ecommerce
A great user experience extends beyond the website
Sep 9th
An unbelievable returns policy
The most stunning example of this was their returns policy.
If you are lucky a website will offer you a 30 day return policy if the goods are unopened and so can be resold. If you are unlucky they will not accept returns at all or charge a restocking fee.
However, with our new client things are radically different. They offer a 365 day return policy! However, they don’t stop there. You can return products that have been used and cannot be resold. Better still they will even pay the postage for you to return the goods.
It is truly staggering. So much so that the problem is convincing the user the offer is genuine!
A culture of service
However, it is more than that. They have the right culture too. I was fortunate enough to chat with their call centre staff. Currently they offer customers three ways to contact them…
- Phone
- Live chat
I asked which contact method they preferred. I expected them to say email first, followed by live chat and finally phone. After all, when on the phone you can only deal with a single customer at a time.
Email and live chat are much more cost effective. However my expectations were entirely wrong. The answer was the phone because “it is the quickest way customers could get their problems resolved”.
Davi Sales Batista, Shutterstock
A growing trend
What’s interesting is that this client is not alone. More and more companies are realising that to compete on the web they cannot sell on product and price alone.
The problem is that competition is fierce and the chances of having a unique product low. With your competition only a click away and savvy customers doing price comparison you are left with two choices – be the cheapest or be the best.
What this new breed of web businesses are realising is that racing to be the cheapest is a loser’s game. Eventually there is only so much that can reduce your margins. Instead they have discovered that customers (especially online) are willing to pay more for convenience.
In today’s society time is as important a currency as money and users will often choose a more expensive option if it saves them time quibbling over returns or being on hold with customer services.
There are many poster children for this movement including the likes of Zappos. What these pioneers are proving is that the increase in revenue outweighs the costs involved.
On face value limiting customer service may seem like a good idea. However, in doing so you are putting short term objectives over the long term health of your business.
Think long term
Recently I wrote a post in which I said that business objectives are more important than users needs. However, that is not an excuse for neglecting your users. If you care about achieving long term business success, then you have to put great customer service and the user’s needs at the heart of what you do.
As web designers we can help you. We can make intuitive sites that are both painless and pleasurable to use. However, that is only half the battle. We also need you (the website owner) to continue that pleasurable experience in terms of customers service. What happens offline is as important as what happens online.
What about you?
So ask yourself – how could you be helping your customers more? Have you hidden away your phone number because you don’t want users calling you? Have you added in extra fields to your contact form so you can collect demographic data for spamming? Have you limited your returns policy for fear of people abusing it? What about hidden costs? Are there charges for returns or delivery?
Whether you are running an e-commerce site or an informational one the message is the same, provide outstanding user experience both on the site and off.
Tesco launches mobile commerce app for iPhone
Sep 9th
Getting started
It helps if you are already registered with Tesco.com, as you will have to register on the app if not. The registration process has not been optimised for the app, so you have to head for the main website on your phone.
Once there, you have a lot of work to do to fill in more fields than seems strictly necessary. Users would be better advised to register on their laptops or PCs before using the app, to save the pain.
While many people downloading the app will be existing customers with logins, a more streamlined and mobile-friendly registration process would help Tesco attract more new customers through the app.
Homepage
The main screen provides the option of selecting a delivery slot, checking existing orders, or adding to your shopping list. At the bottom of the app, users can access their favourites, shop for groceries, see the shopping basket, or enter the checkout process.
The Favourites section is a very impressive feature. I often shop at Tesco offline, but haven’t registered on the site before, but having entered my clubcard number, the favourites list is auto-filled for me with items I have recently purchased at the store.
This therefore saves a lot of time, and this will become more useful the more people use the app. It also displays special offers for the items in my favourites list.
Search and navigation
One of the challenges for grocery apps is to make browsing through huge product ranges as painless as possible for users. With more than 20,000 products on the app, this isn’t easy.
The key is to dice and slice the product range as much as possible by breaking down the categories into more manageable sub-categories, and providing filtering and sorting options to help users narrow their selection.
This works well for some sections of the site; the fruit and vegetables section is quite easy to use for instance, but other product searches are more difficult.
So if I’m looking for red wine, I have a list of 190 bottles displayed in no particular order, with no further options to sort or filter the list. The ability to search by country or by grape would be useful, or at least some options to sort by price. This was also a problem on Ocado’s iPhone app.
Users who know exactly which product they want can at least use the site search option, though I think Tesco has missed a trick by not making the search instantly accessible, either by displaying it on each page in the ‘shop’ section, or having it as a link at the foot of the app.
At the moment, it can only be accessed via the start page in the ‘shop’ section. This means that, if you are on the wine page above, you have to backtrack three or four steps to use search.
Checkout process
Having selected my products and headed for the checkout, I was surprised to be asked to login again, when I only logged in less than 20 minutes before. This is unnecessary, and very fiddly when you have a long email address.
Once you’re over this obstacle, the checkout process is a smooth and well-designed one; as good a mobile checkout process as you will see.
The number of fields to fill in has been kept to a minimum, data entry fields are large enough and clearly labelled throughout, while error messaging is clear.
Conclusion
This is a very useful app from Tesco, and one that should prove popular. The app has some excellent features; a smooth checkout process for one, while the favourites section is very useful for making repeat use of the app as easy as possible.
Some more options for filtering and sorting would make product searches easier, while there are one or two niggles around registration. A barcode scanner would also be a useful edition for a future version of the app, to enable customers to create a shopping list as they go.
Sainsbury’s has only recently launched a store locator / Nectar card app and rivals like Asda and Morrisons have no mobile presence at all, so Tesco is well placed to profit as more customers turn to mobile for grocery shopping.
How can brands use Facebook Credits?
Sep 9th
Virtual spending
Of course, Facebook isn’t the first social community to introduce a virtual currency; nor the first to sell that currency offline. Virtual worlds like Second Life (Linden dollars) and Entropia (Project Entropia Dollars – PED) have long had their own, thriving economies, and their currencies are even being traded on virtual world exchanges (how long before these become regulated markets?).
Virtual worlds have been the focus of the really big virtual currency spending to date. Earlier this year a man paid the equivalent of $330,000 to buy a virtual space station on Entropia; and virtual nightclubs are common purchase in Second Life. It might seem insane on the face of it – but if you can charge entry to go into your club, where a real band is performing a virtual concert; or charge for a virtual trip on the space station; suddenly these look like sound business investments.
Most virtual payments, however, are for small amounts; buying into a game, or buying virtual clothes, or a virtual space online. Apple’s App Store is a good indication of how people will willingly spend relatively insignificant amounts on ‘fun’ apps, even in a recession, and the principle for social games or branded goods is the same.
But Facebook Credits could change all that. Brands are already big on Facebook, and attract customers way beyond seasoned ‘Second Lifers’.
How can brands use Facebook Credits?
There are two big opportunities here. The first and most obvious is that brands can sell their products using Facebook Credits – so their Facebook pages become revenue generators.
Offers unique to Facebook, special edition trials and ‘first to buy’ promotions can all make a brand’s Facebook page more compelling for consumers, and provide a revenue stream for the brand. As ever with social media, this is a community, not a shop front, so exclusive deals will be much more attractive than simply providing an alternative to your online store.
The second is incentive or loyalty points. Facebook Credits could work like Nectar points, and could be offered online and offline to encourage interaction with the brand through the social network by awarding points that can only be redeemed on Facebook, even if they’re picked up in store.
It’s early days, but this could be a great way of encouraging consumers to engage with a brand in social spaces.
Why a virtual currency? Why not just use real money?
If social games and other online environments are to make money from their users, a virtual currency makes sense. It simplifies transactions on the site. If you have users from all over the world, it is much easier to transact in a single currency than accept hundreds of existing currencies.
This has great implications for brands, who may have a global Facebook site, and now Facebook Credits will make it easier to sell in different markets. And, of course, Facebook will take a reported 30% of the transaction.
Trust issues?
I’ll be interested to see if there are any trust issues in buying Facebook Credits. Of course, at the point at which you can buy them like iTunes vouchers, at your local supermarket, trust won’t be an issue. But while you have to give Facebook your credit card details, Facebook will have to prove that its recent privacy and trust issues haven’t damaged its ability to collect money from consumers. I suspect it hasn’t.
The other issue Facebook will have to prove is that it can regulate transactions properly, and set a reasonable exchange rate in all currencies.
If it gets these two things right, brands will trust the site to be secure enough to use as a sales channel, rather than just directing consumers back to the brand site.
One of the most asked questions by brands is ‘how can I measure pure financial return on my social media spend’. Selling on Facebook might just make that question a whole lot easier to answer.
17 killer SEO slides from the 2010 Seattle mozinar
Sep 7th
Without further ado, here are my picks for the top slides (and tips) from this year’s set (hint – you can click on the slides to see larger versions):
SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin kicked things off with an update of all the crazy changes happening to Google’s search results recently.
Even for hardcore search addicts, there were new things to be seen, but the tip that I saw most people scribbling down was about the impact of video XML sitemap submission on existing powerful sites (even if you don’t host the videos on your own site). This has been a big win for a bunch of sites I know of and is one of those things you just need to get on and do.
HubSpot Viral Marketing Scientist Dan Zarrella blew people’s minds with his analysis of data from Twitter. His best advice revolved around an analysis of what gets re-tweeted on Twitter.
Adverbs were associated with a reduced chance of a re-tweet while nouns were associated with an increased chance. Pro-tip: try to stop talking about what you are doing and talk about interesting third party things.
Rand whupped me in our head-to-head presentation-off (with me now having won twice in London, we think there might be a little bit of home-court advantage going on).
In his version of How to Pitch SEO, he took the in-house pitching route and demonstrated formulae for valuing the traffic you are going to drive with your increased marketing efforts.
SEOmoz Director of customer acquisition Joanna Lord showed us how much information you can fit into a presentation if youtalkreallyfast. Her real-life examples of analytics segmentation were some of the most popular takeaways.
Define Search Strategies founder Marshall Simmonds was sharing knowledge from some of the biggest sites in the world including the New York Times and About.com.
When he shows you a chart like this one with what can only be described as cratering traffic from Digg, you have all the information you need to help you map out your social strategies over the coming years.
Our very own head of search Tom Critchlow spoke about advanced keyword selection and spent a good part of his presentation discussing ways to select and target the long-tail when many of the search terms in question haven’t even been searched yet.
He demoed a mock-up of a CMS that pulled in relevant content to the primary page keyword to enable content writers to target the full long-tail effectively. To show that this isn’t just a pipe dream, he then proceeded to show us this information collected automatically in real-time via a Google Docs spreadsheet, giving up some of our xpath secrets in the process. With this in hand, you can toy with moving the line between automatic and human content to suit the scale of your needs.
Keyphraseology founder Lindsay Wassell stunned me (and I think much of the rest of the crowd) when she gave up the actual structure of her detailed SEO audit documents.
These were the same documents she implemented processes around when SEOmoz was still in the consulting game. If you want to see how some of the most valuable audits in the SEO world were constructed, you need look no further.
Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik gave a great presentation on scaling SEO – including the immortal line ”you want to be a monkey with a suit on”. One of the biggest take-away lessons for me for organisations in the ‘compete’ phase of SEO when they have been spending large amounts of money on this area for some time was that you can create productive internal competition in much the same way as you would with sales teams.
When you reach the point of treating your whole organic channel as a P&L, and don’t rest on your laurels about the traffic you are already getting from search, you need to listen to Seth’s views. You can download his full presentation here.
To continue the theme of great strategic insights, Nine by Blue partner Laura Lippay shared her process for building a complete SEO strategy for big brands.
She began by telling us how a lack of strategic thinking resulted in a major loss of traffic for a site in her remit early in her time at Yahoo! (where she was head of technical marketing before leaving for the SEO consulting world). The slide I’ve picked shows the overview of Laura’s split between data gathering and research and the specific actions you are recommending (emphasis Laura’s).
As any of us who have worked with large clients will know, both the data underpinning your recommendations and the specific nature of your recommendations are crucial to implementation.
SEOmoz senior scientist Ben Hendrickson went a little geeky on us, talking about the developments in information retrieval up to the state of the art in probabilistic topic classification algorithms.
With accessible examples about classifying pages about Lady Gaga and Poker, he demonstrated that it “would be nice if someone were to develop an LDA [Latent Dirichlet Allocation] tool to measure closeness to a specific topic”.
Nicely, as I think the audience were lost at gamma functions, Ben proceeded to roll out his handy little labs tool. Updated since his presentation, the tool computes the cosine similarity of a page to a topic. This is a metric that is better correlated with Google rankings than the best link metric he has previously computed (which is what the slide above shows). Geeky? Yes. Awesome? Definitely.
The actionable take-away is that you may be helped in the rankings by mentions of related words and phrases and hindered by those that muddy the water about your topical relevance. So if you are writing about the Rolling Stones, make sure you mention Keith Richards and avoid talking about gemstones.
Portent Interactive founder Ian Lurie was given the difficult challenge of telling a bunch of advanced SEOs things they didn’t know about blogging. He did a great job, even before the no more secrets panel where he gave up his secret Levenshtein Distance method for fixing broken links. Ingenius.
Rob Ousbey covered manual linkbuilding and getting more tweets about his tip that girls get more links than for the more substantive parts of his presentation. Alongside showing us a linkbuilding email that actually works, he also offered up his tips for getting links your competitors can’t get – nicely meshing with Wil Reynolds on competitive analysis:
Seer Interactive founder Wil Reynolds was typically lively when talking about how to reverse engineer your competitors’ rankings. Having seen the energy he puts into not only analysing, but also monitoring changes to his clients’ competitors’ rankings, I have to feel bad for them.
At one point, he unfurled a print-out of the kind of spreadsheet he enjoys analysing. The slide above shows his formula for comparing exact and phrase match anchor text links to all competitors for an individual keyword ranking. Great stuff and certainly inspiring me to do more competitor monitoring.
Rand was back on the second day to show off 25 sites that earned amazing links but one of the key takeaways from his talk was the increasing awareness and scepticism on social news sites about linkbait – and infographics in particular.
While the sky is not falling, and great content will always be capable of earning links, the detailed discussions taking place on Reddit (in particular) recently show that the average social news site user is growing increasingly familiar with the practice and its manipulation.
My top tips
For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to include my own slides in my top tips above, but I did want to share with you some of my best ideas:
In my head-to-head presentation-off with Rand, I offered up for download a model I built to help understand the business impact of an increase in organic search traffic. It’s still a work in progress, so please don’t hesitate to share any ideas you have for improvement.
In my session on sexy reporting (surely a tautology – us geeks could just go with reporting), I delved deep into my Tufte-inspired notes to share tips for making your charts more readable. In addition to removing “chartjunk”, I demonstrated how avoiding stacked charts can make your point many times clearer. Next time you go to stack bars or lines on top of each other, consider splitting them out into “small multiple” charts instead. I need to go update some templates…
At the end of the second day, we had a session called No More Secrets that was low on PowerPoint and high on tips. I shared a bunch of tools I’ve been using recently. I think the one that most people hadn’t heard of was Run My Process.
This is a crazy tool that allows non-developers to draw a flowchart process and automatically build a simple web app to execute that process. With integrations to common APIs (and the ability to add custom integrations), this has the power to revolutionise your content creation and linkbuilding processes by automating the tedious bits and ensuring everyone works to the defined process.
If you like what you see here, you can now book tickets to the London version of the event, taking place on the 25th & 26th October at the Congress Centre in the West End. I also wrote up a sneak preview of the London event over at SEOmoz.
The Conran Shop: site review
Sep 7th
Homepage
The homepage has a clean, uncluttered look with good presentation of the featured products. I like the fact that users can click to get the price and details of the products shown, and head straight to the product page if they want to:
This seems obvious, but it is something many sites don’t do. Having used lots of valuable homepage space to promote products, it makes sense to lead customers straight to product pages if they are interested.
Navigation
The drop downs on the homepage can be fiddly, since the links are small and close together, while white text on a black background can be a strain on your eyes.
If you click a sub-category from the drop-down menus, it often doesn’t bring up further sub-categories (or should it be sub-sub-categories?) on the next page, just a repetition of the labels from the drop down.
The products from the selected sub-category, in this case tea and coffee are shown, but unlike many e-commerce sites, there are no further filtered navigation options on the left hand side.
This particular category (tea & coffee) brings up 65 products, a mixture of espresso makers, kettles, teapots, mugs and more, but the refinement options, unless you are looking for products from a particular designer or collection, do little to help narrow the search:
The site search works well, returning accurate results and dealing with misspellings. It can actually be a more effective method of narrowing product selection than by browsing the site.
In general, the links are small on the site, and could be made to stand out more. For example, every product on the site search results page above has a blue ‘buy now’ link, but these links could be clearer. This also means that viewing and clicking the links on an iPad is difficult to do without plenty of pinching and zooming.
Product pages
Product pages look good, but they are short on detail; delivery charges aren’t that easy to find, while there are a few irritations.
For example, there is a colour palette on the product page for this chair, which is a good feature let down by the fact that there is only one image available, so clicking on any colour but crimson will produce a ‘no photo available’ message.
While there is a broad range of prices on the site, there are many big ticket items, but the product images and options don’t do as much as they could to showcase designer furniture.
The product images are high quality, and can also be seen in full screen view, but that’s it. When viewing a chair for £5,000, it would be good to see it from different angles. The product pages would benefit from tools such as the 360 view used by Schuh, or the kind of 3D planning tools used by MyDeco.
There are links to add the product to a MyDeco wishlist, but this requires registration for new users, and it can be lengthy process to get from the Conran product page to the room planner on MyDeco.
I found that a number of products were out of stock when I arrived at the product page. While it can be annoying to find that products are unavailable, at least the site gives shoppers the options of an email notification when the product becomes available.
This is a good idea, but the site could also appeal to shoppers who don’t want to wait for an email by suggesting alternatives to the selected item, or else checking offline stock and pointing shoppers to the nearest store.
The pop-ups are slightly annoying too. Shoppers have to first click the basket link to leave an email address before typing it into the box, while they have to click the small cross to close the pop-up, instead of simply clicking elsewhere on the page.
Checkout process
Once products are added to the basket, the basket link at the top right of the page is too small, and it isn’t possible to mouse over to get a summary of contents and charges. Shopping basket links should be easier for users to find.
The site handles the issue of registration smoothly, providing a login option for existing users, while new customers can simply enter an email address and continue on to the checkout.
Later in the process, customers are offered the option of creating an account, which is a good way of capturing customer details. However, the site asks customers to open a pop-up window to see the benefits of registration, but this information would have been better explained in a couple of bullet points next to the tick box.
A contact number is visible throughout the checkout process, which is good practice, as it offers reassurance to customers and a clear channel for getting an answer to any questions about their order.
The process has not been enclosed and the top navigation options are still in place throughout the payment process.
This is now an unusual sight for website redesigns, as the navigational links offer a distraction for customers when retailers would like them to focus on entering address and payment details, and well as offering a number of links which will take them out of the process altogether.
Conclusion
The new Conran Shop website generally does the basics reasonably well; navigation and site search is functional, most information that customers will need is accessible, and the checkout process is smooth enough.
As Matt Curry pointed out in a previous post, most websites have yet to deliver a luxury e-commerce experience, and The Conran Shop website doesn’t really differentiate itself from most other e-commerce sites, and doesn’t necessarily do as much as it could to sell big ticket items.
Matt points out that luxury brands need to do more than simply deliver a standard e-commerce experience, and should seek to delight customers and to carry some of the in store experience online.
International e-commerce: retailers need to improve on delivery
Sep 6th
While the market for cross-border e-commerce may still be relatively small, a report last year found that 7% of Europeans shop online from other countries, it is growing, and can still be a valuable sales channel for retailers.
The report cites the example of ASOS, which gets 28% of its sales from overseas, business which was worth £56m to the retailer last year. In addition, ASOS found that these international customers had a higher average order value.
Retailers are catching on to the potential though. House of Fraser launched an international delivery service two weeks ago, and now international orders account for 2% of total online sales.
In the report, Snow Valley placed orders from 15 countries, including Brazil, China, the US and Australia, as well as seven European countries. These orders were placed on 76 separate UK e-commerce sites. ASOS was used as the control retailer, with one order being placed on ASOS from each country.
How many retailers deliver internationally?
- While 42% of UK retailers didn’t deliver outside of the UK, 43% were offering worldwide delivery. 5.2% offered European delivery only, and 4.8% would only deliver to the UK and Ireland.
Issues holding back international e-commerce:
- Delivery information was a major issue, and retailers need to cater for international customers and anticipate the kind of questions they want to ask. For example, 28% of orders were placed on sites that didn’t make it clear that they delivered to a specific country, even though they did. Under normal circumstances, is it unlikely any international customers would place an order with such a site.
- Delivery charges were another issue. 57% of sites offering international delivery didn’t display the charges on the basket page. Since charges uncovered by the report were varied, the average was £12.77 with one site charging as much as £69.99, this is information that customers need before they can decide on a purchase.
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Delivery timescales varied, with ‘up to ten days’ being the most common prediction. Most websites failed to offer any choice for customers, with only 26% offering an express delivery option.
However, the figure is only this high thanks to the fact that ASOS offers this for the 15 countries covered by report. Take ASOS out of the picture, and just 10% offered a fast delivery option.
What should retailers do?
Most importantly, retailers need to see the potential for international e-commerce and start to offer delivery across borders. As the examples of ASOS and House of Fraser show, this is a relatively easy way to grow sales.
Retailers also need to provide an excellent service for overseas customers, and this starts with giving them accurate information on where they deliver to, and how much it will cost.
ASOS was picked out as the control retailer in the report for a good reason. Its international delivery information is clearly linked to from the homepage, and charges are clear:
The Book Depository is another great example of a UK business that has effectively targeted an international market. The retailer grew its revenue by 20% to £74.2m in the year ending June 30, with 73% of sales generated overseas.
It has a very clear proposition for international visitors on the homepage, declaring that delivery is free worldwide, while you can also see people from around the world making purchases, as they are plotted on a map.
The report is worth checking out in more detail, and contains a number of suggestions for retailer to improve their international offering, with the common theme that retailers need to actively cater for overseas customers and provide clear and accurate delivery information, just as they should to any UK customers.
Craigslist’s growing PR problem
Sep 3rd
The controversy over these ads isn’t new, but it isn’t going away. Despite Craigslist’s attempts to appease lawmakers and law enforcement, public officials continue to lambast Craigslist. Some are even suggesting that laws designed to limit the liability of internet service providers for content posted by third parties be revised. Such revisions could threaten Craigslist’s business model.
Politicians, of course, love to stir the pot, but perhaps much more worryingly for Craigslist, the company seems to be getting less love from the media lately too.
Case in point: Amber Lyon, a reporter at CNN, recently surprised (or ambushed depending on your point of view) Craigslist’s founder, Craig Newmark, as part of a story on the trafficking of women and children. Newmark spoke with her and arguably came off looking a bit aloof. The interview sparked an angry response from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. Newmark himself responded to the interview last week. His defense: my personality makes me an easy target for a reporter looking to craft a story, and everyone knows I’m a good guy. He wrote:
…Amber, CNN, and others are depicting Jim and I as profiteers oblivious to the welfare of women and children. Anyone that’s followed us over all these years knows that’s not at all what we’re about. In reality, we’re both pretty obsessed with trying to make the world a better place, and neither have much interest in possessions or fancy lifestyles. Me, I’ll stick to my causes, like doing right by our veterans, keeping the faith on net neutrality, and working toward better governance…
So are the complaints about Craigslist’s position vis-à-vis adult services ads fair? People on both sides of the debate have their arguments, and I’m not going to jump into the fray. But I would suggest from a PR perspective that when the face of any company is forced to declare “I’m a good guy who is trying to make the world better” and cite his or her good works in response to a matter that calls into question a company’s values, it should serve as a wakeup call.
Craigslist may be low-key, but it has a high-profile brand. And despite the apparent staying power of Craigslist’s popularity with consumers, every brand is vulnerable. Here, regardless of whether one believes Craigslist is right or wrong, Craigslist increasingly finds that a lot of the buzz around its brand deals with an inherently negative and visceral subject: the exploitation of women and children. That’s not good. Clearly, the company’s previous attempts to address concerns over adult services ads haven’t been effective, and the situation has arguably gotten worse. And it will likely get worse unless Craigslist ditches its down-to-earth corporate persona and realizes that it’s in the PR fight of its life.
Eight tips for understanding Baidu SEO
Sep 2nd
In the near future, there’ll be more native
Chinese speakers than there are native English speakers online (check out the
numbers here).
Internet access in China is soaring (for instance, last year 233m Chinese accessed the web using their mobiles alone), the Chinese middle class
is growing all the time, and so is their disposable income.
No longer are emerging markets just the places businesses look towards for outsourcing
and manufacturing, now these countries are the places where you want to be
selling, and as we all know, making the move into foreign markets online is by
far the least risky and expensive way to go about it.
Many businesses are currently looking at how
they can attract customers in China, and let’s also take it as read that any
business looking to step into the Chinese market will appreciate the necessity
of having their website completely localised for the Chinese market. That means
professionally translated content in Simplified Chinese, a website design that
takes into account the aesthetic preferences of Chinese internet users, and a
sales strategy aimed at Chinese buyers.
The next step, then, is to make sure you rank in the Chinese internet and
potential customers can find you. Google’s battles with the Chinese government
have been well publicised, but whether or not you think the search superpower
has a solid chance of gaining supremacy in China, there’s no doubting that
Baidu is the most popular search engine for that market, with 63% of the market
share and gaining.
The reasons put forward for Baidu’s supremacy are many and varied; it may be
due to the engine being optimised for Chinese characters, or perhaps it’s due
to Chinese patriotism, or it could just be as simple as the fact that Baidu
links directly to illegal MP3 downloads (and more than half of all Baidu searches
are for MP3s).
So how does Baidu differ from Google? We know the essentials to winning with
the Google algorithm; getting the right mix of long and short tail keywords,
refining them regularly, link-building, local relevancy, regularly updated,
useful content, etc but how does Baidu operate?
Well, here’s eight simple tips
to get you started…
- Baidu doesn’t seem to have the same PageRank inbound linking algorithm as
Google does, so spending your time by building inbound links with relevant
websites in the Chinese internet would largely seem to be a waste of your time,
for SEO at least (never hurts to spread the word a bit). - You’d be better off investing that time and money into your pay-per-click ad
campaigns, as higher rankings are achieved solely by higher spend – the
relevancy of the content to the search phrase isn’t counted in the way it is
with Google. -
Baidu actively censors its content in line with Chinese government
regulations, so be very careful with what you put on your site – it would be
well worth your time to look into China’s censorship
regime to figure out what you can and can’t say before launching. - With Google, you can host your site anywhere and then set each subdomain’s
location using the Geotargeting tool to specify which region it’s relevant to.
Baidu doesn’t appear to offer the same service, so your best bet is to buy a
Chinese top level domain and host it on a server in China. Luckily domains and
hosting services are relatively inexpensive in-country. -
Baidu still loves metadata. While Google has largely discounted the
relevance of metatags, etc, Baidu still factors these into consideration…and
remember that your metadata should be in Simplified Chinese, not English. -
Keyword research. There are a few different ways to check what keywords are
ranking on Baidu, for instance trends on the Baidu
Index or the live keyword ranking feed,
while Firefox has an extension that
displays Baidu stats (a native Chinese speaker may come in handy for all these
tasks). - Get ranked for your news posts and get more visitors by submitting your content
updates to the Baidu News Protocol. -
Submit your site to
Baidu. This might seem obvious, but if you don’t submit it for the spiders,
you’ll never rank!
Zara launches in the UK, forgets about Chrome
Sep 2nd
This is how it is supposed to look, viewed on Firefox:
I first noticed this problem when I went to write a review of the site around 9am this morning, and three hours later, the errors are still there. At first I thought the whole site was broken, but it seems its just Chrome users who will see this. It appears to be OK in Firefox, though I did encounter a few errors on Safari.
On Chrome, it’s a mess though. The image on the homepage doesn’t show, and there are error messages on every section of the site.
Here’s the shopping basket page, not one likely to reassure customers thinking about making a purchase:
Chrome is a popular enough browser, so companies launching new sites should be checking that it is compatible and there are no major issues for users.
At the moment, any Chrome users are likely to think the site is completely broken and head elsewhere. By failing to account for Chrome, Zara is missing out on custom from up to 10% of web users.
UPDATE: Since writing this post, I’ve checked again, and Zara seems to have fixed whatever issues it was having with the site, probably just to make me look stupid…
The importance of knowing how to use web analytics tools
Sep 2nd
Conversion is not the be all and end all
Fact: not everyone who visits your site will convert, no matter how amazing the experience and how targeted the user journey. Some people just like to research and browse. So obsessing over conversion metrics as the sole indicator of success is in itself a failure.
Social Media is a case in point. Most brands’ social media traffic adversely affects KPIs like average order value, revenue and conversion. Why? Social media is better associated with building relationships and increasing content engagement, less so with direct selling. Of course the channel can convert, just look at Dell, but the point is I’ve seen as much as 95% social media referral traffic contribute de nada to the revenue pot if you simply look at direct sales.
What can you do? Well, it’s not a great leap of faith to assume that social traffic is more likely to use social bookmarking to share content. This is easily monitored via web analytics tools including Google Analytics. However, what is the impact of that shared content on your website? Well, by embedding a neat bit of js code into the bookmarks you can monitor people who visit your website from the content that others shared. Now create them as a custom segment and you can evaluate the impact on KPIs like time-on-site, bounce rate etc.
If social media visitors are increasing viral effect, you can start to build a contribution model. With the increased insight, do you know perceive a greater value to your social media visitors?
Avinash Kaushik lists a few neat social media reporting tools in his Occam’s Razor blog. My favourite is Tynt which measures content after it has left your site.
The value of custom segments and data filters
I’ve just done a piece of analysis for a retailer, digesting their Google Analytics data to provide insight into the impact of site search. The top level stats (22.7% new visits use site search with a conversion rate three times that of those who don’t) don’t give me anything juicy to sink my teeth into. I wouldn’t pay me simply to say visitors who use site search convert better, old news my friend.
However, if I start adding filters to show the top 20 products (defined by total revenue for last 12 months) matched against Google SERPs and then run against the live site search, the light flickers. I can see that 17 of the top 20 don’t even return search results yet on Google exact matches appear in the first 3 pages. Why? A deep dive reveals the problem: issues with the search algorithm and poor data matching.
Taking the core web analytics data, questioning what it tells us, then filtering data and using complimentary analysis has given me insight to take to my client.
The next step is to add engagement metrics from Google Analytics. By adding % search exits, % search refinements and conversion rate by search term, I now build a picture about the impact of using search refinements driven by the merchandising tool.
Relating this back to revenue and conversion sheds light on the relationship between search refinements and conversion; the correlation proved really high, telling me that here is a big opportunity for testing to drive commercial benefit.
(click image for a larger version)
Creating a custom segment for visitors using search refinements also enables the ongoing analysis of this feature to understand trends. I can recommend reading this blog on Occam’s Razor waxing lyrical about using data to drive actions.
In short…
Now i’m not denigrating the importance of conversion optimisation, just saying that web analytics is a much bigger picture.
The commercial benefits of web analytics are dependent on the quality of planning and level of effort spent asking the right questions and then interpreting data and information. The information above only scratches the surface but hopefully it illustrates the point i wanted to make.
Web analytics gives you the what, voice-of-customer data overlays the why. By blending intelligent data analysis with continuous customer feedback, website owners can piece together an often puzzling yet highly fascinating engagement jigsaw.
So what do you think? Do you get insight from your web analytics or do you struggle to know where to start?
Follow-up reading
There’s a nice post by Avinash on heuristic evaluations of website performance in relation to answering the “Why” question.