I’m intrigued with the idea of the Quantified Self which is all about self knowledge through self tracking. I am a firm believer that inefficiencies exist in all of us that could be improved if only we could record the data and analyze it. The book Moneyball (if you haven’t read it yet you should) has a great quote about this idea:

“If gross miscalculations of a persons value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over, or under valued, who couldn’t? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn’t play baseball for a living.”

One area that likewise has gross miscalculations is how we all use our time. There is a big disconnect between how we see ourselves and what we do. For several years the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has conducted a study called the American Time Use Survey which consistently shows how we all overestimate how busy we are. These studies involve thousands of people who report what they do every few minutes over 24 hours. Despite all the widely held beliefs that we are over-worked and never have enough time in the day – In 2010 employed people still only worked on average 7.5 hours a day and the average American gets 8 hours and 23 minutes of sleep a night.
Even those who claim being over-worked are less worked than they think they are – one analysis comparing estimated workweeks with time diaries, conducted by sociologist John Robinson of the University of Maryland, found that the average person claiming to work 70, 80 or more hours per week was logging less than 60. So where does the extra time go? Mostly to TV, about 21 hours a week – the one thing most people underestimate.
There are a plethora of things one could quantify to improve themselves, but I think one of the most effective things is tracking where your time goes. Keeping track isn’t easy, using journals or time-logs, something I’m still working out myself (and planning on writing about on this blog), but its worth it.
On a final note, I think the reason most people underestimate how much time they have is summed up in this quote by George Bernard Shaw,

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

Believing we have less time than we really do passes the responsibility for ourselves on to someone else – time. Realizing you have more free time than you think means coming to terms with what you have done with it all.

Are you about to fire off that blog post/tweet/status update? Put your idea through this flowchart and see if it is share-worthy before pushing the publish button. Most campaigns live and die according to their propensity to be shared, how does yours stack up?

In AdWords Campaign Settings is the option to set frequency capping. You can set an impression cap per user per day, week or month, and on the campaign, ad group or ad level. This is particularly useful under display remarketing campaigns because it allows you to limit the amount of impressions a visitor sees in a given time period.

Plus, AdWords allows you to set up a remarketing list, what they call an Audience, to target visitors for up to 540 days. A cool way to set up a campaign is to put the remarketing code that is set for 540 days on the site and then use the frequency capping option together. For example, put a frequency cap of 5 impressions per user per month per campaign. This way the same person will only see the same ad 5 times in a month. Then at the beginning of the next month they get another 5 impressions. If you updated your ad creative on a regular basis you could message that person every month for over a year by giving them one piece of information at a time about the features and benefits of the product you’re selling – instead of hitting them with the same ad over and over for 10 days and then giving up on them.
Couple this with a custom combination made up of other audiences, and once that person purchases, they could then get dumped into the post purchase audience and be messaged to become a repeat customer. I think there is definitely potential for a constant pipeline of educating and converting and re-converting visitors through out the purchase funnel with this strategy.

Once you start optimizing your existing ecommerce pages for SEO you realize how important it is to create more content. Considering you should only be focusing on a handful of keywords per page, you quickly run out of pages when looking at the thousands of keywords available that you could rank for – so you settle for head terms with the most volume of searches.
The challenge is that there are just so many queries to rank for – 25% of queries every day have never been seen before and over 50% of queries have more than 3 words.
Blogging is usually the first thing that comes to mind to create more content that can drive more traffic from long tail keywords that you aren’t covering with the existing pages of your site.
My point with all of this is that by focusing on optimizing only your existing pages (or in many cases only your most popular keywords) and creating more content with just your blog, is a micro way of thinking about organic search and how it can grow your revenues.
Creating more pages on your site should be a bigger emphasis. One product or category page can be duplicated several times, with only the important on-page SEO content changed. For example, lets say you have a category page full of winter coats. Currently all it is optimized for is winter coats. Make that same category page multiple times and with each version focus on a different important keyword – water proof winter coats, winter skiing coats, fur-lined winter coats, etc and for each version include those keywords in the URL, metadata, page title, alt tags and copy. All of these pages can be linked to from copy on other pages in the site but they don’t need to be included in the site navigation, their sole purpose is to be navigated to from a search engine. From the user experience perspective, it’s seamless – they search for water proof winter coats, click to your site and according to all the copy on that page, they see what looks like a buch of product that is specific to what they are looking for. They don’t know or see that that same page exists in multiple iterations.
Considering the biggest challenge to blogging is thinking up what to write about, simply making more product pages on your site is a simple way to create more content and drive more organic traffic.

There are a lot of reports about the positive effects online video has in increasing engagement and conversion rates. I think it’s still one of the most under-utilized tactics for ecommerce sites. There are different kinds of videos that can be used for different purposes, just like different kinds of content for each stage of the conversion funnel.

Brand awareness: This is your typical commercial. Usually you have to pay money to get people to watch these. Hopefully you can make something compelling enough that people will enjoy and want to share with their friends.

How to: These are videos not specific to your product but that answer the questions people search for. Lowes does a good job with this, if you Google “How to Install a Glue-Down Engineered Hardwood Floor” Lowes is right there  with helpful content related to their products and services. Lowes isn’t pitching their product, they are earning attention instead of buying it.
These videos are also huge for driving organic traffic; Youtube is the worlds second largest search engine. According to some reports, videos “stand about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.”

Category Education: Videos don’t have to only live on product detail pages. Videos on category pages can explain collections and broader use cases than on just the individual product level.

Customer Service: Videos can go a long ways to help users navigate a site, answer questions about the assembly or use of their purchases and answer customer service centric calls like how to return a product. All of these types of videos save money deflecting calls from customer service call centers and make customers happier that they don’t have to call.

Product video: The traditional product video explaining the use of the product. Missing from a lot of these videos is showing the product in context. Too often product videos are done inside a beige studio with a stale person showing all the product features. There is a much bigger branding and emotional aspect that these videos could capitalize on by showing the product being used in its intended setting with people who reflect the aspirational style of the customer.

The most focused on types of videos are the brand awareness and product videos, but there are a lot more opportunities in between.

See if this scenario sounds familiar:

This report shows visits are up year over year. Yea! Well done everyone, the markting budget is paying off! Let’s keep the momentum going and see if we can continue to drive even more visits to the site!

This report shows conversion rate is down year over year. Boo! What the heck is going on everyone! Let’s optimize our accounts, cut cost per acquisition in all channels and limit non-qualified visitors entering the site!

The truth lies when you look at conversion rate on top of visits. Obviously, if you’re spending more on reaching out to drive more visitors to the site, chances are they are new visitors and not very low in the conversion funnel, causing a drop in conversion rate. Do you ask someone to marry you on the first date? No of course not, yet that is what too many companies expect when they pay to drive new traffic and expect them to purchase after their first interaction with the site.
What is a “good” conversion rate? Is less than 1% bad? Is greater than 7% amazing? Neither. It all depends on volume of traffic, average order value and margin. If you sell a product for $50 online, would you rather have a site that gets 100,000 daily visits and have a dismal looking conversion rate of .9%, or a site with an amazing conversion rate of 6% but gets 1,000 visits? Option one would be making $45,000 while option two makes only $3,000.
It gets dangerous when an organization has its mind set on a specific conversion rate and makes short term changes to maintain it – like managing their marketing channels so that only the most qualified and interested visitors come to the site. These visitors tend to be repeat customers already far down the conversion funnel – converting the converted. A healthy business will continue to invest in adding more new customers into top of the the bucket. If not, and the tyranny of maintaing conversion rate runs rampant, the amount of people leaking out the bottom of the bucket will exceed the amount going in the top. A target conversion rate should allow for a healthy amount of new visitors who are an investment in the long term. Today’s expensive, non-converting visitors are tomorrows cheap, high-converting visitors.

There are quite a few metrics to consider when planning a display remarketing campaign. In the Display Remarketing Planner (download below) I put together all of the relevant metrics that need to be considered when setting up and planning a successful remarketing campaign. The bold boxes in the top row are the ones you need to adjust to fit your site including budget, click-through-rate, conversion rate, view-through conversion rate, average order value and the amount of attribution you will give to view-through conversions.

It’s hard to say what click through rate, conversion rate and view-through conversion rate will be for your site if you’ve never ran display before.

A lot also depends on how you have the tagging set up on your site. If you’re only serving ads to shopping cart abandoners, chances are your conversion rate will be higher since those people have already shown they are very interested in buying, on the other hand your view-through attribution should be lower since it’s likely that people who have added items to their cart were planning on buying anyway, regardless of seeing any display ads. That view-through attribution % is a pretty subjective metric unless you’ve got some kind of test and control methodology to really measure incrementality.

Another thing to consider is the creative you are using in the display ads themselves – if it’s heavy in promotion, like “get 25% off,” expect higher click through and conversion rates.

Download Online Display Remarketing Planner (.xlsx)

#1 is when you talk directly to people who want to hear you.
#2 is taking #1 to scale by paying someone to carry your message for you, like advertising. Expensive, not always effective, but easy to scale.
#3 is when magazines and news outlets pick up your story because they think it matters. This is unpredictable but worth more because it comes off as unbiased.
#4 Is when, thanks to new technology and the democratization of distribution, people can pass your message to others, free, through blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Its costs little, very effective and scalable.
The tricky thing about #4 is that you can’t buy it like #2. And because it’s the most effective, companies try to make it work like #2, but it intrinsically doesn’t work like that, you can’t buy genuine desire to share. The only companies that are successful with #4 are the ones that make stuff worth talking about. If you really want to be successful in #4, don’t spend more money trying to turn it into #2, spend more money to change the product or service instead.

The filter function in AdWords is pretty powerful. Definitely should be one of the first steps in discovering opportunities and diagnosing problems. Here are a few of my favorites:

This one helps identify low hanging fruit. These keywords have great quality score, low CPA but just need a little increase in bid to get to a higher position so they can make more of an impact.

CPA is high, conversion rate is low and average position is also high. The bid unnecessarily high for these keywords. They’re not doing much for you so you might as well pay less for them.

These keywords are the bottom feeders. Really expensive and nothing to show for it.

Lots of clicks, high CTR and low conversion rate generally means that the ad does a good job of being relevant with the keyword but there is a disconnect when it comes to the landing page. Test different landing pages with these ones.

Lots of impressions and no clicks means these keywords are going to kill your quality score over time. Try different adtext.

Lots of clicks with a low quality score means these keywords are really expensive. Is it worth it?

Landing pages are underestimated in the role they play in paid search. I think the reason is because it’s a lot easier to tweak adtext, bids and keywords than the landing page. For the query “front load stacked washer and dryer” this is the ad and landing page Sears gives me:

Can you imagine walking into a sears and telling the rep that you are looking for a front loading stacked washer and dryer and in response he says, “sure, all washers and dryers are in the back, go ahead and find it yourself.” Yet that is what this landing page is telling me – “here’s everything we sell related to washers and dryers, figure it out.”

You can discover where your ads are writing checks that your landing page can’t cash in Google Analytics. Pull up your keyword report under Advertising > AdWords and add the secondary dimension of Destination URL (or make a custom report like mine below). Sort by bounce rate and here you will see all the keywords that aren’t matching very well with their chosen landing pages.

In my example below, line 2 has spent $335 and has a bounce rate of 90% and -40% ROI – ouch. Time to rethink the quality of this keyword and the quality of this landing page.