Sometimes it can be difficult when shopping for a web technology provider in a market that is continually expanding, exposing niche disciplines, and introducing new technologies and methods. Gone are the days where a HTML Webmaster is all a company with a thriving web presence needs. Shopping for an SEO, PPC Manager, Website Designer, and Social Media Expert can start becoming a daunting task – especially when you realize there isn’t anyone at your organization with the technical skill set to manage all of these roles.

This is where we find many of our new clients – trying to make sense of all the web marketing options available in order to decide where to spend their budgets most effectively. They’re searching for design, development, and implementation specialists when they really need to take a step back and re-access their efforts on a strategic planning level. Although this can be overwhelming at times, atomni’s strategic identification process allows us to gather from these new clients detailed information about what they’d like to achieve with their businesses online and extract precisely what pragmatically needs to happen in order to reach those goals. This might include a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign, search engine optimization, a new website design, or the development of a mobile offering – it entirely depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Hire business people that know technology

atomni^TM has a deep understanding of today’s technologies and equally important a true appreciation for how these technologies can be leveraged to maximize the value-add to your business. Responsive web design, search algorithms, and big data analysis are only the beginning of what cutting edge technologies atomni^TM can help your web marketing team tap into.

We consider your business – our business

Entrepreneurship runs in our blood – so whether you’re selling traffic cones, emergency dental leads, or asbestos abatement supplies – we treat each initiative with meticulous care executing for flawless success. We take pride in building web assets that deliver value for our clients and provide lasting positive impact on their businesses. Providing a clear & transparent route from your marketing dollars to increasing revenue is what we focus on providing to all of our customers – from there it’s all about setting goals that align with your business objectives and achieving them.

Organize, Prioritize, & Deploy

We can help you realize your goals, concepts, & even brainstorm ideas from the back of napkins. We’ll coordinate with your internal team for the entirety of our projects and provide seamless hand-off with external documentation & training. Our design & development processes ensure your corporate web project gets executed in a timely & effective manner with the supplementary strategies to drive qualified inbound leads.

Test, Improve, Iterate

There are a lot of variables in the real-world, even in the confines of the Internet there is a vast multitude of user, computer, and content behaviors adapting dynamically – so how do you ever keep up? The answer is you keep your feet moving! By hypothesizing, testing, and making iterative improvements along the most sustainable lines you will add value to your corporate web assets and engage growing online markets.

Define Conversions

What exactly is a conversion? Depending on your organizations goals a conversion can be many different user-behaviors – creating an account, signing up for a newsletter, submitting a contact form – but for eCommerce websites the most important conversion is a transaction; measured in the most pure-play business KPI metric that exists – dollars. Measuring conversions is critical to monitoring and optimizing the performance of traffic generating campaigns, particularly paid campaigns such as search and display advertising. Without paying close attention to spend and revenue – how will you ever know if you’re building or burning cash with your efforts.

But What is My Web Conversion Rate?

Whether you’re talking about web conversion, internet conversion, or ecommerce conversion rate – you’re talking about virtually the same thing. Once you’ve defined what a ‘conversion’ means to you and your company, the conversion rate is simply

Do not be discouraged if this number is seemingly low – Google has published that they consider a 1% conversion rate quite successful.

Track with Analytics

Using software such as Google Analytics will allow you to track the data about your website, transactions, and measure the conversion rate. You should be able to segment the data as well, and potentially see variations in conversion rates from different traffic sources or types of users. You can then gauge the quality of traffic sources and user types and therefore inform your advertising spending. Sometimes with site updates, maintence, and relaunch, tracking code can be lost or misplaced and their will be a gap in the ecommerce data. It’s very important to account for these data discrepancies as they have the potential to misinform an otherwise sound optimization strategy. Analytics tracking provides data – but how do you turn that Google Analytics data into actionable information? Employing talent data analysts or a 3rd party web marketing agency empowered with automated tools to scrub, search, & synergize patterns, similarities, & differences in the data available is a requirement if you’d like to render true business intelligence from the data.

Aim to Improve

By taking ownership of tracking conversion on your website, your taking the first step towards improving your conversion rate. The two primary factors to consider when you goal is to improve your conversion rate are increasing

1. The qualified traffic to your website
2. The quality of the user experience on your site

What measure do you have to access the quality of traffic that is coming to your site? Are they your target market? What behaviours are they expecting to perform on your site? Does your website meet their expectations for the experience they’re about to have? Could we further segment or refine incoming traffic to only focus on those that convert more frequently?

Getting people to your website is only the first step in the sales funnel, the experience you provide once they get there is what will ultimately drive them through the sales funnel to conversion. A key component of tracking and improving the performance of your online sales funnel is identifying bottlenecks, plateaus, and popular exit paths by analyzing your data. These areas typically expose the greatest opportunity for improving conversion rates by alleviating experience pain points or fundamental issues.

1. Obtain an SSL Certificate for Magento

You’ll need an SSL Certificate to shake hands with Google Checkout, which you can read more about here. For our purposes we’ll just say you need to have https:// enabled for Google Checkout to synchronize data with the Magento sales dashboard, so acquire and install a SSL certificate with your hosting provider.

2. Magento Administrative Dashboard Modifications for SSL

Log into the Magento Administrative Dashboard and Navigate to System->Configuration->Web under ‘General’ in the left hand column. Specify the secure URL as https://www.yourdomain.com/ and set ‘Use Secure URLs in Frontend’ to ‘Yes’. Make sure that the media, skin, and javascript base URLs reference the {{secure_base_url}}. Save Configuration.

3. Verification of SSL with Google Checkout

Navigate to the frontend of the website. Make sure your certificate is validated and no warnings or errors are generated. If you’ve correctly installed the certificate but have a big red X through the https in Chrome, you probably have issues with mixed-content. Basically you’re trying to secure a page with unsecure resource references; that is http:// links and paths in the source code of your https:// page. For troubleshooting, please read these instructions.

4. Callback URL Verification for Google Checkout

Navigate to http://checkout.google.com/sell/ and either login or create a merchant account. After you click the ‘Settings’ tab, select ‘Integration’ from the left hand column.
To test the callback URL, you will need to navigate to the following 4 URLs
https://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/googlecheckout/api/
https://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/googlecheckout/api/beacon
And
https://www. yourdomain.com /googlecheckout/api/
https://www. yourdomain.com /googlecheckout/api/beacon

The correct callback URL will render a 404 error at /googlecheckout/api/ and a blank page at /googlecheckout/api/beacon/. This is the best information we have for verification testing of the callback URL. Fill in the correct callback URL, select ‘Notification as HTML’ and click ‘Save’. Keep this browser window open for reference. You will also need to make sure that the apache module mod_security is either not installed, or if it is installed that you’ve added an exception. Any questions you have with this (unless you host your own site) will be most easily remedied by contacting your hosting provider.

5. Enabling Google Checkout in Magento Admin Backend

Log into the Magento Administrative Dashboard and Navigate to System->Configuration->Google API under ‘Sales’ in the left hand column. Enable Google Checkout as a payment option, select ‘Yes’ for Secure Callback URL, provide the Merchant ID & Merchant Key from the Google Merchant Integration screen. Select ‘Notification as XML’ then select a continue shopping URL and click ‘Save Configuration’.

6. Correct Shipping and Tax Calculations in Google Checkout with Magento

Within Magento admin go to the following sections:
i) System -> Configuration -> Google API -> Google Checkout
- Enabled to YES
- Sandbox to NO
- Secure Callback URL to YES
- Debug Mode to YES (important!)
- Disable Default Tax Tables to YES
ii) System -> Configuration -> Google API -> Google Checkout Shipping – Merchant Calculated
- Enable Merchant Calculated to NO
iii) System -> Configuration -> Google API -> Google Checkout Shipping - Carrier Calculated
- Enable Carrier Calculated to YES
- Select your shipping methods...hold control to select more than one
- Delivery Address Category...change this based on your customers’ addresses (Residential or Commercial)
- Default price for methods: change this to something like $15 if only offering ground/parcel. This is in case the calculations fail
iv) “Save Config” to save everything
v) Goto Google Checkout and edit the shipping settings to reflect Carrier Calculated and enter the names of the methods (IE: USPS Parcel Post) and select settings accordingly. These shipping options need to mirror the shipping options configured in the Google Checkout dashboard so that the data objects exist for the call-back synchronization.
vi) The next few code modifications fix a bug with Magento/GC wherein Magento will pass $0 values for shipping and tax amount values, instead of empty values, which causes circumvention of GC’s standard shipping and taxing calculations no matter what the settings are in GC.
Go to app->code->core->Mage->GoogleCheckout->Model->Api->Xml->Checkout.php
~ line 600, there are two references to ‘tax-table merchant-calculated’ that need to be set to ‘false’ to allow Google to calculate the tax based on Google Checkout dashboard settings. Also change the line to:

Set the $xml variable at line 247 to “”
Set the $xml variable at line 264 (different if the above is deleted first) to “”.

Once completed, process a test order and you will see the correct carrier-calculated shipping options, Google Checkout tax rules, and updating of orders processed with Google Checkout within the Magento Sales Dashboard.

For more information on how atomni can maximize the performance of your Magento eCommerce website, or to discuss further how 3rd party payment systems & SSL / site security can enhance the user experience of your website - please contact us anytime.