In today’s highly competitive eCommerce marketplace, the savvy online shopper rarely makes a purchase without doing a little homework first. To a consumer, there’s nothing more exasperating than spending $200 for an area rug and then stumbling across the same product for $50 less at another website. Of course, no-one has the time to visit hundreds of sites hunting down the lowest available price, which is why shopping comparison engines have become so widely popular. According to industry estimates, 68% of online purchases begin at a shopping comparison site or search engine, with only 30% of conversions originating from a direct visit to an eCommerce store.

The premise is simple—online merchants set up a feed of hand-picked products to the shopping comparison sites, which then accumulate all of the product information into a database and create a search index. When the consumer visits the shopping comparison site and does a search for, say, “golf clubs,” a search is performed against the database and returns a listing of all relevant matches. The consumer can then quickly compare their attributes. Different sites may fluctuate somewhat in their presentation and layout, but most will display such product information as price, product name, seller’s name, product image, and key selling points. Nearly all will provide the consumer with various sorting options, so they can shop by price, by brand, by rating, or by other parameters. A link is also provided, so the shopper can quickly hop to an online store to obtain more information or to purchase the featured item. (more…)

What do you get when you throw a bunch of people in a room together with nothing more than their thoughts and a few hours to kill? One thing you can count on—once they’ve gotten past polite small talk—is animated, revealing conversation about whatever happens to be on their minds. As a general rule, people love sharing their opinions and gauging the reactions of others.

The same concept holds true in the world of cyberspace. With the proliferation of social networking sites, people need not be in the same room—heck, not even in the same country—to share their viewpoints. Most everyone is scrambling to make their mark in the online medium, and interactive forums and blog postings make it virtually effortless to get their thoughts and experiences on the record.

So how does all of this impact eCommerce? More than you might expect. Social networking has become a largely untapped resource for the marketing of online products and services. Remember word of mouth, perhaps the oldest and most effective method of advertising? It’s still alive and kicking, with a twist—instead of Aunt Sue telling her neighbor about the incredible deal on that sweater she got at the department store, she’s blogging to thousands about the steal she found on Amazon’s site. (more…)

No, we’re not talking about teenage girls showing off their ads - we’re talking about some poor implementations of Google AdWords campaigns. With the summer season quickly approaching (then disappearing again with the snow in Atlanta last week) I’ve started my yearly search for some stylish new duds to wear at the beach this year.

The first decision to make: thongs, banana hammocks, board shorts, or nut-huggers. It was a tough one, but after a few hours of reading through InStyle, GQ, and the like, I decided that board shorts were indeed the way to go and according to the fashion aficionados, are still in style. Next, I had to then find my shopping destination of choice. Performing a quick Google search for Men’s Board Shorts, I found some interested results in the sponsored listings. The top three advertisements were all examples of poorly managed ad campaigns. So let’s get critical.

Result the first: LLBean.com

A surprising result for us, seeing the LLBean is consistently one of the top rated online retailers. This is a prime example of how important it is to manage your CPC campaign’s keywords. LLBean sells some men’s swimwear, but the shorts offered by them are definitely not board shorts. Closer to nut huggers if you ask me, but the point is, that LLBean should not be focusing their AdWords efforts on board shorts but more directly focused on the products they do sell - like swim trunks, swim shorts, etc. This will lead to a more productive AdWords campaign and overall better ROI for this marketing campaign. Lesson learned, target your keywords to maximize effectiveness.

Second Result: BoardShortWorld.com

This one kind of baffles me. The site looks beyond amateur (no offense guys), the shopping functionality of the site is very counter-intuitive, and the usability is sub-par. All this adds up to a site that most likely converts very poorly. They at least target the landing page of the ad to the men’s board shorts page, but given the high cost of the ad placement in conjunction with a poorly converting site (would you buy something here?), I’d be willing to bet that their AdWords campaign performs very poorly, so much that they may even be losing money on it. Crunching some rough numbers here, to attain the top 3 spots in AdWords for this search, each advertiser is paying $.50 - $.61 per click. Being generous in assuming that this site converts at 2% of those clicks, we’re talking $25+ per sale. Most of these board shorts sell at $39.99 and assuming a cost of goods sold at 50% they’d actually be losing $5 per sale. These are some pretty broad assumptions; maybe the conversion rate is higher (that would be a big surprise), their average sale may be more than one product, and maybe their costs are very low. But at the end of the day, even if these hold true, we’re still looking at a large percentage of that sale revenue being attributed to advertising. Our suggestion is that their money would be better spent on improving the existing site first, before advertising. They may have great products, great selection, etc. but if you don’t make the consumer feel like they’re dealing with a legit company - you’re wasting money. Lesson learned: Get your site in line before spending too much on advertising

Result #3: SurfWearHawaii.com

SurfWearHawaii.com came up as the third result. This seemed to be the best result out of the three, with the exception that the ad simply took us to their homepage. A targeted landing page would improve the performance of this campaign, especially seeing that they sell all sorts of products and not just board shorts. Lesson learned: Create landing pages to maximize performance

All in all, I was a bit surprised that with the tools available to merchants today, that many, both big and small, are still having a difficult time optimizing their CPC marketing campaigns. What was even more surprising to me was the absence of retailers that I expected to be at the top of this list - Pacific Sunwear, DogFunk.com, and other gen-x targeted merchants (who make up the largest demographic of board short shoppers). Managing AdWords campaigns can be difficult, time consuming, and require constant attention. The goal here was not to pick on particular merchants (we’ve all had poorly performing campaigns), but instead to point out a few areas for online retailers to improve their campaigns - now get to work!