Archive for January, 2012

How much of your web traffic do you convert? The chances are, not very much. In fact, most small business’ websites achieve only a 2% conversion rate. That means 98% of your web traffic is leaving without taking any action.

So why does this happen? Consumer behavior has changed. With the introduction of the search engine, consumers shop around before making any purchase decision.

This means that you might get a lot of web traffic, but if all your traffic does is poke around your website for a few minutes and leave, your website isn’t doing you any good.

A conversion is either a sale (hard conversion), or a lead (soft conversion). To maximize your conversions, you need to alter your website to promote both types of conversions.

Increase Your Conversions

Examples of ways to promote hard conversions would be a feature where users could buy online. That way, for those visitors that are ready to purchase, they have the option right in front of them.

The only problem with promoting hard conversion is that barely any of your website visitors are ready to make a purchase. Thus, trying to convince your traffic to buy right away isn’t very successful.

Soft conversions are a better way to convert your users. Because a soft conversion usually consists of only contact information, your website users will be more willing to give out their information, allowing you to contact them later.

Examples of a soft conversion would be an offer to join a mail list, or using a conversion driver to give a special to your website visitors.

Also, because they are willing to fill in their contact information, soft conversions are further down the purchase funnel than the average website visitor, as they are already considering your product or service.

Your website can’t be a passive page. The Internet is dynamic; use the ability to change deals on the fly and host mini-sites with your special offers to help increase conversions.

Check out our mini-sites and conversion drivers today and see how to use your existing traffic to create more leads.

So, it’s the start of the New Year, and to celebrate, Google released some new figures about smartphone adoption in the United States.

The numbers may not surprise you, but the main takeaway is that smartphone usage is going up, and feature phone usage is going down. Makes sense, doesn’t it? It seems like everyone has a smartphone these days.

Smartphone usage from Jan 2011 to Jan 2012

The first big takeaway from the findings was that smartphone users almost equal feature phone users. Here’s the numbers: 38% of people own smartphones, compared with 39% that own feature phones. Just nine months ago, those numbers were at 31% and 47%, respectively.

You might be thinking that those numbers are just from the younger generations, but the average age of an American smartphone user is 38.6 years old. Also, more people ages 45-54 own smartphones than 18-24 year olds. Still think only young people have smartphones?

Rising with smartphone adoption is mobile Internet usage. In fact, more people use a mobile phone than use a computer.

So what do these numbers mean for your business? Well, at AdsUpNow, we have several solutions to target the mobile population. For smartphone users, we have mobile search, mobile coupons, call tracking and mobile landing pages.

If you want to grab a larger chunk of the cellphone population than just smartphone users, we also have out 5pointmobile SMS program, which allows you to build and communicate with your mobile customer base.

If you have any more questions about smartphone usage or how it fits into your digital marketing plan, leave a comment. Or, contact us for a free mobile consultation.

I consult a search engine about local businesses almost every day. You probably do, too. If I’m looking for the nearest bank branch, gas station or restaurant, I type it into Google Maps on my iPhone and away we go.

Research from eMarketer confirms my personal anecdote. They found that more than 70% of consumers check an online source before going to a local business or restaurant.

That’s a huge number. If you don’t put a lot of stock in your online presence, then you should.

Out of that 70% of people, 43% said they visited Google to find out information about a business. By far and away that was the most popular way of discovering new business. In a distant second place, with 30% of the vote, was yellowpages.com.

This tells us that the majority of consumers look for local businesses in the same spots, meaning it’s fairly easy to get noticed.

One of the easiest ways to appear prominently to searchers is to optimize your Google Places listing, and appear in hundreds of online directories with Local AdsUpNow. These two things alone will get you exposure to 73% of the consumers who search online for local businesses.

If you have any questions, sound off in the comments, or contact us for a free digital marketing consultation.

Fellow Local Search Marketer David Mihm put together an infographic showing the history of Google Places changes over the last few years.

If nothing else, this graph shows the importance of diligence when creating a Google Places listing. It’s not something that you can just set up and forget about – it requires maintenance.

Google’s search results now carry weight from Places and Google+. It’s important to have a well-rounded presence on Google to have optimal placement, and to make sure the search results are reflecting exactly what you want them to.

1. Select your brand name as the title tag in Google:
Rather than select the city that you operate in, use your brand name so it show up in the search results as the page header.

2. Add sitelinks to your places listing:
You can add several different site links in your places listing to make it easier for users to get to a specific page.

3. Know what other directories are doing with your branded name and maximize potential with them:
Using Local AdsUpNow is a good way to make sure you are using all available directories.

4. Start asking customers for reviews:
Google prominently displays your reviews from Google and other sites, so it’s important to you have some (hopefully positive) reviews for it to draw from.

5. Post up photos from your business:
If you don’t post photos, Google will choose some, and who knows what they might pick. Make sure you pick photos with strong brand presence, such as your storefront.

Follow these tips and you should start to see your business listing appearing more complete in Google, which will result in more customers and increased revenue.

If you have any questions, post them in the comments. Or, contact us today for a free digital marketing consultation.

More than 3 billion searches for local goods or services take place every month. That’s a huge number, and it’s only getting bigger.

We’ve talked on this blog before about Google Places optimization and some of the ways to get your business listing higher in Google. One of the things we mentioned was using business directories to get what are called “citations.”

Citations are mentions of your business name on the Internet. So why is it important to have so many citations? Well search engines think it’s important, that’s why.

If you look at it from a search engine’s perspective, it makes perfect sense – trust the business that has more background information. Because it’s so easy to go online and list a business, one, two, or even three listings doesn’t matter much to Google. In its eyes you could be someone sitting in their mom’s basement making up businesses.

Getting business listings isn’t very difficult; you just go to the directory website, such as yellowpages.com, create an account and list your business. The problem is that to really help your rankings, you need to get tons of listings. That’s where Local AdsUpNow comes in.

With Local AdsUpNow, all you have to do is put in your business’ information once, and we automatically submit it to hundreds of online directories. This means that instead of going to more than 100 websites and filling in your information, you just go to one website, fill in your info, and we take care of the rest for you.

Check out LocalAdsUpNow.com to get started with our directory service, because you want to be there when your customers search for you.

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has been integrating its social network, Google+, into search results more and more prevalently.

Before, when searching for something general like AT&T, the website, Facebook and Twitter pages for the company would be most prevalent, along with the nearest locations.

Now, however, when searching for AT&T, the first thing that pops up after the main website is AT&T’s Google+ page, as shown below from a screenshot taken earlier today.

Because of this change, it’s more important than ever to include a Google+ page for your business into your digital marketing strategy. Not only are Google+ results becoming more dominant, but many believe that Google will eventually combine Google Places with the business’ corresponding Google+ page.

Unsure of how to create a Google+ page? Just follow the easy steps below to get started.

1. Navigate to Plus.Google.com and choose an account to create your page with.

IMPORTANT: Choose the same account you used to set up your Google places page, to ensure continuity between both platforms. If you haven’t created a Google Places listing yet, check out our previous blog post.

2. Add information to your page such as category, tagline, introduction and links.

Each one of these will help give a more complete picture of your business, so it’s important to fill out the information in its entirety.

3. Add photos and other media to your page.

This is more for visual appeal than anything else, but users who see photos are more likely to click on your page than if it didn’t have any.

4. Link your Google+ Page to your main website.

Linking to your main website and promoting it on your other social networks will bring more awareness to the Google+ page, giving it increased relevancy and a higher rank in Google search results. Use the Google+ page plugin to add a preview of your page on your website.

5. Start posting!

Post about your business, and offer exclusive deals to your Google+ members. Google+ doesn’t have much traffic now, but in the next few months we’ll see a lot more people and businesses on Google+, so it’s important to get started early.

There you have it, five easy steps to get started with your Google+ page. Let us know if you have any more questions in the comments, or contact us today for a free digital marketing consultation.

We’ve talked about retargeting before, but for those of you who don’t know what it is, how it works, or how it fits in to your digital marketing strategy, here’s the short version: A user visits your website, a tracking cookie gets placed in their browser, your ads appear to them over the next month as they browse the web, and they are more likely to return to your website and take action.

Retargeting is great in that it follows up with your website customers automatically. 98 percent of your web traffic leaves without doing anything, but with retargeting, you get a much higher return rate. In a study from comScore, sites with retargeting got a 726 percent lift in site visitation after four weeks of ad exposure.

Retargeting also reflects positively on your branded search. Branded search is when someone searches for your business, such as “Moe’s Pizza,” instead of searching a broad category like “Pizza Seattle.” Branded searches are important because it means more and more people know about your business. In the same study, comScore noted that after four weeks of ad exposure, branded search increased 1,046 percent.

This means that even if the retargeting ads themselves don’t have a high click-through rate, searchers are still looking for those businesses more often than ones they aren’t retargeted for.

After conducting its study, comScore concluded: “In building the model of branding effectiveness, one strategy clearly outperformed the rest – retargeting. This strategy works well in every scenario and should be considered for both direct response and longer term branding objectives.”

For more information on retargeting, contact us today for a free consultation, or ask a question in the comments.

We’ve talked a lot on this blog about the emergence and importance of mobile advertising, but I’m afraid we’re going to talk a about it a little more. According to a new report from IgnitionOne, mobile search advertising spend grew 269 percent year-over-year during the last quarter.

That’s an outrageous amount, and really showcases the increasing importance that is being placed on mobile. Over the same period, mobile ad impressions also increased 317 percent, and CPC decreased 8.6 percent. Meaning marketers were serving more impressions at a lower cost than ever before.

Things were all good on the desktop front as well, as desktop search grew 22.4 percent year-over-year in quarter four. There were also increase in impressions (20%), clicks (34%) and CTR (12%).

Overall, the search market is still growing, especially in mobile. If you want some more background on what makes up a mobile marketing campaign, and why it’s important, check out some of our previous blog posts.

If you have more questions about mobile, let us know in the comments. Or, contact us today for a free mobile consultation.

When users search in Google, the Google Places listings are becoming more and more prevalent. With more and more businesses expanding their online presence, it’s becoming increasingly important to appear in the first page of listings. How do you do that? Just follow these quick, easy steps.

1. Fill out your Google Places listing
We know, we know, this seems like a no brainer, but we mean you have to fill it out completely. Google will rank your business higher if you have more complete business information.

2. Use appropriate keywords throughout the Google Places listing
Making sure to use keywords appropriate to your business throughout your Google Places listing will ensure that you appear in the most relevant searches. Don’t pack your listing too full of keywords, however, as Google might become suspicious and lower your ranking.

3. Verify your listing
In Google Places, you have the option to verify your listing. This is a must, because it lets Google know that you actually own the business that you’re updating. You can either verify through a postcard or phone call.

4. Make your listing stand out
Put in photos and videos of your business so users can see exactly what your storefront looks like, and give them a reason to choose you over the other guys.

5. Put your listing in as many directories as possible
Google checks to see where else your business is listed, so be sure to include your business in as many directories as possible. However, this can be extremely time consuming, so I would suggest using a service such as Local AdsUpNow that automatically submits your business to thousands of directories, which gives your listing a higher rank.

Just follow these easy steps and you’ll be on your way to a better Google Places rank. For more information about directory submission services, check out Local AdsUpNow and sign-up to request more information.