Exclusive Concepts Blog

How Personas Solve Problems for Your Online Store – Conversion Wednesday

Nik — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:57:23 +0000

Read this and you can begin solving your key conversion problems today!

“Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions - Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.” - Chanakya

In his quote, Chanakya gets at the heart of finding solutions to problems: you have to ask the right questions. His questions are great, because they’re at the core of conversion rate optimization. If summarized, CRO is all about being able to justify ideas and create new ideas through sound justification.

What We’re Going to Achieve in this Blog Post

What I love about conversion rate optimization is that you have many paths that are available to you when you have a sense of the first question – understanding what you’re trying to accomplish. In today’s post, we’ll discuss how to overcome 4 main challenges that inhibit purchases – I hope you can identify with at least one of these very common online retail issues:
Problem #1: My customers crave a faster, easier experience
Problem #2: My customers do not feel a sense of urgency when buying the products I offer
Problem #3: My customers feel unable to make decisions based on the products I offer
Problem #4: My customers aren’t getting excited about the products I sell
We’re going to answer all these problems through the use of the consumer behavioral theory of shopping personas. The theory asserts that all individuals have within them 4 personas: methodical, spontaneous, social and competitive. Each has its own ideal shopping experience that brings out that persona. Each online retail store may have different reasons to create one of these ideal persona-based shopping experiences, but the goal is to overcome problems that inhibit conversions, AOV and brand-awareness.

Problem #1: My customers crave a faster, easier experience

If you have this issue, then your solution will probably lean towards creating a more methodical shopping experience on your site. Users who have a need polarize to this sort of experience. Walmart is a great example of a methodical shopping experience, where everything is in line with simplicity, ease of use and speed. This is especially true in their store-fronts. Add low prices to the mix, and the convenience shopping experience gets wings.

If you want to enhance the methodical aspects of your shopping experience online, consider page load speed, comprehensiveness of your selection, easy filtration, optimal search functionality, and a way for individuals to buy easily without learning rules on the first purchase. Ideally, the consequent purchases would become even easier over time as you store history, allow for accounts, and reach out to past customers through custom tailored auto-generated emails for replenishing their need-based purchases.

Again, add low prices and a clear understanding of pricing policies into the mix, and you’ll have a winning way of adding layers of convenience to your customers.

Anticipating the result of making your experience more in line with the methodical shopping persona is based on a good understanding of what your customers really want. Every business owner assumes that easier and faster will have great success – but it might just be good success. The more emotional, learning-oriented, or product-centric a purchase decision is, the less likely it is to be effected by making your site more methodical. By contrast, unemotional, staple good and category-based purchases are affected by creating a more methodical shopping experience.

Problem #2: My customers do not feel a sense of urgency when buying the products I offer

In the world of selling big purchase items, there’s nothing more irritating and patience-testing than a lack of urgency. This is why over the years we’ve become accustom to hearing things like “what do I need to do to get you into this car today?” or “I can only offer you this discount until the end of this week” – the problem is urgency.

Sure, these timely pitches are corny to some, obnoxious to others – but man-oh-man, do they work! Consumers have become accustomed to the idea of a spontaneous shopping experience. Like winning the lottery, they seem to come out of nowhere and the odds of them reoccurring feel like they are slim-to-none.

Retailers like Express use this to get a significant rise out of their customers. Instead of cleanliness and sophistication, Express embraces a sense of chaos and over-stimulation during their big sales. They work towards creating a sense of how quickly things are moving around them – all towards the idea that this will trickle into a sense of urgency. By making it feel as if the clock is ticking a little faster, it makes your heart pound, it makes you think fast, and it gets you to react quickly.

As opposed to the salesperson who promised you a deal that runs out today, storewide sales have a different type of formalization to them: while you believe a salesperson’s boss may extend the same discount to you tomorrow or the day-after (which undercuts the trustworthiness of the salesperson and their upper hand), most shoppers know that when a store sale runs out, no employee is going to get approval from corporate to extend some extra discounts that have already expired. It’s no longer corny or obnoxious – it becomes a gift.

Online retailers who want to create this type of urgency use a duffle bag of tricks. Some use widgets, like Time2Buy. Others use all-encompassing promotions that permeate the site, PPC ads, email campaigns and social pages. In terms of what results you should expect: both tactics are great for connecting with the spontaneous person within all of us – but while the latter is calendar-oriented and unsustainable over long periods of time, the former is personal and can be sustained over long periods of time.

This is one of the most overlooked aspects of spontaneous shopping. When you’re running a sale, sales are hot. When you’re not, they’re not. Your biggest challenge in online retail will be finding ways to overcome your problem of no urgency in way that can be hardcoded into the day-to-day of your site.

Problem #3: My customers feel unable to make decisions based on the products I offer

Ain’t this a toughie? The scenario is all too common. You, the current online store owner, were an enthusiast of a product that you believed was being sold at too high of a price, or in too niche (mom and pops) of storefronts – so you created an online store to beat the marketplace! After a bit, you came to realize that mom and pops were really instrumental in helping their customers with questions – and the price included the overhead of knowledgeable sales employees. Not only that, but you’re the only real enthusiast that can help customers with their needs.

The challenge can be broken down to some major subcomponents:

Your customers don’t know how to choose the right product
They lack access to others who have used the same product with success
You can't help every visitor and you can't get them to ask for help
Somehow the big box stores, like Amazon are taking away share of the marketplace

Let’s start with the last point. How can a big box store take away share from your market, when you’re the expert? This in itself highlights the gap within your shopping experience. Big box brands have done an amazing job of bringing in elements of know-how into their experiences. Reviews on product by customers, what other products are being seen by the same customers, editors picks and thoroughbred customer support are all ways to re-create the sense of intuition and product wisdom that you’d come to expect from a mom or pop of a niche store. These are social shopping experiences. All of these aspects build confidence in product selection – and help others recognize the value of owning a product.

Companies like Apple use social shopping experiences to overcome major assistive sales challenges in the marketplace. In 2001, they opened their first store to properly sell their products and the optimal Apple sales approach was born. Fortune magazine said of the first store in Virginia: " Saks, whose flagship store is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany's for breakfast, but at $4,032 per square foot, Apple is eating everyone's lunch.” By focusing on the personal, knowledge-based sales experience that is at the core of a social persona, they were able to bring mp3 players to a market, and close Apple products at a record pace.

Online retail stores are at a loss when it comes to staffing the experience with qualified sales people – but there are so many options that help fill that need. Pop-up chat windows saying “can I help you with something?” and readily available customer service numbers are a great start. Showcasing your customer support team on your site and giving some humanness to them can help your approach become that much closer to the brick and mortar experience.

What online retailers have that brick and mortars don’t is crowd sourced support. Reviews, forums and ratings make a world of difference in terms of selling products. My wife once bought a hideous dress (her opinion) from Bebe just because it has 20+ comments. None of the other products had comments at that time - *hint hint* - I'm pretty sure it was gamed, but it worked. It was the closest thing to having a brick and mortar sales rep say “I love the way that looks on you!”

So what kind of results can you expect from going more social? Again, it’s all about whether the problem #3 is your problem. Reviews and ratings for a 12-pack of coke may not make much of a net impact – for the number of people who now feel more comfortable buying soda because everybody’s doing it, the same amount may also find the process to cluttered or be turned off by a review that flames the harmful effects of phosphoric acid. By contrast, reading user reviews of a bed set that you’re buying online and haven’t had the chance to touch or try out will more likely improve conversion rates with consistency.

Problem #4: My customers aren’t getting excited about the products I sell

This is a tough one as well. If you sell something that is supposed to move off the shelves based on the awesomeness of the product alone, then you’re at a loss when your customers aren’t impressed. Competitive shopping is all about adding value to a product from the perspective of the user – and in most cases, the value is not tangible or feature-oriented – it’s attitude oriented.

The art of building a positive attitude towards a product is two-fold: it includes the brands (of the product and your site) as well as the product itself.

Focusing on brand is a major winning strategy because it becomes the lowest common denominator that impacts all your sales from that point on. Armani Exchange does a great job of this in my opinion. It has built an image that it sticks to, and with each passing season it doesn’t try to become more relevant – it simply tries to stay “A|X”. Hot looking people, rare sales (and even then, only displayed in the classiest of ways), extremely fashion-conscious employees – and even a monumental gateway entrance to make you feel like when you’re part of Armani, you’re part of something special. This sense of being part of something is what luxury brand building – and all competitive brand building – is about.

Online retail stores have many ways to create the same sense of “to buy is to be”. From a brand perspective it’s all about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do. These rules aren’t set in stone, but they’ll guide you nonetheless:

You shouldn’t marry competitive with spontaneous – don’t cheapen your product
You should focus on your brand image as being current but timeless, relevant but unique
You shouldn’t let products live in a vacuum as if images and text will sell the product
You should showcase products on models, in look books, alongside complimentary products
You shouldn’t go cheap on imagery
You should put the quality and tone of your images above all – following strict brand guidelines
You shouldn’t focus on new acquisitions as much as retention
You should employ a smart customer loyalty approach that makes every real customer feel ultra-special
You shouldn’t make it as easy to find all products
You should take liberties in showing what products you think are important and why

Results from creating a more competitive shopping experience are that your brand awareness should increase over time, and your AOV can rise at a more controllable clip. In terms of conversion, while you’re new visitor conversion rates may take some time to build up (as your brand gains an image of exclusivity and an inclusionary experience), your repeat visitors should start buying more often from you, and will help fuel a sustainable revenue stream.

Hope this helps!

An appreciation for personas is at the heart of everything we do at Exclusive Concepts. Whether it’s for improving your SEO target keywords, building better sales/SEO content, making more relevant PPC ads, creating smarter Conversion tests or crafting more optimal Email campaigns – we use this approach to build new holistic strengths for our clients over time so they can grow their revenues.

How Google’s New Adwords Ad Rotation Settings Affect You – PPC Tuesday

Logan — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:30:31 +0000

Would you let Google optimize your Ad Rotation? The results may shock you!

Quite a few eyebrows were raised in the PPC community on April 30th when Google announced a seemingly small change to the AdWords interface. The change involves the way in which ads are rotated, and advertisers have quickly realized it has some huge implications. Today we’ll talk about how this change affects the way advertisers test ad creative, and how it will ultimately change the way in which accounts are managed.

Background:

In advertising, showing potential customers the right messaging is vital. Traditionally, advertisers using Google AdWords have been able to perform A/B testing with ad copy in order to find out which ad (and ultimately which messages) work best to maximize conversions. This was done quite effectively within the AdWords interface by selecting the delivery method “Rotate: Show ads more evenly”. The option ensured that ads within the campaign were impressed about an equal number of times, thus creating a controlled testing environment where different versions of ad copy could be tested. Because of the update, the approach taken to testing ads will be forced to change.

The Change:

With this update, any campaigns that have use the option “Rotate, Show ads more evenly” will be automatically “optimized” after a period of 30 days. This means that after 30 days of showing your ads evenly, Google will take the ad with the better click-through rate and start showing it more often. All ads will be subject to this optimization, and the only way reset the 30 day clock (and make them rotate evenly) is to edit the copy in some way.

What Does This Mean? What are the Implications?

Well, if Google is optimizing the way your ads are shown, that’s good, right? Not necessarily. In this case, the key question to ask is: optimized for what, exactly? The answer: Clicks. Initially, this may seem like a good thing. More clicks equals more traffic to your site, and ultimately, the possibility for more conversions. Let’s go through a simple example on how Google performs this optimization.

Two ads, Ad X and Ad Y, have been running in an ad group for 30 days. They both have 5,000 impressions over this time period due to the even rotation setting. However, Ad X has a click-through rate of 3%, and Ad Y has a click-through rate of 4%. Therefore, after 30 days, Google will serve Ad Y the majority of the time. The implications seem positive for everyone. The more relevant ad is showing to searchers, which leads to more clicks, more traffic to your site, and more money for Google. Everyone seems to win.

Wait just a minute. Let’s add some example conversion metrics to those same ads and then look at the effects of the optimization. Over the same 30 day period:

Ad X: 5,000 Impressions; 3% Click-through Rate; 11 conversions; Total Conversion Value: $2,000
Ad Y: 5,000 Impressions, 4% Click-through Rate; 5 conversions; Total Conversion Value: $500

Which ad did Google show more after 30 days? The ad that made 75% less in revenue.

As most advertisers know, more clicks don’t necessarily translate into more revenue. In this example, because the optimization is based on clicks, the advertiser is losing out on a significant amount of revenue. If, like most advertisers, you’ve relied on the “Rotate ads evenly” setting to perform your ad testing, you’ll now have to change your strategy.

New Challenges and Opportunities in Campaign Management

In order to combat issues like the example above, significantly more attention must be paid to A/B testing efforts. While the update creates more management work up front, it also creates new opportunities. We at Exclusive Concepts are creating new strategies around effective A/B testing and finding creative solutions to maintain the intelligent rotation of ads. We want to ensure not only that the most relevant ads are showing, but that the ads that drive the most revenue don’t become lost in the shuffle. This update has created some unique challenges, but it’s also afforded us the opportunity to further optimize accounts to drive the maximum amount of revenue for our clients.

Spring Clean Up with Webmaster Tools: New Updates and How to Deal with Them – SEO Monday

Christine — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:28:52 +0000

Learn to replace the features that you lost from Google Webmaster Tools!

Webmaster Tools is a great place to keep track of your site indexing and any issues Google may have with your site. Over the past few years since its release, Google has added, deleted, and updated a number of features with Webmaster Tools. Not surprisingly, they’ve done it again. Let’s take a look at some of the updates recently made, and what you can do if they affect you.

Robots.txt Feature: Removed!

Google is eliminating quite a few features from Webmaster Tools. One such feature is the ability to create a robots.txt file for your website. This feature gave the option for site owners to have certain pages on their websites crawled or not crawled by Googlebot and is useful for making sure sites like thank you pages, image directories, or shopping cart pages that may not contain useful information, are not found in search engines.

As a solution to this elimination, Google suggests to create a robots.txt document yourself or use one of the many free tools available on the internet. If you don’t want to create one yourself, consider a free generator like the one from Mcanerin International (http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.asp). Remember, something written as /test/ would be considered an entire directory, which would block any pages within it. Written as /test.html would be the singular page.

If you would only like certain search engines to not crawl your site, you can select these from other pull downs on the screen. Once you fill in the correct information into the generator, copy and paste the code into a text editor, such as notepad, and save it as robots.txt. Make sure robots is plural, and that the document type is a .txt file. Upload this document to your root directory on your web page. To update your robots.txt file, you can simply delete unwanted rows, or copy and paste them, editing only the URL you want to block. To view the blocked URL’s of your website and to make sure your robots.txt file is working properly, log in to Webmaster Tools. Under Health, select Blocked URL’s.

It is important to know that a robots.txt file will not block these specific pages from showing up in search results if they are linked to a page that is crawled. In addition, a robots.txt file is not a good solution to making sure private and personal directories will not be able to be viewed by everyone.

Site Performance Feature: Eliminated!

Page load time is just one factor Google considers in SEO. Not only should you have a low load speed for SEO, but for overall visitor satisfaction as well. Visitors who have to wait long load times to view product pages are more likely to leave without buying anything. Recently, Google has eliminated the experimental Site Performance feature that was part of their Webmaster Tools Labs. This feature measured the average load time of your website and gave suggestions on how to fix certain issues. Due to low usage, Google has eliminated this feature and suggests using yet another free tool found on the web. One popular free online tool can be found at Pingdom Tools (http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt). Simply enter your website and go. Google also recommends using the Site Speed feature in Google Analytics or PageSpeed Online (https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/). Using Pingdom Tools offers you site grades and a number of other useful features and suggestions that can help you reduce the overall load time of your website and in turn increase SEO and visitor satisfaction.

Subscriber Stats Feature: Inihilated!

Google is also removing the Subscriber Stats feature from Webmaster Tools. This feature reported the stats for a website’s RSS or Atom feeds. Feeds are a great way to allow visitors to subscribe to regular updates via web portal, news reader, or even email. As a replacement, Google suggests using one of their own similar products, Feedburner (feedburner.google.com). This program is 100% free and backed by Google. It allows you to keep track of your RSS feed subscribers, change your feed URL without losing subscribers, and is browser friendly. Customize it with your company logo at the top of the screen, select a color template to match your company look, and even offer email subscriptions to your fans.

The elimination of these features don’t mean you need to sacrifice your data. Simply find an alternative program, such as one of the tools listed above, and you’ll be on your way to collecting and using data just as you were before.

Google AdWords Mobile App Extensions – Wildcard Friday

Matthew — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:59:38 +0000

Want to promote your app to mobile users? Adwords is making it easy!

Why We Love the New App Extensions:

How many times have you done a search on your mobile device for a business, not knowing that this business has an app? Once you click that business’s URL, you might see a popup saying something like “Download Our App!” Wouldn’t it be nice if you could download the app right away without visiting the site? With the new mobile app extension, you now can!

By turning on the mobile app extension you can promote your app directly within your search ad.

How to Use It:

This new extension is found in the same area as the other extensions. You begin by selection your app’s mobile operating system, Android or iOS (if your app is built for both platforms you’ll create 2 separate extensions). You’ll then need to add the package name (for Android) or the App ID (for iOS). AdWords offers a “Look up app” link to make it easy to find the exact name and/or ID of your app. Once you have your app you can add link text that can be up to 25 characters. This text can be something such as “Download App” or “Get Our App.” Finally, you’ll add the link to your app, whether it be in Google Play or the App Store. You then pick which campaign(s) you want the extension associated with and now a link to your app will show within your mobile ads!

Similar to other extensions, you can view overall extension metrics. You can also view metrics by headline click and extension click, giving you the ability to see exactly how many times the mobile app link is clicked.

What to Expect:

Though this extension is extremely beneficial, I don’t believe advertisers will see a huge increase in app downloads. Just like we see with other extensions, the ads’ headline click-thru-rate may improve, but the CTR on the actual extension will most likely remain stagnant. That’s OK, though, as the extension helps to take up more search real estate (and includes the app’s logo). Additionally, the extension works to improve the credibility of the business as searchers can see that this company has an app.

Finally, this new extension continues to showcase the importance of mobile advertising. More and more searches are occurring on mobile devices so it is imperative to have a strong presence.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. We’re excited about the mobile app extension and are looking forward to rolling out to our clients!

Keeping Readers Engaged with Content throughout Summer – Email Thursday

Elizabeth — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:42:05 +0000

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?”

Summertime is generally a slow month for brick-and-mortar stores as well as online retailers. People have their children at home, are taking weeks off at a time for vacation, and are generally in a different mood than the other nine months of the year. Their attention spans are shorter, they hang out more outside and they’re probably spending money on summer camps, ice cream cones and blockbuster movies, rather than shopping for themselves.

There are plenty of things you can do to tailor your email campaigns to meet the needs of your customers. I won’t cover the more technical ones here, but I will go over some basic techniques concerning content that will still help you capture the attention of your readers.

During the summer months, I tend to try and stay off my computer when I’m home, and in Boston, we only get a certain amount of warm days so I prefer to stay out and about. This doesn’t mean I lose connection with the world; it just means I open up a lot more emails on my phone.

You may notice that reading an email on your phone and reading one on a computer is a completely different experience. I know that when I’m on my phone, my attention span is a lot shorter, too. This is important to take into account when you’re crafting your summertime-friendly emails. As far as content goes, it’s vital to keep it interesting and even summer-oriented. Catchy subject lines and creative, punchy content will get you the farthest.

I know I prefer: Ciao Bella! Italian pencil skirt ON SALE.
To: Hey shopper, check out our new Italian pencil skirt that I’m sure you’ll fall in love with.

As far as sending out emails goes, e-commerce companies want to make sales on each email they send. Instead of just promoting your product offering endlessly in the body content, why not come up with some creative ways to tie your products or services to summer. For example, if you sell car parts, convertible parts might be a hot ticket item right now. Incorporate it into some helpful content for convertible drivers - like safety tips for summer convertible driving or even a best summer road trip tunes playlist. Both are helpful and you can use it tie your sales pitch in. You can even promote your social media. Ask customers to provide their best summer song or safety tip through Facebook or Twitter. You may even get some new ideas by asking them to participate in this.

Since it’s summer and people tend to be more social (real-life social; not online) during these months, it’s a great time to have a local event. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, send out email invites to in-store events, where you can do all sorts of promotions and entice customers into becoming longtime buyers. If you’re solely an online store, encourage people with giveaways that are tied to social media postings, ordering from your store, offering their email up for newsletters and promotions, etc.

Lastly, there are a lot of goings-on during these hot months like fun holidays you can take advantage of – 4th of July, Labor Day, Memorial Day, May Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Summer Solstice. The 2012 Olympics are also going on this summer in London giving you plenty of sports-related material to pull from. While natural disasters are no joke, hurricanes and nor’easters typically occur during the summer months adding to your list of catchy subject lines and content.

Always remember that content and subject lines are always important, but may need to be slightly tweaked in your summer email campaigns to better grab a reader’s attention and convert them to customer status.

Optimize Your Site-Wide Promotions! – Conversion Wednesday

Chris C. — Wed, 09 May 2012 21:57:09 +0000

Learn to control the balance between conversion rate, AOV and promotions.

A lot of stores offer promotions throughout the year to entice more visitors into becoming customers and, as a result, make your website more money.

The issue is that there’s often a seesaw effect on Revenue Per Visit as it’s pulled back and forth by conversion rate and average order value (AOV). The best examples to show this back-and-forth struggle between the two is with promotions or offers that you run on your website.

Promotions, discounts, and offers impact conversion rates by increasing motivation.

The offer you are making increases the motivation for a shopper to buy from you over a competitor. While the example above (giving everything away for free) might be an unrealistic, tongue-in-cheek example of how to improve conversion rates, it outlines the importance price has on the motivation your customer has when considering buying something from you.

Most promotions are aimed at offering an incentive that revolves around saving your customer money. Some examples would be:

Low price guarantee
$10 off
10% off
free shipping

All of these offer a cheaper price to your customers final bill.

Reducing cost has a direct effect on conversion rate. Typically, conversion rates go up with these offers. However, this can have a negative effect on your AOV since you are now eating into your own profits by giving more away for free. If you conversion rates go up, but your AOV goes down, you could end up in a wash for overall revenue (usually measured with RPV).

Thresholds impact Average Order Value

To protect against washing out your offer with lowered AOV, a lot of promotions will have a threshold assigned to them. This threshold is usually a dollar amount that the order must eclipse in order to qualify for that promotion. Here are some popular examples:

Free Shipping over $50
$10 off orders over $75
20% off order over $150

Adding a threshold that is above your website’s normal AOV can counter losses associated with a discount.

The catch is that you will see lowered motivation in your visitors to make a purchase if the threshold is too high. If you raise the threshold too much, you’ll lose motivation in visitors that don’t want to reach that far for a discount. If you lower the threshold too much, you might not make enough profits to justify offering it in the first place.

You can see that there’s a tug-of-war between conversion rate and AOV as you work with these offers.

Timing increases urgency and leads to improvements in conversion rate.

The last thing to consider when running promotions is your timing. There are two types of timing to keep in mind:

Limiting the time in which the offer is valid (example: through June 1st)
Time of year to run a particular promotion (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, December
Holiday specials, Valentine’s Day specials, etc).

As you can see, you could spend all year testing promotions and help improve your business! The great thing is that promotions are high-impact testing areas since they are a big reason why someone might buy from you.

How do I know which offer to use?

Simple, test them! Usually, the best place to start is to find out how much your current promotions are helping your site. This is easily done by removing a current promotion to see what impact it is having on revenue. You might even discover that your current promotions aren’t helping as much as you think!

The next step is to see which promotion works the best. I’d start with your historical AOV on the site and then test different offers aimed at increasing that AOV.

For example, if your AOV is usually $38.50, you might try setting your offer threshold at $50. So, the test might look like this:

Free shipping on orders over $50
$10 off orders over $50
10% off order over $50

See which one of these offers improves conversion rates and RPV the most. Once you find the best of these options, you can then try adjusting the threshold to optimize the offer even more.

So, let’s say that $10 off orders over $50 worked the best. Next, try raising it to $75 and see if that makes you more money. You can also try a dual offer to increase motivation for the majority of your shoppers. Something like “$10 off orders over $50 OR $20 off orders over $100” helps motivate visitors in three different ways:

Keeps motivating customers with lower AOVs
Increases motivation for visitors who would spend around $100 anyway to make a purchase
Increase AOV for visitors who are in the $75-$100 range to increase their order value even more!

Remember…

There are three important factors to keep in mind while testing promotions on your site:

Timing
Type of offer
Thresholds

Once you figure out the right blend of these three factors, you’ll be sure to make the most out of your promotional efforts throughout the entire year!

A Brief History of Google and Content – SEO Monday

Nik — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:18:46 +0000

A history of Google & content that will change the way you see SEO forever!

Today’s post is part of a webinar I had recorded back in February. This section goes through a brief historical recap of the change made by Google over the past several year in response to the changing content habits of the SEO world. I hope you find this insightful and that is brings you a greater sense of why so many types of content seem to “not work” in Google, even when it sounds like everybody’s telling you to simply add content to your site.

The Way It Used to Be

Let’s start with the way it used to be. How far back? Pre-2008 by my account. It wasn’t until 2008 until I personally noticed the first change to Google, so unless others noticed some first moves, I say putting a stake in the ground in 2008 makes sense. So what happened before 2008?

Well, the way it used to be was simple. When Google looked at your site, it would make very rudimentary judgment calls. For example, if you had a page with no body content, your page was placed in the supplemental index. If your page had content, then it was put in the primary index.

Wait… what’s that?

Primary Index: The primary index is where Google stores what it considers to be the most suitable pages for search results. In other words, if they are going to serve up any pages as a result for a particular search query, the preference is to serve up from this index. So, if you type in a search query, the first many results will be from the primary index. So, if Google can scrounge up 50 results from the primary for a particular result, then the top spot you can get if you’re in the supplemental is 51. You can identify what pages are in the primary index by simply doing a Google query: site:yoursite.com/*
Supplemental Index: The supplementary index is where Google keeps pages that it doesn’t want to serve up immediately. Then why do they even keep those pages? Simple – to serve a seemingly infinitesimal set of results. In some cases, it would be ridiculous if Google didn’t serve up supplementary pages, especially if the term is incredibly long-tail. Can you imagine getting only one result for a term? Or none at all? The supplementary plays a major role in what Google is all about. For many websites that have low quality content and that “live in the long-tail”, this historically has been a great source of traffic… ooohhh, foreshadowing…

2008: Duplicate Content

Something happened around 2008. We work with a lot of Yahoo! Stores at Exclusive Concepts. Around 2008, we noticed that these sites were suffering major drops in their rankings – the type of drops you’d see if your page was knocked out of the top results (primary real estate) and put into significantly lower results (supplementary real estate). We couldn’t identify the issue. These pages had content on them! Great content at that – straight from the manufacturer.

We started querying quoted text from these sites and the top results were not these stores – the resulting sites were shopping engines like “thefind”. In fact, it was just as common to see that happen even if the store had created its own unique content. Shopping engines had just started using catalog feeds to populate SEO content on their sites, and we were witnessing a displacement of our client’s rankings because they were seen as copying the content from other sites, primarily shopping feeds.

It soon became clear that Google had created a separation of the same exact (duplicate) content into primary and supplementary based on which iteration Google considered to be the source, and which was considered the duplicating party. How did it make this judgment? Simple – whichever was spidered first. Unlucky for webstores, shopping engines have a high crawl frequency.

So now that good quality content (albeit duplicate) was being put into the supplemental index, and those who tested creating unique content for their sites were seeing better results – a new trend was created in the industry: create unique content, no matter how bad it is – and you’ll get amazing results. Lo and behold, the internet starting becoming a bit spammier – thanks to Google’s insistence on unique content.

2009: Google Caffeine

As websites starting investing in cheap, sweatshop quality content, their results started booming – and thanks to Google’s rollout of Caffeine in Dec of 2009, crap content got the shot of sustenance it was always looking for! All of a sudden, Google was spidering the internet faster, making judgment calls on the uniqueness of content faster, and your pages would end up with a stronghold in the primary index with superpowers if it was simply unique. It could be as poorly written as you wanted. So why pay your copywriter the average of $30-40 a page, right? Overseas, you could get 40-50 pages written for the same cost. And so the internet got spammier and spammier. This was the great depression of onsite content – there was hardly a page on the internet that was readable, yet every ranking page seemed to have some form of content.

2010: Mayday

Mayday! Mayday! I can only imagine what Google’s team did for months, weeks, days, hours – or maybe just a few minutes – to discuss how they could combat the decreasing quality of their results. Somebody’s brilliant idea was to (imaginary paraphrase) “just keep drilling: maybe Google’s not doing enough to combat duplicate content?” I know what you’re asking yourself: “wait, duplicate content? I though the issue was quality.” You’re right, they were wrong.

Mayday, in May of 2010, created a new tier of penalization to duplicate content. Let’s say that many pages being crawled by Google had the same content. The first few would go in the primary. The next few would go into the supplementary. And now – the rest would simply be deleted. Yikes!

This created a race for rewriting content on websites that were penalized by Mayday. The original content was often very well written content, with perfect specs and brand details from the manufacturer – and now, it was being re-written by somebody who was trying to put a few SEO keywords into 50 words of content that needn’t make any sense at all.

Although Mayday may have reduced some server usage on Google’s part, it also fueled more low quality content creation.

2011: Panda

Then in 2011, Panda came about. Panda (an engineer at Google) recognized that low quality content was getting out of hand. He came up with a way to target the loophole that SEOs and websites were using – low quality content. He took it even further than just penalizing page-by-page: he made it mandatory that all sites clean up their act or they weren’t going to win any brownie points with Google.

The algorithmic aspects were simple – use a few signals to determine quality. They seem to include:

Comprehensiveness of topic – does it include semantically-broad terminology in regards to a topic – ie. does the topic reflect other top results, “related searches”, the “topic corpus”, results from Google insights, etc. There are a multitude of internal systems that Google can utilize in order to ontologically determine the depth of a piece of content based on the topic at hand.
Uniqueness of keyword footprint – does the content have the same keyword usage as all the other pages trying to rank for the same keyword?
Quality Assurance – is the content properly edited and readable.

These simple signals easily make it impossible to write content on the cheap, or in a rush. That’s the point.

At the same time, this algorithm only judges on a page-by-page basis – but it penalizes on a sitewide basis. Basically, if you have more bad signals on your site than good in an unhealthy disproportion, then you could be penalized by Panda. You don’t need to rush to create good content to get back in Google’s good graces, but rather should take the time to add good content periodically to the site. To offset this prolonged calendar of content writing, you simply need to request the de-indexation of low quality pages from Google’s index. Then, when Google recalculates the proportion of high quality indexed content to low quality indexed content, the ratios are healthier and favored by Google. That’s how you lift the Panda penalty.

2012: Penguin

Just when you thought nothing else could be mixed into Google’s lethal injection cocktail, they rolled out Penguin.

It’s really too early to comment confidently on Penguin, but there are already some noticeable content-related stances that Google has taken. Penguin seems to focus on some of the old-school tenants of Google, which were aimed at identifying over-optimization. While it seems apparent that even simple over-optimization of keywords can potentially land you negative Penguin points in regards to your rankings for keywords that you are trying too hard to target, the rabbit hole is a bit deeper than that.

Compare your inbound anchor text to your on-page and you may be able to identify your next steps with Penguin:

KW Densities & Permutations: If your on-page densities are unnatural (noticeable bad territory: over 8% including anchor text from your nav), then rework your content. You may even want to consider reworking your navigation.
Inbound to On-Page KW Matching: If your inbound anchor text focuses on words a, b, c, and d – but your on-page focuses on a, b, x, y and z, you’re a likely candidate for Penguin according to our research. Make adjustments accordingly – focusing your on-page to match inbound might be the easiest route here.
Inbound Anchor Text Densities & Permutations: If your inbound anchor text is way too unnatural, for example if you have 20 links using 1 phrase, and no other links at all, you should focus on creating a more natural distribution. Right now, this is a Penguin (algorithmic) issue, but it could also serve as a red flag for manual penalization if you don’t address it now.

Best of luck and we’ll keep you updated on our research with regards to Penguin – sign up to the blog to stay in the loop.

Finally: The Cheese Stands Alone

In the end, there’s only one breed of content that survives the gauntlet of algorithmic changes that Google has built over the past few years. Stick to it:

Keep it unique
Research and be comprehensive
Use natural keywords and unique ones too
Double check your content
Don’t even attempt to stuff your keywords
Make sure your backlinks are as natural as your content

De-index the rest if you need to. Keep your head above water and best of luck! Get an SEO Audit from Exclusive Concepts if you want our team to help you get up-to-date on your SEO.

Beta Test Opportunity for Magento and Big Commerce Stores…

Herb — Fri, 04 May 2012 19:33:21 +0000

Do you operate your e-commerce store on either Magento or BigCommerce? If so, we’d love to speak with you.

Our hosted software, Conversions On Demand, has been a big hit with Yahoo! store merchants. So much so that we’ve received dozens of requests from merchants on platforms like Magento and Big Commerce to make our software available to them. Since our software integrates so tightly with an e-commerce cart, that has been impossible… until now.

Beta test it on your site… get perks…

We’re in our final round of beta testing to make Time2Buy, The Cart Closer, and Daily Deal Bar available on Magento (Magento Enterprise, Magento Community, and MagentoGO) and BigCommerce.

Interested? Email beta@conversionsondemand.com and we’ll tell you more. Beta testers receive free use of our software during the test period and a substantial discount for 12 months thereafter. You’ll also be in a position to advocate for particular features that are important to you.

Why Conversions On Demand?

Because it makes you more money! Our software has been tested and proven to increase conversions over many years, and has made hundreds of merchants millions of dollars in incremental revenue.

* Motivate unfocused shoppers as they browse your site using Time2Buy

* Display one last offer to shoppers when they try to abandon your cart with TheCartCloser

* Schedule and promote site-wide deals, anytime, anywhere, automatically with Daily Deal Bar

There’s no risk (pay only if it works) and setup is both free and extremely easy.

Limited Time Offer

The opportunity to be a beta tester for these Magento Add-Ons and Big Commerce Add-Ons will be available for a limited time only. If you’re interested email beta@conversionsondemand.com today.

Learn more about Conversions On Demand by going here.

Which Pages Should I 301 Redirect?

Scott C — Fri, 04 May 2012 15:45:46 +0000

Want to use 301 redirects in a way that maximizes SEO impact? Learn how!

My name is Scott, a Sr. SEO Specialist at Exclusive Concepts and today I’d like to follow up to Becca’s post earlier this week on 301 redirects (http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/301-redirects-in-yahoo-stores-seo-monday.html) and discuss how to determine which pages to redirect on your site when you are deleting them.

Redirect Manager in Yahoo! Stores

Becca’s post discussed a newer tool released to Yahoo! Stores called the redirect manager, which allows site owners to easily redirect old pages that are deleted to new URLs. Shortly after the post, a client had asked a great question on whether or not to redirect all deleted pages on the site and also which pages to redirect them to.

While the redirect manager does allow up to 50,000 pages to be redirected, which should be more than enough for most Yahoo stores, it can sometimes be time consuming to redirect all pages and can also add up over time for larger stores. In addition, redirects can be difficult to manage as the list continues to grow over time and you wouldn’t want to create multiple redirects for a single URL as you delete more pages on the site. If you don’t have a Yahoo! store and you pay someone else to manage the web maintenance on your site, it can also get much more expensive each time you need a redirect created.

301 Page Selection for Any Website

Because of this, I’d like to make a few recommendations when determining which pages to redirect. Depending on the amount of time you want to spend on it can determine how many of these steps to take.

Looking at the past 1-2 years of traffic, does the page potentially being redirected have any organic traffic coming into it? If so, there is a chance it has some organic value and possibly links going into the page which means you would want to redirect it.
Was the page you’re deleting one of the more popular products that is no longer carried on your site or is it being removed because it is a product that didn’t sell at all? If it was a hot seller and is being discontinued or the page is being deleted for another similar reason, I’d recommend redirecting it just in case it possesses any organic value again.
Finally, if you have access to more advanced tools, you can always manually check each URL you’d like to delete to see things like it’s Page Authority or if it has any external links which can be transferred through a redirect. Again, since time is a scarcity, I’d recommend doing at least step 1 to determine whether or not to redirect a URL.

Choosing What Page to Redirect To

The other question posed was how to determine which page to redirect to. Many people make a quick assumption it’s best just to redirect back to the home when deleting a page, but I’d actually recommend trying to find the most relevant page on the site to the one you are deleting. If you think about it, there may be links from other sources going to your old page and it would be much better to have them land on a relevant page rather than the homepage, where it may take time to find what they are looking for.

Announcement: We're seeking Magento and BigCommerce stores to beta test our conversion improvement software. Details...

3 Ways to Promote Social Media Through Email – Email Thursday

Tim G — Thu, 03 May 2012 21:19:56 +0000

Want to promote your social media through email? 3 ways to get it done!

Don't Assume

Although Facebook and other forms of social media have been prevalent for almost a decade, don't assume that everybody is familiar with social media.

Although it's safe to assume that most people have heard of Facebook or Twitter, it's important to explain why your Facebook or Twitter community are different from your competitors'.

You will also want to reinforce the notion that the experience from social media is different from your website or email. In other words, email subscribers will gain additional benefit from following you on Twitter.

Examples of this uniqueness could include Facebook-exclusive offers, or a means to directly dialogue with your company or brand.

In your email campaign, you may also want to include directions on how to "Join" on Google+ or add a "Like" on Facebook. Again, social media may not be intuitive to all of your readers.

Gradual Process

This is a photo of Rome. Just like Rome, your social media empire will not be built in a day. Be patient!

Continue to promote your social media presence over the course of multiple campaigns.

In addition to promoting your social media presence in your campaigns, try to find different ways to position your social media site. Examples of this include posting a product sneak preview on your Facebook wall, adding a cool link to an article on your Twitter, and hosting contests on Pinterest.

The bottom line is to keep your readers engaged from the point of the email link to your social media channel.

Be Strategic

Finally, be strategic. In a mad rush to get Twitter followers or Facebook fans, it's easy to lose sight of why you are getting these leads. So take a moment to ask yourself, why are you doing this?

First and foremost, what are your plans for your social media community? How are you identifying and monetizing the opportunities that social media present?

It's undeniable that your promotion of social media is costing you time, resources, and money. So what is your Return On Investment?

Thirdly, social media, just like any other marketing channel, cannot exist in a vacuum. How is social media moving your marketing strategy forward?

Is social media driving your bottom line? And can you eventually leverage social media to grow your email subscriber population?

The digital marketing channel is cluttered. Your competitors can steal your engaged subscribers away in a heartbeat with better offers, better presentation, more relevant messaging, etc. The key to maintaining viability with your marketing is to coordinate your marketing channels towards a singular goal.

Make sure that your marketing channels are coordinated from A to Z. Make sure that your messaging is consistent, your design is resonant with your target demographics, and you keep a focus on your brand and company throughout your marketing.

Announcement: We're seeking Magento and BigCommerce stores to beta test our conversion improvement software. Details...