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Coined in 2005 by the online arm of the National Retail Federation, Shop.org, Cyber Monday is now a household name. The Monday after Thanksgiving is the unofficial kickoff of the online shopping season (though trends http://pulse.chasepaymentech.com./ show shoppers have been spending for the last 3 weeks), and is known for its deals that rival Black Friday’s in-store doorcrashers.

But does Cyber Monday live up to its hyper? What’s the deal with Cyber Monday? We’ve collected over X stats about 2011’s most anticipated online shopping day.

Consumer Behavior

Cyber Monday turnout

40% of consumers are going to shop on Black Friday

39% of consumers plan to shop on Cyber Monday, 37% more than last year

92% plan to shop on Cyber Monday because it offers the most one-day deals and free shipping offers

20% choose Cyber Monday in order to spend time with friends and family on Black Friday

6% consider Cyber Monday shopping a “family tradition”

5% plan to shop from the office, considering it “a chance to take a break from work”

4% will shop from a mobile device

Source: PriceGrabber

Sales are projected by ComScore to hit a record $1.2 Billion.

Top reasons US adults will shop online for holiday gifts

Get the best prices and deals (64%)

Have the convenience of shopping from home (57%)

Avoid crowds (47%)

Research and find the best gifts (36%)

Access better inventory & selection (32%)

Save money on gas (16%)

Source: Ebates

Holiday shoppers believe online shopping beats in-store, with:

Better product selection (80%)

Better deals and prices (73%)

Better customer service (53%)

Source: Ebates

Some dread in-store holiday shopping so much, they find themselves releasing their angst with some pretty bad behavior, such as:

Cutting in line (6%)

Fighting over a parking space (6%)

Parking in a handicapped spot (4%)

Taking an item from someone else’s shopping cart (3%)

Physically or verbally fighting with someone for an item in a
store (3%)

Other rotten behavior (4%)

Source: Ebates

Price trumps brand this year. Specific store names are not as important as pricing and promotions. The following reflects what percentage of holiday shoppers rated decision-making factors as at least “somewhat important:”

Price (99%)

Free shipping (96%)

Coupons or other special offers (92%)

Brand name (86%)

Store name (66%)

Source: Ebates

How does the economy impact holiday shopping plans this year?

87% of shoppers are planning to spend the same or less versus 2010

48% plan to use online coupons or coupon codes

Holiday shopping is turning into an all-year activity to find the best
deals, with 49% of US bargain hunting all year

Only 18% plan to wait for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales

Source: Ipsos Research and DaliyDeals.com / Offers.com

The importance of comparison shopping:

52% of online shoppers will spend more than one hour researching the best price for each holiday purchase

6% will spend over 6 hours on each purchase

47% would shop online if deals were better than in stores

27% follow online specials and daily deals

Source: Ipsos Research and DaliyDeals.com / Offers.com

When will Cyber Monday shopping hit its peak?

33% will be early birds and shop between 5am and 9am

36% of men will shop early, 31% of women

29% of consumers will shop between 10 and noon

18% will shop between noon and 7pm

Source: PriceGrabber

Cyber Monday in Canada

Though Black Friday is really an American thing (Canadians celebrate their turkey day in October — another reason why geographic segmentation for holiday emails is a good idea), awareness about Cyber Monday is growing north of the border. According to PayPal Canada, 52% of Canadians are aware of Cyber Monday, an increase of 24% over last year. This is good news for US e-tailers, as research shows average order values tend to be higher for Canadian orders (perhaps because of duties, taxes and shipping charges, smaller ticket items may not justify additional expense). FiftyOne reports 2010’s AOV for Canadian baskets was US $186.

Aside from Cyber Monday madness, 35% of Canadians aged 18-34 plan to do some or all of their shopping online. A major motivator is saving time. The average Canadian believes online shopping with shave an 8 hour gift hunt down to 4.3. Considering the average Canadian values his or her time at $32.10 ($9 more than the average hourly wage), that’s a savings of ~$100.

Source: Ipsos Reid / PayPal Canada

Does social media matter?

44% of consumers plan to use social media sites for holiday shopping

57% will use social sites to find discounts

51% will read reviews

49% will use social sources to find gift ideas

Source: Deloitte LP

Retailer Behavior

92% of online retailers are offering deals over Thanksgiving weekend, 80% linked to Cyber Monday

45% offer coupon / percent-off deals

38% will offer limited-time promotions

30% will promote free standard shippings with conditions

15% will include a free gift with purchase

Source: Shop.org

Tips for post-Cyber Monday

1. Plan for Green Monday. The Monday after Cyber Monday has historically been the second highest sales day of the year, some years it even edged out Cyber Monday. http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/online-holiday-spend-nears-22b-15341/comscore-holiday-spend-10-heaviest-days-dec-2010jpg/ “Green Monday” is definitely an industry insider term, so don’t confuse customers with Green Monday deals, but think of other ways to capitalize on the consumer trend.
2. Review your site search data to sniff out what products are in demand, and consider merchandising home pages with these products more often.
3. Have a plan for OOS (out of stock) products. Whether that’s merchandising the page with product suggestions, pausing PPC ads or cleaning your shopping engine feed.

Here’s wishing you a record holiday season!

Link building is critical to SEO, but tougher for commercial sites than for blogs and other content sites. Not only is it difficult to attract links directly to product pages, product pages can disappear when products sell out – along with their links. So ecommerce SEOs need to get creative.

Though social link building is hot, hot, hot, traditional forms have not lost their importance. This post looks at (trust me) ten ways you can find valuable backlinks to help your ecommerce site’s search rankings.

Low Hanging Link Fruit

Ounce of prevention

Before you look to build new links, why not protect the ones you have? How does your site handle product pages for items you no longer carry? It’s a bad user experience to keep them in the catalog, but dropping them means spoiling some SEO. Make sure you have a plan to either keep them (and updating the page to the new product version, merchandise with alternative product suggestions), or 301-redirect to somewhere on your site, be it your home page or a category page or the new version of the product.

Repeat business

Another trick is to reach out to sites that already link to you and look for new opportunities. Was it a blogger that loved your product? Was it a news item? It’s easier to get “repeat business” than approach brand new sites, so check your backlink results for opps to reach out again.

When evogear.com changed its domain to just evo.com, the team reached out to me to update links, and I ended up blogging about their brilliant idea here on Get Elastic, which earned them another link.

There are a number of backlink checking tools out there, both free and paid. The paid tools are worth it if you want to do serious link analysis (e.g. SEOmoz’ Open Site Explorer and Link Research Tools) will show you segmented links like social, news and blogs, and domain authority scores to help you hone in on the most valuable targets first. If you want a freebie, BackLinkWatch is decent.

Social circle

Not only can you create business profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others and link back to your home page, most social networks allow you to place links to other websites from your personal profiles as well. Encourage your employees to create LinkedIn profiles and add our site, even if they move on from your company these links can stay in their profiles.

But social profiles are typically low-value links because they are easy to set up. Help build up their clout by linking back to them from your site. Not just your business profiles, but also personal ones. Do you have a page with your employees listed?

Howdy partner

Partners and suppliers are great sources for links, but so are your technology vendors. Why not participate in a case study (your vendor will love you), and negotiate a direct link to your site as part of the deal? Bonus points if you can get a brief description of your site with semantically relevant keywords, for example “online textbook marketplace UniXchange…”

Blog Baiting

Blogs are great to target because they are so plentiful, tend to be topical, have regular, subscribed readers and often list the blogger’s name and email address for easy contact.

There are a few ways to get on bloggers’ radars. Here are just a few:

PR pitch

Blogger outreach is very much like traditional PR — blogs are online media, after all. Remember, to get any traction you must first have something remarkable to pitch.

What makes a remarkable story? Check out what these retailers did:

Best Buy Remix

Best Buy’s Remix program offers developers a crack at building their own shopping apps with Best Buy’s API. Major tech blogs like Mashable licked this story up.

Moosejaw Mountaineering X-Ray App

The jaw-dropping moosejaw app that reveals what its catalog models are sporting underneath their gear was perfect fodder for the Huffington Post, Mashable and more.

Sears’ People’s Pick

Doing something innovative with social media will also get you buzz. Sears’ People’s Pick crowdsources its Black Friday deals.

Here’s a sampling of the sites that found this story blogworthy.

But don’t just send bloggers copies of your press releases, and please don’t start off the email with “I love your blog and really enjoyed reading {insert last post here}.” Rather, demonstrate that you understand the audience and the type of content the blogger usually writes about by explaining (briefly) how your story will delight the blog’s readers.

You can also pitch your executives as experts for interviews, for example to provide “predictions” or other business stories to various media (not just blogs).

Bonus tip: Infographics are also so-hot-right-now, so coming up with a killer one is a trendy way to win you some blog love.

Guest post

Offering to guest post can help you build backlinks via your author byline, often from a URL that is topically relevant to what you are selling.

Here’s a tip, use the Dogpile search engine that shows results from both Google, Yahoo and Bing using the term “your keyword] + “guest post”, and repeat searches with “guest author” or “guest writer” to find opportunities.

Don’t take it personally if a blogger no longer accepts guest posts or declines your offer. Bloggers often blog because it’s a way to get their own voice out there. Just keep hunting and you’ll certainly uncover opportunities.

Give it away now

Giveaway blogs are a great way to build links and get your product exposed to potential buyers. Giveaway bloggers are already open to promoting commercial businesses, so you’re likely to have better luck than with other types of pitches. Of course, you want to go for the higher trafficked blogs first, but even the lesser-read ones are still worth it for the link value.

Do-Gooding

Sponsoring good causes or holding charity events can get ya links and help out your fellow man. Just sayin’. evo is an example of both.

Find What is Broken

Here’s a trick from my link building days – it had a higher “conversion rate” (links gained/contacts made) than any other method. Find a page that links to your competitor or a related site and run a backlink check on it. If there’s a broken link, contact the webmaster to report the bug and suggest 2-3 additional links that may be of interest (including yours). Make sure they’re relevant! You’ve already offered something of value, which gives the webmaster motivation to actually go in and change code. But keep it ethical and be transparent about your affiliation with your own link suggestion.

I like to use iWebTool because it’s fast and free, but you can use any broken link checker you like.

The Old Fashioned Way

Of course, there’s the old-skool way of link building, scoping the backlinks of your competitors. So long as you’re patient to wade through spammy sites, you’ll find some good opportunities.

And don’t forget, social link building. Put these all together and with a little elbow grease you’ll have a nicely rounded link profile.

Got your own killer link building tip for ecommerce? Please share in the comments.

Looking for help with ecommerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path Research & Strategy team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy services can improve your business results.

Over the years there have been both complaints and praises about Google’s approach to geo-targeting: while it provides advertisers with the ability to further refine their campaigns to increase conversion rates and other metrics, there were (and are) still a few things missing that AdWords marketers have been wishing for; unfortunately, Google’s recent update to its location targeting tool didn’t solve these issues.

Previous Location Targeting Downfalls

One major complaint of advertisers was that there was no real “zip code” targeting available.  While you could (previously) enter zip codes within the geo-targeting settings in the AdWords interface, Google did not translate this into a true equivalent area if you uploaded them via bulk, and instead converted them into the accompanying city.  In order to get a more precise “zip code” geographic area (but still not the true exact zip area), locations had to be entered manually, which for those marketers using zip codes to target, resulted in a plethora of extra work.  This brought many advertisers to use Custom Shape targeting, by looking up the vicinity of the actual zip code, then essentially “drawing” a geo-targeted shape where the zip code(s) (or other geographic areas) were located.

Issues with the Updated Location Targeting Tool

Recently, Google changed their location targeting tool, which in the minds of many advertisers, only made many of the above issues worse.  Some previously offered options were phased out with the update, only multiplying certain problems.

• Bulk Uploads: no longer does Google offer the option of essentially copying and pasting locations into the location targeting tool within the AdWords interface – yes, it’s gone altogether.  While Google may have good reason for this, all I can see are the negatives (and extra work) this is bringing upon campaign managers across the globe.  For all you advertisers out there who target a large amount of specific locations within your account, get ready to spend an incredibly large amount of time setting these locations.  While you still have the “option” of targeting to more than one location within your campaigns, each location needs to be added individually in the interface, or multiple locations can be chosen at once using the CTRL button within the Editor.

• Zip Codes: while Google’s previous “solution” to zip code targeting left much to be desired, it’s now gone  altogether as an option.  If you have a list of zip codes that need to be targeted, those will have to be converted into cities, or entered as coordinates.  Although the old targeting tool didn’t offer the best zip code targeting options, at least it offered something.

• Custom Shape Targeting: I’ve encountered many advertisers who have used this as a more precise solution to the previous zip code targeting, but it required a lot of extra work – looking up the shape of the zip code area itself and essentially “drawing” it as closely as possible within the AdWords interface.  It was also a great option for those marketers who didn’t want to necessarily target a specific country, city, state, region, etc. and instead saw success in more sporadic areas.  Custom Shape targeting was removed as an option in July of this year, and campaigns that already had custom shapes in place will only be able to maintain these settings until the end of this year.  Removal of this feature will cause advertisers to rely on other targeting options (that may not work as well for them), but the best option may be to target by radius, assuming you can obtain the coordinates necessary.  If you previously had custom shape targeting set up in any of your campaigns, you will now see the message “Feature removal planned” when viewing your campaigns’ location settings.  After 2011, your custom shapes will convert into available locations in AdWords or to a map point with a radius.

While Google’s new location targeting tool looks a lot sleeker and does offer some cool updates (‘Reach’ number, ‘Limited Reach’ messaging, and improved accuracy to name a few), the removal of many previous options will be leaving a lot of advertisers frustrated, and will result in additional time being spent on something that was previously done so quickly.  Maybe there’s a chance that Google will release a new and much improved location targeting tool in the near future (which would hopefully bring back the beloved bulk upload option), but until then, many advertisers will have to give their geo-targeting settings and strategies a facelift.

The Negatives of Google’s Changes to AdWords Location Targeting is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

Over the years there have been both complaints and praises about Google’s approach to geo-targeting: while it provides advertisers with the ability to further refine their campaigns to increase conversion rates and other metrics, there were (and are) still a few things missing that AdWords marketers have been wishing for; unfortunately, Google’s recent update to its location targeting tool didn’t solve these issues.

Previous Location Targeting Downfalls

One major complaint of advertisers was that there was no real “zip code” targeting available.  While you could (previously) enter zip codes within the geo-targeting settings in the AdWords interface, Google did not translate this into a true equivalent area if you uploaded them via bulk, and instead converted them into the accompanying city.  In order to get a more precise “zip code” geographic area (but still not the true exact zip area), locations had to be entered manually, which for those marketers using zip codes to target, resulted in a plethora of extra work.  This brought many advertisers to use Custom Shape targeting, by looking up the vicinity of the actual zip code, then essentially “drawing” a geo-targeted shape where the zip code(s) (or other geographic areas) were located.

Issues with the Updated Location Targeting Tool

Recently, Google changed their location targeting tool, which in the minds of many advertisers, only made many of the above issues worse.  Some previously offered options were phased out with the update, only multiplying certain problems.

• Bulk Uploads: no longer does Google offer the option of essentially copying and pasting locations into the location targeting tool within the AdWords interface – yes, it’s gone altogether.  While Google may have good reason for this, all I can see are the negatives (and extra work) this is bringing upon campaign managers across the globe.  For all you advertisers out there who target a large amount of specific locations within your account, get ready to spend an incredibly large amount of time setting these locations.  While you still have the “option” of targeting to more than one location within your campaigns, each location needs to be added individually in the interface, or multiple locations can be chosen at once using the CTRL button within the Editor.

• Zip Codes: while Google’s previous “solution” to zip code targeting left much to be desired, it’s now gone  altogether as an option.  If you have a list of zip codes that need to be targeted, those will have to be converted into cities, or entered as coordinates.  Although the old targeting tool didn’t offer the best zip code targeting options, at least it offered something.

• Custom Shape Targeting: I’ve encountered many advertisers who have used this as a more precise solution to the previous zip code targeting, but it required a lot of extra work – looking up the shape of the zip code area itself and essentially “drawing” it as closely as possible within the AdWords interface.  It was also a great option for those marketers who didn’t want to necessarily target a specific country, city, state, region, etc. and instead saw success in more sporadic areas.  Custom Shape targeting was removed as an option in July of this year, and campaigns that already had custom shapes in place will only be able to maintain these settings until the end of this year.  Removal of this feature will cause advertisers to rely on other targeting options (that may not work as well for them), but the best option may be to target by radius, assuming you can obtain the coordinates necessary.  If you previously had custom shape targeting set up in any of your campaigns, you will now see the message “Feature removal planned” when viewing your campaigns’ location settings.  After 2011, your custom shapes will convert into available locations in AdWords or to a map point with a radius.

While Google’s new location targeting tool looks a lot sleeker and does offer some cool updates (‘Reach’ number, ‘Limited Reach’ messaging, and improved accuracy to name a few), the removal of many previous options will be leaving a lot of advertisers frustrated, and will result in additional time being spent on something that was previously done so quickly.  Maybe there’s a chance that Google will release a new and much improved location targeting tool in the near future (which would hopefully bring back the beloved bulk upload option), but until then, many advertisers will have to give their geo-targeting settings and strategies a facelift.

The Negatives of Google’s Changes to AdWords Location Targeting is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

Over the years there have been both complaints and praises about Google’s approach to geo-targeting: while it provides advertisers with the ability to further refine their campaigns to increase conversion rates and other metrics, there were (and are) still a few things missing that AdWords marketers have been wishing for; unfortunately, Google’s recent update to its location targeting tool didn’t solve these issues.

Previous Location Targeting Downfalls

One major complaint of advertisers was that there was no real “zip code” targeting available.  While you could (previously) enter zip codes within the geo-targeting settings in the AdWords interface, Google did not translate this into a true equivalent area if you uploaded them via bulk, and instead converted them into the accompanying city.  In order to get a more precise “zip code” geographic area (but still not the true exact zip area), locations had to be entered manually, which for those marketers using zip codes to target, resulted in a plethora of extra work.  This brought many advertisers to use Custom Shape targeting, by looking up the vicinity of the actual zip code, then essentially “drawing” a geo-targeted shape where the zip code(s) (or other geographic areas) were located.

Issues with the Updated Location Targeting Tool

Recently, Google changed their location targeting tool, which in the minds of many advertisers, only made many of the above issues worse.  Some previously offered options were phased out with the update, only multiplying certain problems.

• Bulk Uploads: no longer does Google offer the option of essentially copying and pasting locations into the location targeting tool within the AdWords interface – yes, it’s gone altogether.  While Google may have good reason for this, all I can see are the negatives (and extra work) this is bringing upon campaign managers across the globe.  For all you advertisers out there who target a large amount of specific locations within your account, get ready to spend an incredibly large amount of time setting these locations.  While you still have the “option” of targeting to more than one location within your campaigns, each location needs to be added individually in the interface, or multiple locations can be chosen at once using the CTRL button within the Editor.

• Zip Codes: while Google’s previous “solution” to zip code targeting left much to be desired, it’s now gone  altogether as an option.  If you have a list of zip codes that need to be targeted, those will have to be converted into cities, or entered as coordinates.  Although the old targeting tool didn’t offer the best zip code targeting options, at least it offered something.

• Custom Shape Targeting: I’ve encountered many advertisers who have used this as a more precise solution to the previous zip code targeting, but it required a lot of extra work – looking up the shape of the zip code area itself and essentially “drawing” it as closely as possible within the AdWords interface.  It was also a great option for those marketers who didn’t want to necessarily target a specific country, city, state, region, etc. and instead saw success in more sporadic areas.  Custom Shape targeting was removed as an option in July of this year, and campaigns that already had custom shapes in place will only be able to maintain these settings until the end of this year.  Removal of this feature will cause advertisers to rely on other targeting options (that may not work as well for them), but the best option may be to target by radius, assuming you can obtain the coordinates necessary.  If you previously had custom shape targeting set up in any of your campaigns, you will now see the message “Feature removal planned” when viewing your campaigns’ location settings.  After 2011, your custom shapes will convert into available locations in AdWords or to a map point with a radius.

While Google’s new location targeting tool looks a lot sleeker and does offer some cool updates (‘Reach’ number, ‘Limited Reach’ messaging, and improved accuracy to name a few), the removal of many previous options will be leaving a lot of advertisers frustrated, and will result in additional time being spent on something that was previously done so quickly.  Maybe there’s a chance that Google will release a new and much improved location targeting tool in the near future (which would hopefully bring back the beloved bulk upload option), but until then, many advertisers will have to give their geo-targeting settings and strategies a facelift.

The Negatives of Google’s Changes to AdWords Location Targeting is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

As discussed on Get Elastic last week, behavioral targeting is the new wave of online advertising. A form of behavioral targeting called “remarketing” is close cousin to paid search and email marketing, with the bonus of only reaching people who have visited your site in recent days.

Also coined “remarketing” (by Google Adwords) or “remessaging” (by Microsoft AdCenter), retargeting gives you an opportunity to re-engage site visitors with targeted messages and offers that appear when site abandoners surf other sites around the Web.

This “get started guide” explores how retargeting works, what you need to know to shape your strategy and some campaign management tips.

How it Works

Top players in this space are Google Remarketing, Microsoft AdCenter, Criteo and Retargeter. For simplicity, we’re going to look at Google Remarketing specifically, though the strategy principles apply to all three.

Tags and Audiences

Retargeting relies on tags and cookies. Create tags for the various customer segments or “audiences” based on where in your site the abandonment occurs, what content was viewed or actions were taken, and place them on the appropriate pages on your site.

For example, create a “customer” tag for visitors who have completed a purchase, or a “subscriber” tag for those who have joined your site (free or paid). Or, tag with category or product names. Of course, tagging shopping cart and checkout abandonders is a no brainer.

The system places cookies on visitors’ machines to identify which audiences they belong to, and serves ads corresponding around the Content Network, matching them to the audiences you configure in Adwords.

Cookie Duration

Cookie length can be set so campaigns expire after a short window (such as with checkout abandonment) or longer, up to 180 days. Long windows are helpful for products that may have new releases or upgrades such as software, or require replenishment after a period, like consumable office supplies.

Here’s the catch – each remarketing list requires 500 cookied visitors before ads can be displayed. This is important, as timing is a big factor with remarketing. Lists can grow stale before the first ad is triggered. Abandoned carts should be retargeted relatively quickly. If it takes 30 days to build a list of 500 abandoned carts, your campaign will already by moldy. You may find your traffic only supports more general behaviors such as site or category visits.

Getting Started

Google Help has a straightforward guide for getting started, so I won’t reinvent the wheel by outlining the technical steps. But before you even think about setting up your campaign, you need to work out your strategy.

Crafting Your Remarketing Strategy

Begin with an understanding of who you want to target, after what actions are taken on your site. Jot down a few scenarios. Here’s a sample format:

SCENARIO A (General Campaign)

Objective: Keep brand top-of-mind for visitors who abandon the site and communicate our value proposition
Site pages (to tag): All
Audience (Positive List): General site visitors
Exclude (Negative List): Visitors who viewed Affiliates or Careers pages
Cookie duration: 180 days (maximum allowed)
Maximum exposures: 11
Creative: TBD, A/B test
Notes: (If any)

SCENARIO B (Flagship Product Campaign)

Objective: Retarget visitors who view our flagship product
Site pages: Amazing Product 1.0 product page, “amazing product 1.0” search results
Audience: Visitors to these pages
Exclude: Completed purchasers
Cookie duration: 14 days
Maximum exposures: 11
Creative: TBD
Notes: (If any)

A good understanding of your own industry and customer behavior is valuable. What is the average days to purchase (or average visits to purchase) for your entire site? For product categories? Do you have many competitors and is comparison shopping common? Are your customers motivated by discounts or value-added features and services? Do your customers shop for merchandise across departments? The answers to these questions will shape your scenarios so you’re not mis-targeting customers with the wrong strategies.

Things to keep in mind:

• You need enough traffic to get your campaign off the ground, so don’t get too granular. Use your analytics and start with your highest traffic areas.
• Certain leads “go cold” as time passes. Plan shorter windows for actions like abandoned carts.
• Don’t be too desperate. Targeting offers immediately after site abandonment may cannibalize your margin for customers who were going to come back to pay full price. Consider A/B testing offers against non-offers, or staggering your creative to kick in offers after X days or X exposures.
• Consider excluding geographies that typically convert less or that you can’t ship your full product line to.

Remarketing Creative

There are many styles of display ads that can work for you, for example:

• Branding
• Last category viewed
• Last product viewed
• Abandoned cart reminder
• Sale and promotional messaging (general)
• New product awareness
• Post-purchase events (replenish consumables, submit review for chance to win gift card, etc)

As with all online advertising, it’s important that “scent” is maintained. This means your ad creative matches the behavior that triggered the ad, and the landing page delivers on the promise made in the ad. And as with email, make sure your creative has a clear call to action, even if it’s just for “branding” purposes.

You’ve heard of “banner blindness” but are you familiar with “banner burnout”? After a certain threshold of exposures, seeing your ad everywhere may be more annoying than admired, so you should consider mixing up your creative (showing a different design after X days or X impressions), or use frequency caps in your campaign set up. Experts believe 7-11 exposures is ideal before burnout kicks in.

Remember also to design for various ad formats for maximum placement (skyscraper, sidebar, etc).

Examples:

Up high

Along the side

Campaign Management Tips

Once you’ve nailed your strategy and designed your ads, it’s time to set ‘em up. Here are some tips to remember:

• Start fresh. It is recommended to create display advertising Ad Groups in brand new Campaigns. You’re building Ad Groups around customer segments, rather than keywords, which requires a different structure.
• Block wisely. You may choose not to initially block domains from the Content Network that you find convert poorly with your other text and display ads. Because retargeted ads are more relevant, they may perform much better on these domains. If they prove to still convert poorly, remove them after you’ve collected enough data.
• Be negative. Leverage “negative audiences” to ensure your ads don’t appear when they shouldn’t. For example, visitors who convert should be placed in a list that is added as a negative to your other targeted campaigns. You may also wish to exclude visitors referred by other ad networks like Bing ads or affiliate campaigns.
• Bid smart. Naturally, some visitors will be tagged multiple times. For example, a cart abandoner likely has a “general visitor” tag. Bid higher for behaviors further down the conversion trail to ensure they override the other Ad Groups you may have running.
• Rotate evenly. Like with text ads, you can test a few versions of your creative (great idea, by the way). AdWords has a tendency to default your ad rotation to optimize for clicks (show your winning ad more often). But as you know, for good A/B split testing, your creative should be shown evenly. I recommend you change it to “show ads more evenly.”

If retargeting looks enticing to you, tag your pages as soon as possible to build your audience memberships before you work on strategy, creative and account set up. This makes it much quicker to reach the 500 member mark, take advantage of the holiday traffic surge!

Post-script

While this post was geared more towards Google’s solution, Criteo is another player to investigate if you want harder-core targeting than what’s currently available with Adwords. Criteo provides dynamic ads that merchandise with the products a customer last viewed on your site. Customers include Zappos and Overstock.

The Zappos example above also links to an opt-out page that explains the ads and enables the customer to “turn them off” and provide feedback on how the ads made them feel.

Looking for help with ecommerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path Research & Strategy team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy services can improve your business results.

Over the past few weeks since Google implemented SSL encrypted search results pages that block keyword data for users signed into their Google accounts, SEOs have been pulling their hair and gnashing their teeth. It’s true, and it’s warranted. One of the best SEO KPIs is reporting on the quantity of organic search traffic generated by highly qualified keywords. Now that between 9 and 20% of this data is generic, it’s harder for us to prove our worth and progress. So we’re justifiably upset.

However, as objectively as I can be, I would say that removing data for organic searches has far wider reaching consequences than depriving SEOs of one of their prime KPIs.

One of my friends who owns a great hip hop dance video eCommerce store and I got into a debate last weekend about how it’s not just SEOs who are affected by this change. My argument, which I could not deliver with any eloquence that night, (Friday at 10pm after happy hour and wine at dinner — you do the math.) I will now present here.

Why The (Not Provided) Keyword Hurts the Web

Let me begin by asking a question: Why do webmasters care about rankings? Because rankings=traffic and traffic=some benefit (either monetary or otherwise.) The only thing that webmasters want to do is get their site ranking for relevant terms that drive qualified traffic. To do so, they optimize their sites for those terms.

It is in the webmasters’ best interests to focus on keywords that drive qualified traffic, and to make their site as relevant as possible for this valuable traffic. But how, you may ask, do webmasters know whether they are optimizing for the right things?

What if someone searching for “vice grips” typically wants to buy and someone searching for “locking wrench” typically wants to find out more about the applications for that tool? Both of those words could apply to the same tool, so webmasters look at their conversion data and engagement metrics to find out how to make their site fit the wants and needs of the searcher.

By doing so, they inadvertently give the search engines exactly what they need and want: a page that matches user intent and is valuable to the searcher — who will then use that search engine again because the results were exactly what they were looking for.

The decision to try to rank a product page for vice grips vs. locking wrench has to be informed by keyword data since Google doesn’t provide exact clickthrough data — even through webmasters tools. This data should be statistically significant.

I would hazard a guess, however, that most sites out there don’t have statistically significant traffic over the short term. So even if the site really IS the best result for a specific search, they are already at a disadvantage. Now, however, about 10 – 20% of their already slim keyword data is generalized.

So, the webmaster makes a decision based on personal preference or the opinions of peers in his industry and optimizes his sales page for vice grips. He manages to rank pretty highly for that and can’t understand why people are bouncing so much.

Google, in turn is ranking him appropriately to his level of optimization, but for the wrong keyword and the result is not what the user was looking for so they loose too.

*sigh*

So, why is Google denying analytics users this important information? There is a lot of speculation that it is in an effort to push site owners to depend more on paid search data… up their paid search traffic since they can’t get accurate data through the organic channel anymore.

If this is the case, it seems really short sited to me. The only reason why most people search Google is to get the organic results. Clicking on a paid result is a bonus. If the organic results decline because webmasters don’t have the right information to make education decisions about their site, then Google looses money because people will start using other engines.

If they really are trying to stave off a privacy issue, either present or future, then why is the data still available for paid search? Have people that click on paid links entered into some type of implicit agreement that their search data is less private than those who click on organic results?

Regardless of their motives, the change will detrimentally affect the web in general, search results specifically, and the ability webmasters to make good decisions.

As an SEO, I admit that I’m personally put out by these changes because they make my job harder and who likes that? (See above image.) However, I really and truly believe that the web as a whole will be drastically and negatively affected, especially if more and more people sign in to a Google account while searching.

Why Google (Not Provided Keyword) Hurts the Web, Not Just SEO is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

As mentioned in our Monday post, digital disruption is occurring in gaming, video, music, and numerous other verticals.

Rapid consumer adoption of service-enabled devices like smartphones and tablets connected to the Internet has led to a crop of innovative competitors sprouting up. The new players – companies like Rdio, OnLive, and Hulu – aim to deliver better service experiences to consumers, challenging longstanding business models and industry stalwarts.

Indeed, some would even say that viable innovations must come from outsider organizations rather than incumbents. Clay Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “The Innovator’s Solution“, being a case in point.

As digital content becomes more prevalent, traditional ‘physical goods’ business models like individual unit sales are no longer going to suffice. To successfully build ongoing strategic relationships with customers, providing an array of flexible business models – e.g. subscriptions, rentals, metered access – is important to meet the needs of various types of online buyers. In the digital world, one size definitely does not fit all.

This information (and more) was shared in our November webinar, Digital Disruption Is Happening. Content & Online Service Providers Must be Ready to Adapt. Available on-demand and recapped here.

Business leaders looking to make money from their catalog of digital content, software, or online services must find ecommerce solutions that allow flexibility to trial these alternative business models. A recently released Forrester report provides tactics for selecting the right vendor. Get your free copy of Market Overview – Digital Commerce Solutions 2011 here.

Digital commerce Q&A

Questions asked during the webinar are answered below by special guest, Forrester Research, Inc. Senior Analyst Peter Sheldon. Additional questions? Fire away in the comments!

What type of technology solution do you need to sell digital goods?

Content providers need to find ecommerce solutions that can support emerging business models. Rather than a typical ecommerce platform that only supports the sale of SKUs, look for a platform that can support sophisticated subscriptions, time-based access, and entitlements that are tied to the content management system (CMS) hosting and delivering the content.

Do I need to host the technology in-house, or can I outsource?

It really depends on your business. Global presence is one factor to look at. For firms that only have a U.S. operation but that need to sell globally, outsourcing to a partner with existing global infrastructure that can operate on your behalf can be very attractive. For larger enterprises that already have that global footprint – with legal entities in various markets around the world like China and Japan – managing ecommerce in-house may be less of an issue because they already have distribution and customer support outside the U.S. They may see efficiencies of scale by operating in-house. If digital commerce is of strategic importance, with high revenue potential, then ecommerce should probably be in-house as well. Another factor is internal IT sophistication. You can’t make an in-house solution work without a highly capable IT team.

How do you evaluate and select a digital commerce vendor?

There is a still a place for the traditional request for proposal (RFP) but, at Forrester, we encourage firms to look at an alternative called scenario-based evaluation. It still requires a request for information (RFI) to create a shortlist of vendors who meet your criteria in terms of capabilities, features, cultural fit, and operational model. Then you use real-world scenarios to whittle down that list to one or two vendors. You ask vendors to come in to give you a mini proof of concept where they demonstrate their capabilities and map them to the scenarios that you’ve given them.

The scenarios could be customer-facing or internal day-to-day tasks. Examples are how you upload new content or manage promotions, pricing, merchandising etc. These types of scenarios allow you to take a deep look, not only at the technology, but also at the business user tools. Using scenarios, you can get a sense of how easy the platform is to use and how flexible it is.

In traditional ecommerce, success is generally defined by average order value, conversion rate, and traffic. How do you measure success in the digital world?

Typical ecommerce metrics are based around cart abandonment. But in the digital world, there really is no cart. Instead, what we are selling is access to content or a service. So service adoption – or sign ups – is important to measure. But what is more important is the conversion rate of free trials to paid subscriptions, and then tracking the lifetime value of that customer. How many subscription renewals are there? What is the uplift in subscription spend over time? These types of metrics have much in common with telecommunications operators who measure average revenue per user (ARPU).

How does a content provider build direct-to-consumer relationships, yet happily co-exist with so-called ‘walled gardens’ such as the Apple App Store?

It’s certainly a challenge. We’re seeing publishers building a hybrid strategy. They are offering subscriptions on their own sites so they can own the customer relationship and have access to the CRM data, but at the same time they are open to new customers coming from channels like Apple and Google.

Closed wall ecosystems do make it hard for content providers to build close relationships directly with consumers. For example, the Apple App Store is very closed but you must have a presence there. On the other hand, Android is a lot more open. You have to fight for the data from the third party distributors and look for creative ways to capture customer information so you can monetize it over time. We’re seeing digital content firms pushing for better terms with Apple. And those terms are becoming a little more amenable than they were a year ago.

As we move from selling individual products or SKUs to selling access to content, how does the product catalog work?

In a traditional retail environment, the catalog is typically very large with tens of thousands of unique SKUs. But in the digital world, the number of SKUs or products is often very small, sometimes even as small as a single product with variations like subscription length (e.g. 1, 2 or 3-year) or access to advanced features. Some channels might have slightly different pricing as well. So, on the face of things, the product catalog is very simple.

The challenge is dealing with entitlements to the SKUs. The ecommerce platform is not just responsible for selling items, but must also play a role in provisioning content and services over the lifetime of the customer relationship. It must know when the consumer is able to download the content across multiple touch points like game consoles, smartphones etc. It must also manage the complexities of subscriptions. For example, if the consumer fails to make a monthly payment, it needs to put the subscription on hold.

Thank you, Peter!

Looking for help with digital commerce?

A recently released Forrester report provides tactics for selecting digital ecommerce solutions and looks at some of the key platforms available in the market today. Get your free copy of Market Overview – Digital Commerce Solutions 2011 here.

Looking for help with ecommerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path Research & Strategy team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy services can improve your business results.

Yes, Google+ recently launched but the prevalence of Facebook as a social platform hasn’t changed, especially for marketers. There are a ton of tutorial videos out there, giving insights on different aspects of what Facebook offers marketers. I’ve sifted through the lot and pulled out a list of some of the most helpful Facebook video tutorials for marketing purposes. Here are my top video suggestions:

1. From Awareness to Sale via Facebook Studio

This video from Facebook itself, helps simply conceptualize the purchase cycle from people engaging on Facebook. This short video is a great way to visualize the power of recommendations from friends and how Facebook is merely echoing recommendation on a measurable scale. It helps give you a simple way to explain the importance of Facebook for business to others (clients) and how a marketer can connect with customers at every point of the purchase cycle.

2. Facebook Marketing Best Practices via Mari Smith + HubSpot

This video helps highlight everything from the type of content you should be sharing on Facebook (short and sweet is the way to go), metrics to monitor your success within Facebook (engagement per post), the benefits of Facebook Places (there’s lots) and more. Mari Smith, one of the many social media gurus out there, highlights these features in an interview conducted by HubSpot. It’s half hour long video, but worth the info, even if you skip through to different parts of the video.

3. The New Facebook Subscribe Feature via Social Networking Academy

Brought to you by the Social Networking Academy, this video gives you an in-depth look at Facebook’s Subscribe Feature. This feature, part of the round of updates following F8 and the launch of Google+, has a lot of potential for marketers and publishers on Facebook. By allowing people to follow your public updates from your profile and following the public updates of others, you can help grow a larger, more influential network and gain more exposure for the content you’re sharing. Learn how to allow this feature and how it affects your messaging across Facebook.

4. Anatomy and Best Practices for Facebook Ads via Traffika

Facebook ads are one of the big money makers for Facebook as a company, but they can also help benefit you as a marketer by expanding the reach of the existing content you’re already sharing on Facebook. With amazing targeting capabilities and social features to the ad’s, Facebook ads can be a real benefit. This video by Traffika, highlights the four parts of a traditional Facebook ad and how to use them inline with best practices for higher conversions.

5. Converting Your Facebook Personal Profile into a Facebook Page via Social Vision Media

Pages are the official home for business, brands and public figures on Facebook. However, many businesses are still using a regular Facebook Profile to represent themselves on the platform. This is against Facebook’s terms of service and is a very limited way to connect with a network of loyal fans. Social Vision Media shows you how to convert a personal Profile on Facebook to a Page, changing your friends over to fans, therefore saving your connections and moving them to the appropriate place on the network. This is where you should begin when starting this tutorial: https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18918

6. The World Is Obsessed With Facebook via Alex Trimpe

Facebook and social media is still in its infancy and many people are still doubting its importance. Alex Trimpe put together a wonderful two minute video of some of the most shocking facts and statistics about user activity on the social media giant. This is a resource in terms of viable facts and figures you as a marketer can share with your CEO, potential clients and any one else that is unclear of the benefit Facebook offers.

7. How Facebook Social Plugins Work via Facebook

Soon after the Facebook like button was released, plugins hit the scene. This has helped thousands of websites further connect their web visitors to their social audience and vice versa. Social plugins have been around for awhile now, so you would assume most websites would have implemented them but surprisingly, many still haven’t. This video is a quick and simple overview of how Facebook social plugins are a benefit to any website looking to connect and influence their audience.

8. Eight Ways to Find Great Social Media Content via Mari Smith + Social Media Examiner

Lastly, content is and always will be the driving force behind social media, especially on Facebook. Again, Mari Smith takes us through a tour of some of the most important and effective ways to find content to share about your brand on Facebook. Watch the video to learn ways to find content, like using Google Alerts or Google Reader to find brand mentions.

Have you come across other beneficial Facebook marketing videos? Share these videos with us in the comment section below if they’re worth a look, we’d love to see what you’ve got!

8 Helpful Video Tutorials for Facebook Marketers is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

Back links have always been an important part of SEO, but the type of links that influence search engine rankings have changed over the years.

Links from topically relevant and authoritative sites serve as signals of quality for the content they point to. The authority of a web page, or “Page Rank” in Google lingo, flows from one web page to another through (most) links, making link building a staple SEO strategy, but also one that has been abused by spammers. Thus, the “rules” around what makes a valuable link changes frequently, from an importance on reciprocal links and directories (abused through link farms), to keyword-rich anchor text (abused by paid links), to deep-links, and to today’s vogue – social links.

Search engines have confirmed that social signals do factor in their ranking algorithms, and that Facebook and Twitter links are considered, provided 301 redirects are used by URL shortening services. Social networks like Twitter may automatically add the rel=nofollow attribute, but links can be found by search engines through other data feeds.

Though we don’t know exactly which types of links are counted and which ignored, it’s reasonable that factors such as the authority of the social profiles that share and re-share links and their semantic relevance (the keywords surrounding the link) are important. Social linking strategies should keep this in mind.

Let’s explore 5 strategies:

Like, Share, Plus One Buttons

Simply having Twitter, Facbook and Google Plus buttons on your product pages and email campaigns is a link building strategy in itself. These “chicklets” enable passive word of mouth — free link building provided by your own site visitors, customers and fans. You may not get thousands of thumbs up on most of your products, but the long tail of sharing a few times over thousands of products can add up to a lot of exposure for very little effort.

There’s no harm in adding social buttons to product pages, email campaigns, home pages and microsites, other than the potential drag on your page load speed (like analytics code, they should be loaded after the core page content).

35 million Facebookers (1 in 4 account holders) have shared a product with their network, and 35% are more willing to buy a Liked product, so this is a no-brainer.

Your own accounts

Of course, you can leverage your own social media profiles to share new products, sale events and other content. But just submitting your own links likely doesn’t cut it. Search engines can figure out when links are shared by an account associated with a website (do you link to your site from your profile, hmmmm?) They want to see volume of shares or authoritative accounts sharing your links. Working on building up a strong fan base is essential, as is keeping them interested and making your content “share worthy” – complete with headlines that pique interest. Easier said than done, but a good challenge for your campaign strategists.

Hint: Surround your shared links with relevant keywords or hashtags, and try to include keywords in your site pages that you intend to share. Even if they are shrunk with link shorteners, search engines will follow the redirects and account for these keywords.

Hint, hint: Choose your URL shortener wisely. Though most use 301 redirects, some don’t. You’ll be safe with Goo.gl, Bit.ly, Ow.ly and Cli.gs. For more info, check out this article on which url shortening service you should use.

Paid tweets

If you want Kim Kardashian to gush about how much she hearts your handbags, you can pay your way into her feed through a service called – you got it – SponsoredTweets.com (the same folks that invented the PayPerPost service in 2006).

But note that sponsored tweets are, like paid posts and any other paid links, ethically to be disclosed with the hashtag #ad. Treat paid tweets as advertising, not link building.

The #ad hashtag may be a signal that search engines use to discount such links.

PR

Not Page Rank, but the other-other PR, public relations. You’ve used PR to reach out to bloggers and journalists, and these folk often have Twitter accounts as well. In fact, you’re more likely to get a tweet than a full blog post when you pitch, as they take far less time to craft.

Because tweets sent through influencers are suspected to have more clout with search engines, even one or two tweets of this sort can pay off. If you are reaching out with PR, suggest keywords be included in the tweet, like #hashtags.

Customer campaigns

Share-with-your-network calls-to-action in email and social network channels are an underused tactic. Social links are common, but they’re usually of the “Follow Us” variety, comfortably tucked away in header menus.

Or, footer menus.

I suggest being aggressive, and placing the calls-to-action in the content space of your email. Kohl’s is specific that the call-to-action is to forward the email message, rather than simply Like or Tweet the brand.

(Kohl’s example via Retail Email Blog)

Social linking is important – but it hasn’t replaced traditional backlinks. Stay tuned, next post we’ll revisit some of the tried-and-true strategies that can help keep your link profile growing and well-rounded.

Looking for help with your ecommerce strategy and site optimization? The Elastic Path research and consulting division is available to enterprises selling digital goods and services. For more information, visit us at http://elasticpath.com/ecommerce-consulting/ or contact us at consulting@elasticpath.com.