The Google AdWords Landscape [Infographic]

March 14th, 2013 by Menachem Ani 3 comments »

Checkout this infographic of the Google AdWords landscape from the folks at SEOmoz.

Google AdWords Landscape Infographic
Produced by SEOmoz. ©2013.
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Top 5 Secrets To Keeping Visitors On Your Website Longer

February 27th, 2013 by Guest Author No comments »

irina

Irina Tsumarava is a Marketing Coordinator at aheadWorks, a dynamic market leading provider of Magento extensions, Magento templates and themes, and custom development services with a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class solutions for eCommerce businesses. 

Do you find that visitors of your website leave it too quickly? They enter your web store and after a while (often no longer than a few seconds) they close the page, thus increasing your bounce rate and lowering conversions. Working on Magento platform, aheadWorks makes the following recommendations to its clients to help eliminate this problem.

engaged

In contrast to visitors of brick and mortar stores, online customers can enter and leave web stores with a click or two of a mouse. If the time between these clicks is more than 20 seconds, it is a small victory. However, the main goal is to convert visitors of the store into customers. But due to numerous factors you may fail here. First you need to think about things that may cause visitors to leave. Numerous articles list up to 30 reasons, but only few describe the ways to cope with them. Let`s focus our attention on the reasons a potential customer might leave your website, and functionality that may prevent them from doing so.

1.       Content Structure and Design

Complicated content structure and poor design head the list of possible website drawbacks, because people simply can’t find what they are looking for. What are some ways to fix this issue? Inform your customers about stock availability of your products. Create visually appealing label images and call-to-action texts, rotate pictures of your items, so that you can be sure your customers’ attention will be definitely attracted. Play with different animation effects and select the one which is the most comfortable for your customers’ eyes. Promotional, advertising and other blocks on the product page are quite useful too. But keep in mind – too many of them look irritating, so maintain the balance.

2.       Navigation

Complex navigation makes users feel helpless and frustrated. To eliminate that, first, transform your page loading process by removing annoying reloads that frequently occur when users click “add to cart” and “delete from cart” buttons. Then enable site search with the autocomplete option, show product pictures to users in search results, and allow customers to configure search item layout. This all will make navigation more logical. Let your visitors move directly to desired product pages, completely bypassing the search results page.

3.       Checkout page

Online stores that use multiple page checkouts have been reported to cause 60% of shopping cart abandonment. For the most part, the longer the process, the easier it is for people to change their minds and avoid purchasing. It is much wiser to allow customers to buy directly from the product page with a single mouse click and also to remove all unnecessary checkout questions, replacing them with one page checkout. Recent studies suggest that buying with a single click increases conversion rate up to 70%.

4.       Blog

It is always difficult to trust someone you don’t know. Blogging establishes a personal connection between the website and target audience, thus, building reader loyalty. Writing a good blog has proved to be one of the most effective marketing tactics. If your customers feel you listen to them and respond to their needs, they are more likely to come back to your store again. With the help of blog you will learn more about your customers’ choices, views, and preferences. Being a part of the blog community, your customers will spread the word about you and express their honest opinion.

5.       Advertising

Numerous sites use advertising as the main source of income. However, poor graphics and tasteless headache-inducing advertisements very often prompt visitors to escape and never come back. Make sure to extend your website functionality with multiple configurable blocks for positioning ads on checkout and shopping cart pages. Thus, users won’t be enraged about ads that flash and pop.

Where these ideas useful to you? Have comments or suggestions? Drop us a line and let us know what you think.

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How Google Shopping Stole Christmas

February 20th, 2013 by Guest Author No comments »

mary

Mary Weinstein is an Account Manmager at CPC Strategy specializing in Comparison Shopping Engine, and PLA management with an emphasis on individualized merchant attention.

google-v-amazon

Amazon and Google Shopping are major heavy hitters in the comparison shopping and ecommerce arena. This year, Google Shopping’s switch to paid cost per click listings on Google Shopping through Product Listing Ads has switched up the rivalry even further.

CPC Strategy analyzes data across the comparison shopping engines (CSEs) each quarter based on metrics such as cost per click (CPC), traffic, conversion rate (CR), and revenue for online merchants.

This last quarter, Q4 2012 the engine data is quite varied for the CSEs, most notably Google Shopping and Amazon Product Ads.

Cost Per Click: Google vs. Amazon

google-vs-amazon

In the war for Q4 dominance, Google Shopping won out with cheaper cost per click (CPC) rates.

For Google, Q4 was the first fully paid quarter in Google’s history. However, Google’s average $0.31 CPC for Q4 2012 was still cheaper than Amazon Product Ads average CPC of $0.41. Overall, Google Shopping was 32.5% cheaper CPC than Amazon for the holiday quarter.

Conversion Rate: Google vs. Amazon

conversion-rate

Google Shopping has seen a steady decrease in conversion rate metrics since 2011, with a 22.35% decrease from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012.

Inversely, Amazon Product Ads saw a 57.5% increase in conversion rates, from 1.8% in Q4 2011 to 2.8% in Q4 2012.

Traffic: Amazon vs. Google

traffic

Although Google Shopping is now charging for its traffic, that isn’t stopping consumers from shopping on the engine. Google Shopping sent 96% more traffic to sellers compared to Amazon Product Ads in Q4 of 2012.

Compared to the previous quarter, where Amazon dominated traffic generation.  Google sent merchants 144% more traffic than Amazon Product Ads in Q3 2012, when the transition to a commercial Google Shopping took place.

Check out the full Rankings to see additional engine metrics such as cost per sale.

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Mobile Shopping Trends Increasingly Influenced By Older Consumers This Holiday Season – And Beyond

December 13th, 2012 by Guest Author No comments »

Terry CostaThis post was written by Terry Costa, Vice President of Marketing, SLI Systems. As VP of marketing, Terry Costa is responsible for SLI Systems’ global marketing efforts as well as for driving growth of SLI’s search technology and services in the e-commerce and publishing industries.

older-shoppers

We know that more and more holiday shoppers are doing their gift buying online, but there are some new developments this holiday season that eCommerce professionals should have on their radar. For one thing, mobile devices are playing an even bigger role in the shopping process. In addition, the audience for online holiday shopping appears to shifting somewhat – in fact, older shoppers are increasingly enjoying the benefits of online shopping.

These new angles in eCommerce – during the holiday season and beyond – require special attention from eCommerce providers. For instance, a recent study from Valero found that 20 percent of shoppers ages 55 to 64 expect to do some portion of their shopping online during the 2012 holiday season. According to the study, this is the highest percentage of online shoppers from any age group, followed closely by shoppers ages 45 to 54 (19 percent).

18-24

In an interesting turn, as the study uncovered, shoppers ages 18 to 24 were least likely to do their shopping online – which is a switch from conventional wisdom that younger consumers are more likely to embrace eCommerce tools than their older counterparts.

If older consumers are increasingly taking to online shopping, what does this mean for your business? Make sure your online shopping experience welcomes all shoppers, not just the under-30s. Usability features like refinements and relevant site search results will help all of your customers – even the less-savvy online shoppers – easily navigate around your site and find the products they want. Also, make sure that your merchandising showcases your most popular products and promotions, such as free shipping and free returns, in a variety of ways such as merchandising banners, ribbon overlays, and pages full of product images. With multiple merchandising venues, you’ll guarantee that shoppers in every demographic get the message.

Smartphones

As for shoppers making use of their smartphones and tablets to get their holiday shopping done, usability needs to be one of your top priorities. A recent study we conducted among e-commerce companies found that 40% of respondents still plan to build a mobile commerce site. If you’re one of them, make sure your search box is easy to find and position it in a prominent location at the top of your mobile webpage.

Younger and older consumers rely on mobile devices to do their shopping when they’re on the go and away from home, so localized search results, created with a device’s GPS tracking information, can be very useful. If you have brick and mortar locations in addition to an eCommerce website, localized results can help direct shoppers to stores where a product may be available.

Bottom Line

During the holidays and long after, it’s important to keep a close eye on eCommerce trends that will impact how you present products and structure the shopping experience. Mobile commerce shows no signs of slowing down – but rest assured that there will be new trends developing out of the mobile wave that will demand your attention.

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Weighing the Options for Hosting Ecommerce Videos: YouTube vs. Third-party Platforms

December 10th, 2012 by Guest Author No comments »

This post was written by Melody King of Treepodia. Melody has 13 years of experience in IT, focusing the last 7 in eCommerce. During this tenure, she consulted with more than 500 organizations to assist with increasing their site usability, merchandising, conversion, and order size. She has a Doctor of Management in Organizational Leadership, BSIT with a minor in DBA, and MBA.

To make sure your product videos get as many viewers as possible, you may be thinking about hosting them on YouTube. This is a logical step to take, since YouTube has a massive audience, and makes it easy to do social sharing of your videos.

But hosting videos on YouTube isn’t the only option. You may want to check out third-party video hosting solutions that can offer features that aren’t available on YouTube. It’s a good idea to compare YouTube to other video platforms so that you can decide which way to go. Here are some factors to consider.

Look & Feel

Generally, it’s quite easy to embed videos that are hosted on YouTube on your eCommerce website. However, you don’t get too many choices as to how the video is displayed, or what size they are. YouTube-hosted videos generally take up a lot of space – space that you might want to use for more description of the product, or more images. If you host your videos via a third-party provider, you may have more presentation choices available to you. For example, you may be able to use tabs to showcase video options; when visitors click on a tab, the video screen expands.

Free vs. Paid

YouTube doesn’t charge to host video, and free options are always attractive, especially if your company is new and just getting on its feet. But that free price tag may come at the cost of functionality that you need to run your eCommerce business effectively, and to make sure that your videos are seen by the widest possible audience. For example, if you have a lot of videos, it can take many hours to upload them to YouTube, since the site isn’t really designed for mass uploading. On the other hand, a third-party video platform can automate the uploading process so you can get more done in less time.

Search Engine Rankings

The common wisdom says that by placing your videos on YouTube, you’ll get them listed higher in search rankings, since YouTube is owned by Google. Conversely, so the wisdom goes, if your videos are hosted by anyone besides YouTube, they won’t show up as high in search results.

However, this isn’t necessarily true. The algorithms that Google uses to decide video ranking will place higher importance on a site’s topical authority – so a computer equipment site will rank higher in the algorithm for a wireless router video than a similar video on YouTube, which the algorithm views as a video portal.

Shopping Online

If customers see your product in a YouTube video, or watch the video on a social network, they have to return to your website and search for the product if they want to buy it. This takes a lot of time, which may discourage them from making the purchase. Third-party video hosting solutions have features that make it easier for viewers to make a purchase – for instance, being able to add a product to a shopping cart directly from a video player.

YouTube is a popular choice for hosting e-commerce videos, but sophisticated e-commerce capabilities are limited. eCommerce professionals should consider the features they need in hosted video – such as flexible presentation options, metrics and testing. Third-party hosting providers can offer enough options to make them a strong alternative to YouTube.

Image Credit: jonsson

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Shopping.com Will Now Syndicate Listings To Google Shopping

November 5th, 2012 by Menachem Ani 1 comment »

It looks like Google Shopping is trying to beef up their product listings now that a lot of merchants are pulling their feeds because it is no longer free. Until Google transitioned to a commercial model, they had the most comprehensive shopping database because almost every merchant would list their products. Obviously not all merchants can afford to pay Google and have since de-listed their product datafeeds.

This would be a great way for Google to have a more comprehensive database while they try to get more merchants to sign up directly.

Shopping.com sent out a nootice of the partnership today:

Dear Merchant,

We are pleased to announce that Google Shopping recently joined the Shopping.com portfolio of leading publishers. Google recently moved to a commercial-model based on Product Listing Ads and has become a critical channel for retailers. Via our new partnership, you automatically get exposure on this high-performing channel without any extra effort.

This partnership delivers several advantages for you:

Gain efficiency
It’s easy – submit one data feed to Shopping.com and get exposure across a powerful network of high-caliber publishers, including Google Shopping. This allows you to tap into Shopping.com’s rich catalog to deliver highly optimized feeds to Google. You will also have a centralized point of contact who will optimize your performance to achieve optimal ROI.

Benefit from historical relevance
As an early participant in the Google Shopping pilot, merchant offers from Shopping.com gained valuable click history, a key element to boost quality score, which in addition to bid and relevancy, helps Google determine the right offer to serve. This improves the odds that your offer through Shopping.com will be displayed.

Leverage Value Based Pricing
Shopping.com’s sophisticated algorithm automatically adjusts CPCs daily with our Value Based Pricing model to meet ROI goals.
No action is required on your part to gain access to Google Shopping’s customer base. Please contact us if you have any questions regarding this partnership or would like to opt-out.

Shopping.com Merchant Services Team

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New Google AdWords Feature: Compare Date Ranges

October 23rd, 2012 by Menachem Ani 2 comments »

When I logged into AdWords yesterday, I noticed that Google released a new feature that always felt as if it was missing: a date selection tool. The new tool now let’s you compare date ranges à la Google Analytics. This can be very useful in measuring the performance of your campaigns over time. Just click the blue slider and select the previous period.

Google will then generate a chart with multiple graph lines comparing the dates selected.

Image Credit: TheBusyBrain
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How To Leverage Your eCommerce Datafeeds To Increase Sales

October 23rd, 2012 by Guest Author 5 comments »

This post is written by Ben Bakhshi from adCore. adCore is an SEM automation suite that allows eCommerce shops to synchronize their datafeeds with Google AdWords and managing their bids automatically. Ben also writes for the blog eCommerce Marketing.

Google Doodle

Image Credit: Stuck in Customs

You are marketing your eCommerce shop wrong and that is causing you to miss out on a lot of sales. If you aren’t familiar with your product datafeed, chances are that you are not reaching your site’s full marketing potential. Your eCommerce product datafeed is your business’ catalogue of merchandise that can be read by a variety of platforms. For companies with a hundred or more products, a well-designed eCommerce datafeed provides an opportunity to scale up marketing and sales and overall product manager, like offering discounts, making sweeping changes to inventory, managing suppliers, and more.. While having a feed to inject into your eCommerce platform can help your internal efficiencies, your feed can be used by search engines, shopping comparison sites, and affiliate networks to increase your sales. So let’s find out how.

Optimize Your Feed

Your datafeed should be organized in a manner that Google can understand, aka SEO (search engine optimized).  Your feed should be in XML or CSV format, and hosted somewhere online via HTTP or FTP.  When organizing your CSV or XML headers, use human names like: Brand, Manufacturer, Product Name, Product Description, Category, Sub-Category, etc.

Make sure you separate or use a different feed for your Brand and Category landing pages. When someone searches Nike Shoes, you want them to land on a page with all Nike shoes, not on a specific product page. The Brand and Category landing pages often convert at a higher percentage than product landing pages.

Don’t group multiple columns together. Whenever possible, keep your Brand and Product Name separated. That way when someone searches for Nike Shoes, Google will know to display your broad Nike landing page, and not Nike Dunks Women’s Size 8 just because you poorly organized your feed.

Synchronize Your Feed with Google AdWords

Consider synchronizing your feed to Google AdWords with a 3rd party AdWords tool like adCore. In 2006, Google launched the AdWords API which opened up access to developers to create software that can make changes within AdWords. With adCore you can create an AdWords campaign that adds new inventory and pauses out of stock inventory automatically. adCore and the AdWords API allow you to have up to 2 dynamic numeric fields, (often Price and Quantity-in-Stock, but could be anything), without losing historic data on your ad due to ad-copy changes. You can also push your ads to Yahoo and Bing. It is recommended that you have an experienced AdWords manager manage your AdWords account.

Link your Google Shopping account to AdWords, and run Product Listing Ads. Google does a great job of driving highly targeted traffic to your product landing pages. When you run a service like adCore in addition to Product Listing Ads, you can get 2 or more impressions on any given product search. The more impressions you get the more sales you can make.

Submit Your Feed to Shopping Comparison Engines

There are many shopping comparison engines on the net, with new ones popping up all the time. Some are free, and some charge you for incoming clicks. Here is a list of the top 10 shopping comparison engines, ranked by CPCStrategy: Amazon Product Ads, Shopzilla, Nextag, Google Shopping, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, Pronto, Become, Bing Shopping, and TheFind.

You can save a lot of time by working with a datafeed management company to submit your feed for you and keep them synchronized. Some companies that I recommend are FeedManagerUSA, CPCStrategy, FusePump, GoDataFeed, GoMage, and Aten Software.

Give Affiliates Access to Your Feed

Allowing affiliates to participate in your sales funnel is a guaranteed way to increase your sales in the short and long run. You pay them a fixed percentage that guarantees that you earn money on every transaction; some business will decide to cut even on the affiliate transactions because they take advantage of the extra brand awareness and return customers. The more that affiliates are able to earn, the more they will work for you.  Affiliates are great because they create content pointing to your site, like blogs, forums, review sites, and more.

You can push your datafeed directly to the hands of affiliates one at a time on your website. Just make sure that you apply their affiliate parameter to the URLs in the feed so that they can get credit. Alternatively you can work with affiliate networks like ShareaSale, Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, PepperJam, Avantlink, and more. There is usually a startup fee up to a few thousand dollars to join an affiliate network. This is a great investment to consider because affiliate sales can scale your sales so much.

In conclusion, utilizing your eCommerce datafeed can dramatically increase your eCommerce sales. It is the modern version of having a store catalogue, but with much more scale. Done the right way, you can have other people sell your merchandise for you, saving you a lot of time, and increasing your overall revenue and merchandise turnover.

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New Google AdWords Feature: Shared Budgets [How-To]

September 20th, 2012 by Menachem Ani 5 comments »

Google AdWords just released a new feature which will help you control your budget. Until now, each campaign had it’s own budget. If you wanted to cap your spend across specific campaigns/promotions you had to merge everything into one campaign. The new Shared Budgets feature allows you to group campaigns and override their budgets.

Google AdWords Shared Budgets

Step #1 – Navigate to Campaigns –> Shared Library –> Budgets –> New Budget

 

Step #2 – Enter Budget Settings

  1. Budget Name (i.e. Fall Campaigns)
  2. Apply to Campaigns – select which campaigns should be under this budget umbrella
  3. Budget Amount – this new budget will replace the existing campaign budgets
  4. Delivery Method – same options as on the category level (Standard or Accelerated)

Try it out and let us know how it performs for you.

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GoDaddy Goes Down, Takes Half The Internet With It

September 10th, 2012 by Menachem Ani 7 comments »

Today is not a good day for GoDaddy. At least they are aware of it. Twitter is currently blowing up with people trying to find more information. The first reports seems to be from 1:20pm EST, so Twitter seems to be having problems for almost an hour.

I tried calling GoDaddy’s customer support line and the phone just rings non-stop. It would seem as if I’m not the only person trying to get through to them. Or maybe their phone system is down too.

At this point it looks like every single GoDaddy service is inaccessible, including DNS, Email, Hosting etc… GoDaddy has responded to multiple tweets with a variation of “Sorry for any inconvenience. We’re aware and are working to resolve this quickly.”

Are you using GoDaddy? I use them to purchase domains, but I host them elsewhere.

UPDATE: Anonymous is taking credit for GoDaddy being down.

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