1. Usability – this is by far the most important thing to be thinking about. Amazon and Google recently did tests on their own websites which showed as much as a 20% loss in revenue from a fraction of a second loss in speed. Website users do not like to wait and are growing more and more impatient as bandwidth progresses. In fact, i would step out and say that speed could have one of the biggest impacts on bounce rate, or the rate at which new visitors to your site do not make it past the first page that they came in on. If that first page was slow to load, they are nervous about all other pages they may go to and will likely to decide to find something else to look at.

2. SEO – A websites load time has been a hot topic in the SEO world for at least 5 years now. I believe I am seeing some of the first actual proof of this over the last 6 months. Don’t think the effect is yet profound, but it will be. Put your self in the search engines shoes and the only thing that you want is a good user experience for your searcher so they come back and use your search engine again. Usability, which ties together with website load time, will continue to have a larger impact on SEO than it once did.

How do you speed up your website?

1. Code – make sure your code is clean and is not loading too many external scripts. Everything you have on your site (code, images, java scripts, videos) all play into load time. Make sure you need it before just adding it to your website.

2. Hosting – I have used Godaddy for years, but it is a very poor performing host from a speed standpoint. I would recommend SimpleHelix and Rackspace. You need to get a private server and make sure not to overload it!

You can test your websites speed, versus your competition here – It is a free test and requires no registration

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Step 1: I type in: Santa Barbara Luxury Hotels. I think this has to be an expensive travel keyword, so there is a high probability that people paying for the ranking probably have some good results to feed me.

Step 2: I am presented with a really good ad from Hotels.com that compels me to click:

Step 3: I am presented with my landing page. I expect some really nice hotels (4 seasons, san ysidro ranch perhaps) but this is what I get: (clicking the image will take you to the landing page)

IF you cannot see the results, basically is is littered with best westerns and other mid-level hotels. Now, I am not trying to be snobby here. I don’t mind a best western for travel, and trust me, I appreciate the $100/night rate. But the second I added the word “Luxury” to my search query, and Hotels.com added “5 star” to their ad copy, the results that I should have been given should have been drastically different.

Hotels.com PPC department, you just lost yourself a really good conversion from me.

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Google Instant Issue 1: Long Tail – I go back and forth on the impact it will have on long tail. On one hand, it will get less-sophisticated searchers to start using long tail more…which I think is important. I watched a less-technical colleague of mine perform a search one day and it was a painful process starting at single, at most, double search strings. On the other hand, I am concerned it will make people lazy who were once long-tail gold mines and they will conform to what Google thinks is the long-tail.

It also feels like a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Google force-feeds longtails, they surely wont get as much search history to better search suggestions…which will then make their suggestions less relevant.

Google Instant Issue 2: Sponsored Search – the problem here is a simple one, and I have to think they will fix this but I have not heard it be addressed yet. If you start searching the word “Mortal Combat”, when you get to “Mort..” mortgage ads start to display. These will not doubt hurt the quality score of the mortgage industries campaigns, which would raise their click costs by lowering their CTR. This needs to be addressed by Google.

Google Instant Issue 3: this is more of a preference thing – I sort of feel like my fingers cant keep up with the Google screen moving, this is very distracting and if I was not that good at typing, it would really be an issue.

Google Instant Issue 4: Changing too much too fast – Google is changing things too much in the last year. They need to slow down. My belief is there are too many people making too much money and they might be over-innovating. I believe they should slow down or people are going to start to experiment with other search engines. People like what they know, if Google changes too much, they will lose people who stayed with them simply for comfort reasons.

Google Instant Issue 5: Performance – The site has timed out several times. The milliseconds they save on my searches are swallowed up by the 4 times I have had to refresh my browser. I think it is possible they under estimated the amount of bandwidth they would need.

Aside from that, I actually think it is pretty cool. I like it, I am not sure how a less savvy user will like it…I will be interested in the community feed back as a couple of weeks roll out

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So, I clicked the most logical choice, “Shop Now” as I wanted to see what kind of great deal I was about to get. This is the body of the landing page that I landed on:

Do you see what the major problem here is? No where on this advertisement does it get me to start shopping for my TV. Great, you sold me on the offer in the newsletter, I click on the offer, and you simply list the boring details of the offer, and gave me no link to the TV’s or packages that fall under this offer? Really?

This could have been a HUGE success with a simple “Shop for this Offer Now” Button and then display the packages, with easy links to purchase. Instead, they have made it too diffcult to understand what you are getting and where you are getting it at.

Moral of the story is this. Email newsletters convert at a very low rate. You have too many filters:

Filter 1: Get them through the Spam Filter. If it gets through their spam filter -

Filter 2: Get them to open the damn thing. If they do this….

Filter 3: How do you get them to click on an offer? If you get them to get past step 3, then you are looking good on conversion. Unless you did what Best Buy did above.

Filter 4: If you get them to click on the offer and hit your landing page….THEN YOU BETTER SELL THEM!!! Make it easy for them to locate the offer they obviously liked. Get them to purchase it.  If purchasing is too complicated and requires assistance, then make it easy for them to fill out a lead form, contact button, etc.

Follow those rules and your email marketing newsletter will convert!!

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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!!!

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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.

Spider Test: Daytona Qualifying , Grammy Performers

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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?

Established Websites For Sale

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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.

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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.

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