Checkout this infographic of the Google AdWords landscape from the folks at SEOmoz.

Produced by SEOmoz. ©2013.

Irina Tsumarava is a Marketing Coordinator at aheadWorks, a dynamic market leading provider of Magento extensions, Magento templates and themes, and custom development services with a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class solutions for eCommerce businesses. 

Do you find that visitors of your website leave it too quickly? They enter your web store and after a while (often no longer than a few seconds) they close the page, thus increasing your bounce rate and lowering conversions. Working on Magento platform, aheadWorks makes the following recommendations to its clients to help eliminate this problem.

In contrast to visitors of brick and mortar stores, online customers can enter and leave web stores with a click or two of a mouse. If the time between these clicks is more than 20 seconds, it is a small victory. However, the main goal is to convert visitors of the store into customers. But due to numerous factors you may fail here. First you need to think about things that may cause visitors to leave. Numerous articles list up to 30 reasons, but only few describe the ways to cope with them. Let`s focus our attention on the reasons a potential customer might leave your website, and functionality that may prevent them from doing so.

1.       Content Structure and Design

Complicated content structure and poor design head the list of possible website drawbacks, because people simply can’t find what they are looking for. What are some ways to fix this issue? Inform your customers about stock availability of your products. Create visually appealing label images and call-to-action texts, rotate pictures of your items, so that you can be sure your customers’ attention will be definitely attracted. Play with different animation effects and select the one which is the most comfortable for your customers’ eyes. Promotional, advertising and other blocks on the product page are quite useful too. But keep in mind – too many of them look irritating, so maintain the balance.

2.       Navigation

Complex navigation makes users feel helpless and frustrated. To eliminate that, first, transform your page loading process by removing annoying reloads that frequently occur when users click “add to cart” and “delete from cart” buttons. Then enable site search with the autocomplete option, show product pictures to users in search results, and allow customers to configure search item layout. This all will make navigation more logical. Let your visitors move directly to desired product pages, completely bypassing the search results page.

3.       Checkout page

Online stores that use multiple page checkouts have been reported to cause 60% of shopping cart abandonment. For the most part, the longer the process, the easier it is for people to change their minds and avoid purchasing. It is much wiser to allow customers to buy directly from the product page with a single mouse click and also to remove all unnecessary checkout questions, replacing them with one page checkout. Recent studies suggest that buying with a single click increases conversion rate up to 70%.

4.       Blog

It is always difficult to trust someone you don’t know. Blogging establishes a personal connection between the website and target audience, thus, building reader loyalty. Writing a good blog has proved to be one of the most effective marketing tactics. If your customers feel you listen to them and respond to their needs, they are more likely to come back to your store again. With the help of blog you will learn more about your customers’ choices, views, and preferences. Being a part of the blog community, your customers will spread the word about you and express their honest opinion.

5.       Advertising

Numerous sites use advertising as the main source of income. However, poor graphics and tasteless headache-inducing advertisements very often prompt visitors to escape and never come back. Make sure to extend your website functionality with multiple configurable blocks for positioning ads on checkout and shopping cart pages. Thus, users won’t be enraged about ads that flash and pop.

Where these ideas useful to you? Have comments or suggestions? Drop us a line and let us know what you think.

Mary Weinstein is an Account Manmager at CPC Strategy specializing in Comparison Shopping Engine, and PLA management with an emphasis on individualized merchant attention.

Amazon and Google Shopping are major heavy hitters in the comparison shopping and ecommerce arena. This year, Google Shopping’s switch to paid cost per click listings on Google Shopping through Product Listing Ads has switched up the rivalry even further.

CPC Strategy analyzes data across the comparison shopping engines (CSEs) each quarter based on metrics such as cost per click (CPC), traffic, conversion rate (CR), and revenue for online merchants.

This last quarter, Q4 2012 the engine data is quite varied for the CSEs, most notably Google Shopping and Amazon Product Ads.

Cost Per Click: Google vs. Amazon

In the war for Q4 dominance, Google Shopping won out with cheaper cost per click (CPC) rates.

For Google, Q4 was the first fully paid quarter in Google’s history. However, Google’s average $0.31 CPC for Q4 2012 was still cheaper than Amazon Product Ads average CPC of $0.41. Overall, Google Shopping was 32.5% cheaper CPC than Amazon for the holiday quarter.

Conversion Rate: Google vs. Amazon

Google Shopping has seen a steady decrease in conversion rate metrics since 2011, with a 22.35% decrease from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012.

Inversely, Amazon Product Ads saw a 57.5% increase in conversion rates, from 1.8% in Q4 2011 to 2.8% in Q4 2012.

Traffic: Amazon vs. Google

Although Google Shopping is now charging for its traffic, that isn’t stopping consumers from shopping on the engine. Google Shopping sent 96% more traffic to sellers compared to Amazon Product Ads in Q4 of 2012.

Compared to the previous quarter, where Amazon dominated traffic generation.  Google sent merchants 144% more traffic than Amazon Product Ads in Q3 2012, when the transition to a commercial Google Shopping took place.

Check out the full Rankings to see additional engine metrics such as cost per sale.

This post was written by Terry Costa, Vice President of Marketing, SLI Systems. As VP of marketing, Terry Costa is responsible for SLI Systems’ global marketing efforts as well as for driving growth of SLI’s search technology and services in the e-commerce and publishing industries.

We know that more and more holiday shoppers are doing their gift buying online, but there are some new developments this holiday season that eCommerce professionals should have on their radar. For one thing, mobile devices are playing an even bigger role in the shopping process. In addition, the audience for online holiday shopping appears to shifting somewhat – in fact, older shoppers are increasingly enjoying the benefits of online shopping.

These new angles in eCommerce – during the holiday season and beyond – require special attention from eCommerce providers. For instance, a recent study from Valero found that 20 percent of shoppers ages 55 to 64 expect to do some portion of their shopping online during the 2012 holiday season. According to the study, this is the highest percentage of online shoppers from any age group, followed closely by shoppers ages 45 to 54 (19 percent).

18-24

In an interesting turn, as the study uncovered, shoppers ages 18 to 24 were least likely to do their shopping online – which is a switch from conventional wisdom that younger consumers are more likely to embrace eCommerce tools than their older counterparts.

If older consumers are increasingly taking to online shopping, what does this mean for your business? Make sure your online shopping experience welcomes all shoppers, not just the under-30s. Usability features like refinements and relevant site search results will help all of your customers – even the less-savvy online shoppers – easily navigate around your site and find the products they want. Also, make sure that your merchandising showcases your most popular products and promotions, such as free shipping and free returns, in a variety of ways such as merchandising banners, ribbon overlays, and pages full of product images. With multiple merchandising venues, you’ll guarantee that shoppers in every demographic get the message.

Smartphones

As for shoppers making use of their smartphones and tablets to get their holiday shopping done, usability needs to be one of your top priorities. A recent study we conducted among e-commerce companies found that 40% of respondents still plan to build a mobile commerce site. If you’re one of them, make sure your search box is easy to find and position it in a prominent location at the top of your mobile webpage.

Younger and older consumers rely on mobile devices to do their shopping when they’re on the go and away from home, so localized search results, created with a device’s GPS tracking information, can be very useful. If you have brick and mortar locations in addition to an eCommerce website, localized results can help direct shoppers to stores where a product may be available.

Bottom Line

During the holidays and long after, it’s important to keep a close eye on eCommerce trends that will impact how you present products and structure the shopping experience. Mobile commerce shows no signs of slowing down – but rest assured that there will be new trends developing out of the mobile wave that will demand your attention.

This post was written by Melody King of Treepodia. Melody has 13 years of experience in IT, focusing the last 7 in eCommerce. During this tenure, she consulted with more than 500 organizations to assist with increasing their site usability, merchandising, conversion, and order size. She has a Doctor of Management in Organizational Leadership, BSIT with a minor in DBA, and MBA.

To make sure your product videos get as many viewers as possible, you may be thinking about hosting them on YouTube. This is a logical step to take, since YouTube has a massive audience, and makes it easy to do social sharing of your videos.

But hosting videos on YouTube isn’t the only option. You may want to check out third-party video hosting solutions that can offer features that aren’t available on YouTube. It’s a good idea to compare YouTube to other video platforms so that you can decide which way to go. Here are some factors to consider.

Look & Feel

Generally, it’s quite easy to embed videos that are hosted on YouTube on your eCommerce website. However, you don’t get too many choices as to how the video is displayed, or what size they are. YouTube-hosted videos generally take up a lot of space – space that you might want to use for more description of the product, or more images. If you host your videos via a third-party provider, you may have more presentation choices available to you. For example, you may be able to use tabs to showcase video options; when visitors click on a tab, the video screen expands.

Free vs. Paid

YouTube doesn’t charge to host video, and free options are always attractive, especially if your company is new and just getting on its feet. But that free price tag may come at the cost of functionality that you need to run your eCommerce business effectively, and to make sure that your videos are seen by the widest possible audience. For example, if you have a lot of videos, it can take many hours to upload them to YouTube, since the site isn’t really designed for mass uploading. On the other hand, a third-party video platform can automate the uploading process so you can get more done in less time.

Search Engine Rankings

The common wisdom says that by placing your videos on YouTube, you’ll get them listed higher in search rankings, since YouTube is owned by Google. Conversely, so the wisdom goes, if your videos are hosted by anyone besides YouTube, they won’t show up as high in search results.

However, this isn’t necessarily true. The algorithms that Google uses to decide video ranking will place higher importance on a site’s topical authority – so a computer equipment site will rank higher in the algorithm for a wireless router video than a similar video on YouTube, which the algorithm views as a video portal.

Shopping Online

If customers see your product in a YouTube video, or watch the video on a social network, they have to return to your website and search for the product if they want to buy it. This takes a lot of time, which may discourage them from making the purchase. Third-party video hosting solutions have features that make it easier for viewers to make a purchase – for instance, being able to add a product to a shopping cart directly from a video player.

YouTube is a popular choice for hosting e-commerce videos, but sophisticated e-commerce capabilities are limited. eCommerce professionals should consider the features they need in hosted video – such as flexible presentation options, metrics and testing. Third-party hosting providers can offer enough options to make them a strong alternative to YouTube.

Image Credit: jonsson

It looks like Google Shopping is trying to beef up their product listings now that a lot of merchants are pulling their feeds because it is no longer free. Until Google transitioned to a commercial model, they had the most comprehensive shopping database because almost every merchant would list their products. Obviously not all merchants can afford to pay Google and have since de-listed their product datafeeds.

This would be a great way for Google to have a more comprehensive database while they try to get more merchants to sign up directly.

Shopping.com sent out a nootice of the partnership today:

Dear Merchant,

We are pleased to announce that Google Shopping recently joined the Shopping.com portfolio of leading publishers. Google recently moved to a commercial-model based on Product Listing Ads and has become a critical channel for retailers. Via our new partnership, you automatically get exposure on this high-performing channel without any extra effort.

This partnership delivers several advantages for you:

Gain efficiency
It’s easy – submit one data feed to Shopping.com and get exposure across a powerful network of high-caliber publishers, including Google Shopping. This allows you to tap into Shopping.com’s rich catalog to deliver highly optimized feeds to Google. You will also have a centralized point of contact who will optimize your performance to achieve optimal ROI.

Benefit from historical relevance
As an early participant in the Google Shopping pilot, merchant offers from Shopping.com gained valuable click history, a key element to boost quality score, which in addition to bid and relevancy, helps Google determine the right offer to serve. This improves the odds that your offer through Shopping.com will be displayed.

Leverage Value Based Pricing
Shopping.com’s sophisticated algorithm automatically adjusts CPCs daily with our Value Based Pricing model to meet ROI goals.
No action is required on your part to gain access to Google Shopping’s customer base. Please contact us if you have any questions regarding this partnership or would like to opt-out.

Shopping.com Merchant Services Team

When I logged into AdWords yesterday, I noticed that Google released a new feature that always felt as if it was missing: a date selection tool. The new tool now let’s you compare date ranges à la Google Analytics. This can be very useful in measuring the performance of your campaigns over time. Just click the blue slider and select the previous period.

Google will then generate a chart with multiple graph lines comparing the dates selected.

Image Credit: TheBusyBrain

This post is written by Ben Bakhshi from adCore. adCore is an SEM automation suite that allows eCommerce shops to synchronize their datafeeds with Google AdWords and managing their bids automatically. Ben also writes for the blog eCommerce Marketing.

Image Credit: Stuck in Customs

You are marketing your eCommerce shop wrong and that is causing you to miss out on a lot of sales. If you aren’t familiar with your product datafeed, chances are that you are not reaching your site’s full marketing potential. Your eCommerce product datafeed is your business’ catalogue of merchandise that can be read by a variety of platforms. For companies with a hundred or more products, a well-designed eCommerce datafeed provides an opportunity to scale up marketing and sales and overall product manager, like offering discounts, making sweeping changes to inventory, managing suppliers, and more.. While having a feed to inject into your eCommerce platform can help your internal efficiencies, your feed can be used by search engines, shopping comparison sites, and affiliate networks to increase your sales. So let’s find out how.

Optimize Your Feed

Your datafeed should be organized in a manner that Google can understand, aka SEO (search engine optimized).  Your feed should be in XML or CSV format, and hosted somewhere online via HTTP or FTP.  When organizing your CSV or XML headers, use human names like: Brand, Manufacturer, Product Name, Product Description, Category, Sub-Category, etc.

Make sure you separate or use a different feed for your Brand and Category landing pages. When someone searches Nike Shoes, you want them to land on a page with all Nike shoes, not on a specific product page. The Brand and Category landing pages often convert at a higher percentage than product landing pages.

Don’t group multiple columns together. Whenever possible, keep your Brand and Product Name separated. That way when someone searches for Nike Shoes, Google will know to display your broad Nike landing page, and not Nike Dunks Women’s Size 8 just because you poorly organized your feed.

Synchronize Your Feed with Google AdWords

Consider synchronizing your feed to Google AdWords with a 3rd party AdWords tool like adCore. In 2006, Google launched the AdWords API which opened up access to developers to create software that can make changes within AdWords. With adCore you can create an AdWords campaign that adds new inventory and pauses out of stock inventory automatically. adCore and the AdWords API allow you to have up to 2 dynamic numeric fields, (often Price and Quantity-in-Stock, but could be anything), without losing historic data on your ad due to ad-copy changes. You can also push your ads to Yahoo and Bing. It is recommended that you have an experienced AdWords manager manage your AdWords account.

Link your Google Shopping account to AdWords, and run Product Listing Ads. Google does a great job of driving highly targeted traffic to your product landing pages. When you run a service like adCore in addition to Product Listing Ads, you can get 2 or more impressions on any given product search. The more impressions you get the more sales you can make.

Submit Your Feed to Shopping Comparison Engines

There are many shopping comparison engines on the net, with new ones popping up all the time. Some are free, and some charge you for incoming clicks. Here is a list of the top 10 shopping comparison engines, ranked by CPCStrategy: Amazon Product Ads, Shopzilla, Nextag, Google Shopping, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, Pronto, Become, Bing Shopping, and TheFind.

You can save a lot of time by working with a datafeed management company to submit your feed for you and keep them synchronized. Some companies that I recommend are FeedManagerUSA, CPCStrategy, FusePump, GoDataFeed, GoMage, and Aten Software.

Give Affiliates Access to Your Feed

Allowing affiliates to participate in your sales funnel is a guaranteed way to increase your sales in the short and long run. You pay them a fixed percentage that guarantees that you earn money on every transaction; some business will decide to cut even on the affiliate transactions because they take advantage of the extra brand awareness and return customers. The more that affiliates are able to earn, the more they will work for you.  Affiliates are great because they create content pointing to your site, like blogs, forums, review sites, and more.

You can push your datafeed directly to the hands of affiliates one at a time on your website. Just make sure that you apply their affiliate parameter to the URLs in the feed so that they can get credit. Alternatively you can work with affiliate networks like ShareaSale, Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, PepperJam, Avantlink, and more. There is usually a startup fee up to a few thousand dollars to join an affiliate network. This is a great investment to consider because affiliate sales can scale your sales so much.

In conclusion, utilizing your eCommerce datafeed can dramatically increase your eCommerce sales. It is the modern version of having a store catalogue, but with much more scale. Done the right way, you can have other people sell your merchandise for you, saving you a lot of time, and increasing your overall revenue and merchandise turnover.

Google AdWords just released a new feature which will help you control your budget. Until now, each campaign had it’s own budget. If you wanted to cap your spend across specific campaigns/promotions you had to merge everything into one campaign. The new Shared Budgets feature allows you to group campaigns and override their budgets.

Google AdWords Shared Budgets

Step #1 – Navigate to Campaigns –> Shared Library –> Budgets –> New Budget

Step #2 – Enter Budget Settings

1. Budget Name (i.e. Fall Campaigns)
2. Apply to Campaigns – select which campaigns should be under this budget umbrella
3. Budget Amount – this new budget will replace the existing campaign budgets
4. Delivery Method – same options as on the category level (Standard or Accelerated)

Try it out and let us know how it performs for you.

Status Alert: Hey, all. We’re aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We’re working on it.

— Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

Today is not a good day for GoDaddy. At least they are aware of it. Twitter is currently blowing up with people trying to find more information. The first reports seems to be from 1:20pm EST, so Twitter seems to be having problems for almost an hour.

I tried calling GoDaddy’s customer support line and the phone just rings non-stop. It would seem as if I’m not the only person trying to get through to them. Or maybe their phone system is down too.

At this point it looks like every single GoDaddy service is inaccessible, including DNS, Email, Hosting etc… GoDaddy has responded to multiple tweets with a variation of “Sorry for any inconvenience. We’re aware and are working to resolve this quickly.”

Are you using GoDaddy? I use them to purchase domains, but I host them elsewhere.

“Bring your kid to work day” goes poorly as @godaddy children spill juice/pull plugs on servers.

— William Reinier (@SGTWillReinier) September 10, 2012

Thankfully @godaddy won’t be held liable… they only guarentee a 99.99%* uptime.

— Luke M. Vaillancourt (@lukeMV) September 10, 2012

UPDATE: Anonymous is taking credit for GoDaddy being down.

#TangoDown — godaddy.com | by @anonymousown3r |

— Anonymous (@AnonOpsLegion) September 10, 2012

Now that Facebook has gone public there has been a lot of talk about Facebook’s advertising business. Do you think Facebook’s ads are useful? Have you see positive ROI from it?

Infographic © 2012 WordStream, Inc., a PPC and Search Engine Marketing tools company.

Google AdWords has launched a new feature which provides you with detailed competitive auction information. You can now see how your bid stacks up against your competition.

With the Auction insights report, you can compare your performance with other advertisers who compete in the same set of auctions as you do. You can see how often your ads rank higher than other advertisers’ ads on the search results page, and how often your ads appear compared to theirs based on your estimated possible impressions. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices by showing you where you are succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance.

The Auction insights report provides data at the keyword-level, and provides five different statistics: impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent:

Google is rolling this out now. Are you seeing this in your account yet?

Are you ok with meeting random strangers? Does your product or service pop on video? Is your target audience primarily women?

Check out this guide from CPC Strategy:

Source: CPC Strategy Blog

Francesca StaAna is from AdMedia, an online advertising network that connects advertisers to consumers through a number of innovative products including ad remarketing, affiliate programs, pay per click advertising, and more.

Getting your online store’s homepage to rank high on Google is great and all, but don’t forget to exert more link building efforts for product pages. After all, these are the pages that actually generate revenue for your site, so you need ensure that they also have great spots on SERPs.

But since people are more inclined to link to your homepage instead of specific product pages, getting those coveted links can be a little tricky. If you’re having this same dilemma, don’t fret.  There are some tactics that you can do to get more product page links that would make Google give your product pages the SEO love that they deserve.

1. Write guest posts for related websites – Contact bloggers in your industry and see if they’re open to publishing guest posts. Once you get the go signal, be sure to write about something that would benefit that blog’s readers. Don’t get too promotional and plug your own products and services. This is a sure-fire way for your post to get rejected. Bloggers usually allow guest posters to add around 1 – 2 links to be placed in the author’s bio and not in the post’s body. However, if you develop a strong working relationship with a blogger overtime, then they might allow you to add a couple of your own links to the body of the post, provided that the links are relevant and beneficial to readers.

2. Spice up your product descriptions – Are you using “generic” product descriptions for your items? If so, then you’re making a big mistake.  Chances are websites that are selling the same products are also using those tired old manufacturer’s descriptions for their items. Stand out from the crowd and write your own unique descriptions. This doesn’t mean that you should use dramatic or exaggerated descriptions for your products. You should still be accurate and be sure to include relevant keywords in the content. But be original by thinking of your customers and writing about how those products will benefit them.

3. Sponsor events and causes – See if you can sponsor any industry-relevant events, causes, or charities to get a link or two in their marketing materials and website. You can also give away samples of what you’re selling, and include a tag with the link to that product’s specific page. Chances are customers or journalists looking to do product reviews will see it and might actually link back to that page.

4. Send out free samples to bloggers and journalists – Speaking of product reviews, scour the web for journalists and bloggers in your industry and touch base with them to see if they’re accepting free samples for review. If they’re open to it and decide to write about your product, be sure to send them the URL for that particular product page so that they’ll know where to link to when they publish the review.

5. Do your own product images – Remember that tip about spicing up your product descriptions? The same thing goes for your product images. If you’re using factory or generic images for your products, then you’re just like most of the other eCommerce sites out there that are selling the same things. If you can, be sure to take your own product photos. Put the items under good lighting, make them look great, and get them from every angle. Doing this won’t just make you stand out and look good in the eyes of your customers; it might actually get your more product page links. Think about it. If there are people out there who just happen to be writing about the products that you’re selling, they’ll be more inclined to choose to link to YOUR page simply because you have better product images and descriptions.

The folks at HubSpot created an exhaustive timeline infographic of the history of marketing. Check it out below:

Looks like I post a lot more about Google AdWords these days. Last time I tried this the highest ranking term was “shopping.”

Are there any other topics you’d like me to post about? Please let me know…

What is Remarketing/Retargeting?

Retargeting works by tagging every visitor to your site and then displaying your ads to those customers on other sites in the Advertising network. These types of ads usually perform better than standard display ads. This is because the potential customer has already been to your site and will recognize your brand.

There are many retargeting companies out there such as Fetchback, AdRoll, Collective etc… This guide is specifically for Google AdWords because the setup is very simple and can be done without opening up new advertising accounts or committing to large ad budgets. This can be done in your existing AdWords account.

How do I set it up?

Step #1 — Set up Audience Profile

Go to the Shared Library section in the left hand menu of your AdWords account.

This will take you to a page where you will want to click “New Audience” and select “Remarketing list”. Fill out the form with a name and enter the number of days you’d like to track people for. If you enter 30, your ads will be displayed to anyone who visited the site in the last 30 days.

After you save the form above, you will need to click on the “Tag” link in the list of audiences. This will show you the code that needs to be installed on your site. There is an option for HTTPS, be sure to select that if your site serves pages through a secure connection (as most eCommerce sites do).

Step #2 — Install Tracking Pixel(s)

After you finished clicking around in Step #1 and you have the final code, you need to get it installed on your site. However, before you install the code you will need to figure out what pages should collect retargeting info. Keep in mind that you can set up multiple audiences in AdWords and show different ads based on the audience profile.

For example, let’s make believe we have an apparel site that we’d like to run a Remarketing campaign on. It would probably be best if we made separate audiences for Men, Women and Children’s apparel. This will allow us to tailor the ads based on the visitors buying preferences. Someone who was shopping for kids t-shirts will see a relevant ad and someone who was looking at a men’s sweatshirt will see what they were looking for. The more granular you get, the better performance your ad will have. Keep in mind that you don’t want to get very granular if you do not have a lot of traffic on your site.

Once you decide how to set up your audience profiles, circle back to step one create them all and copy the code into your website.

Step #3 — Set up Campaign

Set up a new campaign with separate Ad Groups for each audience. You will need to enter the same information as a regular campaign. Make sure that you have the Display Network turned on.

Go to the Audience tab in your Remarketing campaign. If you do not see it, you need to enable it by clicking on the “more” arrow.

Once you get to the Audience tab, click on the “add audiences” button and select your Campaign/Ad Group. A new screen should pop out with the audience profiles that you created in Step #1. Click “add” to add these to this Ad Group. If you have several Remarketing list, you will want to put them in separate ad groups so that you can target the ad creative accordingly.

Step #4 — Design/Upload Banner Ads

This is the part where you want to upload existing banner ads or use the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder.

Image Ads

To upload standard image ads, go to the “Ads” section of your campaign, click “New Ad” and select “Image Ad”. You will then need to upload image ads one at a time.

Display Ad Builder

If you do not have any display ads or if you would like to build ads featuring several different products, you can use the Display Ad Builder. In the “Ads” section click “New Ad” and select “Display Ad Builder”. This will take you to a page with many different options. I like to use the “Product Showcase” which Google describes as follows:

Templates that show a selection of product images with different destination URLs. Promoted products are shown like a catalog in these templates.

You will be given a form where you can enter information for multiple products and it will automatically build a dynamic ad in a variety of sizes.

Once you upload you ads, just make sure all the standard campaign settings are filled out properly (keywords, bids, budgets etc…) — At this point you should be done.

Keep in mind that a Remarketing campaign takes a while to pick up because it needs to collect visitor information so that your “Audience” can be targeted properly. Every time someone visits your site where the code is installed they will be tagged with the audience profile and they will start seeing your ads within the Google Advertising Network.

Good luck. Happy Retargeting!

Think you spend a lot of money AdWords? Think again… Here is a breakdown from WordStream of where Google gets its money from.

Create a Google+ Page

The first step to getting set up with Google Plus is to create your Business Page. This is different from a Personal Profile. You can set up a Business Page here:
https://plus.google.com/pages/manage

Add The +1 Button

In order to facilitate easy sharing of the products and pages on your website, you will want to add the “plus one” button. The code for that can be found here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

Add A Google+ Profile Badge

Then ext step is to get customers and site visitors to follow you on Google+. The best way to do this would be to display the Google+ Profile Button. Go to your Google+ Business Page and copy the URL. Paste it into the form on this page and it will output the correct code for your profile:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/profilebutton/

Image Credit: Hongkiat / Artbees

Google recently started testing a new ad extension called the Communication Ad Extension. This allows merchants to collect customer email signups directly in the ad. As of now, this seems to be a beta program with no information published by Google besides for in the AdWords support forums.

What is this?

The communication ad extension is a new extension that allows AdWords advertisers to collect leads directly from Google search.

There are two types of this ad format:

1. Communication Ads for Daily Deal sites: This type allows Daily Deal sites to collect email addresses and zip codes of new sign-ups to their
offer emails.

2. Communication Ads for Newsletters: This variant allows large businesses to collect email addresses and zip codes of people interested in joining a
newsletter or email list from a given merchant.

How do I get this?

I wanted to test this for a client, so I emailed Google AdWords support requesting additional signup information. I received a reply from Google within a day or so requesting specific information so they can review the account in question.

Once they review the account and see whether you are eligible, the ad extension goes live pretty quickly. When the ad is live, you’ll start receiving email notifications whenever someone fills out the form.

There are no guarantees about which sites Google will accept into the beta, however it seems pretty straightforward and can’t hurt to ask. I would suggest you email AdWords support and see if they will let you in the program.

How does it perform?

I have been testing this for a few weeks already. Currently there are no reports in AdWords for this ad extension. However, it seems to work reasonably well as we have been getting quite a few signups on a regular basis since this went live.

Image Credit: Search Engine Roundtable

The folks at CPC Strategy just published a cool infographic on Amazon’s amazing growth. Check it out below.

Source: CPC Strategy Blog

Jimmy Rodriguez is CTO and co-founder of 3DCart, developer of an e-commerce suite for businesses of all sizes. As an authority on e-commerce best practices, Jimmy combines more than 8 years as an e-commerce developer and web programmer with SEO, social marketing and business intelligence.

One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of selling more product is shipping, a feared part of the online purchasing process during the holiday season. It’s easy to fall to become disorganized during the busy holiday season, but it won’t reflect well on your brand and will turn what could have been loyal customers into one-time shoppers. Luckily if you prepare now and have a system in place you can easily avoid holiday shipping debacles.

1 – Offer a free shipping deal
Make it an exploding offer—or, if you can afford it without cutting heavily into revenues, offer it to all customers throughout the holidays. Shipping costs typically make up 5% or more of the total cost, a significant dent in profits. Still, over 46.5% of small to mid-sized businesses say that offering free shipping increases their profits.

2 - Extend the standard shipping deadline
Inform customers that standard shipping prices will go up on a day before they actually do, then announce an extension to the standard shipping deadline.

3 - Use a shipping aggregator for international sales
Shipping aggregators like Bongo consolidate your international products coming from different warehouses into a single, neat package. Merchants can simply ship to to the aggregators Domestic Facility, and the international shipping experts handle the rest.

4 - Stock up on shipping supplies
If you’re shipping products on your own, make sure you stock up on twice as many shipping resources as your projected sales. Being over-prepared is much better than being under-prepared because you can always use the excess materials for post-holiday shipping.

5 - Give customers the ability to track their purchases
Shipping through popular carriers and linking them to your backend CRM and email autoresponders makes it simple for customers to track their purchases.

6 - Showcase contact information prominently
Online merchants need to go the extra mile to make their customers feel safe and protected. You can put a customer’s mind at ease by displaying your contact information prominently in multiple locations on your site. Also consider listing your phone number and alternative email addresses in your auto-responder emails.

7 - Follow up on shipped orders
Through your order management system, track when shipped items are received and set autoresponders to send follow-up emails with links to feedback resources. Also consider jazzing up your holiday autoresponders with a seasonal images and sayings. It never hurts to spread the holiday cheer!

8 - Include physical promotions in shipped packages
Surprise your customer with a coupon! There’s nothing like the feeling of a coupon in your hand; send physical coupons with every order in hopes of inspiring a return customer. It also makes sure that your customer’s last impression of the purchase is a great one.

The above is an excerpt from 3dcart’s FREE eBook 12 Days of Online Shopping. Download yours today to automatically receive a $75 Google Adwords certificate & $100 Amazon Ad certificate and be entered to win one of 20 $100 Google Adwords certificate!

Image Credit: Drewski2112

This post was written by Helen Fang, marketing manager for Vendio.  Vendio offers ecommerce software and helps users in every phase of online selling, from finding the best products to sell online to opening a 100% free web store.

Auctioneers of the modern era are posed with multimedia challenges they’ve never been forced to deal with in the past. A poorly laid-out website or confusing product image can be the difference between making the sale and losing business. In this quick tutorial you’ll learn the basics for writing effective product titles and descriptions, and how to take quality photos of the items you are selling.

Product Titles and Descriptions

The descriptions you put forth of your products play a major role in the bidder’s purchasing decision when they are unable to physically see or touch a product for themselves. If they inquire via email about the product, not only should you be sure to email them back promptly, but you should go above and beyond what is required of you based on their question. If they need clarity on something, do not leave your description lacking. Your extra attention to detail will be remembered by the bidder and, as such, leave open the possibility of spreading good word about your business.

Titles should be as descriptive but short and snappy as possible, leaving nothing desired on the part of the bidder. Additionally, your initial product description should show clarity in shipping and various extra charges – don’t leave anything open-ended. You want your readers to trust you as a professional; your credibility will come along with how well the overall description is written, as well as the quality of the information provided.

Photographs

No, as an auctioneer you are not required to be a professional photographer or own an elaborate camera (a simple digital camera should do just fine). You are, however, expected to be able to take quality and visually appealing photographs of your products. When taking your pictures, consider what you would look for in a photograph as a consumer. Pictures should not be blurry, should be (ideally) taken in natural lighting and should be taken from a close enough distance so that viewers can assess the intricacies of a product. Do not use the zoom feature if it is not necessary, as it tends to distort or blur the image quality.

When finally uploading the images, make your site’s layout is conducive to your users. Do not upload large image files or small thumbnail images; these will only frustrate users who do not have the Internet connections to quickly open these files or, in the case of a thumbnail, who just want a bigger view of the product. Also, take into consideration what is included in the background of your photo. None of the photos you take should look like they were “home taken” pictures; these should be photos with plain backdrops or specifically setup to a fit a theme.

Following these simple tips can help make sure you’re appealing to your potential online customer base as much as possible.

Photo Credit: Stéfan

Google AdWords has allowed advertisers to show sitelinks since the end of 2009. Back in April Search Engine Roundtable showed examples of ads showing up to 4 sitelinks per ad. I am now seeing some ads with 6 sitelinks. It would seem as if this is somehow connected with Google’s push to expand organic sitelinks in the SERPs.

It seems that the Google help center has recently been updated to state:

If a user search triggers your ad to run with Sitelinks, our system may include up to six of your additional links on your ad, along with the main landing page link. The higher the quality of your ad, the more likely Sitelinks may be able to run on that ad.

How many sitelinks are you seeing?

Thanks David.

Alice Delore is an education specialist for SaleHoo.com, an online community of over 95,000 online sellers and retailers. Their product range consists of an online selling course, ecommerce software  and their flagship product, a wholesale directory. 

Most store owners graduate to owning their own website after learning the basics of selling on giant marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. There are a host of benefits to owning your own store including having more control over the direction of your store and not having a percentage of your earnings eaten up by marketplace fees.

However, the one major drawback is that when you branch out from a marketplace, you no longer have traffic spoon-fed to your listings, which usually means very slow sales in the early days of owning your store.

It won’t come as news that one of the most effective way to attract buyers is by capturing them in search engines. However, knowing how to go about doing this can be the tricky part.

Here are my top 3 essential search engine optimization tips for new web store owners:

#1 – Write content-rich product descriptions

One of the ways that Google and other search engines determine which sites to rank is through the text content on the site. Therefore, it is crucial that your product descriptions contain keywords that your buyers will search for when they search for items you stock.

Try to write descriptions that are at least 250 words long and remember to include the keywords that closely relate to the product, but remember not to stuff your description with too many keywords. Doing so could tell Google that your content is not genuine. It’s also an eye-sore for buyers!

If you aren’t sure which keywords to use, try the Google Keyword Tool. It’s a free tool by Google which allows you to swoop in and identify exactly which keywords your potential buyers are searching for.

For example, if you are selling women’s dresses, you can enter ‘womens dresses’ into the keyword tool and hit search to see a list of related keywords that buyers are searching for.

#2 – Write a killer meta description

Your meta description is the text that displays in search results.

Above is a good example of a meta description. This company, Inch Blue, ranks on the first page of Google for the keywords “baby shoes”. Their meta description contains these keywords but, more importantly, it provides information to the person searching which encourages them to click-through and visit the web store.

Therefore, meta descriptions serve two purposes:

a)      They help you rank better in search results when you include relevant keywords

b)      They give you a chance to lure buyers into the store. Make use of your meta description by stating, as Inch Blue has, what makes your product different from other options.

How to alter your meta description depends on how your store was built or which store builder you use but, if you know HTML code, the meta description appears in the header code of your website.

#3 – Keep your content fresh!

Google and other search engines love when you update your site with fresh, new content. When you update your content, Google knows that your website is a ‘live’ one, not just a static website that is never updated, which improves your rankings.

There are a number of ways that you can easily update your web content to keep it fresh. One is by simply re-writing your listing descriptions every couple of weeks. You can still say the same things about the products, just freshen up the order of the wording. Adding customer reviews of the products or general feedback is another easy way to add new content. It also encourages customers to purchase because they love hearing positive feedback from other buyers.

Blog writing to increase your search engine placement

Writing blog posts on a regular basis is another way to brighten up your content. Additionally, when you write about the products that you sell, you show off your passion for the products which inspires customers to hit the “Add to Cart” button!

Most products or product lines are relativity easy to blog about.  If you sell handbags, you can write about the latest season’s color and style trends or about an outrageously expensive new designer bag that your audience would adore, but never be able to purchase themselves!

If you sell gardening equipment, you can write blog posts about gardening tips or keep a photo blog of the world’s most beautiful gardens.

Your blog posts do not need to be long or sophisticated: Web readers will engage better with a shorter, snappier and more personal blog post than a dry, boring post.

Above all else, aim to give valuable, informative or entertaining content to readers and avoid blasting them with advertisements for your products.

How well does your website rank in the search engines? 

Image Credit: Mike Atherton