The online marketing expert blog

Sorry everyone; I will not be blogging here for the foreseeable future as I am now full time at venuebirmingham.

You can always read the venuebirmingham blog though!

I’ve been much quieter than usual of late - and that’s because I have been in “head down and muttering” mode as we worked like mad to get the www.venuebirmingham.com site completed and launched.

This site is my dayjob site and it’s great to finally get it live!  It’s the new website for the University of Birmingham Conference and Events office, and we decided to go for a standalone site due to the old problem - being a very small part of a much larger organisations site and never being the main reason anyone would actually visit the parent site.

Now we have a dedicated site for just what we do; if you’re interested in a wedding, conference, meeting or exhibition venue in Birmingham then come on over!

As usual I am faintly appalled by anyone who thinks that the single, overwhelmingly important issue about your site is what position in Google it is.  For a start - do you know whether it is at number one for the keywords your customers and target market actually type into Google to find this kind of site? - or is it at number one for the keywords that you yourself would search for it under?

Secondly do you know what the conversion rate of your site is, in terms of numbers of visitors converted into profitable action takers?  If you don’t know this then why expend huge time and effort pouring people into the top of the sales funnel if they all escape it before they get to the bucket at the end labelled “profitable transaction”?

And finally, do you know the “AVOV” of your site? - AVOV is another self-coined TLA (”Three Letter Acronym”) which stands for “Average Value of Visitor”.  I am willing to bet that the vast majority of sites have no earthly idea what their AVOV is, as to get to it they must also know the conversion rate of their site and the average profit of each transaction on their site, which quite frankly most people do not know exist, let alone why they are so important.

However - if you do know these two figures then AVOV is easy to work out; total number of visitors divided by the conversion rate of your site times the average profit of your site.

So; if you get 100 visitors a day at a conversion rate of 1% and each sale is worth £10 in profit then the value of each visitor is 10 pence.  Don’t forget - we are talking about the average value of each visitor - not each sale.

This will mean you can spend 9 pence per visitor getting them to your site, on whatever works: typically PPC, preferably PCA, perhaps banners or offline advertising.  However the minute you spend 10 pence or more you will be losing money.

Ask yourself this: for whatever size site you run: do you know the average value of each visitor? - if not why are you spending more on one part of the equation (that is getting more people to visit the site) without improving the other critical element - that is the conversion rate of the site?

This week Birmingham Strategic partnership and the BBC announced the launch of the Big Screen TV in Birmingham city centre on their sites and on Twitter.

This was great: it did what all press releases should do: it got my attention and I wanted to know more.

Then it utterly failed in terms of online marketing; once it had instilled the desire to take action there was nowhere to fulfil it.

As soon as I knew about the Big Screens I thought about the upcoming Six Nations rugby and how it would be a very good way of introducing my son to a crowd of people watching the rugby without actually shelling out the 250 quid per ticket plus that Twickenham would cost.

But could I find an actual timetable of events?  Of course not! - these old-school, offline PR flacks consider their job done when when they have made the context-less announcement.

I mean - seriously; how hard would it be to put up a timetable of events?

Actually - very hard indeed as it would take a total shift of mindset.  These people are doing what they are told - getting stories, websites and tweets published about their specified event / news story.  They are measured on how many column inches they achieve or how many retweets they get or how many incoming links they achieve or how many other websites reprinted their story.

All of which are absolutely meaningless measurements: they measure “busy-ness”: they make sure that the designated minion is massively busy in the eyes of their boss.  There’s no measurement of anything that means that the person who looked at the page actually did something you wanted them to.

In this case it would mean measuring them on something very hard to measure admittedly - such as how many people turned up to the Big Screen as a direct result of seeing these websites.

However “very hard to measure” does not equate to “impossible” to measure.  Off the top of my head I can think of a couple of ways: put a competition entry form on the website that needs to be printed out and can only be handed in at actual events; or publicise a URL at the event itself on the Big Screens that allows people who attend to enter a competition and as a condition they must state where they heard of the event

The trouble is that these people - and even worse the people that hire, pay and reward the PR people - have a “just put it online” mentality.  They have served their superficial interests by putting up a posting, but they have not made more people attend.  This is the mentality that needs to change: it is not enough to just put something on Twitter if when I follow the link I cannot see the specific details for the event that interests me.  You’ve instilled a desire in me to follow through and complete the call to action… - and then when I get there all I see is meaningless phrases like “The Big Screens relay a combination of major broadcast events, news, sport and music.” - great! - what? - when?

As it is I feel annoyed at having my time wasted and now they will have to do a lot more to regain my interest or goodwill.  Is that really how you want people to feel after they initially reacted favorably to your PR activity?!

In my dayjob I am currently looking for a web design agency than can create a new design for a site, together with a content management system that will also link and integrate with some existing back office software we have.

As a result I am looking at a lot of web design agency sites; it’s already obvious how much opening links in new windows infuriates me, but there’s something equally as bad; website design agencies that showcase their work and then fail to link to the sites in question.

Excuse me?! - why would you ever not link to your own work?  Are you consciously going out of your way to annoy and delay me? - and what’s worse, as a web design agency are you so unaware of the basics of SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) that you can afford to forsake the benefit of an incoming link to a site you’ve created?

Do you honestly think I am going to closely examine the name of the client you’ve just created a site for, pop over to Google, type in the name, examine the site to see if it is indeed the correct client - and in fact the same site you created?!

If you fail so badly at your own site, where you have total editorial and creative control - how badly will you fail when you work on my site?

It’s yet another of the problems with web design agencies that I’ve previously noted.

Most senior marketing people in organisations are experts in offline marketing: that’s what was needed in their organisation and career and demonstrable expertise in that field is what has got them to the top of the greasy pole.

However, there is now a new field that they are not experts in, that of online marketing, and there is one thing that senior people hate - and that is being non-experts in a field - and almost worst - being seen to be a non-expert in a field closely related to their own.

This is why - it seems to me - you get offline marketers in charge of marketing efforts in organisations where it can be empiricaly proven that 90% plus of all marketing is online.  And this is how they demonstably fail so horrifically in understanding and implementing effective online marketing.  This is why expert online marketers have to report to people who do not know what a blog is - and in fact have never even heard the term before.

Note:
I base the 90% statiistic above on research that I personally commission and managed: at an open day at Birmingham City University I asked over 900 attendees where they had found out about the University, the Open Day, the way to get to the University and the course they were interested in: 92% said they had used the web - and the web alone.

Far too often I see sites that are designed by website designers.

Fine you might think - what on Earth could be wrong with that? - they are full-time professional designers aren’t they? - who could be better to design my site for me?

Well: think about this:

• a website designer is - on average - far more skilled at using the web than your customers will ever be.
• a website designer looks at websites all day every day: as a result they are far more likely to be bored of “boring design” - that is to say design that just works without being over the top.
• a website designer will make decisions about your site based on gut feel, the last seventeen sites they’ve designed - an urge to do something different for the sake of it.

Even if there is someone more expert than the designer handling the brief, do you know for certain that they will commission the design in the best possible way?

How many times have you been in a meeting about the site and someone senior has made a hugely significant decision about the design or look and feel of the site based on nothing more than their own preferences?  When was the last time you saw the website being influenced by real research done with your actual target audience?

I’m continually appalled that no one seems to challenge the decisions that designers make, simply because they want something to look cool.  For example, designers love to craft text based links on sites that are in keeping with the “hand crafted mood-colour palette for your brand” or some other tosh - and totally forget (or are never even aware of) the fact that plain blue links are obviously links; people do not need to spend any of their precious cognitive resources trying to work out what is a link on a page and do not get confused as to whether a link goes to a page they’ve already visited or not just because the link has not changed colour.

Challenge designers: on what empirical evidence do you assert that this design element / concept is better? - and by what definition of better?

Chances are it is almost always better in terms of visual design - but overwhelmingly worse for usability and achieving conversion rates: you know - the part where people who come to your site actually accomplish some task that results in you making some money.

Always ask for the first hand research: the evidence - the primary data that constitutes proof and not an opinion.

After all: what would you rather have after a visit to your site? - a happy designer (who you pay) or a happy customer (who’ll pay you?)

Images are very easy to get horrifically wrong on websites - see Jakob Nielsen’s latest diatribe against meaningless, fluffy, “lifestyle” stock photos.

On top of that I have noticed another new trend, even when the photos in question are meaningful and useful: if I have to wait for an entire new page to load to view the photo then I am not going to bother.  Subconsciously the thought process seems to go like this:

1. So when looking for a venue to hold a conference in, actual photos of the location would help a lot; does this site have any at all?
2. Aha: there they are: let me see: they have 10 of them: good - so let me click….
3. An entire new page is now loading to view one image? - have they never heard of the new, lightbox techniques to display images?
4. If they get this wrong then what other time-wasting irritations are they going to inflict on me?
5. You know what - their competitors one place below them in the Google search results looked good: off we go!

There are many, many reasons why I absolutely detest links that open in new windows.  On an individual site they are bad enough - but when they are on an agencies site they are intolerable, and will cause me to on the spot stop considering you for any web design work I am in charge of.  And I reckon I have been in control of approx £2.5 million worth of website work over my time…

Reasons I have heard over the years to use links in new windows are:

• But I must control the way my visitors view my content! - they might leave my site!
  This displays an absolute failure to understand the most basic nature of the web that is just stunning: the visitor to your site is the one in control, not you.  If you go out of your way to annoy them by trying to take control, then they will not stay on your site.  And this is the entire point of links on the web: if people click on them then they expect to go to that link!
• But my content is so important is must stay on the screen!
  No it isn’t! - and even if it was: don’t you think the best way to get people to come back to it would be by leaving the “back” button alone? - opening links in new windows kills the back button - and this is the single most often used button on the entire internet! - every user knows how to use it and knows that gets them out of trouble and back to a page they want; by killing it you are making it even more obvious that you do not understand permission marketing.

Links in new windows are proof that the person responsibile is an offline marketer: used to having to shout to get peoples attention and failing to realise that on the web you already have their attention, so shut the hell up, and give them what they need to complete their task.

Yet another way to annoy visitors to your site is to make images unclickable: and not just the generic placeholder, smiling-idiot marketing style images (but then again - what are such low-value, pointless images doing on your site in the first place?!) - but the images that illustrate links.

You know the type I mean: typically in the right hand “see also” bar of a site, they are small images calling more attention to a link.

You go over there and think that this will be interesting and click - and nothing happens.

The person maintaining the site has either not got the power to create a link or has not got the passion to insist that there damn well will be a link behind the image as well as the text.

Irrespective of the reason, the site visitor has just had another small annoyance added to their day - and soon will hit their critical annoyance threshold and vanish from your site, never to return.