Conversion Conference Blog

By Linda Bustos

Director of Ecommerce Research, Elastic Path Software

 

This post is the second in a 2-part series on getting started with remarketing (also known as retargeting). In my previous post I discussed how remarketing works. Today we examine ways to nail down your strategy before picking a remarketing tool and setting up your first campaign, along with ideas for what to retarget.

 

Why You Should Never Design in the Box

So you’re ready for remarketing, so why not dive right into Google Remarketing to walk through the steps of setting up your maiden campaign? Self-managed remarketing tools have step-by-step set-up processes, but without a mapped-out plan, some steps can stump you. The options you choose such as negative audiences and membership duration can’t be decided on the fly.

Planning scenarios in advance allows you to brainstorm, then hone in on the ideas that are most feasible or rewarding. Think about your creative – how you might want to A/B test it, and if you need ads to be dynamically populated (not all tools can do the fancy stuff).

Before launching a campaign, you need to populate your “audiences,” or groups of visitors that take certain actions on your site. Knowing how you want to target visitors (based on your conversion goals) is the first step in deciding which pages to “tag” with tracking pixels, and what to name them so you can build your member lists.

 

Determine Your Retargeting Goals

Your conversion goals don’t need to be completed sales – they could be blog subscriptions, white paper downloads, email or webinar sign ups, trial downloads or site memberships. Remarketing can also be used as a branding tactic to stay top-of-mind, in which case the conversion goal is a visit back to your site to see what’s new.

Select a few goals to build scenarios for. Your most important goal may not be feasible (e.g. if you don’t receive enough traffic to build an audience of 500 members within one week in order to launch a cart recovery campaign) so it’s good to have alternatives to try. You can also run several remarketing campaigns at the same time as long as they’re all using the same retargeting service.

 

Know Thy Customer

Don’t forget to use your web analytics to inform your strategy. What is your average days to purchase, or visits to purchase? (This can differ between product categories you may carry). Which areas of your site are most frequently visited (and can quickly fill an audience if you want to retarget specific products)? Which products have the highest margin and can absorb the additional expense of experimenting with remarketing? Do visitors from certain countries poorly convert that you can exclude from your campaign?

What other information do you have about your visitors’ behavior? Use any quantitative or qualitative data that may help you understand what motivates their conversion.

 

Be Exclusive

Like negative keywords in a paid search campaign, negative audiences are just as important as the “positive” ones. Think through what actions on your site might indicate a visitor should be excluded from a particular campaign. For instance, you don’t want to keep targeting visitors who have completed your conversion goal. Which page(s) should you tag with a “burn pixel” that removes these visitors from the pool?

Another example, if you have a membership site, a log in is a good indicator that you don’t need to follow this visitor around with pleas to join your community.

 

Create a Scenario

Your scenario is based on the trusty 5 Ws of journalism, but it helps to swap “Who” with “Why”

WHY – conversion goal

WHAT – user actions that show intent to this conversion goal

WHERE – pages which correspond with these actions

WHEN – how long you can realistically retarget users for this conversion goal before your ad becomes irrelevant

WHO – segment of visitors that perform the WHAT, minus anyone in a negative audience

 

Here are a couple examples in a sample scenario format:

 

SCENARIO A (General Campaign)

Objective: Keep brand top-of-mind for visitors who abandon the site and communicate our value proposition
Site pages (to tag): All
Audience (Positive List): General site visitors
Exclude (Negative List): Visitors who viewed Affiliates or Careers pages
Cookie duration: 365 days
Maximum exposures: 11
Creative: TBD, A/B test
Notes: (If any)

 

SCENARIO B (Flagship Product Campaign)

Objective: Retarget visitors who view our flagship product
Site pages: Amazing Product 1.0 product page, “amazing product 1.0” search results
Audience: Visitors to these pages
Exclude: Completed purchasers
Cookie duration: 14 days
Maximum exposures: 11
Creative: TBD
Notes: (If any)

 

Once you have a few scenarios and have settled on a tool that meets your requirements, you’re ready to get started tagging your pages, designing creative, building out your campaigns and launching your ads. Interested in learning more? Join me at Conversion Conference West 2012 for my session: Many Happy Returns: Remarketing Strategies for Converting Site Abandoners, where we’ll discuss the best and worst practices in this brave new world, along with plenty of creative strategies to get started in remarketing right away.

 

About the Author

 

Linda Bustos is the director of ecommerce research for Elastic Path Software and the author of the Get Elastic Ecommerce blog. As an ecommerce consultant, Linda has helped some of the world’s largest online retailers and technology brands improve their conversion rates and user experience. An online retailer herself, Linda moonlights as a jewelry designer for Robin Hood Couture, her line of handmade accessories.

Meet Linda in Person!

Linda will be presenting a session on “Many Happy Returns: Remarketing Strategies for Converting Site Abandoners” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Linda on Twitter @roxyyo and @getelastic to touch base and request for a discount code!

 

 

By Linda Bustos

Director of Ecommerce Research, Elastic Path Software

 

Have you ever visited a website and suddenly ads for the site are virtually EVERYWHERE you go on the web? Chances are, the website hasn’t purchased ad space on all your favorite sites, it’s simply retargeting you.

Retargeting (also known as “remarketing” and “remessaging”) is a close cousin to paid search advertising. But rather than being a tool for driving traffic, remarketing provides an opportunity to win back site abandoners (an average website may have goal abandonment upwards of 98%). Targeting web users who have already interacted with your site allows advertisers to get better results from display ads, strategically messaging visitors based on their site behavior and expressed intent.

While some may feel such targeting is akin to cyber-stalking, when done correctly, retargeting campaigns can provide stellar ROI for marketers. How does it work? How do you know if it’s right for you and how can you get started?

 

How Remarketing / Retargeting Works

Like personalization and A/B testing tools, remarketing technology uses cookies to track visitors and serve content. Tracking pixels are added to pages to correspond with your various campaigns and ad groups. As visitors view these pages, they are added to an “audience.” You may have an audience of all site visitors, regardless of where they entered your site, and you may concurrently have audiences targeted to site sections or actions taken on your site (like an abandoned web form or conversion funnel). Negative audiences can be set to exclude users whose site behavior indicates they are not prospects, such as career page views, or who successfully convert. Cookies may live for a few days to one year, and you can set frequency caps to limit the number of exposures your visitor will see on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

When tracked visitors arrive on publisher sites in the ad network, ads are shown based on what audience they belong to (audiences can be prioritized with higher bids). Google’s Remarketing program uses bids and Quality Score to determine “rankings” and impressions, just like with search marketing. Other vendors may use different methods of determining reach and charging advertisers, whether with a CPC, CPM or CPA model.

 

Is Remarketing Right For You?

While the benefits for online retailers are obvious, retargeting is not just for chasing down cart abandoners. Use it to improve any type of conversion, whether it be a site membership, blog subscription, content download, email sign-up, webinar registration or contest entry. It can also be used simply for branding, or keeping site visitors up to date with what’s new on your site.

Like search marketing (PPC), you must have a realistic budget to play with as well as in-house or outsourced help that can manage and optimize the campaign.

With search marketing, your traffic level is irrelevant. But remarketing requires a certain traffic level to “work.” Google Remarketing requires 500 cookied members of an audience before ads begin to appear. (Some networks recommend 1,000, others don’t have minimums.) If Google’s your tool of choice, it’s important that your site gets enough traffic to “fill the bucket” within a relevant time frame. If it takes 4 weeks to build a list of 500 abandoned carts, and 25% of them were added to the audience in the first week, the ads will likely be irrelevant for an abandoned cart campaign, depending on how long a user typically takes to complete a purchase. (Also consider that up to 30% of your visitors may be deleting cookies and effectively dropping out of your audience.)

 

How Can You Get Started?

If you’re already using Google Adwords, getting started with Google’s Remarketing tool is explained step-by-step here. http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=1302483&parent=1713922&ctx=topic Even if you are not intending to launch a campaign right away, building up your audience list as early as possible ensures you are reaching as many site abandoners as possible when you do run a campaign. Google’s product plays nicely with other Google marketing tools, so it’s a good get-your-feet-wet tool if you’re just getting started.

However, Google Remarketing has its limitations. It has less publisher inventory than other networks (limited to Google’s Display Network), so you may not be targeting all the outlets you want. It also lacks dynamic personalization of ad creative (such as showing a rotating carousel of recently viewed items or content). Running more than one remarketing tool at once is not a good idea, and audiences take time to build up. So, if you anticipate that Google will not meet your targeting wish list long term, consider launching with a vendor like Criteo, Adroll, Retargeter or Fetchback right off the bat.

http://www.criteo.com/

http://www.adroll.com/

http://www.retargeter.com/

http://www.fetchback.com/

But before you make any moves, you want to nail down your remarketing strategy. Part 2 of this article will discuss how to design retargeting scenarios based on your conversion goals and what you know about customer behavior.

 

About the Author

 

Linda Bustos is the director of ecommerce research for Elastic Path Software and the author of the Get Elastic Ecommerce blog. As an ecommerce consultant, Linda has helped some of the world’s largest online retailers and technology brands improve their conversion rates and user experience. An online retailer herself, Linda moonlights as a jewelry designer for Robin Hood Couture, her line of handmade accessories.

Meet Linda in Person!

Linda will be presenting a session on “Many Happy Returns: Remarketing Strategies for Converting Site Abandoners” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Linda on Twitter @roxyyo and @getelastic to touch base and request for a discount code!

 

 

 

 

By Robert Brady

Director of PPC Conversion, Trafficado

 

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is popular with internet marketers because you can track everything. You know exactly what search queries are triggering your ads, you know how much each click costs, you know which ad gets the highest click-through rate (CTR) and you know which clicks turn into actual conversions. This transparency and accountability is how I sell PPC to my clients and it’s how I demonstrate the value of ongoing efforts. But even if you have a great ROI, is there more you could learn from your PPC?

 

Learn from Clicks

You’re probably already testing at least two different ads in each ad group and rotating out the underperforming ad(s) on a regular basis. That’s great. It helps improve your CTR, your Quality Score (QS) improves, your account history is strengthening, your cost-per-click (CPC) goes down or your avg. position improves. That’s a lot of benefits, but what is it telling you about your customers? Take the following example:

First, you may be tempted to pause Ad #2 because it has lower CTR. However, we see that Ad #2 has a much higher CR, which led to a lower cost/conversion. Therefore, you would likely pause Ad #1 to get less expensive conversions. In addition to the performance boost, what else can you learn from this? Here are some additional learnings.

• The inquisitive call to action “How affordable?” gets better CTR, but it appeals most to price shoppers who don’t convert.
• The positive imagery of Ad #2, “Make your yard beautiful…” primes the user to convert.
• Mentioning Minnesota didn’t help CTR like I expected, but the “localness” may be increasing conversion.

 

Turn Learning Into Action

The 3 learnings above are great, but how can you act on that insight? Here are follow-up tests to help you learn even more about your customers:

• You like the higher CTR with the “How affordable?” copy, so test a landing page that offers 3 quotes from local providers. By doing the legwork for price shoppers you can capture customers earlier in the buying cycle.
• Positive mental imagery works with the ad copy, so extend it into the landing page copy. Test using more pictures of beautiful lawns. Maybe customers need an idea of what their lawn could be with a little help.
• Take the “localness” to the next level. Target campaigns to cities like Minneapolis or St. Paul. Maybe even suburbs like Ramsey, Anoka and Brooklyn Park. Make sure the landing page supports it too.

 

Get Started

Your PPC is doing great. CTR is good, conversion rates are healthy and ROI is positive. But you still have the chance to get even more out of your PPC as you look at your results and analyze what the data tells you about your customers. As you learn more about your customers you’ll be able to produce even better results. But that’s enough reading, get to it!

 

About the Author

 

Robert is a Google AdWords Certified Partner, Microsoft adExcellence member and is certified with Marketing Experiments for Online Testing and Landing Page Optimization. He has worked with a variety of different companies ranging from a small grass-fed beef grower in Idaho to a large B2B data storage provider.

He currently resides in Provo, Utah and can often be found skiing the greatest snow on earth, mountain biking through the Wasatch mountains or playing ultimate Frisbee at the park on a Saturday morning.

See Robert Live!

Robert will be presenting a session on “End to End PPC Conversion Optimization – From User Intent through Leaky Funnel Forensics” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Robert on Twitter to say hello to him and request for a discount code!

 

By Eric J. Hansen

Founder and CEO, SiteSpect

 

You already know that running multivariate tests can help you improve the usability and effectiveness of your site, but where do you start? Typically you want to examine your web analytics framework and truly understand the most important metrics, known as key performance indicators (KPIs), behind your business goals. Those KPIs, in turn, can be correlated to site factors that can be tested. This blog post will look at how to turn metrics into testable factors, A/B versus multivariate testing, and 5 key errors to avoid when getting started.

 

Starting at the beginning

If you don’t already use a web analytics framework for your website, it’s high time you start. This framework will make your goals and their measurement explicit and keep you focused on what’s important. Almost every website wants to achieve one or more RACR goals; that is, Reach, Acquisition, Conversion, and/or Retention. If you are focused on more than one of these goals for your business, you’ll want to set up a different framework for each of them, as you’ll be focusing on different metrics and therefore different factors to test.

 

Framing the big picture

 Let’s look at a very simple web analytics framework for Conversion using a hypothetical online retailer as an example:

 

Business objective	Website goals	KPIs	Target	Metrics	Dimensions	Segments
Sell goods	Increase online revenue	Average order value	$25.00 per order	# of sales per day	Geography	US vs. Europe

 

With this framework, we now have enough information to figure out which site elements, or factors, to test in order to understand which of them influences visitor behavior. Obviously, you will want track those pages and areas of the site that users click on in the conversion funnel, such as the “Buy Now” button and resulting “Thank You” pages.

Here are some of the things you could test and measure in support of an e-commerce website:

• What elements of the website led to the most “Add to Cart” clicks, followed by successful order completion pages (e.g. “Thank you for your order”)?
• Which combination of product information such as graphics, descriptions, layout, and color increased average order value?
• What combination of factors relating to site search most successfully brought users to pages from which they ultimately purchased products?
• Consider testing coupons and promotions.
• Test offers such as free shipping or financing.
• What about credibility factors, such as logos denoting secure credit card processing?
• Does the availability, placement, or look and feel of customer reviews and testimonials make a difference on purchase decisions?

Those are just a few things to think about. You’ll want to start with the factor(s) you think is most important to your KPI(s) and decide what experimental design is best. With A/B testing, you test one factor, such as a call-to-action button or a hero shot, against one or more variations to see which is most persuasive. While A/B testing allows you to test just one factor at a time, multivariate testing enables you to test many changes simultaneously. Evaluating the impact of combinations of factors and variations often reveals significant interaction effects that can have a dramatic impact on your conversion goals.

 

Common errors to avoid

There are five common mistakes that are easy to make when running multivariate tests. Here’s one of them:

1. Improper factoring caused by poor or no isolation of individual test changes; for example, changing a headline’s text, font color, and font size, all at the same time as an A/B test instead of a multivariate test.Why is this problematic? Because it’s difficult or impossible to isolate the impact of each individual change — i.e., was it the font color and/or the text that caused the visitor to behave differently?

Please join me at my session during Conversion Conference West on March 5 at 10:15 to learn the other errors to avoid and help you prepare your website for testing.

 

About Eric J. Hansen

Eric is the CEO and founder of SiteSpect, and the chief architect of the firm’s non-intrusive technology for multivariate testing, behavioral targeting and digital marketing optimization. He is a frequent speaker at conferences covering web analytics and optimization, and writes regularly on topics dealing with the intersection of marketing and technology.

 

Learn more MVT planning secrets from Eric!

Eric will be presenting a session on “The Essential MVT Roadmap: Test Planning Secrets to Ensure Success” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow him on Twitter and request a discount code.

By Rob Snell
Co-owner, Gun Dog Supply
& Author, Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies

I’m so excited for the Conversion Conference East in NYC.

Here’s a little bit of what I’m going to cover in my session on e-commerce optimization:

GUN DOG SUPPLY is our family business. We’ve sold training supplies for hunting dogs since 1972 via mail order, and back in 1997, we ran across Yahoo! Store, uploaded our catalog, and were off and running on the Internet.
The first 7-8 years were rocking. We were one of the first folks in our industry to get online, and selling online literally saved our family business.

About 6 years ago, our growth stopped…

Expenses were growing faster than our sales. We had our first down month in the history of our Internet business. My brother, Steve, — now running the company — was concerned. And I was saying don’t worry, it’s just a blip — things will pick back up.

So I dove into our analytics, trying to see if anything was broken or find the problem. In hindsight it’s pretty easy to see what was happening. The competition was growing online. Traffic was drying up. Customers had dozens of choices. All the old school catalogs in our industry now had shopping carts with virtually the same products that we had. And all these new school, “dot com kids” were popping up, selling the same things we were selling.

In 2004, SEO wasn’t new anymore. Competition for those first 10 spots on page one of Google was getting fierce. Paid search was exploding. CPC’s were skyrocketing. More and more folks were bidding up the same keywords. It was EXPENSIVE. And all the other, old, ways of driving traffic? They weren’t working as well as before.

GREAT, SO NOW WHAT DO WE DO?

Steve and I had one of our knock down, drag out “conversations…” Maybe this is the new reality? And we’ll have to get used to this? Or maybe we’re going to have to change how we do things…

So I’m sitting in Steve’s office WAITING for him to get off the phone (again). Steve has these MARATHON phone conversations with customers. I’m talking 20-30 minutes, easy. A customer has a problem with his dog, so he gives Steve a holler. And they’re talking about their dogs. And they’re talking about TRAINING their dogs. And they’re talking about HUNTING with their dogs. And they’re talking about their hunting GEAR. And their GUNS and their TRUCKS…And next thing you know, the guy places an order. And he’s a customer FOR LIFE…FOR LIFE.

This is GREAT, but it doesn’t scale. We handle dozens of these calls every day. There’s no way STEVE can do this with every customer over the phone. He has tons of other things he’s gotta take care of, too. And it’s hard to train folks to channel “Steve.” It just doesn’t scale.

SO I HAD AN IDEA…

What if we do the same thing online, on our Yahoo! Store, that Steve does over the phone? What if we took everything he ever said to a customer, and put it all over the Web site. I Wonder what THAT would do?

We put Steve all over GunDogSupply.com. We put his recommendations on the site. We put pictures of him and his dogs on the site. We put his opinions on the site. We completely replicated the experience you’d get over the phone. Instead of simply offering products for sale, we actively recommended products to solve specific problems. And it worked. Not only did it get us back to where we needed to be, it more than doubled our conversion rate and radically increased our growth.

Just for fun, last year I modeled what our sales would have been had we continued with business as usual compare to our new method so I could see what the difference was. Over the past six years the additional lift was over $10 MILLION. $10,354,767, to be exact, in additional sales above what our regular growth would have been.

And how did we do all that?

Well, you’ll have to show up at my session at Conversion Conference to find out!

About the Author

Rob Snell, Co-owner, Gun Dog Supply, a hunting dog supply retailer, & Managing Partner of Snell Brothers Consulting, a firm specializing in search marketing for Yahoo! Stores. Rob has extensive Yahoo! Store experience with both family-owned stores and consulting clients. The Snell Brothers have designed, developed, marketed and/or maintained hundreds of Yahoo Stores that have generated tens of millions of dollars in online sales. Rob has been online since 1990 and opened his first online store in 1997 when his brother, Steve Snell stumbled across Viaweb (now Yahoo! Store). Rob now consults with Yahoo! Store retailers on improving their e-commerce sites and maximizing their search-marketing campaigns and is a guest speaker and lecturer on search marketing and e-commerce for small business.

See Rob Live!

Rob will be presenting a session on “Relentless Innovation: How to Create a Tenfold Increase in Your Online Store Sales” at Conversion Conference East 2011 in New York City. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save $700 on Conversion Conference? Contact Rob to request a discount code!

By Charles Nicolls, SeeWhy

At SeeWhy, when we first launched our remarketing service in 2009, Randy Stross wrote a piece about email remarketing in The New York Times suggesting that while remarketing might be a great idea for ecommerce websites, it’s not a great idea for consumers. He likened emails following up on abandoned shopping carts to a salesman chasing you down the street if you didn’t buy from his store.

There are major differences, of course. We’ve long argued that remarketing emails, when done well, not only drive conversions but also build brand trust.

They can deliver great service and provide customers with the confidence to return to buy—either online, by phone or in store. If Randy was right and customers universally resented the intrusion, then these emails wouldn’t work.

In aiming to answer the question more substantively, I turned to data, and specifically email marketing benchmarks.

The key metrics to look at to determine whether customers like or loathe remarketing emails are:

1. the recovery rate
2. the open rate
3. the clickthrough rate
4. the unsubscribe rate

Frankly, the evidence is overwhelming: Remarketing, when done well, is appreciated by customers. Here’s the evidence:

(1) The recovery rate

The recovery rate is the percentage of visitors that abandon shopping carts, and remarketed visitors thatthen return and purchase following remarketing. At SeeWhy, we measure recovery rates across all our customers, and currently the average is 20 percent.

So, one in five shopping cart abandoners come back and buy, having being remarketed. In some cases, the recovery rate is as high as 50 percent. Moreover, when remarketed customers buy, they spend on average 55 percent more than customers who didn’t abandon their shopping carts.

(2) The open rate

The average email open rate for remarketing emails is currently 46 percent, more than double the benchmark open rate of 22 percent for all email campaigns. Email open rates are higher for remarketing campaigns simply because they are more relevant — remarketing emails are triggered by visitors’ actions (such as abandoning a shopping cart) and sent individually, rather than typical ‘email blast’ campaigns.

The data also shows that most abandoned shopping cart emails are opened multiple times. When opened, the average remarketing email is opened 2.2 times and clicked through 1.6 times. For some ecommerce sites, remarketing emails are opened as many as four times on average.

What this means is that visitors who abandon their shopping carts are keeping these emails in their inbox and going back to them. We know that consumers often use shopping carts to ‘bookmark’ items for a future purchase while they research their purchases, and remarketing emails make this much easier.

Customers appreciate a direct link back to their shopping cart where they’ve saved the items they are considering.

(3) The clickthrough rate

The clickthrough rate measures the proportion of shopping cart abandoners that refer back to the website by clicking on a link in one of the remarketing emails.

Aggregate data shows that on average 15 percent of recipients click through, approximately three times higher than the benchmark for all email campaigns. In some cases, we see remarketing emails getting clickthrough rates as high as 60 percent. The clickthrough rate can vary significantly from site to site and also within sites over time, in particular where a promotion is used.

It’s important to note that the email clickthrough rate is an imperfect measure — some customers will return by typing in the site name, mistrusting links in emails; so it is important to measure the true return rate as well, not just the clickthrough rate.

(4) The unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate measures the proportion of shopping cart abandoners who subsequently unsubscribe from future shopping cart reminders. The email unsubscribe rate currently averages 0.19 percent and is typically lower than industry averages for opt-in subscriptions (0.25 percent). This suggests that abandoners are happier to receive shopping cart reminder emails than a typical house mailing.

So on balance, we have to conclude that email remarketing, such as following up on abandoned shopping carts, web forms and applications — when done well — provides value to customers. In this case, it definitely looks more ‘like’ than ‘loathe.’

Tells us what you think. like or loathe?

About the Author

Charles Nicholls is Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of SeeWhy, blogger, ecommerce visionary, and author of ‘The Top Ten Converting Websites’ and ‘In Search of Insight.’

Recognizing that traditional Web Analytic approaches are limited to historical analysis, Nicholls founded SeeWhy in 2003 to make ecommerce more relevant to individual visitors and customers through real time web analytics. Nicholls, a 20-year veteran of the software industry in the US and Europe, is internationally recognized as one of the preeminent thinkers in the Analytics space. In 2003 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology selected Nicholls as a global leader in Intrapreneurship following his highly innovative creation of Business Objects Analytics. In his role as an advisor to leading companies globally, Nicholls has worked with many of the world’s top companies on their web and customer analytics programs, including Amazon.com, Ebay, Lands End, MasterCard and a many smaller companies.