This is the fourth in a series of posts based on the material covered in our latest webinar: Taking Your Site Performance to The Next Level With Optimization Testing.

The ultimate goal of a Web optimization project is to improve revenue and profits driven through your site. Success is measured by tracking changes in KPIs (key performance indicators), most commonly AOV (average order value), conversion rate, days to purchase, bounce rate, cart and checkout abandonment…

If you’ve been trekking along with us in our Site Testing 101 series, you’re already familiar with the difference between A/B and multivariate testing (opens in new window if you haven’t read the article and would like to get up to speed). Today’s installment looks at choosing the appropriate testing method for your experiment.

A/B Split Testing

Use A/B split testing when:

You are just getting your feet wet with testing…

This is the second in a series of posts based on the material covered in our latest webinar: Taking Your Site Performance to The Next Level With Optimization Testing. The on-demand version will be available shortly.

According to Jupiter Research, 73% of marketers aren’t doing any testing whatsoever, with 49% having no plans to do so. Before I share 4 compelling reasons why you should be testing, let’s look at some of the reasons why marketers aren’t testing:

• Lack of resources (in-house talent, budget for tool or consultants)
• Lack of tool (now with Google Website Optimizer this is less of an issue)
• Lack of buy-in from upper management
• Lack of ownership of the testing process
• IT bottlenecks
• Lack of understanding of the value of testing / don’t think it’s important
• Not sure what to test, how to prioritize testing opportunities or how to take action on results
• Lack of understanding of tools or testing methods

Despite these challenges, serious Web marketers should push to overcome them and get testing capabilities because testing is the only way to truly know what works and what doesn’t for your site based on the combination of your industry, customers and product mix…

This is the first in a series of posts based on the material covered in our latest webinar: Taking Your Site Performance to The Next Level With Optimization Testing. The on-demand version will be available shortly.

Part 1 provides brief overview of what site testing is and describes the differences between usability testing, A/B split testing and multivariate methods.

What is optimization testing?

First let’s talk about what it’s not…

Though we’re only half way through the year, the holidays are just around the corner in the ecommerce world. If you want to grow your holiday sales over last year, you need to get very busy. Today.

What should you be doing now to ensure a successful holiday season? Here are some ideas:

Performance

Ten years ago, web users were more forgiving of slow page loads. But according to Forrester Research, 47% of today’s web shoppers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less…

Oneupweb has recently put out some interesting research which includes the top 10 consumer expectations that influence purchase decisions.

Let’s take a closer look at these items:

Pricing/shipping information clearly stated – 95.5%

No surprises here, as several studies have found that “sticker shock” (the unexpected inflation of final price due to shipping and taxes) is the number one reason for cart abandonment…

Asking for permission to add someone to your email marketing list is not just a courtesy, it’s an important part of your email program’s long term success. If you fail to ask for permission, email recipients may end up marking your messages as “spam” – hurting your sender reputation with ISPs, which can hurt your delivery rates, meaning your messages may not beat spam filters for your other subscribers…

Last post I outlined 10 reasons not to copy Amazon, with a promise to follow up with reasons why you SHOULD copy Amazon. While I could easily have compiled a list of 50-100 tactical items that could improve your conversion like unusual shaped cart buttons, delivery cut-off dates, customer reviews, mobile apps, triggered email or point-of-action assurances, I chose today to focus on 5 strategic things Amazon does really well, that could make you or save you millions of dollars…

Amazon has for years been held up as the gold standard in ecommerce because of its rapid growth and dominance in online retail. This success has created a halo effect, where some automatically assume “if Amazon does it, it must be right.” Many have implemented Amazon’s designs and features on their online shops based on these assumptions alone. This is dangerous. And here are 10 reasons why:

Reason #1: You Are Not Amazon

(My apologies to Jeff Bezos and his gang – if you are reading, of course you may take exception to this…

When writing content for your ecommerce website, the challenge is to craft copy that is usable, search engine friendly, persuasive, that will build trust and communicate your brand promise. How can you satisfy all of these objectives? It begins with an understanding of the 4 pillars of ecommerce copywriting.

Writing for usability

As many usability gurus have said, your visitor decides in 3 seconds or less whether he or she is going to abandon your site…

Every once in a while I come across something truly unique on an ecommerce store. This time it’s Alibris, which does a very cool thing with its Advanced Search tool.

Customers can create a custom bundle at the lowest price by entering multiple ISBN numbers in Advanced Search.

While this makes sense for a site like Alibris which is a marketplace of competing sellers (with cheap, cheap, cheap prices), this approach can have application to other types of businesses…

Bloggers Digest is our monthly ritual that highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.

This month I’ve added Twitter accounts for the contributors of this great content so you can connect further with the gurus. Hope you like!

• Advanced segmentation in Web analytics is the most powerful way to extract true insights from your mountains of data — but most folks need a little help figuring out what to segment…

If you run multiple stores for different English-speaking countries (geo-targeted with subdomains, subfolders or top-level domains like .co.uk, .co.au, .ca etc), it’s important to pay attention to the keywords in your category names and product page titles. The terms that your countrymen (and women) use to describe your products may not be the same as the lingo abroad. And the keywords you choose to describe your categories and products have a huge impact on SEO in your international markets…

In landing page optimization, friction describes “the psychological resistance to a given element of your sales process that causes aggravation, fatigue or confusion,” according to the Yoda-smart Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments. The goal of the “ecommerce optimizationist” (yes, a totally fabricated term) is to minimize this resistance as much as possible.

Where do customers experience friction in your sales process? Let’s examine some of the common areas:

Home Pages

1…

Though it’s rare to find visual search implemented on an ecommerce site (Zappos had it but took it down), visual search and image recognition technology has a lot of potential in online shopping. I’ve been asked in the past what I think they can do for ecommerce. This post is a brain dump of a bunch of ways I could see retailers benefiting from image recognition and visual search.

Visual Search

1…

There’s still time to reserve your seat for next week’s webinar Desperately seeking insights: How eCommerce leaders can harness the power of their data with our special guest, Sandy Gantt of Symantec Corporation.

Sandy will discuss how to define and implement the right combination of people, process, and technology that will turn raw data into actionable business intelligence for your organization…

Often times retail sites offer search and email signup boxes that look almost identical. It’s very easy for customers to mistake one for the other (you’ll know if your email signup logs contain “addresses” like “nose hair trimmer.”)

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Rather than leave them blank, the retailers above label the fields with instructions like “keyword or item number” and “your email address…

Split testing – it’s not just for emails and landing pages anymore.

This week, Google Adwords announced a new tool for its paid search advertisers: ACE (Adwords Campaign Experiments) (Beta) which allows you to split test your PPC campaigns.

Until now, decisions to raise bids, add / delete keywords, change keyword match type or create different campaign structures have been made on gut feel without hard data on their efficacy…

A while back I posted about the opportunity most retailers miss out on – optimizing their own websites for their store names plus “free shipping.”

Related searches in Google indicate the suggestions are highly searched, and therefore valuable to optimize for.

Add to free shipping searches for “promo code(s),” “voucher code(s),” “coupon code(s),” “discount code(s)” et cetera…

Did you know we (at Elastic Path Software post an “Ecommerce Tip of the Week” video on our home page? Here’s a sample:

Search engine optimization for your product pages

Email and RSS subscribers, can’t see video? View this post on Get Elastic.

Want to catch up on tip videos you’ve missed and receive new ones? Check out or subscribe to our channels on Youtube and Vimeo…

Sound too good to be true?

You can absolutely change your site conversion rate (or any other important success metric) by simply optimizing…your web analytics reports!

By default, Web analytics track anything and everything that happens on your site – from both quality and garbage traffic. What if you could exclude all of the garbage traffic from your report? You would get a clearer (and fresher smelling) picture of how your site is performing…

Bloggers Digest is our monthly ritual that highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.

Quick announcement

We’re very excited to have Sandy Gantt, VP of Ecommerce Marketing at Symantec Corporation, joining us for our June webinar: Desperately seeking insights: How eCommerce leaders can harness the power of their data…

Adding fuel to the fire that “Facebook Privacy” is an oxymoron, a tool built with Facebook’s own API lets you search Facebook status updates. Though Openbook is intended for entertainment purposes and public awareness about the insecurity of your Facebook information, it can also be used as a social media monitoring tool for businesses.

Facebookers Talk About Retailers and Brands

I ran through a few searches for top online retailers and found Facebookers are quite chatty about companies…

“Advanced search” means different things to different people. Some ecommerce vendors describe their filtered navigation or guided selling capabilities as advanced search, as does the Internet Retailer 500 Guide. This post considers “advanced search” to be a tool separate from the regular search function, that allows searchers to specify more detailed criteria that is not handled by keyword search or filtered navigation…

On the heels of the Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto, I caught up with one of SES’ expert speakers, Michael Bonfils, to pick his brain on international SEO issues.

Michael is the International Managing Director for SEM International, where he provides expert multilingual search engine marketing and management for global advertising agencies, search engine marketing companies and Fortune 100 firms…

When working out your site search requirements for your ecommerce system, do you know what to look for in a site search tool?

O’Reilly Media has granted Get Elastic permission to reprint this excerpt of Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender’s Search Patterns. The following is a checklist of things you discuss with vendors when evaluating a site search solution:

System architecture
Formal description of the hardware and software components, including crawlers, indexers, data models, and query parsers…

…

Last year, Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) shared its case study on 404 “Not Found” pages with Anne Holland of Which Test Won. This test won a Gold Ribbon in the Ecommerce category in the 2009 Testing Awards.

If you missed it, go on and “test your gut” – see if you can guess which design converted best.

If you guessed the 404 page with the image, you are correct…

Last week we shared some wacky cart button shapes, based on Bryan Eisenberg’s tip that unusual call-to-action buttons can improve conversion.

This week I came across a site that uses a very creative tactic with its cart button, which I have never seen before. ChristianBook.com includes the percentage discount right on the call-to-action button:

This is very persuasive on a product page:

Each product’s button reflects the discount off list price, and is proudly displayed in category results:

And cross-sell suggestions:

This takes some serious custom programming, but it likely has a powerful impact on conversion…

If you’ve ever found yourself scratching your head at a 3-letter acronym in an ecommerce related article or document, this post is for you. We’ve compiled 99 of the most common 3 letter acronyms you’ll find in online business, from a wide range of functions including IT, marketing, web development, SEO, web analytics, web design and logistics. Roll over any acronym to see its title, or click its link to see a full definition…