Lately, I came across one retailer that displays both call to actions, right next to each other. I have no idea how this is performing in terms of conversion, but for users like me, the tactic works just fine. If I want to buy just one product, I would click on the Buy button otherwise I would click on Add.

Buy Now and Add to Cart Buttons

One way you can improve conversion rate (or the time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, etc) is to better match your visitors’ expectations with the website content.

I’ll take the case of a keyword used in a PPC campaign and we’ll improve the landing page to match the user as closely as possible (in terms of the call to action used to find your site).

Let’s say you are selling perfumes online and you attract visitors using paid advertising. You created a highly targeted adgroup targeting visitors that are very close to buy a CHANEL perfume. Your keywords may look like “buy coco chanel perfume” and the synonyms for buy as it follows, “order coco chanel perfume“; “purchase coco chanel perfume“; “shop coco chanel perfume“.

Step 1: tag landing page URLs

You will need to associate to each keyword an unique URL, and tag (add a parameter to the existing URL) them according. The URLs may look like:

“buy coco chanel perfume” - www.sitesample.com/coco-chanel.php?cta=”buy”

“order coco chanel perfume” - www.sitesample.com/coco-chanel.php?cta=”order”

“purchase coco chanel perfume”- www.sitesample.com/coco-chanel.php?cta=”purchase”

“shop coco chanel perfume”- www.sitesample.com/coco-chanel.php?cta=”shop”

Step 2: create a CSS/text button

For the landing pages tied with the keywords above you should dynamically change the text on the button which starts the checkout process.

For that you will need to use a CSS trick that displays text over a background image (your button). To see a good sample button, go to Google Analytics login page and look in the source code for the “Access Analytics” button. Here are some tutorials on CSS buttons: http://www.oscaralexander.com/tutorials/how-to-make-sexy-buttons-with-css.html

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200705/creating_bulletproof_graphic_link_buttons_with_css/

http://naradesign.net/open_content/reference/button/

A quick way to see if a button is made of text or image is to try select the text with your mouse.

Step 3: dynamically change the text content

Once you finish implementing the hybrid CSS text button, tell your programmers to read the cta parameter (can be any other name convention) when someone comes on your site and then build the landing page dynamically, by replacing the default text on the CSS button with the cta parameter.

Now, one someone comes from your PPC ads using the keyword “purchase coco chanel perfume” the button should display “Purchase Now” and not “Buy Now“, which is much closer to what the visitor had in mind when they typed the query.

Do you want to go a little bit more further ? A/B tests, baby! A/B testing!

A) Display “Purchase Now” against

B) Display “Purchase {Product Name Here} Now”

If you decide to test the tactics above, let us know the results.

In my opinion, one of the most under appreciated tactics used for conversion optimization is URL tagging and landing page personalization (segmentation). Once properly implemented, these tactics can have a dramatic effect on your KPIs. Just think of what you can do if you combine cookie techniques with tagged urls: content segmentation, different prices for new and existing users, promotions to attract new customers, visitors frequency based prices…

Happy Optimization in 2009!

Pitstop Media is a top internet marketing company that provides affordable online marketing services to companies of all sizes, from startups to corporations. Please contact us if you need assistance with any of your projects.

Mainly, there are two paths visitors take to find products on your site: using navigational links or using internal site search. The usage percentage for navigation and search is almost 50/50. So, 10 people may search for “xbox 360″ and 10 people may navigate through specific categories on your site, until they reach the xbox 360 product page.

I prefer the search method and I expect to find what I am looking for on the first search attempt (thanks to Google, lots of us will expect high relevancy on the top results).

Online retailers should make sure the results are relevant to users, otherwise they may loose potential customers. But, If you go on www.futureshop.ca and search for xbox 360 you will get this result page:

futureshop.ca - Site Search Results

The screen shot was taken at 1920×1200 resolution and the horizontal red line is the fold line at 1024×768 ( the most used screen resolution these days).

As you can see, above the fold, there is no sign of the XBOX 360 console it-self. Instead you are given all kinds of xbox accessories, which is not what I a looking for. If I would want to buy an external xbox hdd, I would probably have searched for xbox 360 hdd or xbox 360 hard drive.

Big online retailers can implement the so-called adaptive internal search engine, that will rank documents and list products based on users behavior (clicks). Simply put, when 100 people will search for “xbox 360″ and they click on the 8th result, then the site search engine should give a relative higher priority to that specific page in relationship with the query which generated the search result page.

The above solution can be expensive even for small and medium business, as such engine will cost 100K+ and one of the disadvantages is that they are usually hosted applications.

For small website owners, there is a cheaper alternative: Google Analytics’ site search reports.The easiest way to analyze the data and fix major problems is to download the reports and use Excel to custom sort and filter data (use this trick to download more than 500 rows for report). One should mainly focus on:

1. % Search Exits - the higher the number, the worse

2. % Search Refinements - again, higher is bad

Go to your site and replicate the queries from your reports (top 10 highest percentage for both performance indicators). Check if you get no results or if the results are not relevant. Try to tweak your internal engine with the help of your programmer. Some will be easy to fix, some will be a little challenging, but your programmers will love this.

Pitstop Media is a top company providing internet marketing services. We offer affordable web analytics services to companies of all sizes, from startups to corporations. Please contact us if you need assistance with any of the online marketing services we provide.

In case you don’t have data to evaluate, run a test campaign focusing on your main keywords for a limited budget to determine your pay per click advertising strategy. Don’t forget to add the conversion tracking code to your website.

Click through rate (CTR): The no. of people who clicked on your ad /Total no. times the ad was served.

Conversion rate: The no. of people who clicked on your ad and went on to purchase a product online (it could be different depending upon the what is conversion according to you).

Obtain the industry average CTR and Conversion rate from your account executives of Google/Yahoo. Use that to see how good or bad your account is in comparison and take actions accordingly. Remember the industry averages they provide can act as reference point to evaluate how well your account is performing. But that doesn’t guarantee accuracy. You can use 3rd party data from various vendors too.
Cost per conversion: The amount you spent to acquire a customer. Your cost per conversion should never more than your cost per acquisition (CPA).

Cost per Acquisition (CPA): The amount you are willing to spend to acquire a new customer. The easiest way to calculate CPA is to identify how much profit you are making per conversion and determine from that, how much you are willing to spend to get a new customer. This can get complex depending upon the advertiser as they also consider various factors such as Life time value etc. Also if you are using historical data to forecast sales for the current year, you can use it to determine the CPA.

CPA = Advertising budget/Total no. of conversions

Ex. You sell luxury chocolates online and know from historical data adjusted for variability that your sales will be 500 boxes of chocolates. Let’s say you have allocated $10000 for advertising. Then the amount you can spend to get a sale:

CPA = $10000/500 = $20 per sale

Some advertisers know the advertising budget and the dollar they are willing to spend to get a conversion, but may not know the number of sales they need to breakeven. You can determin that as follows:

Total no. of conversions to breakeven = Advertising budget/CPA

This is just to give you an understanding. The way some of these metrics are determined may vary depending upon your business.

Cost per click (CPC): The amount you are willing to spend per click to drive visitor traffic to your website.

Cost per click can be determined by knowing number of visitors(clicks) required to make a conversion.

No. of clicks req. to make a conversion = Total number of clicks /Total number of conversions

Maximum cost per click = CPA / No. of clicks req. to make a conversion

Ex:You sell luxury chocolates and ran a test advertising campaign (details below). You had 10 sales (conversions) at $15 per conversion. Let’ assume you CPA = $20.

Pay per click advertising

You Cost per conversion is less than your CPA which is good. You would like to determine how much you should be paying per click.

No. of clicks req. to make a conversion = 50 clicks / 10 conversions = 5 clicks per conversion

Maximum cost per click = $20/5 clicks per conversion =$4

Your actual CPC is less than your Maximum CPC which is good. If your Actual CPC is greater than you Maximum CPC, then you better start working. The above information should get you started and help you improve your pay per click campaigns.

The collection (at the bottom of this post) of 109 shopping cart buttons from top etailers revealed the following common elements (green items are to be recommended when designing this section of your pages):

1. The icon you should use is a CART or BAG:

a. 64 out of 109 etailers display the cart symbol - 59%
b. 23 display no symbol at all - 21%
c. 21 display the bag symbol - 19%
d. 1 displayed an arrow icon -1%

2. There are more than 20 different names given to this section( basket, cart, items, my bag, my brown bag, my cart, my shopping bag, mycart, saks bag, shopping bag ,shopping basket, shopping cart, total, view bag, view basket, view cart, view my bag, view shopping bag, your bag, your cart, your shopping cart, your shopping carts) but:

a. 70 out of 109 used the word CART when naming the section- 64%
b. 27 used BAG to describe it
c. 6 of the etailers used BASKET
d. 6 used a different designation or none at all

Notice: the names used to describe the shopping cart seems to be correlated with the the brick and mortar stores. For example, apparel and fashion websites are morelikely to use the word BAG instead of CART. This follows the real life, where you’ll carry a BAG and not a CART inside an AE store.Further research is needed (see you competitors and your store rules and decide which one is the best for you) when you decide on how to name this section on your site.

3. The appearance of this section seems to be pretty much the same for all etailers:

a. 84 out of 109 etailer are displaying the shopping cart/bag icon along with short descriptive text of the section
b. 23 display just a descriptive text without any other graphic symbols
c. 1 (art.com) used just an icon without text
d. 1 (proflowers.com) doesn’t have a shopping cart section at all

The icons:

Pitstop Media is a top company providing internet marketing services. We offer web design services to companies of all sizes, from startups to corporations. Please contact us if you need assistance with any of the online marketing services we provide.

What if someone wants to buy one of your products, comes to your website, searches for the product name and he doesn’t find the product page? How would that look like to your prospect? Like LG:

Searching for the model 42LGX returns “Sorry, no matches were found”.

42LGX - Search Result Page

So, are you manufacturing this product or not? The page exists on LG website, as you can see here:

42LGX - Product Page

What can I say?! This is BAD. Really bad for a manufacturer like LG. And this is not the only issue with the website. It was really difficult to find this product even using the navigational links.

Here’s what you need to do: export a list of your products and start querying your database for those names. Create a simple .txt (.csv or .xml) containing the search term and for each query add a code: -1, if there are no results; 0 - if one result was found; 1 if multiple results are found; Save the file and open it with excel to sort by code column. You’ll get a list of queries without results. Go and fix them.

This is a very simple and effective way to correct possible mistakes with your internal search engine. Of course, misspellings and variations of product names or model names are another story. But, start fixing the basics, then go to advanced techniques.

Pitstop Media is a top internet marketing company that provides affordable online marketing services to companies of all sizes, from startups to corporations. Please contact us if you need assistance with any of your projects.

Old FIDO logo

New FIDO Logo

The new brand looks better. They also lowered the minimum monthly plans, which is even better than re-branding. The website is now much cleaner and usable that the old one.

So, what they did wrong? It is how they handled the new website implementation.

The old page (which by the way is still accessible for public at http://v3.fido.ca/portal/home/homepage.jsp?lang=en) :

Old Home Page of FIDO

The new one:

Rebranded Home Page - Fido.ca

For a quick comparison, here they are, one next to each other:

Side by Side - Old VS New Home Page fido.ca

Now, it looks like they also changed some structure of the website. But what about permanent redirects? It looks like there are not in place. Old pages are now not accessible from old links (how much do we work to build links, isn’t it?).

This page http://www.fido.ca/portal/en/packages/prepaid_airtime.shtml returns one of the worst 404 pages I’ve ever seen:

Fido 404 page

For the above page, Yahoo reports 86 external pages linking to it. Now, those are 86 pages linking to nothing. Because the old pages are not 301 redirecting to new ones. Other wasted links pointing to (count one more for each because of this post) :

http://www.fido.ca/portal/en/packages/prepaid.shtml - 202 lost links

http://www.fido.ca/portal/en/packages/monthly.shtml - 122 lost links

http://www.fido.ca/portal/en/packages/fidouno.shtml - 48 links

Under http://www.fido.ca/portal/ directory there are 375 pages indexed by Yahoo. How many of these pages would receive wasted inbound links?

If I would be working with FIDO I would go check the website logs for 404 errors and I create an usable 404 page in hours. Then I will setup my Google Webmaster Tools account and Yahoo Site Explorer account, analyze where do I get the links from, and have my programmers fix the 301 redirect, as soon as possible. Then, I’ll have my IT stuff trained on basic and advanced SEO.

Pitstop Media is a top company providing internet marketing services. We offer search optimization services (SEO services) to companies of all sizes, from startups to corporations. Please contact us if you need assistance with any of the online marketing services we provide.

If you look at what top etailers are using as text on the action buttons (thanks to ) you will find it obvious that the right call to action to be used on this type of buttons it should be Add to Cart.

Source: Get Elastic-The Ecommerce Blog

But, like any other elements of your website (and especially with call to actions), it will be better if this button can look/display different texts based on your business rules and customers’ expectations. It should persuade them to take different actions, in different places based on your business objectives.

Let’s analyze a little bit more in detail this two call to actions:
The “Add to Cart” button:
- suggests that the buying process that does not starts by clicking on the button
- It is not very imperative
- It creates the subliminal idea of a cart (you don’t use a shopping cart to buy one product)

The “Buy Now”
- It’s very strong and imperative
- It suggests that once you click on it you will start the checkout process
- It suggests somehow an emergency

My suggestion is to display both of them, one at the time, depending on your business objectives:

1. If you wish to increase your average items per order, use the “Add to Cart” button.
2. Analyze your average order value, also. Does the visitor meet your desired value? If so, make him start the checkout process by switching to a Buy Now button.
3. If you have a reliable data about your average order size and for years that number was 1.1 items/order you should use Buy Now and not Add to Cart.

In the next post I will give a great tip for those trying to improve the conversion rates of their websites about dynamic buttons’ text (changing the text button on the fly), so stay tuned.

Pitstop Media is a top internet marketing company that provides affordable online marketing services to companies of all sizes, from startups to corporations. Please contact us if you need assistance with any of your projects.

- First page bid estimate
- Ad Rank
- Cost per click

If you want to get an understanding of what is Quality Score then check Google Adwords Quality Score - part 1 .

First page bid estimate

First page bid (previously known as minimum cost per click) is the minimum amount you need to spend per click to show your ads in the first page of search results for the keyword you advertise. Please note that Google Adwords uses the exact match type of a keyword to determine the keyword quality score.

The keyword quality score is used in calculating first page bid.

First page bid = Keyword Quality Score X Current Advertiser Competition

Keyword Quality Score

Ad quality score and the relevance of the search query to ad & keyword is not considered.
Current Advertiser Competition is the bidding competition among advertisers for the particular keyword.

Ad Rank
Ad rank is used by Google Adwords to determine where your ad should be displayed when a search query matches your keyword.

Ad Rank = Ad Quality Score X Maximum Cost per Click of the Keyword

The Ad Quality Score is slightly different than Keyword Quality Score.

Ad Quality Score

When calculating the quality score for ad, Google Adwords doesn’t consider landing page quality (makes sense as ad quality doesn’t relate to landing page). But it considers relevance of search query to the ad and the keyword that triggered the ad. Apart from this all other factors used to determine the quality score of ad and keyword are the same.

Cost per click
Cost per click is the actual amount Google charges when someone clicks on your ad.

Cost per click = [Ad rank of the competitor who is below you / Your overall Quality Score] + $0.01

Overall Quality Score is a combination of account, campaign, ad group, ad and keyword quality scores. Google AdWords doesn’t charge you more when your ad appears in top positions above search results. But to appear in top positions above search results, your keyword maximum cost per click and quality score should exceed certain threshold.

In my next article I will discuss about quality score algorithm changes made by Google Adwords lately.

Since Google launched the Advanced features we now have some toy to play with. The only thing that can stop you to play with web data, is your imagination and the time you have at your disposal.

One simple and elegant solution to analyze your web data is to look just at keywords with conversions. To do so, first you will need to define a goal (conversion, sign up, request, call, etc) and then create an advanced segment.

To create an advanced segment:

1. Select the profile you want to create the segment

google-analytics-profiles

2. Click advanced segments in the left side navigation bar

advanced-segments-interface

3. Click on Create New Custom Segment on the upper right side

create-new-custom-segment

4. Choose Keyword as the first Dimension (in green) and in the Match Regular Expression put a dot char “.” - without the quotes. This means ALL keywords for Google Analytics. Create the second part for this segment by AND-ing the Goal1Completion as a METRIC (or Goal2, or whatever goal you want to analyze) and put Greater than 0 It should look like this(click to enlarge):

keywords-with-conversions

You can TEST the segment and see a live segmentation of your data, just to make sure the segment is properly setup.

Give this segment a name (we named it Keywords with Conversions) and click on Save Segment.

In almost any reports you can analyze your data, just for this segment by clicking on Advanced Segments:

That’s all folks! I am waiting for other ideas from everybody: what would you like to analyze? I will try to help to create the segment for you.

Pitstop Media is a top company providing internet marketing services. We offer affordable web analytics services to companies of all sizes, from startups to corporations. Please contact us if you need assistance with any of the online marketing services we provide.

You probably wonder what the relation between coffee and internet marketing is. It is about saving money and at the same time start generating more, at no additional expense.

I am talking to small and medium business owners whom, at these times (still some of us refuse to accept we - globally speaking - are in recession) should try to improve their business and be innovative. Market your business online is innovative and, as with most of the marketing tactics, you have to try it.

Very often we hear “Internet Marketing is expensive” or “I can’t afford it at this time” or something similar. Good news for you! Online marketing is not necessarily expensive and, take my advice, nowadays, you HAVE TO AFFORD IT.

“Internet Marketing is expensive” - What if I give you tips you could use to save $$ hundreds right away? Would you give it a try?

You will save money and if you are smart, you will use those savings to test what a website and a proper online marketing campaign can do for your small or medium business.

Imagine how simple and effective this is: you get money saving tips so you can build your website, start a test campaign (advertising) or even search engine optimize your site!

The coffee cost tip:
$1.53 - this is the price of a large coffee cup at Tim Horton’s. Two coffees a day should be enough for anyone .

- daily cost is $3.06
- a month will cost $92
- a year will be $1140 (holly smoke, do I spend that much on coffee?)
- 20 years from now, it will be around $22000

The money saving tip:
BUY YOUR OWN COFFEE MACHINE! The low cost ones are just $20 and the high end will be around $200.
Ground coffee will be around $7 and you can make up to 16 coffees with one package.
- daily cost is around $0.55 (including sugar and coffee filters)
- a month will cost $16.5
- a year will be $198
- 20 years from now, it will be $3960

Virtual Savings - if you stick to the program:
1 year - $942
20 years - $21058

It may sound hard to achieve but as with going to the gym, it is all about getting used with it. To persuade yourself, think of the big picture: $21K savings in 20 years.

Internet Marketing Costs:
To start an online marketing campaign, half the savings you would make in a just one year will be sufficient for most of the small and medium business.

Pitstop Media is a top company providing internet marketing services to companies of all sizes, from startups to corporations. Please contact us if you need assistance with any of the online marketing services we provide (SEO, PPC, Google Analytics and Web Design).