But that’s not stopped ideas from crossing the pond, and the latest American invention to reach these shores (courtesy of Amazon.co.uk) is Black Friday.

Black Friday Comes to Britain

So, what is Black Friday?

Black Friday is the name given to the day after Thanksgiving, and traditionally marks the start of the Christmas buying season in the US. Shops see their biggest footfalls and number of sales on Black Friday, after competing with each other by offering various loss-leading discounts.

The nearest UK equivalent would be 5:30pm on Christmas Eve, when petrol stations and pound shops play host to swarms of slightly drunk, scared and desperate British men, hoping that the perfect present for their wife or girlfriend will somehow be nestling just behind an unseasonal bag of firelighters.

So What Are Amazon Doing?

In order to entice customers into their online shop, Amazon is introducing thousands of loss-leading discounts. Games consoles, TVs and traditional big sellers will be offered at a fraction of their normal prices. With online spending set to hit £22.4m per hour in the runup to Christmas, this could well tempt online shoppers away from eBay and the glut of bargain websites that have cropped up following the recession.

There has been criticism however, with The Daily Mail criticising the site for being unable to keep up with demand. Apparently bargains are being snapped up by eager customers, and Amazon aren’t willing to sell off all of their stock at a loss. This might sound like a “disaster” to The Mail, but it seems like sound business sense to the rest of us.

If you’re looking to attract Black Friday traffic, you’ll need to act fast, with an AdWords campaign set to run tomorrow. Our AdWords team can help, but you’ll need to get in touch very soon.

Despite the sponsors, it’s not telling you to drink more cola, move your money to a particular bank or wear a certain pair of trainers.

And despite the players, it’s not telling you to swear at referees, roll around on the floor or spill a ball into your own net in a tragically comedic fashion.

No, what the World cup is really trying to make you understand is that success isn’t about one person striving out on their own. It’s about a team effort.

Whether you want to win the World Cup or succeed in the online marketplace, you’re going to need to put together a team. So let’s introduce you to the players at your disposal.

Goalkeeper – Search Engine Consultants

Without a good ‘keeper, you’re going to struggle to get out of the group stages, let alone win the final. Your goalie’s job is to keep you in the game, stop anything unexpected from causing you trouble and help you build from the back.

Sounds like your search engine consultants to us. They’ll be there to bring your SEO and AdWords into play, stop a sneaky breakaway from the search engine algorithms derailing your whole campaign, and generally to provide a safe pair of hands when you need them most. Just make sure you select a Gordon Banks or Dino Zoff. Robert Green need not apply.

Centre Backs – On Page SEO

Good centre backs are the solid foundations on which winning teams are built. Unflappable, dependable and consistent, they’re essential to any side. And if they can pop up with a goal or two from set pieces, so much the better.

Your on page SEO needs to be just as reliable. By consistently ranking on the search engine results pages, on page SEO provides a sustainable level of traffic – and just like a towering centre back rising to score at a corner, it will lead to a fair number of conversions too.

Fullbacks – AdWords

In the modern game, a fullback has to do it all. Remain steady in defence, and rampage forward in attack to create space. Versatility is the name of the game, and speed is needed to back that versatility up.

Fast and versatile? Sounds a lot like AdWords to us. When you need to keep it steady, your AdWords campaign can focus on your core areas. Then, in an instant, it can switch, probing forward to find spaces, trends and unexploited key phrases.

Holding Midfielders – Inbound Links

Possession. Holding territory.  Supporting the defence. You can’t win a World Cup without a holding midfielder, as Gennaro Gattuso can attest. By supporting the defence and neutralising the opponent’s advantages, the holding midfielder is the key to a team’s success.

And by supporting your on page SEO and giving you a competitive edge, inbound links are the key to your online success. Good quality inbound links fortify a website’s rankings, and building new links is a great way to gain ground on the competition. It might not be pretty, but it’s rewarding.

Wingers – Social Media

Always probing forward, looking to link up play and create openings and opportunities – the winger is the prime creative force for any football side. Nobody in the side reacts quicker, and the winger is always looking to turn a situation to his advantage.

In the modern game of online marketing, social media is your way of reacting quickly to unfolding events. It also helps you create openings for conversions by building up relationships, and by monitoring what potential customers want and need, it shows you a myriad of opportunities.

Strikers – Online Shop

Despite what Emile Heskey’s apologists will tell you, a striker has one job. Convert chances into goals. Simple.

Your online shop has one job. Convert visitors into customers. Simple. So make sure it can do its job, and then set up the rest of your side to create opportunities for your star striker to convert.

The Manager – You.

Football is a team game, but there’s still got to be someone to stand up and take responsibility. Someone to put the strategy together and make everyone on the team pull in the right direction. And the same is true of your online marketing strategy.

It’s your company on the line, so you need to be the one to take charge. Sure, you can rely on your goalkeeper to command the defence, but you need to give him clear instructions.

But if the pressure gets to you, remember one thing. Unlike the World Cup, there’s no chance of you being knocked out on penalties.

If your team needs a safe pair of hands at the back, call FirstFound now on 0161 909 3400. We’ll even coach your wingers for free with our handy Social Media Guide.

 

Conversion

• What is it?
• What is the typical conversion rate?
• How do I find out what my conversion rate is?
• How do I measure this?

Conversions on a website, what does it really mean?  There is a lot of fuss made over this term but unless you know what you want out of your website this term “conversions” is meaningless.  In a nutshell, a website conversion is a percentage or number of website visitors that have performed a desired action on your website.  For example on a website selling books, it will be the number of people that have brought books whilst visiting the store.  If it is an information site, it will be the number of people that have signed up or downloaded information from the site.  There are a number of actions that can be performed on a site and all can be tailored to your end goal for the website and business.

So I know what it means, how can I measure the conversion rate on my site?  This is the difficult part, different industries and retail sectors have different conversion rates.  In the retail industry, conversion rates can vary from 0.5% to 8% of visitors.  They also vary dramatically when specific industries are compared side by side.  On average catalogue e-commerce sites have 6% Conversion rate compared to electronics e-commerce site which has a 1% conversion rate.  The average in the retail sector is 2% conversion rate. 

 There is some debate into how conversion rates are measured, but for simplicity the normal calculation is:

Completed Actions / Total Number of Visitors = Conversion Rate x 100

 For example:
Selling specialist Champagne in wine merchant

Number of bottles of wine sold / total number of Visitors to wine merchant site
3/250 = 0.012 x 100 = 1.12%

1.12% is the conversion rate. This is how many visitors will purchase Champagne per 100 visitors to the site.   Once you have this conversion rate you can then focus on increasing relevant visitors to the site wanting to buy Champagne.  As long as the conversion rate stays the same, the more visitors to the site, the more Champagne this site will sell.

So how do I measure the number of visitors to my site? Unfortunately, this is the most complicated part of measuring conversion rates.  Visitor traffic can be tracked through a number of analytical packages of which there are hundreds on the market to choose from.  The most widely used and easy to install on you average HTML website is Google Analytics.  However there are increasing more e-commerce sites which offer analytical packages built into the site to monitor, trace and track visitors on the site.  It is worth whilst looking if your e-commerce site or web developers can install this functionality for you. 

One point to bear in mind is that different analytics packages will measure and report on traffic very differently from each other.  So if you are comparing conversion rates between two site, ensure the raw data is reported by the same analytics packages. 

I will take time to understand conversion rates specific to your site, and this rate will fluctuate dramatically throughout a 12 month period. Specifically during key seasonal periods such as Christmas, Easter and Summer.  Understanding what your typical conversion rate is can help increase your sales and maximise the potential of your site throughout peak seasons.