We all want to know which sites, search engines and keywords are sending us traffic. But what about direct type in traffic? When people access your site URL by typing it in from memory, it can be a great indicator of your brand preference, success of your offline and online marketing efforts and customer satisfaction.
If you’re smart and lucky, you named your site your main-keyword-dot-com and you get search traffic from visitors who use their address bars as search engines. For example, a search on “reusable bags” sends you automatically to “reusablebags.com” which sells…you got it, reusable bags.
Other types of type-in visitors could be:
Loyal, repeat customers
Late stage buyers who’ve already visited your site through search, PPC, email or affiliate link but needed time to make the purchase decision or comparison shop
First time shoppers pre-sold from a newspaper article, blog post, social media reviews or word-of-mouth
Type […]
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Big news in alternative payments this week: your friendly neighbourhood Amazon has just launched it’s challenger to PayPal and Google Checkout - cleverly dubbed Amazon Checkout. For 2.9% + $0.30 for all transactions over $10, 5.0% + $0.05 for transactions under $10, and tiered volume discounts above $3,000 per month, you too can offer patented 1-click ordering.
There are a few reasons you might consider adding Amazon Checkout to your roster of payment options, including:
Access to 81 million (no, I didn’t forget a decimal) people already hold Amazon accounts. This is roughly 30% more than PayPal. Customers would not have to create a new account to checkout with you, nor share any additional personal information. If a customer has multiple billing and shipping addresses on file with Amazon, that can be very convenient for the customer.
Through IP-targeting, Amazon can recognize Amazon.com customers and display the […]
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Amazon SimpleDB released a new version last week. With this new version, developers will be now able sort the results and use a new does-not-start-with operator in their queries - the two most frequently asked feature requests.
I am very excited about the new sort feature because now all the processing will happen in-the-cloud and I will be able to execute scenarios like:
“Top ten” scenario – return top tem items based on some criteria (price, rating, etc)
“Most recent” scenario - get X most recently updated items (sorted by “LastUpdatedDate”)
“Contact List” scenario – return items sorted alphabetically on “Last Name”
I would also like to highlight if you are storing your data on Amazon S3 and indexing your corresponding metadata on Amazon SimpleDB, this feature will be highly useful. Use this excellent library to index all your Amazon S3 object metadata in Amazon SimpleDB.
I also highly recommend reading the Query […]
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I’ve been hearing that traffic from Microsoft’s Live Search has been rising as a referrer for eBay Store sellers, in some case’s moving up just behind Google in traffic. I just wanted to ask guys if you are seeing the same thing.
Live, recently launched “Cashback“ through their search engine, so it would make sense that traffic would be up, but the big question would be; are sales up? The searcher only gets “CashBack” after a purchase, but can earn up to 25% on some eBay purchases.
It would be interesting to test the traffic coming from Live, by identifying a few items in your store inventory to fine-tune for CashBack search and then tracking the conversion of those items. I’m not sure if Omniture provides that capability though.
To conduct this test, go to Live’s Cashback site and search on your items. Check out how you compare with the other merchants and […]
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If you’re not familiar with Steve Krug’s web usability classic Don’t Make Me Think, it’s an entertaining and informative introduction to web site optimization. Though its screenshots and examples are quickly looking “old school” - its principles still stand. I “think” any web design and ecommerce professional should give it a read, and then give their own websites the “don’t make me think” test.
Today I’m going to apply the concepts from Don’t Make Me Think to The Source - a chain of electronics retail shops we used to call Radio Shack here in Canada, until it was acquired by Circuit City. I’m a fan of Circuit City’s web design and marketing, and have praised them many times before on this blog which is why I had high expectations from The Source’s web presence. But I found myself “thinking” very hard on this site.
This post […]
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Before we dive into the link pool, I want to remind you of 2 webinars happening on Wednesday:
Christmas is around the corner, and that means cyber Monday is coming up fast. What did Top 500 Retailer Danskin do last year, what did they learn and what’s in store for holiday 2008? Join Sitebrand and Danskin for a 29 minutes of Danskin: Can It Repeat Its Cyber Monday Mega Success? Wednesday, July 30 at 2:00 PM - 2:30 PM EDT.
Marketing Experiments is offering Optimizing for PPC marketing Experiments on Wednesday, July 30 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. EDT. This is your chance to have your pay-per-click ads optimized in real-time by the Marketing Experiments team.
It’s never too early to register for the next Elastic Path webinar. We’ll be joined by Bernardine Wu from FitForCommerce for The Art & Science of Choosing Ecommerce Technology.
Buy.com’s been in bed with eBay, listing […]
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Amazon has launched a video tutorial section on listing and selling through Amazon. It is available in your Amazon Seller Central account.
There are multiple videos on several different topics:
Set UpYour Account
ListInventory
ShipItems
IncreaseSales
DesignYourStore
You may not be able to view these unless your are logged into your Seller Central account.
Just my 12%
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What’s wrong with this picture?
This economy sucks. Consumers are hurting. While a temporary ease in oil prices and a once in a lifetime housing bill will ease the pain a bit, it’s not a cure for the economic crisis the US and the world is facing. Consumers are looking to save money. They are thinking about price.
Unfortunately, the shopping engines have fought for years to be known as more than just price comparison engines. Reviews! Search! Cash back! Social shopping! Mobile! Safe shopping! Green! Well, all those things are nice and should be part of a strategy, but right now, this is the perfect opportunity for the shopping engines to step up their marketing efforts (or at least run some bold tests) highlighting the fact that they save consumers money.
Yes, all the shopping engines are going to once again do a good job of PR and talk about how consumers can […]
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Not only is Amazon taking share of business away from eBay and other online ecommerce sites, but they are apparently taking share away from the offline world as well.
The online data is easy to track with Amazon active users growing 18% Y/Y in the 2nd quarter to 81 million, compared to eBay, which grew active users by 1% Y/Y to 84 million in the most recent quarter.
So where are these new Amazon customers coming from? Certainly they are coming from other online retailers and marketplaces, with eBay and Overstock recently reporting slowdowns, but could they also be coming from traditional B&M retailers as consumers decide to travel by mouse rather than car.
Perhaps Amazon is getting an increase in share of new online shoppers who would prefer to shop from home than drive to the store. Jeff Bezos suggested that during the conference call; “On the fuel prices we suspect that […]
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Because the AdWords system rewards keywords with high click-through history (relative to competitors) with better ad positions and lower cost-per-click, click through rate is considered an important performance metric. Along with a keyword’s relevance to ad text and landing page copy, click through rate influences a keyword’s “Quality Score.”
Every PPC campaign is bound to have a few (or few thousand) keywords with low click through rates. You can identify them easily enough with web analytics and campaign reports, but what do you do with them?
You have at least 6 options:
1. Do nothing. You’re always going to have stinkers, why major on the minors?
2. Try to improve your Quality Score, which should improve ad position, which may positively affect click through rates.
3. Add negative keywords if you’re using broad or phrase matching.
4. Create a new Ad Group. Pull poor performers out of your […]
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