Cream of Life

When asked of ways to improve conversion on e-commerce sites, many people tend to complicate the whole ideas by highlighting contributions of marketing strategies to site conversion. While this holds true to a large extent, your online marketing department would have their ROI and budget concern in determining how they should spend their ad dollar. I usually have a check list on items that I should consider optimizing user experience within the site before talking to marketing folks on the clicks they send to the site. Generally speaking, it should also apply to the user experience optimization of most e-commerce conversion.

Before digging into the checklist, I always bear in mind 2 ultimate goals to optimize conversion and enrich user experience. The first one is to address customer anxiety. Users have no one to talk to as they browse your products and decide if they should buying from you. They are unsure if buying that product will bring them real benefits or more trouble. They need to be assured that every single step along their checkout path is safe and they are making the right decision to buy. The second one is to improve trust on your store. Show users they are well protected by various things your site provides to protect them. It’s always important to let your visitors know how much you care about their money and privacy.

I categorized the checklist items into those you can do on the product pages and those on the checkout pages. On the product pages of your online store, consider the following items.

1. Product Information

Do you provide enough quality info on your products to facilitate your site visitors’ buying decision? Would it be too simple or technical to understand how to use your products? Are you having the product specifications in a language that talks to your target audience? Do you address the users’ concern on exactly how they should use your products and benefits they would receive?

2. Product Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. Quality images and 360 degree view of your products would be ideal, but technically please don’t make it too long to download (too high resolution) or require an external plug-in to view it.

3.  Customer Reviews

Once again it’s often the community that speaks loudly on your products than you do. Both good and bad comments from people who bought the product are essential to establish a level of trust on your site and usefulness of the reviews. But what’s more important is monitoring the comments to avoid unfair, irrelevant opinions to disturb the quality of the contents.

I will continue on the items on the product pages in my next post.

Sales and marketing are often linked and regarded as one single aspect that almost every business has. I was asked about this question one day: how do you view the relationship between online marketing and online sales?At the first sight, online marketing is pretty straight forward to understand, but the question is how I should understand the idea of “online sales”.

While online and offline marketing have the same goal of improving communication with target customers, they may differ in terms of marketing channels, tools, and metrics. Same for sales. Both online and offline sales aim at increasing the revenue for the business, but the means to achieve the goals are very different.

In the retail world or B2C business, offline sales efforts may involve cold calling, pitching and product consultation. Sales team simply reach out to your potential customers and show and discuss with them how your products or services resolves their problems. Online sales may appear to be more reactive, but instead focuses more on user experience of online store where transactions take place. The success of online sales relies on building a best-in-class online shop through website and conversion optimizations.

Optimizing the website may simply start with being relevant to users. It means showing every user coming in your site the right information on the right page at the position and at the right time. It involves your understanding of who your users are, where they are from, and what they expect to see on your site. One way to do so is to work with the SEM folks to ensure a relevance between the keywords they use and the landing pages they send users to. As part of site optimization, the bounce rate of different site sections is a good metric that should be reviewed regularly to check the relevance of the pages your users perceive.

The other idea to build a good e-commerce site to through optimizing conversion. The goals of conversion optimization are to address customers’ anxiety as they shop and improve their trust level with you as a retailer. One metric to measure success of conversion optimization is cart abandonment rate, and the fallout report of your SiteCatelyst or Google Analytics definitely can tell you a lot about it.

One of the key improvements I enjoy the most on the new AdWords interface is the way that Google brings 2 useful reports for optimization more accessible. The first report is the Search Query Report, and it’s for generating more relevant keywords. The other report is the Placement Performance Report (PPR), and it’s for optimizing performance in the Content Network (if you opt into that).

With the Search Query Report, you will see the search terms people use to trigger your ads on Google Search Network. Because of different keyword match types, like Exact and Board, the keywords that trigger your ads are not necessarily those you added to your campaigns, and you may want to add those keywords that you don’t have in your campaigns. To dig out these keywords, on the new AdWords interface, go to “Campaigns” Tab > “All online campaigns”  > “Keywords” Tab, and hit “See Search Terms” > All. Focus on the “Match Type” column and look for keywords with “Board Match.”

If you opt into the Content Network, you may want to know where exactly my ads are displayed. While you can choose “Managed Placement” (formerly known as “Placement Targeting”) to control the website to show your ads, the “Automatic Placement” (a.k.a. Content Match) has been a mystery that scared off advertisers. Although Google provided the PPR to address the concern allowing advertisers to view performance of individual website, the PPR was too shy, and too logically and properly placed under the “Report” Tab. The net result was no one cared to discover it and appreciate its beauty.

The PPR is now in a much prominent position on the new interface. Check it out on the “Networks” Tab > Content > Automatic placements > show details.  If you find some sites that you like, e.g. the CTR is high or the CPC is low, you can add them to your Managed Placements and set a separate bid for them (see the picture below).

I find the 2 handy reports/ tools easy to use for myself and easy to communicate my optimization suggestions with my clients. If you have time, please check them out and let me know what you think. Enjoy.

Many people know Google has an official certification program for individual or ad agencies to obtain the Google Advertising Professional qualification to manage AdWords campaign for advertisers. I was recently asked by a Hong Kong advertiser if there’s something similar for Google Analytics (GA). Yes, there is. But it’s not yet well developed as GAP. And there are different resources for advertisers and ad agencies.

If you are an advertiser who needs a vendor to install and maintain GA on your website, you may check out Google Analytics Authorized Consultant program. You will see a list of GA Authorized Consultants located in US, Canada, Europe, Asia Pacifica and so on.

Say if you work in the ad agencies, you may want to equip yourself knowledge of GA. Afterall GA is free and you are likely to be asked some common questions when you talk to your clients. Go to Analytics Troubleshooter if you have some specific technical questions on installing tracking code or setting up filters. Visit Analytics Help if you want to get an overview on what GA is.

Some of my favorite articles about how GA can help improve Conversions are found on the Conversion University. Check them out to make sure you understand GA not just on theories, but in practice as well.