The Chameleon Net blog

Google Grants 3: Tracking: How to prove RoI for Google Grant activity

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:32:11 GMT

So what does the Google Grant bring to your business? Are you using the “free money” Google affords you to generate real revenue for your organisation? There are numerous ways to track this, but also numerous obstacles to getting this tracking in place as well.

The ideal situation
You tag all of your inbound traffic, and you can see at a glance which website, channel, campaign or keyword was the last referral point before a user came to your site and completed a key goal (download, sale, donation etc). You can talk in terms of marketing spend per completed goal for any channel, including AdWords.

AdWords Conversion Tracking
By implementing AdWords specific code on your goal completion pages, you will be able to see in your AdWords dashboard the cost / conversion for any keyword, ad text, ad group or campaign. Every time AdWords drives a user to a goal completion page on your site that conversion will be recorded. With some code adjustments you can also record the value of the conversion (e.g. donation amount or shopping basket total). N.B. these conversions only show up in your AdWords dashboard, and if you have several goals it’s quite hard to distinguish which goal was completed.

Good for: Grant accounts with one specific purpose e.g. purchasing from your shop. Requires simple code change to one page, so good if you have limited technical resource.
Not so good if: you have multiple conversions to record, or you’re interested in a user’s journey through your site from clicking an ad to converting.

Find out more here.

Goal tracking in Google Analytics
This is perhaps the best way of tracking the success of your Google Grant-funded AdWords campaigns, and also allows you to judge other marketing efforts against the same goals you judge your AdWords activity by. You can also measure the effectiveness of each stage in your conversion process (e.g. a shop checkout) using the funnel visualisation feature. If you are tracking this way you would find all stats in your Google Analytics dashboard.

Good for: anyone wanting to get serious about measuring RoI and site performance across all channels including the Google Grant.
Not so good if: You are short on time and technical resource for implementation.

Find out more here.

Barriers to tracking

Having processes hosted across different domains or subdomains.
As a user arrives on your site from a Google Grant ad, their session will be labelled as such. If you then force that user to leave the domain / subdomain for another in order to complete a goal, their session labels will change. It will appear as though goal completions originated in the previous subdomain, not your Grant ads. This makes comparing ad spend to completed goals difficult.
You will need to customise your Analytics code to ensure the correct session information remains attached to a user as they navigate across your domains / subdomains.

Find out more here.

Inability to set up goals correctly in Google Analytics
We see loads of Analytics accounts where goals are set up but not working. There are tons of help resources online for setting up goals correctly, although often you will need to use regular expressions to get these correct. One top tip is to always speak to your developer about the various pages a user could see upon pressing “submit” or “donate now” in order to make sure you aren’t missing any key conversions.

Find out more here.

Next time... I'll be talking about tailoring campaigns for seasonal topics and how to compete in very competitive keyword markets - for instance, how to stand out via PPC and sign up London Marathon runners.

Click for more on the tailored management and insight service Chameleon Net offer to organisations receiving the Google Grant.

Google Grants Blog 2: Your first campaigns

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:08:23 GMT

You’ll actually build your first campaigns before you’re account has been signed off by Google: this is because submission of well-targeted campaigns that meet Google Grant’s criteria is a requirement for receiving The Grant.

So what key areas should I cover with my first few campaigns?

I’d advise that to start with, you should just cover a few topics, so that you can get your final application off to Google with the minimum of fuss. You need to impress the people upstairs with the first part of any marketing camapign so not spreading yourself too thinly is vital.

You could start with a campaign focussed around your brand and the main topics that your organisation is focussed upon. I would have an Ad Group and associated keywords for each of these topic, as it allows you to create specific ad variants based around that theme. Most donations that you receive from PPC traffic will be triggered by people searching these terms so it’s important to get them live and start optimising as soon as possible.

A couple of tips:

If part of your brand name is common to other popular culture terms, ensure you use negative match keywords to stop your ad being shown unnecessarily. E.g. if your charity was called “Lost Children” and your brand campaign targeted keywords broadly similar to this you would negative match terms like “lost property”, “lost tv” etc to ensure you weren’t paying for irrelevant clicks.
Include as many misspellings and acronym keywords for your charity as possible to your “brand terms” ad group: this will ensure you reach as many of the people searching for you as possible. Take a look at your site’s entrance keywords in Google Analytics for inspiration. (remember to filter out non brand terms to save time)

It’s also worthwhile to create another AdWords campaign for promoting specific fundraising drives or “take action” campaigns. Your ads here should try to contain a call to action; remember you can fully customise the display URL in your ad so this is a bit of extra space to incorporate messaging if you’re struggling with the 95 character limit on the ad.

So there we have it: try to focus your first campaigns on your brand, your primary issues and your current campaigns and you should have a solid platform to work off.

Next time I’ll be talking about how to track your AdWords / Google Grant activity against tangible goals such as donation, newsletter signup, form downloads etc. Add our RSS feed to your reader so you don’t miss out.

Rich will be speaking at our seminar “Money Talks” for charities on April 22nd. You should sign up to come along!

Google Grants 101: "What is The Google Grant?"

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:32:09 GMT

The Google Grant is a free search advertising programme that affords charities and non-profits nearly $10000/month in Google Adwords budget. At Chameleon Net we provide Google Grant help and assistance to charities like The RNID, The Anthony Nolan Trust and Friends of the Earth. In this series I hope to talk about how your charity can apply for, and get value from the Google Grant. In our experience The Grant is a fantastic channel for revenue generation whether you’re a small charity or a major UK non-profit.

Sponsored search results are a form of advertising delivered via Google AdWords. They look like this:

You find these ads at the right hand side of top of a search engine results page (SERP). Your ad’s position is determined by the relevancy of your ad to the keyword searched for, and your bid for that particular keyword (aka search term or query). If your ad is clicked, you will be charged by Google. However, a Google Grantee receives $10000 of clicks a month for free.

Just think of all those terms you’d love your charity to rank number 1 for… a Google Grant would allow you almost unlimited budget to chase that coveted top spot.

So how does your charity go about getting one? A Google Grant application can take a long time - sometimes nearly 6 months! (Charities who have utilised our services have found we speed up this process dramatically). A Google Grant application falls into 2 stages:

Proving your eligibility to Google
Submitting a well structured and targeted set of AdWords campaigns

Passing stage 1 is fairly simple, and most charities should be able to get through this bit. The key thing is to prove you are a charity and that you actively campaign and have planned resource to manage AdWords on a regular basis.

To pass stage 2 is more difficult, and often this is where we see charities struggle, so you’ll probably need someone with experience to help you. You will need to submit an application that conforms with the extensive Google Grants checklist. Examples of the sorts of thing Google is looking for include an account that is well structured around keyword themes and relevant landing pages, applied geographical and language targeting, and keyword bids that utilises multiple match types to ensure ads are only delivered where they are appropriate.

To someone with a good amount of AdWords experience, creating and submitting an account that meets The Grant guidelines is not a difficult task, but we’ve seen many charities have their attempts rejected by Google, and as the Google Grants team is made up of volunteers it can take a long time for the resubmitted account to be evaluated. Ultimately, it is in a charity’s best interest to get the account right first time, so make sure you have access to knowledgeable AdWords resource before applying.

Next time...

...I’ll be looking at setting up your account in more detail and some of the areas you should target first with your Google Grant for maximum RoI.

Rich will be talking in detail about maximising RoI from search marketing at our FREE seminar “MoneyTalks” on April 22nd. You should sign up for a place here!

Top Tips For Charity Digital Marketers: Jan 2010

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:54:16 GMT

Two weeks into the New Year and already Christmas feels a lifetime ago. For many marketers, January is a quiet month, with conventional wisdom saying that apart from a few obvious products (gym memberships, savings accounts etc) acquisition / sales will be average at best given the previous months gluttony.

However, January is a really exciting month for charity marketers, especially those dedicating time and resource to the web. We run the pay-per-click search advertising for several charities, and we always see an uplift in the number of donations made in the weeks following 1st January. These conversions will usually originate from a brand keyword search, or a search on the issue your charity is associated with, suggesting that these January donors are aware of who you are and / or what you do, and have been triggered by the passing of the New Year to give you some cash. Whether this is driven by Christmas guilt or a desire to start a new year on the right foot matters little, what matters is that as a charity you take advantage of it.

Here’s our top tips:

Defer December spend: that Christmas campaign you were thinking of running? Save it! People are stressed, busy, preoccupied and generally frazzled in the run up to Christmas. Your message may achieve greater penetration and be afforded more thought in the New Year

Target your warm leads: cross reference the following:

newsletter subscribers
people who’ve signed your petitions
people who have fundraised for you
people who have sponsored your fundraisers

with your list of regular givers. Those people that aren’t giving via direct debit are a good group to target with email, social networking or even offline material around the 1st January.

Ramp up your PPC budget for the month and spend it effectively: Have you checked your AdWords scheduling recently? Do you know if your daily budget enables your ads to be shown 24 hours a day? Do you use bid adjustment to spend your budget at the most profitable times of day? Failure to do these things may mean your organisation misses out on a great deal of potential regular givers through a lack of visibility in search results.

For many charities, January will be a peak time for getting people to sign up to do various fundraising events in 2010. The London Marathon is one particularly lucrative opportunity. As a result however, competition in search results amongst charities is extreme. First page bid estimate for “2010 London marathon” in Adwords right now is $1.25, and $1.50 for “london marathon charity”. Maybe 1 in 100 people who clicked on your ad for that term would download an application, so now is the time to investigate the long tail of keywords for events like this, especially if your budget is not very big. Keyword research should inform not only your PPC campaigns but also SEO. Whilst there is little point aiming for a top 3 spot in the “London Marathon” SERP, you could get a real win optimising around “run the London Marathon for charity”.

Finally, a word on improving website performance, with special regard to acquiring regular givers. Recent research shows that the way you present amounts of money on your site affects the number of people who convert. 3 price formats were tested in the study:

Dollars and cents numerical format with a dollar sign ($00.00)
Numerical format without a dollar sign (00.)
Scripted or written-out prices (zero dollars).

It was found that adopting option 2 led to significantly more acquisition. Even if you have the most convoluted CMS, testing this would not be a great deal of work. We recommend trying an A/B test using Google Website Optimiser if you want to improve your site's performance: delivering a percentage increase in donations would be great way to start your organisation’s year!

Of course, our top tip is to get in touch with Chameleon Net if you think we could help you with search marketing or website improvement!

International Student Recruitment for HEIs

surajs@chameleonnet.co.uk (Suraj Shah) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:23:14 GMT

How to digitally attract, engage with and recruit international students, while mobilising your existing students to help with language translation, to overcome cultural barriers and give them valuable online marketing work experience.

There are websites, blogs & social networks such as facebook and twitter, all crying out for your prospective students' attention. I'm sure you'll agree that there is simply a lot of noise that they are exposed to. For prospective international students, that noise online is amplified, as you are competing not just with other UK Higher Education Institutions, but also the hundreds of institutions around the world.

Play this slidecast (7 mins 37 seconds) to get an insight into the 3 stage process to run an international Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign at your university that spans across 12 to 24 months. The campaign involves forming a team of International Student Ambassadors, the creation of an optimised online destination, and digital community engagement to attract visitors to your new online destination and raise it's profile in search engines.

The slidecast also touches on a handful of tips to run a successful campaign and gives you a glimpse into what's involed in a 3-month international Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign if you want more rapid results.

International Student Recruitment for HEIs

View more presentations from Suraj Shah.

Audio Books – Who’s Listening?

jeremyd@chameleonnet.com (Jeremy Davis) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:12:18 GMT

My Dimbleby mission continues. Seriously, David, look over your shoulder and you will see me there…albeit with the need of the Hubble telescope.

I was invited to be a panel member for The Bookseller’s “Audio Revolution 2008” – a one-day Publishing industry seminar focussing on all things audio book-related.

My session was the last of the day and I must say that it showed in some of the faces but nonetheless Jo Henry chaired an interesting discussion about how audio books could/should be marketed.

I was representing the web marketing side of things, with Tony Lynch of Gospoken making an excellent case for the viability of audio books on mobile phones and Madeline Milne of e-Music discussing the success of their subscription-based download model.

It was difficult to do justice to this very broad topic in fifty minutes and I was very surprised at how few questions the panel got from the floor. I think this represented a general feeling that I got from the afternoon. No one was really talking about marketing audio books. By which I mean getting them out there and selling them.

I spent the afternoon thinking that audio books are like this little-known secret and it surprises me that the industry isn’t shouting about them more. I mean, they are really great!

I was speaking to one of our recent recruits at Chameleon Net – young, early twenties, bright – and, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, he said “I don’t like reading books, but I really like audio books. I wouldn’t read a book on the train but I just put on an audio book – it’s great.”

And there it was…a new market for publishers. So why, I wonder, isn’t the industry shouting from the rooftops about this amazing format that means people who don’t like reading can enjoy books? I mean, some people are just mainly auditory – that’s how they like to learn and that’s how they like to consume information.

Surely the industry should be running massive campaigns about audio books?! Publishers should be giving some away as tasters…get people using them!

I think if the publishing industry could unite, get over all the internal issues like audio book rights, royalties, investment in recordings, etc and just get the message of audio books out there, the response would be huge! Just get people aware of them, using them, liking them. There’s a market out there and most of them don’t think about audio books. And they are not all old women and travelling sales reps.

So, “quit your whingeing” I hear you cry “and do something to help”. Ok then, I will. Here are my top ten tips for marketing and selling audio books:

1.   Get all over social networks – they are still the fastest growing sites in the UK and your target market is using them every day. Sometimes for hours and often when they should be working. Create groups, use Facebook advertising, run competitions, give-aways (i.e. free downloads)

2.   Use ePR (or an agency that knows how to use it :)) to target key influential bloggers and get them blogging about you and your products. Credibility online is everything and all votes are not created equal. Make powerful friends and work together.

3.   Get all over search engines. By which I mean Google. They have nearly 90% of UK searches and 94% of people use it, all of whom are qualified as having an informational need (otherwise they wouldn’t be searching). Where else would you want to advertise? Do this by PPC ads and also by optimising for organic search results (see below).

4.   Optimise for natural search. This gets its own number coz it’s so important. It’s by far the best ROI when it comes to search engine marketing and every day that you don’t do it and your competitors do, the lower you will show up in the searches. In natural SEO, doing nothing just means you keep getting lower. More of this below….

5.   Use metadata: use target key words to describe your audio files and make sure they are on optimised pages: page titles, H1 tags, alt tags, copy, etc. SE’s can’t listen to audio books (yet…I’m not kidding, speech recognition software is getting better and Google may soon be able to index the spoken word) so give them lots of thematically-relevant content to help them.

6.   Think Accessibility. Audio books have a perfect market in people with visual impairments. Make sure your site works for screen readers. If you’re not sure, get an audit (“from us” is the answer to your next question).

7.   Speaking of sites…get a good one. There’s no point spending time and money marketing products if your site is rubbish at converting visitors to customers. You’ll lose sales and damage your brand in the process. Make sure your site makes buying mind-numbingly easy. Joyful even. People should leave your site happier than when they arrived. If not, your site is letting you and them down. I mean, nobody likes to be made to work hard to buy something – it’s just not polite.

8.   Don’t worry about DRM. There are so few audio books out there that there is not much of a market in illegal copies 9unlike music). It’s about creating the market at the moment – better to have a million audio books out there with 10 per cent buying them than ten thousand with 100% of them buying. DRM can always be adopted later.

9.   Create added-value content. Like extras on DVDs…publishers can offer something more than the retailers…exclusive interviews with the author, an introduction, an otherwise unpublished epi/prologue, etc. This will really help the ePR and build buzz.

10.   Sell ‘em direct. Find out what your customers like and talk to them about it. Don’t let Amazon have all the fun.

Of course audio books are part of a seismic shift in the Publishing sector that is happening in order to adapt to digital content and multiple delivery platforms and formats.

For an excellent analysis of these changes, I recommend Sara Lloyd’s insightful article “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century”.

If you are a publisher and want to know more of our thoughts on this and other Publishing-related topics, you may want to attend our free seminar: Quick Web Wins for Publishers, on Tuesday 25th November at London Chamber of Commerce, EC4. There’ll be exclusive content and an opportunity to ask us questions.

Free PPC Audit

donnaa@chameleonnet.com (Donna Adams) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:25:51 GMT

We are currently running a free offer!

If you are running a paid search campaign on Google Adwords then you might be interested in our FREE PPC audit.

The audit will include bespoke advice on your Google account structure, the quality score and tips on how to make the most of your paid search spend.

Take a look at the audit page for more information.

Also if you're new to Google sign up for some free adwords vouchers here.

Online Marketing Predictions for 2008

andrewd@chameleonnet.com (Drew Davies) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:57:44 GMT

With some major shake-ups in the Online Marketing world over the last twelve months, 2008 looks set to be a balance of new strategy and contingency. As PPC advertisers grow in number, an increasingly crowded marketplace will force some to experiment with more niche engines to ensure a return while the search engines will all be tweaking their natural algorithms every which way they can (Google patenting new image reading technology for example). 2008 is going to be a year of surprises, but let’s see if we can foresee a few trends:

Email
With the effort and skill it takes to ensure email lists are clean and the communications get through, we might see more companies providing an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) / blog alternative to email broadcasts allowing technically savvy recipients to source the info as they want it, avoiding “inbox overload” with a demographic quick to unsubscribe.

PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising)
Yahoo’s much needed PPC Platform update last year has paved the way for Advertisers - distrustful of the clunky old system - to head back for a look, especially if they’re finding it increasingly expensive over at Google. Yahoo’s new Platform is in some ways a carbon copy of Adwords, however there are cheap clicks for the diligent, and the similarity between the two systems will make it easier to duplicate PPC campaigns across the Engines.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Future Proofing for SEO has always seemed an oxymoron, but 2008 will be the year sustainability gets serious. Forward thinking companies with a history of search engine marketing should look at their on-going strategy to ensure a synergy between process and results. Can in-house or agency teams make effective changes quickly (especially after Algorithmic updates)? How will new copy evolve and be optimised? What are the long term link-bait goals?

Link Building
With Google stepping up the war on link buying, Link Builders will branch off into two camps – increasingly covert campaigns on one side and transparent link strategies on the other. Covert will mean closed door link “arrangements” between sites, especially in engineering those all important editorial links. Of course there are high risks to this approach, which leads us nicely to the more ethical option…

ePR (Online PR)
Already a vital tool when building online influence for our clients, 2008 will see ePR recognised as that must-have ingredient when sourcing links from highly credible websites and blogs. Avoiding the money-for-links trap, ePR puts the emphasis on relationships and trust, connecting key influencers with content and opportunities for mutually beneficial results.