The Click #008
When we started Mint Digital, we wrote a manifesto - principles for creating effective websites.
Item 1 in our manifesto is ‘Focus your message’. A website needs to start with a simple, concrete message.
Here are 3 sites we’ve just launched. If you’ll excuse a moment of self-indulgence, we hope these demonstrate what we were driving at. (Future editions of The Click will examine how we lived up to the rest of our manifesto.)
Lovell Consulting
Lovell are capital allowance advisors. They save tax on property expenditure. Their consultants are dual-qualified in surveying and accountancy. They’ve never lost a client. If you own a big building, they’ll shave 20-30% off your costs. They’ve got big name clients.
All these are great selling lines, but none featured prominently on their previous site. The new site - makes all these points in an easy-to-absorb way. From a design point of view, the site conveys solidity, professionalism and attention to the details of buildings - just what you’d hope for from a firm in this sector.
The Nursery
The Nursery do qualitative research. In a field swept by fads, they concentrate on research groups. This consistent experience gives them great feel for groups and their reactions. Our problem was how to demonstrate this - lots of firms in their sector make similar claims, but with less to back them up.
We devoted a quarter of the home page to an article ‘How we generate useful research’. Each headline (e.g. ‘We hire drug abusers and bishops’ or ‘Never underestimate body language’) is something you’d only know if you had thought long and hard about how to conduct effective research groups. Each point is a tiny portion of their expertise - but it paints a bigger picture. Check out the new Nursery site.
Interactive KnowHow
Jemima Gibbons, MD of Interactive KnowHow, seems to know everyone in old/new media. She’s a classic ‘connector‘
With the new iKH site, we tightened up the corporate blurb and brought the lively events section to the forefront. What captured iKH’s essence is the ‘Friends of iKH’ section - each time you refresh it you see a different friend. A solid visualisation of the friendly, creative, supportive network that is at the heart of what iKH does.
Thanks for reading. Any thoughts about these sites, or anything else, much appreciated: andy@mintdigital.com.
Since writing the last Click Google AdWords - advertising made easy, I’ve had feedback from people with more experience than me. The thrust of my argument stays: the combination of cost-effectiveness and measurability makes AdWords a great advertising option. But if you are planning to spend lots on AdWords, here’s the detail:
Firstly, AdWords doesn’t always work. One reader pointed to this article by Search Engine expert Andrew Goodman. Goodman says that despite being selective a quarter of his Adwords campaigns are failures. Successful campaigns are for companies that are
“in a hot industry, or one that is very amenable to very close targeting, with only a handful of web-savvy competitors; or selling products or services that people seem to be in a hurry to get at, or have time limits attached (medical needs, necessities for sudden trips abroad, etc.). Or in a competitive industry, they have built in some kind of differentiation that consumers can quickly come to terms with”.
Secondly, there was disagreement about my reasoning as to why a certain ad did better.
Alicia of Succurrolmen thought the phrase ‘3 lovely cottages’ was off-putting:
I figured that if there are only 3 available, it’s a small operation and therefore the cost will be higher, also three cottages will probably go quickly so I’d try it only as a last resort.
My brother, Will Bell, picked up on my lousy grammar:
I thought the reason “sleeps up to 20″ didn’t do so well is because of a grammatical issue, i.e. a plural subject and a singular verb (3 lovely cottages…sleeps up to 20).
Finally, Will Bell also pointed out a number of factors I had glossed over:
a) Is a higher ad CTR necessarily better?
I imagine not. There are high quality clicks and low quality clicks. Improving CTR by specifying location is often going to be a good idea. Improving CTR by putting keywords in Ad Title may not be. In the holiday cottage example, “Dorset Cottage” gets the highest number of impressions. If you made an ad for that keyword with “Dorset Cottage” in the title, the CTR would go up, but there would be a lot of clickers who are set on a thatched place with a flowery garden, who maybe aren’t interested in Scoles.
b) Is higher keyword CTR necessarily better?
For those bedmakers, using “insomnia” or “renovation” instead of “teak bed” will bring the CTR down, but if the number of impressions shoots right up, that may be no bad thing. (You do need to keep CTR above about 0.5 though, or Google will disable the keyword.)
c) Is higher ad position necessarily better?
Again I imagine not. There is some evidence that people look more at position 3 or 4, than 2 or 1.
A completely different point is about drone clicks. A lower position may mean losing good clicks to competitors, but, that said, I’d prefer 1000 clicks at position 8 than 1000 clicks at position 1. People who scroll down, find you in 8th place and then click are better prospects.
(A problem with being number 8 though is that your ad won’t appear on Adsense sites, which show a maximum of 5 ads and often less).
d) Is a higher conversion rate necessarily better?
Well, there is the maybe obvious trade-off between conversion rate and number of conversions. (If you whittle your campaign down to only your star conversion keyword you probably won’t get as many conversions as you want).
On a different note, I have a personal qualm with conversion tracking because the two things that I bought using Google Adwords before I knew they were called Adwords - some software and a garden fork - wouldn’t have shown up as a conversion. Both times I went away and then returned directly to the website. Are some types of clickers (e.g. those using v. specific keywords to research a product) more likely to go away and come back? No idea. Nevertheless, I suppose this is purely good news in as much as conversion rates are a minimum and the actual rate could be much higher.)
All the above makes me think it’s worth spending $70 on Andrew Goodman’s book (I say book, it comes as a pdf file). In his sales spiel he talks about it dealing with, among other things, “how to harmonize the four (sometimes conflicting) objectives that you and every advertiser on the system are facing”. http://www.page-zero.com/products_asroi.asp
Seth Godin’s compiling a list of 300 books that provide a better education that an MBA. Here’s a suggested reading list for the web design & marketing module:
Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
The best book on creating websites that are a pleasure to use. Fun to read but never simplistic.
Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing by Philip Greenspun
This book opened my eyes to the ecology of the web, the value of sharing and the power of communities. It’s antique, its technological recommendations are obsolete, but it is still a rousing polmic. Free online version.
The Big Red Fez by Seth Godin
Hammers home one important point: don’t think of a web user as an intelligent human carefully weighing up all the options you present him with. Instead, think of the user as a monkey in a big red fez, manically searching for the next banana.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
If you are coming to web design from an analytical background, you’ll need to present ideas in a snappier, more visual way. This book is a great demonstration of visual thinking for habitual bookworms.
Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples
If you’re interested in the web, direct marketing is the advertising medium you can learn most from: copy works hard, facts beat hype, testing is key. Caples was a master copywriter who shot to fame in 1925. If you are ever stuck for a headline, flick through this book and rejig one of his.
Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
Secrets of success from an advertising phenomenon. Ogilvy attributed much of his success to his direct marketing background. Learn from the master.
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill
Every website is selling - be it products, services or ideas. Underhill has spent 20 years watching shoppers’ every move - and understanding the subtleties of what facilitates, or blocks, the purchasing decision.
Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte
In impassioned and beautiful plea for clarity and simplicity in information design.
Peopleware by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
If you’re involved in websites, you may end up managing geeks. This book shows how. In short: give them responsibility, give them space and give them quiet.
Collapse by Jared Diamond
If you are thinking about an MBA, there’s a chance you’ll already have been infected with the cold, atomised worldview of contemporary economics. Collapse is the antidote. It demonstrates what successful businessmen (and Indian mystics) have long known: everything is connected.
The Click #007
Google’s revenue has increased by 437,115% over the last 5 years. The reason? AdWords are a great way to advertise.
What are AdWords?
AdWords are the sponsored links that display down the right hand side when you Google. The bottom of this article explains how to get started, but first a few tips:
1. Lead with need
We are just starting a website redesign and AdWords campaign for bed makers Litvinoff & Fawcett
I’ll bet my laptop that ads shown to people searching for ‘back pain’ and ‘insomnia’ will be more effective than ‘beds’, ‘mattresses’ or ‘teak finish’. Watch this space.
2. Match your headline to the search term
The easiest way to get a good response is to make the headline of the ad match the term that the user has searched for. Better still, squeeze in some geographic information.
It’s not exciting but it works, as this old campaign for Mint Digital shows. (The ad with title ‘Web Design - London’ has a significantly higher CTR - Click Through Rate.)
3. Use AdWords to discover why people want you
AdWords lets you run a number of ads and see which resonates best with your target market.
The first campaign I ever ran was for Scoles Manor holiday cottages.
As this report shows, the left ad gets better responses than the other two - 1.3% CTR compared with 1.1% CTR.
The main difference is that the line ‘Sleeps up to 20′ has been replaced by ‘2 miles Corfe Castle’. In retrospect that is clearly a better appeal - it’s more evocative and more specific.
As we are paying £2/day, I can leave it at that. If we were paying £2000/day, there is lots of scope for improvement. I’d make three new variations on the ‘2 miles Corfe Castle’ theme. I’d check them a few weeks later, see which variation was working best and then make new variations based on that. I’d also rejig the relevant page of the website to reflect the most successful advert.
4. Get started
The best way to understand AdWords is to start a campaign:
http://www.google.co.uk/adwords.
Within 5 minutes you’ll be cost-effectively advertising your business and learning about your market.
My pal Matt Weston has £20 AdWords vouchers to give away - no strings attached! Send him an email (matt@businessbricks.co.uk) and start today.
I’ve been looking into how to boost search engine rankings. This is a useful article:
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone
A shop in a premium location costs a fortune to rent. A webshop in a premium location costs… well pretty much anything. Creating a premium location (that is, one with lots of traffic) online is a problem so new and so different that almost no one seems to have much of a grasp on it.
Sure, there are bloggers and SEOs who are starting to feel the way.
It’s slippery. Big media intuition is often plain wrong. Rupert Murdoch just convened his 50 execs to reexamine the challenge of the internet. I bet they end up flushing a whole lot more cash down the toilet.
Meanwhile, the boys from CollegeHumor.com have moved into a $10,000/month Tribeca loft, on the back of their hot bartenders and dorm stunts website.
As I nipped out to post a letter I was thinking that Seth Godin has made some great posts recently: Don’t Shave That Yak,
The Tolstoy Rule, The Ever Worsening Case of the Cog.
I just saw his new book is called All Marketers are Liars. It is about ‘the power of telling authentic stories in a low trust world’. I had wanted Mint’s tag line to be ‘The marketing agency that tells the truth’, but no one thought it was a good idea. Perhaps the tide is turning?
Great photos on this site: Seb Janiak
Is the design helping?
I think so.
Orange branded Wednesdays. Now Mint are branding summer.
We’re planning a party to mark that fantastic first day of
summer when shirt sleeves are rolled up and pretty girls come
out of hibernation.
Each Mint founder will do a song or a dance.
Everyone’s invited. More details soon.
The Click #006
The last Click argued that you need a website the way a peacock needs a tail. It got the most favourable feedback yet. Thanks to everyone who replied.
There was one dissenting voice.
I asked Matt Weston to
glance at it before I sent it out. He phoned back with a dozen
reasons why a website should be more than a peacock’s tail.
(When he phoned, I was out the door to a meeting. The limited
time to incorporate his thoughts without losing sight of my
argument meant The Click ended up riddled with typos.
Apologies.)
This is roughly what he said:
There are two sorts of websites: showy ones (peacocks’ tails)
and hard working ones (let’s call them monkeys’ tails).
A monkey’s tail doesn’t look great. But it is hard-working,
efficient and, above all, responsive to its environment. It
does the vital job of balancing the monkey… saving her from
falling to her death.
Constant measurement means good balance
Your website should be a monkey’s tail. Constantly balancing
your company.
As Bill Gates said ‘Your customers are your greatest source of
learning’. As Bill proves every time you struggle with bullet
points in Word, this is tricky in practice.
A website makes it much easier. Your site can be a constant
source of learning. It offers unprecedented opportunities to
see how your customers want to relate to you.
How to start measuring
There are hundreds of opportunities. Here are some ideas:
1. Run two home pages, with different headlines, to see which
message resonates best.
2. See which pages people are on when they leave your site.
Reconsider the design of those pages.
3. Consider your least visited pages. How can you excite
visitors about that content? If you can’t, consider dropping
them.
4. Analyse where people are coming to your site from. Spend
time cultivating those sorts of links.
5. If you run an online shop, compare the number of people
viewing an item to the number of people buying. If a high
proportion of browsers buy, promote that item more heavily. If
a low proportion buy, adjust the price.
Accountable advertising
Maybe the most exciting opportunity the web offers in this area is instantly measurable advertising: Google AdWords. Read more in The Click #007
