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If you’re not familiar with Engine Ready’s free software suite, Conversion Critic, you may want to take a moment to utilize some handy online marketing tools. Conversion Critic can be used to evaluate your landing pages, check for broken destination URLs in your pay per click campaigns, and to forecast the performance of your PPC marketing efforts.
The calculator is perfect for computing expectations for a new campaign. Many marketers and business owners want to calculate the risk associated with a new campaign. Accurately forecasting return on ad spend is a challenge shared by all marketers, which the PPC Calculator attempts to relieve.
The free tool will also illustrate how slight changes in the conversion rate or cost per click can significantly impact your bottom line. In the example below we can see that a 0.5% increase in conversion rate (everything else being equal) equates to thousands of more dollars in revenue.
Example:
Slide the button, or manually input your ad spend.
Forecast snapshot of performance.
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Rand Fishkin and Engine Ready Networking Party
3 Comments | Posted by Brian Lewis in Industry Events, Online Marketing, SEO
On December 22, 2009, Engine Ready’s Brian Lewis and SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin arranged for a holiday networking party for the local San Diego SEO community. About 35 internet marketers showed up at the Gordon Biersch Brewery in San Diego to join in some great networking, beer sampling and appetizer munching.
Rumor was that there were even isolated pockets of SEO related discussions going on … imagine that …
In addition to Laurie’s post on Choosing a Shopping Cart I figured it would be helpful to put together some tips on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment. In my opinion, nothing is worse than driving traffic to your site, selling your product or service, and then having your already convinced customer leave in the middle of the ordering process due to your shopping cart.
Here are just a few pointer for your shopping cart…
1. Asking too much!
Try and keep the required fields to a minimum, nothing is more frustrating than taking 10-20 minutes to fill out an order form. If a lot of information is needed, try collecting your visitors contact information and following up after the purchase is complete for more information.
2. How much more?
If you absolutely need to collect a large amount of information from a prospect, make sure to break things up. If possible, separate required fields into 2-3 pages. If your ordering process is split between 3 pages it will be less intimidating and will most likely convert better. Also if you use this strategy it is recommended that you clearly state which step the buyer is on. If you request 3 pages of information, simply include “Step 1 of 3″, “Step 2 of 3″, “Step 3 of 3″ for each page, this will let your customer know exactly where they stand in the ordering process.
3. What does that mean?
Many times I have been filling out an order form and arrived at a field where I needed to add information and I didn’t know what they were asking. If there is any question as to what something means, make sure to clearly explain what is being requested. Remember, just because you understand, doesn’t mean your customers do.
4. Errors
Check, double check, and then check again. The more fields required, the bigger chance for a mistake. If there are errors in your checkout process you just lost a sale. Check in all browsers, all browser versions, different computers, and try to check at least once a week.
5. Validation
Many times an order form will be filled out, a field or two will be missed, and the page will refresh saying “You Missed a Field!” Not only is this annoying but sometimes a shopping cart will erase everything you previously entered and you are stuck at step 1. Make sure your shopping cart does not erase already entered fields, and have your form ask nicely when a field is missed.
6. Security
With the high amount of fraud and identity theft that is arising these days, having a secure shopping cart goes far. Many are very skeptical about giving out their name, let alone their credit card information. Make sure you have a secure shopping cart and the security seal is visible and reassuring to the buyers.
7. Speed
When using a multi-page checkout process make sure your shopping cart is fast. Humans are impatient by nature. If clicking the “Next” button results in a 30 sec delay, say good-bye.
8. Tracking
Last but certainly not least is tracking. Once you break your checkout process into 2-3 pages, analytics will help you pinpoint other flaws. If you dig through your analytics and see 50% of people are leaving on page 2, there is obviously a problem. Since there are fewer fields on each page it will be easier to figure out where or why people are abandoning your shopping cart.
These are just a few thing to be aware of, or help when choosing a shopping cart. There are many other factors that come into play. A shopping cart is huge part of your business if you do business online. Once you choose your shopping cart it is often difficult to switch to another, so be sure to take your time, research, and find out as much as you can before make a final decision.
Like I said, this is only a short list, if you can think of any other shopping cart best practices, leave a comment below.
If you have recently gone to run a report in Google Adwords and attempted to customized the report by adding or removing columns you probably have noticed a change. Under the “Conversion Columns” section you will now have the option of (1-per-click) or (many-per-click).
This is Google’s new update for conversion tracking, but what exactly do these new options mean?
(1-per-click)
Currently Google Adwords reports the 1-per-click conversion. This means if someone clicks on your Ad and results in multiple conversions, it will only be counted as 1 conversion.
(many-per-click)
On the other hand many-per-click conversions will report each conversion after someone has come to your website through your Ad. So if somebody clicks your Ad, buys something, bookmarks your page, and comes back a week later and purchases something else it will be reported as 2 conversions.
Your Thoughts?
For now, these additions are only being shown through the reports in the Adwords Interface. Google is planning on eventually releasing this feature to Adwords Editor, Adwords API, and the new Adwords Interface.
These features will hopefully help managing campaigns with a variety of advertising goals and help you compare your PPC campaign with other online campaign as they usually use many-per-click as their conversion metric.
So how do you think of these new features will effect how you manage and report your campaigns? We are not sure how useful it will be for us, but we will soon find out.