Eye on Analysis

One of our clients has had outstanding success since their launch back in Nov 2005. Strong growth month to month, great channel opportunities. We've been aggressively helping them build and execute marketing strategies.
When July hit, we noticed a strange hiccup in sales from one of our most reliable referrers. What tipped us off . . . ? Analytics reports. We run comparison week to week and month to month and noticed a change. Traffic from the referrer was going up but conversion was going down. Turns out there was some click fraud going on and the partner was quick to address it once we brought it to their attention. If we didn't pay attention to the details this would have just gotten lost in the sea of collective traffic. This just reinforces the "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" rule we live by when helping our client build eCommerce profitability.

What is eCommerce Web Design and eCommerce Web Development

To someone on the outside it is easy to see web design as a commodity. Web design is web design . . . right?  We've heard it 100 times, even 1,000. "Please give us a quote and we'll decide from there." Implying that price is the #1 item in the decision process. And for many it is.

For the discerning businessman there is an inherent understanding that the company you choose to partner with and the depth you allow them to influence the process, both long and short term, will determine the chances you have in succeeding in any given eCommerce initiative. ECommerce Web Design and eCommerce web development are not a commodity and not all companies are created equal.

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A Piano by any other name is not the same

I was reading an interesting article somewhere lately. Can't remember where for the life of me, but the gist of the article was the comparison of two phrases in a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign.

• "Learn to Play a Piano"
• "Learn to Play the Piano"

Any person with common sense would say that these two phrases will perform virtually the same in a Pay-Per-Click campaign.

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Quality of Traffic Has High Effect on Conversion

We had a potential client approach us about a conversion problem. They were getting healthy traffic (250k unique visitors per month) but were having conversion problems. They were only converting about .6% of visitors to customers. This was dreadfully low for their industry which had an average conversion rate of about 2.5%. Conversion problems usually reside in a combination of two areas; Site usability and traffic quality.

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eCommerce Strategy, then Tactics.

The other morning I was sitting in a meeting with a client and a collection of experts in marketing and copy writing. We were brainstorming about the client's current market position and identifying where they wanted to go. Very often companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), will throw a dart in the dark and almost as often miss the target when it comes to market position and eCommerce strategy. This wasn't the case with this client. They were quite eager to approach things in a sensible manner. Unfortunately not all clients take the sensible approach.

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Innovation, the New Competitive Landscape

Google has been leading the charge of on line innovation as of late with the release of Gmail, Google Local and Google Maps. Their focus is on building what we call usable applications with a focus on the innovative use of technology, not just for sake of making "cool things" (aren't we all tired of that), but actually fulfilling real needs.

Now Yahoo is moving away from leaning solely on their brand strength and moving towards providing usable, needed solutions to their customers and search users. They recently released a beta product called Yahoo! Mindset.

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Ebay to buy Shopping.com

In a deal worth $620 million (wooo mama!) EBay agreed to purchase shopping.com. With both of these sites acting as powerful channel marketing partners for many of our clients we see this move as beneficial. Ebay plans to include auctions in shopping.com search results creating greater exposure for Ebay auctioneers. Auctioneers can also enhance their listings in shopping.com by paying for keyword targeted ads. All this leads to greater control and greater exposure. All good things.

SMBs Reaping eCommerce Benefits

This weekend I was reading an interesting report from ISP, Interland relating to how SMBs(small and medium-sized businesses) use the Internet and more specifically eCommerce within their business.

In the survey, 24% of the 1,032 businesses surveyed reported that eCommerce was an active part of their business. 42% of those respondents reported that 25% or more of their revenue was generated directly from their websites.

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Amazon.com redesigned

Popped over to Amazon.com tonight, (looking to see how much the 3rd season of "24" on DVD is running) and to my surprise I saw something different. Seeing anything different in Amazon's design is interesting to say the least.

A change in navigation, a change in color(no more brown) to a blue fading bar with a hint of an Aqua styling on the buttons. The tab system has been simplifed into 3 and potentially 4 buttons; the "amazon" button, the "your store" button, the new "See All Categories" button and potentially a 4th button with the category that is currently being displayed.

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It's the Little Things

We were recently engaged by a new client to help them understand where their current website was leaking visitors and revenue opportunities. Out of the many recommendation that were made and implemented I want to focus on one very small change that had a measurable effect on conversion and demonstrates how the little things can add up to big results.

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