Online Marketing Blog

We have already discussed how Google is launching mini applications, or mini services, in which by entering a query in the search box, it automatically offers you the answer.
For example: Who is the director of Star Wars, the Euro – Dollar exchange rates…

What is still surprising is that Google, although part of its DNA is to resolve users’ doubts, has a very peculiar form of answering them by sending users to high content web pages related to the user’s “question”.

Now the search engine is becoming something more… “semantic” but at what cost?
Right off the bat, it’s causing the users not to click on the search results, or SEO or PPC, for which the decline of CTR and therefore traffic is considerable or more than considerable.
Can it be that in the future when someone searches “Pythagoras theorem”, Google will provide a direct answer in the SERPs and there will be no need to enter the websites?

I’m concerned that Google tends to become a great question answering machine:

- Cheapest hotel in Barcelona
- Used cars
- TV programming

And instead of SEO results, the PPC appear (at best) but Google directly answers these questions, feeding off the content we generate in websites, blogs, etc. Google is currently categorizing content through webs. Possibly in the future Google will directly categorize content, offering an overview of the property of the same and not “direct” traffic to the pages of the content owners. Logically the screw will have to be tightened since in this case, to not receive traffic from Google, since it doesn’t “take” the content, for it in the robots.txt.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Google is pushing it: flight search, hotel search, contacts directly from adwords, eBooks, social networks,… but let’s not forget that the content does NOT belong to Google and content Reigns online.

The customers, webmasters or owners of an online business want quality traffic. We already spoke about quality traffic and all the subjective and relative of it.

The thing is that a website that is designed correctly to sell should be able to sell its product no matter where the user comes from.

The web needs to be ready to sell either if the user came into the website from a brand keyword, from searching an specific product, a general one, from a banner campaign, written notes on blogs, email forwards or from social media sites such as facebook or twitter…

We fell into the mistake of thinking that the user is unique, when we really have or are so many different users with needs of that product that you may have. I hope am clear, because I think I have said something really freaky

We don’t have the same behavior when we search for shoes over the internet without knowing for sure what we are looking for, I mean, I search for information/inspiration, that I know for sure when I find the product that I am searching, how I want it, when I know the brand and price of the product that I want to get.

We can set an online marketing strategy with a great design of landing pages with the different kind of users and traffic source. But the users can come to us in 1000 different ways. And those 1000 different ways are the ones that we need to have ready to sell.

We should have a great website design of the “brand”, a good design of our product, and a good design of the advantages and utilities of our product. Therefore, if I sell shoes, and on top of this I said that my shoes are of milk, and explain why it is necessary to have shoes that are from milk and Wow! What a coincidence, we also sell them.

The internet gives us a huge advantage so we can be flexible with making decisions and be able to modify the way our online business is going in a couple of days, or knowing if a campaign is not going to work after a couple of hours of launching it.

And is this flexibility the one that we need to take advantage of to read our statistics fast and take decisions.

I have the opinion that there’s no such a thing as low quality traffic, I believe that there are websites that aren’t ready to monetize any user that they get.

When we launch or design a website we need to be clear on which the objective is (sell, leads, and impressions) and how we are going to get them, surveys, attractive images, videos, wide catalog…

But from the moment the user comes to a website to till the moment this makes what we want, there’s a click space that we need to take advantage of to adequate the page to our objective and needs that the user has based in the traffic source this came from.

For example if a user comes from a banner, the landing should be correlatively alike to the banner design, if it comes from PPC, the used message should appear in the landing, and if it comes from a brand keyword should be offered in a very cleared way the brand that is looking and the right brand.

It may happen, just as it happens in blogs, that the keyword traffic that is not directly related to the business object or product that want to market, for example, in my case I get a lot of traffic from “ vistaprint fraud”. Is this low quality traffic? I don’t think so, what is of low quality is that I am not able to monetize this traffic.

There’s only one week left for the e-commretail show, the I electronic commerce fair and online business, that will be held on April 15 and 16 in Barcelona

For now you may enter for free and you can get your entry here: Free Pass E-commretail.

I think it is an even that anyone that is into this kind of online business should go, either for the networking, and to learn new things, understand the reality of this industry that is growing each day.

The program is very wide and it highlights the main problems and structures of any online business need to keep in mind:

- SEO forum: with the Elite of the national organic ranking.
- Web Analytics Forum : Table full of cracks.
- Marketing Results Forum: where I have the great luck of moderate the tables with my high weight people of affiliation.

These are some of the round tables related to online marketing directly, but in this Fair, they will be having some direct topics related to the online business and how to develop them, for example, ecommerce forum, forum, hosting, payment options, industries like adults o gambling,… Come on! Is a very complete fair for all those who want to start with the online industry, as for experts that already are part of the topics or sector.

I hope to see you at the Fair

Meanwhile I leave you the promotional video of the Fair
Ecommretail Promotional Video

Of the visits you get, how many leave you money? Simple question, simple and direct, would you ask it yourself?
I imagine and hope you do

The thing is that what we want are visits, traffic, users, therefore they will come from SEO, PPC, Banners, email… and these all will send traffic and more traffic and if we don’t know what to do then we will just stay there looking at them like fools and won’t make any money.

But how can this be, if I hired a great SEO person that filled my website with visits, why don’t I sell?

An easy way to check if we are profitable is by calculating the effective CPC (eCPC). This is only the calculation of:

[Traffic Acquisition Cost]/[nº of visits “purchased”]

And we can compare this with the number of enters of visitors:

[Entries of the Buying Visits]/[Buying Visits]

If we make the calculation of the Entries per visit of our website we will see that although weh have thousands of visits, we only win 1 cent or less for each one. If in the previous example we are talking about SEO traffic, it doesn’t mean that the SEO is the one that brought us the low quality traffic or that the SEO as strategy is not good for our business.

What it means is our website the one that is not well designed to market our products and get those users to buy.