PPC Archives/Category

Black Friday Shopping: Is Your Online Business Ready?
America’s favorite shopping season is right around the corner and with it a barrage of online bargain shoppers. Is your site ready to handle the Black Friday shopping rush? If the answer is anything but yes, you may want to consider a quick preparatory revamp. Why? Because the year-end holiday season is not only the best time to meet your annual sales goals, but a great time to capture new customers. Following Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the last two months of the year are prime for gift-giving; people are shopping for themselves, their family, and their friends. Not to mention, over the last eight years, Black Friday retail e-commerce spending alone went from $534 million USD to $1970 million USD – and it’s only expected to rise again this year. Which means optimizing your site for online sales now can ensure your business is ready to roll this holiday season. So how can you prepare? The first step is to decide which holidays you want to run promotions on. Once you’ve determined that and set up a promotional calendar, you can move on to polishing your website and online holiday marketing strategy. To make it easier, we’ve compiled a checklist to help get you on your way.
Getting Your Website in Gear
Image of a person browsing an ecommerce platform

Check Your Server Traffic Capacity. Black Friday weekend is sure to draw a lot of traffic to your site, especially if you are running promotional deals. So making sure your server can handle the influx of customers is likely to make both their and your experience easier. Check your server capacity before the season starts at LoadImpact.com or Blitz.io.

Create Landing Pages for Your Black Friday Deals. If you plan on setting your customers up with some awesome deals, it’s important to make sure they know what they are and where to find them. Landing pages on your website specifically made for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions can help alert your customers to all the seasonal discounts you have on offer. Going the extra mile and creating a banner for your deals to be displayed on every page, will also help ensure no one misses out!

Make sure your website is mobile friendly. The share of mobile sales on Black Friday in 2013 went from 27% to 48% in 2016. And with more and more customers turning to their phones for online shopping, having a site with responsive design is more important than ever. Don’t know whether your site is mobile ready? Check it out with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. And if you still can’t figure it out, let us take a look!

Test and troubleshoot everything. Even with the best promotions, the holiday shopping season could still be a complete bust if your customers aren’t able to make purchases from your site. Whether it’s a broken link or simply a slow loading page, it’s important to make sure you’ve tested the durability of your landing pages and made sure your promotional coupons are working fine.

Make the checkout process as seamless as possible. Simplicity is key. Customers like it when they can make a purchase with the fewest clicks possible – and obvious clicks at that. So spend some time ensuring your website has a user friendly interface with clear add/delete item and checkout buttons. And if you need a little help, let us know.

Have your Shipping and Returns Policy for the shopping season in fine print. To prevent any future misunderstandings or complaints, it’s best to have your holiday season shipping and returns policy listed on your website where customers can easily access or see it.

Track EVERYTHING. To make sure you’re getting the results you want and your leads are converting into sales, keep a detailed track record of every change you’ve made to your site and how it has affected your conversions. A great way to do this is through tracking your Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel data.

Marketing Yourself Right
Now that you have your website ready to go the next thing to tackle is your marketing strategy. To start, look at your past marketing data to see how your business performed during previous years. This will make it easier to plan a marketing strategy as you’ll have a better idea of what worked and what didn’t. Once you have that data, you can start to plan for the future holiday season. And the following tips will help you put your best foot forward!

Research your customers. A good marketing strategy starts with great research. For example, do you know 100% who your customers are? Have you created buyer personas? If you haven’t, check your Google Analytics demographics to ensure that the personas you have in mind match the factual customer data retrieved by Google. This will help you market to not only your current customers, but all potential buyers as well. Still unsure? Take a look at this helpful B2B Buyer Persona Guide for a more in-depth look on how to make your customer-data work for you.

Create a winning PPC Campaign. Pay-per-click is one of the best ways to reach targeted customers. If you have optimized your campaign with the right keywords, your ad should appear at the top of Google’s search results. However, if you did not have the time to get your SEO and keyword targeting in place, PPC can help! For example:

Shopping Ads is one of the best ways to get your products in front of your customers, because its CPC is much lower when compared to a Text Ad, and it can get you better conversion rates. You can also target local customers with Google’s Zip Code Targeting.

And if you are already running PPC campaigns, the holiday season is a good time to start a remarketing campaign. Reach your customers who are actively searching for your products, or are loyal to your business with remarketing campaigns.

Utilize social media for customer insights. Your social media channels can be a treasure trove of information. Places like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are full of consumer opinions on products and services. And not just on products they currently use, but items they are interested in buying. Put this information to use by –

Promoting your Black Friday deals on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook.

Creating product hype and awareness by offering special discounts to your followers.

Closely monitoring comments or mentions on your social channels and responding to any customer queries and feedback promptly. You can even make use of social listening tools to listen to what people are saying online about your brand or products.

Creating your own hashtags for the holiday season. You can stick to the regular hashtags of #BlackFriday and #CyberMonday, of course, but you can also create hashtags specific to your business. If you do, make sure you plug them on all your marketing channels- website, social media, and emails.

Using Facebook Dynamic Shopping ads, which are a great way target customers who visited your website and added a product to their cart but never followed through with the purchase.

Start an email campaign targeting current customers. When it comes to getting results, email marketing is still very effective. Triggered emails like those to customers that abandoned full online shopping carts, still tend to bring in more customers than many social media campaigns. To get the most out of your email campaign –

Categorize your email lists. Segmenting your emails into specific customer lists based on products they’ve looked at or purchased is likely to get you more email open rates.

Personalize! Include the name of the subscriber and offer specific promotions based on their location.

Create and manage your email workflows in advance. This will ensure that every email is catered to the customer receiving it, and be less work for you in the long run.

Leverage your current customer base through exclusive deals. Not only will this help build anticipation for future Black Friday deals, but it will show your loyal customers that there is some advantage in following you.

Create a countdown timer for your emails to promote urgency.

In the End
No one knows your customers as well as you do and any website adjustment or marketing campaign should be planned with them in mind. However, we hope these tips will help get you and your site on your way to holiday-ready! And if you still have questions, let us know!
Sources
Desktop retail spending on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States from 2008 to 2016 Share of mobile online sales on Black Friday from 2013 to 2016 How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business Get Local with ZIP Code targeting Effects of List Segmentation on Email Marketing Stats Why You Should Spend More on Google Shopping vs Text Ads
Greg McNeil

October 18, 2017

Ecommerce Platforms, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, PPC, Responsive, SEO, Social Media Marketing

Digital Marketing, ecommerce design, ecommerce website, PPC, responsive design, responsive web design, SEO
Google’s New Search Quality Rating System: What Does It Mean for Ecommerce?

On 11/19/15, Google posted an update to their search quality rating guidelines. In the post, you’ll find a link to a PDF which provides instructions to Google’s search results raters. These are human users who rate the quality of results that Google returns for search queries. Google’s PDF does not provide direct advice on best practices for SEO—that’s simply not its intent. However, by reading Google’s instructions to its human raters, we can understand SEO best practices in a new way. In this post, we’ll comb the Google document for new information that’s relevant to ecommerce store owners. A large portion of the document deals with mobile search results. While much of this information is not new, it’s great to have it all in one place, straight from the source. However, there are a few points to be made.
User Intent Behind Queries
Google classifies search types based on user intent. This is a great way to approach the keywords you’re trying to rank for. What is the user intent behind the keyword? It should always match what users will find on the page which you’ve optimized for that keyword. It’s a fairly obvious point, but it’s worth making. For example, if you’re a paid stock photo site trying to rank for the keyword “free stock photos” so you can persuade users to buy stock photos when they searched for free photos, the intent of your landing page does not respect the user intent behind the keyword. This practice is fundamentally deceptive. Just don’t do it. As Google’s instructions to raters show, Google continues to refine its ability to match user intent to honest search results. If you’re a brick-and-mortar business, you should pay special attention to “Visit-in-Person” search intent—that is, local searches on mobile in which the user is looking for a nearby brick-and-mortar location. For example, a music store with both a physical retail location and an ecommerce store should prepare its online presence for Visit-in-Person search intent. As well as a fully functional, mobile-responsive online store, this business should have a fully populated Google Business page with accurate location, contact information, and hours. Incomplete or inaccurate information could stop mobile users from finding the brick-and-mortar location they’re looking for. You’ll find this information in section 12.7.4 of the PDF.
Google Is Getting Better at Understanding User Intent
Image Link In that same section, you’ll find a discussion of ambiguous queries that could be the name of a restaurant (Visit-in-Person intent) or the name of a spice (purely informational query). In writing web copy for your site, you should be precise, leaving no room for semantic ambiguity, while also writing naturally. Be informative, clear, and natural. This will allow Google’s powerful Semantic Search to match precise contextual results to keywords that display ambiguous intent when examined out of context. Take note here: fundamentally, Google is getting better at divining user intent behind queries. That means that SEO efforts will gradually move away from technical precision (e.g., including exact-match keywords in copy at a recommended density) and towards excellent, well-written copy that matches user intent. Good content marketing is fast becoming the most effective road to good SEO. We expect that trend to continue.
Special Content Result Boxes
Special Content Result Boxes Image In Google’s PDF, you’ll also find a discussion of “Special Content Result Blocks” (section 12.8.2). If you haven’t noticed, this feature has started appearing at the top of SERPs when the query has a definite answer for which no entity can claim copyright. As the document makes clear, SCRBs only appear when the user has asked Google a specific question—for example, “how much does a gallon of water weigh?” In our screengrab, the SCRB appeared with a URL to a landing page—but not all SCRBs have landing pages associated with them.
Content Strategy
For ecommerce stores, that means checking content strategy very carefully. If some of your content strategy involves trying to rank for questions with definite, non-negotiable answers related to your niche, you should trim those topics from your content strategy. Google is so sophisticated at this point, it’s starting to give us answers directly, without sending us to 3^rd party sites for the answers. That means content strategists must narrow the focus to topics on which they can provide fresh, useful information which Google can’t get elsewhere or prepare from aggregate data.
Give Users Fresh Content When That’s What They Want
For ecommerce stores associated with a niche that evolves regularly, that means publishing fresh, accurate content on news within your niche. If users google “boston marathon” and your business is associated with the marathon, you should publish timely content about the next marathon. That’s what users are likely searching for.
The Bottom Line
Google is always tweaking things. This causes some stress in the SEO community—but it shouldn’t. Google is trying to create a better experience for users. Keeping up with Google’s constant algorithm refinement helps us all to create better experiences for our users. For ecommerce store owners, happy users mean satisfied customers. There’s really nothing to lose.

Greg McNeil

November 20, 2015

Content Marketing, Ecommerce Platforms, Google Analytics, PPC, SEO
Get Dumped By Trada? – Let Us Pick Your Adwords Campaign Up!
As of Today, March 30th, 2015, Trada customers were met with the unfortunate news that Trada is going out of business. This is terrible for anyone who has relied upon Trada to manage their Pay Per Click marketing. The fact that customers only have one day to act makes it even worse. Luckily, our Google Certified Pay Per Click experts are here to save the day.

We want to become your long term partner in growing your online sales and leads through digital advertising. At 216digital, we are dedicated to doing whatever it takes to ensure that your campaign is a success tomorrow and for many more years to come.
- Experience – Our paid search experts have over 10 years of digital advertising experience!
- Affordable – Fixed Campaign Management Fee’s – our prices / fees are not based upon your spend.
- Expertise – Our agency is both Google & Bing certified
- Transparency – your campaign is yours to view, manage, and edit. We want to keep you involved!
Ultimately, your business is met with a difficult decision to make and it must be made quickly. We would value the opportunity to speak to your further about your PPC campaign and how we can be your partners moving forward. If you are interested in speaking with us, please email us at team@216digital.com or call toll free 877-907-3277

Want to learn a little more about our AdWords management? – Take a look at our professional PPC management.
Greg McNeil

March 30, 2015

PPC
3 Pay Per Click Tips

My friends and family who know how successful I am when it comes to running PPC campaigns for my clients always ask me for some free tips and advice they can take back to use on their own campaigns. I generally give them 3 quick and easy tips that they can implement and see instant success.

Add Ad Extensions

One of the easiest ways to make your ad stand out is by adding ad extensions. Google offers 7 different types of ad extensions to choose from (Sitelinks, Location, Call, App, Review, and Callout). Now you have to understand that many times these ad extensions don’t make sense for your business, so don’t go crazy and add them all. So why are ad extensions so important? Simply put, they increase the real estate your ad takes up, and provide more links that can be clicked on giving you a higher click through rate.

Create a Branded Campaign

Let’s say that people are actively searching for your brand name. Do you show up? Does your competitor show up above you? Is one of your competitors bidding on your brand name? Unless you have the greatest SEO campaign humanly possible and no one is bidding on your brand name, one of the above answers is not what you want to hear. These are all common occurrences. You should have a branded campaign to guarantee you convert people who are actively searching for your brand name. It seems so simple, but many companies over look this and lose what should be easy conversions to their competitors.

Add a Remarketing Campaign

How many people visit your site and don’t convert? How many of them instantly forget you exist after they leave and never come back? A lot. Remarketing campaigns are the perfect solution for this problem. Remarketing campaigns track visitors to your site, and follow them to each site they visit after, displaying high quality ads along the way. This keeps your company, brand, or product fresh in their head and gets them to convert even after they forgot you existed.

Now these are just three quick tips that can help your Pay Per Click campaign. If you want your campaign to take the next step in 2015, be sure to follow my subsequent blog posts to get more great ideas.

Greg McNeil

January 20, 2015

PPC

Black Friday Shopping: Is Your Online Business Ready?

Getting Your Website in Gear

Marketing Yourself Right

In the End

Sources

Google’s New Search Quality Rating System: What Does It Mean for Ecommerce?

User Intent Behind Queries

Google Is Getting Better at Understanding User Intent

Special Content Result Boxes

Content Strategy

Give Users Fresh Content When That’s What They Want

The Bottom Line

Get Dumped By Trada? – Let Us Pick Your Adwords Campaign Up!

3 Pay Per Click Tips

Add Ad Extensions

Create a Branded Campaign

Add a Remarketing Campaign