E-Commerce

Search engine and conversion rate optimization is often times the lifeblood behind an E-commerce web property. The strategy must be very thorough with cross platform integration at the center of it all. It starts with the design of the website. Many organizations make the mistake of focusing 80% on the aesthetic appeals and only 20% or less on building a foundation for search engine optimization. For starters, when the backbone of the site isn’t just about visual appeal and has a big focus on no pages and links breaking out of the structure the entire site can help with indexing (Lyngbo, 2013). E-commerce sites are constantly updating their products and it is extremely important to ensure the web property is being crawled early by the spiders that search. With stock keeping unit’s being refreshed frequently this is critical to do this early on to make sure page links are remaining intact. Search engine optimization needs to be a part of planning phase to ensure subpages and different section templates have product pages to promote them with an internal linking structure (Lyngbo, 2013). 

An organization that has plans to do a very effective job at maximizing their sales from an effective use of Google Analytics and search engine optimization strategy is the organic juice company Raw Generation.

Jessica Geier was a certified health coach by profession before she created Raw Generation in Middletown, New Jersey (Raw, 2016). Jessica brought her father Bill into the picture and established a company that makes losing weight and being healthy a simpler task. Raw Generation focuses on a weight loss system that uses organic juices, superfood, fruit and energy teas to help jumpstart a weight loss (Raw, 2016). 

Bill and Jessica’s initial method of sales and lead generation was surrounding social media and it was not successful(Raw, 2016). Granted they were primarily going for a more organic approach trying to generate a buzz from clever posts, followers and shares. I do believe that targeted advertisements at this stage would be far more effective for them on social media channels. As we have discussed in prior lessons, Facebook has the ability to peg down into user demographics and psychographics that can be extremely valuable for positioning advertisements. Today this health crazed millennial generation can actually be painted with a pretty broad brush, but the channels in which to reach them are now far more targeted. 

Jessica and Bill experienced tremendous sales growth going from $8,000 in May, 2013 to $96,000 in July, 2013 (Wang, 2014). They experienced this tremendous success through the use of deal sites like Groupon, Rue La La, and Gilt (Wang, 2014). Now they claim the majority of the sales and efforts come from repeat customers and positioning new sku’s to them. According to Jessica they are now in a mode of branching out to see additional methods of driving revenue and customer acquisition. An increased focus on Google Ad Words has made the top of that list. I mentioned earlier in this post that Raw Generation has plans to effectively utilize search engine optimization. Avenues like deal sites are typically cheap and come with the cost of expensive customer acquisition and heavily discounting products. This is a never ending cycle and it thins margins, while in contrast an effective search strategy coupled with an ad campaign is extremely useful for customer acquisition and long term strategy. 

There was not much information on Raw Generation’s SEO activity, but to be fair it is difficult to find this information on any organization as it is all executed internally and typically not released. I was able to look at their backend code and woo rank to determine how effective their on page optimization efforts have been thus far. 

Here are a few observations: 

• There is no title tag. 

• There is no meta description. 

• They have H1-H6 tags in place, but have not done a good job in matching up the tags with desired search queries. 

• There in-page links are very solid and there is no broken links. 

• They have many of the basics down like www resolve, robots.txt, xml sitemap, long domain registration and an active blog. 

• They also did an excellent job with a building a mobile optimized site. Unfortunately they couples the aesthetically pleasing site with an extremely slow load speed. They need to immediately go in an compress files so they are not turning away potential buyers due to a poor experience. 

Over all they have a lot of work to do on page before they jump into the next phase of off page optimization. As I mentioned earlier in the post these are things that can be fixed, but it all works better if done prior to the site being built and indexed. 

In conclusion, E-commerce search engine optimization demands a team handling it that is well versed across many disciplines. It is important to have an understanding of target market, many different marketing channels, a good understanding of analytic platforms, conversion rate optimization, web development experience, communication, usability and customer experience. The most optimal team members to work on a web property have a good understanding of how the businesses message is presented and received at large. 

E-commerce optimization and conversion rate is never finished. A team that knows how to put data and metrics into executables helps drive an E-commerce site forward. 

References: 

1. Wong, J. (November, 2016) E-Commerce Examples | 5 Inspirational Case Studies for You. Retrieved from: http://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/e-commerce-examples-case-studies/

2. Wang, D. (May, 2014) How One Ecommerce Entrepreneur Explored New Sales Channels – And Took Revenues From $8K to $96K per Month. Retrieved from: https://www.shopify.com/blog/14154621-how-one-ecommerce-entrepreneur-explored-new-sales-channels-and-took-revenues-from-8k-to-96k-per-month?ssid=1025d04ab08274a0f9695eea6a2814&signup_code={signup_code}&ref=wbe

3. Lyngbo, T. (November, 2013) 17 SEO Best Practices That Could Double Your E-Commerce Sales. Retrieved from: http://searchengineland.com/best-practices-in-e-commerce-seo-176921

4. Raw Generation Official Page. Raw Generation. Accessed November 21^st 2016. Retrieved from: https://www.rawgeneration.com/pages/it-s-a-family-affair

Call Track & React

Infinity Call Tracking for Google Analytics

Call tracking serves a very necessary and important role within paid online marketing campaigns. Most organizations depend heavily on inbound leads and call tracking will give a new level of insight to help maximize return on investments. One obvious reason that call tracking is important to organizations that it allows business to clearly attribute a lead source. The attribution is also not strictly subject to the platform the lead was generated from, but can also be the device etc. There are many statistics generated by studies across the globe highlighting the affect mobility is having in marketing. Call tracking is very important in this movement because by tracking appropriately it can have huge impact on revenue associated with these calls. According to Search Engine Watch’s recent survey findings, 63 percent now using multiple devices to find a local business (Lee, 2014). The looming question over organizations is not the volume in the people using mobile platforms, but if the proper percentage of conversions are taking place. 

A staggering four out of five searches via mobile devices lead to a purchase, often within a few hours, the survey said. Compared with other devices, the mobile phone showed the highest conversion rate, with nearly 80 percent of mobile phone searches ending in a purchase (Lee, 2014). All that to say that an organization needs to be capitalizing on the inbound calls and having a very clear picture of where they are coming from. 

Many organizations are not properly analyzing/understanding the sources of their inbound leads which does not lend to investing in the proper areas. Back in the day the phone book was extremely valuable as a lead generation tool because businesses were listed by category. This medium had its limitations in that it was very difficult to realize where the lead had come from. From a business owner perspective it makes you almost timid to remove the investment in the yellow pages because you didn’t know if the inbound call that turned into a sale came from the drive by billboard on the interstate, the listing in the local newspaper or the yellow pages. Now obviously times have changed and the phonebook is no longer relevant so why would organizations not be capitalizing on call tracking to learn of the source. 

The guessing game is no longer acceptable in today’s fast pace marketing environment. After researching several of Google’s application partners, I found Infinity Call Tracking to be a very effective solution. The organization is based out of the UK, but is available across the globe (Infinity, 2011). The cloud based application focuses primarily on a seamless integration into Google Analytics and the ability to transmit real time voice data. This data will provide businesses with key performance indicators to ensure that paid advertising campaigns are being optimized. 

The overview of the solution includes the following: 

1. Infinity Call Tracking will send phone call data into Google Analytics and report custom metrics such as length, It will not only send phone call data into GA but also custom dimensions about the call, like length, rating or your own customized filters passed through from the web property (Infinity, 2011). 

2. Infinity Call Tracking will note unique and returning site visitors and assign a unique phone number to each session. This allows for visitors to be tagged when they land and then sending that behavior of the visit to Google Analytics in real time (Infinity, 2011). Because Infinity Call Tracking assigns each visitor a unique ID it can be tracked back and linked to an existing campaign or ad group. This is extremely valuable for marketers as it allows them insight into which campaigns are generating leads and which ones to pull the plug on. 

3. What I find to be one of the most valuable tools is the call leads by source functionality. This can give valuable insight into exactly which keywords that visitors are searching to get to the site. It can also integrate with existing goals and report on all of the items we discussed in last week’s assignment. A similar functionality is the call leads by page which gives insight into the different sessions and how which domain or subdomain they landed on the site from (Infinity, 2011). 

4. Infinity also comes with a gui interface that reports on the general metrics being collected. It can be run within Google Analytics and can provide a unique look at what is being measured. 

Over and over again we have discussed that data is worthless if it cannot be effectively transferred into strategic direction and executables within an organization. A tool that I feel best bridges this gap within Infinity Call Tracking is the integration with customer relationship management tools like Sales Force. This can be extremely useful for organizations that are measuring effectiveness of a campaign on inbound calls to close ratio. The integration piece delivers real time insight into sales teams of exactly what the caller was viewing on the web page before giving a call to the listen number (Cloud, 2016). It also shows if someone was looking and then did not call back. As you can imagine, this gives marketing professionals incredible insight and the ability to draw conclusions based on visitor behavior (Cloud, 2016). It would allow an organization to be able to edit content on a page if not enough people were calling in, or altering the aesthetics of the page to make the process of getting more information or calling a sales rep easier. 

The secret sauce is the automation and directing sales forces to increased efficiencies. When an inbound call occurs, the operator is presented with either the existing Salesforce record relating to the caller, or the most recent interactions of the caller if they’ve never called your business before that they can then use to create a new lead (Cloud, 2016). This is incredibly powerful and can lead to a unique competitive advantage driving new revenue, higher conversion rate and optimization of campaigns. 

References: 

1. 1. Yaro, B. Accessed November 14, 2016. Lever Interactive. Retrieved from: http://www.leverinteractive.com/why-call-tracking-is-so-important/
2. 2. Lee, J. (April, 2014) 80% of Local Searches on Mobile Phones Convert. Retrieved from: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2339085/80-of-local-searches-on-mobile-phones-convert-study
3. 3. Infinity Tracking. (October, 2011) Infinity Call Tracking for Google Analytics. Retrieved from: https://www.google.com/analytics/partners/company/6215774515494912/gadp/5629499534213120/app/5707702298738688/listing/5685265389584384
4. 4. Infinity Cloud. Accessed November 14, 2016. Caller Insight for Sales Force. Retrieved from: https://www.infinitycloud.com/call-tracking/caller-insight

"Keep Your Friends Close And Your Enemies Closer"

Google analytics is the most popular tool in today’s market for tracking and reporting on web property metrics. However, as an integrated marketing and communication professional it is important to keep up with other tools that can supplement and compliment relevant metrics within Google Analytics. 

Why? A couple of reasons. 

It is very important to note that at the end of the day Google is a for profit business and there analytics, while very valuable for understanding web traffic and providing key insights, is ultimately pushing a Google AdWords campaign as an actionable response to the data displayed. The information provided by Google Analytics will help a business understand where traffic is coming from and if they are receiving a proper ROI within their channels, but the underlying message is to either begin or increase an AdWords budget. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is important to note and recognize that marketers should always have a more agnostic approach to data retrieval so they are looking at what is relevant and important to their web property versus having a tool tell them what is relevant. 

A second reason is that other tools have different features and functionalities that Google Analytics does not. Throughout the remainder of this post I will walk you through an analytics tool called SEM rush. A huge competitive advantage that SEM rush offers is simply keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Through SEM Rush you have the ability to analyze competitor’s web pages while on Google Analytics you can only see the metrics through a personal login account when a web property is owned. This is incredibly valuable as it allows an organization to analyze what the competition is doing right that they are not capitalizing on. It gives the smaller organizations the ability to look over the shoulder of the industry goliaths to see what methodologies they focus on for optimum organic ranking. 

SEM Rush offers a free version that gives pretty minimal results because they want users to subscribe their service, but luckily I have access to a paid subscription through my company. Here is the look at the home page overview for Dell.com on SEM Rush: 

This page is extremely insightful as an overview because it shows a snap shot of where the site traffic is being generated from. It highlights organic search, paid search, backlinks and the breakdown of geography representing percentages of traffic. 

This snapshot highlights the competition and which organic keywords have the highest traffic results. This would allow the Dell marketing team to closely monitor HP and Lenovo to see who is receiving more volume to the site and where to geographically invest more into organic or paid ranking strategies. In the organic keywords section it even highlights the cost per click associated with those particular keywords. 

Additionally SEM Rush notes branded vs non-branded searches, total backlinks, referring domains, and follow vs non-follow links pointing back to their site. At a high level, follow links allows for the juice of the referring domain to flow through, while no follow does not. For example, if forbes.com writes a story on you and gives you a link to your site it will likely be a follow link and it will do wonders for your site as their trust flow and citation flow is through the roof, while if someone posts a link on Facebook to your site it would be no follow because Facebook is not going to pass that juice of their site through. It is also very telling that Dell does not have a very high percentage of non-branded searches. This is basically meaning they aren’t ranking well when people type in general thinks like laptop or software. Most of their traffic is generated from people searching things like Dell laptop or Dell software. This could be a strategy for them because they know their brand is powerful and well known and they may not want buyers looking for the best price point searching general terms like laptop. 5 million backlinks is also an insane amount, but it is largely because they have so many channel and ecommerce partners who carry their products and they are discussed on many different tech forums. 

This page will look the most familiar as it most closely represents what Google Analytics offers. In my opinion Google Analytics offers substantially better insight and depth into things like conversion rates, bounce rates, page visits, etc. 

Another example of SEM Rush’s unique advantage is on-page analysis. Through the tool you can analyze an overall score of your on-page optimization and what needs improvement. Things like Meta-tags, H1-H6 tags, XML site map, text to html ratio etc, is a very important step one to a successful organic search engine optimization strategy. Through tools like SEM rush it is easy to look at inefficiencies of your web properties as well what the competitions score looks like. Really on-page optimization is only about 10% or less of the battle in SEO. While it is important to have the sites code optimized for search engines, solely focusing on that will not usually be enough to put you ahead of the competition. For example, if two ice cream shops both have perfect on-page optimization, and their keywords and content are similarly focused…which one will rank higher organically? The answer is whichever one has implemented a solid off page-strategy. This is what made Google who they are today. The site with local directory submissions, referring links from relevant sites with good trust and citation flow, and the many other things that play into a successful off page strategy will play a role in which ice cream store ranks higher.

In conclusion, there are a lot of competitive advantages that SEM Rush offers to compliment and supplement Google Analytics. 

References: 

Noff, A. (September, 2016) Why Google Analytics Isn't The Tool To Measure The Value of PR. Retrieved from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2016/09/12/why-google-analytics-isnt-the-tool-to-measure-the-value-of-pr/#2979eb38351a

Dell Official Site. Accessed November 7^th, 2016. Retrieved from: http://www.dell.com/en-us/

SEMrush. SEMrush Competitive Data. Accessed November 6^th, 2016. Retrieved from: https://www.semrush.com/