In some ways, it seems search engines have a grudge against eCommerce sites. Often times, I don’t blame them. Many online stores offer little useful content, including dry manufacturer product descriptions, poor internal linking, and no unique, user generated content. Without a doubt eCommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. Below I’ve gathered 25 tips that I’ve successfully used while optimizing eCommerce sites in the past.

1. Avoid Manufacturer Product Descriptions: It’s tempting to just copy and paste from the manufacturer’s website, but resist the urge. At the very least, re-write the description in some way to make it unique.
2. Create a SEO Keyword Field in Product Database: Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to the site, enter commonly search for keywords in this field. Not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.
3. Focus on Singular Keywords on Product Page: As a general rule, I try to optimize for plural keywords on the home page or other SEO landing pages. Focus on singular terms on the product pages by using the SEO keyword field mentioned in step 2.
4. Simple Product & Category URLs: Ideally, URLs should consist of keywords, not useless ID’s or other parameters. If you don’t have the option of using URL re-writing software, at least limit the number of variables passed in the URL.
5. All Products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page: Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. Many sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories. This can be accomplished by using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page.
6. Unique Title Tags: While it’s debatable whether the company name belongs in the beginning of the title tag, most agree you should not include extra keywords that are repeated in every tag. For example, if you company name was XYZ Travel, include only the company name in title tag, not “XYZ Travel Agency and Vacations.” Use as little duplicate content as possible in order to prevent diluting the value of the rest of the text in the title tag.
7. Unique Keyword Meta Tags: Meta tags, including keywords and description, should be entirely unique on every product page. Though meta content likely doesn’t directly affect your ranking, unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties. In addition, don’t stuff keywords into your meta tags that aren’t relevant to the specific page they are on.
8. Unique Description Meta Tags: Personally, I like putting the same product description that appears on the product page in meta description tag. This will ensure unique content on each product page.
9. Product Reviews: A great strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from your customers. Allow customers to review products they’ve purchased or comment on one’s they haven’t.
10. Pass PR Wisely: Obviously, not every page on your site deserves the same link juice. While your Return policy page is important, it likely won’t bring in loads of revenue driving traffic from organic search. Make sure your primary SEO pages, (category and products pages) receive most of the PR flow by capping PR flow on less important links. You can accomplish this via Javascript links, form submit links, the no-follow tag, or the robots.txt file.
11. Internal Contextual Links: Site navigation links don’t tell search engines very much information about the page. Within a paragraph of text, link to a relevant page using keyword rich anchor text.
12. Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the SE’s to crawl. There are ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spiders without the session ID.
13. Create a Product RSS Feed: Create a product feed and submit it to relevant content aggregators. Google Base accepts an XML like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages.
14. Product Tagging: With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
15. Page File Names: If possible, use keyword rich page file names. A page files name such as www.yoursite.com/keyword-phrase-here.html tells Googlebot a lot more than a URL such as www.yoursite.com/?ID=1234.



16. Use iframes for Duplicate Content: If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product descriptions are not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that they data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalize you for duplicate content.
17. Links in Product Descriptions: Create keyword rich links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords.
18. Crawl-able Navigation: Avoid JavaScript or css based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In additional, don’t rely on form based navigation such as drop down lists since the SEs can’t follow them.
19. Don’t Stuff Keywords in your Nav: This is useless and very tacky. Keywords that show up universally in the navigation on every page are not as important as they used to be. Instead, use keyword rich anchor text pointing to your important pages within a paragraph of relevant text.
20. Don’t Use “View” or “More”: On your product category pages, make sure you link to the individual product pages with anchor text that contains more than just words like “View” or “See more”. Vague terms such as these tell spiders nothing about your products.
21. Optimize your Images: With images now popping up in the regular SERPs, every image on your site should be optimized. Make sure all your product images contain unique alt text attributes. By simply populating the alt text with the product and brand name, I’ve seen a huge increase in traffic from Google Image search. In addition, you’re making your site more useable for the vision impaired.
22. Optimize your Internal Site Search: This is more of a usability tip, but it applies perfectly within the context of eCommerce SEO. Because your visitor found your site via a search engine, they will likely expect your internal site search to work as well. I’ve found that many first time visitors landing your site from a SERP will search for the exact same term they typed into Google.
23. Create Brand Landing Pages: If your site sells branded products that customers may be searching for, setup a optimized landing page for every brand.
24. Use Title Attributes in Links: For all anchor text on your site, be sure to use appropriate title attributes (e.g. <a href=”page.html” title=”keywords here”>) in order to provide search engines more information about what the page contains. Although not nearly as important as the actual anchor text, title attributes are factored into the ranking algorithm in some way.
25. Track Page Yield: In order to determine the effectiveness of your site as a whole, take the number of unique keywords you are found for during a given time period. Then, divide that by the number pages indexed by Google. This will give you your page yield, a good metric for measuring the length of your “long tail.”

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing offers Ethical SEO services and Expert eCommerce consulting for small to medium size businesses.

I suppose I can title this post “25 Email Marketing Mistakes I’ve Made.” But rather than focus on the negative, below I’ve outlined the best practices I’ve come to adopt over the years. Hope you find something here useful.

1. Diversify your Content: If your entire email focuses on one product, service, or topic, you risk alienating all but the few people who will be interested. Unless you have segmented your database based on previous behavior, do not send an email on only 1 topic. I consistently find that the click through rate increases in proportion with varied content.
2. Don’t Stress about Spam Words: Many experts will tell you to avoid words like “free” or “sale”. In my opinion, ISPs tend to be moving away from content based spam filtering in favor of reputation based filtering. In other words, your sending IP address and from email are more important than whether or not your email contains certain words. Personally, I’ve used words like “free” in the subject line without any affect on delivery rates.
3. Make it Readable with Images Disabled: Always take into account the appearance of your email with images disabled. For email clients such as Outlook, this is now the default feature. Even popular web mails like Hotmail now disable images unless the sender is in the address book of the recipient. The best tactic to create readable emails with images block is use an alt description.
4. Create an Online Version: Always provide an online version of your email for users having trouble viewing images. I’ve calculated from emails I’ve sent in the past that around 5% of users will use this feature.

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Tags: 25 Ways Series E commerce email marketing Internet Marketing Transactional Email Marketing Transactional Emails

Ever since Shop.org coined the phrase “Cyber Monday” back in 2005, online retailers have realized the sales potential of this first Monday after Thanksgiving. After all, people are back at their office jobs, tired and overweight from the Thanksgiving holiday. What better to do than shop online?

 Below I’ve gathered some Cyber Monday marketing ideas for eCommerce sites.

1. Bounce Back Discounts: Capitalize off the huge amount of traffic you’ll be receiving by offering an incentive for the next purchase. While Cyber Monday sales are great, you really want consistent customers who will order all year long, even when there are no special offers. Try sending out a follow up email with a gift certificate or coupon code to everyone who makes a purchase.
2. Make It Viral: Take to the opportunity to capitalize on this huge traffic surge to encourage customer viral marketing. On your emails and landing pages for whatever promotion you run, include a link to a tell a friend form where shoppers can email your special to friends and family.
3. Clearance Loss leaders: A classic strategy, but I’ve found it works well online. Most of the time, customers will buy additional full-price merchandise, especially when they realize they have to pay shipping anyway. 
4. Free Gift at Threshold above Average Order: Give away some sort of gift item once customers reach a certain threshold. In order to determine the threshold, take a look at your average order on last year’s Cyber Monday and increase it bit. However, make sure the gift warrants spending that much.
5. Offer Deal on CyberMonday.com: If you doing something really noteworthy, you may want to highlight it on CyberMonday.com, a deal site run by Shop.org. Many prominent brands feature promotion there all year round, not just Cyber Monday.
6. Random “Blue Light” Specials: Randomly highlight items throughout the day on your site. Better yet, highlight different items everyday through the holiday season to keep people coming back.
7. Send 2 Reminder Emails For whatever promotion you run, make sure you keep your company top of mind after the Thanksgiving holiday. There will be a ton of marketing emails floating around, so you may want to send an initial email right before or after Thanksgiving. Then follow up with another right as the sale begins.
8. Give Store Credit, Not Discounts: Don’t give away the farm by offering outrageous discounts on your products if you don’t have to. Consider offering store credit in the form an online gift certificate that can be used towards a future purchase. For example, rather than offering a $25 discount, offer a $50 store credit. Incentives like these tend to cost less, and they may actually be more attractive to your repeat buyers.
9. Spread it Out: 1 day sales are great for everyone, except your fulfillment staff. In order to prevent hysteria for your warehouse and customer service staff, run the sale over a few days rather than 1 day only. This also will allow time for customer viral marketing to kick in.
10. Create Product Bundles: The value of a product bundle can be perceived as greater than the sum of its part because you are conveniently creating a one stop gift.

For more ideas, you might considering using the Wayback machine to view your competitor’s site last year at the time. I hope some of these ideas have been useful for you. Happy holiday selling!

Surprisingly, many ecommerce sites waste the thank you or receipt page by making it a dead end. Instead of encouraging your visitors to close the window, continue to engage your customers with one of the following tactics:

1. Refer a friend form: After the user completes the purchase, ask them if they would be willing to tell a friend or family member about your product or service. Obviously, if they trusted you enough to give you their own money, they might be willing to recommend you to a friend.

2. How to Track your Order: In order to prevent needless queries to your customer service department, you might consider showing customers the process for tracking their order. Show them how to login, and find out when the order has shipped and what the current status is on the delivery.

3. Show products related to those ordered: By doing this, you might be surprised at how many people will immediately order again. Just be sure that your customer service team is prepared to deal with customer requesting to add additional items to their orders.

4. Feedback Survey: Ask your shoppers about the experience they just had. Because the experience is fresh on their mind, they will tell you about any frustrations while using your site.

5. Coupon for Next Purchase: Encourage customers to bounce right back with a coupon for their next purchase. Make it clear, however, that this discount cannot be used on previous purchases.

In choosing one of the above tactics, your company priorities will apply. For example, if you’re most concerned about providing preemptive customer service, then you might be inclined to use the receipt page to clarify how to track the order. If you’re more concerned about driving sales, you might choose to show related products.

A word of caution applies to these ideas. Before you encourage your customer to perform another action, make it very clear that the purchase process is complete, and order has been submitted. In addition, always send an email confirmation receipt.

By using one of the above tactics, hopefully you’ll steer clear of the mistake many ecommerce sites make on their Thank You pages and continue to build a long lasting, profitable relationship with your customers.

Hopefully, you’ve already begun to consider any necessary improvements to your site to accommodate the influx of holiday traffic.  Below I’ve compiled holiday improvement ideas for e-commerce sites. I hope you find something here useful.

1. Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Think about how much traffic your site will receive during the holidays. How can you harness that traffic to create year long business? Consider offering a good discount incentive for customers to come back and shop in January. You can automatically email them a coupon after each order, or send one along with the package. Make sure that this coupon is not valid until after the holidays.
2. Loosen Up on Your Return Policy: While a 30 day return policy is commonplace for the rest of the year, it may scare off early shoppers during the holidays. Make it clear to your visitors that you will accept returns and exchanges on all Christmas gift purchases.
3. Use a Website Monitoring Service: Odds are, your website will go down at least once during the busy holiday season. If you’re not big enough to have a 24 hour IT department monitoring your server, signup for a website monitoring service such as Alertsite, who will email or text message you if your site goes down.
4. Gift Receipts: Gift givers hate revealing how much they spent on a gift. Make sure you allow customers to click a Gift receipt option that will hide the prices on the packing list from the recipient.
5. Gift Messages: Let your customers add a personal message to their gift. For simplicity, you can have the message appear on the packing list which will already be included in the box.
6. Determine Shipping Cut-off Dates: This is quite possibly the most important information to communicate to customers during the holidays. Check with your shipping carriers to determine what the cutoff days are for the various methods of shipping.
7. Prominent “No Hassle” Return Policy: Your return policy should be easy to find. Consider re-packaging it as a ”no hassle” policy in order to calm the fears of first time buyers.
8. Holiday Graphical Themes: Show some holiday spirit and redesign some of the artwork on your site with a holiday theme. Hopefully, this will get visitors in a buying mood.
9. Increase Server Capacity: Talk with your web host about how you can increase your server performance during the holiday rush. You don’t want to end up like Walmart or Amazon on last year’s cyber Monday. Here’s a sad, but funny example of Macy’s servers getting overloaded.
10. Checkup on your Domain, Web hosting, and Merchants: God forbid that your credit card or domain name expires during the Christmas rush. Double check the basics just to be safe.
11. Audit Your Online Product Catalog: Have a detail oriented person visit each of your product pages to ensure accuracy. Check for typos, broken images, and bad hyperlinks.
12. Seasonal SEO and PPC Landing Pages: Don’t forget to optimize your SEO and PPC campaigns for seasonal keywords. Visitors searching habits change around the holidays, so your marketing strategy should as well.
13. Mystery Shop your Site: Either do it yourself or hire a professional service to mystery shop your site. Mystery shopping should include ordering, contacting customer service, and returning the product back to you.
14. Learn from Your Past Mistakes: Just for fun, checkout your site at Christmas time last year on the wayback machine. You’ll likely spot issues that can be improved this year.
15. Learn from Your Competitors: Also, checkout what your competition was doing last year. It may give you some tips on what or what not to do this year.
16. Build up those Wish Lists: Start encouraging your visitors to build their wish lists now. Come Christmas, they’ll know exactly where to find what they want. Check out this post for Wish list improvement ideas.
17. Offer Online Gift Certificates: If your site doesn’t offer online gift certificates, and your visitors don’t find that perfect gift, they will just leave. Gift certificates make great last minute gifts. In addition, they’re a great way to drive sales at the beginning of next year.
18. Gifts by Price: Organize and suggest gifts by price range. For example, highlight gifts under $10, 25, 50, 100 or whatever price points are appropriate for your business.
19. Gifts by Person: Organize gifts intended for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, grandparents, etc.
20. Get 404 and 500 Error Notifications: Talk with your webmaster and ask him to setup a script that notifies him every time a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error) occurs on your site. You might be surprised how often errors occur. When we set this up for one of my clients, they received over 1,000 errors in one day. These errors can be costly, especially at Christmas time.
21. Stocking Stuffers: Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. These can be a great way to increase your average order total.
22. Shipping and Return Info on Product Pages: Shipping and return issues will be top of mind for your customers at this time. Assure them your policies are convenient and fair by linking to your shipping and returns page from your product pages.
23. Offer Gift Wrapping: Many don’t like the idea of sending gifts to friends or family wrapped in nothing but bubble wrap or Styrofoam popcorn. If you can, offer gift wrapping services to your online customers. Be sure to charge enough to cover the labor and material costs for this additional service.
24. Emphasize Urgency: Let your customers know it’s not safe to wait until the last minute. To prevent shipping issues or product stock outs, encourage your customers to shop early.
25. Bundle Products: Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle.

Hopefully you’ve found something here useful for your site. Be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions.  

We’ve heard it said that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” However, I’d argue that words can be worth a thousand pictures.

Good product descriptions should both inform and persuade your customers. Below I’ve gathered  some tips for spicing up these powerful selling tools.

1. List benefits, not features: Have you ever encountered a salesman who rattles off useless specs and features that you either don’t care about or don’t understand? Don’t be guilty of this with your product descriptions. Suppose you sell a wireless phone that offers a wireless headset feature. Rather than boasting about “Bluetooth wireless technology” phrase the feature as a benefit. “Safe, no-wire hands free operation allows you to keep your hands free for more important tasks.” For more suggestions on selling benefits, not features, checkout this post.
2. Proofread them Thoroughly: There’s nothing more embarrassing than being told by a customer that your product description is erroneous or contains typos. Make sure your descriptions are proof read by someone other than the original copywriter.
3. Let Customers Describe It: Allow your customers to review your products. The information they provide will be very valuable to customers considering a purchase. Visitors may trust a user generated review even more than your own product descriptions.
4. Don’t just sell, educate: When you educate your customers about your products, they feel like you are providing additional value for the price they pay. RadioShack does a nice job of this with their Research library.
5. Use Enticing, Image Oriented Words: Let your customers see, hear, taste, touch, and smell your products through descriptions that create powerful images in their mind. Here’s a great comparison of 2 very different descriptions of the same product.
6. Too Much is a Bad Thing: Don’t overwhelm your customers at the outset with a huge, novel size product description. Crutchfield uses a JavaScript enabled “Read more” link to hide or show additional product information.

As always, please leave a comment if you have any more suggestions to add to these.

It’s a question I hear asked over and over again. Most eCommerce sites struggle with ranking their product pages due to 3 factors: duplicate content, poor internal linking, and competition. While nothing can be done about the last problem, much can be said about the first two.

In this post, I’ll share some of the tactics I’ve used to improve product page rankings for my clients.

1. Product Reviews: Product reviews are a sure fire way to ensure your pages are rich with unique content that occurs only on your site. Back when we were able to view supplemental results on the Google SERPs, I found that pages that had unique products reviews did not end up as supplemental results. On the contrary, pages without unique descriptions or product reviews did.
2. Keyword Rich URLs: Because most ecommerce sites are linked with a dynamic database, they use ugly url’s which contain at least one number parameter. Convert your category product page URLs into friendly, keywords rich file and folder names. For more info on URL re-writing, check out this Wikipedia article. For IIS users, you might want to consider this software from Isapi Re-write.
3. No Follow Tags: Many sites distribute their internal link juice in such a way that is not favorable to the product detail pages. In order for your pages to rank highly, they need to receive a decent flow of PageRank. I would strongly recommend slapping a no-follow tag on your less important pages from an SEO perspective (e.g. Privacy, security, about us pages). Just be sure to link to them from your sitemap without the no follow. For more info on this tactic, check out this post on the no-follow tag.



4. Avoid Manufacturer Descriptions: Resist the temptation to copy and paste manufacturer provided product descriptions. Why? Because all your competitors use them as well. When Google sees multiple pages with the same content, it will likely favor the site in which the content was published first. In addition, these stock product descriptions often are not the most well written from a sales perspective.
5. Add SEO Keywords to Title Tag: It goes without saying that all your title tags must be unique and contain the product name. However, this is simply not enough. Create an extra field in your product database where you can add alternative SEO keywords. Then have these keywords show up in the Title tag for each product page. For example, while you’ll likely never rank for a high volume keyword search such as “apple ipods”, you may stand a chance at ranking for “discount apple ipods” or “Apple ipod mp3 player” if you add those phrases to the title tag.
6. Internal Contextual Linking: Link to your important product pages internally from a non navigation link. For example, you may want create a keyword rich link in the product description of one product linking to another product page.

I hope you’ll find these suggestions useful. As always, leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback.

Why do we hate car salesmen? Simple, we don’t trust them. It’s not that we don’t want the car, we just don’t find the salesman’s claims to be credible. Because of the lack of face to face interaction between you and your website visitors, customers will judge your company based on your website. Your products may be incredible, but if your site isn’t credible, you’ll never close the deal.

Below I’ve listed my top 5 tips for improving your website’s credibility.

1. Clean, Professional Site Design: Nothing says amateur more than an ugly or unprofessional website design. It’s painfully obvious when websites are designs by “techies” rather than graphic designers. While it’s certainly possible to go overboard with graphics, they are none the less important.
2. Personal Contact or About Page: More often than we realize, customers use contact or about pages to determine whether your company is reachable and or credible. Make sure you prominently display contact information on your contact page. In addition, you may want to add a personal touch by showing pictures of your customer service staff with their direct contact info.
3. Trust Logos: Secure logos from your SSL provider, Hacker Safe, or BBBOnline can go a long way to show credibility.
4. Privacy/Security Page: Display your privacy policy (you do have one, right?) for your customers to review. Assure them their information is kept safe and secure. Allow them to validate your SSL with click-through verification (most SSL providers offer this.)
5. Unfiltered Customer Reviews: If your site sells products, I would highly recommend allowing customers to review them. While it’s tempting to remove negative customer reviews from the site, they can be a great way to convince your customers that you are open and transparent about your products.

I hope you found these suggestions useful. Be sure to leave a comment if you have any other ideas.

About

Among other things, the Palmer Web Marketing blog offers SEO Tips for eCommerce sites.  Palmer Web Marketing also offers ethical search engine optimization services and expert ecommerce consulting.

We’ve all heard it said “you don’t lose wait by weighing yourself.” However, I beg to differ. Not in regards to weight loss, but rather in reference to monitoring web analytics. Everytime I check my site stats and see improvement, I’m motivated to create even better results.

Below I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be the most important metrics to monitor for eCommerce sites.

1. New Visitor Conversion Rate: Most etailers rarely differentiate between their new and return visitor conversion rates. By isolating the new visitor conversion rate, you’ll be able to see a clearer picture of what’s happening when first time visitors land on your site from search engines or other ad campaigns.
2. Return Visitor Conversion Rate: Unfortunately, not everyone buys on the first visit. The next best thing, however, is getting them back to your site. By analyzing your return visitor conversion rate, you’ll see how likely you are to convert your return traffic. Most likely, you’ll find that your return visitor conversion rate is the higher of the two.
3. Pageviews / Visit: Pageviews per visit can reflect how well your site engages your audience. An increasing number of pageviews per visit can indicate that your content is interesting, therefore visitors are spending more time browsing it. However, a high pageviews per visit metric can also indicate unecessarily complication processes such as checkout or product browsing.
4. Items / Order: If your site has a suggested product feature to encourage add-ons, you would benefit by tracking how many items you sell per order.
5. Average Order Value: While your target average order value will vary greatly based on your industry, it would be wise to monitor this metric over time. Ideally, you’d like to see a year over year increase.
6. Landing Page Bounce Rates: A bounce occurs when a visitor visits a page on your site, and immediately clicks away and goes no further. High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors including excessive loading times, irrelevant content, unnactractive site design, etc. Be sure to monitor your bounce rates on all your important entry pages including your home page and any SEO or PPC landing pages.
7. Landing Page Load Times: As mentioned above, excessive page load time can wreak havoc on your bounce rates. Monitor your page load times on different connection speeds with this free tool from WebSiteOptimization.com
8. Traffic Sources: Google analytics breaks visit sources into 3 categories: Direct visits (from typing your URL directly), Search engines visits (both SEO and PPC), and refferring sites (any other sites linking to yours). Obviously, the percentage of visits from each of these sources will vary for every site. However, as your brand grows, you’d like to see more visits coming from direct URL entry. These tend to convert better.
9. Orders Per Customer Per Year: Come up with a calculation of how many times a customer order per given time period. This serves as a good tool for determining how much you can afford to spend on marketing or re-marketing.
10. Shopping Cart/Checkout Abandonment Rate: Measure what percentage of visitors abandon the shopping process at each step in your checkout. For example, how many abandon after adding an item to the cart? After entering shipping & billing info? After entering credit card info? Too high of an abandonment rate could signal a serious checkout problem.

About PWM

Palmer Web Marketing blog offers web usability advice and SEO Tips for e-Commerce sites.  Palmer Web Marketing also offers ethical SEO services and expert e-commerce consulting.

Every website has two conversion rates. One for your first time visitors, and one for your returning visitors. Combining the two results in your overall conversion rate.

Recently, while reviewing a client’s Pay Per Click campaign, I was dismayed to find several high volume ad groups were resulting in a 1% conversion. Compared to the site’s overall conversion rate of 2%, this finding was disappointing. However, as I began to compare these results with the conversion rate of all first time visitors, I found they were comparable.

It’s crucial to monitor both of these metrics in order to obtain an accurate picture of what’s happening. With the same client mentioned above, we also found despite the fact the overall conversion rate remained flat over the past year, the returning visitor rate had improved dramatically. I believe phenomenon was due to an increased number of search engine visitors for keywords not perfectly relevant to the site. For more details on this, checkout my post on how SEO can decrease your conversion rate.