Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

ComScore Inc. published a study called “Mobile Shopping Goes Mainstream” and the data is incredibly compelling. If you do not have a true, mobile-friendly website, you need to put that high on your to-do list for 2012. I wrote a separate blog about the importance of mobile websites for business-to-business companies, but this blog will concentrate on true ecommerce sites.

When I say “true, mobile-friendly website,” I don’t mean your regular website viewed on a smartphone, but actually optimized for the mobile user experience. Two-thirds of smartphone users performed shopping functions (including purchases, product comparisons, coupon searches, taking product pictures or retail location searches) in the month of September. (Another interesting statistic from this study is that 56% of people were in their home when purchasing, when they most likely had access to a desktop or laptop computer.)

Here’s why having a mobile optimized site so important (these statistics are from the 2011 Harris Interactive Mobile Transactions Survey, released in March of 2011): 63 percent of all online adults said that if they encountered a problem conducting a mobile transaction, they would be less likely to purchase from that company by any other purchase means. That means, if a potential customer’s mobile experience doesn’t work, you have lost them, not just for now but the future too. And four out of five of those that have had a problem will share it with others, either via in-person conversations or via a blog, Twitter, Facebook or other social media. Talk about viral marketing gone bad.

And from Compuware “What Users Want From Mobile”, 50% of users won’t return to a site where they’ve had difficulty and 40% have turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience. So not only is a bad mobile experience hurting a company now and in the future, but it’s actually beneficial to their competitors!

Mobile websites matter and that only will increase in the future. If you don’t have one, get one and sooner, rather than later. You can go to Google’s website www.howtogomo.com to see how your site stacks up, view best practices and some really compelling case studies.

If you are changing the URLs of your website, please, please, please read this blog! Tell your web people to read it too! Your Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing & Bing results will thank you.

URL Changes Impact PPC Advertising

Twice in the last month I’ve had clients change their website URLs without telling me (and one of the other PPC account managers here had it happen to them just yesterday). I either find it because PPC ads start getting declined at Google AdWords or Yahoo, or conversions drop off, or something happens that I go snooping around to check.

There’s very little that’s worse than clicking on a PPC ad and seeing “Server Error: 404 – File or directory not found.” And it’s so easy to prevent it.

If you are changing your URLs, please, at the very least, do a 404 error redirect to your home page or site map. Another better option is to create a Custom 404 page.  Or better yet, do a redirect to the correct new page, so a searcher lands on what they expect to see.

A 404 error redirect will send a person right on to your homepage instead of landing on the dreaded stock 404 page. A custom redirect can even communicate more information like a “personal” message and how they can solve it (By the way, having a custom 404 Error page is a good practice, regardless if you change your URLs or not. In fact, I previously wrote a blog called “404 Errors – Save Those Clicks” ). And the best way of all is redirecting each old URL to the new, correct URL, so that the searcher doesn’t even know there was anything wrong.

And of course, please let your PPC Management Company know – preferably BEFORE the change happens. If we have access to the new site mapping, we can have your change-over ads ready to go when the site change happens. Or at least know that it’s happening so we can fix everything fast instead of spending money on wasted PPC advertising clicks.

So says Reuters News Service. 1 in 2 pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns paying out money for clicks they don’t really need. So says me. It’s really just a made-up statistic, but I’ve seen that happen often enough that I can say with certainty that it’s happening quite often in quite a lot of campaigns that we have seen over the years. I think many people managing PPC campaigns in Google AdWords, Yahoo and MSN have a tendency to hold on to keywords far longer than they probably should, or they’ll hold on tenaciously to higher positions when the ROI simply just does not justify holding on to such aggressive spots.

Sometimes you do need to just cut your losses and run. Hope is a powerful thing, yes, but hoping a keyword will still convert after it’s received a hundred clicks with no sales attributed to it will only continue padding the coffers of the search engines, not yours. You need every extra penny you can get out of your marketing efforts these days.

Now is the time to perhaps be a little bit more ruthless in your treatment of your ill-performing keywords. You don’t have to be so vicious as to slit their throats (i.e. delete them), but you can certainly give them a healthy dose of chloroform (i.e. pause them). You can always revive those knocked out keywords later if you notice a big drop in your sales, but I’ll bet quite often the only thing you’ll notice is that you’ll actually start saving money.

Don’t give them a bail out, knock them out.

If you’re not sure what to do, you might want to consider a free consultation from a qualified PPC Management Company.

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