We have had an excellent start to 2012 here at toinfinity with some fantastic new client wins.

We are very pleased to welcome on board Monuskin, Fresh Tracks Canada, Heart Gallery, and RS Sailing.

Monuskin have taken us on to act as their full e-consultancy team, featuring pay per click management, full search engine optimisation services, email marketing and overall e-consultancy. Monuskin produce natural beauty products and we are looking forward to helping them grow their B2C market over the coming months.

Fresh Tracks Canada are a travel company offering specialist Canadian holidays and adventures. Fresh Tracks have employed our search engine optimisation services and we are excited to be working with such an interesting company especially to be taking toinfinity global!

Heart Gallery, based in Lichfield, sell high quality limited edition prints, sculptures and original artwork. They have taken on our SEO services and we are really pleased to welcome them on board.

RS Sailing based near Southampton sell a wide range of sailing boats and have enlisted our pay per click services initially with the potential of more further on which we are thrilled about.

As always we are very happy to welcome new clients and hope that this bodes well for a successful 2012 for toinfinity.

KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators are a set of performance statistics (in this case we are talking about website/online campaign statistics) specific to your business. They offer an insight into how you are performing against your organisations goals.

Why do you need KPI’s? Without some sort of regular baseline of information, you will find it difficult to understand the impact of your marketing campaigns, form strategies or move your business forward.

Which KPI’s should I use?  This is not a straightforward question to answer, as every organisation has its own set of objectives and therefore KPI’s will differ. What they should be is useful. For each measurement, does it highlight a success or failure against your organisational objectives? Can you use that information to identify opportunities?

One of the most common KPI’s you see is visits, but really what does that data tell you? You had more visits last month than this month but less that three months ago?  More useful KPIs could include:

• Conversion rate – whether this is goal conversion or sales conversion, this KPI focuses on outcomes and therefore organisational goals (and probably the reason your website exists.)
• Average Order Value (AOV) – If you have an ecommerce website, this is a key KPI as there are a number of marketing strategies which impact your basket value.  For example, if your AOV is £45 and the boss suggests a free delivery offer, rather than offer free delivery for all orders over £40, you could set free delivery at all orders over £50 to increase AOV.  This is also a good metric for testing cross-sells on the basket pages.
• Return on Investment (ROI) – This needs to measured several times over a period of a campaign, as sales can be generated weeks after a campaign has finished. True ROI should include all your costs eg. Agency fees as well as set up/send/advertising fees.
• Vistor Loyalty & Recency – an excellent metric for content websites where you need to measure engagement ie. How frequently do people visit your site and within what period.
• Task Completion – different from conversion rate because this relies on an exit survey rather than analytics.  If only 3-4% of your visitors ever buy or contact you on your website, why don’t the rest of them? By using a simple exit survey (in the form of a pop up), you can gain useful information on why people didn’t buy from you and use that information to improve your site/offering.
• Search Exit Rate – the usefulness of this KPI varies depending on your customer eg. More technically adept users tend to use keyword search over other navigation methods. This would also be something to follow up with an exit survey.

If your organisation relies heavily on social media, there is a whole other set of KPI’s you should be using to measure the effectiveness of this online medium, that however is a whole other blog post!

If you would like more information on putting KPIs in place for your organisation, why not get in touch with us now.

Yesterday, we attended the ECMOD Direct Commerce Show, we had a great time meeting old and new colleagues and enjoyed some excellent conferences. The best by far was Amy Africa’s conference on ’18 Things Every Website Must Have’ it was a very concise and informative talk and we came away with a few new ideas to share with our clients.

We also attended the networking party and awards ceremony as we were nominated for an award. The networking party was well done with casino tables, drinks and canapés. Unfortunately we didn’t win an award this time but we are still very pleased to have been nominated with so many other great companies. All in all a great day and night for the toinfinity team!

The main concerns of chatterers are that:

1. The bottom three positions will not be seen by searchers

2. Only those with big budgets will be able to compete in the Adwords auction for top positioning

Some companies are ringing the death knell for google Adwords but are they jumping the gun?

Google is first and foremost a business and as such its aim is to make money, so why would they look to kill its biggest cash cow? Google is also ploughing a lot of investment into support for adwords agencies including training seminars both online and at their London offices as well as telephone and tech support. As a company they are continually innovative and will have tested these changes to the nth degree before rolling them out but equally, if the changes prove to be having a negative impact, there is no doubt it will be quickly rectified.

We think that the changes will be positive as there will be a bigger emphasis on advertisers creating more compelling ads which are much more targeted (with much smaller groups of keywords – something which was actively encouraged at a recent google seminar) to give users a better experience.  This will make agencies work harder and will hopefully see the end of those so called experts that set up campaigns for clients, charge a high monthly fee and never update or manage the campaign as there is no chance that these campaigns will compete with correctly managed campaigns.

Adwords customers should also look at connecting their google local and product feedsto their adwords account as google is pushing more visually enticing advertising – by this, we don’t mean banner advertising, but methods of showing products or location maps or even specific site links within ads that are more helpful to the user and as an advertiser allow you to offer several “touch points” within a single ad.

If your adwords campaign isn’t working for you, why not give us a call and we’ll take a look.

Fresh content (e.g. “blog posts”) seem to now rank higher for their relevant terms from the time they are indexed by Google. Obviously all the important on page elements still need to be well done (e.g. title/description tags), but the newsworthy and recent element of the blog post means that Google seems to be giving these a boost. This boost does wear away as the time of the post becomes more historic.

The second change is that Google now gives more weighting to social network ranking factors such as a Facebook like, a Twitter retweet and a Google +1. It’s therefore imperative to include these where possible on your site.

To put it into context, these algorithm changes are fairly minor in the overall SEO pie, but they have caused a lot of fluctuation in the recent weeks as sites jump around to take these factors into account.

To make sure your website is at the forefront of SEO following these and potential future changes give us a call on: 01793 238697.

Are you ready to capture your share of this increased online revenue spend?

Have you:

• Merchandised your homepage/website to ensure it’s promoting your best selling products and offers?
• Got an email marketing plan in place to contact your customer base with relevant products and promotions?
• Got visibility in the search engines for your brand and products? If not, although it’s too late for search engine optimisation (SEO) it is still possible to make a profitable impact with pay per click (PPC) – on average we are seeing over 400% ROI for our clients using this online marketing channel

With success stories from Christmas last year of £110,000 generated from email marketing campaigns and 2000%+ ROI from pay per click campaigns in the months building up to Christmas we have expert knowledge and a wealth of experience to help you gain your share of the £7.75bn that’s out there!

If you want help to maximise your online sales this Christmas with a money back guarantee don’t delay contact us on 01793 238697 or email: info@toinfinity.co.uk to see how we can help.

ECMOD are keeping quiet on which category we have been nominated for but we are humbled to be amongst so many great companies.

We will be attending the networking party on the 30^th November where the winners will be announced so have your fingers crossed for us!

We are especially pleased as for the ECMOD awards you have to be nominated by your clients, which means that we must be doing something right!

Exciting times ahead at Toinfinity!

Last week, Google made some changes to the algorithm for pay per click. It has updated the relevance of landing pages when determining the quality score within Adwords.

The changes to the quality score will give more weight to keyword and landing page relevance and will therefore effect how the ads are ranked on Google.

Google has been testing this update in Brazil, Spain and Portugal with the goal of improving the user experience for search ads.

Over the next few weeks we will see some fluctuations in average positions and keyword quality score.

Once this has settled down we plan to make amends to our client’s campaigns to update following this change.

The three factors that now determine the quality score are; click through rate, relevance of the keyword to the adverts and landing page quality.

For more information on this change or to find out more on our pay per click services speak to one of the team on: 01793 238697.

So What Are You Getting for Your Money

At the time of publishing this blog, we’re waiting to speak with Google to take a look for ourselves, but in the meantime we have been told you can expect:

• Lifted data limits to allow you to track deeper and further back
• Download high data volumes and analyze all of your data.
• Perform attribution modelling on your marketing campaigns to understand the full value of all the channels in your media mix.
• With 50 custom variables, you can customize your analytics and collect the unique site usage data you want.
• Data collection of 99.9% in any calendar month.
• Data processed in 4 hrs 98% of the time
• Reporting of 99% in any calendar month.
• You own all of your data
• Dedicated account manager for daily support and training.
• 24/7 Tech Support

How Much Will it Cost?

At this stage we don’t know, we’ve seen rumours of $150k per year which in comparison to other major paid analytics solutions seems pretty steep – we’ll update this when we know for sure.

With Google stating that they have developed the tool in close coordination with some of its largest clients including Gucci, Travelocity and TransUnion it is obviously a solution built to compete with the likes of Coremetrics and Omniture.

We’re both excited and delighted to announce that the new Active Toy Company website has launched.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working closely with the team at The Active Toy Company and Webnetism to deliver a new website with improved customer experience with changes to the design, layout, navigaton and checkout process.

The Active Toy Company have used Toinfinity’s online marketing services for the past two years, including Pay Per Click management and Email Marketing services. In this time the Active Toy Company has grown considerably and taking the next step of improving their ecommerce website was a natural progression to increasing the brand’s online visibility.

Checkout the new site for yourself and let us know what you think and maybe stock up on a few xmas gifts for the kids (and grownups – we really want a Ovalpod, but the ceiling’s too low in the office!)