Jonny - Head of Social Media 
Pinterest, the current darling of social media, has managed to bag itself some significant investment money – in fact an impressive total of $100m.
The vast majority of this money has been raised by Rakuten, the Japanese ecommerce giant which also owns both Play.com and Buy.com.
The combination of people’s interests or desires along with commerce is an extremely potent mix. With this news there is huge potential for Pinterest to drive its growth exponentially and to become the first real social commerce success story.
How can Facebook respond? Does it even need to?
Natalie - PPC Account Executive After the successful rollout of sitelink extensions in Google, with most PPC managers agreeing they provide a big CTR increase, the ad extension format continues to evolve. With a variety of ad extensions now available in AdWords allowing you to command more of the search results page, it could well be time for an extension.
Let’s look at a few:
Product extensions
Perfect for any retail business, product extensions work in conjunction with an associated Google Merchant centre to dynamically display product images relevant to a user’s search. Being able to add images to a standard text ad is a great way of further filtering irrelevant traffic. With prices displaying alongside the images, consumers gain important information inherent to a making a purchase before they have even clicked on your ad. Essentially this should save you money and Google claims that you should see a 7% rise in CTR.
Offer Extensions
Currently only available in beta, offer extensions are another great offering for any retail business. Allowing advertisers to include offers within standard text ads which can either be redeemed in store or online, this type of ad extensions certainly provide an extra incentive to the user.
Google is currently testing different formats of the offer extension but says it can increase CTR by between 10-30%.
A key benefit of offer extensions is the ability to turn online traffic into offline traffic. It provides the means to quantify footfall to a store as a result of PPC activity. Using geo-targeting you could provide offers dependant on location, something which a new store opening could in particular benefit from.
Social Extensions
By social extensions, we really mean Google+, as this is the only social network which this extension is currently compatible with. Google is placing increasing importance on Google+ in search results, and we certainly advise clients to develop a presence on and be active on the social network. Social extensions combine Google +1s from both the website and the ad to display as a total as part of the ad. The consumer validation makes an ad more attractive to a searcher so it’s worth taking advantage of.
Trusted Stores Badges
Trusted badges would work on the same brief as social extensions, that ad endorsement is attractive to searches.
A Google spokesperson commented “As part of the Google Trusted Stores program, we’re currently conducting a test with a small set of advertisers to help users identify online merchants that offer a great shopping experience. In our ongoing efforts to provide ads that are useful and relevant for users, we’re experimenting with different ways to communicate information about the quality of the shopping experience for a particular advertiser in the search ad itself”.
With a ‘trusted stores’ badge an ad gets more standout from the competition. Also, when the user hovers over the badge a box appears with ratings and standout features of the retailer, qualifying why it should be trusted.
These are just a sample of extensions which are available and it can be assumed that Google will continue to roll out such functionality. With so much choice it can be overwhelming, and Google is unclear about which extension trumps another, as not all will show simultaneously. Most importantly you should think about matching the right extension to the client and the device on which the ad is appearing. The choice is yours…
Axelle - Conversion Analytics Consultant 
“What is an average conversion rate?” – people ask us this all the time. Or better yet: “what is a good conversion rate?”
So before I begin explaining how to calculate your conversion rate (because believe me, very few businesses actually do it right), I am going to answer that question. And the answer is that there is no definitive answer.
Or rather, “it depends”.
Too many variables impact conversion for there to be a meaningful average across all websites. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that influence conversion rate:
- Industry – is what you are selling something people are likely to buy more than once?
- Products / Services – are you selling a high consideration product, like a long haul holiday, or something relatively simple like T-shirts
- Price range – do your prices range between £5-£100 or £500-£10,000?
- Payment options – do you offer easy online payment options - and do you have hidden extras, such as credit card charges
- Target – how large is your target market – how many people does your product/service address?
- Traffic acquisition – do you rely only on organic traffic or do you run paid campaigns as well?
- Seasonality – does this affect your sales patterns?
- Competitiveness – are you significantly more expensive/cheaper than your competitors?
- Landing pages – are you directing your visitors to landing pages congruent with a search query or are you directing them to a generic webpage (or worse, your homepage!)?
- What is your conversion goal? How do you measure this?
With all this in mind, the only thing that can be said for sure about conversion rates is that they can nearly always be improved.
Measurement: visits or visitors?
In most cases, divide your number of conversions by your unique visitors, not overall site visits.
Why?
If you are selling lamps and on average the same person visits your website five times over a week before making a purchase, it does not mean you had five opportunities to make a sale: you only really ever had one.
The first seven seconds a user spends on your page are critical: people are identifying the value of your offer and its ability to meet their needs. If you fail, they bounce. If they come back to your website, they are considering your offer. This phase can take minutes, days or weeks, but each visit falls under one potential conversion.
If you are not sure on whether to calculate conversions based on visits or unique visitors, have a look at your visits to conversion reports in your web analytics. If the vast majority of conversions occur during the first visit, use visits. Otherwise, you should use unique visitors as your metric.
Goals for non-ecommerce websites
Every website has a goal — otherwise it wouldn’t exist! Think about what that goal is (and what its key performance indicators are) to measure your site’s success in reaching that goal:
- Leads
- Sales
- White paper downloads
- Time on site or page/visit (particularly for content websites or blogs) and so on
Your traffic data is skewed
If you have a look at your organic search report and break it down by keyword; you will realise that a lot of the traffic to your website is irrelevant.
For instance, looking at our own DBD Media website analytics report I can tell you:
- 1.50% of our traffic arrived on our website looking for our clients’ logos
- 1.45% entered a search query that included some of our keywords but have nothing to do with our content; such as “telling a client about deliveries in SEO” or “how to handle social conundrum”
- 3.84% were searching for information on social media networks (logos, FAQ…)
Now it is safe to say that none of these visits were ever potential conversions. And by filtering out the 6.79% of traffic that is non-relevant, and measuring conversions against only relevant traffic, our website conversion rate goes up 7.28%.
At the moment there is nothing that enables us to setup a filter precise enough and complete enough to filter out all of that irrelevant traffic.
Which leads us to the most important point of this post:
You have more than one conversion rate
If you are looking to optimise a product page on your e-commerce website, it doesn’t matter that your website conversion rate is 3.4%.
What matters is …
(a) How many visitors to that page add the product to the shopping basket or cart i.e. the product page conversion rate
(b) How many visitors to that page complete their purchase i.e. the shopping basket conversion rate
(c) How you can improve these figures
That’s why in Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), rather than looking at your overall conversion rate, we look at your conversion gaps i.e. where are visitors dropping out in the conversion path and why?
By successfully testing and implementing solutions to enhance your funnel conversion rate, you will see your visits to purchase decrease, your bounce rates improve, your ROI grow and ultimately, your website conversion rate increase. Now that’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it?
Jonny - Head of Social Media With the continued and overwhelming media focus on Facebook and its IPO, you’d be forgiven in thinking that there was no other interesting developments happening in social media.
As it happens LinkedIn has been going about its business quietly, growing its audience and its increasingly turning into the most important platform for B2B lead generation.
Overnight the business social network announced its acquisition of the popular social content website Slideshare. The value (just $119 million) is small compared to Facebook’s $1 Billion acquisition but for me it is just as compelling.
This acquisition proves that content is king, not, as we already know, in consumer social media marketing but now also in B2B. Depending on Slideshare’s integration into the LinkedIn platform this could mean interesting developments in various areas of business communication such as investor relations, sales, marketing and PR.
Here’s a presentation from the horse’s mouth.
Lotty - SEO Strategist There is no doubt that the Advertising, Affiliate and Search Theatre was one of the most popular destination at this year’s Internet World, this was certainly true of the show’s final day with seminars from key players in the digital world covering topics such as ‘Staying Google Proof 2012/13’ which was so heavily oversubscribed that half of those queuing were turned away. But, considering the incredibly recent algorithm changes from Google (two days prior to the event), this was no surprise.
Over the past week it has been clear that a mass of websites have been hit with Google’s recent announcement of their new algorithm to tighten up on existing ‘quality guidelines’. In the words of Internet World’s own speakers this ‘mass’ is in fact over a million sites. The air of panic was evident, every seminar was followed by at least one question from an MD or in-house marketer, perhaps struggling to keep up with Google’s recently volatile actions and major clamp down on ‘link schemes’, quizzing speakers on what they could do to stop their site being hit, or, in instances where it was too late, how they could recover their site’s ranks.
One of the most commonly occurring messages from the speakers of the Search Theatre was the fact that content is still king. And will continue to be so. But, to really make the most of unique content benefitting your sites, you need to be integrating this with your social media strategy. Social media provides an invaluable opportunity for sharing your unique content – particularly when it comes to the likes of images, videos and infographics, and thanks to tools such as Topsy, you can now identify relevant tweeters to whom your content is likely to be of interest. Locating these people provides prospective link building opportunities with real people who will share your content with their followers, who in turn are likely to also find this content of interest, and therefore potentially share it with their followers too – and so on.
While the necessity for link building looks set to continue, in light of Google’s latest algorithm change there is now far more focus on the quality, not quantity, of links. So as part of SEO’s on-going development, we should expect to see less backlinks to websites but they will be from far more relevant sources, as opposed to a multitude of low quality, spam-style links.