Pod1 Blog

Magento commerce has the ability built in to run test with Google Website Optimizer. But these are limited to the default style templates and limited to the category and product detail pages. This is less than ideal if you want to go onto the big guns and test your checkout for example.

At Pod1, the Magento Development team and the E-Commerce Strategy Team have come up with a simply way of testing all aspects of a page or section within magento.

We simply use the cascading element of Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, which allows us to overwrite styles. We leave the control variant untouched and simply use Google Website Optimizer scripts to load an additional stylesheet with corresponding styles in. These of course are altered in a way that allows us to change the layout of the page quick and efficiently. Either hiding elements or repositioning them or adding to them. If setup that way, you can do the same with JavaScript using the DOM model. Change the “Add to bag” button to a “Buy now” without the need for having graphical representations produced.

This way, we are able to reduce the cost of producing variants dramatically as all you need is a front-end developer and not the whole team. This makes for remarkably quick turnaround that yield results much faster than changing the whole site using all skill sets of your agency and implementing costly multivariate software that requires you to produce every page two or three times.

If you’re interested how to get the most out of your Magento Commerce Package, have a click around our blog.

An article of mine was published in New Media Knowledge about Behavioural targeting. You know, the thing that stops you dead in your tracks when you suddenly see that lovely pair of denims all over the net you’ve been looking at a few days ago on that website. Some stumble over Banana Bags as well.

The article in NMK is currently free to view: Behavioural targeting – Is big brother watching you?

It’s been a while since I last posted IE6 stats here. The good news is that Internet Explorer 6 is losing more and more ground. Not least, one would hope, because of Microsofts push to upgrade to IE8. The analogy of drinking 9 year old milk is pretty much what overcomes our Designers and Developers here when we talk about IE6 as well, so well done Microsoft Australia.

Another factor could be that Microsoft was forced to deliver the “Browser Choice” option to desktop machines where many users probably upgraded or switched. I don’t think that seeing Google ban Windows from their office machines will have an effect though. Interestingly IE6 is loosing it’s share in terms of revenue faster than it looses it’s share in traffic. We actually have the first clients pulling IE6 support from their retainers and invest the money saved into better marketing or a better strategy.

However, I don’t see IE6 vanishing as fast as we would like to but we’re on our way.

Below are the figures of our sample of about 3 Million p/m visits across the Pod1 Client Portfolio

Hands up who uses Google Analytics and gets most Organic- or PPC Revenue from branded terms (Brand name that is). All of you? Thought so.

Here we often have discussions around why you should do PPC & SEO on branded terms when you get most of your traffic and possibly revenue from organic branded terms anyway. I guess we need to take a closer look at what’s happening here.

There are two reasons why you get more traffic from branded terms when using the wonderfully free Google Analytics.

Convenience
Many, (many many) users have Google or any other search engine setup as their start page. Rather than typing your URL into the address bar they just type it into the nice and friendly, large text field in the middle of their screen. Ask a random sample of your users if they know what the address bar actually is. Ask your office mates. I swear most won’t know what you’re talking about.

Last click counts
This is the second reason why you get so many “head keywords”. Users come to your site in different stages of the purchase cycle. They most likely start of on a long tail keyword like: “Pink polka dot jumper”. They find a few pages, check them out and might even land on your page if you’ve done your Search Engine Optimisation right. Now they do something else, go back to work; take care of the kids; go out for a coffee and then remember that website where they saw that great Pink Polka Dot Jumper. Most likely they have no idea how they got there or what the product was actually called (I’ll do a post about slang later this month). What they do remember will be your brand name. So instead of going back to Google and using Pink Polka Dot Jumper then click through endless results, they type in your brand name and, shazam, you have a head term conversion.

The problem with Google Analytics is that it only counts the last click from which a user came to your site. So even if they have come from a natural long tail keyword they are likely to convert on an organic head term or even branded PPC term. Analytics will only count this last click, but not the first one or second one or third one. So your stats will be skewed and it might look like only brand terms convert. There is of course and additional problem that many users will use their lunch break to research but convert at home, i.e. switch computers. Forget about these users; it’s going to be a while until we get those tracked.

So should you do SEO and PPC on your own brand name or the other way round: “Should you even bother with this nasty long tail optimisation?” Yes is the short answer. You actually have to do it as otherwise you’ll simply die a virtual death. Always think of the purchase cycle your customers are in. Unless you’re a really really really big brand (Coca-Cola level I’d say) your customers will start of on a long tail keyword search. Most searches are 3 or more keywords long (see: http://image.exct.net/lib/fefc1774726706/d/1/SearchEngines_Jan09.pdf) so it is fair to assume that is the same for your customers. Brand names tend to be a bit shorter. If they don’t find you for Pink Polka Dot Jumper they won’t remember your brand name as they won’t get in contact with it. Not doing PPC or SEO for your own brand terms (PPC even for the sake of getting cheap clicks and preventing competitors to bid on it) will lead to them, if they do find you on the long tail search, not finding you on a branded search.

Now that it is clear that you must do SEO for both, long tail and head keywords what should you attribute the traffic to?

I guess the only way to find out is to launch a PPC campaign on your own brand name and see how far organic traffic drops. The difference should be your convenience clickers, the rest probably very engaged customers.

Discussion more than welcome!

P.S. Yes there are ways to hack 1^st touch into GA, check this out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-get-past-last-touch-attribution-with-google-analytic

A while ago we had a heated discussion around whether we should support IE6 anymore or not. I created a monthly report on IE6 stats across Pod1s ecommerce websites and took clients from each of the industries they represent in our portfolio with a focus, of course, on fashion ecommerce. Here are the figures:

Traffic share of IE6 per month

Revenue per browser (last 3 months, this is different from the above)

Where we see a nice and steady decline in the traffic share (YEAH!), we see as well a rather constant level in revenue generated by IE6 users. IE6 users roughly generate 8% of the total revenue on our clients websites. As we see above IE6 contributes a total of about 9%.

This seems indicative for the luxury segment our clients operate in. Peak shopping hours are still around lunch break, 12:00-14:00 and shortly before closing time at around 16:00. I.e users shop from their workplace and large organisations such as banks simply don’t upgrade their entire IT with a more modern browser to allow their users to enjoy YouTube better. So if you work with Clients selling high value goods, you can keep the swanky Flash Intro the CEO is asking for but you will need to make sure you support IE6 as well.

After @i_am_cam suggested to break this down by revenue per browser I started looking at individual clients and how the browsers are spread. We can see that there are two shifts:

1. The more expensive the items the more Safari
2. The younger the audience the more non-IE

Welcome back to our weekly summary of news from InternetRetailing.net

George Davies’ GIVe launches multichannel

Thanks to our friends over at K3 (Hi Dan), George Davies will be launching their new fashion venture, GIVe, in store and online on the 1st of October. The stores will offer Kiosk Systems, to allow customers to browse the site and hopefully order. Interesting what Nigel Roberts, head of ecommerce, systems and logistics at GIVe has to say: [...] an online channel that offers customers a fantastic experience at whatever point they connect with us [...]. I am really looking forward to this, as they seem to have understood multichannel and the impact a Website can have on how your business is perceived as a whole.

Zara to open online

Finally Zara has acknowledged that fashion e-tail is worth doing and decided to open it’s gates in Spain, France, Germany, the UK, Italy and Portugal. We’ll see how this goes, last year saw them loosing out, this year seems to be going better already.

Just in time, H&M announced the launch of a UK transactional website as well. Hmm….

Debenhams tries out twitter

Debenhams tried out for 1 day how they could use twitter to engage with their customers. They prepped 6 shop assistants with Smart Phones and had them answer, about 10 queries an hour. They used their existing Social Media tools to promote the trial and got some stuff into the papers as well. Overall they seem to be happy with how it worked and users have been asking for more.

While I think it is great to invest in this rather than a swanky Flash intro that pleases the CEO, let’s not forget that twitter is only being used by a tiny minority of people who actually wander into Debenhams, or use their website. It’s a bit like too many iPhone apps not enough iPhones.

E-Bay launches Outlet Store

Last week saw e-bay launch an outlet store. Basically a branded “Buy Now” section for retailers who want to flog last seasons stock. I don’t think Value Retail will break out into a sweat over this but it is an interesting concept. Where many retailers in the past simply used e-bay as a powerseller, now they can brand the experience e-bay style. For the consumer that means they will get genuine goods at bargain basement prices. Win-Win I’d say.

Akamai puts new meaning to short and sweet

Research conducted by Forrester Consulting in the US shows that customers give you exactly 3 seconds to get your message across.
40% will simply leave your site after this, 14% will begin shopping at another site, and 23% will stop shopping or walk away from their computer. 52% say that site speed is directly connected to their loyalty to this particular site.
You thought that’s harsh, it get’s better:
46% of dissatisfied online shoppers are more likely to develop a negative perception of the company, and 44% will tell their friends and family about the experience.
About 87% of consumers shop in both online and retail channels so you can take a guess what that means for your sales.

Fast and reliable hosting are only part of this, flash intros, overly heavy sites with high impact imagery are now more than ever disliked. The fact that users get broadband at home now has not made them more patient and more receptive to your 25 second flash intro, on the contrary, they’ve got even more impatient. If you need help getting out of the “The CEO designs himself”-loop just drop us an email.

http://www.internetretailing.net/news/ sends me an interesting newsletter every week. If you don’t have time to read it in full, come back here next week

Originally Published on internetretailing.net
http://www.internetretailing.net/news/guest-comment-how-to-make-sure-your-site-is-working-for-you

It’s easy to ignore, or write off as something just for the bigger players, but testing creatives, propositions, navigation and other site elements against each other is something everyone should be doing. Here David Hefendehl, ecommerce manager at digital agency Pod 1, offers hard-won tips to get you up and running quickly.

Making the move from bricks to clicks in the retail space can be tough for traditional retailers as they try to apply offline knowledge to online offerings. It’s no use trying to replicate the shop window experience or create a website and hope that it will run itself.

To make sure a site works as hard as possible, retailers and brands need to understand their customers and how they react online. This requires the creation of a solid testing programme that allows online retailers to gain actionable insights into their customers’ behaviour and capitalise on this. Having devised a number of testing programmes for clients such as Matthew Williamson, matchesfashion.com and Reiss, here are a few dos and don’ts for retailers looking to firm up their online offerings.

Don’t spend a fortune on test programs

Installing a test program used to be an expensive undertaking but today most analytics software offers this either as an add-on or additional part of the package. Google’s Website Optimizer is free and easy to use. It works brilliantly with or without Google Analytics installed and it is easy to set up. If you know what you want to test and have all assets ready, you could be up and running within an hour. Every tool you use for testing will automatically calculate the number of visitors per variation that converted, display the correct variations and so on. All you need to do is provide assets and design follow-up tests.

Do set realistic goals

If your goal is to test how many clicks it takes to achieve a conversion, make sure that you don’t set your targets too far away from each other. If you are multivariant testing your homepage then the goal page shouldn’t be much further away than the product detail page. The further away the tested page is from the conversion page, the more likely it is that you get skewed results as there are too many drop off points in between.

Don’t forget to test your information architecture and usability

Your site’s information architecture is critical as it dictates the way the site elements are structured and the way you want to move users though the purchasing process. Users will not follow the planned route and will always behave erratically on your site. You need to test that your IA caters for this behaviour and offer the right information at the right time.

You also need to test site usability. An example would be the “delivery information” section on a product detail page. Good information architecture would suggest a link to the details and good usability would offer this information in the form of an overlay rather than a link that leads out of the cycle.

Also remember to test your blanket email marketing, the order confirmation email, customer support emails and so on.

Do make sure that your copy is working for you

Even without investing in high-end technology you can do simple things to improve your online proposition. You should ensure that simple buying psychology is applied to all copy on your site and that you know what grammatical structures to employ — and avoid.

Also, place copy effectively and apply the appropriate copy style. When copywriting stick to the core principles: never use a passive voice; start your copy with a question that the customer has to answer with a ‘yes’.

As a simple rule of thumb, when writing a product description make sure the first paragraph appeals to the emotional, the second focuses on product features and the third points out the benefits.

Don’t stop testing

Tweaking your website after an initial test may lead to a spike in customer engagement — but don’t stop testing at this point. It is important to come up with a test plan and to evolve the tests you conduct. So start with variations and then test the winning one against further variations. Matthew Williamson, for example, started to test showing price versus no price on emails. We are further testing different copy and different subject lines to find the ideal combination for Matthew Williamson. Once we feel comfortable with the emails we will continue to test landing pages against variations of these emails.

Do make it someone’s responsibility within your organisation to be in charge of testing

Someone within your organisation has to own this space. Who should it be? Marketing, IT or the intern? There is no right answer to this, but it is advisable to use someone who encompasses both marketing and IT skills and has the necessary level of authority to make changes happen quickly.

Do be prepared to embrace change

Be aware that a test may lead to adjustments to your site which some people in your business won’t be happy with. While a swanky Flash intro may please your brand manager, your test results may show that your money would be better spent improving the information architecture and usability.

Don’t think that this advice doesn’t apply to you

No matter what the size of your business, you always need to be active in your approach to new technology and constantly learning. Matchesfashion.com tested ‘home link’ against ‘no home link’ in the main navigation. ‘No home link’ proved to increase their product detail page click throughs by about 20%, and this is the page where you really start to making money.

Retailers and brands need to be courageous about unifying their entire business proposition both off and online. If a customer has a bad experience surfing your website, it is likely to affect how they perceive your company in its entirety. So test, test and test again!

Welcome back to our weekly summary of news from InternetRetailing.net

Landing pages more and more important

According to an Avail Intelligence study, 45% of users claim to leave a retailers website instantaneously if the content presented does not relate to the search query they did. They don’t even bother refining their search there. If you don’t want to loose 45% of your prospects, why not get a few landing pages designed.

Faberge launches Luxury Shopping Experience

Faberge takes the “We offer a personalised shopping experience” seriously and does what so many brands claim. “It’s all about our shop assistants delivering a personal experience” or “The customer is at the heart of our business”. Phrases often heard but when it comes to the web it usually just ends up being a Flash intro that pleases the CEO because: “We’re luxury”.

Faberge on the other hand takes this to the extreme and launches a site that requires you to have a 1400 x 1050 screen res and you have to provide a Client Number (the equivalent of ringing the Bell at a Bond Street Jewelers and you’re still not allowed in). On The other hand they offer live chat (video chat if you want to), customer service agents to place items in your basket and directly relate to their clients.

Sure, they make it difficult to access the site and impossible to navigate it and I am no advocate of this. However, it seems that the services offered will entice their target audience. If they would now manage to make their site load faster to cater for their cash rich time poor customers, they could actually lead the way for really luxury retailers.

John Lewis launches their Fashion site

At the other end of the scale JL launched their Fashion offering online. The site is functional yet it delivers what you’d expect. The Mens and Womens section is underlined with Fashion advice, less so for Men (we just go in, grab and get out). I am yet to find the “Glossy Magazine” pages but I guess John Lewis’ target audience will gladly take to this site.

ASOS now offers same day delivery

ASOS uses it’s strategic warehouse location to it’s customers benefit and offers same day delivery to everyone within a 50 mile radius (80.46km for the rest of the world). Orders which were delivered using this option were high value orders according to ASOS.
IT might be interesting offering this to your customers during Christmas based on a set basket value.

Christmas Shopping has started

According to Google 44% of US shoppers have already started their Christmas shopping. We have gotten used to seeing Chocolate Santas in the shops as early as August (or was it April?) but this is really early. Metldown Monday is still some time away so hurry if you haven’t booked your Christmas Resources.

Wallace Sacks goes with Magento

Wallace Sacks has launched their online store on magento, the e-commerce platform Pod1 has endorsed for quite some time now. As you won’t trust our Glossy Marketing, though it is beautiful and absolutely true, here is what Wallace Sacks MD, Stephen Sacks has to say:
“This investment will give us a massive leap forward in terms of functionality and service: Already we are seeing larger order values. For us Magento offers state-of-the-art and feature rich e-commerce capability at a fraction of the budget, on a non-proprietary platform.”

Do you want to make a leap with your online business?

The Faberge intro has finally loaded, 40 minutes after I started writing this.

http://www.internetretailing.net/news/ sends me an interesting newsletter every week. If you don’t have time to read it in full, come back here next week

Welcome back to our weekly summary of news from InternetRetailing.net

Kiddicare launches new Website

Kiddicare has relaunched and, after testing a lot on their old site, incorporated what worked there into the new site. 10CMS provides the Flash image content just as before and the visual merchandising of the homepage etc.
Great example of how testing can help you make more money.

Best Buy is coming to the UK

Best Buy has launched a recruitment focused website ahead of it’s e-commerce roll out. Best buy is probably best known in the UK for making headlines with their TwelpForce a 500 strong twitter team. I am sure there will be more forward thinking to be seen soon.
Watch out Currys there is serious competition on the way

Visualsoft has picked up the Punctum Day ‘design of the year’ award

They won it for the design of www.jonathantrumbull.co.uk . Clearly a design award as the site looks nice but is so unbelievably hard to navigate. I can hardly read the content (tiny 10px white on black copy). A designers dream for sure but is it a dream for their customers?
Anyway, congratulations to Visualsoft.

MandMDirect chooses Tealeaf to get better Customer Insights

Bargain retailer MandMDirect has implemented tealeafs tracking technology to gain valuable insights into customer behavior on site. Tealeaf allows you to “record” screen sessions and replay them. You can define business rules when you want to be alerted, therefore highlighting problems faster and making them easier to understand and reproduce rather than endless testing sessions and emails like: What browser was the customer using?
Great technology and certainly the next step to recession proof your business.

RetailMeNot comes to the UK

The hugely popular voucher site launched a customised Uk version on VoucherHub.com. Retailmenot has been around for a while and delivers time and time again for US retailers and so should also work well for UK retailers. The content is largely user based which is great as other users trust this much more than anything else. Rating vouchers is a useful tool to lower frustration. Welcome to the UK guys.

Data protection gone wild

Asda now allows you to generate shopping lists online from your previous purchases offline. You need to type in a few key details of any receipt you got in store and the system produces the list of what you bought. OK I admit I am all for data protection and it seems quite scary just how much data Asda seems to keep, but secretly I can’t wait for this to be possible on my local supermarkets loyalty card so I don’t have to click my usual weekly shop together.

Europeans shop differently

And I don’t mean in comparison to UK customers (who strangely don’t feel European but geographically are) they all shop differently. ATG has conducted a survey amongst 6,500 online shoppers and found quite significant differences. The one they all have in common is that most don’t think much of their online shopping experience. The biggest difference seems to be that UK customers have no problem spending £1,000 or more as opposed to the rest of Europe (there you go) who wouldn’t want to part with more than 50 EUR. Some like reading peer reviews some like the efficiency of online shopping (Guess who?).
The main take away from this survey seems to be that if you expand into different markets it’s not enough to replicate your website, you have to localize your website.
Do you want to have a shop that your customers rate Excellent, contact us and I am sure we can help you.

Helly Hansen starts selling online

They have appointed our friends at GSI commerce to launch e-commerce sites for 8 countries and handle their logistics and call centre. I don’t want to steal their thunder here but they signed an agreement for 8 years. That’s longer than many have been using the internet.

http://www.internetretailing.net/news/ sends me an interesting newsletter every week. If you don’t have time to read it in full, come back here next week

Welcome back to our weekly summary of news from InternetRetailing.net. Apologies for not posting last week, it’s been busy here launching a multitude of blogs and sites that needed professional Google Analytics advice.

Consumers searching for the best deal not the cheapest product
According to a hitwise study UK consumers spent more time looking for vouchers than ever. Searches for voucher related terms have increased by 47.5%. Interestingly users have become a bit wary about voucher sites as they often only offer out of date codes or no codes at all, just optimized their site to fit as many terms as possible.

Mobile payment solution launched
It’s called Paysafecard and allows users of O2, Orange, T-Mobile and 3 to pay for goods up to £8. There is a 25% “handling fee” so users actually pay £10 for the £8 voucher. The low limit is set by the Payforit standard.

I would love to see a safe method of paying via your mobile phone, £8 just isn’t enough to buy most products, though I guess we just need to wait for this to become safer to allow higher limits.

Blow for the Flash lovers: Only 68% of users have broadband
You remember that swanky flash intro your CEO loved? Well according to Ofcom only 68% of households have access to broadband. It get’s worse if your target market is Wales where only 58% have broadband. The figures are actually up compared to last year and mobile broadband is now available in 12% of households monitored.

The age old story that you can build ever heavier websites and apps still means you alienate a large proportion of users. Do you really need a Flash intro?

Argos gears up clearance sale site
Argos, who run an amazing multi channel super successful website, have added shopping by postcode to their clearance site. This makes it significantly less laborious for customers to track down these items as they had to go to each store individually in the past.

Argos is becoming the darling of multichannel customer centric website usage. They are pioneering quite a lot of stuff lately. You may like or dislike their products or brand, but their customers seem to love that they are quite clearly at the heart of Argos’ operation.

Should you worry about a high shopping basket abandonment rate?
Not really according to a study by Amaze and the University of Glasgow. Their study found that 87% of users abandoned their basket but for different reasons. The study classified users into “vague”, “price conscious” and “window shoppers”. The first two make about 84% and 16% are claimed to be window shoppers.

The study points out that you can’t do anything about window shoppers, they are just there and won’t purchase, just as people will walk past your real world shop. You can however convince the “vague” and “price conscious”. These two groups cite “Need to consult with someone else”, “found item cheaper” and “need to think about it”. If you want these customers, you need to go down to the psychological level of human behavior and start employing the principles of this to your online business.

We often hear that developing personas is last on the list (let’s talk about the viral) but this study underlines what we have been saying for quite a while. You need personas, user generated content and a content strategy based on buying psychology rather than what your marketing manager thinks is the brand to get shoppers online to actually purchase. There are so many facets to this, why not give Pod1 a call and let us help you put your customer at the heart of your website.

Only 4% shop for groceries online
A study released by Key Note revealed that only 4% of us are doing their weekly shop online. However, within the “online shoppers” demographic 17% do shop for groceries online. It is said that any major growth is dependent on the expansions plans of the 5 major suppliers in the UK.

Maybe Morrisons could now join the club.

Mums surf just as much as anyone else, but spend most of their time on retail sites
As if we didn’t know it: Mums are just like you and me. However, where I for one, like to check news sites, Mums head for the retailers websites. Mostly, Amazon, HRG, Tesco and Very, former Littlewoods.

No news here I think other than this underlines what the industry knew all along. Women are more confident buying, especially fashion, online. We men just need a little longer.

http://www.internetretailing.net/news/ sends me an interesting newsletter every week. If you don’t have time to read it in full, come back here next week