MightyMerchant eCommerce Blog

Google Analytics is a free and powerful way to track the performance of your website. If you’re not already using Google Analytics, let me give you 5 reasons to do so:

Discover how customers find you. From the left navigation menu under Dashboard, click on Traffic Sources>Search Engines. This report tells you the traffic that all of the search engines have sent you, from the big cheese Google to tiny crumb Netscape. On the left side is a search box with a pull down menu with choices ‘containing’ and ‘excluding.’ You can exclude Google from the results this way, and get a feel for how many people come to your site from other search engines. Another nifty feature is the Segment box at the top of the page. You can segment these remaining results by keyword. This segment button also sorts by city, browser, operating system, and many other parameters to help you in an ad campaign.

Discover how your customers search. In Traffic Sources>Keywords select the ‘unpaid’ link to the left of the segment box. This view tells you the keywords customers use to find you that you are not paying for. Optmizing for these keywords would give your sales a boost without ads.

Discover where people leave your site. Go to Content>Top Exit Pages. If the majority of visitors leave your site from the homepage, you’ve got some work to do. Ask yourself some serious questions about your homepage layout and what you could do to make it more appealing and usable.

Discover your top referring sites. Referring sites are those sites that have linked to you and send you traffic. You may sort through these referring sites by both paid and non-paid links. Click on Traffic Sources>Referring Sites, then choose the Goal Conversion. If you have configured goals, this will tell you which of those referring links results in successfully meeting a goal. Usually goals are sales, but they can also be downloads or sign-ups. Which of the referring sites are successful for you? Don’t throw money at the sites that aren’t bringing you anything.

Monitor your email success. The links in your emails can be connected to Google Analytics so that you can tell which emails are effective at converting to sales. It’s easy to configure most email programs. Try this resource for coding emails, ROI Revolution. Once your email is coded, return to Traffic Sources>All Traffic Sources. Under the graph, click Show>Medium and choose ‘email’ as your medium. (This medium will be whatever word you chose when you coded the email. You could pick any word, but ‘email’ is the obvious choice. It could also be ‘newsletter’ or whatever word makes sense to you.) Within this medium you can track your conversions by email, region, or other factor.

This is but a handful of the ways Google Analytics can help the ecommerce webmaster. MightyMerchan’s article on using Google Analytics has more information on useful and easy-to-access reports. If you crave even more information than what Google Analytics provides for free, for a one-time charge of $100 MightyMerchant can configure Google Analytics’ Ecommerce statistics. This resource is not available in the standard Google Analytics interface but provides valuable information by linking all of these traffic sources and keywords to the revenue they generated, giving you even more control over your advertising spending and site optimization efforts.

Posted on November 14th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Analytics | No Comments »

There are lots of things in this world that we use everyday and don’t know how they work…televisions, cell phones, microwave ovens, search engines, URLs, speaking for myself, of course. If you’re involved in online business (and if you’re reading this you no doubt are) having a working knowledge of a URL is an important tidbit of knowledge. If you’re a programmer you might just want to skip back to another post and catch up on your reading, but for those of you who may not know all the parts of a standard URL, please keep reading!

First of all, a URL is a “uniform resource locator,” and it is a way of identifying and locating items on the web such as files or pages.

Let’s look at this example URL:

http://www.blog.example.com/faq/link-policy/index.html

The http is the protocol, or method of accessing the file and stands for “hypertext transfer protocol.” Other protocols are https (secure hypertext transfer protocol) ftp (file transfer protocol), sftp (secure file transfer protocol). The portion following the protocol, www.blog.example.com, is the host, the subdomain is blog and the domain name is example.co and www indicates is an acronym for World Wide Web.

Items in the slashes, /, are directories or folders where the files you are looking for are found. /faq/ is the directory, /link-policy/ is the subdirectory, and “index.html” is the “resource ID.” This is the name of the file for the page which is stored on the specified server. /index.html is the file name for the specific page. The file name ends with a three or four letter designation of the file type like .rtf, .pdf, .jpeg or others.

If a website has a URL like this example:

http://podcast.example.co.au:80/podcastplay?id=1073682064&

the “au” is a country code and is also the “top level domain,” meaning the website originates from Australia. The second-level domain is “.co.au.” “:80″ is the default web server port. Ports may be identified in other ways but if it is 80 it is most often left out. The path is /podcastplay which is where the folder is, like in the previous example. The characters within the ? and & are a parameter. The parameter has the name id and the value 1073682064. A URL can have many parameters and they are always set off by ? and &.

A static URL is a document that can be returned by the server without the server having to do any computation. A dynamic URL, on the other hand, does require the server to perform some computation to return it. If the URL contains a question mark, it’s usually considered dynamic while no question mark in the URL usually means its static. The contents of a static URL don’t change whereas a dynamic URL is basically a template in which to display changing content, which makes updating a site much easier; Instead of changing information in the static HTML code, the content is changed in a database.

For a non-programmer, how did I do? If I missed something, join the discussion and let me know!

Posted on November 12th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: General, Search | No Comments »

On Friday, November 2, I listed MightyMerchant with SuperPages.com, which is like an online Yellow Pages for finding local businesses. With SuperPages you can also review businesses and read reviews other people have left. It’s free for local listings, and I wanted to be able to recommend this service based on my own experience, so I signed up for a business listing.

Well, I’m only partially happy with it, but I’m still recommending it. The set up process was relatively painless, and today my listing is there for anyone who searches on our company name, MightyMerchant eCommerce Hosted Shopping Cart. Searching for “ecommerce” is less effective-you have to click on the related category of “electronic commerce” to find MightyMerchant appearing on the second page of results. But, searching for “ecommerce” and clicking on the related category of “web site design” doesn’t bring up the MightyMerchant listing, even though that is an integral part of the services we offer, and it says so in our business description.

I easily updated our profile to add MightyMerchant to the “web site design” and “web site development” categories, as well as “Internet Marketing Services” category, only to discover that I was limited to 5 categories. I can live with that.

Part of my dissatisfaction comes with how much they charge for enhancements. To add red, italics, or bold to your ad is $20 a month. Highlights are $25 a month. For “preferred placement,” as they say, to “move your listing closer to the top of the search results,” they charge $101 a month. There is no explanation of how they determine placement beyond that. What happens if everyone in your category is paying for preferred placement? Someone still has to be last. To have my listing appear in the directory of my town is free, a listing covering my county is $45 a month, my city’s metro area is $85 a month, and a listing covering all of Oregon is $235 a month. As if that’s not enough extra charges, to add a company logo and promotional message is $23 a month. That’s $292 a month for an Oregon listing with red and bold, a logo and promo text. Sorry SuperPages, I think that’s way too much! But, they know that local search is probably the next big thing in search technology, as both brick-and-mortar businesses, and small online business strive to tailor their results to an increasing desire to find locally available products and services.

On the bright side, even with a free account you can see the number of impressions, which is people who viewed the page your results appear on, and the number of clicks, which is people who clicked on your entry.

Here is a screenshot of our free listing:

There are a few outlets for free listings for local business searches, such as Google Maps, and YellowPages.com. It definitely can’t hurt to have your business in as many of these free local listings as possible. Whether a red listing is worth $20 a month, I’ll leave that for you to decide!

Posted on November 9th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Marketing and Promotion, Search | 1 Comment »

OK, that title is a little misleading, because I don’t advocate writing copy strictly with the intention of it being search-engine friendly. Any decent SEO (search engine optimization) expert worth her salt would tell you, rightly so, to write for your customers. If you write fresh, keyword-rich, engaging advertising copy or product descriptions, the search engines will find it as relevant as your customers will.

But, there is an art to writing copy with key phrases in the form in which people actually search for them, and a somewhat scientific approach to writing copy based on the knowledge of how search engines handle things like punctuation.

Pick three keywords related to your site, such as “soccer, teams, jerseys.” Go to Google and type in these keywords separated by a space. Next, type in the keywords separated by a comma and space. Try it with exclamation points or any other punctuation. The fact that these searches return identical results tells you that search engines ignore punctuation (for the most part). You can use that knowledge to your advantage when writing copy and product descriptions for your website by writing in such a way as to include phrases that would be awkward if written in a sentence.

As an example consider the fact that when searching, people tend to first enter the item they want followed by the location they are looking for, even though in everyday speech it is much more common to say the location first: “Portland soccer teams” rather than “soccer teams Portland”

Writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams Portland” would be nonsense, but writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams. Portland has several teams with colorful jerseys…

Period ignored, awkward search phrase returned! As you do keyword research, (see MightyMerchant’s comparison of free and subscription keyword research tools) keep in mind the fact that search engines ignore punctuation. You just might be able to creatively work in some phrases you previously thought were too unnatural.

Posted on November 5th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Copy Writing, Search | No Comments »

As the fires in Southern California burn down, the storm begun by Fasano and Associates over their ill-thought email is still building. In days past, a marketing or public relations mistake could be forgiven and forgotten about in time, but today’s climate is totally different. With blogs recording events for posterity, and with the growing popularity of email marketing, that email you send today could still be available in cyberspace not just tomorrow but for months, years and maybe even decades later.

Too bad Fasano and Associates didn’t think their latest email through a little bit more before they hit that ’send’ button.

Coming from the well-respected consumer list management firm, this email was a shock: Against a back image of flames, in all yellow capital letters was the line, “What else is burning in Southern California? Check these hot lists out!”

Whoops. Guys, don’t make light of a natural disaster. Don’t ever joke about a disaster, but especially not to promote yourself. At the time this email was sent out, San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium was filled with thousands of evacuees, people were losing their homes by the hour, there was a lengthy and growing list of dead and injured. Unsurprisingly, the email was immediately met with major protest and is circulating all over the Internet as an example of the type of email you should never send.

To her credit, Fasano and Associates founder Patricia Fasano sent an apology email to the same mailing list after she discovered that what she describes as an “overzealous employee” sent the improper email. This is the type of marketing mistake that can kill even a respected and well-established business, and Fasano and Associates executives say they are implementing safeguards to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

So, being that Fasano and Associates is located right in the heart of the California area that burned, this could have been a golden moment for them. They made a donation to the California State Firefighters Association three days before the inappropriate email was sent out, but instead of heart-warming stories about their charitable acts, their tarnished reputation is front and center.

The thing that really stumps me about this is that Fasano and Associates are marketing professionals. They’ve been in the email and list management business for 25 years. They should have known better, and this could have been avoided had Fasano implemented some sort of check-and-balances system to screen any potential emails for insensitive content. Self-promotion is one thing–indeed, all of marketing is built on it–but if there is even any semblance of that promotion coming at the expense of someone else’s misfortune, it should be considered taboo.

It’s a whole lot easier to do damage control before you hit the send button.

Posted on November 2nd, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Email, Marketing and Promotion | No Comments »