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Guided Miss-Aisle

Posted on 30 Mar 2009 at 15:09

Kevin Partner is on a mission to find a good guide to website development, and suggests some useful tools for online businesses.

When learning a new skill I want concise, relevant instruction in best practice techniques, and I absolutely don't want to learn in great detail how not to do it! Especially when I discover I wasn't supposed to do it that way once I've become expert and applied for a job in the field. This fiasco has left me heartily fed up. There are some good web-based resources, but there's nothing quite like a book for learning a new skill.

I want web design and development to become more and more mainstream, and attracting creative, intelligent people into the industry is the way to do this. I'm sure there are many people who'd like to learn how to create websites from scratch, rather than picking up a template-based website editor CD-ROM for £9.99 from PC World and suffering the consequences. There's so little around to help them, and what is available is of poor quality, outdated and often requires the beginner to invest in hundreds of pounds worth of software. This is little use to someone who simply wants to create a website for their small business or charity, or to record their family tree. These people will often turn to template-based software either online or on CD-ROM with almost universally disappointing results. I feel so strongly about this, that I'm going to do something about it - watch this space.

Getting an edge

I'm not going to use the "r" word, but in such a challenging economic climate it's especially important to get an edge on your competitors. This means working on various aspects of your product or service, including its features, customer service and, perhaps most crucially, the effectiveness of its marketing and its conversion rate. There are a number of fundamentals that most successful web businesses have in place, including:

l An effective Pay Per Click group for each set of keywords

l An efficient process for converting visitors to sales, or whatever other action you require, through having an effective landing page for each ad group and an efficient buying process

I've covered AdWords in previous columns and heartily recommend the book Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall as an excellent first step. There's no question that Pay Per Click advertising is a vast and complicated subject, but bear in mind that like so many other aspects of business, most of your competitors won't even make the effort to grasp the basics.

At the heart of all good marketing is the principle of split testing, which at its most basic might mean running two adverts (print or online) and comparing the results. The beauty of AdWords is that you can get such results very quickly. It's essential to only change one variable per experiment so, for example, split test a headline but leave the body copy the same - otherwise, you can't be sure which change had which effect. Run the experiment for as long as it takes to get at least 100 clicks, then check the results. You're looking for improvements in both click-through rate and, most crucially, in conversion rate. A higher click-through means more traffic has been driven to your site, which costs you more, but if your conversion rate drops you're actually going backwards. For example, adding the word "free" to any AdWords ad will almost certainly increase your click-through rate while simultaneously slugging your conversion rate (if you're selling something). This is the road to ruin. What you're looking for is an increase in conversion without sacrificing click-through.