Just because your overall cost per sale is £6, it doesn’t necessarily follow that every sale you make is profitable. Consider for example, your brand name. Chances are, the cost per click on your name is much lower than for the rest of your account, and there’s a good chance that the conversion rate is higher as well. So what? Consider the impact of splitting this data out:

Your performance looks good – you’ve made £5000 (from 500 sales making £10 each) and only paid £3000, so you’re £2000 in profit. But what happens if you split it into brand and non-brand?

Interesting… The sales via your brand name have cost £2 each, but your non-brand sales have been costing £10 each. It appears that non-brand conversions aren’t profitable at all!

However, it gets worse. Overall, your non-brand sales may be breaking even, but if you’ve ever tried to generate more sales by increasing your budget, you’ll know that this is an over-simplification.

Any time that you increase your bids to generate additional sales, your cost per conversion will increase sharply. This is because you will not just be paying more for the incremental clicks that you pick up, you’ll also be paying more for the clicks that you were already getting. Conversely, reducing your bids will reduce your CPA disproportionately. Consider the ‘Other’ campaign above. What would happen if you were to reduce the cost per click to £0.20 (from £0.25)? It’s impossible to tell for certain (since you don’t know whether you’ll drop one place or three, or what impact this will have on your click through rate), but for the sake of argument, we’ll say that clicks also fall by 20%, and that conversion rate doesn’t change.

Your CPA has also dropped by 20% (obviously, since your conversion rate hasn’t changed, and your CPC has dropped by 20%), but if you look at the figures more closely, there’s a bit more to it than that.

By paying £0.25 per click instead of £0.20, you’ve increased your click spend by £900. But if you look at the sales volumes, you’ve only got 50 more. The additional sales have cost you £18 each – and they are only worth £10!

This is the basis of sweet-spot analysis – one way to identify the most profitable position is to estimate the cost per click at which the incremental cost per sale becomes unprofitable.

In fact, extending this analysis further, you’d probably want to reduce your bids to just 12.5p – halving them:

By reducing your bids by half, you’re now making £625 in profit on this campaign (125 x £5), but even then, you’d be missing a trick.

The performance of the different Ad Groups within the campaign may be completely different, so in the same way that your overall figures masked the fact that brand was propping up non-brand, some Ad Groups may be masking the underperformance of other Ad Groups. Continuing the example from above, suppose that having reduced the cost per click to 12.5p as above, you see that your two Ad Groups are performing as follows:

Neither of these bids is optimal – increasing bids on Ad Group 1, and reducing them on Ad Group 2 will result in higher profits on both:

Theoretically, you could extend this analysis even further, down to keywords, though I would argue that if the performance of keywords in the same Ad Group varies, why are they in the same Ad Group (surely the fact that their conversion rates are different should indicate that the people searching are different, and may respond to different adverts).

There are a number of flaws with this type of analysis. Firstly, we haven’t taken into account the average order value. If Ad Group 2 had a much higher AOV than Ad Group 1, then you’d want to pay more per conversion. If this data is available, then you should be using it to calculate the profit for different levels of bids, rather than the overall figure.

Secondly, there’s no way to predict accurately the impact on clicks of increasing or reducing your bids. Since this is the case, I would advise against making dramatic changes to your bids – changing them slowly over a period of time will allow you to assess the impact on clicks with more confidence, and reduce the risks inherent in basing your bids on estimates.

Another concern is the conversion rate. Most of the time, the conversion rate isn’t affected that much by the position in the search results (something Hal Varian at Google acknowledged in 2009), but there are cases when the conversion rate can be affected significantly. In these cases, the effect of bid adjustments cannot be estimated with the same degree of confidence, and you should rely on empirical data far more.

However, perhaps the biggest assumption in this analysis was that your brand conversions weren’t caused by non-brand searches initially. People searching for you by name must have been led to your site by something, and whilst some may be via word-of-mouth or other advertising, much of it may be people that have visited your site previously via a non-brand search, and are returning to make a purchase. Clearly, these sales are at least partially (almost entirely) due to the non-brand clicks, and excluding their value from non-brand understates the true value of these clicks.

On this last point, the solution is multi-touchpoint conversion attribution. By assigning part of the value of the sale to the first visit, and part to each subsequent visit, you’ll get a much truer idea of how your Adwords campaigns are performing.

The two points to take away from this blog are these:

• Don’t rely on the overall performance of your account. Look at the performance of the individual Ad Groups and campaigns (particularly non-brand campaigns or Ad Groups). If you aren’t being given this information by your marketing team or agency, request it.

• Don’t be distracted by the total cost per sale – consider how much the incremental sales have been costing. Could you make more money with a higher or lower bid?

• Use conversion attribution to understand the true value of your PPC campaigns (and the rest of your marketing), and attribute your sales appropriately. This data is now available in Google Analytics, so your marketing team or agency should be able to analyse it for you easily.

Please share your thoughts below – @CustardMite

You can now see whether your advert has a stronger click-through rate and conversion rate in the top positions and if so, how much you will need to bid to ensure you are achieving those results more often by putting your advert at the top.

For example, the screen shot below shows that the ads at the top generate a much higher click-through rate as you would expect, but also when the ads are shown on the right hand side, this ad group doesn’t generate as many conversions. Therefore, it is better for this particular account to have the adverts for this keyword in the top position more often.

You can then select the Est. top page bid option from the column choices and this will show up next to each keyword. This shows the top of page bid to be £3.75, which is quite a lot higher than the current bid of £2.41. This then gives you a stronger idea of what effect different bid adjustments could have on the position of your adverts for each keyword.

Questions or comments? I’d love to hear from you either below or on Twitter - @aimee_roberts

If you are measuring the cost per transaction, or goal, in Analytics then you are likely optimising toward these metrics.  The transactions in Analytics are fully attributed to the last advert a visitor clicked, but this is not the whole picture.

A visitor may search multiple times before purchasing, and so the last advert and keyword the visitor used may not be the most important one.  Consider this – the visitor conducts three searches over the course of a week:

Widget -> Blue Widget -> Widgetworld

The conversion would be attributed to Widgetworld, but the process started with Widget and involved Blue Widget.  If this were always the case, then you would presume Widget made no sales and stop focussing on it; this would ultimately result in losing all your sales, or a large proportion.

In the above example, Widget is called the initiator, so we can change to a first click model instead.  However, we would quickly end up in the same boggy mire.  After the initial search, the visitor would not see your advert again and may choose a competitor.  We need to assign some of the conversion to both the initiator and Widgetworld – the converter.

There is still a step missing here.  We would end up focussing on Widget and Widgetworld, but not Blue Widget; this intermediary step is called a contributor.  We must continue to bid on this since otherwise the visitor may not have typed in Widgetworld (especially if this is our brand name).

The answer is to give each of these terms a share of the conversion.  This is conversion attribution, and will ensure you continue to focus on all terms that drive conversions, which will help you drive maximum return on investment.

The big question is – how much of the sale (how much weight) do you assign to the initiator, contributors and converter?

What are your thoughts? -@ChrisRowett

I’m encouraging (well, bullying) many of my clients to stock up on User Generated Content.

Most seem to be clear about the value of user reviews in the sales process, and how they can boost conversion rates, but few are as knowledgeable about the SEO benefits.

If you can kill two birds (conversions and rankings) with one stone (UCG), it’s surely a must.

INCREASED CONVERSION RATES

Ultimately, reviews increase the chance of a consumer making a purchase as they increase a user’s trust in the site, and can help answer questions and remove doubt about a product.

More reviews mean more conversion, as people have a broader range of opinion to draw from.  A big string of reviews can be made more digestible for the user by picking out the most useful positive and negative reviews, as Amazon does, to provide a summary.

But UCG can do so much more than that…

IMPROVED RANKINGS

Search engine spiders are hungry for unique content that is frequently updated, and user reviews are a perfect example of this.

UGC can be used to enrich any bog-standard product page by simply displaying the usual manufacturer descriptions, setting it apart from the direct competition and affiliates.  Pages become more useful to customers, and the chance of achieving high rankings in the SERPS is increased.

CAPTURING NEW RANKINGS

Reviews are an increasingly important part of the purchasing process for customers.  Many will even search specifically for the product name plus the word ‘review’ or ‘rating.’ With relevant content, your site will much more likely become visible for such search terms.

INCREASED CLICK THROUGH RATES

If your review content is formatted correctly, the snippets shown in the SERPS can help to increase click through rates by as much as 10 to 20%.

See how the star rating in the rich snippet below makes one result stand out from the crowd:

TARGETING THE LONG TAIL

The content which user reviews create is in addition to the core content of your site and it tends to be a completely different style.  It is important that all questions and reviews are genuine so that you are capturing the user’s natural language, i.e. what people are searching for.

The fact that words and phrases used by reviewers are often the same words and phrases used by searchers increases the change of ranking. Well, for long tail searches at least.

BUT DON’T FORGET…

• Ensure your UGC is in text form in the HTML so that it’s visible to search engines.
• Bits of the review can appear on a number of pages on the site, but make sure the full review has a single page and URL to avoid any duplicate content issues.

Encourage UGC throughout your site to achieve the best results, get started ASAP, and then let your customers do the hard work for you.

Please leave your comments either here or on Twitter - @lujackson

So, you’ve set up a campaign, and now you want to start fine-tuning it? Understandable, though depending on your business, optimisation may mean slightly different things…

For the majority of businesses, their ultimate objective is profit - making as much money as possible. And for most of these, the purpose of their PPC campaign is the same.

There are a few cases where this isn’t true. If you have a bricks-and-mortar store somewhere, you may run a PPC campaign to get people to visit you. This would make a lot of sense if you’re selling something that people aren’t likely to buy online, such as a second-hand car.

Alternatively, if your website is designed to give information, such as how to stop smoking, why you should convert to a new religion or who you should vote for in the next election, then you may have no objective, other than to be heard.

In all of these cases, you can use Adwords to track some form of conversion – placing the tracking code on the appropriate page will give you an indication of which keywords are the most effective. Online Stores should (if possible) place the code on their ‘Thank You For Ordering’ page, tradesmen may want to tag the ‘Thank You For Contacting Us’ page or the ‘Contact Details’ page, bricks-and-mortar stores may want to tag the ‘Find Your Nearest Store’ page. Even informational websites could tag pages containing information, in order to identify users that interact with the site.

Aside from identifying the keywords that you should be bidding on (which has already been covered), there are three aspects of optimising - one is true for all of these, and two are only true when you are trying to make as much money as possible from the site.

• Maximise your conversion rate
• Improve Google’s opinion of your campaign (in terms of its relevancy, known as Quality Score) as far as you can.
• Adjust your bids until you find the position in the search results that generates the most profit (higher = more sales but a higher bid, lower = less sales, but each one costs less).

This blog covers the first of these – maximising the conversion rate.

Optimising Your Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is probably the most critical number there is when trying to make money online, and with PPC, it’s even more critical.

Think about it. If your campaign costs £0.50 per click, and you make £30 from each conversion, with a 2% conversion rate, how much money do you make from 100 clicks on your site?

What happens if you double the conversion rate? It doesn’t double your profits!

Your profits just went up by 600%. That’s a lot!

In this example, reducing your cost per click couldn’t generate this level of profit, even if the clicks were free!

Even a small increase can have a disproportionate impact on your profit - in the above example, even an increase in conversion rate from 2% to 2.2% would increase profit from £10 to £16, a 60% increase.

So, how do you improve the conversion rate of your campaign?

Website Design

The first place to look has to be the website itself. This isn’t really related to your campaign, it’s a more general thing. It’s just more important with your PPC campaign, because you are paying for each and every visitor to your website – if your cost per visitor was £0, then a 10% increase in your conversion rate would yield a 10% increase in your profits.

There are plenty of books and websites about how to maximise the conversion rate of your website, so I’ll make just a few points on this.

• If people are giving you money, they need to trust you. If your website looks like it was put together by a spotty teenager in his bedroom, they may be reluctant to give you their credit card details.
• If people can’t find what they are looking for, they aren’t likely to buy it. Don’t tell people how to buy things on your website, let them choose their own way. Include a simple, straightforward navigation on the left-hand side of the page, and a clear, easily visible search box at the top (that actually returns what they search for!).
• Don’t distract them. You want a big, clear button telling them what to do next. “Buy Now” on the product page. “Proceed To Checkout” on the basket page.
• Don’t annoy them. Everyone hates pop-ups. Adverts for other products, such as cross-sells and up-sells, are fine as long as they are relevant and not too obtrusive.
• Don’t bore them. Only ask for the details you need when they are paying. You don’t need their full life history, their mother’s maiden name or their favourite type of cheese, so don’t ask. Ideally, put all of your questions on one or two pages.
• Sell your product. Tell people why they should buy this particular product, and why they should buy from you. You put shop assistants in a shop, and they do more than just recite product specifications at you.

Landing Pages

I’ve already told you (in a previous instalment) what a good landing page needs, but sometimes, it’s not quite that simple. Suppose that you are selling digital cameras, as you were in the example earlier.

Somebody who searches for digital cameras may have a range of technical knowledge – some will be familiar with all of the technical terms, whereas others will just know that they want something that takes pictures.

Each of these visitors would probably look for different things on your website. A less technical person may want a guide, to tell them what to look for in a digital camera, and whether they really need the different features, whereas a more technical person may prefer to see the products with simply stated features, without being lectured on things they already know.

But both are searching for the same term, so both will land on the same page. Should you land them on a guide to buying digital cameras, or a thumbnail page?

The correct solution here would probably be to test different landing pages, and see which one works better. Adwords has the facility to let you run different adverts at the same time – in this case, the adverts would have the same text, but with different target URL’s.

For more advanced tests, Adwords has a tool called Website Optimiser. To directly quote Google:

Website Optimizer works by testing different versions of the content on your live site to see what will lead to the highest conversion rates. You provide us with the original content of your site and the different variations of that you’d like to try out. We run an experiment on a portion of your site traffic using those variations, to see the effect of each variation on your conversion rate. When we’ve collected sufficient data, we’ll provide you with a full report of our findings that can help you determine what changes to make to your site.

It works quite well most of the time, and gives you a free and easy way to serve up alternative landing pages and track their performance.

Advert Text

Many experts never look beyond the website when talking about conversion rates, but writing the correct advert text has a role as well.

Remember my example from an earlier post?

If you sell luxury leather furniture, and you bid on “leather sofas”, there will be some searchers who are looking for cheap, low quality leather furniture. Writing an advert to maximise the click through rate will attract many of the wrong people, and end up costing you money. On the other hand, you don’t want to put people off by implying that your sofas are expensive. So you need to write an advert that gets as many potential buyers through, but as few inappropriate visitors as possible.

In this case, you might use a title like “Top Quality Leather Sofas.”

The objective here isn’t to get people to click on your advert - it’s to stop them from clicking on your advert.

Suppose that you sell armchairs, specifically aimed at the male market (maybe they’ve got a built-in beer fridge?). Your advert reads:

Luxury Leather Armchairs

Five-Star Leather Quality

Free Delivery, Money Back Guarantee

Overall, your advert has had the following results:

So your campaign made a total profit of £500. Nice.

But this may be split as follows:

Writing your advert more like this:

Leather Armchairs For Men

Five-Star Leather Quality

Free Delivery, Money Back Guarantee

That may put off most of the unprofitable lady visitors, and make you more money.

In this case, you were trying to get rid of unprofitable clicks, in order to make more profit overall. Note that in the above example, your click through rate would drop from 5% to 4%, but the 60% increase in profit should outweigh any additional costs from increased bids (since click through rate is a factor in your Quality Score).

Not Keyword Selection

Pardon?

What I’m saying is that you should not select keywords solely on their ability to convert. You should get rid of keywords that have a 0% conversion rate after a reasonable number of clicks, but if your campaign has an overall conversion rate of 5%, then getting rid of a keyword with a 3% conversion rate may not be in your best interests.

Remember, the objective is to maximise profits, and improving your conversion rate is merely a way to do that.

There are two situations to consider here – either you are spending your full daily budget or you aren’t.

If you aren’t, then clearly, any keyword that is making you money should be kept, and any that isn’t should be optimised (and removed if it can’t be made profitable).

If you are, then you should always look at the keywords that generate the lowest ROI, and either remove them, or make them more profitable (see later). These are not necessarily the ones with the lowest conversion rate.

Suppose that you’ve got two keywords, [leather chair] and [reclining chair].

Their performance figures are as follows:

The first keyword has a conversion rate of 10%, the second 5%, and yet both make the same profit, from the same level of spend. So, where possible, you’ve got to do the calculation, and base your decisions on which keywords make the most money per pound of spend, if your budget is restrictive.

Of course, if a keyword is getting no conversions at all, then it can’t make money. Just make sure that you give it time. If a keyword has a profit per sale of £500, and a cost per click of £0.50, you only need a 0.1% conversion rate to be profitable, so don’t panic if you’ve got no conversions after 100 clicks…

Not The Amount That You Bid

In most cases, the conversion rate is not affected very much by your position in the search results. I can only think of a few cases when this is not true.

One may be if you are bidding on a generic keyword like “digital camera,” where a lot of people are doing research on what they are looking to buy, they are more likely to click on a few of the sites at the top of the page while they collect information. So the top positions may see a lower conversion rate than the ones further down the page. This is less likely to be true with more specific keywords like “Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-T100S.”

Then again, the way that the majority of people advertise on Adwords, the bids for the top positions on generic terms are frequently way too high, so a well-run campaign probably won’t appear in these positions anyway – it’s just not profitable.

If you assume that the quality of traffic driven by the two different is the same, then you can simply look at the click through rate – the conversion rate won’t vary. This is a reasonable assumption if the key messages and tone are similar, and if the website doesn’t receive many conversions (or can’t track them), it’s necessary.

However, if there is a chance that the different adverts are likely to drive a different type of visitor to the website, and sufficient conversions pass through the adverts, then it’s important to look at conversion rates.

But does this really go far enough?

Consider a casino website. They can promote their site using a small, easy-to-claim bonus, which small-time players can probably claim, or they can promote a much larger bonus, that only high-stakes players are likely to qualify for. Which will work better?

It’s likely that promoting a higher bonus is likely to deliver a higher click through rate. Or is it? Are searchers savvy enough to realise that they can’t claim this bonus? If so, they may be put off by this, and would respond better to a lower, more realistic bonus.

What about the conversion rate? If users weren’t put off by the higher bonus, will they be put off once they read the terms and conditions? If the landing page also has more realistic bonuses as well, this may not be a serious problem. On the other hand, has the bigger bonus attracted newbies – potential players that aren’t aware of how these bonuses work? If so, they may click on multiple websites before converting.

Is this sufficient? Can you tell from the click through rate and the conversion rate which is the more effective advert? Well – no.

Consider the likely behaviour of the visitors that do convert. If they’ve been attracted by different bonuses, their behaviour could vary significantly. If the bigger bonus appeals to the high stakes gamblers, then their lifetime value could be substantially more. On the other hand, if the people attracted by large bonuses are just bonus-hunters, playing just enough to claim their bonuses before moving on, then their lifetime values may be lower.

It may be that this can’t be answered – it depends on the back end systems that the advertiser has. But if you add a variable to the end of the destination url, and the back end can tag up new accounts with this variable, then after a few months, you’ll be able to ascertain which advert generates the more valuable players. Combining this with the conversion rate and the size of the bonus that was paid out, you can establish the value of a click from each advert. And from this, you can make an informed decision.

If this seems like an unusual situation, it really isn’t. Consider another example – a retailer selling discounted designer labels.

The advertiser decides to lead with the size of the discounts in one advert, and promotes the designer labels in another. Whilst the former may generate a higher click through rate and conversion rate, it’s likely that average order values (and possibly margins) will be lower for these customers.

Of course, it takes a lot of customers/players to generate reliable results. One big order or degenerate gambler shouldn’t be sufficient to make a major impact on the outcome. But for advertisers that can perform this kind of analysis, the benefits could be substantial. After all, there are probably thousands of advertisers who have squeezed their average order values, chasing improvements in the click through rate.

A full packed agenda spread over 2 days looks like a must attend for anyone in the conversion rate business – which frankly should be everyone! One of the keynotes will be delivered by conversion guru Tim Ash – a man I have read a lot of but never actually seen live – so it should be an interesting one.

And again Epiphany is the bringer of great news – we can get you a discount!!!

Whilst booking simply use the code: EPIPHANY010

This will provide you with 15% off all tickets so get buying!

Epiphany’s knowledge of website optimisation was approved by Google when they awarded us the Website Optimisation Authorised Consultant (WOAC) qualification.  At the same time, our analytical & technical ability was acknowledged when we became Google Analytics Authorised Consultants (GAAC).

The final acceptance to the highest tier, Google Conversion Professionals, is testament to the experience we have in the field of website optimisation as a whole.  Google are more than willing to pass their clients to us for consultancy, with the confidence that we will deliver a world-class service.

For our existing clients, the GCP accolade will provide peace of mind that Epiphany offer the highest quality of service available.  New clients will be excited about the extra level of service they can expect when working with Epiphany.

The GCP programme not only proves our company, but will help us move even further ahead of the curve with exclusive access to some of the latest tools and some deeper insight in Google Analytics available to us.  By invitation only, we have several employees involved in focus groups set up by Google, where the brightest and most experienced website optimisation analysts share thoughts and new ideas.

Not only are Epiphany leading the way in conversion rate optimisation, but will get even further ahead in the future!

The Leeds-based business has been certified a Google Conversion Professional (GCP) and is now in an elite band of companies in the UK – including global management consulting company, Accenture – endorsed by Google as being an expert in website optimisation.

In order to receive GCP status, companies must first apply for and achieve two separate Google accreditations – Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant.

The final stage involves months of detailed analysis and interviews to ensure rigorous qualification standards are met.

Rob Shaw, managing Director of Epiphany, said: “This is a fantastic endorsement of the expertise which resides within the agency and cements our position as one of the UK’s leading digital agencies.

“Google doesn’t give this accreditation lightly, they have created a robust qualification process and we appreciate that. To be part of an exclusive club including the likes of Accenture is a tremendous achievement for us.“It demonstrates the maturing of our business into a commercially aware agency with a results-orientated approach. We have always said that we wanted to build a world class digital marketing agency and this latest accolade is a further step to achieving that objective.”

Next week, Epiphany will be attending a four-day conference at Google’s headquarters at Mountain View, California.

There are simply too many advertisers, bidding too much for PPC to be highly profitable for every advertiser – in short, it’s becoming a dog-eat-dog world. Every sale that you make is one that your competitors don’t get, and vice-versa.

Once you’ve got your account in order, optimised your keyword list, grouped it into nice, neat Adgroups, tested many adverts on each, found your sweet-spot for each Adgroup (the most profitable bid) and tested the Content Network and all the various options that Adwords et al offer, eventually, your account’s performance is likely to plateau.

So how do you take your PPC to the next level? It can be particularly frustrating if you’ve got a well-optimised campaign, but are still only appearing 6^th or 7^th – somehow, your competitors are getting most of the sales, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The answer is to improve your conversion rate. If visitors to your website are more likely to buy something, then you can afford to pay more for them. And the amount that you can afford to pay for a click is the basis of the whole PPC auction.

Unless the people advertising above you are complete numpties, the only way that they can stay ahead of a well run PPC campaign (and still make money) is to make more money out of visitors to their website than you do.

Website Optimisation is currently Google’s big pet project at the moment – they understand that higher conversion rates are a win-win-win situation.

· If clicks from Google are worth more, people will pay more for them, and Google make more money.

· Better-designed websites can only be a good thing for people that use Google – the fewer websites somebody has to visit in order to find what they are looking for, the happier they are.

· If an advertiser’s website converts better, it gives them an advantage over their competitors, allowing them to spend more on advertising, and make more money. Not just from PPC, but from all advertising media.

Whilst better-converting websites are important for all advertising, it’s particularly important for PPC. And generally speaking, it’s easiest for PPC as well.

After all, if you’ve got the right list of keywords, and a well-written advert (filtering out irrelevant traffic), almost all of the PPC visitors to your website will be looking for your product or service. All you have to do is to convince them to buy.

There is a whole world of literature out there about how to optimise a website, and there are few genuinely hard-and-fast rules (or Website Optimisation would simply consist of website design, rather than a process of testing). But some things are clearly important.

· The user needs to be able to find all of the appropriate products quickly and easily. Navigation should be easy to find, intuitive, and shouldn’t force the user to discard products that may be relevant.

· The user needs to be able to choose the product for them easily. They shouldn’t have to click on every single product page to see which product is right for them. Key differentiating facts should be visible on the category (thumbnail) page, such as price and critical features. If there are a lot of products, filtering and sorting are also important.

· Trust is critical. There are still a lot of people out there, sceptical about buying products online. Websites should look professional, and your contact details should be easy to find. Testimonials are good as well, as are product reviews.

· The average user has the attention span of a goldfish. Long, complicated processes for ordering can really put them off. Keep the ordering process as simple as possible.

In reality, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. If it was, there’d be no need to test changes to the site, and all websites would end up looking virtually the same.

So, does your website offer users a good experience? Pretend to be your target customer, click on a couple of your adverts, and find out. Get your family and friends to try it as well.

If your business is large enough, it’s worth hiring an Agency to optimise your website. There is nothing more valuable in website optimisation than experience, and a good Agency can do more to improve your conversion rate in 6 months than you’ll be able to do in years, in all probability.

Google are releasing a new qualification, the Google Conversion Professional qualification: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/conversion/#. Unlike previous qualifications from Google, this one carries a bit more weight, as Google recommend agencies that pass this qualification.

At the moment, finding a reliable Agency to perform your optimisation is a hugely difficult task – they all claim to be experts. Separating the wheat from the chaff based solely on their websites is almost impossible, and many sound good even when you speak to them in person.

The new Google qualification should help hugely – they won’t recommend anyone that doesn’t know what they are doing, and any agencies failing to deliver on their promises will lose their qualification in no time.