Page Speed Optimization
If it takes too long for your website to load when someone clicks on your ad, they’re more likely to give up and leave your website.
What’s more, this unwelcome behavior signals to Google that your landing page experience is poor, which negatively impacts your ad’s performance. This is especially critical for mobile devices, whose role in shopping continues to grow. That’s why you want to make sure your landing page load time is up to speed.
Often, there are steps you can take on your own to improve page speed. However, in many cases we have found it more effective to build a mirror landing page on a dedicated site that provides super-fast load times and creates no SEO/duplicate site issues.
In one A/B split test, the Super-Fast Landing Page generated
232% more conversions than did the legacy site.
Contact us today to learn more!
Conversion Tracking
With today’s technology, it is possible to know which sales come from which source, and that leads to more confident and better decisions about profitable ad spend. Here’s one way to think about the path to purchase:
The same way physical stores carefully monitor their cash registers, online stores carefully track their marketing spend. This means that they can react quickly when sales dip or cash disappears. A physical store uses security cameras to monitor shopping activity. Online stores use pixels.
Pixels help you understand which sales come from which leads. A particular sale gets attributed to a particular ad or click or promotion. Attribution is like a security system for sales. It makes sure you’re not money isn’t being “stolen.”
There are three elements to any security system. Here’s how it works:
- Install cameras in the right places
The first step is coverage. If we can see the cash but not people’s faces, then we don’t know who took the money. If we can see the faces but not the register, then we don’t know anything is missing.
The same is true with ad spend. If we use two different checkout paths in our shopping cart solution but only track one, then we’ll underestimate our sales. If we have two sources feeding the same landing page, we need the right kind of pixels to differentiate the sources.
The security system can’t track what it can’t see.
So, the first step is to make sure the right pixels are in the right places.
- Ensure settings are correct and images are clear
Once the cameras are in place, we make sure they are behaving as expected. A lens could be dirty, or the focus could be off, or we could need a wide angle where we only have a narrow one.
The same is true of pixels. There are many different ways to set up and use pixels and it’s important to make sure the right pixels are set up correctly, looking at the right events, and sending back the right data… and to reevaluate them when changes are made to the events or respective data.
Clean data leads to robust reporting and better ad spending decisions.
- Updates
In physical stores, cameras can get bumped, batteries need to be replaced, new registers get added. Online, the business experiments with new apps/plugins for their shopping cart, different styles of landing pages, revises a best-selling product, and more.
This is not “set it and forget it.”
Here’s how MQ&C makes sure your conversion actions are properly recorded.
- Initial Audit
Our first step is to evaluate and fix the existing conversion tracking. Cost varies by size of the business and complexity of the reporting systems. The same way more cash registers mean more cameras, more products and landing pages mean more pixels. Also, the sales funnel must have a good foundation so it can handle more and more traffic.
- Basic Tracking
Basic tracking lets you (and us) know when an order comes through. You probably already have something like this in place to track sales. We make sure to protect the integrity of your reporting so that you know which sales are coming from the new advertising.
- Advanced Tracking
With advanced tracking we tie orders to specific leads. It’s the difference between knowing that somebody just placed an order in your store and knowing that Sally Smith, who has been on your email list for 4 months, just spent $900 on product A plus $100 on the upsell to product B from an ad she saw yesterday on Facebook. This is the difference between just tracking orders and tracking lifetime value.
We can show you – in most cases – that a prospect attached to this action (exposed to an ad, signed up for your newsletter, sent a promotion) turned into a customer and what they actually spent.
If you understand the value in spending $1 to make $10, you’re going to be really excited about this type of tracking. Because once you are confident that these leads come from that source, you know exactly where to spend your money to generate strong growth for your business. Contact us today to learn more!
Conversion Rate Optimization
Have you had a sleepless night trying to figure out how you can get more online sales? If so … you are not the only business owner who has struggled with this frustrating problem.
The fact is – it is NOT your fault.
You have a business to run, with a lot of moving parts. From Accounting to Logistics, Customer Service to Sales, you wear a lot of hats. We get it. One of the biggest problems we see in nearly all of our clients – is online conversion.
Many websites today struggle with very high bounce rates and low conversion rates. In some cases, some clients we have seen have over 85% bounce rates… and less than 1% conversion rates. These make staying in business extremely challenging in the highly competitive online retail space.
Think about this for a minute… what would happen if 85 people out of 100, walked into the doors of the local Walmart and then immediately turned around and left, never to return. What if only 1 out 100 people that walked into that same Walmart actually purchased something? How long could that go on before Walmart went bankrupt?
At MQ&C, we are masters at finding your business targeted traffic both on and offline – but we see this same issue over and over again…. Conversions are struggling for many businesses. So, we are doing something about it so your business can start to thrive online.
By actively working with your team to determine goals, test ideas and generate data driven decisions – the MQ&C Conversion Rate Optimization experts can systematically improve your online sales conversions by following scientific and methodical approaches.
We know that getting traffic is expensive – so if we can help you reduce bounce rates, then more people see your message, understand that message and have a longer time to absorb and decide if your products or services meet their needs… instead of just wandering off to buy from your competitors. It also helps you keep your CPA and ROI goals on course, so you can run a more efficient and profitable business.
What would your business look like if we could double your conversion rate?
When you choose to have MQ&C partner with you to improve your conversion rates you get a holistic approach to optimization. From business goals and objectives to strategic and tactical review of your business processes, to the actual implementation of these on the landing pages – we cover the optimization process from start to finish.
We will implement the tests for your site using our A/B Split Testing software. We will develop heat maps and click maps of critical landing pages. We will work with your team to develop brand new pages if needed, but only after we have done all the tests we can on the existing page designs. We will do the analysis and report these findings to you – then all you need to do is implement the changes that resulted in making incremental improvements to your website.
Contact us today to get your free, no obligation quote on Conversion Rate Optimization services and see what we can do for your business today.
Channel Attribution
An analysis of a client’s mail campaign revealed that almost 40% of new customers came from other sources of traffic, such as TV, internet, storefront drive-by, or referred by a friend. The big challenge for marketers is that sales are usually attributed to the last-touch channel, but this is too simple a data point for today’s multi-channel, multi-touch world.
To overcome the challenge, we match as many interactions as possible to unique keys: direct mail key code, email, phone, cell phone, first/ last name, address, zip code, device id, internet visit (GCLID and UTM). We have the most access to unique keys, giving us unmatched match rates for attribution. Plus, when we can’t match a specific interaction, we can often connect the dots using the profiles of similar people. This means that you know exactly which combination of advertising tactics is working.
Intentional Content Research
The Customer Intent Research & Analysis process is a vital step in creating marketing strategies, offers and content that will work for you and your goals.
We talk to business owners every day and they almost always think they know exactly what their target prospects are searching for and why. This is great, but the very truth is that right now you can save yourself thousands of dollars in your ongoing marketing budget just by basing your marketing decisions around why Google thinks your prospects are searching for what you have to offer.
By uncovering your buyer’s intent, you can communicate with them via the right channels in a way that provides a solution to their problem. Knowing how to determine what Google thinks the buyer’s intentions are increases conversions all throughout your sales funnels, while simultaneously lowering marketing costs. It changes how you structure your ad creatives; which keywords to base your paid advertising and retargeting campaigns around. It critically impacts how you structure your content, copywriting and offers.
Understanding the intention behind your target buyer’s searches
is critical to your digital marketing success.
Th Customer Intent Research & Analysis is designed to meet 3 main objectives:
- Find market segments and identify exactly what your target market is not only searching for, but how they are searching, the intent behind why they are searching and what Google thinks they are searching for.
- Provide you information needed to create intention-based marketing strategies that are consistent and successful for website content (articles and blogs), Google Ads, organic search, sales funnels, email marketing and more.
- Create an intelligent content marketing plan to gain rankings for your most important and monetizable keywords, phrases and questions.
Here’s an overview of the process:
- Organic Keyword Research: Most of our clients do keyword and market research very differently than us. It’s critical for us to find out exactly what people in your markets are looking for and why. This information gives you the foundation to create campaigns, content, product pages and structure your offerings to meet the needs of your market and get maximum conversions while still being authentic to you and your vision and messages.
- Customer Intentions: This is the most important part. We mine the internet to find all of the questions that your target buyers are asking. We find out what they want to know and why. We find out what they care about and how they are asking the questions. We scour through websites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, Disqus, Reddit, Google Featured Snippets, Google Questions & Answers, etc. It also shows you exactly who the segments are in your market and what they are searching for and why. Identifying the customer’s pain point is how you can be the solution to their problem.
Contact us to learn more about this ground-breaking investigation toward better understanding your customers’ online behavior.
Instant Scoring
Here’s an example of where data, technology and content come together to create an unparalleled marketing opportunity. Let’s say you’re running a telephone lead generation campaign… it could be comprised of radio ads, paid search, display… or any other channel. Now imagine this.
The phone rings in the call center and even before the call is taken, it’s assigned a rank of 1 to 10. How is that possible, you might ask. Well, within micro-seconds of the call hitting the switch, the phone number is bounced off a database that matches the phone number to a household. Now, the consumer information can be evaluated and scored by a predictive model. That is very useful when call volume is exceeding capacity, and you’d like to make sure the best leads are given priority.
What’s more, this technology will not only prioritize the flow, but allow you to send the best calls to the best agents and the others to less-capable agents or, perhaps to people who take messages for return calls from the good agents. And that’s not all. This technology can call up different scripts promoting different price points can be deployed to leads, depending on their score. And what about the lowest-scoring leads? You could sell and transfer them to a partner – in real time – without ever having taken the call. What a great way to self-liquidate your ad spend and maximize the efficiency of your call center!
Oh, and by the way, we can apply a similar approach to online landing pages. We match IP to zip code, screen resolution, screen size, and other device-specific data points to provide a preliminary or remarketing score that considers time on site. We take data from millions of page views and distill a predictive score from that data – even before it’s linked to an individual customer – which means we can customize the user experience much earlier in the sales funnel than would otherwise be possible. In the case of paid search, we know even more. The combination of GCLID, UTM and phone number allows us to track attribution from initial click to final click before purchase or hand-off to an agent. Our integrations with popular Ecommerce platforms means you know exactly who’s vising your website.
Programmatic Nurturing
Programmatic nurturing is an extremely effective way to deliver follow-up messaging by direct mail to prospects or 1-time buyers who are a good fit for the product, but aren’t looking to buy right now.
As email inboxes are increasingly flooded by promotional messages, USPS boxes are becoming more and more empty… increasing the impact and open rates for follow-up promotions. Digital printing enables the mail to be sent on specific schedules or in response to specific triggers (e.g., a former prospect or 1-time buyer visits your website)
What’s more, the letters can be customized to address the trigger (e.g., “we noticed that you recently visited our website”) or circumstances specific to the initial inquiry (e.g., “sorry we weren’t being able to schedule a convenient time to discuss your home remodeling needs”). Letters can focus on a variety of topics, such as product updates, incentives, and general tips or advice. The goal is to maintain brand awareness so when they are ready to buy, you are the first one that comes to mind.
Retail Site Selection
So why does one existing location soar while a second “identical” location struggles? At first glance, both may show similar population density and demographics. To answer this question, we dig deeper, considering competitive issues, drive time, daytime population, residential population, market cannibalization and more.
There are several reasons sales can be slow. Sometimes the problem is lack of advertising—a store is not well known in the area. Or, it could be a marketing problem—a store has different psychographic targets around its location, so the creative message requires adjustment. Perhaps the problem is cannibalization—a store finds itself with much of the target psychographic within its trade area closer to another store.
Once we have this information, we use it to offer a clear, actionable advertising and marketing path to maximize profitability for both stores.
Got an underperforming retail location? We’d love to take a look!