17 Nov 09 Converting Traffic into Sales
Google Adwords is not new, but when it was, it was the vehicle through which your competitors grew and stole market share away from you. Today, there are new vehicles like Social Media that we need to pay attention to. You’re not just competing with other online stores, you’ve also got to contend with individuals on Ebay as well as Jo Blogs starting up your competition in his bedroom. Pretty soon he will move into his garage and before long, employee number one will be writing his memoirs.
Niche. Exploit yours.
Finding unexploited niche products can help you turn $0.15 clicks into $150 dollar sale. That’s 1000x return on investment. Worth the time and the research? You betcha. An unexploited niche means little or no competition. This let’s you bid next to nothing and Google will still display your Ads.
As far as the Adwords system is concerned, next to nothing, is better than nothing.
Now that you have your niche, you still need to get people to:
- Click your ads
- Place orders.
1. Getting your Ad clicked
- Read Scientific Advertisng by Claude Hopkins. It’s free on Google Books.
In short, be as specific as possible (only attracts strong prospects and saves you money on clicks.) - Speak your customer’s language. Be relevant, timely and have a strong call to action..
- A/B/C test multiple variations of headlines, ad-copy and display URL, and in about 5 days, you will have enough data to start using your optimum combination.
2. Getting People to Order
People are at your site because they chose to click on your Ad, but they will only buy if:
- They trust you
- You can deliver what your ad promised
- Your price is right.
Your website should be easy to use and ooze transparency and safety. Your site navigation should be painless. Your shopper should never be trying to figure out what to do next. Follow conventions (they’re conventions for a reason!)
First impressions count. Your signup process, your transaction workflow and your customer service responses need to be frictionless. Deliver exactly what the prospect wants, or they will leave, say nasty things about you and shop with your competition.
No Surprises
The price and product benefits in your ad should be reflected on the landing page. Don’t suddenly introduce a delivery fee at the very last step if you made no mention of it before.
Some ‘discount’ airline websites have a bad habit of offering very low airfares and then slapping tax, fuel charges, booking fees and baggage fees on top, which generally make the ‘discount’ prefix a bit of a lie. I can’t imagine they will stay in business very long if they continue with such practices.
For a copy of my Conversion Optimisation Guide 
Tags: paid search marketing
06 Jul 09 Experiments in Facebook Social Ads
Objective
My recent Facebook Social Ads trials were aimed at driving traffic to retail websites in order to earn affiliate commissions. Here is what I did and what I learned: Affiliate cookies typically last 30 days, Place very low bids. Adhering to Facebook’s recommended bids will drive you to bankruptcy and to complain loudly about how ads on social networking sites do not work. My objective was to drive traffic with lots of low cost, but well qualified clicks to high value products on retail websites and then benefit from sales that occur over the next 30 days. This methodology allows for making a positive ROI.
Headlines
Like with any ads, experimentation with different headlines and ad-copy was critical in identifying the correct mix. Once established, the ’secret formula’ delivered perpetual returns.
- Well targeted headlines that were very specific worked best. Eg: “Buy Books” was not as good as “Vampire Lover?” when talking to an audience of female Edward Cullen fans.
- Getting clicks is easy using truisms in your headlines and Facebook’s interest based targeting system facilitates this well. For example:
A female between 18 and 25 who has an interest in Vampires and Edward Cullen, is likely to be responsive to the headline: “Vampire Lover?”
OR A 27 year old male in San Francisco is likely to take notice of the headline: “27 and in SF?”
Ad-Copy
With ad-copy, I found two styles work well:. Firstly, a compelling message that is conversational in style. For example, positive customer reviews like:
“I love this set of Vampire tales! It has everything you want Mystery,Fantasy and of course romance with juicy bits! Only $88.99
- Other good ad-copy requires a compelling, yet specific value proposition that sounds believable. For example “Today Only” was not as good as “Until sold out” because people hear the phrases like “Today Only” and “One Day Only” far too frequently.
- Coupon codes also drove good clickthrough rates and allowed me to easily track which specific combination of headline and ad-copy worked best. Interestingly, resulting conversions where very limited.
Product Strategy
Promote specific, high value items to a captive audience (people who want what you are selling) who are more than likely to become customers. This increases the probability of your ROI being positive.
Targeting
Improve your targeting. I’m able to tell which specific page or application on Facebook each of my clickthroughs came from. I’ve been running identical Google Ads for comparison and my sales reports tell me exactly what search terms people are using to trigger my ads to show. I can then add these keywords to my Facebook targeting.
Limitations of the Facebook Social Ads Platform
Currently the Facebook social ad campaign manager is somewhat limited compared to Adwords. For example, if you want to change your bid, you need to make the change for each ad manually. There is no global bid manager, although i’m hopeful we will see this option appear in the future, together with email reports.
- A recent change has meant that the % symbol is no longer allowed in ad-copy, which constrains the type of value proposition you can convey to your audience.
- I’ve tracked a number of clicks from intern.facebook.com. I was suspicious that I was being charged for these clicks, but a count of my clicks vs. charges revealed that this was not the case.
Concluding Observations and Comments
Finally, I noticed Subway have made clever use of Facebook, displaying ads with headlines like: “It’s time for Lunch” and “Hungry?” between around 11am to 2pm and encouraging you to order online. I think they are certainly doing something right.
I was using the Amazon Associates Program until they announced they will no longer pay referral fees on paid-search-derived traffic. In any case, the system seems to work better outside of the USA. I will continue to post my results as I experiment with different types of products, companies and countries.
What have your experiences with social network advertising been like? Please leave a comment or read more about Leveraging Social Networks
More about what works on Facebook:
engaging-with-facebook-social-ads/
facebook-advertising-resources-the-6-types-of-ads-on-the-new-home-page/
contextual-advertising-in-facebook.html
why-would-you-want-to-use-facebook-advertising
why-facebook-likes-small-ads-despite-the-small-dollars/
Americans Expect Companies to Have a Presence in Social Media
25 May 09 SEO: The (not so) Secret Formula
Search Engine Optimisation is a way to make it easier for Google to crawl and index your website. By making your website more useful for people, you tend to make it more Google-friendly also. This is how it’s done:
Have Unique & Accurate Page Titles that display its title and the three main focus areas like so:
<head>
<title>Citypulse New Zealand – News, Event Listings & Sports</title>
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Read the latest news localised for every major town in the country. Tweet your news to @citypulsenz or txt to 8525 and have it published.>
</head>
Words that you enter in a search query are bolded if they are appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP.) So the more relevant keywords you have on your site and site description, the higher the chance that a person will notice your listing and deem it worthy enough to click on:
Have Unique Title Tags for each page of your site.
Titles for deeper pages on your site should accurately describe the focus of that particular page and might also include your business name. They should be brief and informative.
Good Example: [Local Auckland News]
Result: Latest Auckland News – Citypulse New Zealand.
Use Google Webmaster Tools Content Analysis Section: Tells you about any description meta tags that ere either too short, long, or duplicated too many times. (eg same information shown in title tag)
Use Google Trends, Analytics and Adwords reports to determine what search terms are driving people to your website and optimise your website accordingly.
Your <meta> snippets can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked. However, note that meta descriptions won’t affect your ranking within search results.
Bad Example:
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”[domain name redacted]
: Sookie Stackhouse Box Set: Books: Charlaine Harris,Mary GrandPré by Charlaine Harris,Mary GrandPré”>
Poor quality meta descriptions like this have the following traits:
- The title of the book is complete duplication of information already in the page title.
- Information is duplicated (Charlaine Harris, Mary GrandPré are each listed twice).
- None of the information in the description is clearly identified; who is Mary GrandPré?
- The missing spacing and overuse of punctuation makes the description hard to read.
Better Example:
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Author: Charlaine Harris, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $97.99, Length: 7 Books”>
Notice that there is no duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality.
Improve URL structure
Long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words are a turn-off. Deeper pages that have titles that match search queries are good because they get bolded in search results.
Descriptive categories and file names:
Eg: articles in a [articles] folder, blog post in a [blog] folder etc,[glass suppliers in a [glass suppliers] category.
Use punctuation:
Google recommends use of hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.
Pitfalls
# Dynamic generation of documents. This can result in small changes because of counters, timestamps, or advertisements.
# Problematic parameters in the URL. Session IDs, for example, can create massive amounts of duplication and a greater number of URLs.
# Sorting parameters. Some large shopping sites provide multiple ways to sort the same items, resulting in a much greater number of URLs. For more treatment on this subject, read Google’s search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.
Use breadcrumb navigation:
Consider what happens when a user removes part of a URL…what does the user see?
Have a useful 404 page…but it should not be indexed in search engines make sure that your
webserver is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code when non-existent
pages are requested
Appropriate Use of Heading Tags:
Heading tags (not to be confused with the <head> HTML tag or HTTP headers) are used to present
structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with <h1>, the most
important, and ending with <h6>, the least important.
Optimise Use of Images:
Unique and relevant filenames and ALT text.
Use a robots.txt file
A “robots.txt” file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site.
This file, which must be named “robots.txt”, is placed in the root directory of your site.
You can use Google Webmaster Tools robots.txt generator to help create this file.
Avoid Cloaking:
If you have indexed pages that require a use to login to read, then you should display a page snippet like WARC: http://www.warc.com/Articles/View.asp?ArticleID=89340&Origin=WARCNewsEmail or Scientific American do for their articles.
Action List:
- Put an HTML sitemap on your page and make a XML sitemap for Google using their automated sitemap generator script.
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to find the source of URLs causing ‘not found’ errors
- Backlinks from other highly regarded websites including social websites: Linkedin, Twitter, Slideshare, cross links to related sites in community
- Use Google Webmaster Tools Content Analysis Section: Tells you about any description meta tags that ere either too short, long, or duplicated too many times. (eg same information shown in title tag)
- Use Google Trends, Analytics and Adwords reports to determine what search terms are driving people to your website and optimise your website accordingly.
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to see the Top Search Queries for which your website appears
- Benchmark your progress using the Hubspot Webgrader.
If none of this makes any sense, then ask us for an SEO Review.
Here are a few things you should consider before hiring us:
TIPS ON PICKING AN SEO COMPANY:
* Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
* Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
* Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
* What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
* What’s your experience in my industry?
* What’s your experience in my country/city?
* What’s your experience developing international sites?
* What are your most important SEO techniques?
* How long have you been in business?
* How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?
04 May 09 Sheep Theory: E-commerce Product Placement
Soy milk does not need to be refrigerated until opened, so it never used to sit in the supermarket fridge next to the regular milk. Not surprisingly, it didn’t sell very well. Milk that’s not in the fridge? That’s just too weird for most of us used to buying fresh milk. Soy milk eventually got repackaged and put on a shelf next to all the other milk and hey presto, it started selling. And now on to product placement in the virtual world:
How do you decide what people see on your homepage? You let your customers decide.
Majority rules in the world of e-commerce. If a lot of people are buying a particular product, then it’s very likely that others will also want that product on the basis of what is effectively a very powerful recommendation from their peers. Roger’s Innovation Adoption Curve, while not created for this purpose, is still a clear illustration on how a little known product can be catapulted to stardom and it teaches a valuable lesson: Speak to a narrowly targeted audience of people who will want your product.
So, it makes sense to identify potential products that could fit the bill as early as possible and then give them some homepage real-estate. To do this, mine your data and display what other people are buying through visualizations of:
- Your daily / weekly sales stats. (Bestsellers)
- Things people desire (Wishlists)
- If Customer A buys product X, then display products Y and Z that Customer B,C,D bought who also bought Product X. (Keep up now
)
A note on product pages: The primary objective of the product page is to get the prospect to add the featured item to their shopping cart and then easily complete the order and pay you. However, the product page also offers ample opportunity to cross-promote and up-sell your prospect by enticing them with related products, thereby increasing your Average Sales Value. The classic example is Amazon’s Better Together feature which recommends the top 1 or 2 other titles that are commonly bought with the item in question and offers the entire bundle to you at a slightly discounted price. (A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.) This is made possible by analytics driven decision making.
17 Apr 09 Satisfying a Desire
“Consumers spend time and money satisfying a desire for authenticity”
Joseph Pine@TED, 2004
In his presentation at TED, Joesph Pine used coffee to illustrate what consumers want. Coffee starts life as a bean:
Commodity: (Coffee Beans) Command a meagre $0.02 per cup
Product:(Bag of beans on Supermarket shelf after roasting / refinement / instantisation) $0.15 per cup
Service: (Coffee made for you at a kiosk) $0.50 per cup
Experience: (Buying a cup of coffee so you can satisfy a desire for an authentic experience) $4.00 per cup
I see this as the same reason we choose to visit the movie theatre or shop at Borders. Both supply commodity products, but they have been packaged into an experience that you can’t get anywhere else. You might have also noticed how you tropical island holiday ads always feature idyllic white sand beaches and clear blue skies, with a happy couple or family playing on the beach…this could be you. (Ofcourse, being a tropical island, it does tend to rain every so often.)
Another example from my recent Facebook Social Ad Experiments is in selling books. Another commodity, but a particular genre, author or title delivers emotional value to the fan. She doesn’t buy a book, she buys the experience that it delivers, and that is exactly how I write my ads, not selling books, but selling the immersive experience that she will have once the book is in her hands. This works because people using Facebook are not looking to make a purchase. They are in what I like to call ‘Escapism Mode’ where they seek opportunities to ‘take the red pill’ and go further down the rabbit hole.
Tags: Buyer Behaviour
16 Apr 09 Analytics Driven Decision Making
What do the numbers say? The beauty of e-commerce is that everything can be tracked and measured to your benefit.
- Track where the buyer came from, what they bought, at what time, on what day and in combination with which other products.
- Understand what page layout converts best by conducting A/B and multivariate tests.
- Use IP addresses to know what geographic location your traffic is coming from and customize what is shown on your landing page accordingly. More customization can be done for repeat visitors by using cookies. For example: Recommend new items based on their previous purchases.
With access to timely, accurate and actionable data, there is no reason to do things ‘on a hunch’
Read more:
Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics
Tags: analytics
13 Apr 09 Skycity Cinemas – You’ve Failed!
Last night I was out with a friend and decided we wanted to check out the movie Watchmen. We were at dinner, so I did not have access to a computer. To cut a long story short, I spent 10 minutes trying to find show times, but to no avail. Skycity Cinemas have struggled to make ends meet in New Zealand last night was a taste of why that is:
- Their website is too heavy and takes too long to load
- There is no mobile WAP site / Iphone site etc.
- The Movie times service on Vodafone Live! does not work
- A phone number was difficult to find and when dialled, I got no answer!
Details of each of these issues and solutions are described below:
Skycitycinemas.co.nz is image and flash heavy, but most people still have a dial-up connection in.
Of the 1,504,000 internet users in New Zealand (March 2008, Statistics New Zealand)
- Broadband: 891,000
- Dialup: 613,000
Download Times for Skycitycinemas.co.nz*
| Connection Rate | Download Time |
|---|---|
| 14.4K | 315.90 seconds |
| 28.8K | 163.65 seconds |
| 33.6K | 141.90 seconds |
| 56K | 89.70 seconds |
| ISDN 128K | 35.38 seconds |
| T1 1.44Mbps | 13.48 seconds |
One and a half minutes is far too long for a website to load, but as the saying goes, you don’t have to outrun the tiger, just the guy standing next to you:
Download Times for Hoyts.co.nz*
| Connection Rate | Download Time |
|---|---|
| 14.4K | 515.06 seconds |
| 28.8K | 266.73 seconds |
| 33.6K | 231.26 seconds |
| 56K | 146.11 seconds |
| ISDN 128K | 57.51 seconds |
| T1 1.44Mbps | 21.80 seconds |
For more about Hoyts, check out Mathew Sanders post:
Dear Hoyts: here’s 5 tips on showing movie times on your website
With over 90% of New Zealand’s population owning a mobile phone, the cinema has failed by not making it easy for people to access them via this medium. I was forced to chew through my meagre 10MB Vodafone daily data allowance
Vodafone’s Movies feature in its Sim Lifestyle section is absolutely worthless. It hasn’t worked once in the 2 years i’ve tried to use it. (Atleast they didn’t charge me for the txt requests, oh those angels)
Solutions:
- Functionality is more important than form. The flash and heavy imagery needs to be stripped down. Removing the flash module would be a good start, followed by caching the css and images. Also lighter image formats (PNG rather than JPEG) would make sense. View a full checklist here.
- With a larger mobile audience than pc-internet audience, a WAP site is essential, as well as iphone / Blackberry optimised versions that are light,fast and functional. A good design would consist of just 2 search boxes, one for the movie name and the other for location. A list of movie times should follow on the next page. Added bonus: Txt a shortcode to buy tickets!
- Sort out the Movie times feature on Vodafone Live! or get rid of it. Skycity Cinemas should have their own shortcode that people can simply text QUEEN ST WATCHMEN to and get a list of movie times returned. Again, “a reply with TIME QUANTITY (3.15pm X2) to buy would be a powerful call to action. This service should be promoted on all of their marketing collatoral, including their website, emails, movie money booklets, tickets and receipts. Ideally, Skycity should provide this themselves, but theres no reason a service like Flicks.co.nz couldn’t do this either.
- An easy to find phone number and good IVR system that tells you movie times. (Don’t switch it of after hours! What if I want to by tickets for another day?)
Looking back, this is in fact my second post about the flaws of Skycity Cinemas. The first was with regard to the launch of their ‘Film Squad’ product. My gripe was that they issued actual plastic cards rather than use someone’s mobile phone number as their membership ID, a much more convenient and less archaic solution.
Functionality is more important than style.
Site speed tests conducted using: Websiteoptimization.com, www.webpagetest.org.nz
Tags: ecommerce, skycity cinema
13 Apr 09 Good Friday is bad for E-commerce
Weekends are notoriously weaker for e-commerce than weekdays and when it comes to long-weekends like Easter. Good Friday is in fact, Very Bad Friday. While not being restricted by archaic no-trading laws like physical retailers are, online retailers tend to struggle on account of people being away on holiday and therefore, away from their computers during the day at work and also away from their home computers while they relax in vacation spots.
While there is an obvious short term sales slump, I wonder if clickthroughs over the holiday convert later on. With a 30 day cookie, standard with most e-commerce sites, this is easy to track by setting up a campaign with a tracking cookie separate to your regular campaigns. Try this:
- Pause your regular campaign.
- Copy the exact same ads over to a new campaign, but change your URLs to include a new tracking cookie.
- Now you can accurately measure your holiday advertising ROI vs. the norm.
08 Apr 09 Cart Abandonement
Why do people put stuff in their cart and then leave it in the middle of the store? Well:
- They think they might be able to get a better deal somewhere else
- Your website was too slow or worse, it crashed!
- They don’t own a Visa or Mastercard.
Let’s flesh these reasons out a bit:
They think they might be able to get a better deal somewhere else because:
- Your big box “Enter coupon code” is a call to action. Your prospect just went scurrying around the internet looking for a coupon code for your store.
Your website was too slow, or worse, it crashed!
- No one likes waiting in a line at checkout. Like the new self-service checkout kiosks in supermarkets, people expect to be able to zip right through when completing an online transaction. If you’re too slow, then they may just leave out of impatience or worse, a lack of trust for your site.
They don’t own a Visa or Mastercard…are they even human???
- Everyone owns a credit card right? No, and those that do might also have these ones called Diner’s Club and AMEX. Yes we all know the merchant fees are too high, but your customer does not know or care about that. Furthermore, you should provide as many mainstream payment options as possible like Paypal, Google Checkout, Electronic Bank Transfer and even accept checks. Every shopper has their preferred payment method and all of the above apart from processing checks can be turned into an automated process.
07 Apr 09 The Cost of Free Shipping
Free Shipping is a common incentive used by online retailers to entice their shoppers to buy from them vs a competitor or simply to increase the value of the transaction. But is is worth it?
For example, let’s offer free shipping for orders over $50 to someone who has $40 worth of product in their cart. The shopper then purchases another item worth $20. The perceived value of free shipping is sufficient to push the user over the $50 threshold.
In reality, shipping only costs $5, but we have convinced our shopper to part with an additional $20. How devious we are!
If we had not dangled a carrot in front of our shopper, then we would have ended up with a total sale valued of only $45. Instead we succeeded in securing an order worth over $60. But was it worth it? Let’s assume a gross margin of 25% on all sales and that shipping costs us $3 per package
- $40 sale: $10 GM + $2 shipping = $12
- $60 sale: $15 GM – $3 shipping = $12
In this example we did not make any more money. In fact, the transaction costs us extra in handling costs due to the extra item, so we actually lost money on this one!
If the $20 item is bought the following week and we clip the ticket on shipping again, we make another $7 for a total gross profit on the two sales of $19 versus only $12 if the two items were sold together with free shipping. So from a purely economic standpoint there is no sense in offering free shipping. But here’s why you should do it anyway:
- Free Shipping is an effective customer acquisition tool.
- Customers who remember seeing a free delivery offer are more satisfied with the website, which makes them more committed to the brand, more likely to return, and more likely to purchase.
- Almost one-fifth of all shoppers said that when they choose to buy something from a retailer’s store instead of website, avoiding shipping costs is the main reason they choose to go to the store. (Source)
As an alternative to free shipping, which is so commonplace in the world of e-commerce, you might try offering an incentive courtesy of a 3rd party, non-competing, yet complementary retailer. Read more about this here. I have also come across a similar offering in New Zealand.
Tags: linkedin
About Kunal
Kunal Kripalani is a Social Media Strategist with a successful track record in online marketing. He helps online businesses become more popular and profitable.
Over the last 5 years Kunal has helped build the number one online retailer in Australasia: Fishpond.com.au, the number one daily deals website in New Zealand: Firstin.co.nz and The number one online invitations website in Japan: Yobu.jp
Kunal is a member of The Marketing Institute of Singapore & The International Internet Marketing Association.
