I work with many clients right now and most are being impacted by the economy in one way or another. Companies are looking for ways to “trim the fat” wherever they can. This certainly holds true for advertising dollars. What I am consistently seeing is people wanting to knee-jerk a decision based off of a couple of days of data. This will destroy your business. I love analytics as much as the next guy but day-by-day data assessment is not going to do anything for you. Before you make a decision to make a change in an SEO, PPC, EMAIL, MEDIA campaign, ask yourself the following questions first:

1. Are my goals being 100% tracked? Meaning, do some of your leads/sales come by way of phone? If they do, you need to either figure out a way to track phone calls or spread the conversions across all of your ad campaigns in proportion to the amount of traffic these campaigns produce.
2. Are you judging your winning and losing campaigns with data significance? If you are only getting 200 visits a day to your site, with an average conversion rate of 1%, you would need to run your campaign for 10 days to get enough data to really understand if it is working or not working. Prematurely judging or reacting to a campaign would be like deciding on whether or not you liked a movie in the first 10 minutes of it starting. Make sure to get a real picture look before making a decision.
3. Once you feel you hit data significance, react swiftly and decisively. Do not prolong the inevitable.
4. Are you exhausting the long tail? Especially for search, long tail keywords (3 word phrases +) will be a positive ROI for your campaign 99% of the time. The problem is, there is not a lot out there. Make sure that your are exhausting budget here first, and if there is any money left over, spend it on the broad keywords.
5. Don’t panic, there is still money out there, there are buyers. I still have to wait to get into my favorite restaurant or by a shirt at my favorite botique. Right now is the most amazing time in any of our generations to win market share from large companies unable to make a move. Best Buy is probably spending more money advertising right now to win all of the market share that Circuit city just left behind. Take advantage. There are always lots of positives in a bad economy!

If you sell something that can potentially be given as a gift, your conversion will start to increase significantly. As the holiday nears, people stop “shopping” and start buying. Some tips to extract every penny out of this holiday:

1. Increase your paid search bids buy as much as 100% (I would watch this closely). So long as your website conversion is climbing, your roi should be fine.
2. Increase your shopping engine spend. Shopping Engines like Nextag, Yahoo, shopping.com, etc. are like Westfield malls, they get their highest traffic volumes during November and December.
3. If you have a product that can make it to their home in time for the 25th., make sure to advertise that all over your site. No call to action is more immediate, and nerve-racking for a visitor with the thought that the present wont arrive.
4. If you have a large item that wont make it in time for the big day, find a small gift, representative of what they are getting so that the loved one can wrap something. A close colleague of mine sells massage chairs that traditionally take 2 months to get. He would send a massage chair pad with every order so the gift-giver had something to wrap up.
5. Don’t automatically shut your campaign off on Christmas day, too many companies do this. Take advantage of post-Christmas shopping. Also, not everyone celebrates Christmas, so those people are still buying.
6. Get your site ready to trigger a “post Christmas” day sale and launch it early morning on the 26th. When new years comes, do the same thing.

Hope these help!!!

I am a frequent builder and user of online carts. The fact is, the more questions you ask, the more likely you are to lose your potential customer before they click the “submit order” button. I have listed items that are surely going to bring down your shopping cart conversion rate and up your abandonment rate:

1. Asking “what Country are you in” (especially those carts that do not offer international shipping)
2. List credit card type (um, simple programming: starts with a 3=Amex 4=Visa 5=Mastercard 6=discover)
3. Having more than 4 steps. Limit them, get them in and out of your cart as quickly as possible!
4. Having a “clear cart” button - why would you want to put this idea in your head
5. Offering too many up-sells - online shoppers are easily distracted (phone ringing, boss asking what they are doing) so don’t confuse them with up-sells until AFTER they submit their previously intended order.
6. Newsletter Options - Don’t freak them out by making them think you are going to spam them, ask this question on the confirmation page
7. Shipping Options - List shipping cost BEFORE the person enters their credit card. Customers want to know the absolute total before they feel comfortable enough to pull out their credit card.
8. Let them know how many steps are left. If on step 3, they don’t know how much longer the process will go, you may lose their attention. Let them know that they are almost done.
9. So long as you have a decent return policy, remind them what the basics are next to each of the submit buttons. Sometimes they just need a little reassurance.
10. Let them know (in big and bold) that your website is as secure as it gets and they have nothing to worry about. I even think going as far as a hacker guarantee is a good move. At the end of the day, your customer is protected by the credit card company, so you wont be holding the bag for much if your site gets hacked.

I could go on and on but I think these 10 are the basics. Always think of your customer as having ADD and paranoid. Solve these two problems and you should have a lower than average shopping card abandonment rate.

I am doing a complete overhaul to Wordpress from Blogger, so my Blog will be down for the next couple of days. I should have everything back to normal by Monday. Sorry for the inconvenience.

65% is an obscene amount of searches to be in control of. Yahoo sinks to 20%. http://www.hitwise.com/datacenter/searchengineanalysis.php