How Programmatic Marketing will transform E-Commerce

E-commerce, which now accounts for 8% of all retail sales in the U.S., is already growing quickly. But that rapid growth is likely just the beginning. The rise of programmatic marketing promises to make selling and buying over the Internet easier and more efficient than ever. Let’s take a quick look at the future of e-commerce. By now you may have heard about Site Retargeting

What is Site Retargeting?

Site Retargeting, a marketing technique that targets users with display ads after they visit a site with the aim of bringing them back for a conversion. For example, if you look at a couch on the site of a furniture retailer, you might then browse to another site and see a display ad for the couch you just viewed. Site Retargeting has now evolved into Programmatic Site Retargeting (PSR). Whereas basic Site Retargeting targets primarily by the page a user…

Which brands are using Instagram effectively?

Instagram and advertising. It seems to be causing quite the stir as the Instagram user-base has already made it clear that they don’t want to see the platform commercialised by Zuckerberg. For example, late 2012 saw Instagram’s terms of service change and then change back when users objected to the possibility that their photos would be used in ads.

Brands just need some imagination

Whereas Zuckerberg may struggle to easily monetise his Billion Dollar investment, the reality for brands is that they don’t need to wait for advertising to gain exposure in Instagram, they need some imagination. There are a number of brands doing this already and surprisingly, Instagram users seem to love them for it. A number of brands have adapted well to the nature of Instagram and its users, appreciating that ‘exposure’ comes with adding value to the Instagram community, not trying to interrupt it. Companies…

Google rolls out a major update to Advanced Segments

Value: [rating=4]

Timing: Originally announced July 16th 2013, rolled out end August 2013

Recommended link: Google Analytics announcement on new Advanced segmentation feature

I've updated this post as a reminder that this feature is now live in Google Analytics accounts. I haven't seen an official announcement on the GA Blog, but I am now seeing this feature in my analytics at the top of relevant reports:

A couple of points I've noticed now it's live are:

1. It's not actually labelled "Advanced Segments" with a button unlike the original. Instead you see a slightly intriguing circle next to a drop down - not sure that's the best usability decision.

2. By default you get to see all your standard and custom advanced segments together, for example, we have two based on a custom dimension in Universal Analytics…

Five steps to clean up your on-page act

If you were to take a survey of blog posts on SEO in the last year I’d be willing to hazard over 60 per cent concern themselves with content marketing and online PR – what we used to call off-page SEO. Attracting links to your website using good quality content is crucial to SEO, but it's worth remembering it’s immaterial if your site is not technically healthy...

By that I mean your website needs to be set up so it’s easy to crawl for the Googlebots, while also optimising for users at the same time. Often even the smallest on-site changes can have significant impact on your search rankings so they should be at the top of your to-do list. If you aren’t already, here are five steps you should take to optimise your on-page.

5 steps to optimise on-page

1. Don’t over-optimise

Stuffing keywords into your…

Implications of the changes to Facebook’s promotions rules

Importance to Facebook marketers: [rating=4] Recommended link: PDF download of new promotion rules

To the surprise of many Facebook marketers, this week saw the release of updated Facebook competition rules,  removing the requirement for businesses to run competitions and promotions through a app on their brand's timeline. "We’ve updated our Pages Terms in order to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to create and administer promotions on Facebook." Until now, it has been against Facebook regulations to run any promotion outside of a third-party app. For example, running a competition that required users to 'like' or 'share' a post for the chance to win. This new change, now allows businesses to: Collect competition entries by users posting on the Page or comment and/or liking a Page post Collect entries through users…

Using Big Data to optimise engagement with your customers 

How to use big data to create better relationships with your customers as individuals instead of as a generic demographic

Enhancing consumer engagement and promoting loyalty is one of marketing’s key goals. But as technology advances, processes are changing. To boost engagement and loyalty, brands must use data to understand how multichannel consumers choose to engage; learn who your consumers are and what they want, and you can adapt to match.

Most organisations are well aware of this data advantage. But data analysis is not simple. The increasing availability of options from channels to devices means opportunities for consumer engagement are expanding, leading to an incredible increase in data generation. This volume and velocity can be difficult for organisations to manage in house initially so they invest in data experts to develop a solution to collate, curate and utilise data in the…

Some little-known tools and techniques we’ve used to grow our own business

When we began Conversion Rate Experts, we used a Prerequisite Tree like this to plan the stages of our growth. The technique was invaluable, and we have used it ever since. This blog post is a mix of great resources we’ve recently shared with each other (using Diigo) plus some tools and techniques that have been invaluable in helping us to grow our own business. We’ve been meaning to share them with you for a while. We hope you like them. A one-minute introduction to Scrum development (video) by Axosoft. We use Scrum, and find it very useful. You’ll probably find it useful too. If you can’t spare 10 minutes, just watch the final…

10 steps for managing social media marketing leading to sales transactions

How social media interactions can lead to sale has been the focus of many a discussion in recent years as social media has grown to become a major customer touchpoint. Since the VP of Coke recently made the claim that Social did not lead to any significant direct sales for them, this has had the knock on effect of some questioning the power of social marketing.

What I aim to cover in this post is how a focused, stepped approach to social media marketing should be directed towards sales and how you should plan this into your marketing strategy.

What most people assume is that social is not is a direct sales tool. The reason for this is because if you think about a classic sales funnel from Reach, interest, evaluation, conversion, referral…

4 Steps to creating a plan for online customer acquisition

Having a digital marketing strategy for your organisation is essential to ensure your marketing activities are supporting specific marketing objectives. The rise in the number of different digital channels available to target your customer base continues to grow as shown by this BIG list of todays customer acquisition channels by David Sealey, so withough without a sound framework in place to manage, monitor and measure organisation performance, not having a digital communications plan could prove disastrous. In a previous post, I provided an actionable plan to help create a retention strategy using key digital tactics.  Retention by its definition is 'maintaining or preserving your existing customer base loyal to your product offering. This post will is an introduction to creating an outline framework to create a plan for online customer acquisition techniques - defined as tactics to help drive traffic or generating a lead or purchase…

If our audiences have less attention than a goldfish, it's important to push the right "hot buttons"

Did you know that the average attention span for a new idea, we page or piece of content is now only 8 seconds - compare that to a goldfish at 9 seconds. It’s pretty startling and when you observe your own behaviour, or mine at least, 8 seconds does feel like a short time. But it depends on the context, in this post, Dave Chaffey talks about a 2 second rule to get your message across as someone visits your site or social media outpost for the first time, comparing it to the 7 seconds we supposedly look at an outdoor billboard.

Rational vs Emotional Content

This got me thinking how so much content that we create does not take the huge lack of time into account. We write and create so much content.…