Exclusive Concepts Blog » Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog The Source, featuring Daily Videos on SEO, PPC, Conversion and E-Mail Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:46:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Conversion Wednesday – Advanced Bounce Rate Math http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/conversion-wednesday-advance-bounce-rate-math.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/conversion-wednesday-advance-bounce-rate-math.html#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:58:17 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=4482
Alright, let’s start with the core numbers. Here, we’re analyzing a section of a mythical site – a section would be something like “all product pages” – or every page in a particular category of a site. The numbers we’re working with are: 90,000 visits, 60,000 that bounced, 15,000 total add to carts, 1,000 sale actions – and finally, a resulting $10,000,000 in revenue from this activity. We’re going to move quickly, so keep up!

Those numbers already start telling us a story. When we analyze the entire funnel – 67% of visitors are bouncing, which is higher than 50% - keep that in mind, because the fact that it’s over 50% is really important in terms of what that will tell us in the end for our investment analysis. The rest of the math is simple, 17% of visitors added to cart, and then they continue to reduce like a fine sauce into the 1% of visitors that made a purchase. That’s a lot of tail off and loss through the funnel!

So what I find interesting is when you analyze a funnel as if there were no bounces at all. So we saw in the last slide that 67% of visitors bounce – well here, we’re looking at the 33% that didn’t bounce. This tells you so much about how well you do when a visitor finds both the entry page, and the site-wide experience worthy of their time. Here, if a person liked what they saw on the entry page, and they were interested in what the rest of the site may offer, they were very highly inclined to make a purchase. 50% of people who engaged the site and did not bounce, ended up adding to cart! Furthermore, the conversion rate with these non-bouncers was 3%!

As a result, the average value per visit of a bouncer versus a non-bouncer is a 3-fold difference. A visitor, on average, contributed $111.11 per visit after all the fallout possibilities play out – the 67% that bounce, the 83% that don’t add to cart, the 99% that didn’t make a purchase. By contrast, when a visitor engaged the site and didn’t bounce, their value was over $300 at $333.33. That’s a huge difference! That’s something to write home about. It starts to make you think about how much more impactful your site would be if you reduced your bounce rate. Well… let’s make some calculations to answer that conundrum!

So this is what I find to be a magical finding. In the case that we’re looking at, the bounce rate was 67% - which is over 50%. As a result, when you compare the impact of 1 of 3 options: either increasing conversion rate by 15%, or increasing average order value by 15%, or decreasing bounce rate by 15% - which one do you think would make you more money? Bounce rate seems like it’s so early in the funnel, that it should be a no-brainer – decrease in bounce rate would have the lowest impact.

Wrong! The first time I got these results, I was a bit shocked as well. In this scenario of a 67% bounce rate, it is nearly twice as impactful to your revenue when you decrease bounce rate by 15% versus increasing conversion rates by 15%.

Here’s the math. For increasing conversion rates by 15%, you simply multiply the revenue currently earned by 15% - which is $10,000,000 times 15%, resulting in a sum of $1,500,000. Not bad! For decreasing bounce rates by 15%, you calculate how many new non-bouncers you would have – 15% of the 67% that originally would have bounced – so 15% of 60,000 visitors, which equals 9,000 new non-bouncers. Each non-bouncer adds $333.33 in revenue – so by multiplying 9,000 against $333.33, you net an additional $3,000,000! Pretty, pretty good.

When doing your math, you’ll almost always be shocked by how much money can be made by investing in conversion optimization. Just remember, that you’ll build a deeper understanding of impact as you test and learn over time.

Does this work the same all the time? Nope. Bounce rate was a more significant factor because the bounce rate was above 50% to start with. If you started with a bounce rate of 33% - so in the same scenario, there were 30,000 of the 90,000 visits resulting in bounces – then your math would change. In that case, the impact of decreasing bounce rates by 15% would only be $750,000, while an increase in conversion rates would continue to be $1,500,000. Then again, the non-bounce in this situation is only $166.67, compared to the $333.33 from our earlier example.

Again, bounce rate is a compass, its value indicates a lot – it is not by any means the most valuable lever for revenue improvement every time around. If you need a quick rule of thumb though, follow this rule: “If your bounce rate is above 50%, a 5% decrease in bounce rate is more valuable that a 5% increase in conversion rates”. ]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/conversion-wednesday-advance-bounce-rate-math.html/feed 0 Email Thursday – Campaign Revenue Versus Loyalty Revenue http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/email-thursday-campaign-revenue-versus-loyalty-revenue.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/email-thursday-campaign-revenue-versus-loyalty-revenue.html#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:30:05 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=4195
For example, most of our clients would look at their costs for a newsletter as how much did I get charged by Bronto (our ESP partner) for sending out the blast, and how much did Exclusive Concepts charge me for their management of the newsletter. Easy!

When you get a report from your email management company, you’ll get some tracking data that reflects how much revenue was directly tracked to that newsletter. This can be pulled through your ESP, like Bronto, as long as your email marketing company has set up revenue tracking appropriately in your shopping cart. Alternately, if you have the correct URL tracking setup with your emails and have ecommerce tracking setup in your Google Analytics, then you can track the revenue generated by a newsletter in Google Analytics. A third way of tracking revenue is coupons: if you offered a coupon through a particular email, and the coupon ID is unique to that email, then tracking the revenue generated by that email campaign can be as easy as finding out how much revenue was attributed to that coupon ID. Some e-commerce platforms, like Yahoo! Store, make this very easy to do.

But that tracked revenue is “campaign revenue” – what you won’t be able to easily track is “loyalty revenue”. This is the value of having a retention program. There are ways to calculate metrics that will help you measure how your email newsletters are influencing loyalty revenue growth.

1 way is lifetime value calculations. This is easy to calculate, and it should be done periodically. Simply take the revenue you have made in your store over time, and divide it by the number of email addresses you have in your database. If you are doing email marketing the right way, then when you calculate this over time, you should see increases in this metric. What does the metric tell you? Essentially, that your past customers are contributing more and more towards your revenue growth over time. That’s the beauty, and the goal, of a retention program.

Another easy-to-eyeball technique for identifying whether your loyalty revenue is growing is through Analytics. In Google Analytics, you simply do the following:
  1. Timeframe: Open up a timeframe that extend from when you started your email program until the past month – click the “month” tab in the top right to see monthly trends.
  2. Drilldown: Use the left navigation to drill down to the subsection of “Traffic Sources” labeled “keywords”.
  3. Filter: In the “filter keyword” section, choose containing and type in your storename, without the www. If you have more than one word in your store’s name, you need to accommodate for when a person types in a space and when they do not. The format you should follow in the contains box should be as follows: store name|storename – example: this store|thisstore
  4. Tab: At the top of the page, you’ll see a header that says “Keywords” – below it will be a tab that says “visits” – expand that tab. Choose “compare two metrics” – and choose “revenue” as your second metric.
Here, I’ve taken a screenshot of a client of Exclusive Concepts – and have mapped visits for brand search terms against the revenue generated by those keywords. This client engages in weekly email blasts and thoroughly evangelizes its audience through interesting content, exciting promotions and frequently refreshed layouts. We utilize A/B testing to help improve attentiveness, open rates and click thru rates, in addition to revenue generation and conversions. The most aggressive changes started in January of 2011.

This created a dynamic shift in the behavior of a visitor who came to the site by typing the name of the brand. In September of 2010, there were 3,100 visits to the site using brand terms – and this converted into $40k in revenue. By contrast, the number of brand search visits in Sept 2011 only increased to 4,000 (a 29% increase), while the revenue generated by these visits increased to $133,000 – that’s a 233% increase in revenue generated by this group of loyalists. The value per visit went from $13 for this group, to a whopping $33. Clearly, this group has become more and more comfortable shopping on this site. ]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/email-thursday-campaign-revenue-versus-loyalty-revenue.html/feed 0 Wholesale Anti-Panda Approach – Wildcard Friday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/wholesale-anti-panda-approach-wildcard-friday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/wholesale-anti-panda-approach-wildcard-friday.html#comments Fri, 13 May 2011 18:52:24 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=3615
Well, there’s a ray of hope out there – and from the most unlikely source: Matt Cutts. In his 126 character, almost cryptic tweet, may lie the answer to the daunting question: how do you get out from underneath this over-”bear”ing algorithm update? Today, we’ll visit the “wholesale anti-panda approach” to getting your online retail company back on track after this recent update.

They say his name comes from the approach he takes to bleeding his victims dry to the bone – I’m kidding, Matt - Matt Cutts is the always smiling and often bald-shaved spokesperson for the main unit of Google’s algorithm business: the search quality team. These days, you’ll see him virtually joined at the hip with Amit Singhal, the man running the search quality department at Google.

Amit and Matt have come forth on several occasion since Feb 24th’s first release of the Panda update in the US – effecting ranking orders a significant portion of search queries - and badly maiming countless businesses who have built their sites by Google’s standards over the years. Since then, victims of the change have followed Matt and Amit closely, deciphering every word spoken, written or tweeted by them.

There’s a sense of frustration in the online retail space as those whose businesses are down these past few months feel that nobody has the answer to Panda – and that even after heeding pieces of advice by the dozen, nobody is seeing significant updates to ranking based on all their efforts – it’s almost as if nobody is watching them do all these good deeds and they are still in a form of purgatory.

Well – on May 6th, Matt answered a tweeted question about how the Panda update is deployed – Matt’s answer: “short version is that it's not data that's updated daily right now. More like when we re-run the algorithms to regen(erate) the data.” What does that mean? If you have been furiously working to get back in line with Panda’s new requirements of quality, you may be doing everything right, even if you haven’t seen the results yet – when Panda’s data is refreshed, your dozens of dutiful deeds will get the credit they deserve. It’ll probably result in a significant reshuffling of 1st page results when it does get updated again. Let’s recap what those dutiful deeds should be.

Panda’s Update is essentially a quality score given to every site. That quality score then gets taken into consideration for each site’s various keywords and search phrases that it ranks for in Google’s SERPs.

In a nutshell – Google measures positive and negative signals of a site. Every site is then judged by it’s balance of signals – sites with higher levels of bad are effected negatively and sites with higher good signals are effected positively by Panda’s update.

Bad signals are essentially bad pages of your site. Google wanted to “ding” sites that were trying to get low quality pages in the index – this includes those pages on your site that have no content, or really shallow content. If you have 50 variations of the same product and the description is nearly the same, you’ve got bad signals as well.

Think about why they would give a low score to a site that has this type of content – A. it’s self-serving. If Google can whip every webmaster into shape and get them to stop forcing low quality pages into Google’s index, then Google will have less junk to sort through. As the internet expands, Google has to enforce rules that allow them to scale down the internet to fit within their cost and bandwidth structures. B. it’s for the users. Panda’s goal is to serve up sites that people could trust – and would enjoy – and essentially penalize, to a degree, those sites that people wouldn’t want to visit.

That being said, by using tools such as canonical links and noindex,nofollow commands in your meta tags, you can compromise with Google. They won’t care so much if you have low quality content on your site – you know, the stuff that they think will effect users – as long as you don’t shove that content into it’s index. They choose self-service over users-benefit in this regard. If you can reduce bad signals on your site to a significant degree, then you’re following Google’s instructions, on how to game Google. And they’ll thank you for it.

After reducing the bad, you’ll need to add more good.
  1. What’s the most important good you can do? Adding more high quality content – not volume of content, quality of content – let’s define that and contrast it against a growing interest in copy. Your new content must be high quality – that means it’s experiential – it uses your brand name, feel and voice in it. You don’t need to hire a fancy copywriter that charges $2,000 per page, but you can’t go and hire somebody who charges $1 either. It easily takes 5+ minutes to research and plan a page of content on your site, even product pages. If you calculate that your copywriter can write a page in under 5 minutes, then be weary – it will surely have the mark of low quality content: too short, too repetitive or just a re-hash of product specs. This is not unique content, it’s not deep content, and it’s not helpful content. Your money will be wasted as Panda’s goal was to target low quality content. Amit Singhal, in a March 3rd interview stated it best when he stated how Panda was conceived to correct an issue from Google’s caffeine update a year earlier: “we basically got a lot of good fresh content,” he said “and some not so good. The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow.” Panda’s goal was to correct for this low quality content. So, don’t invest in low quality content as your Anti-Panda strategy. Invest in good quality content. At Exclusive Concepts, we’ve revamped our content program to help our clients add new high quality content to their sites to stay in line with Panda, and the spirit of Google’s many updates.

  2. Second, you have been hearing from both Google and SEO insiders that experience matters. Usually, I’d dismiss those type of claims as the hocus pocus portion of today’s SEO knowledgebase. Qualitative efforts rarely fall into quantitative measurements that make up an algorithm. But, lo-and-behold our team has uncovered a series of experience-based patterns that have helped reshape the rankings since Panda’s update. They are a mix of Boolean “yes/no” type of qualitative measurements – and many more complete measurements that scale with improved or decreased effort. But sorry folks, we won’t share these golden nuggets with anybody but our own clients.

  3. Finally – your brand matters – if you’re competing in a space where nobody knows one brand from another, your rules are different here – in that case, your commitment to a particular universe of keywords matters more than your brand and experience. If you have a site dedicated to the no-mans-land of “popcorn machines” for example, then your mom-and-popcorn store is getting a serious boost right now. But if you are competing in a space where people know the names of stores and product brands, you need to show a correlation between your brand and the industry in which you play. Social’s a growing player here – our SEO team has been pulling together significant correlations between social links to pages and their ability to rank post-Panda. Matt Cutts has already made it clear that you should invest in Social presence for future updates as well. Secondly – and more important in my opinion – is to start using your brand name in more of your backlink strategy. Backlinks after Panda? Yes. Panda didn’t effect anybody’s ability to rank well through backlinks – but it does credit sites based on their diversity of in-bound links (blogs, social, etc) and diversity of anchor text links. Keep your in-bound link investments in play to stay ahead of your competition, but keep them in natural patterns and utilize your brand name in the strategy.
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]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/wholesale-anti-panda-approach-wildcard-friday.html/feed 1 How to Make E-Mail Marketing Viable for Your Business – E-mail Thursday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/how-to-make-e-mail-marketing-viable-for-your-business-e-mail-thursday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/how-to-make-e-mail-marketing-viable-for-your-business-e-mail-thursday.html#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:14:15 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=3482
Our goals are two-fold: we want to increase the number of e-mails in your database while also increasing the value of each e-mail you have in your database. So we’ll start with goal number 1.

Your site traffic can be broken down into 3 main tiers – bouncers, non-converters and converters. From a technical standpoint, the tiers are differentiated by two variables: page view habits and willingness to buy:
  • Bouncers only look at one page when visiting your site and then leave. It is very likely that the visitors did not find your content relevant.
  • Non-Converters look at multiple pages of your site showing that they find your site, indicating that they find the content relevant, but they still don’t buy in the end.
  • Converters are everybody’s favorite: they find your site so relevant that they buy your products.

Each tier can be targeted from a e-mail harvesting standpoint: converters should be given an opt-in option for newsletters upon cart completion. That one’s the easiest and the list you get there is the most targeted and ideal for future business. For non-converters, it’s important that you take a good look at your website and see whether your newsletter sign-up is within scanning view – if your newsletter sign-up isn’t hierarchically one of the first 4-5 things a visitor will prominently see when scanning a page on your site, it will not perform at its potential in terms of getting sign-ups. Next comes the bouncers: A lot of websites take a stab at procuring newsletter sign-ups before a bounce happens – and the best way to do that is showcase a newsletter sign-up box before a visitor can even judge whether the page they will see next is 100% relevant to their needs. But that approach is obtrusive – and obtrusive entities clog shopping funnels – so think about that one carefully before implementing and if you do wish to implement it, try testing first.

So now let’s move to Goal number 2: getting more value from a larger list. You want people buying from your e-mail marketing efforts – that’s the goal – more revenue.

The funnel to get those buyers is simple: people get your e-mails in their inbox -> some of those open -> of those who open, some are interested in clicking to your site -> many of those who visit your site will buy. It’s a long funnel with diminishing successes from one step to the next, so you need to do whatever you can to widen the funnel at every step – and they’re all impacted by the technology you choose.

Start with the inbox: There are many forms of deliverability, but they’re not all equal. Deliverability to an inbox is achieved through rigorous screening and sandboxing policies by an ESP. Find out an ESP’s screening process before signing up with them – if they’ll let you join without sandboxing and testing your approach, they’ll let anybody through – and that will effect your inbox deliverability. When other members of the IP block you’ve been designated by your ESP violate CAN-SPAM, you get penalized as well. Pay to go through a metal detector if you want to be amongst good company.

For open rates and click-thru rates:
  • Make sure the technology you subscribe to allows you to split stream test – that means running two or more variations of a campaign against a small % of your list, like 20% - then send the next 80% the winner from the seed test group. That way, 90% of your recipients get the most effective version of your campaign.
  • Also, make sure you can segment and personalize your message – it should be an easy task, not a tedious one: if you are forced to split your list into many segments and then send them each a different message one at a time, you’re wasting your time and are limiting your approach.
  • Finally, if you cannot send triggered, automated messages, then you’ll never be able to treat new sign-ups with more attention than your older recipients. When customers buy a product from you for example, they will read many follow-up e-mails from you as long as they pertain to the purchase – your open and click-thru rates for these type of messages will never be higher.

Finally, to track the overall effectiveness of your work, you need proper tracking and reporting – if you can’t get revenue numbers, then you’re steering your ship through the fog – to grow your revenue through e-mail, make sure you know how it’s doing and work from there to make it better each month. ]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/how-to-make-e-mail-marketing-viable-for-your-business-e-mail-thursday.html/feed 0 IRWD Wrap Up: Who Got it Right? – Wildcard Friday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/irwd-wrap-up-who-got-it-right-wildcard-friday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/irwd-wrap-up-who-got-it-right-wildcard-friday.html#comments Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:50:09 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=3276
Well – at the conference, we had a little kiosk where we asked a question – if you had the correct answer, you’d qualify for an iPod Touch.

The question compared two variations of a product details page. Here’s variation one. You’ll notice it has a lef-navigation pointing to categories and sub-categories.

In variation 2, the left navigation was removed and is not distracting the user.

We ran this test for a particular client who uses us for conversion testing through our Conversion Booster service. We theorized that removing the left navigation would indeed increase conversion rates for this client. A deep-dive into some helpful data supported the theory. When the client approved over-coming this issue, we tested variation 1 against variation 2 for a random split of the traffic.

There were several opinions on how this would turn out. Those “for” said it would be less distracting. Those against refused to believe that taking away shopping options would net a positive gain. Others believed that it really didn’t matter.

When every person in a room can argue reasons for and against a particular change to a site, a test is born.

There were several opinions on how this would turn out. Those “for” said it would be less distracting. Those against refused to believe that taking away shopping options would net a positive gain. Others believed that it really didn’t matter.

When every person in a room can argue reasons for and against a particular change to a site, a test is born.

At that rate, you could afford that new Bentley Continental GTC Supersports ($280k) you’ve had your eye on… easily. ]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/irwd-wrap-up-who-got-it-right-wildcard-friday.html/feed 0 Bounce Rate vs Percent Add to Cart vs Cart Completion http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/bounce-rate-vs-percent-add-to-cart-vs-cart-completion.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/bounce-rate-vs-percent-add-to-cart-vs-cart-completion.html#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 05:00:24 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=3019

Bounce Rate



Bounce rate is the inverse of success in pulling visitors through the funnel. Bounce rate is the % of visits that concluded where they began - at the entrance page. The thought behind this is that the page they entered is probably not the same page that a goal (like a purchase) could be accomplished so despite what transpired during that visit, it did not result in a motivated shopping experience. If 7 of 10 visitors to your site leave after they see the first page, your bounce rate would be 70%. That's not great. The rest of the funnel will only be working with 30% of the visitors. In Conversion Booster testing, we have found a multitude of ways to naturally drive down bounce rates for stores, in a way that actually impacts revenue. It's a challenge, but can be well worth the effort.

Percent Add to Cart



The next step is getting a visitor to consider adding a product to the shopping cart. Many conversion white papers and success stories are based on this number: add to cart % - the percent of all visitors (bounce and non-bounce) that add a product to the shopping cart. Last week I heard a member of the Exclusive Concepts conversion team joke, "if I wanted more add to carts, I would simply remove all other elements or trick them into clicking..." He went on to assert, "but that doesn't result in more revenue." For those who are curious the answer is: Yes, add-to-cart improvements can make a significant impact to conversion rates, contingent on whether the higher performance was a result of overcoming an issue on the website, like difficulty locating a product or lower heirarchical placement of add-to-cart on shopping pages like a product page.

Cart Completion



Still, as our team member suggested, you'll sometimes find that when add to cart % goes up because of some change you are either testing or have implemented, the cart completion % goes down. The net change in revenue and conversion rate: 0. The issue there is that all the extra visitors who added to cart were not completely motivated to finalize the purchase, just add to cart. An example of this would be if you created an "add to cart in order to see final price" message.

In some cases, you'll find that conversion rate issues of particular categories on your site may not hinge on your ability to get more visitors to add to cart at all, but rather to complete the cart process. The question then becomes: if they're adding to cart, why are they not buying? Maybe its the basics of value messaging or competitive pricing. Maybe you're not being convincing enough with motivational messaging. Tools like "The Cart Closer" are a sure bet to improve this metric where you need help. Identifying this issue can help prevent many stores from investing in better usability (to help people find products) in order to prioritize motivational messaging improvements.

Defining ways to smooth out and build up each step of the shopping funnel is part of what we do every day for our Conversion Booster clients. If you're looking to get your business to the next level in 2011 and capitalize on all that great quality traffic you get to your site, give us a call and let's explore how we can help.]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/bounce-rate-vs-percent-add-to-cart-vs-cart-completion.html/feed 0 Clients From Hell, Don’t Make Me Think and Other Such Insights – Wildcard Friday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/clients-from-hell-don%e2%80%99t-make-me-think-and-other-such-insights-wildcard-friday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/clients-from-hell-don%e2%80%99t-make-me-think-and-other-such-insights-wildcard-friday.html#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 20:47:58 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2971
By the way – the site where I found these quotes: clientsfromhell.net. Some of it is pretty funny. But first, let’s learn a thing or two.

So what about people who just use the internet? Some people think that the internet changes so fast that you need to constantly modify your approach to keep up with changing trends. The thing is, people take longer to change their habits than what you may expect. One of the most famous books on conversion improvements and usability, “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug, asserts that point specifically.

Steve suggests that your site should have a natural visual hierarchy to it – that users should be visually directed to the most important things first, if you will. He thinks that sites often lack elemental breakdown – where text seems to float aimlessly in space, but actually does belong to other elements. His recommendation – nest them next to one another. He thinks its best to stick to conventions unless you have a great reason not to do so – people don’t have to think as much when it’s a convention. Clearly define different sections of a page – visitors shouldn’t be forced to squint their way through a page, but rather should see the big picture of top level elements from distance so they may choose where to focus their energy and not waste brain cells constantly scanning. Finally – to keep the most important elements popping, reduce noise or those parts of the page that don’t help the experience in that section.

So it’s simple. Don’t assume that people will notice what you want them to. Don’t expect them to be motivated to buy all on their own. Don’t expect that people want the newest and coolest. When you google the term “don’t assume”, you’ll find an interesting article on wikipedia, where I quote from the unsanctioned advice given on the page: “… when you make any assumption, even one of good faith, you are creating for yourself an illusion from which the truth may disappoint you.” Very wise, wikipedia – thank you for that.

When you control a website, you need to be willing to boil everything down to the lowest common denominator – your least internet-savvy users. Strive to create clarity and simplicity and even a person who thinks there is a difference between the “web” and the “internet” will be able to use your website – or internet site. While your competitors feed their egos with the new and fancy, you can satisfy your customer’s basic need to shop and make more revenue.

I hope you enjoyed that – have a wonderful Wildcard Friday!]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/clients-from-hell-don%e2%80%99t-make-me-think-and-other-such-insights-wildcard-friday.html/feed 0 SEO Monday – SEO ROI and Next Steps http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-seo-roi-and-next-steps.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-seo-roi-and-next-steps.html#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:30:36 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2803
Today, we’re going to give some room for SEO to make its case and we’ll explore how you can calculate the current ROI of the multiple elements that are at play in your SEO program and how to take it to the next level. Your goal as a business owner should be to a. increase the profitability of your SEO investment through data-inspired iteration and then b. scale where you are the most profitable to build a stronger, larger “army” if you will, of profitable, visible keywords.

First, you’ll need to bring some perspective to your next step: it is guaranteed that there will be many keywords that you invest in on the SEO side that take longer to rank for than you hoped; and there will also be keywords that you currently rank well for, but don’t make you as much money as you thought.

When determining the ideal mix of keywords to target through SEO, you will have 4 essential options for any keyword: stay your ground, fund your momentum, increase profitability or scale your success.

Let’s determine how to get to those decisions:
  • There are some cases in which no determination can be made as to whether or not your current SEO investment has made its value yet – those are keywords that you have invested in to increase rank, and though you are not yet on the 1st page, there is a clear positive trajectory with rankings and there’s no contraindication of success at this point. That’s a “stay your ground” type of keyword.

  • Now – some investments hinge on sunk costs – a financial concept that really gets under a lot of people’s skin. You have invested x amount in the hope that you would rank on the 1st page for a keyword, but realize a few months into your program that the competition is targeting that keywords much more aggressively than was consensus at first and your ranking is not moving upward but is rather flat-lined; it will indeed require x+y in order to overcome the top rankers for a particular keyword. This is a very common junction in SEO and one that should be faced with swift recourse. Whether your investment was in terms of unique copy, deep optimization or popularity, the good news is that your past investment is still in play – you just need to further fund your momentum. Both “stay your ground” and “fund your momentum” investments fall under the umbrella of keywords that do not currently rank on the 1st page of Google (or Bing or Yahoo!)

  • If you have achieved ranking on the 1st page of Google, then with the correct analytics tracking, you should be able to determine the revenue generated by that concept – for example, if you target the term “beanie hats”, then you should aggregate the total revenue generated by any term that includes “beanie hats” within it and be able to determine the overall revenue generated therein. If your ranking has not reaped a high enough reward to justify your SEO investment, it’s time to switch gears and capitalize on your investment through conversion improvements – whether that be creating a customized experience from a template landing page or engaging in complete multivariate testing to systematically determine how you can engage your disenfranchised visitors. This will help you improve the profitability of a great SEO success.

  • In other cases, you’ll find keywords that you rank on the first page for and they are also making you a lot of money - congrats! This is the type of scenario that you want to re-create over and over again. Use the success of this keyword family to generate hypotheses of why this is working so well on your site and explore new opportunities from there. Scale your success.

  • Finally, when you have started preparing the ROI of your SEO efforts and the next steps to either get the visibility you need or capitalize on it – you’ll also be wondering whether there are opportunities to target new keywords that are not currently on your list of SEO targets. The best place to start – PPC data. More than any other keyword data available to you, this data will give you almost apples-to-apples data into the potential of keywords if you choose to target them with SEO. If you can find outliers that have a phenomenal return on visits from PPC, they may be ripe with opportunity for SEO so that you may scale your success once again. The keywords you choose will then enter at the beginning of your analysis: keywords that are not yet ranking on the 1st page. And the cycle continues.

I hope this video has been helpful!
Best of luck with your analysis – at Exclusive Concepts we perform analyses like this on a daily basis and can help grow your revenue from SEO in the most efficient of ways. We would look forward to the opportunity to discuss. ]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-seo-roi-and-next-steps.html/feed 0 Wildcard Friday – Search and Conversions – Strengths Meet Weaknesses http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/wildcard-friday-search-and-conversions.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/wildcard-friday-search-and-conversions.html#comments Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:01:58 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2757
As a business owner, you already know that there have been shining moments of management that you can remember over the years; the day I decided to invest in pushing product x; the month that I redid my left-navigation to be simplified; the investment in ranking for keyword y. Well, today we’ll discuss how you can achieve those shining moments on a more regular basis.

So what do you need to know? Well, you need to know quite a bit to even start this process – you’ll require a hunch. You’ll also require revenue tracking for whatever analytics program you use.

In this example, we are looking at 3 concepts for a kids store: toys, books and clothes. Essentially, we’re looking at aggregate data that comes from traffic that is toy based, versus books based, versus clothes based. The idea is that we may find some highly efficient to-do’s.

We start with visits. At first glance, it seems like clothes is a huge winner on the traffic side bringing in 100 times more visits than toys. When we introduce conversion rate, the story shakes up a bit: now, even though the traffic on toys has been quite lower than clothes, it presents itself as an outlier: on average the toys section is connecting with visitor’s expectations 3.6 time more effectively than the clothes sections.

Revenue then makes the business effect that much clearer: toys is a clear winner in terms of its impact to the revenue of this online store, while clothes is making a very poor impact. Books is coasting easily as a well-balanced source of traffic and sales.

We then calculate a figure that plays into marketing budgets: value per visit. By dividing total revenue generated by a concept over its total number of visits, we arrive at the value of every additional visit for that particular concept. It tells us where we can invest dramatically in more search traffic at more aggressive costs because the generated revenue allows for it. Here, toys is a big winner once again – with only 1,500 visits in the door so far it would be fair to surmise a major opportunity to drive more SEO and PPC traffic for toys terms which would scale in a very profitable fashion.

When we look at the site-wide average for value per visit, it is clear that clothes has plenty of room for improvement and toys has a major opportunity for scale.
Concept Visits CR Revenue Value/Visit
Toys 1,500 1.8% $25,000 $16.67
Books 15,00 1.0% $2,500 $0.17
Clothes 150,000 0.5% $2,500 $0.02

Now I know a demoralizing scenario when I see one – but I also know that discovering the silver lining of any situation is an invitation for efficient next steps for improvement.

For the toys concept, your next step is to increase traffic as quickly and aggressively as possible. Aggressive SEO to rank naturally for more terms, bigger budgets and more prominence from a PPC perspective. That landscape allows for so much flexibility here given the astronomical value/visit that you have cart blanche in terms of how strong you can go to market. For every online store, there is a concept like this – the conversion winner!

Clothes is very disappointing on the revenue impact side. The first inclination of a business owner would be to consider just divesting from this traffic. But think about the work and investment that may have gone into bringing in that much traffic – this is a major win on the search traffic side. It may partly be because of organic SEO positions that have been attained and retained at difficult effort and large investment. On the PPC side, effective management probably went through hoops to achieve the relevancy scores, click-thru rates and well catered ad copy that is bringing in such an onslaught of targeted traffic. So what can you do? Well, your business can learn to adapt in terms of conversion. With conversion testing against the challenge of: bring clothes traffic up to a conversion rate of let’s say 1% (still less than toys) and increase the AOV (which is currently around $3 if you do the math) to $6, which is still less than the $925 per order achieved by the toys section, the clothes section would quadruple in its impact to the bottom line.

Throughout your store, you’ll find concepts where a strength in traffic is met with a weakness in conversion and vice-a-versa; each instance presents an opportunity to only take one step towards a major win. I hope this was helpful and that you will take the time today and this weekend to think about where you can make these efficient investments into great improvements for your bottom line. ]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/wildcard-friday-search-and-conversions.html/feed 0 Wildcard Friday – Why People Buy Expensive Jeans http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/wildcard-friday-why-people-buy-expensive-jeans.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/wildcard-friday-why-people-buy-expensive-jeans.html#comments Fri, 01 Oct 2010 17:53:02 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2555
The logical statement that guides are unique exploration today is: if a lot of people buy expensive jeans, then they can’t just care about price.

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I’m a jean person and yes, I’ll splurge for a good pair of $100+ jeans if the factors are in its favor. What do I look for? Well, it all happens so fast, but if I carefully think about it, there’s a system I employ, that a lot of people who buy expensive jeans employ as well. First, there’s the "Je ne sais quois“, the x factor: namely, sex appeal. A good pair of jeans is part of who you are when you wear them and if you believe your jeans are sexy, you will feel that way anytime you wear them. Finer details are very important – when I am in a brick and mortar store, I will carefully look at a pair of jeans on the rack before I try them on.

When I do try them on, there are two factors that can either add tremendous value or quash the entire deal: comfort and fit. Between two jeans that appear to be the same look and cut, I will take the more comfortable one. Finally, there’s the fit and the fall. If it doesn’t fit well or the length is too long or short, the excitement of finding the perfect pair of jean quickly deflates into a sigh. It all seems so easy in a brick and mortar: a good looking sales girl tells you that the pair of jeans you’re trying on makes you look great, you find the jeans comfortable and the cut fits the bill – but with all these factors in the favor of brick and mortars, how can an e-commerce site ever compete without offering the value add of price discounts?

Well, that’s the challenge, but as long as opportunities to overcome even the expensive jean quandary exist, there will always be ways around the price issue for other expensive products. Let’s explore:
  • Sex appeal can achieved in either efficient or streamlined ways. For a site that is willing to commit to creating brand new imagery for their entire inventory, a streamlined approach can be very effective. Ideal models and romantic context within product-specific imagery will serve a deep purpose in creating an immediate connection between your shoppers aspirations and the product you sell as the vehicle to those aspirations. If re-doing your entire site’s imagery is beyond reasonable options, efficiency can be achieved on a site through carefully placed site elements that carry the message of sex appeal onto less exciting product photos. Look books often play that role on larger brand sites, where flip books under the ruse of “editor’s outfit picks” or occasion based scenarios like “at the club”, “at dinner” allow websites to cleverly infuse high impact sex appeal into each scene. Some sites simply embellish their homepage, top category pages and even the background image that focus less on products and more on creating the x factor.

  • Finer details can easily be accomplished with high-res photos that artfully point out finer details of your products. Zoom in capabilities tell your consumer, “we’re proud of the craftsmanship that went into the products we sell”. Brands like the “J. Peterman” catalogue of Seinfeld fame use content to accomplish the same. I quote from their site: “When a man puts on this authentic French farmer's shirt he may very well find that his hands look bigger. He will become sturdier and more forthright; either that, or more canny, only time will tell.”

  • The toughest challenge is creating a tactile experience from flat imagery. Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of commitment to a concept like “comfy”. If your images have people smiling in their jeans, then that would convey comfort. A look book that shows a pair of jeans worn by a couple at their fireplace would convey comfort. Your content can easily express something along the lines of “these jeans are more comfortable than your favorite t-shirt” – something a person can relate to an actual feeling they are familiar with. Boasting “our most comfy jeans ever” can be a great draw from your homepage or even an e-mail campaign: and more importantly, it will help you compete with the experience that brick and mortars consistently bank on.

  • Finally, the perfect fit. Some sites showcase dimensions, but even those seem subjective: using words like “actual length” can help visitors understand that this is not your brand’s interpretation of what a size 0 is, but that it is exactly 24” around the waist. To overcome different shapes and unique figures, savvy women’s stores have incorporated a concept that is growing in acceptance: body shapes. A pear-shaped woman can feel more confident in a product that claims to be ideal for her proportions. But what we see more and more in not just the fashion world is customer reviews. The more people that claim that this product fits perfect, is comfortable and delivered on all promises, the less visitors who consider “trust” to be an issue and by far, more of your customers will already start feeling more comfortable in your pair of jeans.

I’m reminded of a story my wife wrote in high school about the perfect pair of jeans: you can search your entire life for it, but when you finally have them, you’ll realize that nothing has changed. But as long as people are searching for that pair, it’s up to us, facilitators of commerce and self actualization, to give them that experience well beyond the finer details of currency exchanged for denim. If you’re looking to inspire your customers to buy more from you, let us know and we’ll show you how we can help.

Have a wonderful Wildcard Friday folks and a very relaxing weekend. ]]>

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