The Magic Marketing Wand

Epopus clients are always looking for the single element that will catapult their online sales from so-so to stupendous. Unfortunately, there is no magic wand for anyone to wave over your store to make it an overnight success.

Instead, success usually comes from a persistent testing and improvement of every possible aspect of your marketing, content and site design. In fact, it seems to mirror the "tipping effect" phenomenon pretty closely. Create enough positive customer experiences, and at some point you'll see a significant upturn in your business that can't really be traced to any single action.

Last week I tried something at the request of a client that was supposed to be another incremental site improvement, and it generated so many calls we had to temporarily remove it from the site because our call center got overwhelmed. In other words, it appeared as though we'd stumbled on a magic wand that produced a spike in response that doubling our client's advertising spend would not have accomplished, and it was free. I think we simply put the last piece in place to get past the tipping point, but it certainly seemed like magic.

Would this single change work for your store? By itself, probably not. What we did was tied to several other tweaks we'd already made to the navigation and calls to action our client's site, and probably wouldn't have succeeded so dramatically without those things already in place. It did open my eyes to a new way to think about calls to action for an online store--exciting stuff.

Are Online Product Reviews a Good Idea?

An article in today' AdWeek newsletter alerting readers to "The New Realities of a Low-Trust Marketing World", repeated something all marketers have been hearing a lot lately. Customers don't believe (or pay much attention to) advertising, putting more faith in recommendations of others who already own the product. No big news there. The buzz-worthy part is the Product Reviews functionality available at many online stores that can turn this into a powerful marketing tool. Instead of relying on the small circle of family & friends that a recommender might influence offline, online product reviews greatly extend the influence of personal recommendations.

Of course, Amazon is best known for this, but many online stores do this well. Zappos.com and Buy.com come to mind. These are all sites with high transaction volume, so they have a large pool of customers who are willing and able to contribute comments.

There are several reasons why most of the home furnishings retailers we talk to haven't done this:

• What if nobody comments? it's sad to have a robust product reviews feature on your site, only to see it collect dust when nobody uses it.
• Labor intensive--takes time to review and moderate comments to be sure you aren't getting spammed or offending prospects with offensive language.
• Risky--anyone who's allowed merchant ratings on their site knows that disgruntled customers are most likely to comment.

Despite these negatives, there are compelling reasons to look closely at this opportunity:

• It will help conversion to sale
• It can improve how people perceive your store (if your customers are generally happy with your service level)
• It will give you an early warning on products or manufacturers that have problems
• It will (if properly implemented) give you a little more presence in organic search engine listings

Customers believe other customers. If your customers like what you sell, they will become powerful advocates for your business.

Click here to chat now

This is the transcript of a chat I just had with Google AdWords tech support. It seemed like a pretty straightforward advertiser question, but it wasn't covered by their scripts, so I ended up with a not very helpful conversation.

Thank you for contacting Google AdWords. Please hold a moment while we route your chat to a specialist who will help you with your question:

"I've noticed that metacrawlers like Dogpile, Metacrawler and the like aggregate both organic and paid search listings. If a Dogpile searcher clicks on a result that is actually an AdWords ad that I've placed, will I be charged for that click? Does that mean that metacrawler sites are in your network, or are they basically throwing you guys some free business?".

(Auto-generated text removed to protect your sanity)

Claire: The ads that appear in the AdWords section and the Google search results are separate and unrelated. It is possible that a website will appear in both sections. Is that what you are referring to, Mitch?

I'm thinking: [Hello? Hello? Anybody there?]

Mitch Speers: no, i understand the difference between organic and paid listings on SERPs. I'm specifically interested in metacrawlers like Dogpile.com. Since they aggregate and return a mix of results from a lot of search engines, including Google, and some of those results are actually paid listings. By contrast, if a user searches on AOL search, they will see my paid adwords ad, and I KNOW I pay for that [click]. But I don't think Dogpile works with Google that way

Claire: The Dogpile website is in our search network, meaning that the ads shown on that website are paid for. I am not sure I understand your question correctly, does that answer it Mitch?

I'm thinking: [OK, we seem to be getting somewhere. Maybe I'll get to the bottom of this]

Mitch Speers: yes, it does in fact. It's confusing because the ads are not separately presented on Dogpile but all mixed up with organic results, though they are flagged as "sponsored by". Is there any way to get a listing of the top sites in your network? It would be really helpful

Claire: Excuse me, it appears that the listings on the Dogpile website are from the Google search results, not AdWords.
There is no way to request the top spots since placement is automatically determined by the AdWords ad ranking system. AdWords ads that appear in the first, second, or third positions above search results rank the highest among AdWords ads. Ad Rank is determined by the maximum cost-per-click (CPC) and Quality Score of the matching keyword.

I'm thinking: [Um, yeah. That canned explanation of Ad Rank was just what I needed to clear everything up]

Mitch Speers: OK. I'm not requesting top spots, i'm just wondering where you distribute my AdWords ads

Claire: To view examples of where your ads display in the search and content networks, please click on this link: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6712.

At that point, I thanked Claire for her time. I knew she wouldn't give me a list of sites where Google ads are distributed, but I had to take a shot. Nevertheless, I didn't get an answer to my main question, which was "Do I pay for clicks on ads that are scraped into the results page of metacrawlers like Dogpile?". Anybody out there know?