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.

The tension is becoming stronger and stronger as publishers are forced to deal with the prospect of having advertisers say to them: “I like your site but I don’t want to pay per impresssion”

Chief operating officer Samuel Stadler spoke to The Independent about SEO, PPC and Online Advertising [PDF].

Christmas is just around the corner, so is your site and online marketing ready for the silly season? In this blog post we’ve decided to cover some of the most important things you will need to consider.

Note: This post is mainly relevant to e-commerce stores. Obviously if you are selling truck axles, or something equally as un-festive, you are going to need a very different strategy.

Getting Your Online Marketing Ready For Christmas

It’s not business as usual. The first thing you need to do is…. change! December is not just another month in the calendar. The very nature of the web will be changing around you over this period, so it’s essential your web presence does the same.

• Make changes to your site. Whether that means adding new content focusing on Christmas, or even going a bit Google and changing your logo to be a bit more festive, you will need to make some changes to get the most out of the season.
• Make sure you have links going to the new content on your site. There is no point making a great Christmas presents page if nobody can find it. Link to it from a banner on your homepage, or put a ribbon at the top of your site. Make it obvious!
• Promote your popular products. If you have a product you know is at the top of everyone’s wish list this year, or has always proven to be a good seller at Christmas time, promote it! Put it in a place where everyone can see it.
• Make your shipping times obvious. Let all your users know what your final shipping dates for Christmas are. This will not only make sure they don’t miss out, but can help assure them that they will get the goods on time, and encourage them to buy from you!

So perhaps you have now got some work to do, here is the next big question: When do you need to do it?

Christmas PPC – Getting the Timing Right

The Christmas rush is all about timing. Getting your product to the market at the right time can make a huge difference to your sales. Search traffic around Christmas related terms really picks up in mid to late November, and peaks in early December. The Google Insights graph below shows the Christmas search traffic for one of the most obvious keywords, ‘gifts’.

(Above: Google Insights graph showing search volume for the keyword gifts in New Zealand)

Using ComScore worldwide data, Volusion, the ecommerce system providers, put the following chart together showing that the date when most people are buying for Christmas keeps on getting earlier and earlier each year, with their prediction for 2009 being the 8th of December.

Above: Volusion’s graphical representation of the busiest online shopping days. Sourced from: http://onlinebusiness.volusion.com/articles/green-monday-2009

So armed with the above knowledge, you should be able to schedule your online advertising budget according to when you expect the most people to come to your site. Watch it carefully though, NZ consumers are likely to behave a bit differently still to their US counterparts.

Obviously if your last day for delivery by Christmas is the 20th, you dont want to allocate half your budget to the final rush. However, if you have ‘virtual’ products that don’t need delivery you may find you need to allocate more to attract those last minute spenders who need something on Christmas Eve.

What It Means for Your Online Advertising:

With the increase in the search volume, there tends to be a jump in the CPC bids you can expect to pay over this time. Google have provided us with an example average CPC graph for the keyword ‘toys’, as is shown below.

(Above: Google provided CPC data on CPCs for the keyword ‘toys’ over the Christmas period.)

It is therefore essential that you are focusing on having the highest AdWords keyword quality scores possible to ensure you don’t start paying significantly more just to keep up with the other advertisers. A higher quality score will mean you won’t be affected by this as much.

There will be a lot of new keywords related to Christmas that you should be targeting around this time, and you should be editing your creative to target Christmas shoppers. First Rate Consultants are starting to trial different creative strategies already to see what will work best for your target market this year.

To really target all those new keywords and the higher bids you will likely face, the online campaigns will need some additional budget. If you are not able to give your campaign a budget injection, consider using some of your January budget in December, as January is generally a much quieter month.

If you have an email you want to send out to your user base, make sure you time it right. If you send it too late, you may find most people have already completed their online shopping. Send it too early and you will find your open rates suffer as nobody takes interest.

Is It Too Late For This Christmas..?

It’s not too late to change your site or your online advertising campaigns for this Christmas, just get onto it right now! First Rate consultants have already been working hard on providing recommendations for First Rate clients, and are looking forward to the jump in traffic and sales that December can bring.

But if you are hoping to rank really well in the organic rankings for that product you know is going to sell well… that is going to be a lot more difficult.

Why not contact First Rate about an SEO project to make sure you get there by next Christmas..?

A couple of weeks ago we blogged on New Zealand Facebook statistics, in particular we reported:

• There are more Kiwi women on Facebook than men (57.5% female vs 42.5% male) and
• Most of the New Zealand users of Facebook are in the 18-24 or 25-34 age range.

This led me to wonder, what is the percentage of each gender in each age range? Are there any interesting trends? Are there any age ranges where men are more common?

And also, now that Facebook is the most popular site in NZ (aside from Google), what percentage of the NZ population is on Facebook now, and how does that change for each age range?

By the way, in case you hadn’t heard, Facebook overtook TradeMe in July as the most popular destination site for New Zealanders – here’s a graph from Google Trends for websites. (P.S. If you want to know what the other most popular sites in NZ are, here’s the Top 100 according to Alexa and the top 20 according to Hitwise).

Graph of visits to Trademe.co.nz and Facebook.co.nz (New Zealand visitors only)

So, let’s use the demographic information from the Facebook advert tool to understand New Zealand’s Facebook demographics a bit better:

The gender gap is strongest for older users

The younger age ranges are much closer to gender parity than the older age ranges.  The 20-24 age range has the highest proportion of men, with 47% male and 53% female. As the age increases though, the percentage of men decreases. The 50-54 age range has the lowest proportion of men, 35% male and 65% female.

% of each gender on Facebook, by age range (% of those who stated a gender)

Nearly all young kiwis are on Facebook

A famous quote about Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings is that the world is divided into two types of people, those who have read it, and those who are going to read it. It could be that the same is true of Facebook in New Zealand – kiwis are divided into those who are on Facebook already, and those who are going to be on Facebook soon!

Dividing the number of Facebook users at each age range (from Facebook’s advert tool) by the total number of New Zealanders in each age range (from the NZ census website) shows that the younger age ranges are almost totally assimilated already. Nearly 90% of the 20-24 age range is on Facebook already. The percentage of Kiwis on Facebook falls quickly as age increases – only 30% of 40-44 year olds are on Facebook. And the percentage continues to fall slowly as age increases – only 17% of the over 60’s are on Facebook.

Estimated percentage of the NZ population on Facebook, at each age range, for each gender and total.

Of course this is just an estimate, and in particular there is no guarantee that the number of users reported by Facebook is indeed correct. But given the popularity of Facebook in New Zealand, it can’t be too far wrong.

So if you want to try an advertising medium that will reach a very high proportion of New Zealanders, then Facebook should be your second choice after Google Adwords. First Rate incorporates Facebook ads in the overall online marketing mix (which also includes SEO, Adwords PPC and performance advertising, all tracked by Google Analytics). Please do contact us to understand how Facebook advertising can benefit your business.

The fine print

Facebook allows advertising on a cost-per-click basis as we illustrated last time. And these adverts can be targeted by age, city, gender, education, relationship status and keyword, allowing very strong demographic targeting. The advert tool has these options for the advert targeting:

Demographic targeting options for adverts on Facebook

As you can see, the estimated number of people is shown, and this is where I got the estimated number of NZ Facebook users at each age range from, including gender:

Estimated total number of people in NZ on Facebook

Estimated number of women over 30 in NZ on Facebook

Estimated number of married women over 30 in NZ on Facebook

P.S. Plenty of other blogs have used the same trick to get useful insights about the demographics on Facebook. Here are a selection of some of the best:

• Facebook Market Research Secrets and 2/3 of Facebook users aren’t (necessarily) women by Alec Saunders
• Facebook Secretly Reveals Demographic Data on the All Facebook blog
• Where Does Facebook Grow From Here and Facebook Growth By Country and the Slowdown in App Usage on the O’Reilly Radar blog
• Facebook Gender Demographics – A Comparison by Country on the Ad Chap blog