1. Running both search and content network campaigns together – Split search and content campaigns so you can control their budgets separately. These are two very different animals.
2. Not using analytics – Analytics and conversion tracking are musts. If you can’t track it, how do you know if you are making money or losing it?
3. Starting with too many keywords – Start with few keywords (5-10) per ad group, then grow slowly.
4. Using broad match options – Stay away from broad match. Stick to phrase and exact match options.
5. Using only one landing page or sending all clicks to the homepage – Each ad group should go to a specific landing page targeted for the keywords in the group.
6. Not targeting countries – Start with USA. Don’t branch out unless you can show conversions at home.
7. Bidding and budgeting according to Adwords/Adcenter recomendations – Take ad and bid optimization recommendations with a grain of salt. After all, they are coming from a company who has a financial interest in getting you to bid more.

Bottom line… start out as simply as possible. This will allow you to learn and understand before moving on to more advanced techniques. It is your ad budget that will be wasted by jumping in to the deep end of the pool before learning to swim.

Split Search and Content Network Campaigns

Search campaigns and content network campaigns are two very different animals. Search users are generally further along in the purchasing process. They entered in your specific search keywords into a search engine after all.

With the content network you usually need to inform more before you start selling as they most likely weren’t expressly shopping for something when they clicked the ad. They were reading the news or their email when they saw your advertisement.

These two big differences mean huge CTR differences for each of the campaigns. Good CTR for a search campaign is generally in the 3%-5% range. For a content campaign, good CTRs may be more likely 0.5%-1%.

Another difference is the methods in which your ads are triggered for each campaign. With search campaigns, ads are triggered based on the keywords you are bidding on. Content network campaigns are not so straight forward. Yes, the keywords you supply come into play, but in most cases, these are a rough guide, not a rule as in the search campaign. Google, Bing and others may try to place your ads on as many sites as possible to fill their inventory of ad slots available.

Use Analytics and Conversion Tracking

This one is so simple. If you aren’t tracking your performance, how do you know if you are wasting your money? Are you profitable paying $1.00 a click to get someone to your site? Or is profitability only possible with $0.25 clicks. How do you know what your break even point is?

Without basic analytics and conversion tracking, there is no way to judge ROI for your campaigns. You quite possibly could be spending more money to get that customer than they could ever return to you in sales. Not Good Business!

It’s also worth mentioning here that conversion tracking should be verified as properly functioning before launching any sizable campaigns.

Start With Few Keywords Per Ad Group

In the beginning, you have so many variables in play there is no way anyone could keep the relationships between them straight, much less a PPC novice. Between the keywords themselves, CPC bids, the actual ad text and the landing pages, how do you know how each effects the other?

Sure, a high CPC bid will usually get your ad higher and better placement and more views. This in turn should result in more clicks, but are these clicks leading to more sales? The trick isn’t to pay the most money to get the most sales. The goal is to pay the least amount of money to get the most highly targeted clicks.

Which keyword group converts best with which landing page? How does the keyword quality score affect bids and ROI? Which ad text gets the most clicks for which keyword group?

It can be daunting to keep all of this in your head at once. Now multiply all of these questions by dozens and dozens, or even hundreds of keywords and it will be impossible to wrap your head around. If you are just starting out, the goal should be to learn and to make money. The learning part will be much easier by limiting the variables as much as possible and sticking to several tightly targeted ad groups with only a dozen keywords each.

Stay Away from Broad Match

Broad match means that if your given keyword is auto insurance, using broad match, your ad could be shown for auto insurance fraud, how to scam my auto insurance, auto insurance agents in Timbuktu and thousands of others you never intended. Unless you can convert that traffic, you are wasting your ad budget on these placements.

Stick to phrase match and exact match bidding for your keywords until you have a better grasp on the potential placements with broad match. Your ad budget will thank you.

Use Landing Pages Targeted for Each Ad Group

As we discussed earlier, search and content network users most likely aren’t in the same stage of making a purchase decision. Searchers more often are closer to the purchasing mindset, while content network traffic is most often still in the information gathering stage.

Trying to close the sale to both using the same landing page is most likely going to leave one of your campaigns with a dismal conversion rate.

Target Your Home Country First

This is a simple checkbox in most advertising platform’s campaign setups. If you don’t already sell to folks outside of the USA, why would you pay for clicks to get them to your site?

Prove your campaigns and landing pages on your best target demographic before hitting the road and going international.

Don’t Rely on Advertiser’s Recommendations

In setting up hundreds of campaigns, I have never once followed the recommendations of Google Adwords or Adcenter as to my budget or bid prices. While I’m not saying these are highly suspect, it is worthwhile to remember that they make more money when you spend more with them. Their recommendations may get you to the top of their placements, but they may send you to the poor house too without many more sales.

Bid what you are comfortable with and budget what you can spend each month.

If you can eliminate these easy mistakes from your campaign you will be much more likely to see early successes in you PPC campaigns instead of wasting a whole month’s budget without seeing a sale. We do provide campaign setup services and ppc management services if need just a helping hand or would like us to take over your PPC marketing efforts.

Coming up with eye-catching PPC headlines can make or break an Adwords PPC campaign. If your headline doesn’t pull the reader in to click your PPC text ad, you might as well save your money and enjoy the silence of an empty website. That is why experienced PPC marketers get paid the big bucks to craft enticing ad copy consisting of only a few dozen words.

What if you don’t currently have that kind of experience to get inside your customer’s head to know what will motivate them to click on your advertisement? Harness the collective experience of the public on Twitter to help you decide what headlines will work best for you. The micro-blogging format of Twitter is similar to PPC headlines in that you have a very limited amount of space to get your point across. No other medium requires the economy of brevity that Twitter does except PPC.

So how can you use Twitter to conduct an A/B test of two different headlines?

1. Select fresh content. The process is to tweet links to the same content using two different headlines. Using existing content you have already tweeted may irritate some of your followers by the time they get the same content the fourth or fifth time.
2. Craft two distinct headlines. You can test two completely different headlines of varying lengths or change only one or two words if you have a killer headline already in mind.
3. Create two different short URLs to the same content from step 1 using your favorite URL shortener that includes analytics. If your shortener doesn’t provide analytics, use the Google URL Builder and Google Analytics to track the clicks each headline receives.
4. Tweet headline A using one of the short URLs created and wait 12-24 hours.
5. Tweet headline B using the other short URL. I prefer to tweet both headlines in the morning, one day apart. If you tweet them close in time together, you really will start to lose followers for spamming your list, so be aware.
6. Watch your analytics for the next few days until a winner can be declared from which gets the most clicks. Depending on the number of followers and the amount of activity and interest you command it may take several days to a week to receive enough clicks to either one to reach statistical significance.

While this method isn’t a perfect solution for split testing headlines, it is a quick hack to get valuable feedback from hundreds of real people.

The cost? Fifteen minutes of your time.

The benefit? Real savings of your PPC budget.

If your Twitter followers are targeted to similar keywords as your PPC campaigns you should get more accurate results.

We see thousands of advertising headlines every day; billboards, signage, television, newspapers, Google and almost every website we visit. Life inundates us with countless messages every day and with every page. Early on we learn to tune out the things that we don’t think is applicable to us or feel the need to deal with at the moment. We learn to ignore mom while playing a video game or talking on the phone. We automatically start talking or leave the room when a commercial comes on television. Online, we learn to navigate Google and our favorite sites without noticing anything that doesn’t immediately speak to us in that moment.

An advertisement has at most a second or two to grab a viewer’s attention with most PPC text formats. Think of all of the distractions there are in any one pageview. On a Google search results page, stiff competition comes from the other six to ten text advertisements on the page; not to mention the search results themselves. If you run ads on the search or content networks you could be competing with visual elements such as content images and banner ads as well.

Clear and Concise

First, do be clear and concise. You have only twenty-five characters with a Google text ad headline. Use them wisely. Don’t waste headline space on words that don’t relate to your product, offer or the keywords being bid on.

In general text ads contain their main point in the headline. Each line below in decreasing order of importance emphasizes or expounds on the main point proposed in the headline. If a potential customer doesn’t understand your ad, they most likely won’t be clicking to visit your site… it’s simply not relevant to them and forgotten. What does this mean for the advertiser? Lower click through rates and higher cost per click.

A good way to start testing ads for a new campaign is take your highest traffic keyword phrases and work them into the headlines of separate ads targeted to narrow groups of similar keywords. In addition to the keywords, state simply a unique value proposition in the headline to give your ad more context relevancy. If you craft a value proposition so that it adds urgency as well, you can greatly increase your click through rate.

Let’s say you are bidding on the keyword and close variations. A user types in weight loss and searches. They see the following headline for the top PPC ad:

Simple Weight Loss

This headline is deceptively simple, but can be very powerful if you can follow through on the statement. The keyword weight loss is displayed in bold because it appeared in the user’s search query. There is little confusion about with should be on the other side of this link. There can be a lot of different and personal definitions of such a generic word as simple, though. What is simple to one is not necessarily simple to someone else. However, you’ve set everyone’s expectations that you have the simple answer, so be prepared to prove it on your landing page.

A positive side effect of having a clear message and giving the viewer an accurate idea about what to expect after they click through your advert is pre-screening your visitors. For example, if you are creating a new campaign to sell supplements and exercise videos to men. Which of the following headlines will likely convert better?

Simple Weight Loss
Simple Weight Loss For Men

I’ll bet you dollars to donuts, all other things being equal, that the second, more specific ad will convert better once you get a visitor to the site. Why? For the simple fact that with the first one, there is over double the audience, men and women. It would be just as likely for a man or a woman to click through. If a site caters to men only, a large portion of women clicking their ads are wasted ad spend costing real dollars.

If a site caters to both men and women, specificity is still important. Direct the male ad to a men specific landing page and similar for the women specific ads. The final conversion rate will most likely be better for each. Pre-screening a visitor as such can be a powerful tool in increasing the overall profitability of your account.

Audience

Do know your audience. Making a purchase decision is a largely emotional experience. Men and women have different emotional triggers as well as the differences inherit in different age groups, geographic locations and ethnicities.

Let’s look at another overly simplified example involving our weight loss campaigns. This time, he is selling exercise videos aimed at women. A women looking for diet and exercise information most likely doesn’t feel good about some aspect of her body… otherwise she wouldn’t be searching. That is a negative emotion. Turn the negative around and sell the positive vision. Sell symptom relief not facts. Sell the hope that fitting back into that ‘little black dress’ is attainable. Hope is positive. If you can link that hope with your product… SOLD!

Women typically want benefits, men want features. Women want to picture themselves with the product and how it benefits them. Men have problems that need solving and each feature can solve one or more problems. Everyone wants quick and everyone wants easy. Whatever you do make it about them; the headline should be about the reader first, not about your product.

Which of these headlines are emotional pleas and which are problem solving statements?

1. Tongue Tied at Parties?
2. Stop Stuttering in a Week
3. How to Flirt on Facebook Safely
4. Get a Date Tonight on Facebook
5. Wear That Little Black Dress Again
6. Rock Hard Abs Without Crunches

The odd-numbered ones attempt to elicit feelings in the reader. Headlines #1 and #3 attempt to connect to the reader through the emotions of fear and anxiety. If a reader identifies with either of the groups spoken to, the message rings even louder on an emotional level. Headline five promises a happy ending and leads a reader to visualize themselves in that dress. What could be better?

The even-number headlines above, speak on a more direct problem — solution level. They identify or infer a problem and tell the reader they have the solution. Just as important, each headline promises the reader something specific about their solution; quick, immediate or easy.

Problem: Stuttering
Solution: Use this product for one week and be cured

Problem: No dates
Solution: Use this product and be cured tonight

Problem: Flabby Abs
Solution: Use this product… and it’s easier than crunches.

When employing a problem solving headline, especially on a common problem with many solutions available, it is important to give the reader a reason why your particular solution is any better than the next. Common areas where products can try to set themselves apart from the pack are:

1. Price
2. Ease of use
3. Speed of results
4. Convenience
5. Best / Optimum / Paramount Solution

There are certainly many others. Depending on your market and competition, some will speak more directly to the intended consumer and provide the right amount of urgency to get more relevant and targeted clicks to your page. This in turn will lead to more conversions in fewer paid clicks and lower overall cost per conversion, making you more money every day.

Conclusions

These generalizations will never approach the accuracy of a controlled test of two different headlines head to head. With some products and markets, gender and age metrics may not follow any decipherable pattern. Knowing and understanding that there are differences should allow you to look outside the box and find more profitable headlines and niches to exploit.

A headline that draws a lot of traffic but doesn’t convert well, shouldn’t be discounted fully without further examination. From the amount of traffic, you have found an obvious hook to pull people to your site. That is half of the battle in any online sales funnel. The problem now is converting more of those users. If the headline is appropriately targeted, the traffic should be similar to your target demographic. In many cases, it may be a product already in your catalog or closely related. Ask yourself a few questions:

What were those users really looking for?
Can we sell it to them profitably with PPC?

Answer both of those and you’ve just created another profitable sales channel!

Image: Damian Brandon

Idea and example packed post at Practical Ecommerce with real world examples of optimizations for any ecommerce site.

6 Common Ecommerce Mistakes

I am amazed every day at quality of product pages of ecommerce sites, even supposedly major sites. One little picture, showing one color option of some product, often taken out of context, sliced out on a white background so most product pictures look OK on the websites whatever background color. They may sell some, but poor shopping experiences leave much money on the table that optimized sites can easily scoop up.

Bottom line… shopping is an emotional experience. When shopping in person, you are able to touch the merchandise, feel the material, examine the workmanship and in many cases try it on, take a test drive or sleep in that Sleep Number Bed for 30 days.

With ecommerce, you get none of those tactile experiences. We purchase online largely from a 2D picture on a small monitor, so we must rely on other ways to spark that emotional interest in our shoppers. You’re article has provided some great ways to lead customers down an emotional path towards the shopping cart.

Having lots of great pictures with multiple color options and angles should be at the top of the list. Follow this up with great product content so that the customer can see themselves wearing the sweater or driving that shiny new automobile and you’re well on your way to putting your customers in that emotional buying nirvana.

The reasons for shopping cart abandonment can be as fickle as the dinner was burning or I don’t have the money to as easily remedied as the shipping was $2 more than the competition or the preferred method of payment wasn’t available. Armed with the why’s of your cart abandonment, many issues can be easily remedied to increase your conversion rate and overall ROI.

Why are Shopping Carts Abandoned?

A quick search of Google will show many surveys on shopping cart abandonment. Some of the most cited reasons are (in relative order of occurrence):

1. Shipping was too expensive.
2. Just wanted to price shop.
3. Lack of money after seeing final total.
4. Wanted a coupon.
5. Concerned about security of payment information.
6. Concerned about support after the sale.
7. The website didn’t offer my preferred payment option.

All of these items can be remedied to some extent once the issues are known. With a little creativity and outside-the-box thinking you should be able to minimize your website’s abandoned carts and give your customers a better user experience at the same time.

Shipping Was Too Expensive

If you have room to cut shipping costs and still maintain profitability, doing so will increase your conversion rate. The only way to know what level it takes to remain profitable is to crunch the numbers using accurate ecommerce metrics.

Other options may include:

Shop Around Other Shipping Vendors

Search for another shipping vendor using your current shipper’s rate sheet. Every prospective vendor will know what they have to beat to earn you business. Give your current vendor a chance to cut their fees as well.

Offer a Low Cost Base Rate Shipment Option

Offer a set rate base shipping option. This can even be used to improve your overall fulfillment response times. State in your shipping TOS that base rate shipping is 7-10 days delivery time. Your customer’s then have the option to receive their order cheaply or quickly but not always both. Base rate shipment orders can be filled as sales volume allows as you have extra days to get the items packaged and out the door in busy times.

Increase Only Expedited Shipping Fees

Depending on the volume of next-day and 2 day shipping sales, the costs on one or all of the expedited services can be increased while leaving base rate, ground and 3 day options as cheaply as possible. It’s much better to impact only a portion of your customer’s delivery costs than to make everyone pay more. People are accustomed to paying more for expedited service anyway.

Add Shipping Estimator to Shopping Cart

Another partial solution, though not as effective at increasing conversion rates, is offering shipping estimation in the shopping cart itself. If a user supplies their zip code, you can present them with estimated shipping cost right in the shopping cart after first adding a product. While this may partially solve the solution by lowering the number of carts abandoned after finding out final costs, you still may be missing sales. The abandonment will just occur earlier in the shopping experience and before you’ve had a chance to capture their email. Attaching an email to a cart is important in that you can use this information to email and attempt to close the sale at a later date. But that’s a whole other post.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will cover each to the top issues that can lead to abandoned shopping carts and ways you can streamline your checkout process to avoid these pitfalls. To follow this series subscribe to our feed or subscribe to email updates.

Need help implementing any of these abandoned cart tips into your website or shopping cart? Contact Cartmetrix to inquire how we can help you with ecommerce optimization, from data mining your analytics to reducing shopping cart abandonment.

Photo: dno1967b

A recent comScore survey on trends in email marketing concluded that webmail usage is on the decline (down 6%) while using mobile devices to read email is up 36%. What does this mean for email marketing?

As the number of smartphones increases, more and more people will be reading their emails on handheld devices while out and about. Many consumers use their mobiles for a quick check of their inbox to see if anything is new or requires immediate attention. Mobile users are more likely to be in the middle of something else like commuting or shopping at the grocery store. If your message doesn’t immediately get it’s point across and speak to the user it’s likely to get trashed on the handheld device and never opened on a full-sized email client.

These tips can help your marketing emails have a better chance of being read and their links getting clicks.

• Short form email should get better response in most cases as many may not take the extra time to scan a longer message as they would at their laptop or desktop.
• Wordwrap lines at 30-40 characters instead of allowing lines to wrap naturally. This makes the content feel lighter and easier to read.
• Short paragraphs of 1-3 sentences adds to the light feeling of the content. This may not make your grammar teacher happy but the object of effective email marketing is to have your email read, understood and acted upon.
• Instead of relying on all paragraphical text, utilize bullet points and short lists throughout so the important points may be quickly scanned.
• Subject lines should be short and concise. Scanning your inbox on a tiny smartphone screen isn’t the same as on your full email client and 23″ monitor. Make it easier for your readers to get an accurate picture of what your content will be and you’ll keep more messages out of the mobile trash bin.

Is it just me or is the quality of the apps in the iPhone App Store declining?

Traditionally Mac applications were developed by Mac people for Mac people (even if the premise was juevenile like fart apps). The developer and the user had the same functional and aesthetic expectations. These benchmarks were based on the shared experience with the operating system and hardware over years of usage. Mac users expected a simplicity in design and function. Since the developer’s were largely end-users as well, everything fit together well. Miles better than any competing product.

It just worked. Well. Without a manual.

Now, so many new developers from other platforms are jumping in to create their own iPhone or Mac applications. How do we keep the quality, functionality and aesthetics we have come to expect as “Mac Nerds”?

Reading through the reviews of some recent apps (both iPhone and Mac App Store), I don’t seem to be the only one to be having problems with horrible interfaces, confusing functionality and poor user experience. It’s almost like I’m reliving nightmares from bad Windows shareware back in the 90′s when I still spoke Microsoft.

Initially there was much complaining about the apps making it in the App Store and about some famous ones that didn’t. This was to be expected for any new project of such worldwide fanfare. Jump ahead eighteen months though, and we still see the same complaints about ripoffs and copyright infringement.

I am all for the continued growth of a great platform, but I’m wondering how much we have to sacrifice for world domination.

Do Apple’s long standing, core customers really want to dominate the world as the largest monolithic company?

With so much income being generated from these ‘side’ businesses which have been driving Apple’s growth in profitability and marketshare, do “Mac Nerds” fit in anymore?

BoostCTR has published a great list of they’re favorite PPC blogs. Give it a look when you have some time and need something new to read. They list and link to several favorite articles in each blog.

The Best PPC Blogs – The Definitive List of Pay-Per Click Blogs

Social networking is here to stay. Sites like Facebook and Twitter have touched a cord with the public worldwide. Millions flock to their accounts daily just to stay connected to the people and businesses that matter to them. While it may not seem relevant on the surface, successful business owners are finding ways to generate revenue and enhance customer service all through the unique advantages of starting a social network marketing campaign.

Convenient for Customer

First and probably most important, social networking is convenient for customers. A properly managed account will give business owners instant access to customer feedback. This can prove invaluable quickly. If your customers see that you are putting effort into social media, they may respond in many ways. They may let you know what you are doing well and what you should improve on. If you engage them, they may share stories of how your product or service has made a difference in their lives. This is an incredible tool for further marketing efforts because any helpful feedback you receive can be used to attract more clients.

Convenient for Business

Social marketing is more convenient to you the business owner as well. Connecting with your customers on Facebook or Twitter is often a faster and more effective way to communicate with them. Most users check their social accounts and friends/contacts nearly as often as they do their email. If there are issues that arise with a product, your main website or even the news media, you can keep customers in the know just by making a simple page update. The communication advantages alone can show immediate ROI for many businesses resistant to technological changes. Twitter can be a great way to connect with your customers easily and quickly day or night.

Generate Traffic and Revenue

Social networking sites also give you a way to generate traffic and revenue by offering special incentives to those who follow you. Discounts, promotions and contests are popular among businesses that are using social media as an effective marketing tool. Not only does this get more customers to your store or website, but it also allows your customers to see the value in the social networking relationship. Attracting users to your Facebook page and Twitter feed is the first hurdle. Keeping them as friends or fans is the next. Give them a reason to come back often with quality content.

Positive Intent

Using social media often and appropriately shows your customers your positive intent about your business. Embracing modern technology is a way of showing progress and forward thinking within the hierarchy of your company. When customers see that you have an eye on the future, they will help you spread the word.

Branding

Finally, social media is becoming a necessary part of the overall branding initiative that you should have as a business. Branding is important to longevity. The more ways that you can show your customer base that you are out there, the better the odds will be that your business will connect with them and convert sales. That alone makes social media worth the effort.

From social media monitoring to find out what others are saying about your products to posting your latest news on Facebook there are many new ways to meet and interact with customers and potential customers online. Finding the niches that will help your business the most is the key to maximizing your resources when investing time and money in social network marketing.

What are some of the ways you use social network marketing to attract customers and generate buzz around your business? Use the comments below.

The only metric that matters in business is dollars in the bank. Everything else is secondary. How often do we check this figure to gauge how well we are doing? We use it to tell us how successful, proud or unhappy we should be with ourselves.

What are some of these secondary metrics?

Click Through Rate
CTR = Number of clicks a link or ad receives / Number of views

Conversion Rate
CR = Total Visitors / Total Conversions
Usually used in conjunction with a specific segment of traffic such as PPC or email marketing.

Visitor Value
VV = Total Visitors / Total Income

You’ll see a lot more metrics reported and discussed but these are the most powerful to get a basic understanding of initially. Get an overview of the forest before you start picking out individual trees.

Visitor value encompasses every other metric in such a way so that you could successfully manage a site based on this figure alone. Do something good brings more traffic and sales. As long as your VV is increasing you can be confident that your increased traffic is bringing in buyers too. With more traffic and a falling VV, you are probably bringing in the wrong kind of traffic.

On the other hand if your traffic is falling but your VV is rising, whatever you are doing is bringing in more buyers and less lookers. Keep it up.

Visitor value doesn’t give us much granularity especially if you are testing multiple aspects of the same site. There is no accurate way to tell which specific change is responsible for the increased VV.

True ecommerce is a game of inches; 1% here, .75% there all add up month over month. Sure in the beginning starting a PPC campaign or re-marketing campaign might show a quick 5% gain, but those types of wins are few an far between.

Steady month over improvements of 1%-3% should be the goal of a successful online marketing campaign.

I’m going to say that again. Steady month over improvements of 1%-3% should be the goal of any successful online marketing campaign. With that as the game plan, it’s easy to be on the lookout for new product lines, partnerships and other ‘homerun’ wins for a larger payday. The steady month over improvements, pay the bills (and probably _your_ salary) while the homeruns help separate you from the pack. The store owner from his competitors and you from your peers in ecommerce marketing.

If you happen to be both, well then take some time (and profit) and enjoy yourself. You’ve earned it.

If you are the consultant, string enough homeruns together and you can price yourself to the next level.

The entire point is to become familiar with your site’s metrics. Start out with just Visitor Value. Figure it out every day. It takes less than five minutes to look up the two numbers and divide them out. Start a spreadsheet. Keep track by date. Even better… if you have Google Analytics installed on your site, VV is one of its included metrics. Create a custom report showing VV over the last few months.

Numbers for some people just don’t make sense. Some guys can list off every baseball stat of every player on their favorite teams. Are they math geniuses because of this recall? Probably not. More likely its the simple rote familiarity. Read sports news everyday, watch ESPN recap, watch a game or two a week, that’s a lot of idle brain cells being tasked. Something has to stick.

Try to do the same with your site’s metrics. Just look a them everyday until they start to make sense. Eventually you should begin to see the trends; from differences between weekends and weekdays to monthly cycles.

Once the fog of data that is your statistics starts to become more focused in to view, you should start to see connections between the metrics and be able to ascertain how they can affect each other. These common relationships should get you thinking:

High CTR but low CR?

Most likely you are experiencing a lot of traffic that doesn’t like what you have. To find out more specifics find out how long they are sticking around and if they are making it to your checkout funnel.

Low CTR but high CR?

This is a great problem to have almost! You may not be receiving enough traffic but the traffic you are receiving is laser targeted on your offer and converting at a high rate. If you can increase the volume of this traffic, do it. If not try to find similar niches that will convert at a high rate.

Low VV and high CTR?

You are generating a lot of traffic, but a low percentage of them are actually converting. Look for better traffic, which usually means higher converting keywords. Use analytics to try to weed out marketing channels that are not currently profitable.