Posted November 12th, 2009, by Stephen Cobb
Traffic. Sometimes it’s a bad thing, like when you’re stuck in it while driving to work. Sometimes it’s a good thing, like when you’re running a business. Then you want traffic. Traffic to your restaurant, movie, hotel, airline, or store. And you definitely want traffic to your web site. You want people coming to your online store, your booking system, or the digital place where you promote whatever it is that your business is about. So I’m going to have to defend my assertion that you can have “too much traffic” because it borders on heresy in the world of digital marketing.
But before I do that, a few words about this world of digital marketing. It was on display last week at the ad:tech event in New York, an event that had plenty of traffic of its own. Ad:tech is billed as “the #1 event for interactive marketing” and I don’t doubt the claim. The event outgrew the New York Hilton last year and has moved to the Jacob Javits Convention Center, a bold gamble given the state of the economy back when the decision to move was made, but it seems to have paid off.
At one point the registration line stretched almost the entire width of the Javits then doubled back on itself. And when you got into the exhibit hall the aisles were jammed. (I did a short radio interview from the show floor with Bryan Eisenberg and you can tell from my voice that I’m having to shout to be heard above the noise of the crowd: WebmasterRadio.fm Interviews Stephen Cobb). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted July 27th, 2009, by Stephen Cobb
I want to ask you a question to which I don’t yet know the answer: If you have an online store, when should you display a coupon box on your checkout page?
Before you answer that, consider another question: Has this ever happened to you? You Google something that you want to buy, for example, “Adirondack Chair.” You see a promising link in the first few search results and click on it: “Voila!” you arrive at a site that offers exactly what you’re looking for, and at a fair price. You click “Add to cart” followed by “Checkout.”
Three cheers for online shopping! You are now just a few keystrokes away from cheerfully and efficiently completing your purchase. Then it happens [cue dramatic clash of cymbals]. Suddenly something troubling materializes before your very eyes: A box labeled Coupon Code. How do you react? Think carefully about your answer because it could be the clue to a whole bunch of lost revenue.
Personally, my first thought is this: “If I had a coupon code then that “fair price” could be even fairer.” Two other thoughts then fight for second place: “Is someone else–someone who has a coupon code–getting a better deal on this chair than me?” versus “Where do I get a coupon code?”
And if I act on either of those two thoughts, you can pretty much bet I will be leaving the checkout page, either to open a new browser window and search for a code, or to navigate back to the home page of the site to see if I missed something about a coupon.
Now, if you’ve been selling stuff online for any length of time you know this: You do not want people leaving the checkout page for any reason (except maybe to grab their credit card). Here’s why: … Read the rest of this entry »
Posted April 29th, 2009, by Stephen Cobb
Some days I think I’ll explode if one more person asks me “How’s it going?” Because I just don’t know. The nightly news is full of recession stories but in the morning I go to work in a business that shows no sign of slowing down. It’s enough to make your head spin.
On April 15, the Wall Street Journal grimly reported that “retail sales tumbled in March as job losses and tight credit left consumers cautious and constrained, damping hopes for a rapid economic turnaround.”
Now I wouldn’t say that the Wall Street Journal is wrong. Indeed, I would say it’s more objective than NBC Nightly News (where NBC apparently stands for Nothing But Crisis). And I certainly don’t think anyone is expecting a rapid economic turnaround. But I work in online marketing and the impression I get at work each day is that the ecommerce department in most companies just didn’t get that memo about the economic slow down. And there are some numbers to back that up. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted February 25th, 2009, by Stephen Cobb
As you probably know, Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is a series of search marketing conferences and expos backed by Search Engine Land. In other words, it’s all about search, about getting people who are searching for something to click on a link to your web site. For most e-commerce sites, search plays a central role in traffic generation, bringing visitors to the web site.
But what happens when those visitors arrive? How does the web site hold their interest and convert visitors into customers after that click? That is the world of post-click marketing. So, it was pretty interesting to me that Gordon Hotchkiss, the CEO of Enquiro, one of North America’s leading search marketing vendors, reportedly had this to say at SMX West in Santa Clara this month:
“post-click marketing moves the needle for our clients more than any other aspect of search marketing.”
This observation, delivered as Mr. Hotchkiss was moderating a panel on Advanced Landing Page Strategies, is interesting for several reasons. First of all, one could argue that post-click marketing is not really search marketing at all. Sure, you can link search-derived traffic to post-click campaigns, but you can also run successful post-click campaigns that are entirely independent of your search marketing campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted February 23rd, 2009, by Stephen Cobb
Each month the top 10 online retailers, as measured by conversion rate, are reported on FutureNow’s GrokDotCom Marketing Optimization Blog. These are some pretty impressive numbers and industry leaders like Amazon.com and OfficeDepot.com usually make the list with conversion rates in the high teens and low twenties.
Of course, the industry average for conversion is a lot lower, around 3 percent, but I tend think of that as good news. Why? It means that most online retailers have plenty of room for improvement. In this post I’d like to flesh out that assertion with some numbers.
From Coremetrics, cited in that FutureNow article, we know that the average online order value is $132.57. Suppose your ‘average’ site is getting 100,000 visitors a month. That translates to $387,000 in revenue at an average conversion rate of 3% (based on 3,000 customers buying an average of $132.57 each). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted January 21st, 2009, by Stephen Cobb
So, you’ve figured out how to get folks to click through to your online store, but now you’re finding that the rate at which that traffic converts into sales is too low. I’d like to share one example of how to change that, a strategy that lifted the conversion rate for a targeted segment by 470 percent.
Heading into the recent holiday season one retailer discovered that 4 percent of visitors to the online store were landing on out-of-stock products. Obviously this was not good– the conversion rate for these visitors was disappointing –but it’s nigh on impossible to keep every product in stock, particularly during heavy shopping days.
The solution? Display a special message to those visitors who land on an out-of-stock product. Acknowledge that the popularity of the product means it is sold out and, because it’s not available, offer them a discount on other products, limited to the current visit.
The result? The conversion rate for these “out-of-stock” visitors jumped 470 percent (as measured against a control group within the same segment). That’s nearly six times as many conversions from this segment of site traffic. And the numbers were even better for new customer acquisition: a lift of 700 percent. In other words, the campaign pages generated eight times as many new customers as the control group.
Delivering a targeted message to a carefully defined traffic segment clearly pays big dividends. In this case, a potentially poor customer experience was transformed and the retailer increased revenue without any additional spending on acquiring new traffic.
Indeed, this retailer has experienced a 3.8X increase in revenue from the “out-of-stock” segment, a lift of 256 percent and a fine example of how mining your site statistics and addressing under-performing segments of your customer traffic with tightly targeted campaigns can pay off.
David Brussin
Stephen Cobb
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