JumpFly Blog: AdWords, Yahoo & Microsoft Advertising

Looking to drive sales this holiday season? Offer free shipping. Free shipping has huge perceived value and can pay-off in added sales.

Case in point: one of my retail pay-per-click (PPC) advertising clients that I manage here at JumpFly offered free shipping on any size order for the last 10 days. Business was brisk, to the point that they were running out of the small free gift they were offering on certain size orders. Their free shipping on any order offer ended at Midnight on December 1st, and they went back to their regular shipping offer (free shipping on orders greater than $75). How did sales do on December 2nd? Dropped by 50%.

According to Ken Cassar, an Analyst at Nielsen Online, “Free-shipping deals is a minimum cost of entry.” What does that mean? Unless you are the only retailer in your niche, if your prices aren’t the lowest of all your competitors, and you’re not offering free shipping, you have absolutely no enticement for someone to order from you. The Internet is all about comparison shopping. It takes one click to leave your site, and without a reason to come back, you’ve probably lost the sale.

Another case in point, I did an A/B test in Google AdWords for another PPC advertising client where we compared a free shipping offer versus a percentage discount. The dollar savings of the percentage discount was more than the free shipping offer; an end customer would have saved more money with the percentage discount. Surprisingly, at the end of the test, the free shipping offer outconverted the discount by a pretty hefty margin.

So what can you do if you can’t offer free shipping on any order? Offer free shipping on orders over a certain amount. If you already do that, like my client above who normally offers free shipping on orders over $75, than reduce that minimum dollar amount. One option is to figure out your average order size, than make the free shipping offer just a few dollars higher than that. (Think about Amazon.com and their Free Super Saver Shipping. I know that I’ve added another item to an order, just to qualify for that $25 minimum. How about you?)

And if you do offer free shipping, whatever the deal, make sure you highlight it everywhere on your site and in your ads at Google AdWords, Yahoo and Microsoft. Remember that it does no good to have it only on the home page if you’re sending your ads to an internal landing page. Make sure the offer is displayed everywhere, on every page, and on your shopping cart. You still have roughly eight more days of online shopping, depending on when your cut-off is for guaranteed Christmas delivery. Use that time wisely.

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Google recently published a Retail Holiday Study that we found very interesting here at JumpFly. Granted it was conducted in September, and some answers might be different now, but there were some key findings I wanted to share.

1. Researching Starts Early: 31% of consumers planned to start shopping before Halloween, and 57% are researching right now, before Thanksgiving.

2. Research is Increased Due to Economy: 43% of consumers say they plan to spend more time this year shopping and researching gifts because of the state of the economy.

3. Online Research is King:54% of people go online to research than go to the store to buy, 49% research online and purchase online and another 28% research online, go to the store to check out the products and then go back online to actually buy the products.

4. The Internet is Key Influencer of Holiday Purchases: 86% of users will use the Internet to plan their holiday shopping and 63% of users plan on paying attention to advertising while planning or doing holiday shopping.

5. Post Holiday Sales Are Important: 63% of consumers say they plan on taking advantage of holiday sales.

A few other key nuggets of information, online shopping will gear up right on Cyber Monday, which is the first Monday after Thanksgiving, or December 1st for 2008. It continues to climb until right before Christmas.

And what are consumers looking for when they are online? 86% of users are looking for and plan on taking advantage of price discounts and sales, while another 75% of consumers are looking to taking advantage of free shipping. What does that mean for you? Unless you are the only player in your market, you better be offering some kind of special like a discount or free shipping or you are going to miss out on customers, plain and simple. Now is a great time to adjust your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising ad copy to reflect any available incentives.

The holidays are coming, so be ready. Plan now because waiting even a bit longer will be too late.

About Nikki

One of the most critical aspects of Google AdWords management is your ability to understand Quality Score and how it affects your account (and your business).

In this article, I am addressing the Quality Score used during a Google Search. 

Google’s AdWords Quality Score is used to determine how relevant your ad is to a visitor searching on a given term.  Google has developed, over time, algorithms to help them present the most relevant results to visitors based on many historical performance factors and on existing relevance factors.

In their quest to present the most relevant results to their visitors, Google rewards high quality ad / keyword combinations with higher positions and lower costs.

When a search query is performed there are two steps. 

1. The first page bid + your keyword (including match type) are used to determine if you are eligible to be shown on a particular search phrase.  In other words – “Are you In the Game?” 
   • The “first page bid” is an estimated metric that exists in your account with each keyword and is only displayed if your particular bid does not equal or exceed the bid estimate.  When Quality Score is used to calculate the first page bid, it does not consider your ad copy or the search query itself. 
2. Once you are eligible, your Quality Score + your Max CPC are used to determine where your ad will be positioned on the page – “Ad Rank” and how much you will be charged for the click – “Actual Cost Per Click (CPC)”.

Quality score is calculated at the Keyword level and is affected by:

• The relevance of the keyword and the ad copy to the search phrase
• The Historical Click Through Rate (CTR)
  • CTR in your current account
  • CTR of the keyword throughout all accounts
  • CTR of any account using your URL in the ads
  • CTR in your account in the geographic region you are targeting
• The Quality of your Landing Page

The algorithm takes into consideration the effect ad position has on CTR and adjusts the importance accordingly.

It is important to note that quality score is used differently within placements on the content network and we will discuss that next week.

If you’d like more information on the Quality Score, check out Google’s Improvements to Ads Quality Post or contact a professional PPC Management Company.

More about Kristie