20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment

If you have a shopping cart you should be concerened about abandon rates.  You are paying good money to get people to your site you should find out why some leave and don’t buy anything after filling up a shopping cart.

Here is a good article that gives 20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment

Google Adwords has released a Beta User Interface

Google has been working on a new User Interface. It has been in a limited beta for the past few months, but keep an eye out for it because over the rest of this week they will be rolling it out to everybody.

The first thing you will notice is that it looks a lot like Google Analytics. They took the concept of the Account Snapshot and put it on most pages. The other thing you will notice is that they tried to incorporate many of the features from the Adwords Editor.

They have included a new help section and it includes top help subjects that corresponds to what you are looking at. It also has a help search box on every page. In the past all you had was a link to the help page.

The features that I like the most are the ones that allow you to make changes without refreshing the page. Just by clicking on a bid you can make a change. Once you hit “ok” the change is made.  You can copy ads to different campaigns. You can also check the box next to an ad and click “More Options” and “Copy” and a box will come up with a list of campaigns and ad groups to copy it to.

The biggest change is that they have streamlined the entire process. You now have fewer clicks to get to many of the things you do regularly. And you can easily hide the boxes on the left to make more room on the main page.

Remember this is a Beta and there might still be some bugs. And once you get used to the new layout and how things work, you’ll be able to get things done a lot faster.

SEO – Web Page Titles

One of the first steps in optimizing a site for SEO is writing relevant page titles. The page title is put into an HTML tag in your page’s source code.

<title></title>

Go ahead and send this post to your webmaster if we’ve lost you already. If you’re still with us, read on!

Every page should have a unique page title that accurately describes what the content refers to. The best way to begin choosing a page title is to decipher which keywords correctly describe what the page is about.

Since these will be the keywords that users search for to navigate to your site, you want to be sure you’ve attached the best keyword choices to the most appropriate pages. When writing a page title, remember, it’s not just a place to stuff keywords. Make the title like a newspaper headline, catching and interesting, something that sums up the entire page in a glance. The first 62-68 characters of your title is the first thing people see in Google when you show up in a Search Engine Result Page (SERP). You can write a longer title with related keywords, but make sure the first 60 or so have sales text — text that convinces the person searching that you are the solution to their query. If you have too many characters, Google will put a “…” at the end. Even if they use an ellipsis, (…) the words that aren’t displayed will still be valued in the rankings.

Beware of fake Google Adwords Warning

There is an email going around claiming to be from Google Adwords telling people their account has expired.  Do not click on this or enter any information. Whenever you get an email with a link make sure to look up at the address bar and make sure you are on the site you think you are on.  Two weeks ago there was another email that was very similar. 

Excerpt from the Phishing Email:

Thank you for using Google Adwords! Google Adwords Services DEP. COPYRIGHT Google Adwords Services 2009 (C)

If you intend to use this service in the future, you must take action at once!. To continue click here, login to your Google Adwords account

Choosing a Domain Name

Below are some general rules you should follow when creating a domain name. These aren’t hard-and-fast and this list is certainly not exhaustive, but rather some things to keep in mind when you’re registering a domain name.

Try to get a .com.

    The public has been conditioned to think of websites as being .com’s.  If you don’t get a .com you will probably lose some traffic to the person that owns the same domain you have but has the .com.

Keep the length of your domain down.

    The longer your domain is the harder it is for people to remember. Try to keep it under 3 words and 15 characters. If you use 3 words make sure one of the words is very short. The reason for this is that people are lazy and will just go type in something shorter in Google. Also don’t forget you’re probably going to be using this domain in print on cards and promotional material, so the shorter it is, the less room it will take up on your printed materials. Before you buy a domain type it out and print it and see what it looks like in print. Another big reason for shorter domains is that if you plan to do pay per click advertising a shorter domain name will give you more text on your display url. You only have space for 35 characters in PPC and it is a very common practice to add extra text after your display URL to get more text in to your ad. I like to put stuff like /Free_Shipping after the domain or /Brand on ads that I create.  If you have a really long domain name you’re not going to have this option even if you remove the www from the front of the display URL.

Keep your domain name Phonetic.

    This means that when it is spoken out loud the spelling should be obvious. No silent V’s or weird foreign spellings unless you are targeting a foreign market where that is common. This is especially important if you plan on doing any radio or TV ads. Even if you don’t plan on doing any radio or TV ads your going to be telling people about your website and more than likely you will be using it as your email address.

Why spend money on email?

Your marketing budget is getting cut; you have to find innovative (read: inexpensive) ways to market your products. But how? All the new and exciting ideas cost lots of money and really you can’t justify them anyway.

According to “Winning in Turbulence: Protect and Grow Customer Loyalty” by Rob Markey and Darrell Rigby of Bain & Company, Inc., “Loyal customers cost less to serve… (and) …help stretch marketing dollars. Their word-of-mouth referrals to friends and associates provide a company with more like-minded customers, laying the foundation for growth when the economy turns around.”

Epsilon conducted an email branding study and published the results in February of this year. The statistics point out how important email marketing is in the advertising process. Consumers said they enjoy receiving email from companies with which they are registered (84%). It may be a struggle to grow your list, but once you have those names and are sending them email, you know you’re talking to an audience that wants to hear from you!

In addition, the Epsilon study found out that 57% of consumers have a more positive impression of companies when they receive email from them. And 40% said that simply receiving email has a positive impact on their likelihood to make a future purchase from a company. What does all this mean? Email builds loyalty and trust with people that want to hear from you. And those people are telling their friends about you, which helps you grow your customer base, your email base and your bottom line.

And if all of these statistics and numbers aren’t evidence enough, then maybe Mr. Markey & Mr. Rigby of Bain & Company, Inc. can convince you: “When spending drops, the companies focused on protecting and growing their most loyal, profitable customer segments often manage to stabilize their business. They may even attract new customers as competitors falter.”