No 1 Solution for Growing Businesses

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

John Wanamaker, 35th United States Postmaster General

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You can learn a lot from a good quote. Amazingly, the quote above is still largely applicable over 100 years after John Wanamaker first made it.

However a shift is currently happening in marketing. While studies have suggested that less money has been spent on advertising as a whole in the last couple of years, some forms of advertising are seeing an increase in spend. What do the following have in common:
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If you use Google Analytics, monitoring your traffic sources is a great idea. And if you only have one domain, Analytics works fine out of the box.

You start to run into problems however, when you operate multiple domains or subdomains. By default, Google Analytics tracks each of your subdomains as unique, so when a visitor comes in to your site on subdomain1.yourwebsite.com, but then clicks on a link to subdomain2.yourwebsite.com, their campaign information gets overwritten – so the visitor looks like a referral from your first subdomain.
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Click to enlarge.

If you currently have a Google Analytics account, you should have noticed that a new dashboard (like the one on the left) appeared earlier this week. While it all looks very grand, I actually think that you will want to go in and remove or edit a lot of the default reports that are spewed out at you.

Dashboards can of course be very useful (we’ve based our CRM product around one), but you also have to be careful about how much information you have on them, and what information you want to display. A good dashboard should:
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Whatever software you are buying; be it CRM, eCommerce, web analytics or otherwise; there are normally a range of free or ‘open source’ alternatives being marketed to you. As a logical buyer making an investment in growing your business this raises the question – why go for a paid solution?

While open source solutions are free in terms of software cost, it is essential that you consider total cost of ownership of your solution; as given the time and technical expertise required to make a success of the project no software ends up being ‘free’!

Consider some of the following things that can add to total cost of ownership:
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Tesco reported last week that they are investing £20 million in a new 152,000 sq ft ecommerce distribution centre. Which by anyone’s standards (even a company the size of Tesco), is a significant investment. Tesco sell a huge amount of goods online, and are developing their own huge infrastructure to support this.

All this raises the question; as a small to medium sized business, do you need to invest £20 million to play the ecommerce game?

You do if you want to directly compete with Tesco…
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If you have been using Google Adwords for any length of time, it’s likely that your bid prices have increased dramatically. This is – in part – a reflection that more advertisers have started to use adwords, increasing the price of individual keywords.

So what’s an advertiser to do?

Watch your quality score…

When using phrase or exact keyword targeting, pay close attention to your
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There’s a lot of hot air and half-truths written about email marketing, particularly surrounding whether or not it ‘works’. The problem, of course, lies in the fact that sending emails is incredibly cheap. Which makes it too easy to send out ineffective eshots, because the cost ramifications of doing so are relatively low.

I came across two Marketing Sherpa charts of US studies, which make interesting reading (click to enlarge):
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This post should really be in two parts as I want to discuss two quite different things. They do, however, both relate to Yahoo!

1.      Instant search is becoming the standard.

As we reported in September, Google Instant has made a big splash, and it seems the other search engines are following suit. Today, I did a search on Yahoo! for the first time in about six years. Unlike Google Instant where the results you are displayed
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This week, MarketingSherpa published results from an American survey of what American companies currently feel about email marketing. The results, I feel, are interesting (click on the image to enlarge).

What does this mean?

Firstly, companies are investing in email marketing as a medium. This makes sense too, as pay per click prices are rising and the wider economy continues to be sluggish.
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A new study commissioned by Google has suggested that online business now accounts for 7.2% of the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) – approximately £100 billion a year. Sixty percent of this comes from ‘internet consumption’ (the amount people spend on online purchases, and the cost of internet connections).

We are spending more and more online, on a wider range of products, and this can have a big impact on your business.

Compared to the offline economy for example, where only 90p for every pound is exported, £2.80 for every pound is being exported online.

The growth in eCommerce is real, and not confined to websites such as eBay and Amazon. Thousands of businesses – including SME organisations selling complex products and services, are making a fortune online.
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