Best practice tips and examples for optimising your checkout

This article explores the variety of checkout options available, as well as common consumer pre-conceptions of registration, best practice tips and recommended approaches in order to optimise your checkout for new customers looking to place their first order. Before I press ahead into the meat of the post, lets set-out a few reasons why marketers should bother investing time and effort in getting new customer checkout 'right'. Abandoned checkouts have always been a huge problem for many brands, and they continue to be so Once you have a new customer, you open up many more ways to engage with them, nurture them and encourage them to ultimately spend more and increase their lifetime order value with brand You may well have invested significant amounts to acquire the new visitor/prospect to your site, and the more new visitors convert to customers, the better your ROI on acquisition…

Mining search keyphrases, entry pages and top content for nuggets of insight

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary: In this post I share a quick tip that often crops up on Google Analytics courses. It is relevant mainly to larger sites with multiple products, but even smaller sites with limited products can benefit from this analysis.

The problem

Google Analytics limits the display and export of search keywords, landing pages and entrance landing pages to 500 within its reports. While the 500 limit will still certainly give you insights on the most important keyphrases and pages, you are still missing an opportunity.

The opportunity

If you do export more than 500 rows of data, these are just two of the options available to you: 1. Complete long tail keyphrase SEO gap analysis to review number of keyphrases that are exact matches or "contain" a target keyword. 2. Review entry pages with advanced Segment natural search applied to…

A how-to guide for setting up goals in Google Analytics

In another post, I've written about how to set high-level goals for digital marketing, this post shows how best to set them up within Google Analytics.

What is a goal in Google Analytics?

A goal is a record of a page you specify being viewed which shows that a visitor has engaged with your website showing interest in your products and services. Since you can group goals in Google Analytics, I recommend you group in a logical way. This example shows one suggestion for a grouping.

Which goals should I use?

Different types of goals include to think about including are: 1. Leads from signup such as a whitepaper download or contacts us 2. Site engagement goals which show time on site, these are most useful for a publisher, but 3. Top of funnel product…

Considered, clever and committed - Cisco share their insight

Since experimenting with a blog back in 2005 Cisco's clever use of social media now plays a serious part in the company's worldwide presence, writes Meryl K. Evans in a post at the B2B Social Media Digest - Cisco staff update content regularly and engage with audiences, it's part of the company culture and their pride in being the 'human network'. As background and context for colleagues on the journey to social media you may want to check: The Timeline of The Journey to Social Media at Cisco The company's vision to inform it's social media strategy is considered and simple - the company's director of social media, John Earnhardt says Cisco "€œchanging the way we work, live, play and learn" We believe it's something that networking technology inherently does. We connect. We make the world a smaller place through video and…

With Nov 2010 change, Google Places now an even bigger opportunity for clicks & mortar businesses

Importance: [rating=5] (if you have a physical location!) Our commentary: Google Places has evolved as with most Google products quite significantly in the last 12months. With the renaming of the service from Local Business Centre there are a number of new features, but the most significant was in late November when the Places algorithm changed to favour businesses with a Places presence. As you can see by a recent search Google places now takes up larger area on a Google results page for a local search. Even more significant, all the top entries have a Places entry, so you're effectively invisible unless you do Places marketing well. This clearly presents a great opportunity for businesses though as with traditional search results there is only room for a certain amount of results and we all understand the value of…

Groupon - The Failed Magic Bullet? A 'cool tool' won't fix a weak sales promotion...

It's the third time now that that I've heard reference to new research on Groupon indicating that "32% of businesses using Groupon find it unprofitable". The report by Utpal Dholakia of Rice University in the US is the first of it's kind, surveying 150 businesses, it can be found here. With the chatter this week that Google is in discussion with Groupon about a $5 billion acquisition it's likely that Google sees the advantages in a scalable, viral platform solution and they realise it can be made to work if the sales promotion is right. There are common themes from those 32% of businesses that were unhappy: Groupon promotions worked effectively to drive purchase, often too many sales were made Some people spend a lot less than others - consumers are extremely price sensitive The consumers using Groupon are deal hungry…

The top 10 link-building techniques

Two of the most common questions I'm asked as a consultant is, "How do I get more links?" quickly followed by, "is there a quicker way of doing it?". Quite often clients expect link building to be something you outsource or there is a "tool" that does it for you. Unfortunately this is far from the case. During this blog post I want to quickly look at what I see as the top level methods for link building. In future posts I'll look at best practice for each of these. In the meantime, I invite you to add to the methods and also add any insights or experiences you have.

Creating amazing content

Looking at the various ways to generate links, there is one thing common between them - they all rely on  content. But not just any content, it has to be exceptional,…

Examples of using vision statements to give focus to your digital marketing

I believe that developing a specific vision or mission statement for your digital channels can really help explain the need for sufficient investment in digital marketing within a company. They also show where your focus should be. So in this post I look at some examples which show effective vision statements.

As you read, you're probably thinking we've already got a corporate mission statement that everyone pokes fun at, so why would we want to define a digital vision statement? or  why should we bother?s too corporate and we're just a small business, we just get on with selling our products.

Good questions! I still think it's helpful to have a vision for your online marketing for all different types of organisation. We say this since the opportunities from digital marketing are too big to not have a vision of…

Applying the crowdsourcing approach to improve content quality

I've written before about I like the forward-thinking approach to involving customers used by Penguin in Spinebreakers, a new site created separate from the main Penguin domain to engage teenagers.I think it's a great example of the power of digital channels to target a new audience, involve and engage them in novel ways through web, email and mobile. In this post I'll pick out some of the success factors as I see them which I think apply to all social media and content strategy initiatives

What is crowdsourcing?

In my Digital marketing books I define crowdsourcing as: "Utilising a network of customers or other partners to gain insights for new product or process innovations and to potentially help promote a brand". This shows how crowdsourcing can combine insight and learning with promotion of products. Here are the…