Let me show you how the owner of a garage door company where I work has turned an ordinary problem into a $0 cost brand building bonanza.

Here was the problem… everyday he would get a ton of phone calls for garage door problems that did not really require a garage door technician; like changing the battery on the remote. Not knowing this he would send someone out who only needed to change a 9-volt battery and charge a service call.

Here lies the problem. People resent like hell having to pay a service call for things like that and so the reputation of the business suffers. And the business LOSES money, because the service call charge can’t cover the cost of the technician, gas etc.

So, a series of videos was made on how to solve simple garage door problems and they are distributed in 2 ways: via the website and by video email.

We feel that any marketing should use nice packaging and giving something away shouldn’t be any different. Nice packaging makes the solution more credible so more people will use it and more people will pass it on. Here is a picture of the how the video email looks when being viewed by a “customer.”

The video is optimized to load and play in that format and its container is optimized so the customer will remember the name of the garage door company that helped them out.

You’re probably thinking this is all well and good but will this really effect the way people think and talk about a business. I’ll let you be the judge. These 2 testimonials came in just hours apart last Friday…

Thank you very much for your assistance in “fixing” my garage door today. Your explanation as well as the helpful video certainly helped me to solve my problem. So far, all is well and my whole family is thrilled. Your diagnosis over the telephone and your honesty are certainly appreciated in today’s world. Thank you for listening to me and taking the time to help me.

I will certainly remember your company and refer you in the future.

You rock.

I was moving some stuff around the garage the other day and inadvertently moved my son’s bike right in front of one of the eyes. I moved the bike and we’re go to go.

Thank you so much for helping me to avoid the cost of a service call. If in the future I need anything done on my garage doors you’ll be the first one I call. Great customer service.

How often does someone say that a garage door company rocks?

Now, all that is left to do (I’ll use the words of Seth Godin) is to amplify these voices.

]]> http://www.convertoffline.com/multiple-google-accounts-and-other-g-phone-discoveries/feed/ http://www.convertoffline.com/multiple-google-accounts-and-other-g-phone-discoveries/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ConvertOffline/~3/438720952/ http://www.convertoffline.com/g-phone-calling-helloooooo/#comments Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:02:23 +0000 Local Search Hound http://www.convertoffline.com/?p=212 Back in May, after weeks of consideration, I had made the decision to purchase an iPhone. Soon after that, Apple announced 3g so I decided to wait. Finally, in July with much anticipation I trekked over to the Apple Store and was stopped cold in my tracks by a 4HOUR LINE.

Annoyed and without a solution I hadn’t done anything about it until this week. The Google phone came out last week and so I was even more uncertain. Given the complexity of the issue and the number of features to consider, I brought out the big guns… my nine year old daughter.

After she recited the available features of each phone, I decided the 3 most important to me are surfing the web from anywhere, GPS, and a convenient way to purchase the darn thing. Since Apple didn’t offer the latter, I bought the G1 by T-Mobile.

UPS knocked on the door last night and I’ve been like a kid on Christmas morning ever since.

Some quick and dirty thoughts about the browser as a consumer and designer.

1) The browser is more than I expected from mobile. It really allows you to enjoy the full web.

Here is how it renders Mihmorandum a well designed blog of which I am a frequent reader. Notice how it allows you to see the site how it was intended to be seen, while also allowing you to read it with only a minimum horizontal scroll. (2 zoom outs)

2)I have definitely endured some frustration in getting used to it. My most frequent peeve is that the home key doesn’t take me back to the browser’s home page, it takes me back to the device’s home. It’s the equivalent of hitting home on your browser and being taken back to your desktop.

3)I can see the eventual disappearance of the drop-down navigation menu. When touching the link, I am taken to a new page and the hidden links are never revealed. If I scroll through the links the hidden links are revealed on “hover” as they should be… I just don’t think that very many people will navigate that way on this browser; which could spell doom for the drop down.

Caution: Really geeky sentence coming, I’ll try to make it brief. If the navbar is absolutely positioned the scroll wheel can’t “see” it; so it CAN’T be hovered. In this case, Hidden links will never be revealed by android’s browser and accessing those links is impossible as far as I can tell. If anyone can let me know in the comments if the same is true of the iPhone I would appreciate it. It’s safe now, total geekyness is over.

Despite the early frustration I am thrilled with the phone. Each time my daughter hears me swearing under my breath, she sighs, and says “no one under 20 should have a phone that cool.” I’m determined to prove her wrong.

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.

But I find this surprising… having signed up with Service Magic only a few months ago, this garage door business has already been reviewed 5 separate times. I started asking why.

I found there are 2 things a small business can copy from Service Magic to get more reviews. The first ask multiple times… or at least once. The second is to make it smoother. You see when a person goes to review a business on Service Magic they are already signed up, so they don’t need to make up a password or download anything or stand on their head. Their in… it’s smooth.

Small businesses often know/ask for their customer’s email addresses, now use it to make it easier for the customer to review you. If they have a yahoo email, they already belong to Yahoo; if they have gmail they already have a Google account. Send them a link to the review site of which you know they already belong - Smooooth.

On the lighter side: I spent my vacation in part reading Seth Godin books, which is why I’m using the term smooth. And I couldn’t help but think his cover photo resembled an athletic african-american.

Now, those of you who know what Mr. Godin looks like think I’m crazy… so I’m going to prove it to you. Here is Seth Godin side by side with David Justice - retired baseball player.

David Justice and Seth Godin Side by Side

I arrived at the mall at about 10:30am, it had just recently opened and the Saturday mall crowd had not yet arrived. But as I approached the Apple Store, I saw the line that started behind a small velvet rope and snaked out of sight.

I talked to the guy who was next online and asked him what was going on. He told me he was on line for the iPhone. He explained the system to me, which seemed to be the low-tech method used by bakeries and deli counter for years, except the numbers were dispensed by an attractive girl with a headset instead of a machine inviting you to “take a number.” He told me he got there at 9:00 and seemed pleased that he was on the verge of iPhone possession. When I told him I was interested in purchasing an iPhone too, he looked over his shoulder, assessed the line and estimated the wait time at 4 hours. “Thanks”, I told him “I don’t need one that bad.”

Not being able to buy one online and certainly not willing to line up for the priviledge, I don’t know if I will buy one now. I was sure I would when I left the house this morning but now I’m not so sure. It’s interesting how Apple is using distribution (or the lack of it) to create buzz. The big question for me is whether my patience will survive this marketing tactic.

Most recently the bell was rung by Chris Silver Smith a person with considerable knowledge of the industry, in fact when he left Superpages a few years ago they came up first in Google for the term yellow pages, and they haven’t since his departure. He was careful to limit his prediction to 10 years from now… but is that what people will read and re-tell? Or will they just read the word dying… I think the latter.

To be successful, small business owners need to focus on the here and now and right now the yp is still a powerful tool. In fact, the small business that just hired me gets 50% of their business from yp and 15% from the internet. My job is to get that number to 25%… (a wonderful assignment). In my heart of hearts I believe I’ll do a bit better but this is a very good example of how powerful the yp still are.

And often, the results are often sooooo much better than you find in Google in large measure due to spam, check out these reults where Google goes 0 for 10, that’s right out of 10 in the local one box not one listing is helpful as a single spammer has overwhelmed the results:

Garage Door Repair Closter NJ

David Mihm has recently written about filtering urls that are obviously spamming and in this case his solution would have gone a long way to solving the problem. Mike Blumenthal has written a ton about cleaning up results like these but Google has left us with only confusing instructions.

One could easily envision a searcher abandon their search for a garage door repairman and grab a yellow pages given the above results, don’t you think? Maybe in 10 years, Google will have it worked out and Chris Silver Smith will be right… but until then Small Business Owners: You need to maximize both media.

How did I do it?

Was it my perfectly organized resume? Nope, I never bothered to put one together.

Maybe it was my perfectly polished appearance? Uh… no… trust me. The meeting was come-as-you-are.

Perhaps, it was the impressive way I prepared for the interview? No, I didn’t have time. We met within hours of our first telephone conversation.

So, how did I find this amazing opportunity? I didn’t… the company’s owner found this blog while researching internet advertising. He was also looking for someone with a diverse set of skills. You see, he owns 2 companies… a garage door repair company in NJ and an advertising agency that primarily handles yellow page advertising. So, check out the skill set he was looking for:

• Yellow page knowledge… inside and out.
• Same with Internet Yellow Pages
• Website Design
• SEM
• SEO
• Management Experience
• Sales

That just happens to be my exact background… but the odds of us hooking up using traditional job search techniques like resumes, interview, head hunters etc. is exactly zero.

The blog allowed me to build my brand and allowed him to find a find a candidate with the 6 or 7 qualifications he was looking for. Think about it… it’s hard for an employer to find a good candidate when the job requires a single qualification; the permutations when 7 are needed are mind boggling.

So, my advice to anyone who is thinking about changing careers is to worry less about your resume and start building your brand. In other words… start blogging. And employers, depending on what you are looking for… you might consider a Google blog search before heading over to Monster.

I found this to be a wonderful thing… that the things that would help rank a site in search engines would be the same things that would help convert them to a customer… that’s my kind of symmetry.

There are 3 of these “symmetries” between ranking and conversion factors that I think are the most important in Local Seo:

The first:

When writing a yellow page ad include everything you do. Every study I have ever read has concluded that if it is not in the ad the reader assumes that you don’t do it.

This little fact often frustrated potential advertisers or they thought it was a trick to get more copy and sell them a bigger ad. But I always believed it whole-heartedly. If I need a drain cleaned and I find 2 ads side by side under Plumbers and one says they do drain cleaning and the other doesn’t… guess who is getting the call?

This is true with Search Engines as well. If you don’t mention the service on your site, Google assumes that you don’t do it. And you will have little chance of ranking for that term (unless of course you get a bunch of other folks to say it in anchor text, but that is a story for another day ).

This idea seems to carry over to the local ten-pack as well:

Notice how often the words drain and cleaning appear in the results near the top.

The second:

Define your service area… specifically.

Long before small business owners thought about search engines, they were asking me to find space in their ads to list the towns they served. These were the savvy, long term yellow page advertisers. And they did it because it worked.

A quick example: You want a pizza delivered… and you find an ad for a Pizza joint in the next town who offers free delivery… do you call or keep reading? You then find and ad that says free to delivery to… and lists your town. Yup, that second one is going to work better even if some answered “call” to the question above.

Listing those towns could be a great help to your site too, if your looking for Google to serve up a first page result for those queries in neighboring towns.

The third:

This one is really true regardless of the media. Try and come up with the best content. If you’re going to advertise in the yellow pages; read your competitor’s ads… learn from them and then design the best ad in the heading. Try and answer all the questions that one might have when shopping for your type of business.

If you want to get your site ranked number 1 on Google… begin by looking at what’s there now and try and create a page that is better than that one based on the searchers intent for a particular search query. Some of the ideas above might help.

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.