Conversions Explained

Alright ladies and gentlemen my name is Mike Martens I am with alien run Inc and today we are going to explain conversions. And this is all I’ve said it many times, this is what digital marketing is all about. It’s about getting in, getting some traffic getting your offer in front of the traffic, earning the click. And the next step is the conversion. And what we’re dealing with local SEO and local businesses and contractors here right so the conversion. This is an E-commerce I don’t deal with E-commerce, we’re not selling things online. We’re trying to get our prospects to take the next step. And usually, that would be booking an appointment booking an estimate, supplying their information so that you can call them, right, whatever that might be for you guys. Trying to think about different scenarios what a conversion could be conversion is just whatever you’re trying to get the prospect to do next, right in your, in your sales funnel. So, in most cases that’s like you said, we’re driving them to an estimate form or a phone call.

Okay, how did I miss that a phone call, we’re going to talk a lot about phone calls, And the second I’m going to show you two examples here, local businesses, contractors, and one is based on getting people to fill out a form and why that’s important, and how that conversion process works. And then the second one is getting people to make a phone call. Okay, call or call what are your numbers, and how do we track that and here’s why tracking is so freakin important this is. You could do everything right up to this point. And I’ve seen lots of people who do business, to businesses doing a ton of revenue, who aren’t tracking conversions properly and you can’t go back and see if you don’t track conversions properly, you don’t know what’s working. Okay, I’ve talked with business owners who say, Oh, I think this is working really well for us. And I’m just an analytical guy I need the data and I say, Why do you say that and they can’t tell me it’s a gut feeling, and I can’t tell you, saying that a lot. Honestly though, I can’t, I can’t even explain how often I see that people think something is working one way, and it actually isn’t. It’s working completely another way, it’s a different track different tracking traffic source than they think is bringing them the traffic or is bringing them to conversions. So, how this all filters back to traffic, is you want to find the best ways to maximize your effort in your budget. Right. And so if you’re getting a lot of traffic from one source. In, and people are coming to your website, and it’s 10 times any other traffic source. You might think that that’s the golden ticket. But if there’s no conversions coming from that traffic, You’re not getting any leads you’re not making any sales, then it’s wasted effort. Right now, it could be contributing to your branding and another way we need to touch customers, prospects a number of different times, we have to create a number of impressions. It’s often been said yet, you know there’s eight interactions with a local business customer before you make a sale. And so, you know traffic coming from different sources that doesn’t generate into an immediate sale may have some other purposes in branding and in your overall scheme of things, but if you don’t have the data you don’t know. Right, so that’s why we talk about conversions. That’s why didn’t like this is exciting stuff to me, this is where really the rubber meets the road, and the difference between a digital campaign that generates revenue and one that doesn’t is being able to track conversions. Okay, and then leverage those conversions to figure out how to how to get more of them. So here’s a local business that I work with that we’re going to talk about, and I’ll show you. First of all, the conversion that we are looking for. Okay, this is a local sunroom manufacturer the name of the company is blue flower sunrooms and they manufacture and install sunrooms and screen rooms and patio covers. They build decks, they do. You know retractable retractable screens, those types of things very very busy this spring, a lot of business going on. And so the goal when people come here. Okay, so we’ve gone out we’ve, we’ve, we’ve built our traffic campaign, we’ve got traffic coming from different sources, and for these guys, I’m going to show you in a moment. It’s a really good mix, we’ve got local organic traffic coming from our Google Business Listing. We’ve got organic traffic coming from search, and we’ve got Google business. Google business on Google ad traffic is well, along with a couple other referral traffic sources, but so the traffic gets to the website and our main goal is once they’ve seen enough information for them to click our call to action to get a free estimate. Okay, so this this free estimate button is built into the website, throughout the website. Free Estimate. Okay. And then I think we got at least one more time there, and probably down at the bottom here as well, free estimate. So of course we’ve got our phone number and everything on there as well, but we’re driving people to click this estimate button. Now when they do that, it brings them through to this sheet to this page sorry. Okay, and we have this form. Very simple form. Now I use WP forms, and there’s a because because of the versatility of it. And when it comes to using different pieces of software, in our, in our stack in the service that we provide. I just like, I don’t mess around. I like to have the stuff that works best. And WP forms works really well, we’ve got a very very simple form we’re not trying to intimidate people here, but we ask a lot of information, and typically the more information that you ask, the more qualified, your lead will be, because if people aren’t really not interested. They’re you know they’re not going to fill this although the average sale for this client is like 45 $50,000 Right, so this is a big ticket home renovation project, and we asked for their name, their certain the usual stuff name, phone number, email address, but then we also asked for their service address, and then we have dropdowns here for the types of services that we provide that they’re looking for. We ask some more specific questions, and then we also ask for the source. Now, we don’t rely on this we still track through analytics, but this gives us a really good idea at first glance what’s converting when the lead comes in. Okay, so we asked them to fill that out and then when they click Submit. We send them through to a thank you page. That all seems very unassuming, right. But here’s the, here’s the process that happens is we track this flow, we know how many people are coming to the website, we know how many people are visit are clicking the Request an estimate button, and we know how many people become leads because they filled out the form and they hit the thank you page. So on this thank you page, We have pixels that fire, a Facebook conversion is registered in Google Analytics that conversion is registered, and now we know we can really track that lead now to extrapolate and go a little bit further, we can then compare all of these, this lead data over, you know the these guys are kind of seasonal right where I’m at in Western Canada. They don’t do a lot in the wintertime, spring right now. May through fall they’re busy, and we can look back and see which of those leads turned into actual jobs, and then you can you can sort of measure your traffic source, as you know, just not just by the number of leads that have brought us, but how many, how many dollars at General. Okay, and we’ll talk more about that in the next example too but just a good example of a thank you page, it does a couple things right, you know, you tell people what’s gonna happen next. Okay, we’re gonna give you a call that’s what we say here, and then we give them some options they can check out the social media sites, and then they can look at our blog as well to see different projects, and just, you know, we get them inspired we kind of build the Stoke right, we’re always trying to get people to take the next step, and have them be excited about that until we get them to the point where we’ve given them enough information that they can now decide whether they’re going to become a customer.

Okay, now let’s look at how that all looks in analytics, and we’ll look at the the last 30 days here. Last 30 days. Okay, yeah, I’m not going to talk about this traffic spike that was something not, not, not, not nothing that we need to talk about. But what we are looking at here in in Google Analytics is acquisition, so people who have came through for the website came to the website. We’re we’ve broken it out by all traffic, and source. And so that’s what these columns are here is our source, and that spike was caused by an ad that we ran on Facebook, and we’re just gonna, we’re just gonna, we’re not even going to look at that that’s unimportant. Right now, our main sources are Google CPC, which is pay per click Google organic which is people who found us searching Google, and then came to our website, local organic, are people that came to the website from our Google Business Listing and we’ve set up UTM codes so we can track that all properly, and then people who came direct to the website and they typed in littleflowercenter.ca right. And then we’ve got some social referrals that use a mediator tool, Facebook, being. Yeah, that sort of thing that goal that I have up on the screen here right now is not, it’s a soft conversion, people who visited the website are longer than three minutes. Okay, and then we can look at those and see that on average, our total traffic just over 11% stayed for over three minutes, but if we break it down when we look at the source, look at it by source, we can see where our most engaged people come from right, two and a half minutes people, we’re just about three minutes, people, organic traffic, both from Google Business Listing and from organic search and pay per click is just about just under two minutes, and people who came directly are about two minutes as well. Okay. Now, if I switch it up, and we go to our conversion. This is a hard conversion in this case for me that that we’re looking for most because we’re driving people to it is the estimate requests. So this is really cool. Okay, this really gives us an idea of what is what is working. Now check this out in the last 30 days. These guys have had 119 estimate requests come through the website. Now I tell you what 119 I told you their average job, let’s say is $45,000. That’s a potential revenue of 5,355,000 bucks. Okay. Now, each job. Each, each vertical each industry, each company has their own metrics. Okay, and, and, and, and what they sell for and what it costs them to acquire a customer and all that sort of stuff. But if you know that you’ve got a pipeline of 5.3 million. And, you know these guys did like $2 million in sales last year. We’re starting the season, May, and they’ve already got three times what they had last year in sales and potential leads. Is that not a good place to be. Okay, that’s why we do this stuff that’s why we market that’s why we do digital marketing is to fill your pipeline right now we’re talking about conversions in this video but so let’s have a look at that, we can see that the number of leads, broken down by source where they came from, and which ones are most popular. And so, in this case, our top three are Google organic. So this means our SEO was working right, people type in, in the case of this company if they type in screen rooms. Well, number two, organically in the area. If they type in green room. Number one, it’s a different keyword, the same but different right. If they type in patio cover we’re number one, if they type in Calgary sunrooms, we’re working to move this up but we’re currently number five. Okay, so all these different things lead to these organic and we could, I’m not going to get into it here but we can break this all down and look at the keywords within Google Analytics to see, but organic traffic. Britain has brought us 32 of the 120 weeks. Okay, that’s great, that’s fantastic. Now we, we, we were in there invested in search engine optimization, they pay me to manage it, when plate break but we don’t pay those are ads that we’re running now. Examples of ads, and neither is Luke is local organic right, this is when we work on SEO, it’s a combination of a couple things, it’s stuff that we do on your website, but it’s also stuff that we do off your website, that gets people back to your website. And those are things like citations and business listings, and the most important of those is your Google Business Listing right and that’s what this local, organic traffic is of the 119 leads that came in the last 30 days 33 came from the Google Business Listing. So again that’s SEO, those are free, we don’t have to pay people to click this site, we have, you know that again there’s an investment in search engine optimization, to make sure your sites work properly, but half of the leads are coming from search engine optimization, great stuff. The other, the other bit. The other big chunk is coming from Google Pay Per Click, and so we can now track these back, also by keyword, to find out what keywords are working best for us. This is why conversion optimization, conversion tracking is so important. You can find out what’s working best, and then you can leverage it, you can work harder at it you can make sure you can check to see if there’s other keywords that are related that are close, that we can be bidding for that would bring us even more traffic and more conversions. So that’s just kind of a quick in depth look about how conversion tracking works with forms. Okay, let’s take a look at a second example, dealing with how to measure phone calls, as a conversion right so forms are great for us miss you want to use a good quality form WP forms. Our team can show you how to do that we can do it for you. We’ve got some stuff coming up in our next level where you can jump into some full hands on training if you want to learn how to do this stuff yourself, or hey, you can, you can hire us to do all this, this, these things as well. But, you know, the main thing is that you get it done. This is really really important because in order to know where to spend money on traffic and what things you should be working on in your search engine optimization, you have to be able to measure conversions. If you don’t measure conversions, you’re just fumbling around in the dark. Okay, there’s no if ands or buts, you’re, you’re, you’re wasting time, your throat you’re flushing money down the toilet. And if you’ve hired people to do this for you in the past, and they don’t have a clear handle on conversions. The, you know, you’re wasting money. It’s just wait I hate waste. I hate waste. There’s a, there’s a term in the, the Japanese production system right in Japan in Japanese, it’s called Moodle. And the reason I know this is because I’ve worked for Toyota for 10 years, I’ve been in frontline customer acquisition for over 30 years now. Okay. And I spent a long time, working as a service manager in automotive dealerships and when I started doing direct response marketing. We were mailing out postcards right to tell people it was time to come in to get the vehicle service in it, and that was, I kind of got hooked on direct response marketing back then. And I was involved in building the first website, in, in, in, in the conversion, the search engine optimization part of it, and we ended up selling a whole bunch of parts. This was like when websites were brand new, this was 1990, right. And Anyways, I digress. But I’ve been doing this for a long time. Okay, and I really get fired up about people who do things that don’t work, or people, and I’m not pretending to be some guru here, don’t, don’t take me the wrong way. Don’t take it the wrong way. There’s a lot of ways to do this stuff, a lot of ways to do this stuff but the barrier to becoming a digital marketing agency is very low, and there’s a lot of people trying to do the things that we do. And, you know, passing themselves off as experts, and doing it on customers dimes, they’re learning on customer’s dime. Well, we’ve been doing this for a while. So we know if you don’t have conversions in place from the beginning, you’re kind of screwed. So let’s talk more about conversions, measuring phone calls, okay. This customer is a drain cleaner, okay they’re based in Edmonton, Alberta, and all of the marketing that we do for them is driving people to pick up the phone and call right because this is an immediate need, toilets, overflowing. We need someone to fix it. The waters. The basements flooded. We need someone to fix it. So we’re driving people to call, we do get some chat stuff from the website I’ll go to the website here in a moment I’ll show you, and we do get some forms, but mostly it’s phone calls, so we track everything right we track with people fill out a form, we track with people, we give them an offer an option to buy a service online, not really, there’s not really any take on that because people want to know what what what it’s going to cost what you need to do go to yada yada. So Chris knows if you can get them on the phone, he gets a phone call, he’s going to close 90 95% Of those, right, and so we’re driving people to make the call. So, and here we’re just kind of look at the conversion numbers first again this is from the last 30 days. Ignore the traffic spike if you watched my previous video, you know that this was we got some referral spam here, not a not a big deal I filtered it out so we’re not tracking it anymore, but it still shows in our, in our past data so you can just disregard that pool line from get bought traffic for free.

And another note on mischievious poor quality SEO people, they’ll send traffic like this kind of nonsense and say oh yeah just see the traffic to your website, because they take advantage of people and you may not know. Right. And I’m telling you, there’s all kinds of referral spam bot traffic and there’s all kinds of people doing shady crap. So don’t get sucked into that we’re looking at hardcore stuff here. Okay, stuff that drives conversions, she gets on traffic 200 visitors, zero conversions. Google Pay Per Click 203 vert visitors 46 conversions. Check that out 20% conversion rate, almost right. Good stuff. So the majority of conversions here are coming from Google Pay Per Click, now we’re, we’re very young in SEO with this company, we’re only a couple months into it, but it’s coming to website direct, we got 19 of the 70 and then local organic that’s from the Google Business Listing again, because we’ve set it up that way they’ve got a couple from there as well. Okay, so that’s just starting and it’ll come, but let’s have a look at what people find when they go searching for this company okay I’m doing this, I’m doing this blind. This website is built by Google, it’s called I search from and you can go there. Okay, you put in your, your country, and again I’m. I work with guys all over the place but I’m in Western Canada so this is my backyard and I don’t I’m not close to this city, three hours away, but but I knew it well. And so, if people. If you use this website. You can choose to see what someone’s searching in that area would find if they were to do a search, and so you could do it by desktop which is I’m currently on desktop, but you can look by Phone, Android phone, iPad, iPhone, and see what different search what the different search results look like. Because there’s, there’s, remember different ways right we’re measured by Google organic or measured by the local map pack, we’re measured by Google Maps are measured by Google certain Google Local, you know, more places which is beyond the map pack in and I’ll show you that in a minute but I’m just going to keep it with desktop, and let’s go sewer backup to see what we find. Okay, so someone’s in Edmonton, they search sewer backup live in Google. Here’s what comes up on Saturday May 23 Now I’m not going to let them see my information, because I wanted to stay in Edmonton. So if you are a plumber carpet cleaner, a locksmith. There’s a few other ones I can’t remember what they are, you have the option to run the Google guarantee. We’re not going to get to into Google guarantee in here, Google guarantee has its place, but now Google’s in charge, you’re not. And I have a bit of a fundamental problem with that. So if you’re in one of the niches that allows for Google guarantee and we’re gonna see more of this. There’s no question Google, Google, Google wants to have their hands in anything, they’re gonna, they’re gonna open this up to more industries.

But Test test test test to see if what inevitably you get back from Google, what you earn from these ads, what the return on investment is okay cuz Google controls that you don’t. But anyways, these guys are a drain cleaner so they fall under the plumbing niche, and they could their first opportunity to show up in a certain search engine result page is the Google guarantee. Now we’re not doing that, but you can see our Google ad comes up first. Okay, where we are, our company is CSL sewer cleaner. That’s who we work for our ad comes up first, so that’s our first opportunity to earn a click, and then disregard my little sign in there from, from the Search Console. And then here’s the, the local map pack. Okay, we’re number two in the map pack, so this is just some traffic right if we go back here, and we look at our acquisition traffic from the last 30 days, not a lot so far, we had 10 visitors come through our Google Business Listing. But people. That doesn’t mean people can’t let me go back there, where are we, doesn’t mean people can’t just call pick up their phone and call the number right from there, right, they can just call the number, and then that comes through, and then we are not coming up organically here yet, we’re like I said we’re still young, working with these guys with search engine optimization, the work we’ve done so far, has brought their, their map pack in their local rankings, way up, they were kind of non existent before, but it’s gonna take some more time to get all of that going on and working better. Anyways, if people come through to the website. This is what I wanted to show you. We’re always driving folks to make a phone call right that’s the main thing. When this site loads on mobile, to send a quick message we, we don’t have it on there, we drive people to call everywhere. And how do you track phone calls, properly so that you know you get conversions, okay, this is, this, this is really really important. And, and this is why we’re talking about it. We use a service that enables us to dynamically change out these phone numbers. Okay, so when somebody searches. And for sewer backup like I just did. And then a few minutes or an hour later somebody Search Search searches for drain cleaning, and they come to the website, they may see a different phone number. Here’s why. We use a service called call rail, and it’s tracking these searches, and it’s tracking when a phone number is made, so even if somebody doesn’t click right that’s easy to track a clip, if somebody clicks it, Now we can measure that through Google Analytics, no problem. And we know that the clip came from the website as a phone call. But there’s limitations, right, if people just dial this phone number right they see that okay I got the phone I’m going to dial it 780-900-3569 You can’t track that unless you’re using a good mechanism like call rail. So here’s what happens in call rail, check this out this is really cool. I’m not going to go through all of it, but you can see that a little while ago, about half an hour ago. Doesn’t matter a little while ago today, someone called this number, and we can see that it came from Google ads. Now if we look at the information. We can see that okay they were on the call for three minutes, 30 seconds sounds like a qualified call right Google ads, was the source, they were on safari, yada yada yada. So, now, through our integration with call rail, this is pushed through to Google ads in Google Analytics as a conversion in Google ads and Google Analytics digs up the background information about what the keyword was, and we’re able to backtrack it in and show us a conversion, and it makes it forces, it’s good information for our analysts because now we know what’s working, but it forces, our Google ads campaign to measure a conversion. Now we’re marketing for conversions, and we’re trying to lower our price per conversion, we know that this keyword works, we’re given Google all the right information to help their algorithms, determine how to make our Google ad campaign work better. Okay. Does that make sense, people show up from a pool of numbers. I can show you here about No, I don’t need tracking. We’ve got four numbers in here right, it, it dynamically updates, a number so that it knows what, what search, it served that phone number for it puts them together, pushes the information to Google Analytics pushes the information to Google ads, we get a conversion track, we know what’s going on, and we can now come back to Google Analytics here, right, or Google ads, and we can see, we can break this down, not just by source we can get into the campaign, the ad group, the keyword that triggered it. Even the search term that they use to to find us to find out exactly what’s working, what isn’t and how to make this campaign, better folks that’s what conversion tracking is all about. It doesn’t matter what type of business you’re having, you have local service business contractor business. If you are looking to generate more customers, you need to be able to measure how they come to you and you measure that in the probate process of the initial contact the lead as a conversion, and ultimately, what customers come out of that. So you can backtrack and reverse engineer your core funnel to get things working even better. I hope that makes a lot of sense. Really important information. And trust me, this, this is the stuff that I’m passionate about, that really makes websites come alive.

Okay, you can have a website that looks good, and nobody ever sees, or you can have a website that, you know, I think our websites look good, but they also drive traffic, We measure conversions, we get we make sales out of that. And these are just estimations, but you can see in the last month we’ve estimated that from this traffic source, we’ve jet from these traffic sources generated over $10,000 in sales, and you know this, this actually this is a this is never accurate it’s always on the low side because they sell more than we estimate per call. We estimate that, you know, a conversion is $150, and they have their averages is way above that, so. Hey, thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed that. Take care.