By the InteractOne Marketing Team

With summer coming to a close, it’s time to start your digital marketing prep for the 2018 holiday season. What’s the key to Pay-Per-Click advertising during the holidays? Start early—create well planned and targeted campaigns as soon as possible. Well-prepared PPC campaigns perform better. It’s that simple. We are preparing clients for the November/December shopping season now.

Here are four tips for Magento merchants on how to run a successful PPC campaign during the holidays.

Lock Down Your Budget

A set budget is crucial for Pay-Per-Click success during the holiday season. It’s important to capture as much traffic during the holiday season as possible without overspending on PPC. Set clear expectations on ad spend so your team can focus on keeping costly aspects of a campaign in check and adjust before your whole holiday budget is spent.

We recommend a budget based on revenue instead of a set amount. Revenue-based budgets allow scalability during traffic fluctuation while maintaining profitability.

What If You Already Have Successful PPC Campaigns?

Great, you’re ahead of the game. Mature PPC campaigns, with high-quality scores, will experience a better cost-per-click than new campaigns. It is also less time consuming to make bid adjustments than it is to update ad copy or keywords. Due to Google’s approval process, new ad copy, keywords, ad groups, and campaigns all start out at a 0 quality score. To get a start on the holiday rush, identify your top performing campaigns. Then, plan out ad copy and have keywords ready by, or before, mid-October.  All you’ll need to do is throttle the budget a little when it’s go time.

Start Testing Your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

Don’t waste your budget on ads, keywords or landing pages that simply don’t convert. Tests need to be run (at the very least) a couple of months in advance of the holiday season.

A/B tests are the best way to discover what works and what doesn’t in PPC campaigns. Implementing split-ad testing prior to the holiday season will help determine the elements of your ads that impact user behavior so you can adjust them.

Elements such as calls-to-action, landing pages, and keywords influence whether an ad will result in a conversion. Focusing on those elements during testing will map out what successful ads should look like. Once your tests have accrued some data, use it to make careful, data-driven changes to the user experience. This will result in the best version of your ads.

For more advanced eCommerce marketers, we recommend multivariate testing. Although, for many merchants, tracking all the moving parts is not worth the aggravation. Notably, there are many helpful tools (including us) to help you with multivariate testing. However, like A/B tests, it’s important to start these tests sooner rather than later.

Sync Your Marketing Efforts

Campaign efforts performed simultaneously such as PPC, eMail, and social media advertising will perform better than stand-alone campaigns. Performing marketing campaigns in tandem through different channels increases the chances of brand recognition while creating brand familiarity.

In order to be successful in harmonizing these campaigns, be sure to keep the language and branding consistent. Also, be sure to build your email lists and loyal followers throughout the year so there is a larger sales audience come November.

Work to optimize your customer shopping experience (this should be an all-the-time edict, but it’s especially important during the holidays when shoppers are busy). With products being available on Amazon and other large online warehouses, ensuring a great customer experience on your site is of the utmost importance. Double (maybe even triple) check that elements such as site search, site navigation, image quality, links, internal linking and checkout experience are top quality.

Better customer experience is one reason why “Chief Experience Officer” (CXO) is a growing job title. Too many companies find themselves compartmentalized or silo-ed in their efforts. Or, companies rely on an agency to manage a specific marketing channel and do not effectively develop or communicate a central overarching strategy. The integration of all marketing initiatives (including customer experience) takes time. Merchants need to start plans for a larger strategy that includes PPC, eMail, social, and site optimizations.

Get Started Now – or Very Soon

Begin with these tips to maximize selling opportunities when traffic is at its peak during the holidays. Even if your marketing efforts aren’t as organized as they should be, there’s still time to put a plan into place.

If you would like some help, contact us to get started. Or, give us a call to talk to a Digital Marketing expert: 513-469-3345.

By the Marketing Team at InteractOne

SEO Keyword Ranking Reports: A Relic from The Past.

SEO keyword ranking reports have had a long-standing reign as the go-to metric to track SEO success. Although, it has lost much of its relevance over the past few years, for a variety of reasons. The keywords that many SEO practitioners and merchants are actively tracking represent a small percentage of actual realized traffic. Meaning you could be missing out on the source of a huge portion of site traffic.

SEO keyword ranking reports began its path toward obsolescence when Google Hummingbird algorithm came out. Google broadened the range of results presented back from a user’s query Hummingbird allows the Google search engine to better do its job through an improvement in semantic search. As conversational search becomes the norm, Hummingbird lends understanding to the intent and contextual meaning of terms used in a query.

This means that folks who are tracking rank positions for a keyword that may not actually present pages which are even targeting that term exactly. So, no matter how good a keyword ranking report is, it’s always going to be missing a great deal of a site’s essential traffic, and it completely misses long tail searches. In short, merchants who rely heavily on keyword rank reports are being bamboozled.

However, that’s not to say that SEO keyword ranking reports are completely irrelevant. It’s still important to track keywords but there needs to be change in how we handle the information collected through tracking those keywords. It is important to adapt the reports generated to enable a better, more in depth way to look at the information that rank reports provide without getting a false sense of where you stand in terms of overall success.

5 SEO tips for what Magento merchants should be reporting on and how to do it

1. Report on Actual Business Objectives

Search engines are continually trying to mimic customer behavior, so merchants will want to monitor and improve the same metrics search engines use in their algorithms. So, it is important to report on on-site metrics like conversions, revenue and page load times, as well as user engagement metrics such as bounce rate, click through rate, and time on site. These metrics reflect the growth and development of your site’s authority.

2. Add Keyword Groups

Take a page from PPC management and group similar keywords into groups and track average monthly rankings for the group in its entirety. Populate each keyword group with super-granular keywords that share the same semantic theme. The key is to make these groups  tightly themed. Track one over-arching word amongst the groups across all your traffic. By doing so you can see exactly how you rank for broader terms week to week. This method also catches the long-tail searches attached to broad keywords.

3. Compare Keywords Searched with Landing Page Content

Monitor search query reports from Google Search Console to see if the content on your landing pages match up with searchers intent. Review how you’ve mapped user queries to landing page destinations, to ensure that they are logical. After grouping like keywords together (point #2, above), group them with a likely landing page. There are tools available that can do this in a more automated fashion. They include gShift Labs, Conductor and BrightEdge.

4. Report on Actual Organic Search-Referred Traffic

Start to report on more types of traffic such as referral and social. Referral traffic sheds more light on your site content’s influence. If your content is getting mentions and generating links, it’s important to report on that traffic. Same for social traffic. Its success reflects in part on your SEO endeavors. While you may have a social media department, your efforts to create good content go hand in hand with a social media team’s work. Benchmark and report on actual organic search-referred traffic. Additionally, if you do not already report on direct traffic, it is advisable to begin to  include it in reports. Effective SEO is a rising tide that raises all ships – it may not be the direct result of explicit SEO, but there are causal links between SEO gains and traffic gains across each of these “organic” channels.

5. Tracking Backlinks

Keeping track of your backlinks and referring domains will give you a good general idea of the potential future effect of SEO initiatives. Backlinks from high quality domains will not lead to better rankings right away but they do show trends in a positive direction. Start to monitor and report on the number of and growth of backlinks, mentions, and citations. To best track backlinks update the frequency of when backlinks are reported, ensuring that they are indexed as they appear online. Also double-check that reports track backlinks as backlinks not follow/no-follow links. Whatever tool you use, should display backlinks only.

If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you implement these SEO techniques, then let us ensure that you are building your SEO strategy on a solid foundation, and leveraging your tools to their full potential. Fill out the form to get started or call us at (513) 469-3345.

Utilizing digital marketing strategies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) will get you some serious brand building and revenue opportunities along with greater levels of engagement on your site. The goal for these tactics is essentially the same: to recruit and drive qualified traffic to your website. But for a variety of reasons, merchants  have trouble focusing on both at the same time and some worry they might cannibalize one another. But it’s important to remember that search engine marketing is an additive and complementary game. When SEO and PPC efforts are strategically integrated, they can actually complement and assist one another.

SEO Benefits

SEO is the process by which a site is improved or optimized so that search engines rank it higher in organic search rankings. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo try to deliver the best results based on the searcher’s needs. Over time, the types of methods and algorithms search engines use are optimized for improvement.

Following and staying up to date on search engine best practices is key for online success.  For example, can Google “crawl” your site and display your content on mobile devices? If not, you could be penalized by the top search engines who will push your site further down in the search results or worse, never show it at all.

Due to ever changing methods and algorithms, SEO needs to be monitored over time. It’s important to continue the “care and feeding” of SEO tactics to keep rankings high. For example, search engines reward freshly and continuously updated, relevant content. Optimizing catalog content and product descriptions, images, and video is vital to your SEO success.

PPC Benefits

With paid search or Pay-Per-Click, you are attracting people with ads who are already searching for your product or service. PPC is the fastest way to efficiently drive targeted traffic to your website. PPC can also tell you a lot about how your pages are converting. For example, if your ad is getting a lot of clicks, but not a lot of conversions, you may have a landing page issue. Maybe the page is difficult to navigate. Or, maybe your page doesn’t offer what the customer expected. Keeping track of PPC performance is critical for making smart decisions and optimizing along the way.

PPC is easily tailorable to your budget needs. You set your own price-per-click and pay only when a customer clicks through to your site. If your budget increases or decreases, so can your PPC efforts. When it comes to managing your overall marketing budget, PPC offers the highest ROI when compared to e-mail, banners and other forms of online advertising.

SEO and PPC: The 1+1=3 Effect

Digital marketing including PPC and SEO often takes a back seat to the technical activity of building and maintaining a Magento store. While there are important technical aspects to your eCommerce Magento site, what drives success is a thorough understanding of your customers’ purchasing behavior. The value of SEO and PPC lie in the knowledge of understanding your purchase funnel as well as driving site traffic and conversions.

SEO and PPC each help with different parts of the sales funnel. SEO is felt to be more useful at the top of the funnel when prospects are in the earlier stages of research, while PPC is sometimes viewed as more appropriate if the prospect is closer to making a purchase decision.

But how does 1 + 1 = 3? When you have PPC and SEO rankings showing on the first pages of search engines, your chances of a conversion increase immensely.

Sometimes merchants are reluctant to commit budget and energy to both SEO and PPC at the same time. This viewpoint does not take into account the additive effect of having your brand come up twice on the page through both initiatives. In addition to the benefits of each of these tactics already mentioned, merchants get that extra branding bump with greater levels of engagement that comes from the old trope — frequency and repetition.

By the Marketing Team at InteractOne

Digital Marketing Plan for Those Shiny New Websites

So you spent a ton of time, money and effort on your big shiny website. Now what? Unfortunately, your site is not the Field of Dreams. Just because you have built it does not mean folks will come. In today’s ever changing world of eCommerce, a cool website is not enough. We help merchants launch and promote websites everyday here at InteractOne and we want to talk about what you should be doing after your site is live. Here is our four step Digital Marketing Plan for new (and mature) eCommerce websites:

1. Build the Right Kind of Site Traffic

You should work to add traffic slowly using tools like SEO and Paid Search.You want to be able review the traffic data and know how to convert it. After all, traffic is good, but conversions are the reason your website exists.The purpose of traffic generation isn’t to make a sale, it’s to get  a site visit. Then it’s your website’s job to make the sale.

Don’t add traffic that won’t convert. If you were to get 10,000 new visitors to your website tomorrow, how many of them would become customers? How many would become lifetime customers?

2. Create an awesome Customer Experience that makes it easy for customers to convert

Your site needs to be designed for both looks and function. It needs to make people feel like sticking around long enough to be amazed by how the site is so friendly and easy to use. So, you want to make the path to purchase a pleasurable experience. Much of this work is done in the initial site build, but don’t be afraid to make changes and improvements to the user experience as you learn what works and just as importantly – what doesn’t.

• Know what makes qualified visitors not buy. Learn from cart abandonment and other actions that interrupt the buying process.
• Work to become a Content Authority. You’ll soon create content so good that it deserves to be shared on Facebook and Twitter and be at the top of the search engines.

And finally, learn what makes customers come back. You’ll want to encourage feedback – both good and bad. And test all communications and on site activities using A/B and multivariate testing.

3. Analyze data

Make sure meaningful analytics capabilities are in place from day one, so you can learn from successes and failures. Develop goals for everything you care about and create Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that are connected to your goals to inform your progress.

4. Repeat – routinize these steps and socialize them within your organization, so they become second nature.

And even though you may follow these steps diligently, prepare for a site redesign every 2-3 years. Styles change, technologies improve, competitors come and go. It wasn’t that long ago for instance that responsive mobile sites were necessary and expected or that social media was even a thing. Now – according to a recent Pew Research Study, 51% of those surveyed say they have made a purchase using a smartphone 15% say they have purchased through social media links.

Are you ready to get started on your own Four Step Digital Marketing Plan? Contact us or give us a call at 513-469-3345

By Joe Williams, Magento Certified Solutions Specialist and VP of eMarketing Services at InteractOne

When it comes to marketing your Magento store, there are a lot of talented marketing agencies to pick from.  Although, the pattern we are seeing is that many of them have little to no experience with the Magento platform and yet, a large number of Magento merchants hire these agencies. As a Magento Development Partner, we are frequently asked  to install extensions or make changes to the catalog for client websites. Unfortunately, more often than not, the task can be accomplished using standard Magento functionality or doesn’t even need a developer to implement.

With Magento Certified Solution Specialists managing your marketing campaigns, there’s no need for a separate marketing agency. Using a certified Magento partner that offers both development and marketing services provides you with more efficient implementation, productive results and a higher ROI. Based on our experience, here are 5 reasons to use a Magento partner for eMarketing.

1. They know how to set up the Magento admin

Aside from the obvious advantages of having development expertise at your disposal, experienced Magento admin users have gone through the learning curve of how to utilize out-of-the-box features and properly configure admin settings for a given situation.

An inbound marketer with Magento experience will better understand how SEO is handled within the Magento framework and how to properly set up your configuration. They should be able to directly manage redirects and rewrite rules, properly generate sitemaps, customize metadata and upload content optimizations using import/export. These details might not sound like traditional marketing activities, but they are foundational to success when using Magento. As a development and marketing agency,  we monitor and perform these tasks on a daily basis.

Your marketer should also know how your Magento catalog is structured, how menus are created and structured, and why it matters. If you’ve ever had to clean up your product attribute values to improve usability and SEO, you know how important it is to set them up correctly in the first place. A Magento expert can help you do it right the first time instead of just suggesting it should be done.

Magento-specific marketers also have perspective from what they’ve seen others do well (and not so well) within the platform. For eEFor example: A new client of ours had more than 65,000 rows of 301 redirects in their .htaccess file because their marketing agency didn’t understand how to manage redirects in Magento during the site migration. After moving the redirects into the database and cleaning up the .htaccess file, the client’s average page load time went from 12 to 7.4 seconds.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Another recent example is a website that was bogged down by search engine crawler traffic, and an increasing number of 404 errors in their Google Search Console. Fixing some mis-configured product attributes resolved the issue on the Magento side, but then we marked the broken links as fixed in their Search Console account. This client’s previous marketing agency sat on the issue for three months with no resolution, while our Magento experience allowed us to catch the problem in less than two hours. Imagine the damage to organic ranking and online reputation done over the course of three months and how long it will take to rectify, all because of some oversight in a few Magento admin settings.

Site speed and performance are huge ranking factors; who better to improve the performance of your Magento site than a team of Magento experts? Marketing agencies that don’t have the knowledge to work with a specific platform can only give high level suggestions from audit tools like SEMRush or Google Insights, and lack understanding ofinof the necessary steps to improve performance. In most situations, a Magento Solutions Specialist can identify several admin and hosting tweaks to improve performance. You’re achieving quicker results by having tasks addressed proactively instead of identifying the problem only and blindly backing into a solution.

2. They know how Magento extensions work

Not all extensions are created equal: We’ve seen extensions introduce bugs that were devilishly hard to track down and correct. Reviews on Magento Connect are good indicators, but they don’t take your particular setup and installation into account.

You don’t always need an extension: Magento might already have the functionality you’re looking for. There are countless extensions on the marketplace that either duplicate features that already exist within Magento, or they extend some existing functionality. You or your marketer might want to do ‘X’ and then find an extension requiring an integration, when there may be a Magento-native way to accomplish 90% or more of the benefit of the idea. You could have some solid front end features working on your site in the same amount of time it would take to find and install a third party extension. Not to mention, installing unnecessary extensions adds overhead to your site and makes updates more time-consuming in the future.

Another unfortunate commonality is seeing Magento installs with redundant and inactive extensions that are meant to improve performance or SEO, but aren’t working properly due to misconfiguration or conflicts. One example is having three SEO extensions installed to implement rich snippets on your site, or multiple marketing automation plug-ins, none of which are setup correctly. The great thing about the user friendly Magento extension marketplace is sometimes the worst thing – anyone can download extensions. When people who don’t understand the Magento platform download extensions but can’t get them to work properly, they will just download and install another one to test out, and so on.

3. They know Magento is not indestructible

WeIWe’d be remissedremiss if weIwe didn’t mention site security and how it pertains to SEO. Google is able to identify known vulnerabilities and malicious scripts on your website, and then broadcast that in search results. Lacking security and not being up to date with Magento patches has an has an obviously has a negative effect on your SEO efforts and online reputation.

You might be thinking this is an area where development and marketing don’t really need to communicate., so what’s the point, right?. Both the Magento core and all of your extensions, whether you’re actively using them or not, need to be well-maintained and patched. Since installing an extension isn’t just “set it and forget it,” it’s important to have someone research extensions before deciding whether they’re necessary, and then make sure they’re kept up to date and secure.

An agency with solution specialists and developers working together is more proactive at keeping these things updated for you, compared to a marketing agency focusing just on marketing and a development agency just working on the projects you ask them to.

In addition, a Magento-focused team will be more up-to-date with new features and extension changes that can benefit your business. Your Magento solutions provider will be able to keep your site ahead of the curve on user experience while ensuring your site stays secure.

4. They see your missed Magento opportunities

Magento solutions partners exist for a reason, and partnering with one that also has marketing expertise helps analyze your entire business and set realistic goals. They can evaluate your business needs and interpret them into the best marketing or development solution without wasting the budget on unnecessary wishlist items.

For example, spending $10k on new photography for your products might be a great idea. But investing less time and money optimizing your product attributes and faceted navigation could give you a higher ROI in the short terarm and help pay for athata bigger project. Both projects add value, but one of them is already in your hands if you are a Magento merchant.

A recent client came to us with four extensions installed (all of them paid extensions and two of them were subscription-based with monthly fees) and they had no idea how to use any of them. They liked the thought of having the functionality these extensions provided, but didn’t have the resources to manage them – that is a huge opportunity cost. Magento consultants can help take a high-level look at your goals and pull back on the reins to prevent lost focus and budget by going extension-crazy.

5. They provide in-depth Magento and marketing collaboration

Using a team dedicated to Magento, composed of specialists in each area of eCommerce and digital marketing gives you efficiency and peace of mind by having a single point of communication for your website marketing and development. Marketing and development should be able to set expectations together in constant communication. Development should support customer acquisition. The two main reasons development work is necessary (after security of course) are customer acquisition and customer support. Efficiency is gained by the lack of duplicate work, blind delegation and extension-cluttered installations.

With your teams in one place, you can focus on running your business instead of becoming the middle man or project manager.

So, are you using a Magento Partner for eMarketing AND development needs?

SEO and User Experience (UX) go hand-in-hand. Your marketing team needs to be knowledgeable in the Magento platform in order to connect business and marketing objectives to actionable tasks. Often times you save a great deal of time and money by just having a Magento Solutions Specialist available to suggest improvements and resolve issues without sending everything straight to a developer.

That valuable resource will save on development costs, implementation time and improve your user experience. With both teams working together on your business, you’ll get the synergy that separate freelancers or agencies just don’t provide, and more assurance that your solutions will lead to success.