As an eCommerce manager, one of the primary challenges you face is getting visitors to your site. Even more vital (and difficult of course) is getting targeted traffic, which you count on to convert into sales. Running pay-per-click ads on Google Adwords makes collecting targeted traffic easy, but such ease means your competitors are probably doing the same thing. If you want to generate more targeted traffic than your competitors, you’ll need to take advantage of Product Listing Ads.

Product Listing Ads (highlighted in green below) occupy the space just above the organic search results in Google.

Originally, Google provided this space to eCommerce stores for free, but in May 2012 they were transformed into paid ads. Much like your regular text PPC ads, you’ll be charged when a search engine user clicks on your ad.

The advantages of running Product Listings are many. Visually, they grab users’ attention. The large page real estate they take up helps overpower any other results on that page. Our data shows that in general, you can expect Product Listings to provide 50-100% higher ROI than your Adwords account average. Conversion rates are also higher than site average with Product Listings, proof that the traffic they bring in is more targeted.

Getting Started

Getting started with Product Listing Ads begins with a product feed. A product feed is a simple file on your server, which Google looks for to quickly gather details on all your products. Think of it as an index in a book. Besides listing all of the products it tells Google everything it needs to know about each product: from the location of the picture to the price.

You’ll need a Google Merchants account to tell the search engine where this file is located on your server. Connecting your Google Merchant account with your Adwords account will then enable the Product Listing Ads in Adwords. This is easily done in your Google Merchants account. Just follow the prompts you see on your dashboard.

Tips to Optimizing Your Product Listings

Setting Up Your Product Feed

If your store is running Magento, the biggest obstacle for you will be generating your product feed. Although Magento has the ability to natively generate product feeds, using an extension that is more robust and customizable than Magento’s native implementation will save you lots of time and headache.

Adwords isn’t the only service that takes advantage of product feeds. Shopping comparison engines such as Nextag, Pricegrabber, and Shopping.com use product feeds to populate your data. If you’re part of an affiliate network, your affiliates can take advantage of a product feed to display your products on their sites. Selling on Amazon? Amazon also provides the ability to use a product feed.

Managing all your feeds may sounds a little daunting, but extensions, such as GoMage’s Feed Pro, make it easy to manage all of your feeds from the same place.

Updating Your Feed Appropriately

Do you have a high turnover with your products and an inventory that fluctuates often? Do you change prices occasionally to reflect sales and discounts? If you said yes to any of these things, you’ll need to update your product feeds often. How often? Many of our clients update their feeds daily.

For example, if you don’t update your feed, and a shopper clicks an advertisement for a shirt that went out of stock yesterday, the shopper will bounce from your site since that shirt is no longer available to purchase. Not only does this decrease conversion rates, it also costs you money because that shopper still clicked on your ad. The same thing goes with price. If the price in your product listing ad is lower than the current price, it’s unlikely that a shopper will also convert into a sale.

Naming Your Products Correctly

When creating a traditional pay-per-click ad, you assign keywords to Ad Groups that will trigger these ads. Product Listings work a little differently. You cannot assign keywords to them.

Instead, when naming products, make sure to at least include the brand, model, product type, and SKU if possible. Other important attributes should be included as applicable such as Mens, Womens, Color, Material, etc. Think of these attributes as your keywords and use them to name your products. This will increase the chance of your Product Listing Ad displaying when users are searching for those keywords.

Making Sure the Product Image Is Appropriate

Earlier, we showed you a screenshot of Product Listings when searching for the term “red polo shirt.” Notice the first and last ad displayed:

The shirts aren’t red even though they have the word “red” in their product names! Because of this disconnect, search engine users will have a lower click through rate on your ads. Product listing ads are enhanced when the appropriate image is used. Implementing the appropriate image goes back to the proper setup of your product feed. Once again, extensions make this process easier. The result is an increase in targeted traffic.

In Conclusion

When Google announced the transition from free product listings to a pay-per-click model, there was a storm of controversy. However, over the course of almost a year, that controversy has died down as advertisers are finding that Product Listing Ads deliver a return that justifies the cost. Taking the time to properly set up and implement Product Listings for an ecommerce store is very important step that can provide a significant and permanent boost to your online revenue.

How Product Listing Ads Attract More Targeted Traffic is a post from: Blue Acorn

The iFive:K is an evening race through the historic streets of Charleston, sponsored by Charleston Digital Corridor and Comcast Business Class. The race, which brings together Charleston’s knowledge-based business community for an evening of spirited competition, has seen massive growth since it began- from 250 registrants in 2007 to 800 this year.

Last year, PeopleMatter began handing out the “SPIRIT Award” to the team with the most spirit. In response, the CEO of Blue Acorn dressed up as a squirrel named Rocky, ran the 5k, and took part in a dance competition against our neighbor, Boomtown, in an attempt to win it all. Sadly, he lost in the last moment. This year, though, we planned for things to go differently.

The Video Contest

New for 2013, Benefitfocus introduced the iFive:K’s first video competition, “Lights, Camera, Run.” The contest is an opportunity for each team to show why they are the best, the fastest and most spirited. We loved the idea so much, we created two videos. The first uses historical footage to tell the tale of Rocky’s previous defeat, so the world can better appreciate his triumphant return:

The second introduces the fighter, the lover, the legend, and the comeback of Rocky in 2013:

After we told the world that Rocky and Blue Acorn were ready, all that was left to do was count the time until race day.

There’s Nothing Wrong With A Little Trash Talking.

And that’s exactly how race day began for Blue Acorn and Boomtown. Between graffiting windows, altering company signs to say different messages, and acts of aggravated Twitter assaults, things got escalated pretty quickly. And it was still only one o’clock.

By four o’clock, the Blue Acorn pre-party was underway. By five o’clock, Boomtown had found their way to the party and joined us on the field. Together, we played cornhole, talked pre-race strategies, and shared clif bars. For the time being, a peace treaty was struck between our two great companies. By six o’clock hundreds of members from the tech community were at the Blue Acorn Pre-Party.

The Race

At 6:30, runners gathered at the finish line to start the race, but first observed a moment of silence to reflect on the recent tragedy in Boston. The moment of silence technically ended, but the introspective crowd continued to stand solemnly. The next sound was the national anthem, sung by someone from our community. On the back of an old pickup truck, Rocky stood holding the American flag. The spontaneous act of patriotism managed to inspire a few chuckles from the runners.

With the anthem over, the runners slowly turned from rumination to a more pleasant and present feeling. With the help of ACDC and CDC president Ernest Andrade, Rocky fired the starting pistol and began our race.

A few ran to win. Some ran to push themselves. Others walked lethargically on, hoping that the “5” in 5K referred to the number of cupcakes awaiting them at the finish line. Some, however, raced against the limits of their technical abilities. I’m talking of course about the now famous Blue Acorn Mobile Mobile Development Lab, in which a Blue Acorn employee rode in a wheelbarrow and developed the first-ever-recorded mobile app in a mobile setting (that we know of). It even made the paper.

The Boomtown After-Party

Beer, food, a spectacular view of the harbor and great people – that sums it up pretty well. Oh, and of course the massive rainbow shining down on the technology community like a sign from the tech-gods that they would never again try to destroy us. Of course, it was probably just a rainbow.

Standing on the veranda of the Charleston Maritime Center, one could only look down and try to absorb all that Silicon Harbor had become. The air buzzed with conversation and laughter. An entire city of professionals had come together to enjoy the things we have in common, namely, our love of this city and a field that rewards innovation and constant improvement. Of course, all that brotherly love had to come to an end. A boxing ring in the center of it all reminded us of that. There was a SPIRIT Award that needed to be won.

After the winners of the race were announced, it was time to begin the dance competition. Words fail to express the majesty and hilarity our community was privy to that night. First came Telological’s Wizard of Oz clan, who, despite great costumes and a good effort by one very persistent flying monkey, lacked the choreography to stay in the competition for very long. In a flash, a pair of Gorillas from Boomtown arrived and mopped the floor with Dorothy’s red pigtails. Some people thought is was all over, but they were wrong. There was one more competitor.

From the crowd, a grey blur shot on stage. The music kept going but every heart in the audience skipped a beat. It was Rocky and he was there to dance. Flawless breaking, locking and popping. Free flowing turfin’, kerkin’, and memphis jookin. He was b-boying, toprocking, and throwing out powermoves like Optimus Prime. All the gorillas could do was watch.

“Round Two! Down to two!” the MC yelled. It was between Boomtown and Blue Acorn. The gorillas plotted in their corner, forming a plan. Confident, they approached the stage as the music began, but froze in their tracks when another Rocky arrived.

Even through their furry masks, one could read it on their faces. “Two Rockys? That’s not fair! We could hardly handle one!” Despite the protests, the Rockys didn’t care. The music had begun and they had already started dancing. Their techniques were supreme, their moves embodied grace under pressure, and pretty soon it was all over. The two gorillas could only do mental backflips while the Blue Acorn squirrels concluded their musical acrobatics. The MC conducted a polite round of voting by applause, but the winner was clear. Blue Acorn had won the SPIRIT Award.

Now that the whole thing is over, we look back on our incredibly silly behavior and wonder why we ever got so competitive over a sparkly shoe. Of course, we don’t regret it. We love our sparkly shoe, but more important than any award is the community we’re so lucky to be a part of.

iFive:K 2013 is a post from: Blue Acorn

Google Analytics provides you with an abundance of information on visitors to your site, but if you want more meaningful and comprehensive visitor interaction data, you should seriously consider advanced tagging.

Advanced tagging allows you to get specific by tracking individual visitor segments. This is achieved through advanced implementation options and the two advanced analytics tagging entities, custom variables and event tracking javascript snippets.

How To Choose Your Custom Segments

Trying to find behavioral trends when looking at your entire customer base is like trying to find Waldo. To find what you’re looking for, you have to search for certain segments that stand out. With Waldo, you look for those brilliant red and white stripes, the blue pants, and the glasses. With your eCommerce site, figuring out those segments is more complicated.

Tracking specific segments doesn’t take long to set up, but you’ll need to carefully consider which visitors segments to track if you want insights that assist you in engineering a better user experience.

Your visitor subsets can be created from micro-KPIs throughout your site. For example, if your business offers product engraving, you can track all visitors that choose engraving in order to gather more specific information about their behavior. For example, you may discover that such customers often search for the warranties page before purchasing, and those that find it, convert at a higher rate. You could then increase overall conversions on your site by adding warranty information to all product pages with custom engraving.

Another rather common segment is visitors that log into their account while on your site. By comparing the behavior of those that log in and to those that don’t, you can measure how personalizations on your site affect visitor behavior. You can also see why users are logging in and tailor the site to more readily address those needs. For example, you may find that most users log in to check how many loyalty points they’ve racked up. In response, you could place such information on the first page they see after logging in.

Choosing Between Custom Variables And Event Tracking

After deciding what to track, you’ll need to decide which advanced analytics tagging entity is best for your situation. Both custom variables and event tracking provide great functionality, but each has it’s limitations.

Custom Variables

Custom variables provide the option to track site users at the Visitor, Session or Page level. That feature allows you quite a bit of tracking freedom.

While Google generously provides five custom variable slots, it is important to remember one major drawback: only five variables can load per pageview. For example, if you have five page level custom variables on a specific page, plus an overarching site session level custom variable (a total of six custom variables trying to load on a page), only five of the six will load on a page. For this reason your resources might be better used by using event tracking for page level custom variables.

Event Tracking

Event tracking is usually thought of as tracking specific events on a site such as a user clicking Add to Cart or providing data in a form data field. The great thing about event tracking is the flexibility. You can basically track any visitor interaction on a site.

Getting The Most Out of Advanced Tagging

It might seem simpler to do so, but be careful not to fall into the habit of using just one of these entities to track user behavior. Understanding which tagging entity to use for different situations will take some trial and error, but by mixing the flexibility of event tracking with the broad range of custom variables, you can go beyond a typical actionable data set and better understand user interactions on your site.

Advanced Analytics Tagging is a post from: Blue Acorn

Much like the application on which so many relationships and stories have been born, Magento Imagine is many things to many people, and it is always, always a good time. Whether you’re a user, an enthusiast, a solution provider, an independent developer, or a vendor, Imagine draws its attendees in, enticing with and engulfing them in the culture of Magento. It is a time and a place for friends to visit, for online colleagues to meet in person, for prospects to become clients, and for developers to learn and grow. And for many of us, it all begins before the beginning!

The Arrival

Magento Imagine 2013 for me started with a Saturday evening arrival, just in time to meet Aron Stanic from Inchoo, community superstar Sherrie Rohdie, and Rico Neitzel (a fellow Magento U instructor) in baggage claim. Before leaving the airport, and two full days before the official start, Magento community members representing four countries in two continents shared a cab to the spectacular M Resort.

Upon arrival, I enjoyed dinner with folks I have met online and many whom I have met in person, including Mosses Akizian (community man and jack-of-many trades at Magento, Inc.), Brent and Susan Peterson from Wagento Creative (organizers of the now-traditional pre-Imagine run); Dutch community organizer Guido Jansen; my dearest colleague and fellow Magento U instructor, Vinai Kopp; renowned frontend developer Brendan Falkowski (a veteran Imagine speaker); and several others. Together, we shared food and stories as we (ahem) “carb-loaded” for the following day’s run through the gorgeous Nevada countryside. Chalk up more countries, more backgrounds, more stories; a couple hours slipped by with ease and enjoyment.

The Pre-Imagine Race

The next morning began with a shuttle bus ride full of Imagine attendees to the race site. The race – a benefit for cancer patient charity Hope 4 Lives – was a combination 5K / half marathon. I opted for the 5K, having run a 10K road race 24 hours prior. While the race was full of mirth and personal successes, we spent a lot of time talking shop on the shuttle bus rides; I was able to have some incredible conversation with one of Magento’s project managers. Chalk up more states, more countries, more stories, more knowledge, and more camaraderie.

The Pre-Imagine Pool Party

Following a much needed refresh, I awaited for my Blue Acorn contingent to set up our booth and ahead of the legendary pre-Imagine pool party, which is sponsored by Blue Acorn. The event was, ah, well-attended, and I’m sure they could hear us on the strip a few miles away. Deals, relationships, war stories, and speculation about the conference could be heard everywhere around you.

I enjoyed meeting yet more of my online acquaintances as well as several developers who learned from the Magento Fundamentals of Development videos which Magento, Inc. has kindly made freely available. It’s quite humbling to have been a part of something which helped start developer careers, and I am forever indebted to Magento for making me a part of it (and to Vinai for helping to edit it!). Among the many people with whom I was privileged to visit was Mr. Unirgy, one of the original architects of the Magento framework. Yes, it was a lively, exciting time. I lost my voice somewhere around that pool for the remainder of the conference. You could say that my voice stayed in Vegas.

Dev Meetup

After a much-needed night of sleep, Monday started with an influx of current and soon-to-be friends and acquaintances. In the weeks leading up to the Imagine, it occurred to me that with so much developer talent in one place, we ought to get together and discuss the complexities of managing the Magento development workflow. Just prior to early registration opening, a number of developers and managers from several companies met up in the excellent beer bar in the M Casino to openly discuss approaches, tools, and tribulations.

The entire Flagbit contingent was there along with developers from AOE Media, Human Element, Guidance, and SUMO Heavy. This meetup demonstrated that many of us engage in deployment and test automation using utilities such as Capistrano, Apache Ant, Travis CI, Selenium, Behat, and all sorts of relevant environment configurations. It was an excellent casual warm-up to the official technical talks which would take place over the next couple of days, and it was awesome to see how readily – and passionately – different Magento service providers handle problems common to us all. I think we all walked away from the meeting with an awareness of our common struggles and the understanding that there are several valid approaches to delivering client needs with certainty and efficiency.

Following the meetup, I noticed that our meetup of developers with common goals and a common technology was taking place dozens of times a day, every day of the conference. From the developers in the halls outside the presentation rooms to the hustling vendor room, people were working together to get things done and move their business forward. Combined with the framework improvements announced during the event, and I expect the incredible momentum of Magento to continue through the release of version 2.0 next year.

My Final Impression

There have been a number of other writeups on the meat of the conference, so – rather than cover the excellent speeches, presentations, and the parties – I’ll distill one final point.

From the very first announcement of the framework, Magento worked hard to create an impassioned developer community. This was achieved through a mix of openness, collaboration, and delivery of features which demonstrated a response to feedback, whether application features, organizational changes, developer education initiatives, etc.

Fast forward several years and we see that, despite the acquisition by a multi-billion dollar company, Magento continues to facilitate the communal drive with enhancements to the framework and events such as Imagine. We all hope for and expect Magento, Inc. to continue in the collaborative tradition with the people who have spent so much time organizing events, parties, meetups, and hackathons, and contributing value to the framework. We expect this because it benefits us all, even as it ultimately benefits the clients whom we ultimately serve.

Tell us your favorite part of Imagine by voting on our facebook page:

Imagine 2013: My Impressions is a post from: Blue Acorn

Everyone knows about Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season. With few exceptions, it is generally the most active time of the year for eCommerce sites, but what about other holidays? Most eCommerce stores have at least one other holiday. Think of it as a secondary holiday that drives traffic and sales. Somewhere in Google Analytics, there is data pointing to a secondary holiday spike.

You may not believe you have a secondary holiday, but trust me you do. To identify your secondary holiday, simply log into Google Analytics (or another web analytics platform) and researching your traffic for the past year. Do you see spikes? Next look at revenue. Do you see corresponding spikes?

A spike in traffic and revenue does not necessarily directly correlate to a secondary holiday. It is possible you are looking at spike caused by a successful campaign or massive public relations bump.

By carefully annotating your web analytics account, you can quickly dismiss campaign/PR spikes and consult your calendar to determine what people were celebrating.

For example, you frequently see a spike near the 3rd Saturday in August and discover that correlates with: International Geocaching Day! That explains why your eCommerce store sells so GPS devices and flashlights during this time. Not all secondary holidays are as eclectic as International Geocaching Day; some are very obvious such as a beer t-shirt eCommerce site’s secondary holidays, ex. St. Patrick’s Day and Spring Break.

Once you have discovered your secondary holiday, it is important to target visitors during this time period and determine how they are finding your site. Not all holidays are the same. For example you may find visitors convert very well from affiliate sites during the Christmas holiday season, but a negative ROI from affiliates during your secondary holiday. Using Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, you can discover what visitor paths convert best and use that information to better target your visitors.

What to do about a spike is important, but the first step is simply finding out when. Take a few minutes today to check out your account and discover your secondary holidays.

Using Google Analytics to Identify Important Holidays is a post from: Blue Acorn

Blue Acorn usually handles considerably large clients, but let’s say that you manage a mom and pop eCommerce store with niche products. Most likely, visitors to your site are there because they need something special they can’t get on Amazon. You do solid business, but you’re hardly pulling in millions of customers, not to mention their hard-earned money.

The easy answer is to increase the conversion rate for the customers you do have, but maybe you don’t have the capital lying around to spend on an eCommerce solution. There are still ways you can mitigate the risk your customers feel and bolster the conversion rate without spending a fortune. Here are seven inexpensive ways to get you started.

1. Include a Phone Number

So your storefront may only exist in the digital realm, but customer service needs to look like it exists in reality. That means putting up a phone number on your site, even if you have to say that you only accept calls during special hours on the weekdays. In addition to a phone number, you may want to include a physical address to build confidence.

Note that, the higher your cost, the higher the risk for your customers, and the more a little detail like a phone number can affect confidence. For instance, one of my colleagues recently related a past work experience at a mom and pop eCommerce shop. The shop, which sold very high dollar items, was experiencing a very low conversion rate. It was apparent to my friend that this was due to the shabby-looking site and the absence of a phone number. There was no way to call and verify the legitimacy of the business. The consequence was a lack of customer confidence, which led to a low conversion rate.

Shortly after putting a phone number on the homepage, the phone rang constantly and the conversion rate nearly doubled. Without a costly redesign to the site, the site had an increased conversion rate.

2. Accept Credit Cards and Debit Cards

Once upon a time, the internet was a scary place. Danger still lurks, but your consumers have learned to watch out for the marks of a bad scam. One of them is a site that doesn’t accept credit cards and debit cards, which give your customers a layer of protection i.e. offering them a way of getting their money back if they can prove they are the victim of a scam. Other methods leave them high and dry.

It may be obvious to some, but if you don’t accept credit cards, and only accept Western Union or, much worse, only certified checks, then customers will not trust your site, or worse, think you’re site is a scam. Call it unfair. Call it a blanket assessment. Call it whatever you want, but consumers have come to associate certain payment methods with scams. So go ahead and leave them as an option, but don’t rely on them as your only method.

3. Have Testimonials/Reviews.

It goes without saying, external reviews help to build confidence. Place links to reviews on Yelp, Google, your Better Business Bureau page, Urbanspoon, and/or whatever applicable and relevant review sites you can find. Meanwhile, if you have a physical location, most of these review sites prove that you’re on the map.

4. Make Your Social Media Presence Obvious

Having a healthy social footprint is the sign of a legitimate business operation. Keep your social media channels, like Facebook, visible on your site, and keep them active. Do what you can to get customers to engage, give feedback, and post positive sentiments about your brand.

5. Have FAQ and Policy Pages

Questions about warranties, returns, shipping, etc – people have asked about all of these before and you’ve answered before. Save them and you some time by devoting an easy-to-find CMS page with all of this information.

One thing to remember – remove as much of the ambiguity as possible and you remove the risk. Do this by being clear and concise and including any product specific information. Then, promote the information on the order success page and the checkout. While you’re at it, you can add other valuable brand building content to your order success page.

6. Have a Professional Looking Website.

Have you ever walked into a dimly lit retail store with an odd smell, coming from either the ragtag employee with the bloodshot eyes or a mysterious carpet stain in the men’s section? Maybe you haven’t, but if you had walked into such a store, it’s doubtful you would’ve browsed the products for long.

It goes without saying, a professional looking eCommerce site will do wonders for customer confidence. A well-designed site impresses, inspires confidence, and relays critical information easily and with near transparency. The goal is to provide everything the customer needs to make their purchase and none of the clutter that gets in the way, like advertisements for other businesses, an overload of sales banners, or blank pages.

7. Have an About Us Page.

Whether you call the page, “Our History”, “Our Story” or simply “About Us”, having a page dedicated to your story shows that you’ve been around for a while and you know how to take care of your customers. It also builds your brand identity and differentiates you from the competition.

According to our research, visitors to an About Us page were five times more likely to make a purchase than those that didn’t. They also spent an average of 22.5% more on their purchases. If you’re interested in how to make a better about us page, check out our article here.

So there you have it. Seven low hanging fruit, all ripe for the picking. If you have any ways that I didn’t mention, then leave a comment in the comment box below.

7 Cheap Ways to Build Confidence in Your eCommerce Store is a post from: Blue Acorn

Last week, my fiance set forth onto the internet to find the very best screen protector for her brand new phone. After two grueling hours of research on forums and fansites, she found the most highly-recommended screen protector, a product exclusively sold on the manufacturer’s website. When I realized the site was a Magento store, I started paying particular attention. She navigated the site easily, but then, having added the product to cart and prepared to checkout, she stopped and exclaimed, “I don’t want to go through this checkout! I’ll just buy something on eBay instead.”

Why would she go through all that trouble trying to find the best screen protector and then choose to buy an inferior product on eBay? Because (and I don’t like saying it) the checkout process on eBay is much easier than the default, out-of-the-box Magento checkout.

The truth is, I wasn’t that surprised by my fiance’s behavior. This story is not uncommon. Across Blue Acorn’s clients, we’ve found that a good checkout success rate (meaning visitors who view the checkout process and then the success page) is 60% or above. A rate between 50-60% could use some improvements, but a rate under 50% is a signal that your process needs some immediate attention.

Calculating Your Checkout Success

Before you make improvements, you’ll have to know how much you need to improve first. Determining your checkout success rate in Analytics is a relatively easy process if you’re running Magento. First, go to All Pages under the Content section in Analytics on the left hand menu.

In the filter box, type checkout and then click the magnifying glass.

If you’re running the stock Magento checkout, you’ll be looking for two things: /checkout/onepage/ and /checkout/onepage/success. The unique pageviews are what we’ll use to calculate checkout success.

You’ll want to divide the number of unique page views of the success page by the number of people who have viewed the checkout. In this example, it’s 5885/9900 for a checkout success of 59%. If you find your checkout process can use some work, there’s generally a few things you can do to improve it.

Getting More Detailed Data

At Blue Acorn, we make intelligent decisions based on what data is telling us. Often times, this requires collecting more detailed data before making a decision. For example, in optimizing your checkout, advanced Analytics tagging will tell us exactly where in the checkout process visitors are leaving. This allows you to prioritize which part of the checkout needs attention first. The screenshot below shows a client that is using advance Analytics tagging to track steps in their checkout.

By just quickly looking at the data above, you can conclude that something in the billing section is preventing customers from reviewing their order.

Using Checkout Best Practices

Removing distractions

There are a few things you can do to help improve your checkout success by sticking to some best practices. One of the easiest approaches is removing elements that cause friction or distraction with users. This includes removing extra fields that are not needed (i.e. fax number) and completely removing website navigation. In regards to the last suggestion, one of our clients had 87,000 visitors leave the checkout process within the last year because of a particular element of the website navigation.

Building confidence

Adding confidence builders to your checkout can also increase conversion rates. This includes making any warranties and guarantees easily visible. Site security badges and your acceptance of varying payment options increases confidence as well. The main point of confidence builders is to take away the feeling of risk that a visitor may have from purchasing from your website.

Knowing your audience

For example, an eCommerce manager working for a store that sells mobile phone accessories should be aware that a significant amount of visitors will be visiting from a mobile device. Having a mobile-optimized checkout will likely increased the checkout success. If you’re not sure if your site is optimized for mobile, you can find out how to access that information here.

Testing Your Changes

Not every change you make to your checkout is guaranteed to increase the checkout success. Sometimes, you may find your changes have a negative effect. It’s important to use a testing tool like Convert.com that will allow you to test your changes (hypothesis) before you commit to expensive development time.

By taking it step by step and ensuring that you are moving in the right direction after each change, you can achieve a 60% checkout success rate in no time.

Optimizing Your Checkout Success Rate is a post from: Blue Acorn

To quote Veruca Salt of Roald Dahl’s classic , “I want data and prizes, analytics and surprises of all shapes and sizes, and now. Don’t care how, I want it now.”

It’s funny how, even back in 1971, young Veruca Salt was able to predict the importance of having analytics data in real time- especially seeing that such an option didn’t become available until very recently.

But now it’s 2013 and we finally have realized the dream of viewing your website data in real-time. Real-time meaning as it is happening right now, viva a la immediate!

What Exactly Is Real-Time Analytics?

Simply put, real-time analytics data is collected as it happens. No more will you have to wait up to 24 hours to see what is happening on your site. This means you can see how visitors are interacting with your site while they are on your site.

So why is immediate data satisfaction so important to your eCommerce site? Because in the eCommerce word, time is money.

Having an agile approach to your eCommerce business is important to maximize your conversion rate; hence the importance of real-time analytics. Using real-time data you can quickly see if current campaigns are driving the traffic you want.

Learn How Site Changes Affect Visitors

Real-time data allows you to determine if an implementation is successful. By viewing real-time data following a deployment you can see if visitors are jumping ship because of a change and quickly make changes that save your eCommerce revenue. For example if you make a change to your homepage then see your bounce rate suddenly increase greatly, you may want to roll-back your deployment and investigate the problem.

Where To Find Real-Time Data

As the importance of immediate data has become more apparent, more and more options have become available.

The easiest to access (assuming you have Google Analytics installed on your site) is Real-Time Analytics in Google Analytics.

The great thing about this option is Google continues to improve the product. It has evolved from a very basic offering to a full fledged real-time data collection unit in Google Analytics. Today, it even provides filtered data! Visitors filtered in your Google Analytics will now also be filtered in your Real-Time data. Also, you will not see data normally filtered in Google Analytics data in your Real-Time data either.

Take the time to give real-time a chance, but be warned – real-time data can be addictive! And if you don’t have Google Analytics, or aren’t sure whether or not you need it, check out these blog posts on why it’s so important:

• Analytics for eCommerce: Tools and Tips for Proactive Monitoring
• Celebrating Our Analytics Relationships
• Beginner’s Guide To Web Data Analysis: Ten Steps To Love & Success

Also, other real-time data platforms worthy of mention:

• Jirafe – Provides easy installation with a free Magento extension and basic analysis.
• GoSquared – Great Social metric integration along with a free Magento extension.
• Clicky – Beautiful real-time heat map to tell you where visitors are clicking.
• Woopra – Allows you to chat with visitors in real-time along with providing their specific session data.
• Chart Beat – Beautiful dashboard with easy share functions. Great for impressing the executives.
• Mix Panel – Real-time segmentation and funnel analysis makes this a must have for eCommerce sites.

Live Analytics for eCommerce is a post from: Blue Acorn

Loyalty to your brand can be hard to come by, but when it does, it’s important to not let it get away from you. It’s actually something we’ve written about before. There are a couple of ways to make sure you’re getting the most out of your loyal customers. This article describes two ways to do just that. One is a traditional and proven method. The other is a new and untested, but promising, strategy.

Fostering Loyalty with Rewards – Two Strategies

Programs that drive revenue and return customers

Recently, one of the commenters on our blog suggested targeting loyal customers on the order success page. I suggested that, instead of just a pat on the back, you could reward loyal customers with low-cost, low-weight items for reaching milestones. That way, you keep your investment and shipping costs low, and you are able to provide them with a physical representation of your gratitude. It sounds an awful lot like a Customer Loyalty Program, but by keeping the rules secret, you make the reward feel more organic and personal.

Depending on the needs and resources of your business, you may want to choose between a loyalty program and a secret rewards program. In addition to whether or not you let them know the rules, you would also choose when you let customers know about the reward during the shopping experience.

How an eCommerce Loyalty Rewards Program Works

With a loyalty program, you would most likely place information on the front of your site for customers to see immediately. It might even be found on category pages, product pages and the cart. The copy may read something like:

Hit $250 in lifetime purchases and receive a free pint glass.
Reach $500 and receive a free shirt!

It’s like a rewards card, except, instead of taking up space in your customers wallet (or trash can), the card is stored on the site. To add to the sense of urgency and to simplify your customers’ experience, you could add a counter to the cart or minicart as a reminder of how much more they need to spend to get their reward. Or better yet, you could use a product like Sweet Tooth Rewards to set up a points program, where customers earn points for spending, sharing, and signing up.

Many businesses who use this strategy see more regular customers who spend more money. Despite that fact, it can hardly be said that these programs are fostering true loyalty to your brand. You’re simply setting up an expectation and are now obligated to deliver. You’ve not created loyalty. You’ve created a contract.

Secret Rewards Programs

A new, more organic approach

In contrast, a secret rewards program is nothing like a punch card. It’s more like the good memory of your local neighborhood barista, who gives you a free scone after you’ve been going there a long time.

He recognizes that you spend more at his local shop instead of going to the big chain and that you’re loyal to his small business. Now, you keep going back to buy coffee there, because your actions were justified. You were recognized. Plus, you feel there’s a chance he might give you a free scone again.

How do you mimic that kind of experience in an online store?

One way is to surprise your customer with a reward on the order success page and leave out the specific numbers they reached. While a loyalty program may drive average order value up, a secret rewards program would leave more of an impression and have a greater chance of creating a loyal customer.

Instead of your customer feeling like they are the beneficiary of an algorithm that farms loyal customers, they would feel like you, their new favorite eCommerce shop, took the time to recognize their continued loyalty and rewarded them. Shoppers, especially younger shoppers of the millennial generation, seek affirmation of their choices. This program does exactly that.

Make a Lasting Impression

More tangible + more surprise = more memorable

A third option would be to wait until your customers receive the package in the mail. The surprise is stronger because it is now tangible. The more senses you can appeal to, the stronger the memory, and the more they will recall the gesture when making their next shopping decision.

The opportunities with this kind of delivery are endless. For example, over the holidays I ordered an expensive gift from an eCommerce store that sells upscale home decor, which was, in this case, a hand-painted vase. When I received the order, I was happily surprised to find they had added a free stack of “thank you” cards. The item was lightweight, probably inexpensive to produce, and tastefully smothered in their branding. More importantly to me, it was relevant to my life, especially given the season. After the holidays, I sent the free cards out to my friends and family.

Essentially, the eCommerce store created not only a loyal customer, but a brand ambassador, for the cost of printing some stationary. Could you do this? Of course. Can you come up something even better, and more specific to your store? I bet you can.

Imagine you’re Thrive, and you sell modern furniture named after American presidents. Your customers appreciate that you create truly modern furniture, something that few do nowadays. Not only that, but they like how you show an appreciation for the time period in which the style was created.

Now, let’s say someone buys the Kennedy Chair. In return, you could include a small photograph of the Kennedy brothers lounging in the Oval Office, along with a note thanking them sincerely for their loyalty and reminding them why they bought from you. You connect them to your brand, and you recognize their contribution to your business.

Whatever you end up doing, make sure it’s relevant to your customers. Remember, the neighborhood barista gave you a scone because he thought it would go nicely with your coffee. If he gave you a paint sample, you might be a little thrown.

The Right Criteria For A Good Decision

Choosing between strategies

The cost of the items you send is basically identical, but the impact on your customers is different. A loyalty reward program drives average order value (AOV) and return customers. A secret reward program that surprises loyal customers creates truly loyal customers who evangelize your store and drive AOV and return customers, only at a lower rate. Also, the returns you see will be far less immediate.

Sometimes, an online business will lose money on a pay-per-click campaign, but they will continue to run the campaign to raise brand awareness. Even though they lose money, they grow recognition that will ultimately bring them more customers. When making your decision about a rewards program, consider the resources of your store, how badly you wish to grow your brand, and the loyalty your customers have in it.

So the last question you may be asking is, do you really have to choose? Who can say no to higher AOV and return customers? Then again, who can say no to a loyal customer who markets your brand for you? You can do both if you are willing to double up on your costs. Just differentiate the rewards you offer enough so that each leaves a lasting impression.

What True Loyalty Is Made Of

Tough to measure, difficult to grow, and almost impossible to fake

For customers to feel a sense of recognition, there needs to be something to recognize. Maybe customers appreciate that you inject a sense of humor into your site. Maybe they appreciate that, in such a tasteless society, your site maintains a sense of dignity and propriety. Or maybe, you make returns easy by offering free shipping.

In the end, all rewards programs are strategies to foster loyalty, not create it, which is great if you already have a base of loyal followers. If you want to create loyalty, you have to do good business. The confidence your customers have in you from years of positive transactions will drive up loyalty and revenue more than any other tactic. As Josiah Royce once wrote, “The single act of business fidelity is an act of loyalty to that general confidence of man in man upon which the whole fabric of business rests.” A good start is having policies that take away the risk of online shopping and not making mistakes that lose customers.

Fostering Loyalty with Rewards – Two Strategies is a post from: Blue Acorn

In Designing a Landing Page, Part I, we discussed the use of certain confidence builders on a landing page in order to persuade your visitors to answer your call to action. With input from our fictional client, Orange Walnut, we were able to construct a mockup that combined their vision, the confidence builders we selected, and the best practices that we’ve developed over the years. While client preferences and best practices are a great place to start, they are just that, a starting point. The most important step in designing a landing page involves the tools and steps used to optimize it.

Pre-Launch Optimization

Getting it right before you launch

So we haven’t launched the site yet. That means there are no analytics to pull from, no data to stew over, and no A/B test results to examine. A few years ago, pre-launch “optimization” would have been based on whatever the designer and client thought worked in the past. At most firms, that’s still the case.

Predicting Behavior with Custom Tools

Custom tools for unique pages

At Blue Acorn, our design team doesn’t design in the dark. We built a custom tool that predicts how customers will respond to different visuals. We also use another custom tool that uses an algorithm to predict the path of human eye movements. These tools allow us to deliver landing pages that are as optimized for human eyes as possible before being seen by the public. It’s more than intuition and experience. It’s science.

The first tool, which has been custom built by Blue Acorn, defines hot spots and cold zones in terms of contrast. Hot spots show up red and signify areas of concentrated visual contrast. The more contrast, the more an area will impact and draw visitors’ eyes. Areas of lower contrast turn up cold and are more neglected than their high-contrast counterparts.

On our page, we realized that Tom Selleck’s face was a real hot spot of activity, a characteristic we attribute to his magnificent mustache and bronzed cheekbones. By moving Mr. Selleck up, we added more contrast – and thus, attention – to our primary call to action, the phone number.

In the same vein, a piece of paper and a small musket were areas of heavy contrast within the video panel. So, we made the play button in the video brighter, and consequently the two points of contrast meshed together to give us a large hot spot on our secondary call to action.

We adjusted the levels of contrast to bring more attention to the brand logo and the scent, which in this example is the image and text in the upper right hand corner. With all of our confidence builders optimized to stand out visually, our next step was to arrange them in a manner that would (a) fall along a predictive visual pathway and (b) lead visitors’ eyes to the call to action.

Predicting a Visual Pathway

The key to better placement

Enter the second tool we mentioned earlier. Using custom-defined algorithms, this tool, which we call “Inception Wire” (because that sounded really cool), revealed the pathway that the average set of human eyes would naturally take to explore our current landing page mockup. It gives a visual map of where human eyes travel in the old-map style of Indiana Jones (which, by the way, nearly starred Tom Selleck).

The tool revealed that visitors’ eyes would travel from the play button in the video, to Tom Selleck’s cookie duster, to the brand name, to a random spot in the video, to the scent, back to the video, and after a few random glances around, it finally wound up timidly passing over the phone number.

Well, shoot. Our confidence builders stood out, but they weren’t yet in the optimal position to lead Orange Walnut’s visitors to the call to action.

All is not lost, however. We didn’t become the intelligent eCommerce Agency by being a one-trick pony. We decided to do something very simple, logical, and revolutionary.

We mirrored the design.

The simplicity of this decision should be obvious. What was on the right is now on the left. What was on the left is now on the right. Simple. It’s logical to move the call to action to the left side because every word of every paragraph of everything you’ve ever read begins on the left. So why is this revolutionary? Because so many eCommerce sites continue to place their call to action buttons on the right.

The Payoff

Guiding eyes to the right place

After our very simple, logical, and revolutionary design changes were made to the mockup, we analyzed the new layout again. The predicted path for attention now goes from the video button to Tom Selleck’s well-equipped upper lip, the brand, the scent, the description, and ends on the call to action.

According to our tool, visitors will most likely look at every confidence builder before being guided directly to the primary call to action. Is that a success? Heck, yeah. Are we ready to start theming this page? Of course. Are we done optimizing? No way.

The Road Ahead

Optimization never ends

Our design work, guided by these tools, put our client far ahead of where they would have been in terms of an optimized design, but none of the methods that we’ve described thus far are examples of true conversion testing, which we highly advocate at Blue Acorn. Such testing involves tracking the results of publically available landing page variations and lots of people, and people, as I’m sure you know, can be strange.

Nevertheless, now that we have our client, Orange Walnut, starting with what we believe to be the best design for the average human eyes, we will perfect the optimization of this landing page by testing against the same eyes that come to visit Orange Walnut’s site. To do this, Blue Acorn will collect data on how users behave by tracking how long they are on the page, where they come from, where they go, if they call, how many times they play the video, where their mouse travels, and even where their eyes travel. We’ll also run an A/B split test, pitting our latest version of the landing page against a more traditional version, in order to be positive about which one converts better.

There are a few key things to remember about designing a landing page. First, optimization is rarely ever 100% finished. You can almost always get more mileage out of your conversion rate. However, starting a hundred miles ahead of the competition is a major advantage. Second, confidence builders should be used but not abused. Try not to use too many, and don’t be crass about drawing your attention to them. Third, always remember that the call to action is the most important aspect of every page.

*Note: While Orange Walnut is a fictional client, 100% of this process is true to Blue Acorn.

Designing a Landing Page, Part II: Pre-Launch Optimization is a post from: Blue Acorn