These days, shopping online is the easiest way to grab those essentials or max out your credit card on luxury items that you ‘need’ to order a week before payday! DVDs, games, clothes, concert tickets…. we’ve bought them all – but what’s next? Cars, boats and houses..?

According to reports by Google and Ispos MORI, the internet plays a dramatic role in the purchase of a new or used car. In 2009, Google announced that 80% of new car buyers start their search on the internet and from this, 69% started that search using a search engine. Whatever happened to walking down to your local car dealer, who you’ve dealt with for years, and picking the newest model off the showroom floor based on your dealer’s advice? The only decision you had to make was whether you wanted it in black or silver! In our consumer obsessed society, manufacturers are now engaged in a tougher battle for your custom; simple advertising methods such as billboards and TV advertising are failing to make us drive up to our local garage to pick up our new dream machine.

Further to First Rate’s own research into New Zealand consumer search trends for cars, according to Google the automotive buying cycle for new cars takes an average 5 weeks from initial research to final purchase of the vehicle, and often it can take up to 12 weeks (2008/2009 data). During this period, 55% of buyers switch brands, 62% are undecided on which make of car and 69% remain undecided on which model.

What can we take from this data?

As a marketer it is essential that you ensure your brand is visible throughout the entire buying cycle. Unlike an e-commerce store selling DVDs, it is impossible to use tracking software such as Google Analytics, or even sophisticated cross-channel conversion attribution tracking, to track whether or not a consumer buys a car – offline.

In similar vein, with almost half of consumers changing their mind in the buying cycle and starting their research again, when are you going to allow your brand to drop out of the process?

How to Reach New Zealand Car Buyers Online

YouTube – Video consumption is up 237% year on year and YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google. Don’t miss out on an ideal opportunity! With 54% of new vehicle buyers reportedly going online to view a video… have you got yours up there? Below is a graph of where auto enthusiasts use their time online to view car videos:

Search Engines – As previously mentioned, 80% of new car buyers are going online in order to purchase a car, where do you fit in? Make sure you get the relevant free traffic with a well ranking website that has been optimised for search engines (SEO).

Paid Advertising – Yahoo, Google, Facebook, all allow enhanced visual campaigns to support your offline marketing. You no longer solely need a static “information/contact only” website. Ensure your car dealership has their online showrooms and TV ads well supported online through the use of image, video and text ads across a variety of channels. Facebook Ads and Google Advertising (Adwords) are an absolute must these days for any car dealership wishing to reach today’s consumers!

Seven free optimisation tips to get more from your Google advertising in 2010: If the person/agency managing your AdWords account isn’t doing these things then you need to ask them when they will be!

Note: The tips below are from our pros – of course there are plenty of books covering Adwords (check Mighty Ape, for example).

Tip #1: Negatives are Positive…

Always ensure your account has a sufficient number of relevant negative keywords. You don’t want your ‘sun GLASSES’ site getting charged for clicks from people searching for ‘wine GLASSES’…

Tip #2: Embrace Experimentation

Einstein said that he’d found “10,000 ways that didn’t work”. We don’t suggest you try quite as many as that! But creating multiple copies of different AdGroups and running them at different stages can often help you experiment with a new account. A/B testing, landing page testing and website optimiser will always help. Trying different page layouts, even different colour/size/position for “Buy Now” (or even calling it something else altogether) can all improve conversion rates. Even single figure percentage increases mean a lot over the year. The key is to fail quickly.

Tip #3: Stay Niche!

Bidding on specific keywords within specific sub categories will often be a lot more cost efficient than bidding on broad matching words. Make sure you’ve thoroughly researched all your PPC keywords and phrases; make sure you have comprehensive picture of what people are searching for. It’s not about what you want them to search for or what you think they’re searching for, it’s about what they are actually searching for. Yes, keyword research is still important.

Tip #4: Reporting, Reporting, Reporting!

Always check what you are paying for. Why do you have an AdWords account if you aren’t concerned about an effective ROI? Have you set KPIs that include $ values and real world outcomes? Click through rates are interesting but what you really need is to sell your product or service, get enquiries/downloads/bookings etc.  As with all online advertising, make sure you’re getting reporting against KPIs with actual value to you. Use search query reports to see which keywords are costing you money and which aren’t relevant to your site. Use the impression share reports to see where your competitors are grabbing the views because they are willing to pay more!

Tip #5: Landing Pages are Essential

A relevant Landing Page is crucial for giving you a good relevance score. As with SEO, relevancy within the landing page can make or break your marketing approach. The more relevant your landing page coupled with the keywords, CTR and ad text will improve your overall keyword quality score. This will save you money in the long run making it cheaper to achieve the top positions! Always ensure that each Ad Group or Keyword lands on a specific landing page on your site. E.g. if your AdWords ad is for an LCD TV and runs against associated phrases, make sure that the landing page has LCD TVs on it!

Tip #6: Seasonality is Key

I hear Christmas bells a ringing! You can always capitalise on different seasonal trends by ensuring your website and AdWords campaigns cover them. Create Christmas, Holiday, Winter and Summer Ad Groups and make sure they are running at the right time! You can also make creative use of current affairs – try using ad copy targeting specific events. Looking at data from Google Trends or Google Insights can be very helpful to help you understand what keywords are causing buzz in your industry. And make sure you do it in time: Remember, people research before they purchase, so if you sell sports goods don’t wait till the season is underway to start your advertising of skis & snowboards, chances are people have long since made their purchase.

Tip #7: Tracking, Tracking, Tracking!

Spending money obtaining visitors is no use if you don’t know how many visitors you got, where they came from, how much they cost, or what they did on the site. Having 100K visitors a day is not always better than having 20K visitors a day, it depends on what they do once they hit your site. Tracking conversion rates for each campaign / ad group / keyword is absolutely essential. Use Google Analytics to compare your AdWords traffic with your organic traffic. Are all your AdWords conversions coming from branded or generic terms? Are you spending all your money on traffic for your own brand name which you could get for free? Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool – make sure it’s properly deployed – talk to us if you need help to get in configured correctly.

BONUS TIP: Effective Creatives – Write effective ads! No matter what product you have for sale; a lack of creative or marketing acumen will ensure that it doesn’t sell. Target your audience effectively, use appropriate keywords and call to action phrases and always test multiple ad texts simultaneously!

Wishing you all a Happy Christmas and a prosperous 2010.

So, Google Analytics reports the search keyword that was used to find the website – you can also see the number of sales or other conversions that resulted from that query. However for Adwords traffic the keyword that is reported is the “bid term”, the keyword that is targeted in the Adwords account. This is different from the real search term that people used in their search, because Google matched the real term to your bid term using “broad match”.

It is possible to get the real search term to be shown in Analytics, and therefore to look at the performance of the real keyword using the metrics available within Analytics, (e.g. Bounce Rate, Time on Site, Goals and Ecommerce). This is done using a custom filter for Analytics. This will rewrite the campaign term to show both the bid term and the real search term in brackets:

As you can see, often the bid term is the same as the real search term, but sometimes it is not. In the example above, the 4 entries for ‘Clinicians’ would normally be combined into a single entry for that keyword.

You can use this information to adjust your Adwords campaign, for example you can add additional keywords into the Adwords account (e.g. “new zealand clinicians” shown above) and depending on the ROI of the keywords you could adjust the bids or even prevent the ads being shown for a particular variant if that didn’t convert well.

Instructions

First of all, remember, as with all filters for Analytics, make sure you test the filter out on a test profile, and always have a Raw profile to which no filters are applied.

This requires 2 custom filters …

1. This filter restricts the data to CPC / PPC traffic only, using a Custom -> Include filter. If this filter were not in place then natural search traffic would also have a second keyword added, and this would always be exactly the same as the first one. The details are:

Filter Type: Custom Filter -> Include
Filter Field: Campaign Medium
Filter Pattern: (cpc|ppc)

2. This filter extracts the real search term out of the referrer string and also extracts the campaign term (the bid keyword) and then it writes both the bid keyword and the real search term back into the campaign term. The details are:

Filter Type: Custom Filter -> Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Referral: (\?|&)(q|p|query|search)=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Term: (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Campaign Term: $B1 ($A3)

Contact First Rate to maximise the return your organisation gets from Google Analytics.

The time it takes to load a page has always had a big impact on how visitors navigate around your website, and more crucially, how long they stay on your website. 2010 will be a turning point for your website if it loads slowly.

Visitors won’t endure slow loading pages anymore

In 2006, Akamai commissioned Jupiter Research who interviewed over 1,000 internet users and produced a report entitled “Customer Reaction to a Poor Online Shopping Experience“. The main takeaway from the report was that the average time a visitor would be prepared to wait for a website to load was 4 seconds – any longer than that, would see potential customers abandoning the website and going elsewhere.

Akamai again commissioned a report which was published in September 2009 with the objectives of understanding how customer expectations to online shopping have evolved.  The results were astounding – the average time a user would be prepared to wait in 2009, has halved to only 2 seconds!

Source: Every Second Counts: How Website Performance Impacts Shopper Behaviour – www.getelastic.com

Wow – 2 Seconds! Does your Homepage load in 2 seconds?

The respondents in the Akamai Report stated that website load time is second only to high prices on a customer’s list of pet hates.

Have you spent all that time and money making your E-Commerce website look as exciting as possible, featuring products with competitive pricing on a website that has been conversion optimised, only to find out that your customers are leaving without buying because you haven’t put the time into making your page load any quicker…?

It has been proven that you can increase your conversion rates and decrease your bounce rate simply by moving all your javascript externally, building your website with CSS, Gzipping, removing whitespace and utilising low latency server architecture. Why not fix this today?

Page Speed as a factor for Organic Search Engine Rankings?

This is where page speed will get interesting in 2010!

Yahoo recently filed a patent that explores the ways a search engine considers the time it takes pages to render, for example how quickly that page is loaded directly after clicking on a natural listing from a search engine. Basically they’re hinting towards the fact that those sites that are the quickest to load will get a boost in the organic rankings.

Since that patent was launched, Matt Cutts (Google’s head of Web Spam) has been interviewed and he said that Page Speed will be a part of the Google algorithm (if it’s not already). We have known for a while that Page Speed has been a part of Quality Score in Adwords, and we should start to see it making a difference when Caffeine starts to go live on the rest of Google’s data centres in early 2010.

Here’s what Matt had to say:

Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Just this morning, Google blogged about released an experimental tool in Google Webmaster Tools called Site Performance. It takes the aggregated data from Google Toolbar regarding actual page load times, example pages, and more interestingly how your site compares to other sites. Although it’s still in labs, it is an interesting development and indicates where SEO is moving towards.

Finally, Microsoft’s Patrick Harris mentions Page Speed as the most important on-page factor to focus on for SEO in the recent webcast “Search Engines: War Stories from the World Tour” (Dec 1 webcast, 6:50 in the video).

As we can see, in more ways that one, the speed at which your website loads should be a major concern to you in the next decade…

How can you improve your Page Speed?

Other than the Google’s new Site Performance feature in Webmaster Tools, there are plenty of tools available to help you monitor and improve your page load speed:

www.WebPageTest.org

WebPageTest is an online tool to show you what parts of your site take the time to download. It provides a useful waterfall feature to give you a visual pinpoint as to exactly where the bottlenecks are.

Google Page Speed

Google have released their Page Speed Firefox plugin (also need to install Firebug, but both tools are extremely useful). This is similar to WebPageTest but you need Firefox and Firebug to be able to use it. It also provides a useful timeline of how your page renders.

Google Closure

An interesting add-on to Google Page Speed is called Google Closure. This plugin can compile all your Javascript into compact, high performance code. It basically checks and optimises your code which helps to make code that is cleaner and easier to maintain.