The team at Snowcap is at Startup Riot for an all day pitch event. We’re not pitching, but listening. Loren is broadcasting live from the event at his site:
Live from Startup Riot
May 19th, 2008The Most Important Question for Your Search Campaigns
April 16th, 2008Running a search campaign requires that you collect and analyze a bunch of data. Of all the metrics you are collecting what is most important question that you should be asking? Some might say what is my conversion? Others might state cost per click. But chances are you aren’t collecting the most important thing.
What should you be asking: Why are my potential customers here? This is by far the most important and overlooked aspect of a campaign. Let’s say for example that you are a jeweler and advertising on terms related to “ruby.” Now, from your perspective that makes perfect sense. You sell rubies so you should naturally be advertising on them right? Not always.
What you should be asking yourself is what do people typing in this term really want? In the case of “ruby” most of that traffic is actually looking for information on the Ruby on Rails programming language and framework. So you might be paying for quite a lot of traffic that completely misses the mark.
When you are researching your market you want to break up all your keywords into really tight groupings. Each of these is a segment. Now ask each of these segments. So in our jewelry example we might have a tight group around “ruby” terms. When you drive traffic from this segment you’ll want to ask them “What were you looking for today? What is your most important question?”
When you start collecting this data the psychology of each and every single terms starts to unfold. By analyzing their answers you’ll realize that a majority of the traffic search on “Ruby” wants computer stuff and not gems. On the other hand you might find that “Rubies” is the where your audience truly lies.
But wait, it gets better. when you collect this data you can immediately integrate it into your search campaigns. When you analyze the data you can prioritize a list of concerns that people in a particular segment have. You can use this information in your landing pages and absolutely trounce conversion. When you speak to your audience in the same language and hit on all their major concerns you are much more likely to close the sale.
Go out and start digging into the psychology of your market. I bet you’ll find a huge pot of gold.
Building the Brand
April 10th, 2008Branding is a tough game to play. In traditional advertising building a brand can cost millions of dollars. The big boys on the block (think Wal-mart, Sears, Coke, Miller) literally spend billions of dollars annually building the brand. I’m sure that you would be happy to to have that kind of money to throw around, but chances are that your budgets are significantly smaller. Let’s take some learnings from the big guys and show you how to apply them to your business.
Measuring the value of a brand is pretty tough work. Owning the trademark for Coca-Cola has got to be worth something right? In practice it is hard to nail down a price because a brand is not a tangible thing. In truth, it’s more of an art than a science. In the financial world when they put a dollar value on a brand they call it “goodwill.” This is the figure that traditionally gets tossed around.
In the online world there are a few fantastic ways to measure the penetration of your brand. The two best metrics you should follow are:
- Direct Navigation Traffic
- Number of monthly searches on the brand term and it’s derivatives.
Take Bidz.com for an example. I went to Google Trends and typed in “bidz.”
As you can see, over the last few years, they have enjoyed about a 20% increase in their brand term searches. Now, that’s cool. The data above is Google’s view of the world. When you are assessing the demand for your brand you’ll want the hard facts from your web analytics package.
Go back six months. Measure all the traffic that you received from search engines that included a brand term. Do the same for last month. What is the change in the traffic from these two periods?
Do the same process for your direct navigation traffic. Is your brand getting more prevalent or less?
Start now. Go measure the pulse of your brand.
Have questions about this post? Ask a good question in the comments section below and I will answer it and give you a link on our blog roll. Fire away!
2 Steps to Purchasing and Transferring Web Sites that Won’t Get You Banned
April 2nd, 2008
Duncan of Indie Music 2.0 asked this in response to my post and video about valuing web properties:
“Interesting presentation Charles… as more and more people purchase properties as income generators, do you see Google modifying its algorithm to prevent these kinds of sites from showing up in the first 10 listings of a search?”
It’s a good question and I wanted share my response with you.
Duncan,
Good question. When purchasing web properties you need to make sure that you follow a few hard and fast rules to avoid being penalized by the big G and the like.
1. Make sure the domain is transfered anonymously
2. Put the site on a new C-block IP address.
You’ll need to make sure that when the domain is transfered in that you register with privacy protection. For reference, Google is also a domain registrar so they have access to all the domain records. Registering the domain anonymously keeps them from knowing that you are aggregating sites. There is some heated debate about rankings and transferring ownership of a site. Some people have had issues. In my experiences the traffic has stayed consistent.
Put the purchased site on a new c-block level IP address. You want to make sure that you aren’t aggregating too many sites into one IP. If Google sees that these sites are linking to one another and concentrated in the same IP, you risk them pinning all the sites to you. We use SEOHosting to spawn new web hosting accounts onto separate IP blocks. Their setup is great, you are able to spawn new accounts and set them up very quickly using the standard web host manager and cpanel software packages. It’s really a breeze. It works out to about $7/month per account if you buy the 10 site package.
Good question, what questions do you have? Ask a good one and I’ll add your site to the blog roll.
3 Effective (and Slightly Badass) Methods for Valuing Web Sites
March 31st, 2008One of my all time favorite work tasks is finding and acquiring web properties. Purchasing web sites is one of the few ways I’ve found to reliably double and triple your investment over a few short years. You can go out right now and purchase profitable web sites at crazy good valuations. You just need to know what to look for and understand how to assign value to a web site. In this video I cover three ways to value a web sites:
And the Presentation:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dd6c2wqw_643xvq63hf
And the links in the Presentation:
http://www.electronicappraiser.com/sample/fullsample.html
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/18550
http://www.Sitepoint.com
http://www.tdnam.com
http://www.stuntdubl.com/2006/02/20/website-valuation/
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Have questions? Comment below.
Google and the Tragedy of the Commons
March 30th, 2008Don’t get me wrong, I love Google. I remember quite clearly what it was like surfing the net in the 90s. Finding what you were looking for was often really hard. Google was absolutely the key to unlocking information quickly and we loved it. Years ago, when I started advertising with them, I loved them even more. While Google gets their money from advertisers, it has always been on the side of the search user. Fanatically so. Over the past few years they have made countless changes to the rules advertisers must follow to be qualified the give them money.
They were the first to use your click through rate when deciding on your bid pricing. They were the first to consider the relevancy of the landing page. They punished campaigns with single page landers. They’ve changed a lot, but now, they have set the bar too high for most advertisers. Recently they stated that they will be considering landing load times when determining your quality score. Ok, I get it, another update. But when is enough, enough? What’s awful about all these updates is that somewhere along the way Google lost site of the small guy. Just about every day I hear from people with horror stories:
“I tried advertising on Google, but they wanted $10 a click. There is no way I can afford that.”
Its not that Google really is charging $10 per click. They are just telling you that “something” is wrong in your campaign or your web site. The tables are getting tilted again. The big sites with the big budgets and the big servers are less affected by all these changes than the huge base of small advertisers. And that is a shame. You shouldn’t have to be a technology and advertising guru to send a little traffic to your web site.
This is the tragedy of Google’s success. In fearlessly championing the search user, they are now pushing out many of the very businesses that helps catapult them to their huge success. One thing is for sure, it’s not getting any easier for the little guy.
What do you think? Have you been cut down by the big G?
