Essential CRO and SEO advice for small new e-commerce businesses

In the past couple of years, we have seen a boom in e-commerce websites that have managed to sell their products without necessarily bringing something new to the table. But e-commerce is a growing sector that will continue to see increases in the coming years. That only means one thing: the competition will grow exponentially in the future. Millions of websites sell their products in the online medium, using its accessibility and ease of use to draw the attention of customers. This will make innovation a necessity. In this highly competitive world, your product landing page and presentation can make or break your business. Learning how to optimise it for both your consumers and search engines is vital to thriving in the crowded market of e-commerce. A great product is just half the battle. The rest is making sure that the entire world…

Make sure you avoid these costly e-commerce mistakes at all costs

There are many ways to grow your e-commerce business. Similarly, there is a multitude of ways to kill it. If you have a well-designed site, good products, a smooth checkout process, and still aren't getting good conversions, you might be committing any of these below-mentioned mistakes that are fatal for all e-commerce businesses. [si_guide_block id="79186" title="12 common e-commerce marketing mistakes" description="Learn about even more mistakes that we've seen marketers make with our free guide. More importantly, learn how to correct them if you see you're making one or two of them yourself!"]

1. Not having a clear site navigational structure

Yes, it happens. Sadly, most of the e-commerce sites don’t pay much attention to their navigational structure. If your navigational structure is not clear, it will confuse your visitors, and they will feel lost. A good navigational structure will not provide a good user experience but will…

How to know if you should be selling on Amazon, or if a third-party seller would suit you better

For businesses wishing to reach a wider market with their products, selling online can seem intimidating. Selling with an established company like Amazon can make things easier, but knowing who to sell with can be difficult. So to help you be sure you're putting your product where it will do the best, here's a quick and dirty guide to third-party selling.

The Benefits of Amazon

Above all else, Amazon has a big share of the market. As of 2015, Amazon had a base of over 300 million active customers. They count a customer as active if they have a profile on Amazon, and have made a purchase in the last 12 months. That means that Amazon has accumulated-and kept-a number of customers roughly equal…

Where to place your online ads: How to use scripts to filter your ad placements to select the most effective

This article is useful for those who would like to place advertisements on sites across the Internet, e.g. on YouTube, forums, mobile apps, and sites devoted to a similar subject. When you are using different targeting on the Google Display Network, Google selects placements for ads automatically, except placements added manually. After a short period of time, you can find interesting statistics, which shows that some placements perform well and some not so well for you. [si_quick_block id="124322" title="How to set up a Google Display Network campaign" description="Unlike search ads, which are text only, ads on the GDN can use a combination of text and images, and can be static or included animated elements. Learn how to start taking advantage of the Google Display Network with this quick win."] Try the following guidelines…

Prevent costly errors with Google Ads by not falling foul of these classic mistakes

Google Ads is probably one of the best tools you can use to generate leads, sales and grow your business. However, most business owners end up wasting hundreds, if not thousands of dollars each month as a result of inadequate account management. A poorly configured ad campaign could easily be shown to the wrong target audience or simply get buried under the competition. Here are eight common mistakes business owner make when setting up their campaigns, and tips on how to avoid them in order to make the most out of your ad efforts.

[si_guide_block id="79626" title="10 costly google Ads mistakes" description="Read about the most common mistakes people make when using Google Ads and, more importantly, how you can avoid them!"/]

1.    Using ad groups for multiple keywords

Creating ad groups which contain up to 20 loosely related keywords…

6 types of user experience and online audience surveying tools to help create a more customer-centred website and brand

Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics are used by nearly every company since they provide valuable quantitative data on site visitor behaviour. No surprise there. But web analytics systems don't give direct qualitative feedback from site visitors and customers and the surprise to me, is that relatively few companies use these, although their popularity is increasing rapidly. They can be used to support UX improvement projects both on the live site and when getting structured feedback during website redesign. We believe that qualitative website feedback tools are also essential to take the pulse of your website and improve your UX, but surprisingly they are less widely used despite paid services such as Opinion Labs being available for many years and some incredible free tools.

April 2018 update to tools

Thanks for your suggestions in previous…

Use these testing tools to help structure your experiments and boost your conversion rate

A/B tests allow you to run one or more different versions of a page which may include one or more of different features such as a call to action, a hero banner or other page elements compared to a control version. Multivariate testing enables you to test multiple elements at the same time. This requires more traffic and more time spent on set up, but gives the benefit of being able to isolate the impact of each element on conversion and average order value. Improving leads or sales through driving more users down the conversion funnel is the primary goal of these tools. They simplify the process of running these tests, allowing control over the test variables (e.g. how much traffic is sent to the various test versions), provides…

How you can use push notifications to increase your online conversions

You already know about email, social media, affiliate marketing, SMS, ads (Google Adwords, Facebook, Bing). All these channels have their own piece of the marketing promotion pie, where you can deploy different kind of campaigns to reach and engage users. Online businesses use all or a part of these channels to attract visitors to their website, as well as engage with the ones who have already visited it. But there’s a new one that looks very promising for both businesses and users: push notifications. Push notifications have a short history in the world, coming from mobile apps, where IOS and Android used them as the default way by which mobile apps communicate with their users. The advantage of delivering the message in real…

Google puts A/B testing tools at everyone's fingertips by making it's Google Optimize product free

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but since it launched out of beta in March 2017, there's a free CRO package that gives you the ability to run A/B tests across your site. Almost half of smaller businesses don't currently utilize A/B testing, which will mean they're potentially losing vast sums compared to the revenue they could have been generating had they engaged in CRO.

[si_quick_block id="101832" title="How to do AB tests with Google Optimize" description="This Quick Win explores what AB testing is, and what process you should use to build a test. We will cover some ideas on what you could test, as well as working out where to focus your attention, hint, don’t just jump to say your homepage, you may want to test somewhere else that will give you a bigger impact."]

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Apply behavioral psychology to your web design to boost your conversion rate

Getting people to choose something over another has more to do with psychology than anything else. When the principles of psychology have been understood, they may be integrated in UX and website design. If they are integrated well, they end up becoming a determinant of whether the website is a success on the market.

[si_guide_block id="5686" title="Download Premium Resource – Improving Results from your website: 7 steps guide" description="Use a structured review to increase leads, sales and satisfaction from your site."/]

The principles of psychology employed in general marketing are the same ones employed in UX and web design. The following are some of the psychological principles that work in marketing. Use of research in social psychology is important. It explains the reasons why consumers sometimes do the opposite of what is expected of them.

Users Prefer Substance Over Beauty

It’s…