Testing Gmail Open and Click Through Rates

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Email is a great tool to use in traffic acquisition; it's a way to get existing customers to come back, as well as providing a way to communicate with your market.

However, to make sure that your effort is being rewarded, you do need to make sure that you are measuring its effectiveness.

There are two key measures for this:

• Open rates
• CTR

Of course, you'll want to add conversion to this, as well, but since that requires tracking more than just the email, it's outside the scope of this article.

How to Measure Open Rates

The classic way to measure open rates is to track the number of times an image included in the mail is downloaded from your server. To try this out, create an image and upload it to a specific folder, and give it a specific name.

Then, send yourself an email, with the image linked to (i.e. not sent with the email, but provided as part of an HTML message), and open it in your email client.

What you should see is that the image is downloaded from the web site, and subsequently, since you know how many emails you sent (1) and how many times the image was viewed (1), the open rate is 100%.

On the other hand, if you send the email to someone and they delete it without opening it, then the open rate will begin to fall.

What is it testing? Your subject line. If it's not compelling, the email won't be opened.

Of course, this also only works for HTML email. If the receiver only ever reads plain text, then it isn't going to work; which is where the CTR comes in.

How to Measure Click Through Rates

The CTR, or Click Through Rate, measures how compelling the email was that someone actually bothered to click on a link to follow through to the web site being advertised or offer being made.

The simplest way to measure it is to use a bitmark (from Bitly.com, or a Goo.gl link) and simply track the number of clicks.

Of course, there's going to be a confusion for people with text only email clients, who will likely see the "Can't read this email, click here" text and then use that to show the original email. So, it's important to have two pages set up on the web server:

• the original email
• the offer itself

The first page should, of course, link to the offer page. While the results might be a bit skewed, it's better than nothing.

Gmail Changes Complicate Matters

Now, Gmail has introduced image caching for email. This means that although email users will be able to see images in their email faster, and without specifically asking for them, it's going to play havoc for measuring traffic acquisition through email.

For a start, the open rates are going to be so unreliable that you should disregard gmail recipients from the open rate calculations.

Then, you will need to pay a lot more attention to the CTR and display rates, probably by adding counters on the two pages mentioned above, and adding them specifically to custom Experiments and Goals in Analytics.

It's not the disaster that many seem to be suggesting, but it does make testing and tracking traffic acquisition through email marketing a little more complex for list managers with a large number of gmail recipients.

Traffic Acquisition and The Comparative Cost of Customer Acquisition

Traffic acquisition is only part of the equation; another important part is customer acquisition. It's all very well to have the traffic, but how much of it actually converts into customers? If you can't answer that question, then you're in even more trouble!

Let's start at the beginning.

Traffic acquisition in web site terms is the act of getting eyeballs to a specific web property (page, video, blog post, etc.) It can be achieved through PPC campaigns, paid search placement, SEO techniques, social marketing, and so on - all of which have a cost.

Knowing that cost (essentially the price paid divided by the number of visits) enables you to work out the TAC. But there's also been a lot of talk recently of something else - the CAC, or Customer Acquisition Cost.

That's the cost of acquiring a single customer, on average, and needs to compare favorably with the average lifetime value of your customer base, if you are to remain solvent.

If your CAC exceeds the revenue generated by the customer base, you will begin to lose money. Typically, your CAC is equal to the TAC plus the cost of any additional resources that have been used to convert the visitor into a customer.

This is usually where the trouble starts. How do you know what your conversion rate is? How do you increase your conversion rate? How do you get inside your visitors mindset to work out why they do or don't choose to buy from you?

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All of these topics (and more) are covered in the Traffic Acquisition Insider newsletter, where we expand on the topics talked about on the blog, and give you real advice and step-by-step guides that you can use today to boost traffic, conversions, and expand your bottom line!

Why Bit.ly is the New 1-800

Domain names are in hot demand - and the chances are good that your personal favorite is already taken - so how do you get your keywords into your URL? Read on...

Enter URL shortening services.

If you're not familiar with them, they take a long URL, and reduce it to something that can be tweeted, quoted, texted, or just scribbled on the back of a napkin with more accuracy than a regular URL.

There are a number of services that you can use:

• bit.ly
• goo.gl
• ow.ly
• is.gd
• ... and many more!

There are so many to choose from, that it can be difficult to make sure you're using the most appropriate, and useful service. Whichever you choose, your URL will look something like:

• http://bit.ly/keywordcracker

Notice how, even if the top level domain is taken, you can still have a (shorter) TLD with your web site name or marketing message in it!

So, why use a URL shortening service? Easy - they can be easier to remember, less ambiguous to communicate, and come with some extra benefits.

To learn about the key hidden extras, see why you should be using URL shorteners as part of your next traffic acquisition project, and, importantly which service to choose just join the Insiders Club:

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You'll get the free URL Shortener Traffic Acquisition Report, as well as hints and tips on a regular basis to help you generate traffic, and make the most of it!

If You Make ANY of these Three Mistakes, Your Site will be Invisible!

Sometimes, the best information is the most basic, and takes the least number of words to say. With that in mind, here are three very basic mistakes that people make time after time when trying to attract traffic to their site.

#1 : Your Site (or page) Isn't Even in Google!

It might sound a bit silly, but do take the time to check that your site is actually listed in Google's index.

How? Do a Google search for [ site:http://www.yoursite.com ] and Google will return a list of every page that appears in Google's index.

If there's one missing, you can add it using the Google Webmaster Tools submission service. This also works for individual pages.

#2 : Your Site (or page) Doesn't Rank Well for Real Keywords!

This sounds like more familiar territory; at least it isn't a newbie error like #1, right? You'd be surprised. The keywords that you think are important might not be as important to your visitors. Get them wrong and you might as well not even be in the index at all.

The remedy? We used to tell people to check their Analytics stats. But since Google decided that we shouldn't be able to see the keywords people use, and since we're trying to make sure that we've got all the keywords down pat, that isn't going to help...

Enter AdWords. More specifically the new AdWords Keyword Planner. Just do a search, using your URL rather than a root keyword, for Keyword and Ad Group ideas. Check that the top 10 matches your content - if it doesn't, again, your site will be invisible to people who don't look past the first few pages of results.

#3 : You Have No Sitemap!

This is a bit obscure for some people, and many forget it. A Sitemap is just a list of all the content on your site - all the FLVs, all the pages, images, and so on - arranged in an XML file that can be easily read by a search engine.

There's the key - search engine - not just Google, but Bing, Yahoo, and others all use Sitemaps to figure out what's on your site, and what's interesting on your site.

For the complete lowdown on Sitemaps, Google has a great page all about them, and you should check it out.

So there it is - a short and sweet guide to making your site go from invisible to visible in three easy steps.

What do Google's Changes Mean For Traffic Acquisition and CPA?

The first thing to say is that Google's recent decision to provide (or enforce?) end do end encryption across search queries will benefit SEO operations, traffic acquisition professionals, and the quality of information on the content.

In the long run.

In fact, a recent Website Magazine article agrees. As does the Keyword Cracker blog.It's actually quite hard to find someone (beyond the usual SEO scare-mongering tactics and anti-privacy activists moaning) who thinks otherwise.

By all means check out this article by the Keyword Cracker blog to get the full details of why it's such a big deal (and it is) but the basic skinny is this - nobody will ever know, going forward, what search terms brought a visitor to a specific page.

So, how will this affect your CPA?

In the world of Search, your CPA measurement (Cost per Acquisition) is more often than not linked to your AdWords spend. It's easy enough to see that, for a given search term, a certain number of visitors have been acquired, and that if you divide your total AdWords spend by that number , you have your first basic CPA metric.

Traffic Acquisition by regular organic search traffic, on the other hand, is more complex, as the CPA for that traffic now has to include the research component.

It's the ability to compare the two (organic and paid) that has changed. In fact, on the basis of keyword phrase analysis it's gone completely, and you can no longer figure out which the better tactic might be, or cross-pollinate from organic to paid search terms.

Tough.

How Does it Affect Traffic Acquisition?

In my opinion, it's just become a lot more fun again. we now can't look at organic search metrics to give us answers, and so, as an industry, we're going to go one of two ways. Back to keyword stuffing more or less at random (urgh), or towards quality content that counts (yay!).

If we bring value to our marketplace, we will acquire visitors, we won't be able to help it. If we acquire visitors, we will acquire customers for our clients. There are a whole lot of ways to add value to the content, and bring that content to the marketplace besides looking at marching figures of organic search metrics.

That's why it's going to become more fun - it will force us to become creative again. A byproduct will be content that enriches the marketplace, and forms lasting bonds; not just promote keywords to get high traffic numbers with little engagement.

Because, as we all know, the true CPA has to include a drop-off component, and reducing that increases efficiency, and hence brings the CPA down.

Don't thank me, thank Google.

Two Great Reasons Why You Should Be Buying Expired Domains

Expired domains can be found very easily using the DomainTools.com domain finder service. Those who are serious about traffic acquisition will already know their way around the various tools, but you may have overlooked this one.

It's called Dropping Names, and contains domain names that people don't want any more, or have no use for. A simple search yields a list of related names in a series of columns. The two that we're most interested in are:

• the domain name itself;
• the domain age.

Here's a quick reminder - the domain name must relate to your site, otherwise (a) these techniques won't work, and (b) you'll end up with irritated visitors.

So, pick a domain name that is relevant.

Someone Had It First

The first reason to buy an expired (or expiring) domain name is that someone had it, there are likely bookmarks pointing to it, and at the very least, it has some recognition. Plus, if you didn't have it, that's probably because you wanted it, but it wasn't available.

This could produce a trickle, or a flood of traffic, and is similar to the Revisitors.com philosophy.

Once the domain name has been purchased (probably in an auction, if it's any good), you will need to remember to update the 404 Page Not Found redirects to point to your own site. Otherwise, the bookmarks will fail, and you really want them to go to a page that contains quality links to your main site.

Authority Comes with Age

The second reason to purchase an expired domain name is age. A domain that has been around a while, and is relevant, can be linked to sites that haven't. Those sites can benefit from the Domain Age and rank more highly in search engine results pages.

This can also help to drive traffic towards your site, provided that all the other on- and off-page SEO principles have also been respected.

There are other reasons for buying up expired names, and other tools for finding them, but the process remains the same, and web real estate remains one of the more valuable components of a traffic acquisition strategy.

Website Traffic Flipping : The Traffic Acquisition Cookbook

This is one of the more expensive, but potentially one of the highest return, methods for increase quality traffic flow to a web site. It's lifted from the forthcoming Keyword Cracker Traffic Acquisition Cookbook, which contains (at the present count) eleven separate strategies for generating high volume, high quality traffic.

There are three steps to website traffic flipping:

• acquire the website;
• convert the traffic;
• integrate the site.

It's important to note that this is much like a company takeover in which a rival is purchased for the customer list, and other assets, and the two are eventually amalgamated. I don't personally like the term asset stripper, but if you're familiar with it, try to think of this as something of the same.

Acquiring the Website

This requires research, and verification. Low priced sites, such as Squidoo lenses can be found on the open marketplace, and I daresay that there are Wordpress blogs for sale as well.

They need to have a high volume of traffic, be turning a profit, and have high conversion rates. The high conversion rates are important, especially when measured for pages that rank highly for the keywords that your traffic acquisition plan is targeting, as you're paying for engagement rather than raw traffic and conversion.

Other assets include mailing lists and backlogs (pipelines) of un-published, quality blog posts. Be prepared to offer a bit more for these, as they are very valuable in the right hands.

Converting the Traffic

Sounds easy - all you need to do is put a link to your website in their list, right?

If that's all there was to it, then a simple Joint Venture would suffice. However, the reason that we're buying the site rather than just doing a JV is to have the control to be able to convert the traffic in a consistent and controlled manner.

It's a gradual process of re-education (of existing customers) and gently diverting them to the new site, where they are promised better quality resources and content, and better deals on purchases.

Integrating the Site

At a given point, all the existing affiliate links will be converted to yours, and the various back-links will have been upgraded to point to your own site; and the customers will be educated.

The final stage is to ensure a consistent look and feel by redirecting the URLs so that they point to content on your site, and gradually phase out, or move across, the acquired content.

This final stage is, in fact, optional, as you could choose simply to dispose of the acquired site, having converted the customers and re-deployed the key assets. This is the online equivalent of the asset stripping I spoke of earlier, and as I said, I'm not 100% keen on it.

But it does work, probably better online than in the real world.

Traffic Acquisition Strategies for Lifestyle Businesses

A lifestyle business is one that let's you lead the kind of lifestyle that you want - be it as a kind of nomadic business owner working four hours per week (as in Timothy Ferris' "Four Hour Work Week"), or a stay-at-home parent - without any pretense that you're trying to build an empire or legacy.

On the face of it, it's a fairly easy proposition. After all, there are any number of bloggers out there who make a reasonably healthy living, as well as freelance SEOs, article writers, and various affiliates.

However, as Sean Ogle points out on his blog:

"The single most difficult roadblock you’ll encounter when starting a business like this is traffic. You know there are thousands if not millions of people out there who have the same interests as you, but finding them during your first year can seem like nothing short of an impossibility."

(As an aside, it's well worth checking out his Location Rebel product - it's free, and I get nothing for pointing you in that direction - it's just a great read!)

So, lifestyle businesses will live or die on the amount of traffic that they will receive. I don't care if you're a bricks and mortar business, or an affiliate marketer, or some kind of online-offline amalgamation mash-up of the two, business is your lifeblood.

On Sean's blog post, he gives his approach, but it can be easily generalized, although your mileage will vary.

He embraces the Facebook route : set up a Facebook page, get traffic to it by using Facebook adverts, point the visitors to a domain that captures their email address by dangling a carrot in front of them, and then give them a great freebie to say 'thanks'.

That's one way, but it works equally well with any high-traffic content-centric well-curated publishing platform. Squidoo, Hub Pages, article repositories, even Blogger can all be used to generate traffic as long as you provide high quality on-topic content.

On the advertising side, Google AdWords are a great way to get some targeted traffic. You'll need to test various campaigns (and Google's made that really easy), but it will work for the correct set of keywords.

Paid inclusion to search engines can also help, but again, you need to be sure that the keywords that you choose are conducive to bringing in traffic that is actually going to convert into actions. Check out my Future of Organic SEO article for more information in that direction.

Bricks and mortar lifestyle businesses can also benefit from using traffic acquisition strategies - but you'll need to go local. Local search, local web site traffic (i.e. local Facebook pages and Blogger blogs) and locally facing keywords.

For example, in my own niche, model rail, there often seem to be different keywords for different locales - in the UK it's model railway, in the US it's model railroad, for example - and it's worth taking a moment to segregate the search terms by country just to make sure that you're still bang on target.

Not forgetting, of course, to test, test, test!

SoLoMo, Google In-Depth and Video : Improving Traffic Acquisition

Modern traffic acquisition techniques are no longer merely based around getting the word out and doing a bit of search engine optimization or PPC campaigns. These days, any strategy has to integrate high quality content, social marketing and multimedia aspects.

The so-called SoLoMo approach (read SoLoMo Minded SEO Strategies from Websitemagazine.com) for example, embraces [So]cial, [Lo]cal and [Mo]bile aspects of modern organic SEO. We can also leverage this approach. For example, Social traffic acquisition might include anything from active tweets to maintaining high-quality social profiles on Facebook.

Local traffic acquisition may prove to be a harder nut to crack, especially if your target audience isn't that bothered about where they get their goods and services from. However, if they do, anything from a local domain name to some kind of physical presence will all contribute to helping boost traffic acquisition strategies by giving them a local aspect.

Mobile traffic acquisition strategies follow much the same path as local SEO - low page load speeds, high visibility, mobile specific content, etc. - with the added bonus that we can now leverage things like apps (iPhone/Android) to help improve incoming traffic.

The recent addition of In-Depth to the Google stable also favors traffic acquisition through high quality, in-depth (i.e. well written and researched) articles. Again, Websitemagazine.com has a great article on Google In-Depth, and the underlying message is clear : to get users interest and confidence/trust, you need to provide high quality content.

Now that Google is recognizing that content for what it is, you can build an additional level of trust into that relationship, making the target (potential) customer more likely to (a) bookmark, (b) share  - see Social traffic acquisition, above, and (c) buy!

Time to get researching, creating, and promoting your high quality, industry and product-specific material, then...

Which brings us to video. A staggering 87% of marketers use video, according to Uflip, and it's easy to see why. For example, did you know that YouTube is the second most used search engine?

Clearly, there's a great avenue for traffic acquisition through video. In fact, this is nothing new - it's how soap operas got their name - but the possibility to combine Social, Mobile, In-Depth and Video in one campaign is something that only new advances in technology can facilitate.

Something to mull over when you design your next online/offline traffic acquisition campaign!

What is the Traffic Acquisition Cost for Google?

Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Google could be paying up to 1 billion dollars to remain the default search engine on Apple's iOS devices. Part of their reasons for doing this might just be that the cost of acquiring traffic is on the increase due to increased competition from the likes of Microsoft's Bing service.

The underlying question is : why should Bing (and others) matter to Google's TAC?

The answer is fairly simple. Google, Bing and others do deals to put their services on platforms as a default search provider. They pay money to be able to do this, and to hit the platforms with the highest penetration (Blackberry, iOS, etc.) they need to have deep pockets.

If they miss out on a platform, they have to work doubly hard (and pay more) to entice those 'lost' customers back to their service, as well as having a smaller customer base to start with. Even if advertising (or R&D) costs stay the same, the TAC would go up if they lost one of the key platforms.

According to TechCrunch, Google's actual TAC for 2013 is estimated at 3.3 dollars per iOS user, and is something like 5% of gross revenue across all platforms, which includes iOS and Mozilla, as well as Chrome/Android.

Now, obviously, the increasing penetration of Android, Chrome, and other Google platforms and products going forward will have an impact on Google's TAC, but unless iOS sales drop, that won't save them from paying absurd amounts to Apple, for the slightly dubious privilege of being the default search provider.

What can other businesses learn from this? Firstly, you need to make sure that your TAC is balanced by lifetime customer value. In other words, knowing your TAC per 100 dollars ratio (or similar) will be vital in helping you to understand if it is as efficient as it could be at retaining customer value.

The forEntrepreneurs website has a great graphic illustrating this key ratio. In essence, you can exchange CAC (cost to acquire customers) with TAC, factoring in your conversion rate as you go along.

It's interesting to note that Google has the R&D investment to increase several areas of the equation without shelling out to third parties (through open source participation, viral effects, and strategic partnerships that don't involve the exchange of real money), but that clearly their management puts a lot of stock in their core offering - the free search engine service.

That service drives the Google engine; and that includes opening up revenue opportunities. So, investing 1 billion dollars in keeping a high flow from established and emerging platforms makes good business sense, whilst also demonstrating the power of free.

How Keyword Research Helps Reduce Traffic Acquisition Costs

One of the key questions on all content producer's minds is "how can I reduce my traffic acquisition costs?"

There are some easy answers - pay people less for content designed to pull in visitors, blanket bomb the social networks with a variety of split-tested messages, and use tools to target the lowest priced PPC keywords that have the highest raw return.

But none of these are particularly efficient. They may well drive up visitor numbers, but anyone playing around with Google Analytics will quickly realize, by looking at the Visitor Flow diagram, that the quality of visitor will be falling.

In short, they won't stick around long enough to make a purchase, and they won't come back.

The underlying reason for this is simple : there hasn't been enough keyword research, and as such the visitors that are being captured don't have a real interest in what the site has to offer. You're just pulling in more people with the hope that some of them are interested, whereas an efficient traffic acquisition drive will aim to pull in traffic where the majority of the visitors are interested in what you have to offer.

If you think that sounds obvious, then do me a favor. The next time you go on a traffic acquisition drive, track the conversion rate. 99% of the time, no matter who is managing your traffic acquisition project, it will begin to dip, even as the visitor numbers climb. So will your repeat visitor ratio. As will the time spent on page.

In short, stickiness will fall. And the further it falls, the less profit per visitor is being made. And the cost per visitor therefore begins to climb, which makes the TAC (traffic acquisition cost) look a lot less attractive!

To counteract this, make sure you do your keyword research. Now, as I pointed out on the Keyword Cracker blog post 'The Future of Organic SEO', Google is, on the face of it, about to make this a whole lot harder with the retirement of their AdWords Keyword Tool.

But I think that it's a blessing in disguise, because it will force (persuade?) people to put more emphasis on the context of the keywords that they use, and to re-examine the actual keywords that are bringing in traffic now, rather than trying to second guess what people might be looking for in the future.

So, fire up Analytics (or just look at the Blogger/Wordpress/Squidoo/HubPages/whatever stats) and start your keyword research there, instead. Then try to pick out areas that people are interested in, but that you don't cover explicitly.

Use those in the next traffic acquisition drive, and you should see a rise in effectiveness over previous campaigns, making it that little bit more cost-effective.