E-Commerce for All

Are you feeling that “spring is coming” bug? Well, rightfully so, because right now is the time to plan for your spring marketing and tidy up a bit from the winter sales.

Most ecommerce stores have some season trending. This is very unique to both the store and the product line. So a store selling green widgets can be expected to trend sales in a similar manner to another shop selling green widgets… But not exactly, as they are many additional metrics that influence one’s sales.

So you should be planning for your spring and early summer products, marketing and trends now… So that you are prepared for this period in your business. Even especially if traditionally spring is a low volume period for sales.

Here is a checklist of sorts to help you get started for planning any marketing period, including this spring.

Trending: Unless you site is brand new, you should have some sales and traffic data that you can use to trend or predict the data for the upcoming period. I tend to concentrate on sales and traffic. I use both as they can be very unrelated for some websites. There are clearly some periods where even if the traffic is there, conversions are down… So to properly trend our potential for this upcoming period we should use both. You may even have other metrics such as, bounce, average order or similar that are specifically a target for your store.

Gathering the data is the easiest part, as you should be using a proper analytical stat program to record your data. We will use Google Anayltics for our example, as it is very popular.

When gathering your data, we are looking for specific trends within the matching period from previous years to predict, affect and produce a proper marketing plan for the upcoming period. So login to Google Analytics and lets get to work.

So we will pull data for all of March, April, May and June to cover our bases and provide some overlap. You will want to pull at least on year, more if you have them. I would not be concerned with using more than 3 years as things in your business and on the web change very quickly and it’s not likely to be very relevant any longer.

The example store I am using had a 2009 average daily visits of 279 uniques a day. There conversion rate for the year was 3.87%. You can see by the graph that holiday traffic is a crucial part of this store’s success and that spring is rather soft by comparison. You can also see that our spring period it right at or just a bit above average for them.

2009 Unique Visits

We can clearly see from this data, that traffic could be improved for this period…. Especially because they have a genuine promotable product line for spring sales. Now let’s have a look at conversions in relationship with this traffic… Do they convert well in this period?

2009 Conversions

We can see that last year, while traffic was average, they converted pretty well the end part of spring. looks very much like March should be our focus area.

Next you will determine your trend. You can use data from previous tears to do this… But if you lack that data no worries, this old restaurant manager has the equation to get you close.

Obviously, any data you do have is clearly relevant… But let’s say you have little or none. To determine your current rate of growth in both of these metrics we will poll the last 4 months. This is a weighted process with the greatest weight on the most recent data.

This applies to any metric. Gather the data for these metrics for Nov 2009, Dec 2009, Jan 2010 and Feb 2010.

We will start with March’s data from last year 8,043 unique visits and a conversion rate of 3.13%.

• Nov 2009 8,789 & 4.85%
• Dec 2009 14634 & 4.5%
• Jan 2010 7,604 & 3.67%
• Feb 2010 6,395 & 3.52%

For this purpose, with holiday data so much higher we will exclude Nov & Dec, unless we have 2008 numbers… Which we do. Nov 2008 7,419 & 3.18%, Dec 2008 8,861 & 4.00%, Jan 2009 6,146 & 2.99% and Feb 2009 5,742 & 3.22%.

Here is the math:

The math is easier than it looks….

Step 1: YOY growth, which is simply current year minus previous year.

Step 2: Trend. Like I said we will weight this for the most current monthly data. So 100% being the whole, we will use 12.5% from Nov & Dec, 25% from Jan and the remaining 50% from most current Feb. Something like this:

• 1 part : Nov. 18.49% plus Dec. 65.15% = 83.64 divided by 2 = 41.82%
• 1 part: Jan. = 23.72%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%

= The whole (88.28) divided by 4 = (22.07%) Current Trend

Last year March (8043) apply trend 22.07% = (1775 growth) This year March forecast (9818) unique visits… Into 318 average daily visits.

Check our math:

Last year average daily visits March = 260

This year forecast = 318

% of predicted growth = 22.3%

**Note that rounding changes these just a hair, but not to worry this should be pretty reliable data.

So this “math” can be applied to the entire period as a whole, or each month individually computed. The point here is to have an idea of what to expect, AND and basis to measure the effectiveness of your marketing this spring. For example if you did nothing last spring, and you know (above) what to expect if you do nothing this spring… Then you have a pretty good benchmark to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign this spring.

Melanie E-Commerce Marketing, Small Business

Losers?

With the current climate of Google’s new algorithm, I have had cause to reflect on a basic idea…. Seemingly long forgotten. Are you getting the sales you need from your existing visits? Or are you a “build it and they will come” person?

If you plan to increase your traffic to meet your sales needs and never worry about what you could be missing… Stop reading, this will bore you =-) However, if you want to build your qualified traffic and get the sales from them you need, then read on.

Conversions! Yes folks SALES! This is the point right?

So in light of all the indexing and rank changes, we sent our SEO clients a “Biggest Losers List“. The concept here is that these visits are lost sales, for some reason. Price? Usability? Information? Something is missing and the page cannot make the sale.

First off, lets find your top 5 biggest losers for the last 30 days. Login in to your Google Analytics account, hopefully it is set up properly to track conversion data. Unless you have moved things around from your lower dashboard click “View report” on the “Traffic Sources Overview” box. Then under the sources area, choose Google Organic for example.

In the gray bar, there is a dropdown set initially for keyword, drop this down to landing page. Now click the header link in the “Visits” column to sort them by visits, more visits at the top. Now click on your ecommerce tab.

We are looking for the pages with many visits and no conversions. I have one of my own sites open right now to provide some examples.

Loser Page #1 had 52 visits and no conversions.

Loser Page #2 had 29 visits and no conversions.

Loser Page #3 had 20 visits and no conversions.

Now, we can clearly see without going a step further there is something wrong here. In this shop, for example, the “per visit value” in the upper bar is $4.86….. So we know that for some reason these losing pages lost at least $490.86 in potential sales….. OUCH!

Now lets gather some more information. In the dropdown next to “Landing Page” select “Keyword” to add the column. This complicates things a bit, but sometimes, Google needs more information from you to send your pages qualified leads. If you find that one of your losers is getting a bunch of seeming unrelated search traffic, then it is a good bet that the text on the page is not clear enough to Google.

A good example of this is our pet store example, the 29 searches are for “bows in bulk”… which we sell, except they are dog grooming bows. So I will be updating this page so Google can deliver it for more proper search queries. This part is easy….

What if these losing pages have good, relevant searches?

In this case, we have to have a good old fashioned, come to Jesus look at the page. Is the price too high? Information unclear? Terrible images? Missing selections? Or just plain poorly organized even. Trust me when I say, you must train your eyes to shop like a consumer. In reality it doesn’t matter what you think or what your competitors do…. Matters that there is a problem with this page you need to solve.

These things can really be very small… Layout, color, button positions etc. So your best course of action is to have some friends look at it. The trick here is two fold. First, whatever you think about what they say doesn’t matter… You are not an average consumer. Listen to them, analyze what they have said and act on it. Secondly, don’t go changing a hundred things on the page…. Nothing you cannot measure can ever be successful. Take your list, make a few logical changes and watch it for 3 weeks…. Then measure your results and continue to implement the needed changes in small doses as well. Pretty soon this page will not be a loser anymore!

Need a hand? If you post your page link in a comment, with your own thoughts and the visits & conversions… I will be glad to have a look and make suggestions as I can =-)

Melanie E-Commerce Marketing, E-Commerce SEO

Eye tracking? Heard of that? Know how it affects you and your store’s sales?

Eye Tracking

Eye tracking is defined as  research to track where a user’s eyes look while reading, then analyze the data to reveal behavioral patterns. In essence eye tracking is a core part of usability & accessibility.

So we know that you can drive thousands of visitors to your website a day and not make a dime…. These issues related to the usability of your store are the most common reasons for poor conversions and sales.

We are going to specifically go over some big issues for shop owners in the realm of eye tracking today. I promise to revisit the full usability side when I finish Steve Krug’s, “Don’t Make Me Think” 2cnd Edition.

Recent behavioral eye tracking studies have identified some very useful metrics regarding eye tracking and how user’s navigate your online store. We learn more and more everyday about the user interaction and emotional responses to our content and pages. What I’m covering here are just some basic, fairly unconsidered facts, to help you gain some insight in to your shoppers habits and needs.

Eye Tracking Tips for Ecommerce

• Heading Tags – I have said this before and I’ll say it again… Visitors read text first upon hitting your page about 1 second is spent scanning for text to identify the page as relevant or irrelevant to the visitor’s query or need. Yes, that’s right you have about 1 second to get them interested! Heading tags are a perfect way to grab the attention of these text scanning machines we call visitors. Keep your heading tags, short, logical and highly relevant to engage shoppers more quickly.
• Eye Movement Patterns – Your visitors will averagely read/scan your pages in a particular order (shown below from Eyetrack III). Notice where the user starts his quest to determine if your page is useful… Top Left. Ask any search marketing professional and they will tell you this is one of the most highly effective advertisement areas of a page. While I certainly don’t want to see you with PPC ads in your store, utilizing this space properly is key to visitor engagement.

Basic Eye Tracking Path of Average Visitors

• People scan the first few words of a paragraph and then quickly make a decision to read it or move one. Back to high school with this one. Remember that English teacher teaching you to use a power sentence to start your paragraphs. Creative and visual writing skills have never been more important…. The first sentence is the hook.
• Keep it short! We know from that same high school English teacher that a paragraph is a container for a single thought. In keeping with that shorter paragraphs actually are less daunting and encourage better reading.
• People naturally seem to migrate top and left when seeking navigation. Right hand navigation has its place indeed, many blog surfers have come to expect right hand navigation from the reading they do… This has not yet, however, transferred in to the general reading and shopping ranks. Topside navigation while interestingly more effective according to the study can be a real nightmare for shoppers to navigate in ecommerce applications. In essence the top navigation is only going to work for your simpler menu options… Not 50 categories and children fly outs. So, standard left hand navigation is still going to be more effective and engaging in your online store.
• Categories are the key to every store’s navigation, but also the biggest area of confusion and bottlenecks for shoppers as well. On one hand we know that the fewest number of clicks to get to paying you is most effective, we also know that logical and clearly categorized navigation will yield a better average order value. The biggest issue is when  a shopper is forced to browse through page after page of product index. Most times these products, say numbering 80 can be just 4 pages. However, we also know that the click through drops about 50% from page 1 to page 2 and by the time we get to page 4 only about 3% of the shoppers remain… The rest bailed. So shorter product indexes, ideally one page with your most popular products first will keep the shopper more engaged and on track.
• This I found most interesting, smaller fonts seem to engage readers. So those of you running those 14px fonts are actually encouraging scanning as opposed to reading! The standard is a 10px font, and I would recommend never larger than a 12px. If your visitor profile demands it, then get a text sizer tool for your pages.
• Textual ads within your store will be far more effective than graphics. Aside from the entire banner blindness issue, people are just more willing to click text ads. So just having a neat and crisp “Free Shipping” heading tag will do the trick nicely.
• I have been telling shop owners about the power of color psychology for a while now….. But here you go. In this study a HUGE contrasting red font containing information was completely missed 86% of the users tracked! BAM@!
• How about product pricing? This can really be a heated topic…. But here we see the nuts and bolts of how those numbers came to be .99 and what they should more effectively be .47 or .49 to catch price scanning eyes.

The basic point of this is to establish one thing in your mind… You have no idea what your shoppers need until you ask them. Doing a simple usability study with friends will reveal problems you would have easily missed.

Never stop improving your store, solicit the feedback of your shoppers. Most importantly whether you pay for a usability study, conduct a small usability study on your own or ask for feedback… YOU MUST LISTEN!

Remember, it’s not about what you think… It’s about making a living.

Melanie E-Commerce Design, E-Commerce Marketing

Getting all the sales you need from your ecommerce business?

I think that most everyone would answer NO! We get calls all the time from shop owners who are just not making it. They reach out to us for help… Well kind of. Most think there is some magic wand we can wave to make them rank. This is a common myth among shop owners…. EASY MONEY! Yep, that’s what we hear…

Shop owner: My online store has been live for 6 months and I have made 3 sales!

PRO-Webs: What have you done to promote your store? Build links? Build usable content? Updates?

Shop owner: I really don’t have time to do those things, why do I have to promote my store? Won’t people just find it and give me money??

Easy Content

Ok, so that is a bit dramatized… But we get calls very similar to that all the time! So today for you shop owners who lack the time to properly promote your business AND the funds to hire PRO-Webs to do it for you, we are going to give you 5 easy ways to add additional content to your website and pick up additional longtail and niche searches.

How does adding some content help?

This is a very simple mathematical equation that everyone should clearly understand. Your conversions are generally referenced as a percentage of total visits… and average if you will. Soooooo, increasing the visits (qualified leads) will inevitably increase your sales.

How to Boost Searches with Content

These ideas to help you promote your store with content are NOT completely without effort. I would certainly rather see you sit down and write great content for your visitors… But, since you don’t have time….

1. Buying Content: Buying content is really a simple matter of buying PLR articles related to your niche OR hiring a copywriter to write for you. Most importantly this content must be unique, so the smart shop owner will not just publish purchased articles, but rather change it up a bit for uniqueness.
2. Add a Glossary or FAQ section: Glossaries, dictionaries, FAQs and tutorials are excellent niche content, inexpensive to get going and easy to maintain. Probably the most common for shop owners is a Q&A or FAQ section. Many times this can be accomplished with a simple plugin for your ecommerce software. Our FAQ sections contains questions, answers and tutorials… We used WordPress to build it. Fact is this is very inexpensive to get going and easy to maintain. So when customers ask questions…. answer them and post it.
3. Product Reviews: Product reviews are very easy to manage. Most ecommerce software has this ability build in or a modification is available to add it. Biggest issue with this is getting folks to add a review. Some shop owners use a system to ask for them to post it, some make it open for guests to post (ill advised) and then wade through the spam to find good reviews… But our suggestion is far simpler! Just create a nice email master asking customers how their experience in your store went, did the receive their items and by the way can you reply to this email with a review of the product as you see it. Ahhhhh easy, many more will provide a review for you if they can stay within the comfort of their own email screen.
4. Forums: While web forums are not the gleaming star they used to be, if your products are very technical or related to a hobby for example… then a forum might just get shoppers writing content for you! Again, this is not easy task to get going, but a well structured and supported forum can supply an incredible amount of user generated content with little or no effort long term to maintain. Again, this would not be a very costly project to develop, but you would have to add content manually for a while and invite your shoppers at every opportunity to get it going.

A web site that grows it content in a sustained pattern over time gets better search engine ranking. You can also use content creation regularity to train the Search Engine Robots to visit your store more often simply by updating your web site content every week. The trick is in the perserverance, so don’t run out and buy 10 articles and publish them all at once, you have far more to gain from publishing them once a week for 10 weeks.

Melanie E-Commerce Marketing