B2B Online Lead Generation Campaign Performance

One of the main challenges of B2B marketing managers is launching successful online marketing campaigns and generating leads. Often I come across marketing managers who launch online marketing campaigns generating poor results and complain the channel is not that effective. After working with quite a few of B2B campaigns, it’s obvious that the issue is always not with the channel.

I want to speak in particular about 3 factors that play a key role in success or failure of … Continue Reading » How to Launch Successful B2B Online Marketing Campaigns and Generate Leads Part 1

Last year, Google introduced a new policy that requires landing pages which engage in information harvesting to include a privacy policy on the website. Advertisers that don’t comply with this new policy may run the risk of having their websites suspended by AdWords.

There are three requirements that advertisers have to follow under this new policy change:

1. Clear, accessible disclosure before visitors submit personal information

Our existing policy requires you to clearly describe how any personal information you solicit will be used. Soon, we’ll require that your description must also be easily accessible before site visitors submit their details.

2. Option to … Continue Reading » (Not So New) Google Policy Update That Most Advertiser Should Be Aware Of

Looking for a laptop support today, I reached ikea.ca’s page and added 3 of them to the cart.

Surprise, for a $4.99 item the shipping fee is $34.55. Would you buy online from someone who’s charging that much? Hell, no!

$4.99 for the product , $34.99 for shipping? Good by IKEA!

You can do all the remarketing in the world, I am not going to buy this product … Continue Reading » Who Wouldn’t Abandon This Shopping Cart?

If you want to build links naturally (and also have a usable website), you should allow your visitors to easily share/publish links. Sharing can be social or a simple copy link text field. Such functionality is especially important for websites which don’t change the URL when altering data on the page (AJAX based pages).

canpages.ca allows users to zoom into specific areas of the map, but if they want to share the outcome with someone, there’s no way to do it:

Sometimes is not easy to change your checkout process to go from registration required to guest checkout. This article describes how you could forecast how much you’re losing if you don’t offer a guest checkout option. The method is an approximate but can help you with the number$ needed when making the case for the guest checkout to your boss. The concept behind it is to forecast how many people will not proceed further to the next pages from the shopping cart page, … Continue Reading » Guest Checkouts and Opportunity Cost Analysis – Part 3 of 3

A while back, after this Staples business store failed to provide the service they charged me for for more than one month, I decided to buy and install the broken laptop keyboard by myself.

After clicking several AdWords ads (most of them with a poor destination URL) I found this website selling what I needed:

Sunvalley's Product Description Page

The layout itself is pretty neat, to the point, but the availability info … Continue Reading » Handling Out of Stock Items and PPC

So, we know that Google does mistakes when it comes to SEO – you can take a look at their own score card here.

But, they also have some usability issues on their product detail pages on Google Products website. Take a look at the screenshot below. What is  Not Specified supposed to mean? The size, the shape or the color of the product?

This is the second part on the monetary opportunity cost analysis for guest checkouts series (read the first part here).

For the next two parts I will describe a couple of methods that can be used to derive the opportunity loss due to “locked checkouts” – I don’t like to coin terms, but I couldn’t find a suitable replacement for the term “non-guest checkouts”. To cut a long story short, a locked checkout is a checkout that require visitors to login or create accounts … Continue Reading » Guest Checkouts and Opportunity Cost Analysis – Part 2 of 3

This article is about the optimization of, what I consider to be one of the lowest hanging fruits for ecommerce websites, the checkout process. It can also relate to other types of web site, i.e. sites that require customers to pass through an online checkout process to purchase products or services.

Definitions:

- a locked checkout (a term coined by the author) is an checkout process that requires visitors to create an account in order to complete a purchase. Usually they require users to provide a … Continue Reading » Guest Checkouts and Opportunity Cost Analysis – Part 1 of 3

Warning: if you’re going to implement the technique described below, it’s at your own risk!

You can use Google’s own tool, Google Website Optimizer, to implement a nice gray-hat SEO cloaking (not cloaking per se, as described by search engines, but with the same results). And the interesting part is that at the same time you get to test your site to conversion optimization :)

So what does SEO cloaking mean? Simply put, you display different content to search engine bots and to humans, with the purpose of manipulating … Continue Reading » Legitimate (Gray) SEO Cloaking Technique with Google’s Help