Transcript:
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I want to talk to you today about Web Analytics and a common problem that I see and I want to relate it to a little parable. Oftentimes you’ll see people that have multiple analytics system installed on their site. I’ve worked for people who have as many as five different kinds of analytics systems installed on their site. Even with two this becomes a problem. Why? Because the way web analytics work. Each package works in a different manner. They all measure things differently. Conversions are measured differently. Unique visitors are measure differently. There is some sort of standardization among them, but you’ve got a lot of variation there.
So what does this mean? When you are running marketing programs – which one are you looking at to optimize your results against? Oftentimes you’ll at one and the other is slightly different. And you’ll start making decisions that are contradictory.
I had a teacher in a high school – Mark Tayloe. I had gotten in trouble that year and I came back. And he gave me a sheet of paper. He always handed out sheets of paper in class with sayings – every single class period. I think I got two of them that year. And one of them was “a man with two watches never knows the time.” And I was thinking “Ok – so what does that mean?” And actually I kind of know now. You can’t have two different analytics systems that you are comparing against because you start to second-guess yourself.
So if you must two analytics systems or more installed, only pay attention to the results from one. And optimize the results of your marketing campaign against. Take that as a tip. My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.
Transcript:
Hello, my name is Charles Lumpkin. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. Were going to talk about, probably, one of the most common mistakes that I see. And I see it all the time. It’s that you have budget caps on your campaigns.
So, what is a budget cap? That means, hey, on this particular campaign I only want to spend $100/day. And then you look back historically and everyday it hits $100. This is a terribly inefficient thing to do in your campaigns.
What you actually want to do – and don’t get scared, people get scared when I say this – is set your campaign budget to $500/day or $1000/day. Something that you couldn’t possibly hit. Now, why won’t you hit them? It’s because you are actually going to adjust the bids on your phrases down significantly. You actually don’t want to hit the $100/day. What you want to do is adjust your bids downward so you are getting more clicks for the $100.
So, think about it. Let’s say you are spending $1/click and by noon you are out. The other way to do it is to not put the budget caps on the campaign, set it to $500 a day. And you set your bids to $0.25/click. Then you run the entire day at $0.25/click. And guess what? You got 200 or 300 clicks for $75 or $50 bucks – less than the $100 that you spent to get 100 clicks. And that’s the crucial thing to understand. Don’t budget cap your campaigns.
My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com.
I’m stoked. Ignition Alley opens tomorrow. Tim Dorr and Mike Schinkel are “soft launching” the new co-working space and I’ll be there tomorrow with my check in hand.
Let me tell you why I’m excited. I think that Ignition Alley is going to be one of the big centers of startup culture and execution in Atlanta. I know there are times when I’m stuck on a particular problem. Say – like a programming problem. It might take me hours to figure out the correct solution when a five minute conversation might short circuit me to the answer. These kinds of time savings are immense. One hour saved pays for the price of admission.
As for me, I’m a marketing guy. I’ve made my living running online marketing campaigns for years. I’ll be there to help you with any online marketing, search engine & conversion science questions you might have. And I’m stoked.
So for the first 15 startups/entrepreneurs that join me at Ignition Alley I’ll give you a $100 Google Adwords credit for a new account. That right there will defray the costs an “unlimited access” membership for a month. All I ask is that you physically come meet me after you sign up.
So you are aware they delineated three levels of membership in a recent TechDrawl article:
$35/month – Occasional access – 5 days per month to stop by (not hard monitored. they’re not going to throw people out on the street or anything!)
$95/month – Unlimited access – Stop in whenever you want.
$190/month – Dedicated desk – Get a desk dedicated to your business. They’ll even throw in a custom decal to label your desk as your own
That’s a great deal… no doubt about it.
So take up the call to arms! Let’s help these guys make Igntion Alley a smashing success.
I’ve been working diligently over the past few weeks on a web site rehab for a marine electronics store. In this video I show the exact steps I’m taking to improve conversion on this site. The before and after is pretty dramatic. Check it out below at Screenr:
I wanted to take a second and show you guys how to use twitter and tweetdeck to keep up with public and private conversations I care about. Check out the video below:
Regular readers of this blog know that I throw a particularly cautious eye on the activities of Google. This is because most of the time that they make a change, it is not to the benefit of the marketer. Trust me, they only want to fleece more money from us. But this time it looks like it has backfired. Maybe they will give us a little slack over the next few months.
This will change your campaigns and forecasts, and market research efforts today.
Google is now giving out search volume data on keywords in their suggestion tool. They have been giving out similar information for a while now, but now this data is actually accurate.
You no longer need to extrapolate or guess at traffic numbers. You now KNOW traffic numbers.
Head on over to the Google Tool and see for yourself:
Hey Folks. Loren is giving a talk on screencasts, live video, and video distibution channels tonight at the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs. It starts at 7pm EST. You can check out the live feed here:
Earlier tonight I was watching Hulu.com (which is really great place to burn a few hours and watch some TV online). I noticed an interesting video advertising concept. TRESemme was running a series of ads throughout the videos. Before the video began there was a screen asking you to “Choose the style you prefer:”
I think this is really cool. Here they are actually involving you interactively in the advertisement. When you choose one style over another it gives you tips specific to that hair style. Now that’s an interesting concept delivered over time. If you did this with more fine-grained segmentations you might actually be able to create ads for direct response advertising. I give TRESemme kudos for coming up with a cool concept.
BUT they did miss the market big-time. Why in the world would you show a hair care ads deliberately created for women to a man watching “Weird Science”? It’s about as far off the mark as you can get, but the concept still stands.
What questions would you like to ask your audience?
Recently Yahoo and Google announced a new partnership. Here’s the skinny. Yahoo will serve up Google’s ads on about 80% of their search volume. This move will add about a billion dollars annually to Yahoo in the short term, but in the long term they are going to effectively kill off their search business. This deal really concerns me for several reasons:
Google is becoming a monopoly. Google already has about 65% of the search engine volume. A combination with Yahoo will give them over 90% of the search volume. I’m always a fan of competition over monopolies. This will effectively consolidate Google’s power and dominance. I’ve already mentioned how Google is raking the little guy over the coals. This will only make it worse.
Your costs on Yahoo are going to increase. Guaranteed. Average prices on Yahoo are about a third of what Google’s paid search algorithm is able to achieve. This is where all Yahoo’s new-found cash will be coming from. Straight from your pocket.
There will be less innovation. Yahoo is not known for their innovation in search. But Microsoft is actually innovating. Take their adlab or their excel plug-in for examples of the next generation of tools for advertisers. I believe that a combination with Microsoft would have combined Yahoo’s volume with Microsoft’s innovation. But with this deal there will be no reason to even run a separate Yahoo account. This means no improvements or innovations on their own platform. (Not that they understand how to improve their platform anyway)
Let’s hope that the Department of Justice puts this one to bed before they can execute it or that Microsoft and Carl Icahn go hostile. This deal completely seals Google’s dominance and your dependence on their traffic. Anyone interested in forming a consortium of concerned advertisers?
