Welcome to PPC Myth week! Today is the first installment of a 3 part series challenging common misconceptions about search marketing and analytics.

Myth #1: Organic search more qualified traffic than paid

I was surprised to see in print one of the most respected search marketing gurus state “Organic searchers who click on your pages are highly qualified visitors to your site…

This is a recap of Elastic Path Software’s April Webinar:Delivering Successful Enterprise Ecommerce Projects. (Click to view the replay or download the presentation on mp4).

Why did we choose this topic?

Economist Magazine rated the outlook of 15 industries from 1-5 based on their outlook for 2009, considering economic conditions. Only ecommerce had a sunny outlook, and it’s estimated that 1/4 of all retail transactions will occur online by 2012…

Andy King, author of Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets posted Usability Study: Men Need Speed yesterday — citing a study by Southern Illinois University on how men and women use the web. The researchers found that both men’s and women’s top priority is ease of use, with web speed men’s second choice, and easy navigation women’s…

BoldChat recently released research on The Effectiveness of Live Chat Technology which surveyed 264 US shoppers who consider themselves regular online shoppers.

One of the findings I found most interesting was the most common reason site visitors would initiate live chat is if they experience an error during the checkout process (76%). Other reasons include asking general questions about products/services/policies, sales specials or inquiring about orders already placed…

The etailing group’s 8th Annual Merchant Survey asked 190 senior executives about their e-commerce merchandising and marketing practices. Regarding email, execs were asked about what kind of content their emails use. The number one answer was “sales and specials” at 86%, with “their own branding” (83%), “seasonal messaging” (79%), and “new product introductions” (77%) following close behind…

Blogger, author and multichannel retail expert Kevin Hillstrom recently asked some deep questions about Bricks, Clicks and Multichannel Experiences.

I’m looking for feedback. Based on what I’ve read on Twitter, the 2% of America that uses the micro-blogging service that will become the greatest marketing tool of all time until everybody switches to yet another platform in 2010 have strong opinions on these topics…

If you’re heading down to Orlando May 3-7 for the Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG)’s COLLABORATE 09 event, we’d love to connect with you!

COLLABORATE 09 is the premier event for Oracle database and technology professionals looking for best practices and real-world solutions. IOUG Forum session topics include database administration & warehousing, applications development, and business intelligence, and cover products including RAC, Fusion Middleware, Essbase, Stellent, BEA and many others…

On my most recent visit to Entertainment Earth, I added a Star Trek item to my cart and I saw this “carrot”*

* “Carrot” is a term for a message in the cart that tells you you’re $X away from a promotional offer - usually free shipping. Amazon’s Super Saver Shipping is a classic example.

I thought to myself — whoa, I’m being shown a personalized offer based on my browsing habits! This is HUGE! Then I realized after trying other category items that I had once again confused Star Trek with Star Wars…

As powerful and important as web analytics is, web analysis can often hinder rather than help a web site or business improve. While analytics data is fine for telling you the “what” but not the “why” — so beware of using metrics to make assumptions about your customer behavior, preferences or your site’s performance.

Consider this situation. Retailer sees that the site search box is rarely - if ever - used…

We’re getting closer to another exciting Elastic Path webinar — this month’s topic is Delivering Successful Ecommerce Projects. Our presenters Atul Jain, Associate General Manager of HCL Technologies and Gord Janzen, Chief Operating Officer of Elastic Path will present case studies of ecommerce projects spanning the last 10 years and discuss:

• How ecommerce projects are different from other IT and marketing projects
• What business and project management elements are especially important in ecommerce projects
• What technical elements predispose an ecommerce project for success
• The Top 10 things to do before project kickoff

In addition, we’re inviting the ecommerce community to share their own hits and misses…

Chad White from the Retail Email Blog recently spotted this email from TigerDirect that dynamically updates image files when a product sells out. This practice prevents the frustration and disappointment when one clicks to a product that’s no longer available, creates urgency for other products and may prompt the recipient to open TigerDirect emails right away in the future.

The dynamic replacement is certainly cool But what if you deliberately mixed in some sold out products in your emails?

My first retail job was selling shoes in the mall…

Remember this cheesy commercial from the 80’s for Faberge shampoo?

Can’t see video? Visit this post on the Web.

Along with Faberge shampoo, the “Tell 2 Friends” adage has gone the way of the Dodo. In the Age of Twitter, it’s more like “Tell 2000 Friends.”

Consider this Tweet from Bazaarvoice CMO Sam Decker. Over 2000 of his followers potentially caught this tweet: “On hold too long with Zappos…

When you use a human model in an email campaign, print / banner ad or landing page - does it help or hinder usability, persuasion and conversion?

Research from eye-tracking specialists Bunnyfoot and Think Eyetracking show that a model’s eyes influence your eye movement:

Bunnyfoot, via GrokDotCom

Think Eyetracking, via GrokDotCom

When conducting email tests, often the variables considered are subject lines, headlines, time/date of delivery, offers, call to action buttons, prices or featured products…

Because the cost to acquire a new customer is much higher than keeping an existing customer, and for many sites new visitors make up over half of all traffic — offering incentives to new customers makes sense.

For example, Organize.com has used a pop-up coupon for first time visitors, offering $5 off if you buy something during your visit (not on your subsequent visit).

Here’s another offer for first time visitors (I used a different browser):

Whether these pop-up incentives are a turn-on or a turn-off for your customers is something you’ll have to test…

Though I’d never recommend “lowest prices” as a unique selling proposition, I notice many retailers use a Price Match Guarantee or even a 110% Guarantee to convince customers to purchase from them and not the competition. I’d venture to say Price Guarantees are becoming “Ubiquitous Value Propositions” rather than unique!

Let’s define the difference between:

Low prices: Retailer in general has lower prices than other online retailers or less than the products are priced offline…

What do you do with returned stock? While some open-box, returned or damaged products can be sent back to the manufacturer to be later sold as factory refurbs, that’s not the case for all product categories. The following are just some of the ways retailers are re-selling returned/damaged stock:

Outlet Stores

Zappos doesn’t frown upon ordering 3 sizes and 3 colors of a shoe to try on, with 365 days to return unworn merchandise…

I recently posted How Much is Your Coupon Code Box Costing You? which addressed the problem of customers searching for coupon codes when they see a coupon box in the checkout. If the customer grabs an affiliate code, not only do you have to discount the product or shipping cost, but you also have to pay your affiliate a commission for a sale that really wasn’t initiated by that affiliate…

During my travels around the Internet, there have been a couple occasions where I have been asked if I wanted to use Facebook Connect with a website:

Facebook Connect is a way to “take your online identity with you all over the Web.” It’s an example of websites sharing data with each other to enhance the user experience with each Web property.

Could this concept work in an online shopping context? Particularly for personalization?

Last summer, Amazon introduced Checkout by Amazon…

The following is a screencast of a presentation I gave this week at the Email Roundtable in Vancouver sponsored by Silverpop. The Email Roundtable happens in various cities and is an intimate event where email marketing professionals get together to network, discuss the latest developments and trends in the industry and share tips on optimizing email campaigns.

Can’t see video? View the post at Get Elastic…

This post is a recap of today’s webinar: The New Ecommerce Dilemma: Buy, Build, or Leverage? presented by Michael Vax, CTO, Elastic Path Software.

The on-demand version will be available shortly.

Agenda

• Understanding what models are available
• Understanding your ecommerce needs
• Finding the right model for your enterprise

Understanding what models are available

Choose the Model:

Image Copyright ©2009 B2C Partners…

A common SEO problem for ecommerce sites is CMS (content management systems) that create different URLs for a product that lives under multiple categories. The main reason this is bad for SEO is search engines only allocate so much bandwidth to crawling your site. If most or all of your product pages have duplicates, you’re less likely to get your site fully crawled and indexed — meaning lost organic search opportunity…

When a web-savvy customer sees a promo code field in the checkout process, it’s a call to action - a call to search Google for a coupon code, and there are plenty of affiliate deal and coupon sites to be found. (Hey, even Alan Rimm-Kaufman does it!)

This action is a distraction and can cost you big bucks — especially if in this economy you’re already heavily discounting your merchandise…

Many retailers allow site customers to sort site search, category and sub-category results by price, average customer review, top sellers, new arrivals to name a few. While this is great for usability, it’s also an opportunity to glean information about your customer which you can apply to merchandising and personalization on home pages, product pages, promotional banners and even email campaigns…

Whether your customers are hunters (looking for something very specific), browsers (just poking around your site) or “howsers” (hunting for something but must browse to find the right product) — filtered navigation can be very useful to your site visitors. Filtered navigation:

• Helps hunters use navigation menus to locate a product rather than rely on search
• Gives browsers an idea of what you carry
• Helps howsers understand a product’s important attributes or uses

There are infinite ways to present filtered navigation and they are often product-specific…

A few months ago I went through the process of configuring a custom wheelchair at Spinlife.com. I needed help understanding the options and called customer service. Lisa walked me through the process like a knowledgeable saleswoman and prepared a custom quotation for me which I received by email.

Turns out I decided not to buy a new wheelchair and never returned to Spinlife to complete my order…

A question was raised last week in the E-commerce Network LinkedIn group: “What do you consider to be top 5 must haves for an ecommerce company to be successful?”

I thought I’d share the answer I posted to the group, and I invite you to add your own in the comments of this post.

1. Take a customer centric approach to the website. Design for usability, test, repeat…

Buy vs. build is the perennial question facing IT leaders seeking to enable their organization’s ecommerce ambitions. On one hand, the simplicity of an out-of-the-box solution is appealing and avoids reinventing the wheel. On the other hand, you know that your infrastructure poses some unique challenges, and the business wants to be an innovator, not an also ran.

However, the build vs…

This post is a summary of key takeaways from an Etail 2009 expert panel on online video for ecommerce. Rather than post my notes from the video, I’ve summarized the key takeaways from each of the retailer panelists: Peter Cobbs from eBags, McKay Thomas from BilliardEx and Jimmy Healey from OnlineShoes.com.

First off, big thanks to Xavier Casanova for capturing the entire Etail 2009 session: Optimizing Video on an e-Commerce Site…

If you use the broad match type in PPC advertising, negative matched keywords are essential to keeping your campaigns under control. But are you using negative matches to their full potential?

If you’re new to PPC, the broad match type refers to bidding on a keyword like new york pet store and allowing the PPC system (like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter) to match your ads to search queries that include this keyword, regardess of word order…

Last summer we did a collaborative post with fellow Vancouverites VKI Studios called Stop Google Analytics from Stealing Your Valuable Keyword Data. Google Analytics really isn’t “stealing”, rather “concealing” the actual search queries that trigger your paid search ads when you’re using broad match. It’s a “ye have not because ye ask not” situation…