Six-to-One Impact in Offline Stores

Based on two years of research conducted by retail marketing firm RevTrax, the study discovered that “for every $1 of e-commerce revenue generated from paid search, marketers can expect to see approximately another $6 of in-store revenue.”

In other words, paid search has 6:1 impact on offline sales over e-commerce. Because of the challenges of tracking consumer behavior online to offline, most of this has been invisible to marketers. Only now with the rise of smartphones and other methodologies is online-to-offline tracking becoming more widely available.

Between August 2009 and August 2011 RevTrax monitored millions of paid-search ads and consequent sales for its retail clients. To track in-store sales accurately RevTrax used landing pages with coupons and unique IDs:

• A paid search ad was displayed to a consumer
• The paid search ad led the consumer to a printable or mobile landing page displaying a coupon with a unique barcode
• The consumer redeemed the coupon inside a brick & mortar store
• Each coupon was tracked back to the online search (and the keyword)

Average Paid Click Worth $15 in Store

Using this methodology, RevTrax could conclusively determine in-store sales affected by paid search ads. Here’s how RevTrax’s findings illuminated the “value of a click” (where the average transaction size was under $200):

• The average click on a paid search ad generated approximately $15 of in-store revenue, with some merchants seeing as much as $28 of in-store revenue.
• Approximately 9% of clicks on a paid search ad generated an in-store sale, with some merchants seeing up to 26% of clicks on a paid search ad generating an in-store sale.

Again, what the company found was that paid search drove $6 in offline sales for every $1 in sales online. RevTrax thus argues that multichannel merchants who do not include in-store sales into the ROI calculation are potentially “undervaluing the paid search channel by as much as 85 percent.”

This is the first study to conclusively show the offline impact of paid search at this kind of scale, based on actual behavior rather than consumer surveys and self-reported data. The findings are pretty radical, with broad implications for search marketers and the industry as a whole.

Postscript: Here’s a bit more color and explanation from Seth Sarelson, COO of RevTrax, in response to a couple of questions I received about the study:

Clients are measuring these paid search campaigns at the keyword level and looking at brand keywords, competitive keywords, categories/products, etc. and the study uses a mix all these different types of executions to come to these results. I’m not sure that it’s clear to the person commenting that we’re talking about paid search only, not organic, so there’s certainly no guarantee that a brand is at the top of the paid search results for any keywords in a particular category.

One of the things that the study also mentioned is that many clients are reporting that 40-50% of customers acquired via paid search were new. This is big as it shows that this isn’t just an example of existing customers searching on branded terms looking for a deal.

It would certainly make sense for us to do a follow up that compares brand vs non-brand to address this specifically, as it’s an important point of distinction. I’m going to push for this internally.

As for PC vs Mobile, we’re working on a later study that will address these results, but most of what we’re looking at here is printable coupons from a PC.

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

In my own shopping experiences, both through mobile sites and mobile apps, I’m finding a consistent theme running through the product pages I see: retailers are unsure how to handle product descriptions.

It’s a fact of life that mobile screens are small, and I’ve recently looked at how that impacts decisions about SEO and mobile content.

“Hide-and-seek” Content

Retailers are trying different approaches with respect to the design of their description areas. Some hide them completely, providing a “more info”-type link to keep the clutter to a minimum. Others provide a small sample of the description, while a few brave souls actually include the entire text – sometimes several screens worth.

Amazon's mcommerce site provides a very short on-page description, linking to a second page for more details.

While these approaches deal with user interface issues, they’re all trying to fix a fundamental problem: mobile sites are using product descriptions created for desktop sites. And quite often, these descriptions are already second-hand, pulled from offline catalogs, manufacturer databases, or print brochures that promote the product. Sometimes they’re long, sometimes short, but they’re often not optimized for search, or edited to fit the needs of mobile users.

Specific Pitfalls With Mobile SEO

Here are some red flags to look for when evaluating product descriptions for an mcommerce site:

• Descriptions from the manufacturer. You’ll find these copied at all your competitor websites. Google dismisses duplicated content from natural search listings, so you’ll be completely reliant on shopping results as your non-paid channel.
• Marketing lingo. Often a symptom of manufacturer-supplied content. Filled with brand attributes but no descriptive keywords.
• Lists of specs. A common pitfall for B2B, or any technology product.

How To Manage Wholesale Revisions

Once you’ve identified problem areas, you can start to plan what resources you’ll need to make changes. There are lots of ways to manage the workflow for a wholesale upgrade of your product copy:

• In-house staff. Either full-timers or interns. This is the direct approach, and produces consistent results, but it can get expensive.
• User-generated edits. Think Wikipedia, where readers suggest edits to make the description better. This is clever and cheap, but you need a very large audience to get enough activity. Plus, moderation is necessary to keep the quality up.
• Crowdsourcing. My personal favorite. Revising large numbers of products is an ideal project for a team of remote workers, who can log-in on their own time and tackle them a few at a time. Crowdsourcing tools are difficult to master, but once you nail down a process, you can plow through thousands of SKUs in a few weeks, with good quality results and no need for extra staff.

Pick Your Battles

Whatever method you choose, costs are an important consideration. Creating content – even in bite-size chunks – can get expensive. And that cost has to be justified by ROI.

So how do we prioritize a project where there might be thousands of SKUs to look at?

Clockwise from top left: Buy.com is very text-heavy, while Best Buy only has specs. Walmart.com has a good balance of copy and specs.

Let’s start with the highest priority fixes, and work our way down:

• Top sellers. You could sort this by sheer volume of sales, or their contribution to profits – whatever defines business success for your store.
• Word count. The longest descriptions probably good candidates for a “long-story-short” version.
• Lack of category name in the text. This is a good indication that the description lacks keywords. Most mcommerce sites are run from a database, so a script that looks for category names in the text can be quick way to assess this.
• Ratio of numbers to letters. For technical products (especially B2B) a lot of numbers in the description (say, 20%) mean you’re probably looking at a spec sheet.

So now you’ve identified the your mobile commerce site’s issues, chosen a method for manage the workflow, and singled-out the products that need revising. Now you can circle back to the “hide-and-seek” design issue, and adapt your page designs to fit the content.

I’ll get into that in the next column, but if you’d like a sneak preview of the factors we’ll be talking about, have a look at my past article on using JQuery Mobile for SEO.

The cure for that disease? The folks at testing service Monetate have created an infographic full of tips:

Want the infographic for yourself? You’ll find it here: Shopping Cart Abandonment and Tips To Avoid It.

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• Tips For Checking Your Holiday Retargeting List Twice
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• Infographic: Black Friday As Seen Through Foursquare Check-Ins
• Infographic: Online Holiday Shopping Trends

Kenshoo: Budgets, Transactions, Revenues Up

Kenshoo, a provider of digital marketing software that’s used by five of the top 10 US retailers, says search advertising boomed during the month leading up to, and including, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. In its first Online Holiday Shopping Report, Kenshoo says search ad budgets, transactions, and revenue were all up this year:

Overall, for the 26-day period ending with Cyber Monday, 2010 search advertising budgets were up 31% compared to 2009. Total online sales transactions increased 83% during this time, resulting in 60% more online sale revenue for retailers.

The company’s report compares 2009 and 2010 on a variety of search-related ad metrics. Here are pair of charts showing search ad click-thru rates and search ad sales revenue broken down over several timeframes.

Kenshoo’s report lists six trends uncovered from its data:

1. The Holiday Shopping Season is Starting Earlier

2. Online Shoppers are More Responsive to Paid Search Advertising
3. Consumers are Buying More Often With Smaller Basket Sizes
4. Paid Search Advertisers Have Increased Effectiveness
5. Thanksgiving is Now “Cyber Kickoff Day”
6. Competition for Retailers Peaks on Cyber Monday

SearchIgnite: Black Friday Beats Cyber Monday

SearchIgnite, a search advertising agency that manages more than $1 billion in ad spend for its clients, reports that Black Friday far outpaced Cyber Monday this year:

Consumers spent nearly 90% more compared to Black Friday 2009. In a positive sign that confidence is back, consumers also spent more per transaction this year, with a 24% increase in Average Order Values YoY. To heavily promote Black Friday deals, and to capture more consumer dollars in the competitive retail environment, U.S. retailers increased their spend on paid search advertising 47% YoY.

SearchIgnite says Black Friday advertisers saw year-over-year growth in revenue from search, PPC spend, and average order value. Cyber Monday growth wasn’t nearly as high, and average order value was actually down 7.5% this year.

comScore: Cyber Monday Biggest Online Shopping Day Ever

In its look at online shopping patterns overall (not just relative to paid search as above), comScore says Cyber Monday was the busiest online shopping day ever, with more than $1 billion spent in the US.

According to comScore’s research, there were 4% more online shoppers this Cyber Monday than in 2009, and those shoppers spent an average of $114 each — up 12% from a year ago.

Experian Hitwise: Amazon, Wal-Mart Top Shopping Sites

Experian Hitwise focused on individual web sites and categories that did the best over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping weekend. On both of those days, Hitwise says the top 500 retail sites saw traffic increases compared to 2009 — to the tune of a 13% increase on Black Friday and a 16% increase on Cyber Monday. Here’s a look at the Cyber Monday chart showing the top retail sites.

The top five retailers were the same on Black Friday as you see above.

Conclusion

By all accounts above, search advertising and e-commerce in general has had a great holiday season so far, and there are still about three weeks to go before Christmas. Even outside of the primary research companies and the formal studies discussed above, there’s anecdotal evidence to consider, too: George Michie of the Rimm-Kaufman Group (and a Search Engine Land columnist) recently posted on the company’s blog that retail results he saw over Black Friday and Cyber Monday were “off the charts,” with gains between 50% and 150% this year compared to 2009. And there are a few comments on that post from others seeing similar results.

Vurve is targeting small businesses (SMBs) with e-commerce stores that spend up to $10,000 per month. The minimum monthly spend is $200. Traditional “offline” SMBs (service businesses) aren’t part of the program right now.

The company says it can entirely automate online advertising across a range of media types including search. The platforms and media types Vurve addresses are:

• Search
• Display
• Remarketing
• Social media (Facebook)
• Shopping comparison engines

Vurve is integrated with the Yahoo Shopping Cart and Shopify and has “preferred” API access with Facebook and Google. Kumar made the following claims in his presentation about the success rates of Vurve’s platform for its clients:

Vurve is part of a larger movement toward full automation for online advertising for SMBs. Consistent with that Google recently introduced Boost, a fully automated search marketing program directed toward SMBs (but not exclusively used by them).

Automation, especially of multiple media types, is a solution to the confusion and fragmentation that many small businesses experience in trying to figure out were to best spend their marketing dollars. There was a bit of a “too good to be true” quality to Kumar’s claims and presentation. However he says it’s all true.

Perhaps others more technically inclined and knowledgeable can take a look and opine.

The report — which can be downloaded via this contact form — was conducted by comScore and sponsored by Searchandise Commerce and iProspect. It involved more than 1,000 shoppers who took part in online focus groups in April of this year. When asked to describe the steps they took to begin the shopping process, almost 30% said they used a search engine as either the first or second step.

Visiting retailer websites or manufacturer websites scored highly, too. That’s not new; this 2008 study also placed search engines, retail sites, and manufacturer sites as the most essential product research options online.

Perhaps not surprisingly, social media was rarely mentioned: Only 4% said they visited a social networking as their first or second step, and only 3% said they visited blogs at the start of the shopping process.

The study also reinforces the popular “research online, buy offline” idea, but not as strongly as previous research. In 2008, Nielsen research showed that 80% of consumer electronics buyers bought at a store whose web site they visited first. In his article about the 2008 study I referenced above, Greg Sterling also mentioned reports showing between 80% and 90% of in-store purchases are influenced by online channels.

But in this new study, only 47% of shoppers in each category made a purchase in a physical store.

The study also credits site search — the search engine on a retailer’s website — as a key element of the shopping process:

• 40% of shoppers in both categories used a site search box to find a product, while only 20% browsed the landing page.
• After doing a site search, about 75% of shoppers clicked on five or fewer items.
• Shoppers identify the first set of products shown via a site search as the items that will best meet their needs, as having the best quality, and being the most relevant to what they’re seeking.

The study goes into other aspects of online shopping behaviors that should interest many in the search marketing industry.

According to Nielson, week-over-week traffic to sites teasing consumers early with Black Friday deals has increased 87 percent, from 3.8 million unique visitors during the week ending Nov. 8 to 7.0 million during the week ending Nov. 15.

Black Friday Google search trends since 2005

Nielson also reported that during the last weeks of October and early weeks of November, the number of unique visitors to the top Web sites offering previews of Black Friday sales, such as bfads.net, has quickly been increasing. Hitwise / Experian released similar numbers for the pre-Thanksgiving week, with overall traffic to Black Friday websites up 4%, compared to the same week in 2008.

Last week the percentage of referred traffic from Black Friday Websites to the top 500 retail Websites increased 12 percent versus the previous week. The percentage of referred traffic is up 14 percent when comparing the week ending Nov. 21, 2009, with the same week in 2008. (Full details…)

Since Black Friday has become the official kickoff to the holiday shopping season, both multi-channel retailers and online only retailers have embraced it, as well as Cyber Monday, the first Monday immediately following Black Friday has also developed a similar following for users searching for gift giving deals on the Web.

Despite Cyber Monday’s growing popularity, as reported in our recent article, Practical Tips to Prepare for Cyber Monday, neither it, nor Black Friday is even the biggest online shopping day of the year:”For most online retailers, the bigger spending day of the season to date was way back on Nov. 22, three days before Black Friday. What’s more, most e-tailers say the season’s top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15.”

Are retailers ready for the onslaught?

According to a recent study conducted by the website monitoring company Uptrends, there were indications that many online retailers are experiencing significant amounts of time when their websites are not accessible.  For a 30 day period leading up to  “Black Friday”,  Uptrends monitored the home page of 100 of the most popular e-commerce sites and determined that a significant number of companies were still experiencing periods of downtime that were excessive in some cases.

In the overall study results, almost half of the websites monitored experiencd some level of downtime, with only 55 of the 100 companies showing a 100% uptime for the length of the 30 day study.  24 of the websites had downtime between 99.90% and 99.99% and 21 websites were below 99.6% uptime.  As a point of reference, a website with uptime of 99.5% still has downtime of 3 hours and 36 minutes over the span of 30 days.

Biggest losers? Results from the 30-day study:

Many retailers might also be fearful of higher shopping cart abandonment rates throughout the 2009 holiday season, and is part of the reason Black Friday deals are increasing in number. According to  SeeWhy, a company which  tracks shopping cart abandonment rates across a wide variety of ecommerce sites,  abandonment rates have  steadily increased “in 2009 as the holiday season gets into full swing. For October 2009, the average shopping cart abandonment rate was at 71 percent, the highest this year so far.”

Bing Shopping retailers boost Cashback offers

As announced last Friday on the Bing blog, many Bing Shopping retailers are increasing their Cashback offers up to 35% starting on Black Friday, November 27th, and will run the additional cashback offers for a limited time.

According to a Microsoft official:

When purchased through the Bing cashback program, savings range from 5 to 35 percent cashback from retailers such as Macy’s, Sears, The Gap, AT&T, Walmart, eBay, HP and many more. Of note, Macy’s is offering 10%, Home Depot 8% and Dell 20% in cash back savings.

The increase in Bing Cashback offers was somewhat expected to return for the 2009 holiday shopping season, after Bing Shopping traffic grew as a result of the Double Cashback period during the Back-to-School shopping season.

While savvy companies planned for this season all the way back in the summer, and already have their internet storefronts in order, it’s not too late to do a few more things to insure a business can squeeze out more from gift shoppers on the “Cyber Mondays” following Black Friday.

The first Monday after Thanksgiving is called “Cyber Monday,” although we really should say “Cyber Mondays”—plural—since there are multiple high-traffic Mondays ramping upward and peaking out somewhere around the middle of December.

Source: DoubleClick Performics Chief Marketer blog: holiday peak day planning

Source: comScore Press Release: Cyber Monday E-Commerce Spending Beats Forecast

Although the term “Cyber Monday” was coined just a couple of years back as a conceit to help promote online sales for etailers by creating “buzz” similar to that of Black Friday, the term does describe a very real seasonal trend caused by internet users who are purchasing gifts online or who are looking for offline shops where they’ll buy presents and holiday supplies. For many sites, Mondays have the highest internet usage every week, and this normal trend line becomes even more exaggerated and increased as shoppers flock to find product information, locate stores, or buy online.

Keyword searches for holiday-related subjects traditionally start increasing sharply during the last quarter of every year, maxing out just before Christmas:

Source: Google Trends

It’s thought that the first Monday after Thanksgiving is when this really kicks into high gear, as people return to work from the holidays and squeeze in a moment or two at their office computers trying to find gifts. This year, according to a BIGresearch survey conducted for Shop.org, 54.5 percent of office workers with Internet access, or 68.5 million people will shop for holiday gifts from work, up substantially from 50.7 percent in 2006 and 44.7 percent in 2005. Forrester Research is predicting a 21% increase in online retail sales this year, compared with last.

The internet impact on shopping continues to increase, and changes in search engines’ formatting and layouts of their search results will likely divert users from their initial intentions by some degree. Users searching for products to buy online could easily end up opting to go to a physical store location near them out of concern that they might not receive shipped gifts in time. And, users performing various local searches to find store locations could get lured by contextual advertising into ultimately buying gifts online due to the convenience and free shipping offered by many etailers.

So, if you’re a business that needs holiday shopping to make your year a success, there are two major things you need to enable.

Brick-and-mortar stores need to be optimal for local search—your website should have easy-to-find street address, online map, and phone numbers for each of your locations. You should also be easily found in local search engines and online yellow pages directories.

Online retailers (“e-tailers”) should be findable when consumers use search engines to perform keyword searches for products and types of items that they wish to buy.

Since it can take some time to optimize a site for natural search traffic, and additional time for the search engine bots to index the changes and rank them properly for users to find, even if you did perform some optimization development on your site right now, chances are good that any changes would likely not have sufficient time to help you for this shopping season. But, there’s still a few ways to improve if you haven’t already done so.

Last-minute online optimization tips for local store sites and etailers:

• Brick-and-mortar stores should check their listing information in online yellow pages sites and local search engines. Fix anything that’s incorrect, and those changes have a very good chance of going live within a day or two.
• Brick-and-mortar stores should especially check to see that the Categories they’re listed under are correct. You’d be amazed at how often this is wrong, and how much more business you can get if users find your listing in the categories that are appropriate for them.
• If you’re not on the first page of results for your categories in online yellow pages and local search engines, you might think about advertising right now to get there. Bumping up your prominence will get you noticed more and will result in more conversions.
• For all types of sites, if you’re not already doing Pay-Per-Click advertising, consider buying a few good ads now in major search engines, in online yellow pages, and in other places across the internet where you believe your customers might likely hang out and find you. Afraid it might be too complex to manage hundreds or thousands of keyword ad campaigns if you have many products? Just set up one or two campaigns—it might be worthwhile in traffic for you; some traffic is better than none. Set up ads based on particular product names, product types, your type of store, and ads promoting your offline store locations. Ex: “candy stores in Boston, ma.”
• For e-tailers, consider uploading your products to Google Base so your product pages can get more referral traffic. Google Base feeds into Google Products, and Google Products listings can now appear for some searches, blended into the regular web search results pages (this “blended” format keyword search results page was introduced by Google earlier this year, and it’s called “Universal Search”). Overwhelmed at the thought of developing a database extraction and formatting it correctly? You could perhaps even just upload a very few products and it wouldn’t be a great burden.
• Join the crowd and issue a press release or two, related to the season. Talk about what’s selling hot, or funny things that happened in one of your stores, or what’s ultra-cool to buy this season. Make sure the online press release includes good keywords and links back to your website. A little humor or human interest aspect is particularly effective, too!
• List some of your prime products on eBay, and make sure your product description on there is linked back to your website, too, with a little text like “More items like this at ____” or “Find us online at ___”. Also make sure your item name is very accurate and includes the keywords that most users might use to find you, including a generic kind of name for the product. For example, “GPS Navigation System: Electronics Gifts for Dad.” I know eBay is a bit high on the time it takes to set up a listing and might not seem scalable to you in terms of the hassles of shipping. Think of this as another advertisement, though. You might be surprised how many people will get referred over to your website from a good eBay listing—this is a type of advertisement for you.
• Contact some of your local charities and offer to donate some amount of money for each sale of a certain product of yours if the purchaser shows you a copy of an email note or newsletter printed from the charity website outlining the offer. This can leverage the power of a charity to do promotion on your behalf by emailing their membership, and it also helps benefit a good cause!
• Make sure you’ve prominently promoted a discount of something you carry on your website! Forrester Research says that free shipping will figure heavily for online sales, and that gift cards will be a big winner this year.

Finally, if you’re reading this and need to do some gift shopping yourself, you might try visiting Shop.org’s website, Cyber Monday, which is a nice guide of loads of top online merchants. Cyber Monday’s set up as an affiliate of these etailers, and percentages of all purchases through this shopping portal go to support the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for students interested in an eCommerce career.

We’re told that more than 500 retailers will be posting holiday promotions and special savings both on Cyber Monday and throughout the holiday season, so you might even find some good deals through there. On Cyber Monday itself, more than 400 special offers will be available on the site, some of which will be exclusive promotions only available on CyberMonday.com. Offers will include free shipping specials, doorbuster deals, percentages off, and free gifts with purchase.

May your eHoliday season be very warm and merry!

Chris “Silver” Smith is Lead Strategist at Netconcepts and writes for the Locals Only column which appears on Mondays at Search Engine Land.

On Thursday, May 10, I’ll be presenting the webcast Successful Feed-Based Search Marketing: Shopping Engines, Paid Inclusion & More through our sister site, Search Marketing Now. In this webcast, I’ll describe the multiple types of feeds that can be used to extend a search marketing campaign, and will talk about some of the benefits they provide, including broad reach, the ability to get search-unfriendly websites included in search engine indexes and more.

I’d like to extend a personal invitation to all search marketers to attend this event. The webcast is at 1pm Eastern time, and registration is free. Here are links to more information and the registration form. I hope you’ll be able to join us!