Is Your Site Killing In-Store Sales?

Here's something to give multichannel (web/online) merchants pause:

Year-over-year there's been nearly a 50% increase in consumers who report that a frustrating online experience would make them less likely to shop at that retailer's physical store.

The source for this is The 2006 Holiday Shopping: Online Customer Experience Survey, conducted by a company called Allurent. The survey also uncovered some wished-for site features:

1. The ability to click on an item to create a popup window with more details about the product including price, size, colors, inventory availability, etc. (74%)
2. The ability to click on an item and add it to your cart without leaving the page you're on (70%)
3. The ability to "feel" merchandise through better imagery, more product descriptions and details (68%)
4. The ability to enter all data related to your purchase on one page, rather than go through several checkout pages (64%)
5. The ability to mix/match product images on one page to determine whether they look good together (47%)

Looks like pretty basic stuff. Get it right, or frustrated shoppers may decide not to shop at your webstore or your physical store.

Stop Advertising, Start Marketing

It's pretty common for retailers to think of advertising as "everything we do to get customers in the door". So, newspaper FSIs, direct mail, radio ads, paid search marketing, banner ads on websites, it's all "ADV", right?

Yes, but you need to expand your view of ways to get people in the door. Why? People ignore traditional advertising. Companies spend millions trying to create an impact with advertising (during the Super Bowl, for example), and what's the result? All too often, you remember the ad but not the advertiser. You might as well light your next TV ad by burning stacks of hundred dollar bills.

Even small companies now have the tools available to them to make an impact using new media, to generate awareness and the "viral" effect that happens when consumers pass your message along to other consumers. The most visible medium for this is video, posted somewhere like YouTube, but it could be a podcast, a blog, or a microsite. You can do it without a fancy ad agency or a 7-figure marketing budget.

Don't believe me? OK, take a look at this. Yes, it's hilarious, but you'll remember the store's USP and location after watching it.

The End of One Page For All

Big news in SEO circles over the past week or so has been Google's launch of personalized search. For users who elect to sign into their Google account before they conduct a search, Google will provide personalized results.

SEO firms are wringing their hands because it is now officially impossible to make the claim that a client is "#1 on Google". Of course, the majority of those claims have always been distortions at best, and outright lies at worst. Now, however, it's literally impossible to say that any given site will appear for all users, because more and more users will in fact see something unique to themselves.

What to do? Two things. First, continue to provide excellent, useful content to your customers. Second, get serious about participating in the emerging world of "social media" through blogs, social networks and social search (take a look at chacha.com for example). Relevance in organic search will increasingly fall to those who make the effort to participate in the social internet.

Google Ad Quality Scoring to Change

By the end of February, Google plans to change the way that it scores ad quality while making that scoring easier for advertisers to understand and react to. Google is adding a new quality score column to the advertiser's AdWords account interface to make it easier to prepare for the update. Advertisers will be allowed to activate the new column on their accounts this week so they can begin making plans for the new algorithm.

If some of your ads have been deactivated by Google previously, this update may re-activate those ads. Of course, if you responded to deactivation by raising your maximum bid level, this won't affect you.