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.

Too many people try too hard to get people to whip out their credit card and purchase online. Unless you are a huge brand name online, the highest conversion you can expect (the amount of sales you get divided by your total number of visits) is about 2%. I hardly see more than a true 2% conversion rate when you ask for a credit card.

Now, when it comes to gathering data (an online lead) you can get as high as 15%. If you are a good sales person, you should be able to close half of your warm leads. If you closed half, your overall conversion would be 7.5%. This is about 4 more sales that you would have if you would have relied only on your website to close the deal down.

Imagine what you would have to do to get your website to close 400% more sales. You would most likely need to do 4x the amount of marketing. What would you rather have?

Are you as sick of seeing the ad below as much as me?

If I see another Google ad my head will explode.

With the reach they currently have, I believe Google will start doing more bad than good for themselves. They will have the same issue that Alta Vista/Yahoo/Excite had in the 90’s. Although banner ads are now have a click through rate of under 1%, when they first came out, you could get a click through rate close to 6%.

Right now, all data shows that text ad’s kick the crap out of graphic ads all day long. The problem is that more than 50% of ad-based websites are displaying Google ad results. If people see the same thing over and over again, they will simply stop clicking on them.

Website owners, please start spreading your wings a bit. There are other ways to make money and more advertisements to make money on. The more we see them, the less often we will click.

Far too many times when we start working with clients on their internet marketing campaign are we asked by the client to send daily/weekly reports and give them our insight about each day. This could be one of the biggest problems we are faced with.

Companies online have become obsessed with data to the point that they stopped looking at longer-term benefits of any given campaign. “What did yesterdays Google campaign yield for me yesterday?” “on Tuesday we got 73 orders, today only 52, should we shut the campaign off?”

The fact is, there are fluctuations online that no one can really point to. I call it the Conversion Chaos Theory. Although there is no evidence of what causes cycles in ecommerce, they are there. Sure, there are the obvious holiday/vacation/weekend cycles that most retailers see, but there is evidence of chaotic cycles that could be attributed to complete randomness.

I would say that although we recommend looking at daily spends to make sure something really crazy is not happening, do not knee jerk your campaigns every day (or week for that matter) as to see the whole picture you really need a longer term sampling size. I typically recommend 3-4 weeks minimum before making huge changes. Always remember, data from failing campaigns will teach you just as much or more than data from winning campaigns. So waiting the extra time even on a failing campaign will surely teach you even more about your online business model.