Google's Product Listing Ads: Cheaper, More Profitable

I’ve previously written about why you should make Google’s Product Listing Ads a priority. If you’ve followed my advice in "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?" and, more recently, "5 Steps to Prepare for Google Shopping," there’s a good chance you’ve observed a sharp increase in pay-per-click revenue and profits.

For those of you who have yet to treat Product Listing Ads — PLAs — as a priority, however, this article is for you.

According to data at my firm, revenue and traffic from PLAs is surging across the board. Surprisingly, however, we’re finding that PLA cost-per-click fees can be up to 50 percent cheaper than traditional text ads.

Example 1: Home Products Retailer

For a retailer of home products, we compared the performance of its PPC campaign over the past three months to the same period last year. As the table below shows, cost decreased dramatically while revenue and profit surged more than 159 percent. While PLA traffic did not convert as efficiently as traditional text ads, average cost-per-click was cut in half, which more than made up for the lower conversion. In total, PLAs grew to generate 58 percent of PPC revenue, compared to 21 percent last year.

PLAs show a much higher return on investment than text ads.

These positive results were due in large part to one major change: growing its budget for PLAs to 58 percent of the total PPC amount.

Example 2: Fashion Apparel Retailer

Another retailer, which sells brand-name apparel, experienced similar results. Last year, 100 percent of its PPC revenue came from traditional text ads. Now, 74 percent comes from PLAs, despite accounting for only 26 percent of its total PPC budget. This retailer doubled its PPC revenue without increasing its budget, thanks to the whopping 1,743 percent return on ad spend its PLAs now receive.

Rebalancing an advertising budget can have significant effects.

These results show that total campaign performance can be improved dramatically by shifting even a modest percentage of total PPC budgets into PLAs.

Why Are PLAs Cheap?

We think the primary reason PLAs are so much cheaper than text ads is that they are new, and competition is low because most online retailers have not caught on. Eventually other retailers will participate, but that will take time. In the meantime, online retailers that take advantage of PLAs now can generate a lot of new and very profitable sales during this year’s holiday season.

While we have observed many cases that resemble the two examples above — where merchants were able to dramatically increase revenue at lower costs — PLAs will not always perform as well for every site and for every industry. In some industries, as illustrated by the next example, the competition understands the value of PLAs, and PLA costs per click can actually be higher than text ads.

Example 3: Athletic Products Retailer

This merchant, which sells athletic products, experienced costs per click for PLAs that was 17 percent higher than text ads. The merchant's PLA campaign still achieved a return on ad spend of 1,065 percent, which was profitable, but not as high as the 1,731 percent return from text ads. Despite this, the PLAs did contribute to a tripling of conversions compared to the same period last year. While the campaign wasn’t as profitable on a per-unit basis, PLAs enabled the merchant to increase its market share.

source: practicalecommerce.com

SEO: Using Excel for Keyword Analysis

Excel is the SEO tool I use most frequently. Excel helps me organize my thoughts, decide which keywords or pages to focus on, illustrate key concepts, and even draft rudimentary content.

This article lists my favorite Excel formulas, menu items, and keyboard shortcuts for search engine optimization analysis. You can use these tips for far more than SEO, recognizing that some of the features are only available in Excel 2010. Please add your favorites in the comments.

Favorite Excel 2010 Formulas

VLOOKUP. A must have for matching keyword research data to analytics reports to show how many times a keyword is searched for a month in Google compared to how many visits or how much revenue that same keyword earned a site. I usually put the keyword data in one worksheet and the analytics data in another, and then use VLOOKUP to pull the matching keyword research data into my analytics report.

SUMIFS. When I’m looking for opportunities in keyword research, I may want to know the combined number of searches are done for keywords containing certain elements. For example, let’s say I want to know how many searches Google reports a month for keywords that contain both “black” and “dress.” SUMIFS can take doth of these conditions and sum up the number of searches for me. Its little brother, SUMIF, does the same thing with only one condition.

IF ISERROR. This nifty calculation takes those annoying #N/A results that are essentially error messages and turns them into zeroes, blanks or anything else you please. It can be a tricky formula to write outright, so I usually write the formula I wanted in the first place and then go back and paste the IF and ISERROR formulas around my original formula.

CONCATENATE. A brilliantly simple formula, CONCATENATE takes any strings of characters and cells you please and strings them together in a single cell. For example, if you’ve mapped keywords to URLs — here's my article on keyword mapping — and you want to make a quick start of optimizing the title tags, it’s easy to concatenate the primary keyword, the page name and the brand together with some punctuation to form the start of a title tag. You’ll need to review them to make sure they’re optimal, but it’s a lot easier to tweak something that’s already written than to start writing it from scratch.

Favorite Excel 2010 Menu Items

I’ve moved these menu items into my Quick Access Toolbar for easy one-click access. I save the toolbar for commands that I use frequently that can’t be accessed with keyword shortcuts.

Freeze Panes. A must have for large spreadsheets, this command freezes the cells above and to the left of where your cursor is so that the column and row headings can be seen no matter how far down or to the right you scroll.

Remove Duplicates. I can’t count the amount of time this feature has saved me while researching keywords. With the click of a button, duplicate rows are deleted while the first instance is preserved. This can be a dangerous function, so you might want to play with it a bit before using it on critical data to understand how it works.

Manual Calculation. Tired of watching your document process formulas in “Not Responding” mode? Click the Manual Calculation Option found in the Formulas menu to prevent Excel from trying to recalculate every time a change is made. This one command has saved me weeks of compute time on formula-intensive spreadsheets.

Favorite Excel 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts

While awkward at first, forcing myself to learn these keyword shortcuts has saved me untold hours in Excel. Yes, all of these shortcuts are available in the menus, but it takes more time to execute multiple accurate clicks in the menu than to quickly type three or four keys to accomplish the same thing — once you get used to doing it. Over the course of a day or a week of executing these commands repeatedly to analyze data, those seconds add up to more time to focus on what’s important.

Highlight Range. Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Key. This is the fastest way to highlight all cells in a range when you don’t want to just click on the row or column header. For example, Ctrl+Shift+Down highlights every cell starting where your cursor is and ending with the last contiguous cell in the row. Ctrl+Shift+Down, Right would highlight every cell starting where your cursor is and ending with the last contiguous cell in the row, and then extend the highlighted section as far to the right as the right-most contiguous cell. This command is extremely handy for highlighting large ranges of cells instantly without waiting for the page to scroll until you get to the end of the cells.

Move to End. Ctrl+Arrow Key. This similar command can be used to move the cursor to the beginning or end of the range of cells without highlighting the cells in between. It’s handy in conjunction with the Page Up and Page Down buttons to scan large blocks of cells quickly Filter: Ctrl+Shift+L. Enables the row highlighted to act as the header row from which to filter and sort the rows below it.

Delete. Alt+E, D. Quickly delete any highlighted cells, rows or columns. Unlike using the delete key or Ctrl+X, Alt+E, D removes the highlighted cells not just their contents.

Insert Cells. Alt+I, E. Inserts a number of blank cells, rows or columns equal to the number highlighted. For example, to quickly insert a blank row, I highlight the row below where I want the new blank row to be inserted and type Alt+I, E.

Paste Special > Values. Alt+E, S, V. I like to think of this as “the flattener.” It pastes the content copied onto your clipboard and pastes the numerical or textual contents without any formulas or formatting. So basically you can copy a range of cells filled with formulas that require lots of processing power to calculate, just copy those cells and Alt+E, S, V right over top the same cells to paste just the results of the calculations. You may want to save the formulas in one row or column in case you need to add more data. I’ve flattened too early many times and had to redo the formulas as I added more rows.

Transpose Rows and Columns. Alt+E, S, E. When you want to swap the axis of the cells you’re working with, simply copy the range and do a quick Alt+E, S, E. The contents of the cells will be pasted exactly as they were, except that the X-axis is now the Y-axis and vice versa.

Escape: Esc. Yes, seriously. When Excel is flashing all sorts of annoying warnings and help menus at you and you just want them to go away without bothering to click on the right button, the escape key usually does the job. Escape is also handy when you’ve started to work in a cell and want to erase the contents of that cell and cease to work in it quickly.

These are some of the commands, formulas and shortcuts I use day in and day out in Excel 2010. Sometimes it’s ugly. Sometimes it’s kludgy. But it always gets the job done.

What are your favorite timesaving Excel shortcuts?

 source: practicalecommerce.com

How to Use Google's Remarketing Platform

It's frustrating to online retailers when potential customers visit their websites, browse product pages, and then leave. There’s no sale made, and money is spent serving ads and hosting content to those visitors. This is how a lot of visits end up for online businesses. That doesn’t mean, however, that every bounce is a missed conversion opportunity.

Every time consumers visit your website, they leave behind a little bit of data. It's not their personal information, but enough to identify them on their next visit. If you have the right web tools and services in place, you can take advantage of that data for their next visit, and offer them a special opportunity or sales proposal as soon as they arrive. This is what’s called “retargeting,” or “remarketing” in Google-speak.

Remarketing can be a slippery slope. You have to find a delicate balance between informative and promotional content. Here’s what you need to know about remarketing, and how you can make it work for your business.

How To Enable Remarketing in Google AdWords

Google includes remarketing as a fully functioning feature of its AdWords platform. Google offers many resources on how to enable retargeting and make it work for your business.

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This is where you need to look if you’ve already created Audience groups in AdWords. If you haven’t, Google’s Remarketing page can walk you through creating new groups.

The basics of Google’s remarketing tools require that you create a remarketing list, or a list of user “profiles” based on cookies left by your site visitors. You can develop your lists through AdWords or on your own and then import them into AdWords. Once you have one list — or multiple lists — you can select your targeted list, assign a span of time to remarket to the list, and hit save.

Once you start managing remarketing profiles, those specially targeted visitors will start seeing more advertisements for your business, catered specifically to them. This simple feature lets you use the power and reach of Google’s complex advertising networks for your own benefit. It helps you drive consumers back to your website that you already know are interested in your products and services.

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You can insert remarketing code snippets into certain web pages within your site that will automatically add prospects to a remarketing audience list. This is good for automatically targeting consumers if they’re attracted to your website

 source: practicalecommerce.com

SEO: Can Local Searchers Find Your Stores?

Online location pages of physical stores should provide much more information than just the physical address of a store close to the individual user. Many consumers already know where a store is, based on their everyday routines. What they don’t know and are seeking are the hours, holidays that the store is closed, services offered, manager’s name, and phone number to call for questions about items. The store locator, then, needs to answer these individual store questions.

Now consider searchers. For all intents and purposes they can drop out of the sky from Google or Bing and land on any page on the site. That makes every page on the site a potential landing page that needs to be able to command customers’ confidence and convert searchers to some next step.

The ideal would be to search Google for a store location, like "northbrook furniture store," and get the exact locator pages for the relevant stores.


A Google search for "northbrook furniture store."



Ranking in Google's Organic Search and Places Search

Clicking on the store’s name takes the searcher to the store’s website, but typically not to a page about the store’s location itself. For example, Cost Plus World Market has a large physical retail presence as well as an ecommerce store. This duality gives it the opportunity to rank in both local Places search for its brick and mortar stores, as well as in the traditional organic results.

My personalized results show Cost Plus ranking number 30 in organic search and number 3 in local Places search. How? Organic search rankings for local queries are based on traditional search engine optimizations — title tags, links, site structure and all the other fundamentals. In addition to the information on the site itself, local search results shown in the Places listings are based heavily on the store information shown in a wide variety of local sites like Internet yellow pages, social media, and other local signals. The more accurate and consistent these distributed local signals are, the better able a store location is to rank in Places search.

However, Cost Plus, like the vast majority of sites with larger store locator features, is not optimized for traditional organic search because it requires the user to enter an address or zip code. While advanced search crawlers are able to do this, they may not bother or may not enter enough information to be able to index all locations. Those unindexed locations will have no opportunity to rank in organic search, no opportunity to drive online customers to brick and mortar stores.

Even when indexed, store location pages tend to contain a mash up of all the stores in a 25-mile radius. What we really need for SEO is to be able to click through to an individual page for each store, each optimized for its own unique location. Cost Plus uses the former model, with all store locations returned at a single URL. Without individual URLs for individual store locations, the store information can’t be indexed and returned in organic search results.

 
Cost Plus World Market's store locator with all information at one URL



Some large retailers with ecommerce presences, like Best Buy, do a great job combining organic search rankings and Places rankings. Best Buy’s store locator manages to get indexed, and features great individual store pages like this one at individual URLs, leading to excellent store location organic search results. Best Buy is also clearly doing a great job with its local distribution feeds, because they rank well in Places search results.

Ecommerce Stores without Retail Outlets

That’s all fine and good for Cost Plus and Best Buy. They’re huge and have the ability to operate both physical stores and an ecommerce store. It’s true that while ecommerce sites can sell to customers across the country, they typically lack the ability to rank for local search queries because they lack physical stores. However, ecommerce sites are typically headquartered somewhere; optimize that single headquarters location if it’s all you have. Sites based in a major metropolitan area will obviously find that this tactic drives more search traffic than sites based in less populated areas. But you never know when a single search will result in a several hundred — or several thousand — dollar sale.

Ecommerce site Home Office Solutions sells office furniture online and at a single location in Northbrook, IL. This one location is its headquarters and showroom, with all other business done online or by phone. Undaunted by its lack of physical stores, Home Office Solutions has (a) optimized the physical store location page with all of the information a customer could want, and (b) gone on to also optimize its Google+ Places page.


Home Office Solutions' Google+ Places page.

Could the site and optimization be better? Well, yes, the title tag is the same on every page of the ecommerce site, the layout on my PC is a little off, and there are other things we could pick apart. But the fact is Home Office Solutions made a start and is ranking above larger chain retailers like Cost Plus. My personalized results show Home Office Solutions ranking number 8 in organic search and number 2 in local Places search for the phrase ["northbrook furniture store."] Granted the phrase isn’t hugely competitive or searched for very frequently, but spending a little extra time to make its store locator page excellent, and to claim and update their Google+ Places page, has produced real results.

For small businesses with one or a handful of locations, optimizing the store location pages for local search is a fairly easy proposition. For businesses that require a store locator feature with address search for usability, the impact on local search traffic can be highly damaging. If local organic search is important, make sure that the store locator solution you’re considering will truly be optimal for SEO.


source: practicalecommerce.com

Guide to Google Webmaster Tools

Valuable search-engine-optimization tools that provide unique data tend to be expensive. Tools with limited data sets or limited capabilities tend to be free. Google Webmaster Tools bucks that trend by offering — for free — a unique data set and features that can't be found in any other tool.

I've previously addressed reasons to register for Google Webmaster Tools, in "Top 5 Reasons to Use Google Webmaster Tools." The purpose of this article is to explain how to use this amazing free tool set to improve your site's search engine optimization.

Getting Set Up


Adding Sites to Google Webmaster Tools.

Before Google opens the doors to its treasure chest, you have to prove you own the site by going through a verification process. If you don't already have a Google account to access Webmaster Tools, create one. Then simply click on "Add a Site" on the Webmaster Tools home page to start the process. Every domain, subdomain and TLD — top level domain, the part after the period, such as .com, .net, .org — needs to be added and verified individually. For example, practicalecommerce.com, www.practicalecommerce.com, and developer.practicalecommerce.com are all separate sites in Google Webmaster's eyes, regardless of whether they contain separate content.

Once the sites are added, the sites can be verified several different ways. Click the "Verify" button next to each site, choose a verification method, and follow the directions. Meta tag and file upload are the two most common methods, and both require access to post or modify files at the root of the site.

Note that just "adding a site" gives zero access to data. The verification step is critical to actually using Webmaster Tools.

Tips and Tricks

The first thing to remember is that everything you see is temporary and most data is shown on a rolling 30-day basis. You can change date ranges on some charts, but the range only allows about 35 days. Consequently, you cannot compare data month over month or year over year — or compare data from before and after an algorithm change, for example — unless you’re regularly saving the data in Google Webmaster Tools to your own hard drive. For my SEO clients, I do this monthly in tandem with my regular monthly reporting.

Most charts have a download button, but some charts have two. Buttons that say “Download this Table” will download all of the available data for that report in a CSV format. Buttons that say “Download Chart Data” will download only the data shown in the chart. Take a screengrab of charts that don’t allow downloads, so at least the visual trends will be available for comparison even if the data can’t be manipulated.

Google developed its Webmaster Tools to use the same navigational cues as a regular website. If something is blue, you can click it and get more detail. Mouse over charts to see individual data points. Click the question marks for definitions and help.

Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard


Google Webmaster Tools' dashboard for Practical Ecommerce.

Once verified and logged in, Webmaster Tools' home page features a dashboard of messages, crawl, traffic, and sitemap data. Pay careful attention to the messages section. If Google has detected malware, suspicious activity, a lot of new redirects or other types of behavior consistent with a site that has been hacked or is violating Webmaster guidelines, Google may warn you in the messages section. If the warning is expected, such as an alert about high numbers of redirects when you just changed URLs on a section of the site, then don’t worry about the message. If it’s unexpected, however, definitely look into the root cause of the message.

Google also places “Crawl Errors” on the dashboard. Google reports five different kinds of URL errors and three types of site errors. Don’t get too hung up on a few errors — there are often good reasons for pages to give a 404 error and occasional 500 errors are commonplace. However, if error numbers spike unexpectedly, investigate the cause with your IT team.

The “Search Queries” report is one of the biggest reasons to register for Google Webmaster Tools. The dashboard offers a snapshot of the report, showing organic queries, rankings, impressions and clicks over the last 30 days. Clicking through the snapshot will reveal a more detailed report. This is a fantastic report and will likely be your first stop on a regular basis.

Lastly, the dashboard displays some basic stats about XML sitemaps, including the number of URLs submitted via the XML sitemaps, the number of errors found at those URLs and the number of indexed pages. This section will be blank if you have not submitted an XML sitemap.


source: practicalecommerce.com