Cardboard Warfare

It is amazing what those kids are able to do with a lot of creativity and some cardboard.

To be honest, they should start work on advertising business creating different viral marketing campaigns, because with the quality of this production, they will reach top 10 real soon.

Check it out.

Achieving the FLOW on eCommerce

Couple of weeks ago I have finished the Book Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and what I found interesting was the fact that to be happy you should focus, work hard, have full control of your activities, have constant feedback, and the challenges should be according to your skills and ability. I couldn´t avoid not to compare with Online Marketing and eCommerce in general. Actually the FLOW (a state of mind where the person is so immerse and focus that one can lose track of time and feel enjoyment just for the sake of the activity), it is applicable to any profession, nevertheless eCommerce and Online Marketing, my area of expertise, has demonstrated that achieving flow is not only good for yourself but for your customers as well.

Below I will analyze and link the main theory of FLOW to Online marketing and eCommerce, whereas the main goal is to make customers HAPPY!

Focus

The ultimate nightmare of TV programs it was the invention of remote control. The "zapping" was the worst TV program and advertising enemy where spectators would just use their finger tips to click around TV channels. How did advertisers handled this problem? Quite simply: They knew that the first 3 or 4 seconds were very important, therefore the message and the whole attention of the spectator should be focus on those few first seconds. On Internet, as you know, users can have 3, 4 tabs opened at the same time, (or even 20 to some hardcore users), therefore, a website user-oriented with relevant information and also with minimum visual "pollution", can thrive the website goals.

Creative websites, with visual effects and nice design, can also be a good option in order to keep your visitor around and focus on what they need to do at your website, but of course this is always a matter of understanding your target audience. Fancy websites would work well for brands that link their image to freshness of design and fun such as Red Bull, Coca-Cola or Nike, however B2B websites for instance might be wiser to just stick to the point and present at first the message your customer want to see. Travel websites is always nice to present a paradisiac beach place with happy people enjoying the sun, but since a highly competitive market is the travel industry, displaying clear discounts and promotions and last minutes deals it is always a good idea.

Clean and direct to the point customer flow, it is also good for Search Engines, so before including all kinds of features and pops-up and offers and information to the page, think of that.

Constant Feedback

It is always nice to know whether you are doing good or bad on any activity right? It not only gives confidence and control of the activity, but also control the enthusiasm and excitement to finish the task. Simple manners, such as breadcrumbs on the website, or displaying which step the user is at the shopping cart, can give the perception of control to the user. This is exactly what Csikszentmihalyi has to say about achieving flow. It is all a fact of having control to be happy and enjoyment.

Many of those constant feedback can be used in the advantage of Online Marketers, for instance enhancing the quality of the order status and shipping time, displaying with higher precision the location of the product.

One company called Hailo has created a mobile App where customers can locate and call for a cab nearly available to you. It displays the time will take the cab to reach your location, whether you can pay by credit card or cash, and also the name and if available the picture of the cab driver. All expectations and control given in one simple app.

Challenges

Understanding your target audience is key, therefore your webdesign should be align and respect the smartness of the user and architecture in the way that users wouldn't find complicate to navigate at your page but also not so simplistic in order to users not to get bored and just leave your website. The challenge can also be attained by creating interesting content, infographics and any other material that challenges the mind of your user.

On the image below you can see the mental state according to the skill of the activity in relation to the challenge of the task.

Autotelic Experience

Csikszentmihalyi mention on his book about Autotelic Experience, whereas at the end it would be rewarding and exciting to just finish the activity, bringing relaxation and joy. Some brands are able to spark this feeling on customers that perceive the acquisition of that particular brand itself is the ultimate happiness. However to the wider majority of brands, you can provide an autotelic experience to customers by simply avoiding minor crashes on your website, making sure that the whole process is as smooth as possible. Broken links, products not available, missing information or just misleading information, it can add to unsatisfied journey and even though you can have a clean and clear shopping cart, it might turn that the user is tired of minor defects and just leave the product on the basket.

Below I have listed the steps to achieve FLOW.   

1. intense and focused concentration on the present moment
2. merging of action and awareness
3. a loss of reflective self-consciousness
4. a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
5. a distortion of temporal experience, one's subjective experience of time is altered
6. experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience

Source: wikipedia

HTTP Status Codes - Page Not Found 404 and Redirects 301, 302 - Infographic

When deciding whether use permanent redirect 301, temporary redirect 302 or canonical tag, or what to do with your 404 Page Not Found?

The infographic I found here regarding all HTTP Status Codes it is very easy to read and understand, to any SEO expert or developer. It simplify the idea of how search engines behave in such situation. With this Infographic in hands, you can prepare your list of action items and start design your page structure.

The only one I want to comment at this point is the 404 Page Not Found. It is important to mention that even though it is a "dead end" page, it doesn't mean that the page cannot be used at your advantage. In fact there are mainly 3 situations that triggers a 404 Page:

1. User has clicked on a broken link
2. The page has been deleted
3. User have mistyped a URL

The first situation is the one you should raise a red flag, since this can harm your search positions, especially if the broken links are coming from internal links.

Online Marketing Strategy for Hotel Chains

For some years, when I have worked at Barcelo Hotels in Spain as Subdirector of eMarketing, I have realized that it is very difficult to prepare and attend all needs from local hoteliers. Google has also realized that as well, and created a number of products and services to help local markets.

To start with, I want to illustrate my optimal Online Marketing Structure. The idea is to be able to keep the high level of "Centre of Excellence" across the organization, as well as the ability to act local in a good time fashion.

This structure also known as "Hub-Spoke" it is very flexible and ideal for aligning with off-line marketing activities and online campaigns, as well as easier to have the buy-in of Local Hotel Managers. At the end, local online marketing managers, would be generalists that would guide the experts in the headquarters with optimal strategy to approach local markets.

Challenges & Solutions

One of the main challenges has always being on how to strive in a very competitive local market. Some Hotel Directors would approach our team and ask "How is it possible the hotel just in front of us, with very low brand recognition, is better positioned on SERP than us?". There is no easy answer for this question, but I have a few tactics that can help overcome this challenge:

• Think Global, Act Local: Easy to say, hard to implement, but having a generalist online marketer within the local team is the first step. The local Online Marketer will be able to better liaison with local suppliers, local events, local shops and markets and this should be an advantage when building the link strategy to improve general SEO. 
• Google Places: Make sure you claim your location at Google Places. This will list your hotel on Google Maps, but more importantly, you will be able to use many other features of Mobile Solutions such as Click to Call and so forth.
• Create Mashups: When looking for a place to relax or just for a business trip, it is always nice to know everything about the place. Mashups will provide extra information for users on Google Maps. For users to find your mashups, include KML files on your sitemap. To learn more about, click here: KML
• Understand Target Audience: Some hotels have a strict clientele, well defined geographically for instance. Hotels like this should have a different Search strategy, for instance having local ccTLD, hotel page in the target audience language etc. All localization techniques should apply in this case.
• Content Marketing Strategy: Design a Content Marketing Strategy, that makes sense for your target audience. Create communities and understand what your audience is looking for when going on vacation. Is it your hotel focus on business travelers, walk-in customers, or summer holidays. Every customer type want a different line of communication with the hotel. Chose wisely the communication channel, whether blog, or social media. For instance in US it would be wise to use Google Plus, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc, whereas in Brasil, Facebook and twitter would be just enough.

Cookie Law in Europe

The Cookie Law in Europe is given a lot to discuss. The main reason behind this law is the fact to control phishing, spam or malicious websites. One way that cyber-criminals use to steal/track users are by placing cookies on your computer.

But what are those cookies? 

Cookies are small files that can store user data. It is usually used to trace navigation patterns and click behavior. Most of advertisers and websites has a huge dependency on Cookies in order to enhance UX, better tailor message and campaigns, create and identify new segments, or using the Cookie technology to create retargeting campaigns and so forth. The possibilities are immense, however the cookie law, despite the good intention of e-Privacy, I believe the main solution would be to educate users instead of requesting permission to accept cookie all the time.

Below I found an interesting infographic that explains the option and knowledge of users regarding Cookies and the law itself.

Search Strategy for cross-domain websites

To all Search Managers, at least once in their lives they will face this issue: A company has several websites or sub domains, representing different divisions or business units and they are similarly competing Search Engine Results (SERP) against each other.

Some might call it kw cannibalization, others just a waste of money, but facing inevitably situation, it is better to design a strategy in order to mitigate the problem. I have personally undergone this scenario a few times, therefore I would like to share my experience enumerated below:

Tracking Sub Domains

I strongly recommend to track subdomains into one Google Analytics Account. To do so, visit the developers website from Google , and follow the steps. In order to see the results properly on Google Analytics, you should create a filter on Google Analytics and just do same as the Print Screen below. If you don't do that, you will not be able to see anything before the .mywebsite.com/ but only the "/" for example.

(Sub) Domain Objectives

What are the domain objective? What products do I have highest priority? Is my domain seeking leads, or direct sales? Quite obvious questions, but few times people forget to understand that you cannot tackle everything. If a company has two different divisions and two different websites but their brand kw is very important for both, which sort of kw combination is most important for one than to another? Therefore defining the goals and displaying that clear across the organization is vital.

Division Alignment

Just after having all objectives set, you need to align and actually take advantage of the authority of your main domain. All subdomains might have a strong presence on search results, but in order to avoid duplicate content and also control which product group should be placed first on SERP, you can use canonical tag, pointing to the appropriate page. With this simple mapping, all subdomains will win, since all work done so far to improve the content of the page should pass to canonical tagged page. Considering PPC, it is easier to control who should position first, therefore a simple regular meeting, aligning your bidding strategy should be sufficient, unless otherwise you both want the same kw.

When everyone wants the same kw 

For "generic" brand kws, it is hard to define who should position first. Considering organic search, if your website has several subdomains competing for the same main kw, there are two thing you could do:

1. Optimize the content of the subdomain that has the strategic priority to be first
2. Or devaluate the other subdomains by including canonical tag, robots.txt, noindex (depending on the case, or even 301 redirect if necessary

From a PPC standing point, agree a minimum CPC and raised/decrease weekly, until both reach an optimal cost per click, should be sufficient.

At the end, a good communication between department and a clear strategy of all websites domains, will definitely help everyone and present to customers a good user experience in general, since you will direct qualified traffic to the correct page/information. 

When Google Analytics can help you increase your Conversion Part 3

The last of 3 parts on how use Google Analytics to improve your conversions, I will use the last interesting video of Google regarding Checkout.

Checkout

 

I have personally experienced a situation just like the video above. It is really nonproductive and annoying when you want badly one product but the "Online Clerk" is not friendly to you. So what to do to avoid this situation when users are trying to buy at your online store?

1. Understand your customer. Avoid to translate internal process to customers
2. Credibility: Show that your store has credibility. Specially if your store is exclusively selling online
3. Avoid offers on the purchase process
4. Introduce Guest Purchase, meaning a checkout process without the need to create login and password
5. No hidden cost or information: Make sure you are displaying the most important discounts, and information related to the product the customer is purchasing before he/she completes the process.
6. Shipping information: Make it clear to users all shipping costs and information related.
7. Exclude unnecessary text: I have seen a few websites where the e-mail field has a short text asking the customer to login by using their e-mail, or explaining what it will happen next when the user types his e-mail. (image below)

But nothing can guarantee a successful checkout process without testing. Google Analytics last year has introduced the Google Experiment. It is a very simple tool where you can setup A/B testing. To setup an experiment is very simple:

1. First you will need to create a variation page ex. www.yourwebsite.com/variation-1.html
2. Go to Google Analytics and click on Content > Experiment

3. Then create the experiment




4. Create an Experiment name and include the page you want to test on "Original"
5. Include the variation page you have created previously and include on "Variation" field










On the next page you will be able to finish setting your Experiment. So first define a goal of your Experiment
You can also select the number of visitors of your website will be exposed to the experiment
On advanced options, it is important to mention the "Confidence threshold". Higher this number, longer it will take to end the Experiment.

6. Once set all options, save and go next
7. Here you will need to include the tracking code for your Experiment. Copy the code onto the "head" of the CONTROL or "Original" page
8. After that you can review and enable your Experiment.
9. To check the results just go back to Content > Experiment, and you should find your page "Winner".

At the end, setting an Experiment it is not complicated, but taking the assertive decisions regarding the variation page will decide whether you can improve or not your checkout process.

Hence...

Simple ideas are still the best ideas.

When Google Analytics can help you increase your Conversion Part 2

Continuing the second part of how to increase your Conversion by using Google Analytics, I would like to take the advantage of another video from Google. The topic this time will be Landing Page Optimization.

Landing Page Optimization

Technology can play an important role on our online advertising lives, however, like everything in life, do not exaggerate in the doses, it can really backfire.

It is imperative, before setting all kinds of "good ideas" in your page, to understand your customer journey and define your objectives. You might have a strong up-sell target this month, but hold back your thoughts before including all fancy feature and offers you have heard of, whilst the user is trying to buy something at your online store, define clear KPIs and figure out data patterns.

Defining your KPIs

Needless to say that KPIs is important to control, and optimize your pages, however which one to use? All figures from Google Analytics can be used and translated to action but below you can see the ones I usually use most and the explanation why:

• Bounce Rate: When users view no more then 1 page on your website. It is a good indication that users are not finding exactly what they are looking for. For instance, when setting a campaign, you can use advanced segmentation "paid search" and filter the bounce rate of a specific campaign. High Bounce Rate indicates that your ad is not matching what customers are expecting to see on the landing page
• Avg. Time on Site: When Bounce rate is low but avg time on site is low as well, it might indicate that maybe you are diverting the attention of potential customers with different offers or pop ups on the page. 
• Page/Visits: Depending on the objective of your landing page, a high number of Page/Visit, could indicate a bad pattern. Customers might be just comparing prices and leaving your website, or they are just confuse and getting lost, hence I use to set a threshold (that is of course is different to every website) of Page/Visits. Lower than 2  or higher than 8 are confused users and it should be investigated why they are not getting what they are looking for.
• Page Value: If you have an ecommerce website, Page Value is a good way to see the real contribution of your landing page to the business whereas Page Value is (Transaction Revenue + Total Goal Value) divided by Unique Pageviews for the page or set of pages), therefore, even if your main goal is lead nurturing, you can still set the goal values and the Page Value show the calculation for you.  The only precaution I suggest to use here is to filter out all pages that are hit by a user regardless, for instance the checkout page, login, cart, confirmation page, etc. To do that so, use regex  symbol "|" which means "or".

User Journey

In order to understand User flow, I usually use 3 features from Google Analytics:

1. Visitor Flow
2. Event Tracking
3. Goal setting/Funnel Visualization

Content in-page analysis can also help you to understand where users are clicking on the page, however I prefer the more accurate Event Tracking to evaluate the performance of each click.

Planning before hand the flow you want the user to follow from a specific landing page is important. I always like the Hernan Cortez strategy when conquering Mexico. Hernan Cortez basically before invading Mexico, he simply burned all his own ships sending a message to his own men "That is the only way: Towards Tenochtitlan". At the end, giving too many options might be confusing and dismay users. Make sure that your landing page has the necessary internal links and message (avoid external links but if necessary include "_blank" on the link).

1. Visitor Flow (image below) can help you understand where your customers are coming, how many are exiting the page and where they are heading to. You can segment per region or campaigns and learn whether your campaign intention is directing the user to where you want. To that click on "Select a Segment".

In order to analyse a specific page is a little tricky. You should first click with the right button of your mouse at any page step.

Click on "Explore traffic through here". It will display the flow from the page you have clicked. From here you should click on the the "Gear" icon and it will display the image below

Just type the landing page you want to analyse and apply. From there you will see all flow internal flow of your campaign, so if users are moving to another page and dropping, it might be a good idea to simply delete the link to that page on your landing page.

Beware that the exit percentage is in relation to all visits, hence you will need to do your own calculations. :)

2. Event Tracking is a powerful tool from Google Analytics that can give you extra information regarding your user flow. I strongly recommend to track every single link of your page. On Google Developers website you have a specific explanation on how to install the event tracking on your website. Event tracking can also help you with the Visitor Flow, since you can segment per Event.

Events have the following components:

• Category (required)
The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.


• Action (required)
A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.


• Label (optional)
An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.


• Value (optional)
An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.


• Non-interaction (optional)
A boolean that when set to true, indicates that the event hit will not be used in bounce-rate calculation.

Most of the cases, the first two components should be enough, and you could track external links for instance and understand to where your users are heading after leaving your page.

You can find Event report on Google Analytics by clicking under Content>Events

3. Goal Setting/Funnel Visualization
Setting your Goals with GA is easy and it is "mandatory" to every single webpage, regardless if your page is commercial only or not, you always must have an interest or an objective of having your webpage, otherwise why bother having one? To set goals you need first identify the landing page url and create the goals on your GA profile.

When clicking on Goals, you should see the page below:

Since we are considering Landing Page Optimization, I will focus only on the first Goal type, which is url destination. Unless you are 100% sure that your landing page is not dynamic, I recommend to use the "head match" since this option will consider all variations of the url you want to set as a goal. You can also include a goal value if you want.

On Goal Funnel, first check the box "Use Funnel", and include all steps you want the user to follow on your campaign. If you check the box "required steps" it will only consider a goal success if all steps are hit. After saving, you will need to wait a couple of days maybe, depending on your traffic and then you will be able to see the traffic funnel as follow.

To see your Funnel, you should go to Conversions>Funnel Visualization.

At the end optimizing a page it seems sometimes including or excluding components at your page, so you should always have in mind a clear picture of your objectives and tight control over your analytic.

When Google Analytics can help you increase your Conversion Part 1

I am a big fan of Google Analytics, not only because it is free, but it can give you a nice insight of all your business/website just by collecting and evaluating the correct data. I have divided this post in 3 parts since there is a lot to write about it.

Following the video below (quite funny by the way), I have experience a few times the same issue as our friend just to find the "milk" he is looking for, hence "Site Search" will be the first part of this post about.

Site Search 

Most of eCommerce platform have in-built site search solutions. You could either use Google site search or any other provider. I have also experience working with FAST from Microsoft, however I still prefer the Google site search because it is easy and free to use. If you have GSS installed on your site there is not much you need to do, since all will be sync and automated for you to your Google Analytics Account. However if you do not have GSS on your website, you can easily track your search terms following the steps below:

1. Go to your Google Analytics account and click on the profile you want to track your internal site search. If you are not very confident on how to do that, create a testing profile and make all changes there before moving to your main profile account.
2. Identify your internal site search parameter. To do that, perform a search on your website. Most of internal parameter are defined as just "q" (query), but some other site search engines might use diferent parameter. The example below the parameter the site search is using is "searchKey"





3. As soon as you identify the parameter your internal site search is using you can go back to your Google Analytics account and click on Profile Setting.







Once in your Profile Settings, you should see the screen shot below. Click on "Do track Site Search" and include the parameter of your internal site search. In my case is "searchKey". I recommend to check box the "Strip query parameters out of URL". This will allow you a cleaner result on GA. Some websites might have other parameter to identify your search query, for instance the page category where the search has been performed. If you do not have this functionality in your website, you are done, so click the "Apply" button at the bottom of the page.

In order to check your internal search results, you go to your GA account where you have enabled the site search and go to content>site search.

What to do with all this data?

Quite obvious, you will be able to identify what users are trying to find on your website. With this data you can approach your Search Engine team and show them which kws are performing better and which ones are not performing at all. You can also identify architecture flaws, only because people are searching many times the same kw term it might imply that people cannot find easily therefore they need to ask our internal site search for help.

Site search can also help you sell more if you tune it correctly. With the historical data of searches performed in your website you can give weight to certain products to be placed first and therefore improving customer experience.

Have fun!

SEO: Tactics Infographic

I found interesting the Info-graphic below in the web displaying most of SEO tactics available nowadays. Of course there is a huge another story related to On-Page Optimization which includes Content Marketing tactics such as the info-graphic below. Since I found interesting the image, I think it is fair enough to link back the source and therefore creating natural linking to the content creator :).

I should dedicate a complete another post related to content marketing.

Source: http://econsultancy.com/nl/blog/