Ann Stanley's presentation from TFMA 2012

1. @annstanley
An Integrated Approach to Driving
More Traffic and Sales to Your
Ecommerce Website
by
Ann Stanley
February 2012

2. @annstanley

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Introduction and background

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What’s different in 2012?
• Users now prefer to shop online
• Further fragmentation of online
channels
• Panda update in Google
– Effect on your site’s SEO
– Poorer performance of affiliates
• Innovations and developments
– Paid search http://go.channeladvisor.com/
– Remarketing and display UK-Website-2011-Consumer-
Survey.html?ls=Website
– SoMoLo – Social, Mobile, Local
• More emphasis on conversion
optimisation, measurement and testing

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Fragmentation of channels

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Top UK sites by visits and
where consumers start shopping
http://go.channeladvisor.com/UK-
Website-2011-Consumer-
Source: Hitwise week ending 11/02/2012 Survey.html?ls=Website

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Change in online sales

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Ecommerce landscape
On-site Sales
On-site sales
Sales from Search from other sources
marketing
(email, affiliates, display ads, social,
(PPC, SEO, mobile, shopping comparison,
Merchant Centre) voucher sites)
Conversion optimisation
Other
Shopping platforms off-site sales
& market places
(Social, Mobile, drop shipping,
(Amazon, eBay) daily deals sites)
Off-site Sales

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Search Engine Optimisation

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Panda?
LSI – Latent semantic indexing
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2104571/Google-Panda-6-Months-Out-Still-Has-People-Baffled

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Google Panda update and need for
‘good quality content’
• In 2011, Google implemented a rolling algorithm
update known as ‘Panda’, which ‘penalises’ sites that
host poor quality content and/or provide a poor user
experience
• The effect of the Panda update was widespread
and, with every update, Google becomes more
sophisticated at judging the quality of content on a
site

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Optimise for the user –
not search engines
• Making sure a site is optimised to provide a
rich, relevant and rewarding experience for
visitors is the best way to avoid Panda
penalties, which means:
– No duplicate content
– All pages to have unique, relevant and useful content
(even the 1000s of product pages on ecommerce
sites!)
– Good levels of interaction on site (low bounce
rates, inbound links to ‘deep’ pages, social mentions
etc…)

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Ecommerce optimisation –
unique content on category pages

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Ongoing ‘Fresh’ content
(blogging with social plug-ins)

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User-generated content
• User-generated content, or UGC, is still a great way to add unique and
relevant content to web pages – especially product pages in the ‘post-
Panda’ search environment:

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Video integrated with product pages

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Use of Schema.org and rich snippets

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Google’s “Search, Plus Your World”

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Recent features in AdWords

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Integration with Google Merchant Centre
New Product
Listing ads
AdWords
product
extensions
Shopping results from Merchant Centre

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Ad Extensions, Local Listings (map)
and new Product Listing ads

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Summary of different shopping results in Google
Keywords =
Samsonite luggage
Organic shopping
results AdWords Products Map
Product Listing ads
ad extension and Places listings
(Merchant Centre)

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Product Listing ads in Auto targets tab

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Remarketing in AdWords (aka stalking)

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Remarketing results
Client 1 Client 2 Client 3 Client 4
(from Aug 2011) (from Jan 2011) (from July 2011) (from Jan 2011)
View- Conv. View- Conv. Conv. View- Conv. View- Conv.
Conv. (1- through rate (1- Conv. (1- through rate (1- (1-per- through rate (1- Conv. (1- through rate (1-
Campaign per-click) Conv. per-click) per-click) Conv. per-click) click) Conv. per-click) per-click) Conv. per-click)
TOTAL 445 84 1.7% 2833 220 2.57% 559 118 2.44% 862 1716 1.06%
Brand 39 0 6.7% 413 0 8.99% 433 0 5.13% - - -
Remarketing 9 84 2.3%* 54 215 3.11%* 15 118 1.34% 179 1716 3.06%*
Competitors - - - 216 0 2.01% - - - 184 0 1.88%
Vouchers 29 0 15.26%
Product 1 133 0 2.3% 1 0 50.00% 109 0 0.96% 2 0 1.57%
Product 2 12 0 1.9% 1 0 14.29% 17 0 1.48%
Product 3 156 0 1.7% 6 0 11.76% 85 0 1.29%
Product 4 30 0 0.8% 1 0 11.11% 13 0 1.18%
Product 5 5 0 0.7% 1 0 11.11% 25 0 1.05%
Product 6 2 0 0.5% 3 0 8.33% 155 0 1.03%
Product 7 93 0 7.98% 2 0 0.62%
Product 8 16 0 6.35% 22 0 0.61%
Product 9 3 0 5.88% 31 0 0.59%
Product 10 1 0 5.56% 31 0 0.58%

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Promoted video and YouTube ads

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Video campaigns in AdWords interface

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Integrating PPC and SEO

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Attribution –
top paths which include paid search

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Why use PPC data to determine the
most effective keyphrases for SEO?
• It can take 6 -12 months to see the result of your SEO
activities
• But you may have wasted your efforts on optimising for
keyphrases with high volumes of searches but no
conversions
• We recommend you use PPC data as part of your SEO
strategy
– Narrow down your list to the keyphrases that convert
– Use as many months data as possible and use “See Search
Terms” to see the actual converting phrases
– If you are not currently using PPC then you may want to run
a PPC campaign before starting your SEO, in order to
understand your keyphrase profile

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Understanding keyphrase profiles
Client 2
All keyphrases in PPC account (bid on) 29,287
Number of eligible or active keyphrases (bid on) 26,083
All eligible keyphrases with an impression / conversion 4,666/479 (10.3%)
Number of unique keyphrases (eligible) 5,549
Unique keyphrases with an impression / conversions 1,569/299 (19.1%)
247 (all match types)
See search terms all phrases 46,232
See search terms all phrases with an impression / conversion 46,201/1,837 (4.0%)
See search terms unique phrases 36,968
See search terms unique phrases with an impression / conversion 36,939 /1,050 (2.9%)

32. Selecting keyphrases for SEO @annstanley
using PPC conversion data
PPC data See search Searches Competition
Conv. (1- terms Total (phrase (Allintitle:
Keyword per-click) conversions conversions match) "keyphrase") Ratio
Clients Brand 307 307 2900 14,200 0.204225
mens underwear 196 196 27100 2,050,000 0.01322
aussiebum 185 185 14800 598,000 0.024749
mens underwear uk 86 86 2400 3,540 0.677966
mens slimming underwear 42 18 60 73 551 0.132486
xtg 29 29 58 1600 472,000 0.00339
andrew christian underwear 49 49 590 82,400 0.00716
Clients Brand uk 48 48 58 168 0.345238
andrew christian 47 47 4400 582,000 0.00756
mens enhancing underwear 45 45 260 8,060 0.032258
n2n 44 44 3600 516,000 0.006977
aussiebum uk 43 43 880 210 4.190476
mens slimming pants 25 11 36 16 366 0.043716
andrew christian uk 16 18 34 260 28 9.285714
n2n underwear 29 29 140 10,500 0.013333
xtg underwear 16 12 28 210 8,270 0.025393
gay underwear 24 24 3600 51,300 0.070175
Clients Brand clothing 24 24 58 6 9.666667
andrew christian underwear uk 23 23 73 30 2.433333
2xist 22 22 1600 205,000 0.007805

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Increase in organic traffic and sales
Jan 2011 – Dec 2012 – visits from organic (dark blue line) vs revenue (light blue line)
Visits from organic 2011 (dark blue line) vs 2010 (orange line)
SEO project started July 2011

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Social

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Importance of social
• Direct sales e.g. Facebook commerce
• Direct traffic e.g. Brand pages (Facebook,
Google Plus, Twitter)
• Community, loyalty and word of mouth
(Facebook Likes, Twitter, Reddit, Digg,
Delicious) and social shopping sites e.g.
Kaboodle
• Referrals, links and SEO benefit (Google Plus,
Facebook Shares, social bookmarking)

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Kaboodle

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• Pinterest is a social platform that allows users to ‘pin’ images and videos they like
into pre-determined categories or ‘boards’. Since it’s launch last year Pinterest has
become the fastest site ever to reach over 10 million monthly unique visits.
Therefore, if Pinterest is not part of your social strategy – it should be!
• There are many social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and
Delicious that are currently enjoying record traffic (Reddit recently announced it
has tripled in size over the past year and now serves 1.6 billion pageviews per
month). Again, with these kind of figures, if these sites are not part of your social
strategy then perhaps they should be!

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Pinterest

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Mobile and the
effect of different devices

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Activities differ by device
(Data from AdMob )
Report can be found at http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/

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Device responsive design
• Same url for all devices rather than a separate mobile site or sub-domain
• User detection agent (distinguishes device)
• Liquid or responsive design suitable for each size device/operating system/browser
• Mobile design often has a single column with most important content/features
moved to the top and in some cases some content hidden

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Amazon.co.uk responsive design
or Amazon.co.uk App
Main site – with adaptive CSS Amazon App

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Conversion rate optimisation

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Example of a low PPC conversion rate –
using Funnels to solve a site-wide issue
• Is the conversion rate the
same for all traffic sources?
• If yes, review in “funnel
visualisation” and determine
at what step there is a
problem
• Review site to fix problem on
the first page of the shopping
cart

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Example of landing page
A:B test using Google Optimiser
Using models for the product photos raised purchases by 44% and increased the average order value by 67%.

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Summary
• The ecommerce landscape is more complex and fragmented with many channels
to sell on-site and off-site
• Panda has changed the way ecommerce sites need to be optimised – content is
more important than ever!
• Paid search continues to offer new ad formats for use with ecommerce sites,
particularly by integrating with Merchant Centre
• Use data from PPC to identify converting keyphrases and use these for SEO
• Social is important to generate direct traffic and sales; but also indirectly due to
the importance of social indicators in SEO
• You need to understand how mobile is used by shoppers, and check whether your
website is compatible for use with mobile, tablets and other devices
• Conversion optimisation and measurement is key to maximise the ROI from
different channels
• Channel management software such as ChannelAdvisor will become more
important to centrally manage inventory, pricing and the data feeds

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Channel management using
ChannelAdvisor

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Thank You
Ann Stanley
@annstanley
ann@anicca-solutions.com
www.anicca-solutions.com

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Resources/References
• http://go.channeladvisor.com/UK-Website-
2011-Consumer-Survey.html?ls=Website
• http://www.channeladvisor.com/webinars/sli
des/State-of-E-Commerce-2012.pdf
• http://searchenginewatch.com/article/21045
71/Google-Panda-6-Months-Out-Still-Has-
People-Baffled
• http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/