Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm obsessed with CONVERSION RATE. Conversion rate isn't everything, it's the only thing.
If you have a 1% conversion rate (100 visitors where 1 person actually places an order), all you have to do is get one more person to buy and you can double your sales with the same traffic. Increasing conversion rate is an extremely powerful way of increasing your sales. Then once you get your conversion rate high enough, you can try to draw more traffic.
That being said, there's traffic and then there's TRAFFIC. If you know the CONVERTING KEYWORDS for your business, if you optimize for those words, and buy them through SEARCH MARKETING, you can sometimes get a higher grade of raw ore to mine for customers.
1.) HARVEST YOUR CONVERTING KEYWORDS. Converting keywords are the words that folks type into the search engines that actually turn into sales. Not just traffic, but words & phrases that end up with someone buying something from your Yahoo! Store.
These are usually more specific than the more generic and popular words that generate traffic. Folks are getting more and more sophisticated as searchers, and buyers tend to use 3, 4, 5 or even 6 word phrases to really home in on specific, relevant pages.
Where are your converting keywords? They're usually embedded in the orders themselves. Goto the MANAGER, click on Process>Orders, then go to a specific order number. In the order itself you'll see Referrer and/or Rev-Share URL and /or entry point that will look something like this:
Referrer Yahoo search for shock collar
Rev-Share URL: http://search.yahoo.com/search%3Fp%3Dsd%2B1200%2Bsporthunter%26...
Entry point http://store.yahoo.com/gundog/radfentrain.html?engine=overture!853&keyword=shock collar
Funny thing is, this page is #10 of 20 (free/organic) on the first page of Yahoo! Search Results for "1200 sporthunter", but it turned into a sale. Wonder what bucket I'm optimizing tonight? /p>
Dog SportHunter Dog Training Collar SD-1200 - FREE SHIPPING UPS Ground*
- - - - - - - - - -
SportDog SportHunter Dog Training Collar SD-1200. More for less, simple to operate. The SportHunter by SportDog offers more ... New from SportDog , the SportHunter SD 1200 is a incredibly versatile training ...www.gundogsupply.com/sd-1200.html - 27k - Cached - More pages from this site
Do you also see how this customer did a generic search for "shock collar" and then looks like he figured out what he wanted and did a second search for a model number? Do you see the words "1200 sporthunter" hidden in the encoded URL string? This info will not show up in your REFERENCES:DETAILS for some reason. It's only in the REV-SHARE-URL.
Getting to the Rev Share URL is actually pretty tough unless you want to harvest these by hand. I actually wrote a program to do this. Save your MERCHANT ORDER EMAILS, the ones you get when you get an order, then you can pull out these keyword phrases.
We harvest CONVERTING KEYWORDS from the REV-SHARE URL about 5000 emails at a pop. You can't export 'em. (If you know how, call me!) You either have to scrape them manually from each individual order page or you can get them out of the MERCHANT ORDER EMAILS that your Yahoo! Store sends you.
We wrote a PERL script that extracts the REV-SHARE-URL from all of your MERCHANT ORDER EMAILS and makes a database of that and the ORDER NUMBER. With that info, we're able to tie which CONVERTING KEYWORDS actually sold which PRODUCTS, which is mighty fine information.
2.) Use these CONVERTING KEYWORDS in your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Note which products these words sell, and then optimize these PRODUCT or SECTIONS pages for these words.
3.) Use these CONVERTING KEYWORDS in PPC for Google Adwords (Google, AOL) and Overture (Yahoo!, MSN). The "free-loading web" is over. It's a pay-as-you-go universe now. 40% of Search Engine traffic from the major portals (Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, & Google) comes from pay per click advertising from Adwords or Overture.
My experience is that this traffic SHOULD convert better than organic traffic for most folks because of premium position and because of relevancy. If I'm paying $3.25 a click, my landing page sure better be relevant!
4.) Think in Buckets of these keywords. Create BUCKETS of keywords around products or groups of products. Examples: "Slowpitch Softball equipment," "Easton Baseball Bats," "T-ball equipment," and so forth.
Make the ADS have the CONVERTING KEYWORDS in the title of the ads so when someone does a search for "ipod mini charger" your ad says "ipod mini charger - free shipping," and they think, "Hey! That's exactly what I'm looking for. And the FREE SHIPPING value add doesn't hurt either.
5.) EXPERIMENT WITH QUALIFYING CLICKERS BEFORE THEY CLICK WHICH IS BEFORE YOU PAY. Do you have expensive terms with high click though rates that seem to have a low conversion rate? Prequalify your prospects with better headlines and ads.
I've seen the ROI increase by simply adding the word BUY to the headline. "Buy {converting keywords here:ipod mini charger}" Fewer clicks from tire kickers means the same ad budget goes further.
In this short Yahoo! Store article, I can't begin to dive into all the secrets of PPC. Get Andrew Goodman's book, Google AdWords: 21 Pay-Per-Click Campaign Secrets Your Competition Doesn't Know (2004 Edition) at http://www.page-zero.com/products_asroi.asp.
Also read the PPC forums at Webmasterworld. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum81/ and http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum33/
6.) TRACK EVERYTHING. TEST EVERYTHING. How? R.O.I. tracking (return on investment) is a lot like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. Okay. Bad joke, but if you are not tracking your online advertising, you have no idea how much money you're wasting. Some ad guy said,"Half of all my advertising is wasted money, but I dont' know which half?" Fortunately for us, this was before PPC and ROI tracking.
7.) BE LIKE METRICMAN - TRACK THE NUMBERS THAT DRIVE CONVERSIONS. Track the right numbers. When I'm driving, I like to track how fast I'm going and how much gas I have. For the web?
After about 7 years of trying different methods, I finally decided on a single EXCEL spreadsheet for the entire year. It's my DASHBOARD for driving online sales. In one screenshot I can see the big picture. I can see all of the relevant numbers which tells me what I should be working on.
What do you track? You are tracking some numbers on a regular basis, right? Don't be the "R.O.I. have no idea" guy.
Track OFFLINE STATS like daily phone calls, number of phone orders, shipped sales, # boxes shipped, overhead per box, boxes shipped per employee, etc.
Track ONLINE ECOMMERCE STATS like online sales, total shipped sales, "customers" (sessions), completed carts (click trails > carts > orders), conversion rate, or revenue per visitor.
For advertising track your PPC spend, # clicks, average click-through-rate, average cost per click, # Conversions, cost per order, and so forth. Then I watch for changes over a 90 day period or more to see long term trends, but I'm always looking for holes where sales or traffic are dropping out.
8.) TRUST YOUR GUT. OR YOUR GURU'S GUT. It's not rocket science, and sometimes selling online is very intuitive.
A friend of mine is a Pay-Per-Click genius. He's my "Goto Guy" when I have a question about what's working with PPC today. An employee (an IT guy) for a VIP client is giving him a hard time about the numbers because he wants to justify every single nickel spent on PPC.
They're spending big bucks on Google Adwords, and the IT Guy (who is very, very smart about certain things) thinks he knows more about marketing than the marketing guru. "GOTO GUY" is selling online using several Yahoo! Stores with the one-two punch of aggressive PPC and organic SEO.
He shoots for a COST PER SALE of under $8, which is great. How many of you could pay $8 marketing costs per order and still make a profit? Lots of my clients. We're paying $30 an order in some cases. Ouch!
However, the IT Guy is right about one thing. We are limited in what we can get from a regular Yahoo! store, because they don't give us access to the CGI-BIN, or the log files. That being said, there is a lot of data you can get from your Yahoo Store. My rule of thumb is not to ignore evidence to the contrary, but play your hunches. That's why you're an entrepreneur, right?
9.) GET FREE CONVERSION TRACKING -- Use the FREE Conversion tracking code from both Overture and Google. All you have to do is put a little snippet of code on your ORDER CONFIRMATION page and that javascript hooks up with the user's cookie to record the specific keyword-phrase and advertisement that converting into a sale. Unfortunately, you can't pass the amount of the sale because of Yahoo! Store limitations, but, hey! It's free!
10.) USE THIRD PARTY ROI TRACKING TOOLS -- Use tools like CLICKTRACKS, KEYWORDMAX, or INDEXTOOLS (and others) who have workarounds or hacks that actually do capture the amount of the sale. I like all three programs and have used them on various projects.
Instead of using LOG FILES (which we can't use on a Yahoo! Store), these programs put a cookie on the user that keeps up with various pieces of info from conversion info, to referring keyword, to session info like entry and exit pages, pageviews, and time on site. The major downside is that you have to compare your reports from the PPC guys and the reports from your ROI vendor and sometimes there are huge discrepancies in the data.
11.) LOSE MONEY ON EVERY SALE, BUT MAKE IT UP IN VOLUME. Sometimes ads that lose money are actually profitable in the long run. Remember offline factors. One client has 50% of sales come over the phone, while the other half are online.
Back in the good old days, (1998) the Yahoo! Store was only grabbing about 40% of the referring data from online sales, so 1 out of 5 sales had referring info. Our solution? Seat of the pants ROI tracking using the S.W.A.G. method. We multiplied any sales campaign by 5 and that was the assumed REAL value of the campaign.
Nowadays we're seeing more like 60-80% of orders have good tracking info, but there will always be technical and other reasons why every sale cannot have a source tied to it.
Why would you multiply your trackable numbers to come up with a higher value for an ad campaign? Because you don't want to leave money on the table. Think about things like lifetime value of a customer (repeat orders with no additional marketing costs) and offline sales. Sales that cannot be tracked like type-in urls, or folks using cookie-cruncher software, or ordering from another computer, or PCs without Javascript enabled. It's still an imperfect science.
Retailing on the Internet is much like the weather down here in Mississippi. If you don't like it, stick around for a bit and it will change - sometimes radically. (This week it's flood and tornado season. 100% humidity or drought will be next week.) The online marketing weather keeps changing, and you have more than enough to do as a retailer to grow your business. Start implementing these 10 or so things and you can increase your Yahoo! Store sales and profits!
-- ROB
