Posts tagged conversion rates
Parked domains: is Google wasting your money?
Sep 6th
You have probably come across sites such as the one in the image, a defunct domain allowed to lapse by its owner that has now been taken over by a pointless directory that nobody would ever use to real purpose.
It invariably contains a lists of paid links categorised into groups of expensive search terms. You would never buy links on such a site, and you definitely would not pay for clicks from ads on parked domains. Or would you?
Right now, it is my bet that if you are running PPC campaigns of a reasonable size, you are indeed paying significant amounts of money for clicks on these sites. It is also my bet that these clicks are delivering next to nothing in terms of value for you.
I regularly perform landing page tuning and for one major client, the Website Optimiser tests showed significant conversion rate increases. Why then, was the overall conversion rate on the biggest and best performing search campaign falling?
On investigation, the Google search traffic was performing as expected, with increasing conversion rates, but it was the search partner network that was getting worse and spending more.
My top-level impression of search partners was that they are basically other search engines that are powered by Google’s search results. These smaller ‘search engines’ can choose to show Google ads. What I didn’t realise, and what our investigation showed, was that parked domains are included in Google’s search partners.
I also noted that the appearance of parked domain traffic in the campaigns under investigation had increased massively since last year. In one campaign it had increased by 900% in one year!
If you navigate to the site in the image above and see any of the ‘related searches’ categories, you will see that these are all premium search terms i.e. they carry high click prices.
I doubt that any of the advertisers on those sites are aware of their placement. At the time of writing, I doubt that confused.com, Saga, GoCompare, USwitch and MoneySupermarket are aware they are paying for clicks in the ‘Auto Insurance’ category of this domain.
To turn this off in your AdWords account is easy when you know where to look, but the setting is buried in a place that I think is misleading.
I have a few problems with Google’s view of parked domains:
- This is not ‘search’ traffic. If you stumble upon one of these domains like the one above, you are not searching for these terms; the site is simply displaying expensive categories for the purpose of making money.
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Who is clicking and why? This is extremely low quality traffic, despite getting a 34% click through rate,we received no value from this traffic in the campaign under investigation despite getting lots of expensive clicks.
Is this not Google turning a blind eye to a similar type of click fraud to that which occurred widely on early AdSense accounts? Google and the site host are making money from this.
- Turning off parked domains involves going in to a section of AdWords called ‘Exclude Placement’. However, this is not display network traffic, which this setting suggests. The setting seems to have been buried so that most people will not find it and therefore will not turn it off.
When we complained to Google they came back very quickly with a case study highlighting a business case for using parked domains. Google seemed prepared for the question.
Please, analyse the traffic you are getting from parked domains and assess its quality. You may want to turn them off while you investigate. This post shows how to turn off parked domains.
Q&A: Yummy Interactive’s Chris Hennebery on "frictionless e-commerce"
Aug 24th
The entire process of buying online games is too riddled with what Hennebery terms “a tremendous amount of friction, and that’s the way it’s been for 15 years. You need to get your credit card, find a link, enter a number, go to a site with an entirely different interface. We needed a solution with e-commerce built in.”
To solve the problem, GameShild partnered with e-commerce platform Plimus. “We ended up embedding their API into GameShield,” says Hennebery. “When someone downloads or demos, when they hit ‘buy now,’ they’re not taken to another site. ‘Buy now’ is an interaction screen. They’re still in the game. We’re maintaining this experience, the look and the feel, even when they actually hit ‘purchase.’ A five-step process is turned into a one-step process. If they like the game, we want to simplify the buying process.”
“We’ve seen a huge decrease in abandonment and are increasing trials from conversions to purchase. We’ve seen one of our clients base a 19% increase in conversions from trial to purchase. I thought 12 percent would be the median. We’ve also reduced support costs by almost 23%. When they have to get that serial number via e-mail you’d be amazed at how many people don’t do it correctly and have to call in to get it over the phone. We launch this about two months ago, so we don’t have statistically stable numbers but it’s a huge change with how people interact and the conversion rates for those products. This is what we wanted to achieve.”
How difficult was this to implement?
“All this after only a couple weeks of development. Our competitors are still doing it the old way. Digital River, a competitor, has the ability to do this. But once it’s figured out DRM, all R&D just stops. Our competitors in the DRM field only focus on prevention of loss, not optimizing the experience for customers who are paying. When 100% goes into loss prevention, which creates no incremental value for publishers, it’s stagnant thinking. Everything’s pushing server side. Think of it from a policing standpoint. It’s as if you’re 100 percent focused on trying to catch criminals rather than the prevention of criminal activity.
“There are three types of customer: those who always buy, those who will never, ever buy but often steal, and those who will sometimes buy, but only if it’s not too hard.
“I met with BitTorrent and said look, we’re the first DRM company that’s going to partner with you and to have the ability to create upsells. Our system is intelligent enough to know when something’s being virally distributed. We now want our publishers to actually seed torrents before a new product is launched.
“If the game’s good, if it’s fun, if it can stand on its own merits there’s a huge chunk of the pie that will pay for that. There are incremental sales you’d have never received off a torrent site in the past.
“If the consumer wants to buy the product, remove the friction.
About half the publishers get it right away. Others don’t see any value in it, all they want to do is prevent loss. They look at the churn reports from the torrent sites and get ulcers. Loss prevention should be a little bit of it, but it shouldn’t be our interaction with everybody.”
Is choice paralysis damaging your e-commerce sales?
Aug 23rd
Those damned customers; sometimes they are more trouble than they are worth! On one hand they say they like choice, but when you give them too much they stop buying.
Choice paralysis is a well-known problem in retail. Numerous tests in supermarkets have shown that if you offer a customer too many varieties they are less likely to buy than if there are only a few.
Africa Studio, Shutterstock
However, despite choice paralysis being a well-known phenomena, most e-commerce websites seem to ignore it. I come across too many e-commerce sites with:
- Too many products in one category.
- Complex ways of customising products.
- An overwhelming selection of special offers.
- Endless categories and sub-categories of products.
It is hardly surprising then that many of these sites suffer from dismally low conversion rates.
Unfortunately, website owners often perceive this low conversion as a sign that they are not giving users what they want. This leads them to add even more choice, which results in still further paralysis.
The answer actually lies in a very different direction and begins by limiting choice.
Limit the user’s choice
In a now famous supermarket study only 3% of shoppers purchased jam when confronted with 24 varieties, while 30% purchased when given only six. Although the tenfold increase is interesting, what fascinates me are the people not exposed by the raw data.
A good number of those 27% approached the jam section with a particular jam in mind. They knew what they wanted and went to purchase. However, the range of alternatives actually placed doubt in their mind.
Was their normal choice of jam the best option available? Should they try something new? These questions created enough anxiety to actually stop them purchasing.
fresher, Shutterstock
The lesson here is that choice paralysis is not just something suffered by those who arrive undecided. It can actually prevent a committed buyer from placing an order.
Although this is a scary thought the answer is obvious, reduce your range of products.
On one level this seems counter intuitive, but on another it is an obvious response to the problem of choice paralysis.
However, reducing choice is not the only response. There is also a need to clearly differentiate between the options available.
Clearly differentiate between choices
Choice paralysis is not just to do with the number of choices available. In fact it can be acceptable to offer a large number of choices where the differences between those choices is clearly defined.
Unfortunately the choices we offer often have significant overlap.
Computer manufacturers suffer from this problem. When buying a computer, making a decision can be hard when the only difference between models is technical specifications. Most people do not understand the difference between 2GB and 4GB of memory.
Apple does a great job at overcoming this challenging by reducing the choice and differentiating between their products.
For example, if you visit the Apple website you can easily compare different Macs and read a clear description about what makes each model unique:
If you are looking for something light then go for the Macbook Air, if you want something small go for the Mac Mini. Although they do mention technical specifications these are secondary to the simple descriptions.
However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking this need to differentiate only applies to product lines. It also applies to navigation and product categories. Take for example firebox.com. What is the difference between the top level labels ‘geek’ and ‘technology’?
Clearly differentiating choice has to apply to all aspects of your site from product range to site navigation. If you must have overlapping choices then you may wish to consider hiding less popular choices to avoid confusion.
Hide less popular choices
Unfortunately in the real world website owners do not always get to choose what goes on the website. We aren’t in a position to slim down the product range or redesign it entirely so that products are more distinct. In such situations smoke and mirrors can produce the same effect.
Although you may not be able to remove the choices available to users, you can hide less popular ones to give the impression of a clearer choice.
We faced this exact problem when working on the Wiltshire Farm Foods website. They had a huge number of meals organised into an extensive list of categories. What’s more, there was a real need to ensure consistency between the website and the printed brochure, so we had no choice but to keep the categories they had.
This left us with a confusing site structure. For example if somebody wanted to order a ‘beef pie’ did they look under ‘beef’ or ‘pies and pastries’?
Our solution was to hide less popular categories and focus the user on the most used forms of navigation.
For example, we knew more people navigated by ‘beef’ than ‘pies and pastries’ so we hid the latter. However, it was still available for those who wanted to see all pies.
This approach gave the impression of a clearly defined choice without removing the additional options for those who wanted them.
Of course, so far we have focused on users who have a fairly clear idea of what they want to start with.
What about those who are even less sure?
That is where suggestions come in.
Make suggestions
When faced with overwhelming choice often the most effective way of encouraging users to make a decision is to suggest a course of action.
This well known technique is used by the vast majority of e-commerce websites in the form of ‘special offers’ or ‘staff favourites’.
However, although these suggestions go some way to alleviating choice paralysis they do not connect with users on an emotional level.
Just because something is on special offer or has been suggested by the staff, does not mean it is right for the individual user. After all, today’s astute customers know these suggestions are more to benefit the retailer than themselves.
Amazon uses a slightly more convincing approach on its UK homepage with its ‘what other customers are looking at right now’ section. As humans we have a tendency to follow the crowd in new or unfamiliar circumstances and so will look to the choices of others for inspiration.
Although this is more successful than the ‘special offers’ approach, it still does not fully harness how we overcome choice paralysis in the real world.
When faced with overwhelming choice offline we turn to friends and family for their opinion.
In particular we look to those who share similar tastes to our own and whose opinions we trust.
Some ecommerce sites are replicating at least some aspects of this behaviour with sections entitled ‘people like you bought’. This plays off of our inherent group mentality and goes a long way to overcoming choice paralysis.
This thinking ultimately ends in enabling users to see what ‘friends’ are purchasing.
Facebook has already done some experimentation in this area. However, I suspect it will not be long before Amazon implement a social network of sorts on its own website.
Although suggestions are a useful way of easing choice paralysis, sometimes it is possible to avoid asking users to make a choice at all. That is where good defaults come in.
Set good defaults
The best way to avoid choice paralysis is to avoid choice entirely. It is surprising how often we ask users to make decisions where we could easily do so.
We tend to pass the responsibility of choice to users for a two reasons:
- First, we become obsessed with edge cases. Even though we know the majority of users will make one choice, we worry about the minority who want something different. The problem with this mentality is that the user experience of the majority often suffers in order to cater for the whims of the minority.
- Second, we believe that users want choice because that is what they say they want. However, research shows there is a difference between what we say they want and what makes us happiest. Giving the user choice may make them feel temporarily more in control, but ultimately they are more likely to suffer from buyer’s remorse.
So what is the solution? Am I proposing that we ignore the minority for the sake of the majority? Should clothes come in the single most common size on websites? Should computers not come with the option to preinstall lynx instead of Windows? Not at all.
Instead we must default to the most common choice while allowing the option to customise.
Why make people choose between Windows and Lynx when the vast majority is going to choose Windows? Set the default to Windows with the option to edit it if required.
This principle applies not just to the selection of products but also to the forms at checkout. I have seen too many websites that require users to select from a number of previous delivery addresses when you could simply default to the last address used.
Good defaults have the wonderful ability to reduce cognitive load on users while not taking away the choices available to them.
We are not vulcans
The underlying point that I am making in this post is that we are not hyper-logical vulcans. However much we would like to think otherwise, we do not make rational decisions. We do not carefully weigh the options and make a decision, especially when faced with overwhelming choice.
We simply do not have the mental capacity to do that on a conscious level.
Instead we fall back on the subconscious, relying on gut reactions and emotional decision making. This often makes us feel uncertain and out of control. Sometimes this feeling is so powerful we would prefer to make no decision than make the wrong one.
With that in mind we need to make every effort as website owners to avoid overwhelming our users with choice.
But what about you? What have you done to overcome choice paralysis? I would love to hear your advice in the comments below…
Why you should join up online and offline marketing: a #JUMPchallenge post
Aug 10th
E-commerce has come a long way, but it’s not longer good enough just to have a web presence. The online shopping experience demanded by today’s consumer has reached new levels, with the expectation that the online and offline worlds can be and should be ‘joined at the hip’.
Hassle-free cross-channel shopping is the order of the day, and also a prerequisite for any retailer that wants to attract and retain a loyal customer base.
Interestingly, this joined up approach to commerce is good for retailers too, because targeted and highly personalised marketing can help to increase conversion rates and increase average order value leading to higher revenues. Dynamic merchandising can also help to reduce operating expenses.
Although behavioural targeting tools and personalisation engines have come a long way since the days of IP recognition, a recent survey by ChoiceStream revealed that 59% of consumers still think that they receive poor product recommendations and that many retailers are not able to identify critical ‘indicators of interest’ for their customers.
It should come as no surprise then that the use of sophisticated online personalisation solutions is going to become an increasingly important component of ‘Commerce Anywhere’, enabling best-in-class e-retailers to take a more cohesive approach to building stronger customer relationships and maximise revenues.
This will be particularly important as mobile commerce comes to the fore. Many mobile users claim they would use their mobile devices for more purchases if the online shopping process wasn’t so cumbersome, products were easier to find, and their devices supported secure credit card transactions. To overcome these barriers, retailers are under pressure to create mobile-specific websites and mobile applications for the huge range of mobile phones that are now available.
The key for retailers is to remember that mobile commerce is not just another commerce channel; it can strengthen the link between existing channels such as physical and online stores.
Customers can start shopping using their mobile devices and finish the process online, via a call centre, in the brick-and-mortar store, or even on the mobile device itself.
Customers are not just using their phones to purchase; they are looking for information across the entire buying cycle, including searching for products, locating stores, checking order status or product availability, getting product overviews and photos, reading customer reviews and product specifications, and arranging for in-store pick-up.
Mobile devices enable customers to get information and resolve problems whenever and wherever they want. To meet these needs and drive mobile commerce initiatives, organizations need to be able to have two way communication with customers across all channels.
Integrated marketing and highly personalised communications really is the only way forward for ‘Commerce Anywhere.’
Behavioural advertising can be a win-win for consumers and advertisers
Jul 30th
According to the Office of Fair Trading, revenue from online behavioral advertising is currently between £64m and £95m, and it looks to rise significantly in the future. However, as consumer information is collected through ‘cookie’ files, it is a topic of much debate and regulatory conversation.
I would like to take a minute to break it down a little, simplify it, and highlight the benefits to all:
Marketers benefit from knowing the buying propensity of each consumer and being able to retarget based on:
• Pages visited.
• Time spent on site.
• Recent visits.
• Frequency of visits.
• Products purchased/preference.
Through segmenting interest into groups based on information gathered from activity and search data over a specific time frame (recent = 30-45 days), behavioural targeting offers a great way of qualifying interest and ensuring relevant ad placement, and some say it can increase conversion rates by up to 500%.
If a consumer is interested in cars , then you will be more inclined to click on an advert that offers you something about cars than on one promising you discounted tickets for the theatre. Surely the consumer would want to see this?
Behavioral targeting can deliver as many impressions as possible directly to the advertisers target audience, thereby reducing campaign wastage. It can also help build brand awareness and allow more relevant ‘one to one’ messaging and engagement
For the publisher, behavioural advertising allows them to offer an enhanced offering that can provide their advertisers with far greater ROI, while the consumer benefits since the advertising is more relevant to their interests and need with advertising served via anonymous cookie-based and not personal data.
Key to sector growth
Recently, Jim Sterne wrote a great article about personalisation v privacy which shows how useful targeted advertising can be to consumers. The key to future success of behavioural advertising really starts with the consumer. Marketers and advertisers need to ensure;
- The consumer feels comfortable and is offered an opt-out. Advertisers need to ensure consumers are educated on all aspects of cookie tracking and privacy settings and that all advertisers follow good practice guidelines.
- The consumer also needs to see the benefit of relevant advertising based on their interests and needs, and that advertising is purely served via anonymous cookie-based, rather than personal, data.
Given the media hype and threat of regulation, advertisers are now beginning to engage more with consumers. The reality is that if advertising didn’t exist, many websites would not exist. Advertisers ask: is that good for the consumer?
Many advertisers are testing new systems that enable consumers to opt out of targeting advertising. For example -The New York Times reported that Power I is designed to make targeted advertising more transparent and allows consumers to see more information about the ad they have been served. It tells the consumer why they have being targeted and the data used. It then gives consumers an option to opt out of future ads(note – from that advertiser only).
Don’t believe all the media hype, if privacy concerns are addressed correctly and the consumer can see the benefit of relevant advertising then this market is set to soar.
Half of site searches are unsuccessful: report
Jul 28th
For customers who prefer not to navigate and browse through a site, perhaps because they have a clear idea of what they are looking for, effective site search is vital.
Indeed, some stats have shown that conversion rates through site search can be up to 50% higher than the average: a Screen Pages survey of 39 e-commerce sites found that use of the search box results in an average conversion ratio of 2.4%, against an average of 1.7%.
Entering a product name or code into the search box indicates an intent to purchase, so an effective site search function which returns accurate and usable results can pay dividends.
There is also the added bonus of the data that is provided by user searches. This can provide a valuable insight into the minds of consumers which can inform improvements to site search, as well as other area of marketing, paid search strategies for one.
Site search budgets
The report has some excellent insights into companies’ attitudes to site search and the resources which are allocated in this area.
More than a third of companies (37%) use site search technology which is free, and this number increases to 56% for companies with a turnover of less than £10 million. A third of companies (33%) say the cost of site search is included within other software fees.
Many seem to think site search technology is worth the investment, as those using specialist site search vendors are most likely to be satisfied. A quarter of these companies say they are very satisfied (25%) and a further 36% say they are “quite satisfied”.
Site search success rates
Users have a low tolerance of poor site search performance, and if they cannot find what they are looking for, they are likely to abandon the site and look elsewhere.
On average just 50% of site searches were successful, and 40% of respondents were not even aware of the success rates. There is room for improvement here, as well as in the method of measurement.
Verbatim results show that many firms are simply not measuring the impact of site search. While some use analytics software to track conversions from site search, others are simply asking for customer feedback through contact forms, and many are not looking into this at all.
Use of site search data
According to respondents, the most useful types of insight they get from site search are finding popular search keywords and product trends, the most frequently cited insight.
The data from customer searches is also used to improve the navigation and general usability of the site, while others feed this into future SEO and PPC campaigns.
Despite the wealth of actionable data that site search can generate, only 7% of companies are efficiently learning from site search and distributing these insights across the business. 46% are “partially” doing this, but 47% are not learning from site search at all.
Agency respondents have a slightly different take on this, with 31% saying their clients are not using site search data, but just 8% say their clients are doing this well.
Q&A: Andy Harding on the new Ryman website
Jul 20th
Why did you decide to redesign the website?
Did you see the old website?! The previous website was ten years old and had quite a few flaws. Product information was inadequate, the layout and navigation was weak. It was an old-school website.
Why wait so long to redesign?
There are a number of reasons, the complexity of the project being a bug issue. For one, we had to rewrite the product catalogue from the ground up, which was a lot of work.
What are the major changes you have made? How did you identify the areas for improvement?
Our biggest changes are in bulk pricing, search and merchandising, a new product catalogue, layout, and merchandise categories
The requirements were based on three sources; experience and knowledge of best practice, feedback from our customers, and studying our competitors’ websites and what they are currently doing online.
How have customers responded so far?
Extremely positively. We have feedback on the website, a research panel and our analytics and on all fronts we are seeing positive results.
Our analytics is showing increases across the board, and conversion rates are up. It also benefits us when it comes to PPC. Previously our conversion rates were relatively low so we were not as competitive with PPC. Now we can use it to drive more traffic to the site and convert more so it becomes a virtuous circle.
Is the site designed and maintained in-house?
The website was externally built by e-inbusiness and designed by Essence, and it is third party managed and maintained. We ran a beta for two and a half months, and have been testing it thoroughly.
What percentage of Ryman’s sales are currently online?
It isn’t a lot at the moment but we believe that it could and should be as much as 20%. We have an ambitious plan and will be implementing an aggressive growth strategy to increase our online sales.
Are there any challenges that are unique to selling stationary online?
We have a very large and varied product catalogue, which is a challenge from a merchandising and fulfillment perspective but no more than Amazon or John Lewis. Our biggest challenge is selling to both business and consumers and designing a proposition and interface that fits the needs of both types of customer.
Business customers are generally are happy to buy online in bulk, and we get plenty of business from corporate customers.
For other consumers, there is a price point sensitivity, since customers need to spend enough to justify the delivery charge, though we have had people just ordering a single pen at times…
How is your e-commerce team structured?
The team of 20 people is structured around the customer value chain; marketing, conversion, operations and retention. We are heavily weighted on merchandising,product set up and operations at the moment but we plan more of a focus on retention in future.
Do you have any plans around mobile? Do you see this as an important channel for Ryman in future?
Not in the short term, we are focused on getting the website up to a level that we are happy with and then we will look at it. However, we see it as a retention solution in the future.
What developments are planned for the site over the next 12 months?
Allowing account customers to purchase online is the key development in the short term. After that it will be about fully streamlining our multichannel offering.
Whereabouts you are at as a multichannel retailer, and are you planning a more joined-up approach, with features such as reserve and collect?
We are pretty good but there is more to come. Part of our strategy is to use our multiple channels and retail outlets to leverage over our competitors. We will be introducing click and collect options, allowing customers to buy online and collect items in store.
One thing we have been doing for a while is to use the website to extend the range of our stores. We have 20,000+ lines on the website, while stores are restricted to what they can fit into 2,000 sq feet of retail space.
There is a customer ordering function in store, which is promoted in various parts of the store, especially when it comes to our furniture range. We have lecterns in store which allow customers to browse through catalogues and order stock which isn’t in store. This has been going for two years and has been hugely successful.
When we develop our collection and reserve in store service, then this will be a big USP for us to leverage.
What are the challenges in implementing such multichannel functions?
Stock management is the biggest issue, but our stores are very consumer focused, and the business as a whole has bought in to the benefits of multichannel retail, so we need to make sure we are able to check stock levels accurate and concurrently between stores and the website.
Q&A: eBay on seller updates and mobile commerce
Jul 15th
Why make changes?
With business sellers in the UK, we have changed the way we package and announce the changes we make to the site.
In the past we had the situation where we used to announce changes and new policies and implement them whenever they were ready. This perhaps led to a kind of change fatigue amongst sellers.
In 2009, we came up with a new approach and we now introduce changes in one package and provide some advance notice. We had two of these in 2009, and this will be the third this year. Sellers are given 60 days’ notice to give them time to adapt to the changes.
The changes are all designed to make selling on eBay more efficient for our big sellers, and increase sales for them. If sellers do well on eBay, they can grow very quickly thanks to the 18m UK users we have, and this can bring its own challenges. For instance, making changes to multiple listings can be very time-consuming.
We have introduced listings analytics, which will allow sellers to view data on their listings to see how well they rank, how they perform in terms of page views, click through, and sales.
Sellers can also benchmark their items against the top five listings for a give product search and use this information to improve their future performance. We also provide best practice tips for sellers to increase their conversion rates.
Have any analytics tools been available to sellers before?
Some data has been available before for sellers, and they have a seller dashboard, but not in this way, and not as much detail. This is a development that medium to large eBay sellers should benefit from.
How many business sellers do you have on eBay?
There are 140,000 registers businesses on eBay this year, and we push top rated sellers up the rankings as they outperform other sellers and provide an excellent customer experience, returns policies etc.
We are gradually moving away from auctions to fixed price listings. Buyers are now more impatient and want to get items straight away. Over 50% of our listings are now on a buy now basis.
Mobile has been a successful sales channel for eBay worldwide, is this the case in the UK?
Through the various buying apps and mobile sites, we had a total of £64m sales in the UK last year, and mobile is the fastest growth area for us.
The UK is leading the way in terms of mobile commerce adoption, and are responsible for 65% of the app’s sales across Europe. On average, UK consumers make a purchase from the app every 12 seconds.
We’ve just introduced a new iPhone app for sellers, which allows them to list items quickly and should appeal to the more casual seller. BY using the barcode technology (from RedLaser) sellers can point their phone’s camera at a barcode and list products very quickly.
People are shifting their habits and want to communicate here and now on Twitter and Facebook from their mobiles. There is no reason why these same habits can’t apply to mobile commerce.
M-commerce is definitely going to be massive, as more people adopt these shopping habits. For instance, when I’ve been shopping offline I’ve used the eBay app to check prices, find them cheaper than in store and save some money.
We have nearly very item on the site that people will want to buy offline, so this kind of offline research suits us well.
We will be providing apps for other mobile platforms as well, not just iPhones. The number of smartphones and mobile shoppers is expected to grow and grow and we want to establish ourselves at the heart of this.
Mobile is always going to be a percentage of total sales, but this will grow and grow over the next few years.
What further developments are planned for eBay UK over the next six months?
We will be testing a shopping cart function soon which we hope will enable shoppers to add items to the cart from multiple sellers and checkout at once, providing a better customer experience.
This is something that sellers have been keen on, as they think they’ll sell more this way. We’ll be testing this on around 1% of buyers on the site. There are a few issues to get around, so we’ll see how it works in practice.
We’re also planning a big push for the Christmas market this year. There will be campaigns to show eBay as a great shopping destination.
We have more developments, such as the fashion outlet where brands sell reduced items, which we didn’t have this time last year. This is a very popular market for gifts at Christmas time, and we hope this part of the site will attract more people to the site.
We also want to send the message to sellers that they need to be planning now, getting their stock in, and thinking about delivery options that will be attractive to Christmas shoppers, especially express delivery.
People used to stop buying online at the start of December but now the cut off point is getting much closer to the 25th. Sellers using express shipping options will be able to capitalise from these late shoppers.
Six reasons you shouldn’t invest in ROI
Jul 12th
Certainly social media should have a qualitative value, but it isn’t necessarily to be found in ROI.
Instead, it may ultimately be more useful for campaign managers to focus on accountability.
There are several reasons why a shift in focus is needed:
1: Area of investment.
Marketers don’t invest directly in objects. Instead, marketing is directed at people, at individuals with shifting priorities and allegiances. Market trends can be anticipated, and processes put in place to help manage them, but a successful marketing department shouldn’t be following trends and sticking to set in stone processes.
Truly successful strategies are always flexible, and flexibility will always be stymied by an unrelenting need to meet ROI targets.
2: Tools don’t succeed, people do.
In general, marketers are supposed to show ROI in two major areas. Firstly, when investing in tools, and secondly when investing in advertising space, but do either of these provide true ROI?
Tools in particular provide the promise of quicker, easier management and measurement, and therefore increased output, but neither of these implicitly provides better marketing.
There will always be ads for software that will “run your Twitter on autopilot” or “massively increase conversion rates”, but frankly it will only do so if you’re putting the right fuel in it to start with. Pushing a badly thought out campaign through maximisation tools will only spread negative sentiment more quickly.
Can anyone reading this honestly claim that the tools and software they’re using has massively increased their conversion rates by itself? (And if by some miracle it has, would you admit to it?)
In other words the tool’s effectiveness is entirely down to the marketer. Think about the last paid for tool you purchased, do you honestly have a way to tell if it’s generating money for you?
Tools are enablers, they are not managers. True value lies with the team that utilise the tools and software correctly.
3: People change faster than ads.
So, how about advertising? Surely there’s a straightforward way to measure ROI there?
Certainly. If you pay $15 for Facebook ads and get 60,000 leads then it’s working, but again, is the advert the source of the value?
No. Instead the true value is generated by the team that decided how and when to deploy the campaign and the strategy, the content and the ideas they provided.
Although you can target and hone services like PPC or Facebook ads to within an inch of their lives to show ROI, it’s still a constant juggling act. If your carefully constructed formula for success should change for some reason -and it will, remember we’re dealing with real people in the real world here – then suddenly your campaign’s a failure.
4: Too much data spoils the campaign.
By overly relying on statistics and data we’re ultimately driving our campaigns towards mediocrity. Yes there’s a risk of failure, but in order to truly excel it’s important to occasionally put aside previous data and try new techniques.
Just because something worked before doesn’t mean it will forever, and it certainly won’t provide you with a new breakthrough strategy for new markets.
5: Different measurement for different departments.
Ultimately it’s not unreasonable for managers to want some kind of ROI. Your finance department needs to know it isn’t just throwing money away, but there may be a need for an organisational shift in perspective and a redefining of what we think of as real value.
Marketing departments are fundamentally different from finance for example, or R&D.
MD’s and CEO’s are charged with allocating budgets, providing extra input in specific areas in order to ultimately increase a company’s total value. But when it comes to marketing there shouldn’t always be a solid, inflexible budget, or absolute numerical accountability.
Instead, marketers should rely on persuasive arguments and the ability to predict trends in order to justify budgets. If a business owner realises this and measures his marketer’s performance accordingly then it opens up a world of flexible, workable experiments and new groundbreaking campaigns.
6: Track long term results.
Every strategic tactic doesn’t need to provide instant ROI. Instead, marketing needs to be measured against ultimate business objectives.
All departments including marketing should provide profit, but if you want a successful marketing strategy, then the realisation that it may not always provide great ROI is an important one.
Instead of instant, qualitative ROI, think about how your marketing department provides your business with true, long term value and measure accordingly.
Increase search marketing ROI with retargeting
Jun 18th
Getting started with retargeting
The first thing you should do if you are considering setting up a retargeting campaign is to make sure the cookie pool is starting to build up. Since Google won’t activate any retargeting lists before it has at least 500 unique cookies this might take some time if you’re working in a niche industry. Also keep in mind the typical sales cycle and future use of the cookie pool when setting the cookie length.
The simplest way of starting a retargeting campaign is to reach out to everyone that has visited a specific landing page or whole site. While this will likely improve conversion rates (considering that typically around 95% of visitors won’t convert on the first visit), it is still wasting budget on existing customers and restricting the possibilities of tailored messaging.
Audience lists in Adwords works similarly to keywords and can be used as negative matches and part of Boolean expressions which gives them enormous power to hone in on the desired audience.
Fine tuning the audience
A next logical step to improve the basic retargeting campaign is thus to exclude any visitors who have already converted by using an audience list of converting visitors as a negative match. This also gives the flexibility to target them with a possibly more enticing offer to win them over. This can then be further refined by combination lists to target people within a certain timeframe after a visit, or where they dropped off in the buying cycle etc.
In recent tests for B2B clients, we’ve recorded a vastly improved cost-per-lead due to the improvement of conversion rate that are up to triple that of search and is already contributing to an additional 20% leads.
Obviously retargeting cannot work on its own, i.e. in order to create a retargeting campaign there must be visitors to retarget in the first place. Worth noting is that the Adwords remarketing tag will work for any type of traffic, so in contrast to the regular Google conversion tag, it will drop cookies for visitors from other sources such as direct traffic, email or display etc.
Don’t be creepy
When discussing the topic of retargeting, it’s virtually impossible to not feel obliged to also highlight the privacy issue. As noted earlier Google requires at least 500 unique cookies per list before it can be activated for retargeting purposes. The main reason for this is to avoid the risk of overly clever online marketers to triangulate data to target individual people.
Google also requires the inclusion of retargeting information in the sites privacy policy and a link for users to opt-out from the functionality across the Google Content Network.
A further control that we as markets have to avoid the creep factor, is the frequency cap. While Google typically advices to start off with an uncapped retargeting campaign, it’s advisable to revisit this as the campaign progresses over time.
In addition to improving campaign ROI, retargeting can of course also be used very effectively for branding purposes, but that’s another post.