As Fathom has grown significantly over the past 3 years, we have inherited several paid search campaigns that were failing miserably. These “fails” really grind my gears because they all go completely against paid search management best practices, waste a lot of money, and give a bad rep to pay-per-click profitability & return on investment.
Many of the accounts we’ve received have at least one of the top ten fails outlined below:
1. No Conversion Tracking: Yes, you read this correctly. We have received several accounts over the past couple years in which the accounts were not tracking conversions! This is by far the biggest mistake someone can make in PPC management.
2. Only One Ad Variation: One of the top benefits of PPC is being able to a/b test and identify winners quickly. By not taking advantage of testing, you are missing out on increased conversions, click-through rates, and lower cost per conversions.
3. Bidding on ALL Broad Match Keywords Only: Many accounts we’ve inherited have been exclusively bidding on broad match keywords and these accounts are typically paired with small daily budgets.
4. Avoiding Negative Keywords: It’s amazing to see how much money is wasted on totally irrelevant keywords. Several accounts we’ve inherited have had zero negative keywords and all broad match keywords…SMH.
5. Sending ALL Ads to a Homepage: Don’t get me wrong, there are a few occasions when sending users to your homepage may be OK, but most of the time it is not optimal. It becomes a major problem when all ads for an account are sent to the homepage, no matter the keyword.
6. ALL Keywords in One Ad Group: Personally, I’ve inherited three accounts that had one campaign and one ad group with all keywords (50+) in the same ad group! Obviously, the quality score of the majority of these keywords were a three or below and many of the keywords weren’t even showing since the quality score was so low!
7. No Ad Scheduling/Day-Parting: It is pretty common for the accounts we inherit to have absolutely no ad scheduling and so they are consequently spending a lot of their budget in early morning hours (12am-4am). This causes them to miss out on potentially more reputable clicks during normal business hours.
8. Not Using Ad Extensions: Certain ad extensions, such as Sitelinks can improve click-through rate by 20% (according to Google), which could lead to a lower CPC and higher quality score. In addition, Google Sitelinks allows you to get users closer to the conversion funnel for general keywords or allows you to promote specials/discounts, which would lead to more conversions and a lower cost per conversion.
9. Targeting Search & Display Network in Same Campaign: This is a more common mistake than the others listed above. By targeting these campaigns separately, you can manage your budget more easily, better analyze your campaigns performance (in each network), and ensure the best performing network is receiving the majority of the budget.
10. Targeting Laptops/Computers, Mobile, and Tablets in Same Campaign: It’s much more difficult to determine how each device is performing when grouped together. Also, by targeting the devices separately, you can ensure the best performing device is receiving the majority of the budget.
Make sure you are properly managing your campaigns and avoiding the top 10 PPC fails that really grind my gears. By avoiding the mistakes outlined above, you will be able to more easily improve your results and save money!
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The number of smartphone owners is increasing rapidly each day. People not only use their smartphones to check email and make phone calls, but they’re also using them as shopping tools. According to comScore Inc., two-thirds of smartphone owners shop from their mobile device. They make excellent shopping tools, because there are many websites and apps designed to compare prices, get product reviews, locate nearby stores, and purchase products.
If your business has a mobile commerce website or app, the goal is to lower bounce rates and increase conversions. In order for this to happen, your mobile site must have the proper functionality, and it needs to be optimized effectively. I’d like to share some tips and best practices for mobile commerce optimization.
Usability is incredibly important for smartphone owners. Here are a few usability tips to consider that may help lower bounce rates and increase your customers’ mobile shopping satisfaction:
- Include breadcrumb links at the top of product pages, as well as category results. These features allow users to easily navigate throughout your mobile store.
- Give your users the option of switching to the desktop website at any time. A link in the footer to view the full site is great for usability. This link should dynamically update to point to the desktop version of the current page.
- If your business has a brick-and-mortar location, take advantage of the location-based (GPS) feature on mobile devices, as it will help the user find your closest store.
Once you’ve satisfied your smartphone owners with a good user experience, the goal is to get them to make a purchase. In order to make it easy for customers to convert, it’s important to consider the following:
- Product details, such as product reviews, impact the buying decision of the customer.
- Nonessential steps in your checkout process add friction, likely resulting in lost revenue.
- Low content volume on each page is essential. Instead of forcing users to scroll down on pages, split content across multiple pages, or use jQuery tabs to organize content within a limited space.
- Larger input fields in forms gain attention and decrease typos. Also, any form elements that you can pre-populate with a drop-down select field will decrease form friction.
- Use a drop-down select field instead of radio buttons, because a list of radio buttons clutters the form and makes it look longer.
- Replace a long drop-down field with a predictive text input field.
- Having the shopping cart and checkout accessible from every page makes it easy for customers to complete a purchase.
From an SEO standpoint, here are some technical tips to help your mobile commerce site’s ranking and visibility in Google’s mobile search results:
- Create a mobile sitemap so that your mobile-specific content gets indexed.
- Use an “m” or “mobile” subdomain for your site to help Google crawl it and add it to the correct index.
- Create a robots.txt file with a sitemap protocol listing the location of the mobile sitemap, and upload the file to the root directory of the mobile site.
Be sure to keep these tips in mind as you develop a mobile commerce strategy to decrease bounce rates and increase conversions, and to improve rankings and visibility in Google’s mobile search results. Your customers will buy from you more often, more new clients will discover you while they are mobile-searching, and you’ll enjoy knowing that your website is doing its best job to represent your business to the web-savvy world-at-large.
3 Comments »You may or may not be aware, but navigation is one of the most (if not the most) important elements of your website. With navigation, you wouldn’t be able to, well, navigate your site! It is what will make or break the usability of your layout.
Best Practice
Since this is as much about best practices as it is about alternative styles of navigation, we will start it off on this note. The key is not to overwhelm your visitors with too much to choose from. It is proven that if people are presented with too many choices, they will feel overwhelmed and may not select anything at all. Having too much to select from will deter your visitor from proceeding and of course, will decrease conversion rate! Best that you keep the category titles as simple as possible and avoid using more than 7 items.
Rollover Navigation
If you have a lot of content, then your navigation will most likely be broken into multiple tiers. This is most easily rationalized as sub-categories inside of a greater representative category. If you have too many items to display in your 1st-tier navigation, you may have to flesh these out into categories, and possibly even then some. If this is the case, than you might greatly benefit from a rollover or fly-out style of navigation.
One thing that I find tremendously irritating is trying to select an item from a drop-down menu, then accidently moving your mouse pointer off of the newly expanded area. As soon as this happens, it disappears! This angers your site visitors and can/will cause them to give up and leave your site. Developers, please always include a mouse-off time limit. Even something such as a .25 second delay will prevent things like this from happening.
In some cases you may have 3rd-tier navigational items. Once you get to this point, you really have to analyze your current site architecture and question whether or not there is a better way to do it. In most cases, either your site map wasn’t optimally arranged and needs some pruning, or you need a new solution to help address this problem. This is where the mega-menu can be of some use.
Mega-Menu
You might be wondering what exactly a mega-menu is. Well, let me break this down. We have your standard navigation, which is located on the 1st tier. If you require multiple levels, then your rollover or fly-out navigation comes into play. Now if you must use 3 or more levels of links, then a mega-menu might work for you.
Typically with these, you have your 1st-tier category, which is a part of the navigation that will always be displayed in the header of your website. The awesome part about mega-menus is that you can combine and display your 2nd- and 3rd-tier navigation without requiring any excessive rollover menus.
Now this certainly isn’t the optimum solution for all sites with a lot of content. The best thing you can do is to take another look at your site architecture. Do some research and take a look at what your successful competitors are doing in order to help influence your decision.
Keep It Simple
Most importantly, keep it simple. People don’t want to think. Large, fleshed-out navigation with tons of choices is not always a good option. This should be used sparingly and only if absolutely necessary.
If you are an avid watcher of videos on YouTube, I’m sure you’ve noticed quite a few changes to the way you experience the Web’s second-largest search engine over the last few days. As part of YouTube's effort to remain the best place to discover, share and watch videos, there have been several exciting product updates. YouTube now offers you the ability to upgrade your Brand Channel for viewers around the world to see in the updated design.
No one will see your Channel in the new design until you click the blue “Click here to try the new channels design” button on the top of your Channel; you may also switch back to the old Channels design by clicking the “Switch Back” button in the Appearance tab of the Edit Channel menu on your new Channel. You may switch back and forth as many times as you would like over the next three months. You can also earn more about the new design in the YouTube Help Center.
In addition to Channels, YouTube has launched a new homepage, refreshed the visual design of the site, and introduced YouTube Analytics. The new Homepage enables viewers who subscribe to Channels like yours to access your latest content and activity. YouTube Analytics (formerly YouTube Insight) has a simpler design, more engagement metrics, and greater speed so that you can better understand how your audience engages with your videos and Channel. You can access YouTube Analytics directly from your YouTube account.
These features have been implemented to help you better achieve YouTube success. YouTube is open to feedback so that they may improve the experience for you and your audience - you can submit your thoughts in the blue feedback link inside of the new design. And as always, you can contact the online video professionals at Fathom with any of your questions by visiting FathomDelivers.com
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Almost $20 billion. That’s how much money shoppers have spent with online retailers this holiday season.
As many of you probably know, the Thanksgiving weekend online shopping extravaganza, which also includes Cyber Monday, was the biggest in history.
No one is particularly surprised, but you might be interested to find out just how big it really was. I’m not a numbers person. However, I know where to find people who can take tons of data and put it into easily digestible stats even my fellow English majors and I can understand.
This time, I found those people on the Google Commerce Blog and the Google Retail Blog (thanks guys!). In this fantastic post, they crunched the numbers and came up with some pretty impressive online shopping trends you’ll definitely want to take the time to read and digest:
- Searches for “black friday deals” were up 30% from last year
- Searches for “cyber monday deals” and “cyber monday coupons” grew 15% year over year
- On Black Friday, 50% of the top 20 rising searches on Google were centered around specific retailers or their promotions
- On Cyber Monday the term “cyber monday deals 2011” was in the top five growing search terms (not to mention that it was the most profitable day in ecommerce history)
Aside from using the Internet to search for the best promotions, people were also using it to create a shopping plan of attack. “Black Friday store map” and “Black Friday store hours” were some of the popular choices.
Finally, we all know that these searches weren’t all coming from desktops and laptops. And let’s be honest, a conversation about online shopping wouldn’t be complete unless we covered some of the mobile trends:
- “Mobile coupons” searches were up 90% from last year
- Retail-related mobile searches on Black Friday were up 200% over last year
What are some of the major retail-related mobile searches? Location-based inquiries and price comparisons are two of the biggest, so keep that in mind when designing your mobile site (you do have one in the works, right?).
Online shopping has been steadily growing in popularity, but this time around the stats blew past years out of the water. Ecommerce retailers should definitely be standing up and paying attention, because the opportunities to grow your customer base and increase your ROI are better than they’ve ever been.
My only question for you is: What is your website and mobile site doing to encourage customers to buy online from you?
*Image provided by Shorts and Longs | The Both And on Flickr
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