eCommerce Advertising Strategies that Work

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Michael Dugas

Developing an eCommerce advertising strategy that works is critical to reaching the peak potential of any eCommerce website. A sound strategy should have a clear plan for consistent improvement as well as the flexibility to respond on-the-fly to trends and adjust to market forces. atomni’s approach to online advertising for eCommerce is a proven methodology that delivers results. Its built on a foundation of data, which through expert analysis, becomes information that drives performance. Through atomni’s proprietary processes for optimizing eCommerce advertising campaigns, our campaigns consistently build upon themselves, quickly weeding out non-performing initiatives and growing the ones that work.

Anyone who wants their online advertising campaign to operate at a high level must use a data-driven approach. at atomni, in everything we do ‘Information Drives Success’, so our attention to detail when it comes to data capture and analysis should be no surprise. It is the cornerstone of our success with eCommerce advertising strategies. Cross-thatching onsite conversion metrics with data straight from your online advertising dashboard, atomni sees a complete picture of your campaign’s performance and iteratively improves it utilizing historical performance data and real-time ROI analysis. Campaigns are shaped by cold-hard data, which coupled with high-level qualitative analysis, consistently create opportunities for maximizing growth.

atomni’s processes have been tried and proven. TrafficSafetyStore.com, one of the web’s leading retailers of traffic safety supplies, has been employing atomni’s eCommerce advertising strategy for ongoing optimization since the Fall of 2010. Initially, atomni was able to maintain the revenue that was previously being achieved while cutting ad spend by 60%. As time goes on, the campaigns become increasingly focused and convert more efficiently and effectively. As the keyword lists and bid strategies are refined, spend has remained fairly consistent while revenues have grown. When comparing advertising efforts from January of 2012 to January of 2011, TrafficSafetyStore.com was able to grow revenue over 115% while increasing ad spend by less than 21% by working with atomni’s eCommerce online advertising strategies.

The same process would work for your online advertising campaigns. Utilize our expertise. Find out more about our online advertising strategies, or Contact Us to get started.

PPC Consulting Services

Posted on January 17, 2012 by atomni

Things to Consider When Hiring a Search Engine Marketing Professional

An adept PPC Manager is critical to the success of any search marketing campaign. He or she will be the person organizing advertising campaigns, managing spend and budgets, and measuring performance. Getting the most out of your PPC Manager takes a real understanding of your business, how PPC works for your business, and hiring a person who has all the qualifications and experience necessary to spearhead these integrated marketing initiatives.

Set Goals & Take An Internal Inventory

Brainstorm what your company’s goals are for online advertising and any limiting parameters to decision making. Are you interested in targeting specific geographies or industry verticals? Do you have budget constraints? If you’re an eCommerce website, what are your profitability margins for each product you sell? If you’re looking to generate leads for a more extensive sales cycle, how much is a lead worth? If you want to build brand awareness, who do you want to target and how is mind-share with your target market worth to the company? Your PPC manager will need to know the answer to all these questions and more in order to design a successful campaign. Bid strategies need to account for many variable since most online advertising networks are organized into instantaneous online auctions, and the competitiveness of any give keyword target will guide the cost of driving a click-through.

Online Tools & Decision Support

In addition to the free tools available such as Google Analytics, there are several great data tools that allow greater transparency and robust decision support. Research your options and find one that works for your company. Hire a Google Adwords Certified PPC manager to insure he or she is completely familiar with these tools. Even with the various tools & services available for PPC advertising management, even more synergies can be exploited by integrating your organic search optimization efforts with a cohesive online advertising strategy. Inquire with your PPC Manager how they would help actively take advantage of opportunities in organic search, as well.

Ethical SEO Strategies

Posted on December 20, 2011 by atomni

Building Search Engine Authority is an Asset Investment

Ethical search optimization takes time, consistency, and value-added content. Results vary, especially in particularly competitive search markets – any promises to the contrary should be immediate red flags. Unethical or ‘black-hat’ techniques are meant to actively ‘game’ search engine algorithms to artificially boost search engine rank in the short-term. These unethical techniques could cause search engines to decrement your search result rank, block your website from result pages, or blacklist your URL permanently – even if you attempt to and successfully revert the changes. Remember search engines are competitively trying to deliver the most relevant results for their users – which means you can either try to fake being the most relevant, or be the most relevant – and they’re gunning for the fakers. There is no get rich quick scheme for organic optimization – the best strategy for ethical search optimization is building a thoughtful catalog of captivating content that actively engages users.

Bulk Backlinks Are A Flash In The Pan

A popular SEO technique to quickly gain authority is the bulk acquisition of links to your website, or backlinks. The number of backlinks your website has is A component in most major search ranking algorithms, so by purchasing a high volumes of backlinks you’re significantly increasing one variable in the search rank equation – hopefully to the benefit of your website’s search result ranking. How much impact these links have on your website’s rank depends on your competitive market and the cumulative authority of all the websites where the backlinks reside. When considered in a thorough web marketing strategy there are several reasons organic optimization efforts are better spent elsewhere. The problem is that a backlink is only as good as the website that it is coming from and typically in bulk link acquisitions the authority of the associated URL is very low. Also, these links are on a website you do not control – so they can be modified, edited, or deleted without warning or permission so there is no way to know how long they will exist. For this reason bulk backlink acquisition is considered a gray-hat technique – it does not negatively impact your SERP rank or get you flagged and may even give a short-term boost to your search result rank but does have several shortcomings that are undesirable.

Use Common Sense

If a search optimization proposal includes plans for distributing backlink farms over an overseas server array – ask yourself – “what does this have to do with extending & reinforcing my current marketing efforts to better server my customers and engage new markets?”. If you can’t come up with a concrete answer – you’d probably be better focusing in other arenas. You’d be much better served creating a cohesive web strategy that focuses on developing technology assets that add value to your business.

What If I Need Immediate Results?

Organic optimization is about driving sustainable traffic to your website by focusing on making it bigger, better, & more integrate into the rest of the Internet. It takes time, and organic optimization should be considered a tool that slowly yields sustainable results. If you want to flip a switch and get more traffic immediately for specific keyword phrases, you might try online advertising with any of the popular search engines or display content networks. In these mediums, a dynamic online auction allows you to bid for positioning on search engine results pages.

Online Brand Visibility

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Mike Angstadt

Divide and Conquer

In any serious search engine optimization campaign, there are a lot of moving pieces. This stands to reason – as search algorithm complexity increases, so does the problem of catering to their whim. There is so much real-time data being generated at any given time, even tracking & reporting with software tools can quickly become a daunting task. With all of the different facets of optimization, many times some great opportunities are overlooked without approaching campaigns from an organized, methodical perspective and focusing on the real goal – increasing online brand visibility.

Increasing Brand Awareness

All search optimization efforts should be attributed back to increasing awareness surrounding a specific target keyword phrase. This target could be describing your product, product name, article topic, or a phrase describing your service – but the unified goal of increasing the quality and breadth of your brand’s exposure to potential customers is consistent across optimizing for any of these.

Sometimes taking a step back and approaching the task of increasing online brand presence yields unintuitive results. We find many clients who begin seeking a pure play SEO solution to their brand visibility problems tend to craft campaigns that eventually incorporate a blend of efforts, both internal and external to their main website, in order to facilitate the online culture they want to promote & foster.

Using Strategy to Define Scope

What type of strategy will best suit your company depends on many factors, we typically look to identify specific targets to enhance with a campaign then gather research to create the scope of resources required to achieve the desired results.

Target identification should be achieved by aligning your traditional marketing techniques with supporting web offerings that drive conversions. Two of the most common parameters for scope definition are industry and competitive search landscape. These both impact the overall allocation of resources necessary to make a significant impact in the space. By selecting targets with attractive search opportunities and generating new targets to provide for emerging search markets – you too can work on improving your online brand visibility.

Please contact us to find out more about how atomni online visibility strategies can positively impact your online brand, increase qualified web traffic, and maximize web marketing investment.

Violating Google’s Policies Can Get You Sued, Or Worse… Banned.

Posted on September 14, 2010 by atomni

You’d Be Surprised What Will Get You Banned

Brad Geddes, Paid Search Columnist for Search Engine Land, put together a great post yesterday on the rampant existence of Google policy violations. You can read the full story here, How Many Google Privacy Policies Are Your Violating?

In this post Brad uncovers some startling statistics:

“Every website that uses Google AdWords, Analytics or AdSense, and does not have a privacy policy, violates three of Google’s terms of service agreements.
To get a sense of how big a problem this is, I took a look at a couple hundred sites this week and found some startling statistics:

More than 90% were breaking at least one of Google’s policies

More than 65% were breaking at least two of Google’s policies

More than 40% were breaking at least three of Google’s policies”

So… How many of these policies are you breaking?

If you are using Google AdWords, Google Analytics, or Google AdSense and do not have the appropriate legal verbiage in a privacy policy on your website, than you are breaking at least one, and one is all it takes.

What are the potential ramifications of violating any of Goolge’s policies?

If you are found to be in violation of any of Google’s policies correlated with the use of their free products and services it is at Google’s discretion to file suit, or worse, ban your website from search results.

Why is this so important all of a sudden?

No doubt this scenario has been a rampant problem for years, so why now is it so important to ensure you are in compliance with Google’s terms of use policies? Do to the launch earlier this month of Google Instant, Google is now parsing, indexing, and analyzing loads more data - light years faster, 5 -7x faster to be exact. With 5 – 7 times more results per query, and 5 – 7 times more URL’s being parsed to generate the specific results, Google is crawling all indexed pages more frequently than it was before.

What does this mean for businesses and website owners?

I have said many times before, but speed is paramount
This places an increased focus on the importance of crawlability, Googlebot must be able to make it all the way through your site’s page content as quickly as possible without getting caught mucking about in tables, javascript, and flash
A top-down keyword hierarchy and solid information architecture will be needed to maximize the amount of relevant queries that your website is showing in search results for

So what can you do to ensure the safety and sustainability of your online assets?

Audit the key components of your website. Atomni has compiled an 18-point checklist that analyzes the 6 key areas of a website:

Security
Accessibility
Usability
Crawlability
Indexability
Linkability

So if you think you may be in danger of violating Google’s policies, or just would like to run a diagnostic health check on your website, check out the atomni Web Best Practice Audit™

How to verify your website on Google

Posted on October 28, 2009 by atomni

Just how important is it to verify your domain on Google? Let’s check out a few things you’re missing if you haven’t…

Sitemap

Okay so truth you do not need to be verified on Google to have a sitemap, but, your sitemap is there so search engines know what pages to crawl at what priorities… so if you are not verified, you cannot submit your sitemap to Google to crawl – so what good is it?

Crawler Access

Same as above, you can certainly have a robot.txt file in your root folder, not being verified is not going to physically stop you from doing that, however, same point from above, if Google does not know about your robots.txt file then what good is it? Not to mention within the “crawler access” tab you have the ability to request specific URL’s be removed from Google’s search results – this can be very handy if you have pages indexed that you do not want showing up in the index

Broken links

Things are constantly changing online; URL’s, domains, hosts, etc. all part of the dynamic internet universe. Your website is going to run into a broken link once in a while – it is simply part of operating a website. The good news is instead of waiting for a frustrated visitor or worse, client, to identify your broken links, Google will do this for you. The handy dashboard pictured above will show you not only which URL it cannot find, but how many times it is linked to and from what pages.

Crawl rate

Have you made updates to page titles and other on-page assets in attempts to optimize for search engines? Most likely if you have you have waited eagerly to notice these changes on the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page’s) Unfortunately you may have noticed this doesn’t happen as quick as you like or even at all in some cases. Perhaps some of your page titles have updated and others still haven’t… why does this happen? It is based on the crawl rate that Google has set for your site. Based upon how much content your site has (size of the sitemap), the change frequency of content (set in sitemap), and which crawlers are allowed to access your content (set in robots.txt) Google may only be piece-mailing your website. If you have a larger site, say 500+ pages, of which 350 are indexed, but Googlebot only crawls 120 pages of your site a few times a week – it may take several weeks for Google to get to your other pages that it has not identified as priorities.

Top query phrases

This is extremely important. This quick snapshot shows you exactly which phrases are being searched that are displaying your website in the search results. Not only do you get a sense of how your site is doing visibility wise, based on the composition of keywords you are displaying for – but you also gain insight into how your SEO is doing based on your rank for your priority keywords.

Top click-through phrases

This metric alone is the first step toward refining your user experience for the highest conversion rate possible. Knowing the keyword phrases that create the most click-through’s and knowing where your site ranks for those particular keywords is crucial intelligence for targeting you search engine marketing efforts, both organic and paid. You now know which particular keywords are creating traffic to your site, and can design your content to target visitors searching for these specific phrases. If you can create an experience consummate with the customer’s needs you will most likely win the business.

Sitelinks

This is not a guarantee, or even very controllable. At this point it is still entirely at Google’s discretion to identify and display sitelinks for individual websites. Sitelinks are identified automatically by Google based on the architecture and visitor behavior to particular pages on your website. The idea is that Google has identified the top priority pages on your site (I’ve seen as few as 2 and as many as 10) and has provided these links to search engine users in an attempt to provide a more direct route to site content of the most interest.

HTML Suggestions

This is another extremely helpful piece of functionality from the webmaster tools dashboard. Here Google is nice enough to let you know what on our site it does not like. If Google finds your meta descriptions to be duplicates (see above) it will let you know how many pages and if you click on the link, it will show you which pages and which descriptions. This tab will also identify tags that are too long (70 characters for titles and 155 for descriptions) as well as “non-informative” and “missing.”

Keywords

This is a crawler snapshot of the most used keywords on your site. This will let you know how Googlebot is seeing your website in terms of keywords and their respective density. An even cooler, and brand new feature, is the “Fetch as Googlebot” function that was JUST added last week. This, essentially, sends a mock crawler bot out to the page specified and displays an exact shot of how that page appears to the crawler.

Category Archives: Search Marketing