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Competition on the web is at its highest point ever. How can we make such a general statement, you ask? Have you seen how much you’re paying for keywords in your Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing accounts? One area that isn’t necessarily hurt by the poor economy is online advertising spending. Since there are much better methods of measuring results nowadays, companies can afford to keep their budgets where they usually are because they’re better able to measure ROI (return on investment).

As such, following some critical search engine marketing (SEM) guidelines for your Ecommerce website can help you keep pace with your competitors this holiday season. Since for many websites, December is the most important month affecting the bottom line, it is more important than ever that you keep these techniques in mind when managing your website this month.


1. Establish Sales/Revenue Tracking
2. Expand Your Budget for Existing Paid Advertising Accounts
3. Branch Out Only to a Few New Advertising Venues
4. Email Blasts
5. Customize the Look and Feel of Your Site to Match the Holidays
1. Establish Sales/Revenue Tracking

It is absolutely critical that you measure where traffic, sales, and revenue originate from because you can then use that knowledge to make smart decisions when it comes time to allocate your budget. At this point in the year, we are hoping you spent the requisite amount of time instituting effective tracking either by way of Google Analytics or whatever web analytics package you might be using.

Here are the specific areas of tracking you need to be concerned with:
1. Pay Per Click (PPC) Conversion Codes
2. Goal Tracking
3. Ecommerce Revenue Tracking
4. Campaign Tracking


PPC Conversion codes are provided by the engines, Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter. Implementation is rather “tech-lite”—you don’t need programming knowledge to do this. Simply insert these codes on the order confirmation pages of your site so that they can be triggered when a sale occurs.

Goal Tracking simply refers to setting up Google Analytics to track the secondary metrics on the site. These would include newsletter signups, catalog requests, contact us forms submitted, etc. This implementation can actually occur within Google Analytics. No coding on your site is required. Similarly, other analytics packages (such as Omniture SiteCatalyst) have ways to track these metrics, although they may require some minor code adjustments on site.

Ecommerce Revenue Tracking is slightly more complicated to implement. It involves setting some variables that can be used to pass order data to the analytics program from your shopping cart. This is where you need your programmer or webmaster to step in. This step is especially important because you’ll want to know, at the end of a particular time period, where your revenue came from.

Campaign Tracking involves appending tracking codes to links you are promoting on other sites. These would include banner ads, text links, or other links that point back to your site. By appending these tracking codes, you can more accurately determine how much traffic and/or how many sales a particular referral source brought in to your site.
2. Expand Your Budget for Existing Paid Advertising Accounts

By this time, you must know what advertising sources are driving sales to your business. Or, even if you haven’t effectively implemented proper tracking, you might at least have some idea about what is and isn’t working. So, it is time to expand your budget on the existing sources. If tracking is properly installed, then it should be relatively simple to determine where to allocate the increased budget.

If your existing accounts are Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing, for example, make sure to generate multiple ad variations so that you can test multiple messages. For example, if you’re running a free shipping offer, mention that in one ad variation, and exclude it from another. Then, over the course of a few days, you can see which one produces better, and if it makes sense to continue the free shipping offer.

So it’s OK to test different things in your existing paid advertising accounts.
3. Branch Out Only to a Few New Advertising Venues

We’re right smack in the middle of the online retail holiday season right now, so there’s no time to lose! There’s only money to lose. We recommend you do not expand to unknown, or previously untested advertising sources at this time. However, we do recommend you consider branching out to Google Product Search (also known as Google Base, or Froogle), as well as Yahoo Products. Google signup is free, while Yahoo charges by the click.

The latter 2 advertisers are called comparison shopping engines. Basically, you generate a feed (spreadsheet) of basic product information (product name, description, price, URL, etc.) and submit to these sites so you can then see your products listed alongside other vendors. You’ll quickly understand the importance of remaining price-competitive because very frequently your product listing could get completely lost amid the multitude of other listings on Google Product Search and Yahoo Products. This is why you should also keep your prices competitive and you should load up your product descriptions with keyword phrases that best describe the product. This will at least help improve the click through rate of your listings.

We don’t recommend expanding to brand new advertising venues right now simply because online “window shopping” is at its highest point in the year. Those other comparison shopping sites that charge you per click might prove expensive, yet unprofitable. Especially now, users are looking for the best bargains, so while you might see a spike in traffic, you won’t necessarily see a spike in sales. Increasing the budget to known advertising sources is the way to go here rather than trying new things. Wait till January for that.
4. Email Blasts

Sending out targeted email blasts to your existing customer base is probably something you, as an Ecommerce website owner, already do. As a consumer, as well, you know how many emails you get this time of year. But the truth is it’s OK to increase the frequency of email offers. Instead of one a month, you could double your output to twice a month, or even 4 times (once a week) per month. It is vital that you target the email offers to the time period of December during which you are sending the blast. In other words, at the beginning, you can play on the “fall” theme since technically we’re still in the fall season. However, by the 2nd and 3rd weeks of December, it’s time to migrate your messaging to winter, then holiday themes.

There’s nothing quite as unproductive as sending out a canned email blast. This may be an obvious point, but we challenge you to check your Yahoo or AOL email Spam folder to see how many of the emails are NOT tailored to the winter or holiday season.
5. Customize the Look and Feel of Your Site to Match the Holidays

Our final suggestion involves updating the look and feel of your website to match the season. This can range from subtle color changes highlighting blue and white, then red and green, to more extensive design enhancements such as updating your logo to include snowflakes. To emphasize this, just check out Amazon or eBay. Their changes are not-so-subtle. But this gives the user a comfortable feeling, like the site is up-to-date, not stale, and probably has good prices.

Competition online is high right now as retailers slash prices to adjust to the growing recession fears. As an online retailer, it is vital to make sure you’re accurately tracking sales and revenue data, and that you’re measuring the traffic each advertising source is bringing to your site. Additionally, you should consider expanding your budget on known advertising accounts—those producing sales and profitability—but you should consider waiting to try most new advertising sources because you’re likely to get many window-shoppers and few buyers. Conversely, new accounts with Google Product Search (Google Base) and Yahoo Products are acceptable places to expand your advertising reach because they are proven entities. Lastly, updating the look and feel of your website and email blasts to display the appropriate imagery of the winter/holiday season will help buyers feel more comfortable shopping on your site. And this could lead to more sales. Isn’t that the best gift you could get this holiday season?