you have any questions regarding conversion tracking and how it can benefit you, or if you just think you need some help in defining your business goals. Come on over to LoveClients.com and we are more than happy to speak with you!

Ok, so everybody on earth has used Google or Yahoo or some kind of search engine. So chances are, you have come across paid search campaigns before! Did you recognize the ads as paid?.. Chances are if you have been around the internet for long enough you would be used to these ads and they probably blend into your everyday searching without causing a stir.

Did you know that quite often people are paying $1,5 or even $50 per click to get traffic via these paid links??! You may think, why the hell would somebody pay $50 per click? Well the truth is, that if you were making $100 per click, paying $50 isnt that bad! – It’s sort of like poker, you are never going to be 100% sure that spending $50 on a click is going to pay off every time, but by making the educated decision and the “right play” more often than not that click is going to deliver a good return on investment!

Paid search is a science and the basics premise behind it is to buy clicks that are valuable to your website and get a good ROI from the campaign as a whole. Lots of individual elements come together across the whole campaign to deliver the end results. Paid search combines elements of marketing, advertising, copywriting, analytics, accounting and many other smaller elements together.

The main differences between paid search and organic search is that paid search can deliver instant traffic on demand which is highly accountable and can be constantly optimised towards many different end goals including a lower cost per click, higher traffic volumes, more conversions or any other metric which you desire.

Paid search isnt going to do everything for your business, it wont make your site convert better if it sucks. It wont do the ironing for you or cook you dinner It CAN however deliver real value to your business by getting your brand in front of consumers when they are in the right frame of mind to purchase your products or become a loyal follower of your message. The difference between an average search marketing campaign and a good one can be the difference between buying a ferrari or a fiat!!

I haven’t gone into too much detail in thos post about the inner workings of SEM but stay tuned for some far more detailed insights into the world of paid search!