Avinash Kaushik - Search Engine Strategies conference 2012

I attended the SES in Toronto this month and I did learn some nuggets of wisdom from Avinash Kaushik, Google's digital marketing evangelist, who was the keynote and gave a very animated presentation. He pointed out some obvious mistakes Rogers, Canadian Tire, Expedia, Calvin Klein, the Bay and the Toronto Star are doing online. And by defacto pointed out that TD Bank - one of the top 5, can't be found on some basic keywords like property loan, student loan or best bank for foreign exchange. So its not just about what you are doing - its also about what you aren't doing.

• "Do not make the world unhappy" Avinash pleads - fix your sites; check your bounce rates and fix the pages people are bouncing from. Also if your site doesn't load in two seconds fix it. He said Calvin Klein's was very slow to load because it was loading images in Flash.
• "Every time you use Flash a puppy dies" claims Avinash.

The three things you should consider when looking at metrics are:

• Acquiring traffic - look at your entrance pages and unique visits
• Behaviour - what did visitors do - check your bounce rate (daily) and enter/exit pages
• Outcome/value - what was the conversion rate? who purchased, downloaded, called?

Another piece of advice was around questionnaires - Rogers has a 37 questionnaire on their site - really. He said there is only three things you need to ask:

• Why are you here?
• Do you want to buy something?
• Were you able to complete your task?

He also cautions to beware of "Data puking" - too much of the wrong data just wastes time.
He ended with "Expect more" from our own websites and from others.

Advice for agencies

I recently ran an RFP for social media agencies and was surprised by a few responses and non responses. One company got back to me after the submission deadline and said that if I wanted to do business with them in the future I should email three people as the one I had as a contact had been on holidays. Note that I did not receive any vacation alerts. Sorry but if you want business you're the one that needs to be responsive - in this day of automation there is no excuse and if you are senior enough to be on your website then have someone monitor your email account when and if you take vacation.

Another response was equally absurd. The company indicated they were interested in responding and then another person at the firm submitted questions. I responded to all questions and I used the first/main contact's email. The day the RFPs were due I emailed them asking if they were going to submit something and they said they were waiting my response to their questions which they would have received a week prior. I emailed them back indicating that I had sent them the answers. They then emailed me saying that because I hadn't emailed the "right" person they should get an additional three days to submit. Hey, its up to you to read your email and talk with each other internally.

Needless to say I will never work with either of those two firms because they don't understand how to read an RFP, don't understand email or email etiquette, certainly they don't understand customer service, and they exposed their lack of organization and internal communication capabilities - seriously for a marketing and social media agency if you don't know the basics why would I trust you with my strategy project?

So agencies take note - if you can't practice what you preach you are going to lose business.