Convert Offline

Although every website defines conversion a little differently, we all need visitors to take some desired action. We need them to advance one step at a time until hopefully they become a customer. Because ours is a service business we need a phone call. And because the particular site I’ll refer to in this post is a national franchise that repairs and installs garage doors, we need our visitors to find the local franchise in order to make a phone call. So, the desired action is simply to enter a zip code into the zip code box. Which was happening at a rate of about 8%.

So we did a redesign, here’s what the 2 pages looked like:

Original Page

New Layout

The goal was to create a cleaner look that emphasized the desired action by isolating it above the fold. The result using website optimizer for a month showed only the chance of a slight improvement.

Original Vs New Layout

Then we added a video spokesperson to the new layout.

New Layout With Video Spokesperson Added

The video contained a spokesperson that highlighted one or two important reasons to choose us and asked visitors to enter their zip code in the box. We pitted this new page with video against the original in 2 separate experiments. In the first, the video was present but did not start automatically, the player needed to be clicked to launch the video.

In the second, the video was launched automatically.

You want to take a guess which was the winning combination?

The combination where the video needed to be activated by the searcher was the only combination that showed significant gain and it was dramatic. The desired action was taken 70.5% more often and Google was very confident that should continue – 99.9%!

Website Optimizer Shows 70.5% Increase

I learned a long time ago when selling yellow pages that when people get information on their own they trust it more. I always believed that was true of search as well. Now, I’ll add video to that list.

My takeaway from this experiment is that if you want someone to do something you have to tell them to do it— just wait until your asked to tell them. We’ve added this same spokesmodel to some local sites. She’s telling the site’s visitors to go ahead and a make a phone call, but only after that information has been politely requested.

(Full disclosure: At this time I have no affiliation with Live Face On Web. However, based on this experience, we are currently in negotiations to become a reseller of this product. Whether we do or not I do not yet know.)

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The analytics of local search are different than e-commerce; avg. time on site, pages/visit & bounce rate are largely measures of engagement and e-commerce. Yet, us local searcherati try to fit these square pegs into our round holes. Why? Because these are the tools Google Analytics made available to us.

Let’s face it, we never considered these metrics prior to the GA installation, and then after we hooked up GA, we had to do searches on Google just to find out what these terms meant. And now we use these terms as if they are truly meaningful. Well no more! It’s time to add a 12th internet marketing skill…

From now on we are going to use only the metrics that we can tie directly to revenue and profitably. I know that’s boring when compared with exciting things like “engagement”, believe me I know, I love it when you talk that way. However, times being what they are we must consider the more practical aspect of dollars actually going into our pocket.

Here are the Ratios and Metrics I’m going to watch from now on.

Clicks to Phone Calls Ratio. This measures your sites ability to get people who are interested in your service to call for an appointment or request a free estimate or some thing like that. Whatever the equivalent is in your company you know.

For service businesses, your website’s main job, perhaps its only job is to generate phone calls. Yet, I bet very few people are actually measuring this right now. This will helps us measure the effectiveness of our most basic internet marketing skills, keyword analysis, copywriting and website design.

% Calls Booked- This measures your ability to convert phone calls into appointments or estimates.

As a former Yellow Page rep I can remember telling clients over and over again, “All we can do is make your phone ring.” But now as part of the service we provide, we listen to our clients web calls and provide feedback.

This metric is far easier to take action on then avg time on site or the others to which we typically pay attention and the opportunity is tremendous, really. To fully comprehend the power of this metric, imagine raising booking % from 40% to 60 %. This is not a 20% increase… it is a full 50% increase in the amount of leads your generating and you didn’t need to spend anymore on advertising to generate it!

Closing % – this measures your company’s ability to turn leads into customers

Because of this metric’s proximity to actually collecting money it is already pretty well regarded by most; but I would venture there is still some room for improvement.

Avg Sale $ – What is the average sale?

Don’t leave home without this one and definitely don’t talk to any advertising people without knowing it.

Profit Margin%- the percent of each sale that goes into your pocket.

I think of this number as the dollars that make it into your pocket on your last sale— expressed as a percentage.

Focusing on and improving these stats can help you stretch your advertising dollar and bring in more sales. Which is why we pay attention to analytics in the first place. Imagine logging into your analytics package and seeing the number of unique phone calls you generated expressed as a percentage of unique visitors. Next you see the % of these calls that were booked and finally how many turned into customers and how much was spent. I see this as being the default analytics package of the near future for local service businesses. The tools are actually available for this right now, it’s just a matter of putting them together.

*Here’s a little secret: If you get the numbers for your company for each of the 5 metrics above and multiply them, it will give you the single most important number in your entire internet marketing campaign… more on that next time.

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Digital Alex defines Direct Traffic perfectly at Search Marketing Gurus as

These are visitors who came to your site without first visiting a search engine, another site or some marketing tactic.

This post will take that last part – “some marketing tactic” a little further and demonstrate how small businesses can learn more about traffic from other online advertising by having Google Analytics give you all the goodies that most other portals won’t show you.

Then it will show you how to segment Direct Traffic to help figure out how many visitors came through a bookmark (favorites) and how many likely came through some offline media like yellow pages.

Let’s start by looking at Traffic Sources in GA:

Traffic Sources Google Analytics

Looking at the 2 different line items for superpages.com in the above report provides a good example of how Google Analytics reports traffic. In a nutshell, Google will report traffic from all “free sources” and show it to you. However, if you pay for it, it will get buried in Direct Traffic (unless it’s Adwords… now that’s marketing). So, if it comes from superpages.com for free, this is a referral and GA shows it , however if it is superpages pay per click … it will go into Direct Traffic – that’s what Digital Dave, means when he said “some marketing tactic.”

So, how did I get Superpages/PPC out of the Direct Traffic bucket and have it report like other sources? The answer is you tag the url. That sounds complicated but Google makes it kindergarten simple. Simply, go to the the Google Url Builder and create the new url and then use that at the sites you want to track. For superpages I created a new url for each category (keyword) I wanted to track and then let the magic begin.

Now instead of this traffic getting mixed in with Direct Traffic I get this:

Superpages.com PPC Traffic As Reported In GA

This is already way more information than I would get from the reports provided by Superpages but I can also segment it by keyword, city, landing page or anything else I can do with GA.

Perhaps even more important is that my Direct Traffic bucket now represents uh… well… direct traffic; so I can learn more about how folks are really ending up on the site… and since this traffic is VERY high quality and converts at twice the rate of Organic traffic and Three times the rate of PPC understanding it could be critical to future marketing decisions. To get a clearer picture a few more graphics will help; but first back to Digital Alex… where he explains how to figure out WHAT pages are being bookmarked on your site, which is cool info.

And then you can use this same technique to segment by Visitor type to determine which people came from bookmarks and which typed in the url directly, which in my case, probably means they came from yellow pages. Also, you can find out where the searchers are located, which is obviously important for a local business to learn whether the traffic is really quality.

Segmenting Direct Traffic In Google Analytics

Now I click on VISITOR TYPE and see this:

New vs. Returning Visitors

Using some educated guesses, I can surmise those who are returning, originally found the site through search engines, bookmarked it and returned later. The new visitors typed the url in directly and since the url is not intuitive I further surmise most of these folks came through yellow page advertising.

Now, by clicking Goal Conversion, I can see which is converting at a higher rate.

New Vs Returning Conversion Rate

This actually surprised me… I had sort of assumed the conversions from direct traffic were latent conversions and represented business obtained from our search marketing; but having seen this it looks more like it came from yellow pages or another offline source… yellow pages dissed again! This really shows how important it is to segment the traffic to better understand it. Without this information we could have easily underestimated the business coming from offline media.

If I wanted to be certain which offline media it was coming from I could do that… here’s how:
Tracking Offline Advertising With Google Analytics

And believe it or not if I wanted to track the phone calls from the Yellow Pages using Google Analytics, I can do that easily. Go to Mongoose Metrics buy a unique telephone number and place it in the ad. Mongoose Metrics will allow you to configure the phone number to a hidden page on your site so you can track the call to a thank you page on your site. Then you just need to set that up as a goal in GA. Here’s how it will look when your done:

Tracking Phone Calls In Google Analytics

But don’t forget to tag the url to the hidden page or the phone call will show up in Google Analytics as… you guessed it – Direct Traffic.

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I discovered Mongoose Metrics a few weeks back and I’m surprised by how much I was missing. I was blind and now can see.

On one of the sites I manage, I segmented the traffic sources and used separate phone numbers to track and test the different sources of traffic. So, when the phone rings I can tell if it was from organic or PPC… and for PPC I can tell if a geo-modifier was used. And obviously, when the contact form is used I can get it down to the keyword level.

Because it is a small local site, it is difficult to draw any “significant” conclusions this soon, but even after a short time I have gained some interesting insights.

The site has had a total of 197 visitors since April 2nd, when the test began, so about 22 days.

155 of those visitors came from organic traffic, 30 from PPC Traffic that included a geo-modifier and 12 from PPC containing short keyphrases (1-3 words) that did not include a geo-modifier. During this time we recorded 22 conversions, which I defined as contact by email or phone call.

22 Conversions – 12 were by phone call and 10 used the contact form.
-The contact form was used a higher % of time than one might expect.

The organic traffic converted at a rate of 12%… 19 contacts/155 Visitors.
-If I took out the 17 image searches this conversion rate really starts looking good!

PPC traffic converted at 10% when the geo-modifier was present… 3 contacts/30 visitors.
-The 3 contacts were by phone call… which leads to a developing theory – Adword users may be less likely to use a contact form.

PPC traffic with no geo modifier – 0 contacts / 12 visitors.
-Although the results are not statistically significant it appears that the shorter the keyphrase the more expensive the click and the less likely it is to convert.

The number of words in the keyphrase that led to the 9 email conversions were as follows: 6, 4, 5, 7, 5, 6, 5, 5, 5. All of which contained a geo-modifier. Paying more for a one word phrase, does not seem like a good idea, especially considering a mark up of nearly 40% for some 1-word queries.

There are so many more cool things that I’ve discovered, that I will share in coming posts as the data keeps coming in. And yes, for research sake, I will continue paying for the short keyphrases, at least until the study becomes statistically significant. And no, the client is not paying for them… at least not my client.

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The best team wins nearly every game and the faster runner wins nearly every race, so are we surprised that the best ad gets nearly every phone call?

For similar sized ads; the standard deviation of the calls received from yellow page ads is greater than the mean.

-Paraphrasing Dr. Dennis Fromholzer, CRM Associates

That quote means that 2 same size yellow page ads for the same type of business are likely to get wildly different call volumes. One of the ads will be just like the better team and the faster runner and win nearly each time the product is searched. Should we expect this to be different on the web? I think not.

Eighty-five percent of respondents agreed that the quality of a business owner’s website is an important factor in earning the consumer’s trust. Over 75 percent of respondents said they were more likely to make a purchase from “an unfamiliar business with a quality website,” than “a poor website from a known business.”

-This is from a Study by Nielsen and WebVisible as reported by Peter Krasilovsky.

The lament of the loser

“I was getting the clicks, but I wasn’t getting the calls” or “Yellow Pages doesn’t work for my type of business.”

I always felt terrible when I heard this and I work hard to inform anyone and everyone around me as to the importance of good content. But the challenge is always the same… how do you define it? What does it look like? The only way to consistently improve the content of any form of advertising that I am aware of is to split test it.

It is has always been much easier to focus on coming up higher in the search results or getting a bigger ad; but there is no doubt the best bang for your buck in advertising will be accomplished with good content.

Local advertisers have been relegated to a place where marketing tools like split-testing just weren’t available to them. After all, do you think the publishers of any Yellow Pages, are going to spend the extra millions to publish and distribute 2 directories so the ads could be split-tested? Not likely. (Side note: This might not be a bad investment for yellow pages, as they would own the copyright on almost every small businesses best yellow page ad and could prevent that ad from being published in a competitor’s book).

The Times They Are A Changin’

I am thrilled that this is not true for the local advertiser on the web even if they depend on phone calls; and can now have this data all reported in one analytics program.

Such a local site can be measured with nearly the precision and ease, previously afforded only to e-commerce sites. It can be done without creating dynamic pages and except for the cost of the phone lines and calls… it is free.

It could also be used to measure conversion for keywords. I have just set up a test that will measure the difference in conversion rates between search phrases that include geo-modifiers and the same terms when the geo-modifier is missing. That’s cool… when you are a local nerd like me.

How To Split Test A Website When Measuring Conversion In Emails and Phone Calls.

What follows is a step by step tutorial for setting up split testing for a website when conversion is measured in contacts through an email contact form and telephone calls. In order to use it, you must have or set-up an account in Google Analytics and have or set up an account with Mongoose Metrics. I have no affiliation with either service.

1. Have or create 2 hidden pages on your site.
   • One for contact form submissions and one for telephone calls. Only the one for contact form submissions will ever be seen by the customer, this one should say something like “Thank you for contacting us, we will return your message within 24 hours. The other one doesn’t need to say anything as it will not be viewed by the customer.
   • Both need to have the code from Google Analytics. The same code will be on all your pages. Not to worry, we’ll set up filters for that in GA.
2. Replicate the site twice and put each copy in its own subdirectory
   • On each of the replicated pages use the meta tag “noindex, nofollow” to prevent your content from being indexed multiple times. (Make one copy; add the tags and then make the second one to save you from having to add the tags twice)
   • The name of the subdirectory you choose will be viewable in the url (www.example.com/subdirectory/actualpage.html), so choose something that relates.
3. Have or create an account in Mongoose Metrics and purchase 2 phone numbers.
   • Consider waiting awhile after purchase to make sure the lines are clean.
   • In your mongoose account, map the tracking number to the actual phone number and configure the tracking to the url of the hidden page of each replicated site.
   • On each of the replicated sites, replace the real phone number with the new trackable number on all pages. Make sure you have one unique phone number per “site”. And that the url’s are mapped to the corresponding phone number in your mongoose account.

   In effect, you now have 3 sites, each with a unique phone number, and unique confirmation pages. But all on the same domain. We just need to prepare Google Analytics for our first test.

4. Go to Google Analytics and set up a new profile. Put the radio button on “Add a profile for an existing domain” and use the pull down menu to choose your site.
5. Name the profile and add a filter to include only traffic that comes to the pages within your first subdirectory. Here’s the set up:

Filter Type: Use Only Traffic From A Subdirectory
Subdirectory: ^/mysub/ (inside the lines put the name of your subdirectory)

6. Find the profile for your original site, and create a filter to exclude the traffic from pages in a subdirectory

Filter Type: Custom Filter
Exclude
Filter Field: Request URI
Filter Pattern: ^/mysub/

These pages in the subdirectory will now be tracked in Google Analytics like they are on their own domain. Which is exactly what we want.

7. Repeat steps 4, 5 & 6 for the pages in your second subdirectory

We’re now ready to set up the goals in Google Analytics

8. Find the settings column in your first “test’ profile and click edit to add the goals:

/mysub/emailformthanks.html
/mysub/ijustgotaphonecall.html

9. Repeat this step for the 2nd profile.

That’s it… now you’re ready to go. Split test a redesign, keywords, copy… whatever you like. And since both Mongoose Metrics and Google Analytics allow you to tag urls you can use this set up to test conversion on almost any form of internet advertising.

Local websites, typically don’t get enough traffic that these tests can be done overnight. So be patient, over the course of months, I believe they will prove invaluable when making decisions about where to spend money, how much and changing aspects of the website.

None of us are good enough that we are going to develop the very best combination of content on our first try. So, track and enjoy.

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I recently read an article by Dr Pete discussing conversion rates and one of the points he made was that nobody seems to share theirs. Hmmmm… could that be because we are all insecure about our conversion rate. Maybe… no one seems to be able to answer the question: What is a good conversion rate? And few things lead faster to insecurity than ignorance. Will publishing one’s conversion rate lead to the spontaneous purchase of a sports car with a very large engine as other shortcomings have.

I don’t know about that; but I’m up for a game of… I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours… I’ll start.

The 2 metrics I am most interested in are: the overall conversion rate (those who contacted the business) and the % of visitors who ended up at the contact page from other pages on the site (the path).

So, here I am exposed: (the website belongs to a small house painting company, it’s real)

Just About 4.5% of the uniques contacted the business.

Now, it’s your turn… please show me yours. Please use the comments below and tell me about the conversion rate of your best site… and maybe a tip about how you did it.

Now, I’m not sure if this is really a “small analytic” or not; but I do think it can do better. So, I’m going to split test it using the Google Optimizer.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share more about the test I set-up and from to time to time provide progress reports. And remember this is all about getting this dirty little secret out of the closet, so please comment and share as little or as much as you like… thanks!

For more about conversion myths.

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I’ve been seeing more and more local campaigns set up on search engines with no local phone number. The only number on these sites is a 1-800#… I assume this is done for analytics… and it is a bad idea in my opinion. Let me show you why.

Open up your Yellow Pages and flip through it… c’mon, I know you have one… and look for ads that have 800#’s. I’ll bet you find very few.

Do you know why?



Applying this YP concept to your Website should crank up
conversion, while providing ‘local seo’ benefit. (addt’l locations)

All the studies shows that people prefer calling local numbers and that having only an 800 number in an ad will significantly reduce call volume. If 800#’s worked better, the Yellow Pages would be loaded with them, after all, at one time both products were sold by the same company.

Want to take it one step further; check this out from YP Commando:

Research on over 77,000 Yellow Pages ads using metered telephone lines found that ads with multiple local phone numbers received many more calls than ads with only one local number.

Ads with only a single toll-free number received the fewest calls. Having both local and toll free tends to increase call counts slightly.

So, if you believe that you can apply lessons learned in local advertising from yellow pages to the web… and I firmly do – STOP using 800#’s in your local website for the sake of analytics. Use local numbers instead, and use many.

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In my last post, I showed you a keyword report from a campaign put together by a yellow pages company managing a paid search campaign for a local advertiser. In this post, I am going to show you another keyword report and let you compare it. And again I will ask you to sound off in the comments. Thank You Local Seo for taking the time to comment on the last post.

For clarity, let me begin by defining “keyword report” as I used the term – the word or phrase typed into a search engine prior to the ad being clicked as reported by the analytics program.

Here is the report from the campaign set up by a yellow page company if you have not seen it:
Keyword Report

Now, let’s take a look at another keyword report for a different local business engaged in search marketing. They are in different lines of business, so it is not comparing apples to apples. But this is closer to what I would expect when looking at the analytics for a local campaign. (geographic references have been ’smudged’ for privacy reasons)

3 Take Aways

1) In my opinion, it is optimal to see geography plus category – I believe this represents a transactional search and the searcher is close to making a buying decision.

2) The next best thing would be just the category. 49% of local searchers report searching this way. In my opinion, it could represent a transactional search or an informational search, which makes it slightly less valuable than a search that included a geo-modifier, but I would still want to come up in that search using geo-targeting.

3) Advertise for the keyword that is the name of your business…wow… look at the “names” in the searches above. These are the names of competing landscape architectural firms. Did these companies lose referral business because they were hard to find on the web?

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Chris Silver-Smith wrote a well articulated piece about Internet Yellow Pages being Toast in 4 years that set off a bit of a fire storm among yellow pages advocates. I’ve also read a lot on the internet about the print yellow pages being dead. Even Bill Gates has gotten into the act… forecasting near 0 yellow page lookups in 5 years for most demographics. All this, while Click-Z reports staggering growth in the IYP sector.

What is a small business owner to make of all this? Nothing.

All of this is hogwash from the stand point of a small business owner.  The local space is far to complicated for generalizations of this sort from where your sitting.  These posts have considerable practical applications for large businesses and certainly for yellow page publishers but small business owners should pay no attention.

To show you what I mean I’m going to take an educated guess at some statistics here, I don’t think I will be far off, but if I am please correct me in the comments below.

There are over 2, 0000 categories in a yellow pages directory each with it’s own share of usage in print and online.  I think it’s fair to assume that one might  shop differently for a Pizza Parlor than a Roofer.  And if I’m a roofer, I care only how people are shopping for this service and if lookups for Pizza have shifted it means little to me.  And vice-versa. Generalizations cannot help either one of these business owners.

There are also more than 70,000 towns, cities etc. that will each have their own propensity for print and online usage. A person doing a local search in Manhattan may behave differently from one in Okay, Ok.  When you consider the permutations of this many business types and this many locations it becomes far too complicated a matter for a small business owner to draw conclusions from generalizations.

So, what is a small business owner to do? Track the hell out their advertising.

I would begin by taking Matt McGee’s advice and use Google Analytics. Many small business owners have little idea what this can do, so in short: Google Analytics can track where the visitors to your site came from, what they typed in to get there and whether or not they converted online (email form etc.).

For offline conversions in a service industry… use a tracking number. This can be purchased through the local telephone company; they call it RCF (remote call forwarding). And although I’ve not tried it yet Ring Central has an offering that I think may be worth a look.

If I already had a business line I would start with Ring Central and purchase multiple telephone numbers.  If I did not have a business I would buy at least one RCF number from my local telephone company and tell them I wanted a yp listing with that. That will give a link to my site in hundreds of local sites including G Maps, IYPs and a lot of the review sites.  They won’t have seo value in the traditional sense, though I’ve not seen a business place top 3 in Google Maps without one, it will make your business far more visible and easier to review.

Both of these options are going to be in the $15-$30 per month range depending on how many numbers you buy. And all have additional charges after a certain amount of minutes are used.  But they are worth it if you are investing in advertising already.

Please disregard articles that predict the future and focus on where the calls are coming from right now. Also, read almost any other post from Chris Silver-Smith who contributes often to the Natural Search Blog.

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I get a warm feeling when I look at my analytics and see my efforts bear fruit… don’t we all. I use multiple analytic providers, Google Analytics for conversions and the rest and Shiny Stat to keep an eye on Google Analytics (GA). Recently I noticed some conversions from “Direct Traffic”, as reported by GA and suspected that some had simply bookmarked the site and returned later to request the service. So, I checked further and found that the conversions had come from ‘absolutely unique visitors’, hmmm… off to Shiny Stat to see if I could find out anything else. They reported visits simply from directory. So, off I went to Superpages.com to run a traffic report on the PPC campaign I set up with them. And one by one I tracked the dates of the clicks with the dates of the “direct traffic” I was receiving and lo and behold they matched…wow.

This campaign is so local that the traffic was low enough that I could figure this out with a good degree of accuracy. If this was a major campaign, however, it would be nearly impossible.

Local Directories are Shooting Themselves in the Foot

I went on to test Yahoo! Local – a featured listing and organic, yellowpages.com, true local and local.com and found that only yellowpages.com reported the click-thru accurately. The others were recorded in a fashion that made them “untrackable.” Will professional search marketers advertise on sites that they can’t track easily?

Now that local search has arrived (you almost wouldn’t know it because as it finally arrived the conversation shifted to mobile) these sites may be able to attract more of the professional search community… but not without fixing this problem.

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