Estimating visitor value

We love traffic.  We want as much traffic as possible.  It is really nice to see our traffic graphs jump really high.  With our PPC campaigns we pretty much obsess over our click-through rates.  We like to go after the keywords phrases that drive the most traffic.  Everybody is in love with Digg and Social Media.

All traffic is not equal, even search traffic coming from similar phrases.  What we really need is traffic that converts.  Visitors that take whatever action we expect them to take.  Buy an e-book, subscribe to our newsletter or download our software, etc.  We need traffic motivated to take action.

There is a big difference between running a site that get 10,000 visitors a day that makes $10,000 a month and one that gets 1,000 visitors a day that makes $20,000 a month. For the first, the visitor is worth 3 cents, and for the second is worth 66 cents — 22 times more.

While some might say that non-converting traffic is good for branding, I prefer branding that actually gets results.

The most cost effective way to get branding traffic, in my opinion, is via Viral Marketing, Social Media, Organic Search or very cheap CPM based deals.  I do not like the idea of big PPC budgets for branding only.

If you are planning or working on your start-up, you need to make the best use of your time and money, possible.

Here is a simple tip I use to get traffic that takes the action I want by measuring the potential visitor value before hand.

My tool of choice is Google’s Adwords Traffic Estimator.  I know it is not very accurate and many times the estimates are way off, but it serves my purposes.

1. Use the Google Keyword Research Tool to find as many relevant keywords as possible for the target content.
2. Include those keywords in the traffic estimator .
3. Set the maximum click to $100. Don’t panic! This is just for getting the #1 slot estimates.
4. Sort the results by cost per day. That is — the number of clicks times the maximum bid.

The reasoning is the following: If advertisers are willing to pay x for some particular keywords, that means that they are making at least that to break even.

It is a good idea to run the estimates several times during the week to rule out inexperienced advertisers bidding blunders.

If we sort by number of clicks, we only care about the volume of traffic. If we sort by the max cost per click we only want to target the most expensive keywords. Now, targeting the keywords with the max cost per day means we are after the money makers.
Use PPC, SEO or buy relevant ads or reviews on sites rankings for those keywords.

Determining searcher intent automatically

Here is an example of how useful it is to learn SEO from research papers.

If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you will know that I am a big fan of finding out what exactly search visitors want. I posted about classifying both visitors and landing pages, so that search visitors looking for information find information articles, searchers looking to take action land on transaction pages, etc.

I really like the research tools MSN Labs has. One of my favorites is this http://adlab.msn.com/OCI/OCI.aspx

You can use it to detect commercial intent. Try it. It is really nice.

I’ve been wanting to do something like that, but I didn’t have enough clues as to how to do it. Until now.

Search engines patent expert, Bill Slawsky, uncovered a gem. A research paper that details how a team of researchers achieved exactly this.

I still need to dig deep into the document and the reference material, but it is definitely an excellent find.

I will try to make a new tool for this. I will also try to make this and other scripts I write, more accessible to non-technical readers. I guess most readers don’t care much about the programming details. They just want to be able to use my tools easily

LongTailMiner v0.1 alpha – find long tail keywords nobody thought about

I’m really enjoying this blogging thing! Every comment I am getting from my readers is a new idea that I feel rushed to put into practice.

My reader, Andrea, mentioned she parses log files to mine for keywords as well. That is an excellent idea.

I decided to put that idea into code and here is a new tool to mine for long tail keywords.

To make really good use of it, I would setup a PPC campaign in Google with a “head keyword” in broad match, bidding at the minimum possible. Make sure your ads maintain good click-through rates (over 0.5%) to avoid getting disabled. Run it for a week or two (preferably more) and you will have a good number of search referrals and “long tail keywords” that people are actually looking for. You can later create good content pages that include those keywords. In most cases, long tail keywords are really easy to rank with on-page optimization only.

I will probably write a Youmoz entry with more detailed instructions on how to take advantage of this. In this way I can get more people to try it and get really valuable feedback.

Here is the Python code:

#!/usr/bin/python

# LongTailMiner.py v0.1 alpha by Hamlet Batista 2007

# 


import re

from urlparse import urlparse

from cgi import parse_qsl


p = r'[^"]+"GETs([^s]+)[^"]+"s2[^"]+"([^"]+(?:google|yahoo|msn|ask)+[^"]+)"'


log = open('tripscan.actual_log')

lines = log.readlines()


keywords = set()


for line in lines:

 m = re.search(p, line)


	if m:

 	(internal, link) = m.groups()


		elements = urlparse(link)


		if elements[4]: #check to see if there is query string

 		params = parse_qsl(elements[4])#break qs in keyword, value pairs


			for (k,v) in params:

 			if k == 'p' or k == 'q':#top search engines use p or q for the keywords

 				keywords.add( elements[1] + " - " +  v)


#print the report

for k in  keywords:

 print k

Here is the output:

search.sympatico.msn.ca – best places to vacation in april
www.ask.com – help find a cheap vacation package anywhere
www.ask.com – new york vacation package deals
search.yahoo.com – vegas vacation packages
search.yahoo.com – what is the best beaches to stay in jamaica
search.yahoo.com – outrageous hawaii vacation packages
www.google.se – “paris in 5 days” versailles
search.sympatico.msn.ca – Vacation Package Deals
search.yahoo.com – vacationpackage
search.yahoo.com – vacation packages
search.msn.com – 10 best places for vacation
in.search.yahoo.com – vacation package
search.yahoo.com – best places to vacation in june/july
search.sympatico.msn.ca – best travel deals for june
search.msn.com – last minute caribean deals
search.yahoo.com – package vacation
www.google.com – Tripscan
search.sympatico.msn.ca – best places to vacation in June
search.sympatico.msn.ca – best places to travel in october
search.yahoo.com – vacation package
search.msn.com – caribean vacation
search.msn.com – Best Caribean vacation
www.ask.com – Cheap Vacation Package
search.sympatico.msn.ca – CANYON RANCH IN LENNOX
search.sympatico.msn.ca – find vacation packages
ca.search.yahoo.com – Hawaii all inclusive Vacation Packages
search.yahoo.com – california vacation ideas
search.yahoo.com – vacaton package
ie.search.msn.com – caribean vacation
search.yahoo.com – all inclusive package deals from New York to Cancun
search.yahoo.com – best places to explore
search.msn.com – caribean vacation island packages
search.yahoo.com – vancation package
search.yahoo.com – puerto vallarta nude resorts
www.ask.com – all inclusive vacation places
search.yahoo.com – vacation packge
search.yahoo.com – vacation package
www.ask.com – caribean deals
search.msn.com – best hotels in caribean
search.msn.com – the best caribean vacation
www.google.com – related:www.exectourtravel.com/
ca.search.yahoo.com – vacation packages

This is just scratching the surface. One improvement we can make, is to identify the landing pages to which the keywords lead, so we can make sure visitors are finding what they want.

Usage

In order to use the script you need to download Python from http://www.python.org. The script should run in Unix/Linux, Mac, and Windows but I only tested it in Linux.

1. Copy your log file to the directory were you saved the script.

2. Change the name of the log file (inside the quotes) in the line log = open(’tripscan.actual_log’) to the name of your log file.

3. In the command line type: python LongTailMiner.py and you should see the report.

Assessing competitive levels

Critical to success is competing where we know we can excel.  This might sound obvious, but many entrepreneurs fail to identify exploitable opportunities.  Don’t get me wrong; I love competing.  There is no problem with dreaming big.  Even if we want to go after Dell or Microsoft, we have to find a really smart plan to achieve that.

Realistically it is wise to start very small and have a clear and smart plan to grow bigger.

I do this with SEO.  I always target niche keywords first — keywords that no other SEO or few others are targeting.  When I conquer those keywords, I move on to the more competitive ones.  This has the added benefit that my relevance profile looks natural to the search engines.

Here is a tip I use to find such keywords.

Google and other search engines let you search for words in the title, url, body, and the text in the links pointing to the web pages.  You can use this information to assess whether there are savvy SEOs targeting that keyword niche.

It’s been well known for a while to SEOs that the link text in the links pointing to a page carry enormous weight.  You can practically rank first page for keywords that are not in the body text if you use the link text effectively.  Many websites that rank high do not contain those keywords in their incoming anchor text.

How competitive a keyword is, is usually measured by the number of sites listed for the keyword search.  For example, a search for “seo” in Google returns 125 million results. Very competitive!

Searching for “allinanchor:seo” returns under 3 million results.  A lot of results but far fewer than the normal search.  A search for “allintitle:seo” returns under 5 million results.

To assess how competitive a search phrase is, I prefer to compare different searches: intitle, inanchor, intext, and inurl.  This cues me as to what extent websites are being actively optimized.  This is my real competition!

Visitors intentions and correct landing pages

One of the most often-overlooked aspects of search engine marketing is building sites and doing keyword research without first considering the importance of understanding the visitors and giving the right information they seek.

For a successful campaign, there needs to exist a website that is designed with a clear path that leads the visitor to conversion and a direct connection between what the visitor is searching for and what he or she finds on the landing page.

We can organize visitors’ searches by their intention in three main stages: generic or information search, navigational or brand search, and transactional or action search.

We need to have landing pages for each step and each page must have a call to action that tries to lead the visitor to the next step. Most marketers send the visitor to the home page or to the action page disregarding the stage of the mind of the visitor. This is one of the main reason the industry-wide conversion rates are so low.

For example, if we are selling a Dell Latitude D420 and we get a visitor looking for computers, we need to send him to a landing page that talks about the benefits of laptops over computers, with a call to action to take him to the laptops page.

Once there, we will try to persude him to research our particular model, and in the model page, we will try to take him to buy it.

If the user was searching for laptops, we need to send him to the laptops page directly, and if he is looking for our particular model, we will take him there and convince him that we have the best price.

Finding profitable niches

Oftentimes what we would really like to do, will not bring the money we need to survive immediately.

What I really love is writing software and solving problems, yet I had to learn the boring part of business and marketing.  I was very lucky that SEO required a great deal of technical understanding and was really fun to do in the early days.

In order to support myself and fund my software business, I started doing affiliate marketing in highly profitable markets such as on-line pharmacy, finance, travel, etc. These markets are extremely competitive, however with the right knowledge and tools you can thrive.  Take for example one of my old affiliate sites http://www.tripscan.com  which ranks organically in the top 20 (used to be top 5 when I was actively marketing it)  in Yahoo for the highly competitive phrase “vacation package” which has more than 50 million competing sites.

The key is to start small and find keywords that nobody else — or a few smart ones — have thought about.  Most people call this “the long tail” but let me tell you that it is longer than most marketers think.

Let me give you an example of how I find keywords with very little competition and a lot of searches.

When most marketers do keyword research they think of keywords in terms of their solutions not in terms of their customers’ problems.  Now let me ask you this:  When you go to your doctor because you feel something is wrong, but you don’t know what it is; do you ask your doctor:  Can I take ABC medicine to feel better?  Or you tell your doctor your symptoms and wait for the tests and diagnosis?

Similarly, customer go to search engines looking for answers to their specific problems.  Most of them don’t know the solutions yet and most marketers miss this big opportunity.

For example one way I use to find out what my potential customers want is to read the support forums and Google groups they visit.  They will post questions asking for help and they usually use the same words when searching for help.

It is smart to use those same words in our Google ads or in our titles, descriptions and page copy.

Hopefully this trick will not lose effect now that I made it public.