10 Tips for Mastering Google Remarketing Ads

10 Tips for Mastering Google Remarketing Ads

Remarketing is a popular topic in the web marketing world lately. And it’s no wonder why. Who better to show ads to than your previous site visitors? Personally, I’ve found the ROI on remarketing ads to be incredible, second only to email marketing. If you haven’t yet tried it, what are you waiting for?

For those unfamiliar with Google remarketing, here’s how it works. A visitor lands on your website. Google’s ad network writes a cookie in that person’s browser, identifying them as having previously visited your website. When this same person is visiting another website in the ubiquitous Google display network, your ad appears, “remarketing” them back to your site. The power of this concept is self evident. It’s far more effective to show ads to people who’ve previously shown interest in your products, versus the person whose never heard of you.

With that background in mind, let’s look at some tips for mastering this powerful tool.

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4 Shocking Truths about your eCommerce Site

4 Shocking Truths about your eCommerce Site

#1 – Barely anyone sees your homepage
Far too many online businesses worship at the alter of the homepage. While certainly important, homepages today carry far less importance than in years past. When I review the analytics on most of the sites I work with, the vast majority of visitors never see the homepage. (When you have a moment, take a look at not only how many of your visitors never see the homepage, but also what percentage of overall pageviews your homepage represents, you’ll probably be shocked at how low it is.) This is due to a myriad of reasons, one of which is that people simply search for specific content, and Google does a pretty decent job of landing you on the specific page you’re looking for. There’s just no reason to pass through an overly generic destination like a homepage.

I believe one of the biggest sins in web design is promoting mission-critical products and promotions only on the homepage. I typically see sites where an email signup or free shipping promotion is highlighted only on the homepage. This is a tragedy, because there’s very little leverage in the homepage, compared with other, more frequently viewed pages. The time you spend redesigning and testing is much better spent on your product, category, or shopping cart pages.

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6 Secrets to Fantastic Facebook Ad Campaigns

6 Secrets to Fantastic Facebook Ad Campaigns

“Facebook ads don’t work!”

I’ve heard this over and over. And to be honest, this was my experience up to a few months ago. But then I really got serious about Facebook ads. Keep reading and I’ll share some of the secrets that have helped me obtain up to 600% ROI on some of my campaigns.

#1 – Ignore everything you know about Adwords:

For those of us who come from a search marketing background, ignore everything you know about traditional pay per click. With Adwords, it’s not uncommon to create an ad and leave it on autopilot for years, all while returning excellent results. Not so with Facebook. Once your target demographic has seen your ad over and over, the click through rate will fall, and your cost per click will rise, therefore destroying your ROI. To be successful with Facebook ads, be prepared for a successful ad to have a lifecycle of as little as one week. Then move on to the next big idea.

#2 – Stand out or Stand Down

It’s extremely critical that your ad image be striking. I’ve spoken with many companies whose first Facebook ad consist of nothing but their brand logo. For most business, this is a horrible strategy. In fact, my most successful ads completely ignore the company that’s advertising and instead focus intently on one particlar product that people are passionate about. Pay close attention to the Facebook ads on your own profile. Which ones grab your attention and why?

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Putting A/B Tests to the Test: 4 Pitfalls of Testing

Website testing can be one of the most fruitful website optimization tactics in your arsenal. But, it can also be a huge waste of time. Below are 4 pitfalls I’ve found myself in at one time or another.

1. Testing “Everything”

A common axiom in website optimization is to “test everything.” The problem with this advice is it ignores the reality we all find ourselves in, that we have limited time and resources. If you have the choice to test between testing your checkout process or a different coloured add-to-cart button, which do you think will legitimately provide long term value to your visitors?

Quite frankly, not everything is worth testing. Yes, you might inch out a slight improvement to your add-to-cart rate with a flashy new button, but how will that translate to profit and lifetime customer value? My advice is to skip the gimmicks and test stuff that matters.

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4 Reasons your Product Pages Don’t Convert

4 Reasons your Product Pages Don’t Convert

I believe online stores focus too much on technology, too much on traffic generation, and even too much on site conversion optimization, and forget that it’s still all about the product. Everything else is just a tool. Below I’ll share what I believe to be the 4 biggest mistakes made on the product pages of today’s online retailers.

1) Too much imagination is required

All too many product pages require their customer’s to have a good imagination. For example, product images convey the product alone with a white background. Not exactly awe-inspiring. Online shopping can be devoid of context when product images aren’t show in use. Lifestyle and contextual images help create mental ownership by giving specific examples of use.

Yes, it’s a lot of work to get this type of photography on your site. But as I recently shared my experience in lifestyle images, it can be earth-shatteringly effective.

Don’t require your customer to have a good imagination. Paint a picture for them. How will it look in context, in their hands, in use?

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The Ultimate Holiday Checklist for E-Commerce Success

The Ultimate Holiday Checklist for E-Commerce Success

I’m making the list, be sure to check it twice to ensure success for your e-commerce website this holiday season.

#1. Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Your site will be flooded with traffic this holiday season. How can you harness that traffic to create year long business? Consider offering a good discount incentive for customers to come back and shop in January. You can automatically email them a coupon after each order, or send one along with the package. Don’t forget to email and remind customers to come back and use their discounts.

#2. Loosen Up & Emphasize Your Return Policy: While a 30 day return policy is commonplace for the rest of the year, it may scare off early shoppers during the holidays. Make it clear to your visitors that you will accept returns and exchanges on all Christmas gift purchases. Be sure to let visitors know early and often about your policy, such as on product pages and the shopping cart.

#3. Review Past Failures & Successes: Try this as you plan your busy holiday season. Take a look at you and your competitor’s website’s through the lens of the Wayback machine. What worked and didn’t work last year? What can you improve upon?

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How to Build the Perfect Website

How to Build the Perfect Website

If you’re seeking perfection on your website, stop reading this. It doesn’t exist.

In fact the search for perfection might just be more detrimental to your website than anything else.

That homepage that your designer has been tweaking for weeks, stop fiddling and make it live. That eBook you’re still perfecting, launch it now. If you have doubts, test it.

In the web world we are lucky to have a friend: instant feedback. Feedback in the form of customers, analytics, surveys, etc. If you were developing a tangible product or print material, you don’t have this luxury. You have to get it right the first time. There is no excuse for a typo on the front of your catalogue or a defect on your product. But a website is a living, breathing, evolving creature. Problems can be fixed. Inefficiencies can be optimized.

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The Symptoms and Remedy for Homepage-itis

The Symptoms and Remedy for Homepage-itis

Are you suffering from homepage-itus? The symptoms include:

  • The belief that visitors always enter your website through the homepage
  • You send all of your traffic PPC, SEO, or Ad traffic to the homepage
  • Promoting products, content, email newsletters, or promotions only on the homepage
  • The belief that the “wow factor” is the most important impression to a customer, so you make your homepage do a flash based song-and-dance
  • A disproportionately large amount of your web design budget goes to redesigning it obsessively

The truth is that visitor behaviour has changed drastically. Homepages don’t matter as much as they used too. First-time visitors enter deep into the site courtesy of Google’s more accurate search results. Repeat visitors enter through landing pages from email campaigns or bookmarks to specific pages that interested them. If you take a look at your analytics, I bet you’ll be shocked out how many of your visitors never even pass through the homepage.

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3 Ways to Sabotage your Website

3 Ways to Sabotage your Website

Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy. Below I’ve reflected on 3 ways I’ve sabotaged my websites in the past. Hopefully you won’t follow my example.

#1. Completely redesign it – If you redesign your site from scratch, you’re probably throwing out the baby with the bathwater. No matter what your web design firm tells you, very few websites are so bad that it must be completely redesigned. When you do this, you end up distrupting features that worked perfectly fine just to fix features that didn’t. Instead, redesign your site incrementally around business objectives and customer needs, not the design whims of you or your company.

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Unnecessary Detours on Your Website

Unnecessary Detours on Your Website

About Us. FAQ. Customer Service. Contact Us.

Odds are you have these pages on your website. Last week I raised a question about the value of site if your products disappeared. But here’s another consideration, what if the above pages disappeared?

If your About Us page was gone, would customers still be able to learn about your company, your beliefs, your values, your unique offering, throughout your site? Or is the About Page the only place you communicate who you really are.

What about an FAQ page? Is this the only place you answer common questions? If they’re really so “common”, why not answer them in context instead? In other words, it doesn’t make sense to answer common questions about your shipping policy on an entirely separate page, it makes sense to answer them with a popup box or mouseover in your shopping cart when people are actually choosing their shipping option.

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