Stop for a moment and consider the goals of your website. Regardless of whether it’s a purchase through a shopping cart, a lead generation, white paper download, or a email opt, I’m going to bet every one of these actions requires a customer to use a web form.

With web forms playing such an important role in the completing goals, it goes without saying that we should optimize the heck out of them. Below are 25 tips for doing just that.

1. Ditch the Captchas: Captcha’s are great for blocking spam, but some evidence suggests they are just as good at blocking conversions. A little spam isn’t the end of the world, and definitely isn’t worth losing conversions over. If you must use a Captcha, make sure it’s easy to read.
2. Remove Unnecessary Fields: Do you really need to ask for your customers date of birth and gender? Even if your customers aren’t concerned about privacy issues, odds are they’re lazy and might just abandon your excessively inquisitive form. Here’s some great advice from Get Elastic on registration forms.
3. Keep It Simple: Just because we can use CSS to do all sorts of fancy things with text boxes, doesn’t mean we should. Keeping form fields simple will ensure that customers understand their purpose and won’t confuse them with design elements.
4. Clear the Clear Button: Having a clear button next to the submit button just makes it easier for customers to accidentally delete what they’ve entered. Skip this unnecessary feature.
5. Cancel the Cancel Button: In the case of long or multi-part form pages, such as checkouts, don’t give customers the option to cancel their decision. That’s equivalent to a commission driven salesperson asking, “are you sure you really want to buy this?”
6. Label Required Fields: People want to do as little as possible. For this reason, let your customers know what they are required to fill out with an asterisk or similar label.
7. Use Point of Action References: If customers are getting confused by the information you’re asking for in a particular field, include a small note with a popup link with more information. For example, one of the most common POA references is an explanation of the 3 digit CVV code found on the back of credit cards.
8. Show Formatting Examples: Some fields should have a notes showing how to format them, depending on your database requirements. For example, you might want phone number formatted in a certain way, with or without parenthesis, dashes, etc. In general though, keep these formatting requirements to a minimum in order to keep it simple for customers.
9. Make it International Friendly: Forms requiring an address can be confusing if they’re built only with US residents in mind. Check out these detailed guidelines for building international friendly forms.
10. Allow Easy Forward and Backward Movement: Customers rarely maneuver through our website the way we intend them to. In order words, they hit the back button the forward button, refresh, etc. Depending on how your forms pass data, this could cause error messages such as “this page has expired”. Make sure you test the forward and backward flow of any multiple page forms on your site.
11. Logical Tab Sequence: Don’t you hate it when you hit the tab button, and rather than going to the next field, the focus moves somewhere else on the page? This problem is likely due to the way the form is laid out with HTML tables. Make sure your forms tabs in a logical sequence to prevent customers from accidentally skipping fields.
12. Server Side Validation: Basically, there are 2 ways to ensure that your visitors are entering correct data into fields. You can use client-side scripting (such as Javascript which is browser dependent) or server side error processing. In addition to server side validation being less reliant on the user’s browser settings, it is also preferable from a security point of view.
13. Clear Error Messages: When displaying error messages when customers enter invalid data, make sure your messages are clear and well placed. This means saying “Please enter an email address” rather than something vague like “you must fill out all fields.” A best practice is taking them right back to the field with incorrect data, and displaying the error message next to it.
14. Show What’s Needed When Its Needed: It’s best to hide form fields until you know they are absolutely needed. For example, if you already know your user is from the US, you can dynamically hide the province field and show the state drop down box instead.
15. Logical List Order: When using drop down lists or radio button lists, make sure you order them in a logical way, listing items higher if they are selected more often. In other words, if 90% of your customers buy from the USA, don’t list Afghanistan as your first option, and United States at the very bottom.
16. AJAX Validation: Some sites have begun to validate form inputs as soon as the user tabs out of the field. This can be very effective, since it does not break the flow of the process. In other words, its easier to correct an error immediately after entering it rather than after the whole form is completed.
17. Remember Me Feature: For login forms, always allow customers to choose a “remember me” option, which uses a cookie to fill in login information the next time. Who wants to remember all those passwords anyway?
18. Set Focus: When a page loads containing a forms, sending the cursor to the first required field will prevent users from having to click into the field in order to start typing. This can be accomplished with a simple JavaScript function.
19. Avoid Obnoxious Password Requirements: Ever received this annoying error? “Your password must contain at least one letter, number, and be least X number of digits.” Requiring passwords to be formated in a certain way may help security, but it will likely discourage return visits since visitors must now remember a new password they are not used to.
20. Progress Indicators: For any forms that span multiple pages, make sure to include a progress indicator letting people know where they are in the process. These are most commonly seen during checkout and would include steps such as “Shipping Info > Payment Info > Receipt Confirmation.”
21. Minimize Scrolling & Pages: A good case can be made to limit the number of pages in a a multi-part form in order to prevent customers from abandoning. However, an opposing case can also be made than ridiculously long, single pages forms that require scrolling can scare off customers. There’s no sure-fire rule here, its a perfect opportunity to perform your own a/b test.
22. Strong Call to Action Buttons: Sometimes “Submit” just doesn’t cut it. In other words, be specific and action oriented with your form buttons.
23. Use External Labels: Have you ever used a form that labeled the field with text that disappears when you click into it? This can be a great space saver, but extremely confusing if a customer forgets what the field is for since the label has disappeared. Here’s a great example of why external form labels are more effective.
24. Prioritize Size and Location of Multiple Button Forms: On a form with multiple action buttons, make sure you emphasize the most important button leading to the conversion. For example, your final order confirmation screen has 2 buttons, “Finalize Order” and “Edit Order”, make sure the “Finalize Order” button is larger and more prominent.
25. Clear Confirmations: Have you ever filled out a long, tedious form, clicked submit, only to be returned to what seems like the same page with the form empty? You can do everything right with your form, but if you drop the ball on the confirmation, your customers will be helplessly confused. In addition to making a clear confirmation message, check out these other tips to prevent wasting your confirmation page.

So what are your thoughts? Have any other form optimization tips to add?

What’s one thing that all successful e-commerce sites have in common, regardless of their industry, technology, or experience? Their customers trust them.

E-commerce in particular lends itself to a low trust environment. After all, when you make a purchase online, you’re giving money to someone you can’t see, for a products that you can’t touch. Needless to say, trust is a crucial aspect of transacting business online.

Duct Tape Marketing recently interviewed Steven M.R. Covey on his book The Speed of Trust. Covey speaks of a “low-trust tax” which makes all business processes less efficient. Inspired by this concept, I came up with 10 ways to avoid paying a low-trust tax with your e-commerce site. If you have any ideas of how to inspire trust on your website, please leave a comment below.

1. Have a Real About Page: I’m not talking about a vague paragraph describing what you do. I’m referring to a personal, detailed explanation of who you are. Share your mission, your passion, and your vision with customers. This information becomes a powerful word of mouth tool when customers are telling friends and family about your products or services. Consider even showing pictures of yourself and your staff to add an extra personal touch.
2. Ability to Reach Management: Customers love to know that they can influence the management of a company. Providing an email address to reach a manager or even the owner shows you are committed to listening. But don’t stop there, why not publicly thank customers who have recommended new site features that you added. Even better than a company who listens is a company who responds to customer feedback.
3. Security Logos: Simple, yes, but having a few trusted logos from the BBB, McAfee, or your SSL provider inspire confidence for your customers. For first time visitors, these logos may be the only thing they recognize, and the trust they have with these brands spills over in favor of your company.
4. Professional Design: Even if customers don’t have any artistic inclinations, they intuitively know if your website design sucks. Your website doesn’t have to do a fancy song and dance, it just needs a professional, clean design that instills confidence in your brand.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: E commerce Website Conversion Tips website navigation Website Usability

What’s possibly the #1 problem preventing you from improving your website?

You.

As much as we want to believe website optimization is all about tactics and strategy, often the key to success lies in our own behavior. In order for optimization to occur, we first have to properly collect and interpret data about our websites. However, if the daily processes which we use to collect data are overly systematic and rigid, inevitably out of the box thinking will cease to exist.

Let face it, we all get into ruts by doing things in the same old way. So how can we change perspectives and see our website through a different lens? Here’s 12 ways to help you look at your website as if it were the first time.

1. Stand Behind Someone Browsing your Site: One of my favorite ways to inspire ideas is to hand my laptop over to my wife, and have her browse through a client’s website. As she does, I watch her browse the site and ask her questions. Because she interacts with the website as a much less experienced user, she often does things I wouldn’t expect.
2. Stand Beside Someone Browsing your Site: Want to perform a low budget eye tracking study? Perform a similar experiment like the one above, yet this time focus more on the person than the website. Stand beside a friend or family member as they maneuver through your site for the first time. Pay close attention to where they eyes go as they browse. Are their eyes attracted to the page elements you would expect? Interact with them and quiz them on their impression of the website.
3. Record Your Visitors: Screen recording allows you to see your website through the eyes of your visitors and offers an experience that traditional analytics software just can’t. The ability to see micro-actions, such as the cursor moving or visitors interacting with a form, is absolutely priceless, and something you will never glean from log files or Javascript based programs. ClickTale offers a free version of their screen recording analytics.
4. Change analytics programs: Using the same analytics tools over and over can get you into a repetitive rut. I’ve found that looking at the same data with a different analytics program can yield insightful results. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft’s new Adcenter Analytics.
5. Try a slower internet connection: We forget how using a slower internet connection creates a shockingly different user experience. When page elements, such as images, embedded videos, or flash files hesitate to load, visitors may think your website is broken. For a disturbing reminder of a slow internet connection, check out this free application.
6. Get an Analytics Buddy: Give a trusted friend or colleague access to your analytics data for an hour or two, and offer to do the same for them. They’ll likely interpret the data a much different way than you, shedding light on previously unnoticed trends.
7. Use a Different Web Browser: As much as I love Firefox, I intentionally use other browsers on occasion. Sometimes even simple design modifications can cause rendering problems in less fortunate browsers such as such as Internet Explorer. Regularly viewing your website in multiple browsers will prevent simple rendering issues from going unnoticed for very long. Try BrowserShots for a quick screen shot of your website in all the popular browsers or give Google’s new Chrome browser a spin.
8. Change your Screen Resolution: Using your web analytics, take a look at the 5 most common screen resolutions of your site visitors. If possible, adjust your screen resolution to that size and take a spin through your website. You might be surprised that certain mission critical site features such as add to cart or checkout buttons are obscured or below the page fold. Webconfs.com offers a nice little tool to simulate different screen resolutions.
9. Adjust your Color Settings: Color settings on monitors vary greatly, frequently causing certain colors to have insufficient contrast with the background. Try adjusting the settings on your monitor, or using another monitor altogether.
10. Browse with Script Errors On: You know those ugly little JavaScript errors that popup now and then? Make sure your internet browser it set to display them so know when one of your pages is broken.
11. Use a Mobile Device: How usable is your website for a mobile user? Does it render properly? If not, try using a service such as Mofuse that can generate a functional mobile site based on an RSS feed.
12. Work at a Different time: Apparently, I’m not alone in discovering creativity late at night. Taking a hard look at your website or your analytics reports when you feel the inspired can yield surprising results.

Think about how you would react if you were actually able to visit your website for the first time? What would you tell yourself? Hopefully the tips above will help you uncover previously unknown issues with your website and improve upon them.

Have you used any of the tactics above? What other methods can inspire out of the box thinking and creativity?

I recall a memorable staff meeting in company I worked for when the following question was directed to me, “What percent of visitors to our website actually by make a purchase?” Upon responding that our website converted about 3% percent of traffic, a panic went off in the room. “What’s happening to the other 97%!?” many wanted to know.

Because we’re so focused on the primary conversion goal of our website, we often forget many of our visitors come to our website with a different agenda in mind. Although we’d prefer that 100% of our visitors make a purchase or generate a lead, its in our best interest to help visitors complete the task that’s most important to them at the time.

FACT: Your ability to convert visitors for secondary goals affects your ability to convert visitors for your primary goal.

For example, if a customer tried unsuccessfully to find a store location on your website, how likely are they to make an online purchase? Judgments are made quickly about your site, so if a simple task can’t be accomplished, some may assume your site is broken or poorly made.

What type of alternative goals are we talking about? Here’s a few that come to mind:

• Finding a store location
• Checking for new products
• Learning about the company / brand
• Researching in-store purchase
• Finding a job
• Tracking an order
• Contacting customer service
• Finding an answer in an online knowledge base
• Adding a product review

So how do you go about optimizing for alternative conversion goals? Here’s quick checklist:

1. First, identify all your alternative goals. To help with this, study your navigation paths from the top entry points on your site. You may also consider directly asking visitors their intent, using a survey tool such as Avinash Kaushik’s excellent 4Q tool.
2. Setup Google analytics goals or similar tracking through your analytics software, allowing you to see visitors as they funnel their way to the goal in mind
3. Looking through the lens of this goal, try to identify possible obstacles. For example, if you learn that 10% of your site visitors are looking for a store location, but your locations page is buried in the footer of your website, you’ve found a potential stumbling block.
4. Determine the goal completion page. In other words, after a visitor completes this goal, where do they end up?
5. After a visitor reaches the goal completion page, ask yourself “How can I steer this visitor towards the primary goal of the website?” For example, after a customers adds a favorable product review, you can suggest similar items to the one they just purchased.

Potentially, you could have hundreds of various alternative goals on your website. Start with optimizing the most common ones, and go from there. If you delight your visitors in these areas, you’ll undoubtedly build a bridge to future conversions.

In 10 Costly Assumptions, point #10 touched on a topic I’d like to explore in more depth: attracting repeat traffic. First of all, why do we like repeat visitors?

1. They convert better
2. They spend more
3. They’re more likely to tell others
4. They’re free (you already paid to acquire them)

Here’s 10 ideas for creating loyal visitors by creating a magnetic website:

1. Consistency: If customers know that content is updated at a certain time consistently, you’ll train them to return to the same place at the same time.
2. Get Email Opt-ins: An obvious point, but I can’t overemphasize its importance. Consider an email opt-in almost as important as a purchase. (or whatever your primary conversion goal is) Browse through your site with an eye for this secondary conversion action, asking yourself how you can better encourage email opt-ins. Can you offer an incentive such as a freebie or a contest? Maybe you just need to place your sign up form in more places?
3. Trigger Based Emails: Event triggered emails, in contrast with regularly scheduled marketing emails, are a great tactic for bringing in highly targeted traffic. Here’s a few trigger based email examples. You can email customers (who have opted in) notifications when:
   • A Certain product is re-stocked
   • Before a product sells out
   • Similar products are added
   • Someone abandons a shopping cart
   • Someone abandons a wish list
   • Order confirmations
   • Shipping confirmations
     
4. Daily Specials: Wouldn’t it be cool if part of your customers’ daily routine was checking your “daily deal” page every morning? By offering item of the day (or week) special, you’ll consistently attract curious deal shoppers.
5. Social Communities: Allowing your customers to interact with each other creates an automated mechanism for repeat traffic. By yourself, you probably can’t create enough content to keep visitors coming back daily, but a self-sufficient community can. Forums, mini-social networks, & online street teams are great ways to attract and keep a loyal following.
6. What’s New Section: Your loyal visitors don’t like digging to discover what’s changed since their last visit. Ensure that your homepage, category pages, and product pages all clearly label new items and allow visitors to sort or filter by newness. Having dedicated section highlighting new products or website features would be ideal.
7. Freebies: Free branded content such as wallpapers, screen savers, myspace layouts, and web banners provide sticky content and great viral branding tools. If content such as this doesn’t fit your brand, consider posting useful “how to” videos or articles.
8. Blogs: The benefits of blogging are numerous, even for eCommerce retailers. It’s sometimes hard for customers to see real people behind a website, but not so with a blog, which allows your personality to shine through. By allowing customers to comment on posts, you’ll create two way conversations that will keep them coming back.
9. RSS: RSS can be used not just for blog updates, but also to keep customers current with new products, company news, or sales. CompUSA lets customers subscribe to over 30 RSS categories, creating a truly personalized data feed from company to customer. Using RSS in combination with a Daily special (see #4 above) can be especially powerful.
10. Make Customers Part of R & D: We often think of customers as the last link in the chain of business processes. But why not make them apart of research and development as well, ensuring that your products are made by customers for customers? Threadless pioneered this approach with community based product development, allowing their community to submit and vote on t-shirt designs. C28 asks their street teamers to vote on new clothing designs and uses the feedback to modify designs and production quantities. Allowing customers to influence product development creates an incredibly interactive experience that customers won’t be able to get enough of.
11. Ask for a Bookmark: If all else fails, just flat out ask customers to bookmark your site. In addition to browser bookmarking, suggest other popular social bookmarking sites such as Delicious.

Before you make any changes, delve into your analytics to determine just how well you’re doing with attracting repeat visitors. Take a look at your ratio of new vs. returning visitors, and make this your benchmark to improve upon.

What other tactics can be used to attract repeat traffic? Leave a comment with some tips of your own.

“Never assume.” - These 2 words represent the greatest advice ever given to me on the topic of website optimization. Here’s a list of 10 assumptions site owners make (myself included) that could cost you a ton of business.

Assumption #1: People will know how to find your website

We often assume that people have memorized or bookmarked our web address. But what happens when people forget, or are using a different computer and don’t have access to bookmarks? In addition to ranking on Google for your brand/company name, do you rank for common misspellings and variations? One company I work with uses uses pay per click to bid on at least a dozen variations / typos of their brand name, which is often misunderstood when spoken. What about your domain name? Especially if your URL contains dashes (example-url.com) or a top level domain of anything besides “.com”, consider buying up every reasonable variation you can afford, and redirecting it to the correct address.

Assumption #2: People know what you sell

How many times have you landed on the homepage of a website, and were unable to understand the primary purpose, product, or service? We often neglect to succinctly inform our customers about our product or service, which leads to a prompt bounce from visitors.

Assumption #3 : Everything will go as planned

Here’s an experiment. Try going through your website conversion funnel (checkout process, contact us form, etc) and do everything wrong. For example, enter an invalid zip code, click on things that weren’t meant to be clicked on, click the back, forward, and refresh buttons on your browser excessively. You might be surprised what you see. How well does your site handle errors? When people stray off the beaten path, can they get back?

Assumption #4: People know where to click

Don’t assume that because you know where to click, everyone knows where to click. Creative can be beautiful and attention grabbing, yet completely worthless if people don’t know what to do next. The power of a strong call to action button on a landing page is priceless.

Assumption #5: People know how to get home

Yes, most people know that clicking the company logo will take them to the homepage, but not everyone. Recently, I performed a test on a website and found that 45% of visitors preferred clicking on a link that actually said “Home” instead of the company logo. Even worse is when interior pages offer no link at all back to the homepage.

Assumption #6: People know where they are

People don’t always start on your homepage, and navigate step by step to their destination. Maybe they landed on an interior page from a search engine, and they have no idea where to go next. Breadcrumb navigation helps orient visitors, and establishes a navigational hierarchy.

Assumption #7: People know how to buy

This one is quite common, unfortunately. Many eCommerce sites assume the visitor will be on the shopping cart page to checkout. However, my experience has found that customers will look for a “checkout” button from any page of a site whenever they are ready to complete a purchase. If it’s not painfully obvious where to go, you might just lose a sale.

Assumption #8: People will volunteer loads of personal information

It’s important to think like a customer when building registration forms or checkout pages. Is the information you’re asking for so important that you’re willing to lose a customer because of it? The truth is, you will lose a certain percentage of customers for every additional piece of unnecessary information you ask for.

Assumption #9: People will contact customer service if they have a question or problem

Actually no, they will probably just leave and never return. In my experience, one customer question or complaint usually represents at least 10 other unspoken ones of the same nature. It’s best not to count on customers to tell you about problems, but rather to discover them yourself.

Assumption #10: People will come back

Even if people love your site, don’t assume they’ll be back unless you give them a good reason. This is why it’s so crucial to capture an email address, since it provides a proactive follow up mechanism. Other tactics to help bring in repeat visitors include having an RSS feed, a section highlighting what’s new, and constantly updated, fresh content. I can’t tell you how many incredible sites I’ve visited and completely forgotten about. When a do remember them, I often can’t remember the url or brand name. (see assumption #1)

To follow my own advice, I’m not going to assume that you’ve already subscribed to the Palmer Web Marketing feed. If you haven’t, why not subscribe now?

Some evidence suggests top internet retailers are eager to frequently redesign their website’s, but not so eager to perform optimization and testing. It’s easy to understand why upper management loves redesigning websites. It’s tangible, it’s exciting, and it often comes with a load of lofty promises of future ROI. Website usability on the other hand, is not quite so tangible and easy to grasp. It’s not drastic, but rather slow and steady.

In a perfect world, a website redesign might never be necessary. After all, a redesign implies someone wasn’t monitoring the performance, and tweaking and optimizing as needed. However, inevitably the topic of a redesign will come up. Here’s 8 questions to ask yourself before embarking on a website overhaul project.

1. What are the problems with the current site? - Why are you thinking about a redesign in the first place? Make sure you answer this question with fact rather than feeling based reasons. You may be tired of the look and feel of your website, but what do your customers think?
2. What do your customers say about your current site? - What feedback are you getting from your current customers? Your customers may not be professional web designers, but even a novice can point out a bad website. In order to get feedback, try taking some surveys or polls from your site visitors.
3. What is the purpose of this redesign? - Try to avoid vague objectives such as “the site needs to be updated” or “because we do it every year.” Is your goal to improve conversion rates? Reduce bounces rates? Increase search traffic? Ideally, your redesign goal should be inline with the overall purpose of your website. Be sure to set measurable goals that you can easily revisit after the launch.
4. Can these problems be fixed with optimization rather than a full redesign? - Just because your search engine rankings need improvement doesn’t mean you must redesign your site. Maybe it can simply be fixed for a fraction of the cost. It’s easy to over react to a problem and assume everything needs to be scrapped, when it can be optimized instead.
5. How will the redesign affect my search engine rankings? - Too often, SEO is an afterthought of a website redesign. While SEO is certainly not the only consideration when considering a website overhaul, there are many search related ramifications of a site redesign. Make sure you understand how these changes can impact your search traffic before you begin a project.
6. Have you considered the opportunity cost as well as the financial cost? - Depending on the complexity of your website, site redesigns can take a significant amount of time. During this development time, will the current site be neglected? In my experience, its very difficult to focus on maintaining and optimizing an old website at the same time you’re building a new one.
7. Will it be hard for my customers to relearn my new site? - Nobody loves change. Will customers be confused by the new layout? If the changes are drastic, expect the learning curve phenomenon. In other words, things may get worse before they get better.
8. How will I judge if the new website has succeeded? - This is perhaps the most important question of all. If it’s not asked and answered properly, you may get stuck in an endless cycle of website revisions, never reaching a goal because the goal wasn’t defined in the first place. Be sure to answer this question before you launch the new site. Are you prepared to switch back to the previous design if the site is a failure?

As you can probably tell by now, I’m a big fan of website optimization vs drastic, sometimes unnecessary website overhauls. Don’t get me wrong though, there are certainly times when a situation warrants a complete redesign.

What has been your experience with optimization vs. redesigns? Under what conditions would you justify scrapping a design and starting over?

Building customer confidence in your brand is vital to converting first time visitors to your website. This post will highlight 3 customer confidence building tactics I recently discovered.

Who Just Ordered Feature

We all know testimonials are a proven way to boost confidence in your products. Email marketing company Aweber has found another way to leverage the well-known social proof buying trigger. Aweber’s Who Just Ordered feature shows, in-real time, the first name, city, and state of customers who have just signed up for their service.

This innovative feature counters one of the major draw-backs of online shopping, the lack of a shared shopping experience with other customers. For example, if I’m in a department store, I can easily see where people are going, and what they’re buying. On the web, I cannot. We all want to know we’re not the only one buying something. (I’m not the only one who sneaks a peak in other people’s shopping carts, right?)

Showing Press Recognition & Awards

While many online stores have a press page buried deep within the site, few retailers actually brag prominently about recognition they’ve received. Romanicos Chocolate, on the other hand, highlights awards they’ve received on their homepage. This is a great tactic to raise the value of the brand in the eyes of a first time visitor. Even if a visitor has never had an interaction with your company before, seeing other well known brands or people endorsing your products helps your website’s credibility.

Shipping Assurances

Questions regarding shipping and fulfillment can cloud a customer’s mind and become an obstacle for ordering. “Where does it ship from?”, “How long will it take?”, “What method will it ship?” are just a few of the common questions. For me, there’s nothing worse than placing an order, and having the retailer sit on it for days before they ship it. Kids Bargains assures customers with an ad on their homepage that orders ship quickly. Such a reminder is perfect for deadline sensitive customers who need their order by a certain date.

Seen any other tactics used by online retailers to boost confidence? Please share them in the comment section below.

Need help boosting the confidence of your site visitors? Get 3 recommendations from Palmer Web Marketing.

Not many years ago, successful pay per click campaigns could basically run on auto-pilot. As this marketing medium has matured, good ROI has become increasingly difficult to achieve. This post will focus on some tactics to keep your campaigns afloat in these competitive and changing times.

1. SEO Your PPC Landing Pages: Recent changes to Google’s quality score now look at on-page text and load time to determine relevancy, and therefore your final click price and ad position. By applying basic on-page SEO tactics and web usability best practices to your landing pages, you can save a bundle and improve your ad position.
   
2. Turn Off Auto-Matching: Apparently, Google doesn’t think PPC marketers are good enough at picking keywords, so they want to do it for us. They’ve done quite a good job at spinning this one, but don’t fall for it. With auto-matching, Google will automatically show your ads for queries that they think are related to words you already bid on.
3. Set Cost Per Conversion Goals by Product Category: How much are you willing to pay a customer? Looking at your gross and net operating margins, set a goal on how much you are willing to pay to acquire a customer through Pay per click. Then stick with it, and adjust or cut your ad groups in order to meet this goal. Taking this a step further, determine how much you can afford to pay for each product category. For example, you can obviously pay more to acquire a PPC sale for a 70% margin product vs. a 30% one.
4. Calculate Your Lifetime Customer Value: In addition to understanding your customer acquisition cost, it’s crucial to know the long term value of customers you acquire through PPC. For example, on average how many times will your typical customer buy per year? Sometimes marketers are willing to take a hit on the first sale if they know the customer will generate many future sales. Recently, I analyzed an Adwords campaign, and broke it down by LTV for each adgroup. The results were surprising. I discovered that many groups were performing well up-front (low cost per conversion), but weren’t ever generating future orders. In contrast, some groups were generating poor up-front results, but great LTV.
5. Recognize Cross-Channel & Untrackable Conversions: Because ROI tracking is so easy, we sometimes think its infallible. Realize that customers who click on your ads will often convert through other channels such as through your call-center, store, or catalog. In addition, its nearly impossible to track sales from customers who use multiple PCs (home, office, laptop). For example, a customer may find your website from work, but make their first purchase at home after typing in your URL directly.
6. Dis-Allow Trademark Bidding for Affiliates: If you utilize affiliate marketing, take a close look at your pay per click bidding policy for affiliates. If you’re not careful, affiliates will bid on your brand name terms, (keywords that you likely already rank organically for). This type of affiliate theft adds unnecessary marketing costs, since you’re now paying affiliates for a sale you would have likely received without them.
7. Use Appropriate Data Samples for Decisions: One mistake I see frequently is making decisions to cut or increase PPC spending based on an inadequate amount of data. Before making a drastic decision, make sure you view several months worth click and conversion activity. I frequently come across ad groups that perform well one month, and terrible the next.
8. Turn Off the Content Network: In my experience, the content network is extremely difficult to generate acceptable ROI with. Even if you’ve had success with the content network, be sure to separate it from your keyword campaigns, as mixing them will blur the ROI between the two.
9. Test Your Ad Copy, But Not Too Much: A/B testing your ads is so easy, there’s no reason not to do it. However, don’t stress about changes that are too small to track. Changing insignificant words in your ad copy may show slight changes in click-through rates, but the results are likely random.
10. Test Landing Pages: More importantly, test which landing pages result in better conversion. You can accomplish this by creating an identical ad, yet linking to a different destination.
11. Make Your Ads Less Appealing: Yes, you read that right. If your goal is good ROI, then you actually don’t want everyone to click on your ad, only qualified customers. This might mean adding the price of your product to your ad, with the intention of filtering out discount shoppers. The key is to qualify your clicks, not to cast a wide net. This is especially important with high volume, broad keywords.
12. Build Custom, Focused Landing Pages: One of the major advantages to PPC vs. organic SEO is the ability to send visitors exactly where you want to. Make sure your landing pages feature the same keywords you bid on in order to reinforce relevance. In addition, ensure that the next step is impossible to miss, featuring a strong call to action.
13. Use Negative Keywords Exhaustively: Not bidding on keywords can be as important as bidding on them. Use Google’s ad preview tool to help determine whether your ads are showing up for irrelevant queries. Here’s some great tools to help find negative keywords.
14. Avoid Bidding Wars: Focus on ROI, not your ego. The number one spot doesn’t always convert best. In fact, some think spots #2, and #3 outperform #1, since it tends to get clicked automatically.
15. Use Phrase Match & Exact Match: More and more, I’m finding it difficult to achieve good results using broad match keywords. Instead of a shot-gun approach, use phrase match or exact match to focus in on specifc phrases.
16. Don’t Compete with Your Organic Listings: If you rank in the top 3 organic positions for a keyword, you’re probably better off bidding for the 4 or 5 spot with PPC rather than competing with your natural listing.
17. Don’t Worry about Click Fraud: Yes, click fraud happens. It happens in some industries more than others. However, its best just to consider it a cost of doing business with paid search. If you focus too much of your time trying to catch it, or you know its happening and you can’t do anything about it, maybe you shouldn’t be using PPC in the first place.
18. Use PPC for Organic SEO Research: Let your paid and natural search campaigns feed off each other. As you analyze your top performing PPC keywords, consider optimizing for them organically. PPC makes great testing ground for SEO, since you can roughly gauge the success of keywords before going into all the trouble of optimizing for them.
19. Use Keyword Management Software: Campaign management software such as Google’s adwords editor simplifies repetitive tasks that are mundane in the web-based Adwords admin. Microsoft adCenter is now allowing beta pilot signups for a similar future product.
20. Track Secondary Conversions: It goes without saying that sales conversions should be tracked. However, what about that other 97% percent of visitors that don’t buy on the first visit? The next best thing to a purchase is often an opt-in, since a certain percentage of your opt-in list will eventually buy. Consider tracking “mini-conversions” such as email or RSS signups.
21. Double Check your Ads and Landing Pages: Over time, links get broken, copy gets out-dated, and products go out of stock. For these reasons, its important to test your ads on a regular basis, removing ads that should not longer be showing.
22. Watch your Traffic from Parked Domains: Take a look at your clicks and conversions from parked domains. While there is some debate about this, many marketers find this traffic is lower quality, and converts poorly. See this Adwords help page for how to turn this off.
23. Track Branded vs. Non-Branded Keywords: Make sure you separate your branded keyword campaigns from your non-branded ones. Realize that while branded keywords usually boast a much lower cost per conversion, they are often the result of other marketing campaigns.
    
24. Use Your Time Wisely: Whether your paid search program is managed in-house, or by a third party, your time resources are limited. Make sure you spend that time effectively, doing the things that will make the most difference. The Rimm-Kaufman Group suggests a break-down of how to allocate your time between term list management, bid management, landing page/site layout, and ad copy tweaks.
25. Make Big Promises; Overdeliver: Seth Godin recently wrote brilliant post on these four words that applies well to PPC. Your ads need to make big promises in order to get clicks. Your landing pages need over deliver on the promise of your ads, then make more big promises to keep visitors engaged. Your product pages need to fulfill the expectations from your landing pages, and so on. Top this off with a product that actually exceeds expectations supported by great service, and you’ve got yourself a winning formula for any type of marketing.

What PPC tactics have worked for you lately? I’d love to see another 25 tips in the comment section

About PWM

Justin Palmer is a Google Adwords consultant, who specializes in helping small businesses improve the ROI of their Pay per click campaigns.

Anyone who has ever meddled with SEO has asked themselves a ubiquitous question, “How quickly can I rank for [insert keyword phrase here]? More and more, I’m finding the word “quickly” and “SEO” don’t belong in the same sentence.

We want to believe there’s a magic SEO tactic that, if used, will revolutionize our results. On the contrary, a sound, long-term strategy consisting of great content combined with long-term SEO will win out. Below are 6 tips for ensuring long-term SEO success.

1. Build links steadily, not suddenly: We’ve known for years that overly aggressive link building can trigger ranking penalties. If Google sees optimization happening too quickly, they may penalize you for what they consider unnatural link building practices. Even successful link-baiting campaigns can sometimes backfire, resulting in too many links in too short of time. In reality, the safest bet is slowly developing high quality links over a longer period of time.
2. Focus on long tail keywords first, then broaden your approach: Suppose you were trying to rank for the keyword “ipod”. With the competition you face, its unlikely you rank for this word anytime in the next 5 years, even with aggressive SEO. Rather than shooting for the stars and landing on the moon, consider taking a different approach. By starting out optimizing for your primary keyword in addition to a modifier (e.g. color ipod, ipod 60GB, etc), you’re more likely to rank in a reasonable amount of time. Since this modified keyword phrase contains your primary keyword (ipod), you will also slowly start gaining ground on your original target. In a way, you’re shooting for the moon with the intention of gradually working your way to the stars.
3. Diversify your Target Keyphrases: Sure, your top keywords may be performing well today, but what about a few years from now when your competitors catch up, Google changes their algorithm, or some other external factor pops up? Rather than keeping all your eggs in one basket, begin researching now what you’d like to rank for a year or two down the road.
4. Create landing pages before you need them: Ever get an idea for a new keyword, but don’t have time to build a page? You may not have the time to fully create and optimize a page at the time, but why not at least create the page, throw a few internal links at it, and come back and optimize it later? I’ve found that this strategy gets the clock ticking with Google, since they obviously place value on the age of the page itself. Even if you can’t get to it for 3 months, you’re better since the page has now been given time to age in the index.
5. Use Reactive vs. Proactive keyword research: Even the best keyword research will never yield perfect results. That keyword phrase that you thought would be easy to rank for sometimes ends up being more work that its worth. Or worse yet, once you are ranking you discover it isn’t converting to sales. A reactive SEO keyword research method would take a different approach. Rather than doing a perfect job of keyword research upfront, you analyze the traffic you are currently getting and re-optimize your pages accordingly. As I analyze the top keywords bringing traffic to my blog, I’ve realized 90% of the keywords I never intended on optimizing for, it just happened. But once I see it happening, I reoptimize the posts, adding some internal links and on-page tweaks.
6. Content first, SEO second: Yes, it sounds trite, but if you focus on your content good rankings will follow. Quite frequently, potential clients contact me and ask them to review their website, believing they have an SEO problem. On the contrary, they have a content or usability problem, and SEO is the last thing they should be paying for. It’s important to not get caught in an SEO tunnel vision mindset. SEO will help good companies be better. SEO will do nothing for sites that have nothing to offer in the first place.

What advice do you have for long term SEO results? Be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts.