Pinterest launched business pages a few months ago, which allow companies to create accounts specifically related to their websites.

Last week, Pinterest took another step toward increasing the value it provides businesses by adding an analytics component.

“Bloggers, businesses, and organizations often ask us, ‘What are people pinning from my websites?’ These website owners help create the content on Pinterest and we wanted to help them understand which pieces of content people find most interesting. Today, we’re pleased to announce Pinterest Web Analytics, a first step towards doing just that. Web Analytics gives site owners insights into how people are interacting with pins that originate from their websites,” wrote Pintereston its blog.

Pinterest analytics contains three components that are represented in graph form:

• Number of pins from your website;
• Number of people who have seen the pins;
• Number of visitors to your site from Pinterest.

You can also see a selection of the most repinned, most clicked, and most recent pins to gain a better understanding of what is popular. You can use this information to tailor your website and Pinterest boards to attract more pins, views, repins, and traffic.

Users can change views by selecting different date ranges. Default options exist for 7, 14, and 30 day ranges. Data can also be exported to your computer via CSV files.

Benefits to Merchants

Pinterest analytics adds another piece to the big data pie that can help merchants understand what types of interactions within social media are actually driving traffic and influencing sales.

One study from RichRelevance, an ecommerce personalization firm, found that Pinterest users spend more than Facebook and Twitter: $168.83 average order value versus $94.70 for Facebook and $70.84 for Twitter. The addition of analytics can help merchants make more informed decisions about what is popular, which can lead to more productive pinning activity.

Third-party analytics tools such as Pinfluencer have been available for some time that offer robust analytics. But these frequently cost money to use and require merchants to log into a separate dashboard. Pinterest analytics are free.

How to Get Started Using Pinterest Analytics

Follow these steps to get started using Pinterest analytics:

• Switch to Pinterest’s new look. To do this, hover over your account name located in the upper right-hand corner of your business page. A drop-down menu will appear. Click “Switch to New Look.” Pinterest has made some slight modifications to its interface to include simpler navigation and larger images.

  You must have a business account to use analytics. Read “Pinterest Releases Business Accounts,” my earlier article, to learn how to set up an account.

• Make sure you have a verified website. If you have a website listed on your profile with a check mark next to it, then you are verified. If you do not see the check mark, click the pencil icon located next to your website URL and follow the verification procedure. Alternatively, you can go to the menu in the upper right corner and select “Settings.”

  Verification can be accomplished by either adding a meta tag to the head of your website or by uploading an HTML file to your server.

• Click on “Analytics.” Once your website is verified, go to the top right menu and click on Analytics.

• Wrap Up

  Analytics builds on a toolset that Pinterest offers merchants. This includes business accounts, Pin It buttons, and embeddable pinboard widgets.

  “We think that these tools will help website owners understand what’s working for them and what’s not so that they can create even better pins in the future,” stated Pinterest.

  Read More

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There is a lot to be said for convenience and simplicity. These are just two factors that heavily impact the consumer experience, which in turn affects your conversion rates. Learn more about these 5 common mistakes or “sins” of website design.  A recent article published through Practical Ecommerce explores 5 items that as a business owner, you should be aware of:

1. Poor Mobile Accessibility

Forrester Research predicts that sales through this medium will reach $25 billion in 2013. Retailers must be prepared for it.

2. Complicated Checkout Experience

The checkout process should be secure, simple, and fast.

3. Low Quality Images

Visitors want to zoom in as close as they can and they want ample product information; details, dimensions, and more.

4. Difficult Site Navigation

A retail site should present product information in a way that helps visitors make an informed buying decision. Choose a design that is both attractive and simple.

5. Small Font Size

A major demographic in online shoppers include less computer savvy users, who might benefit from larger, legible fonts.  Don’t eliminate these shoppers through smaller text.

It’s always helpful to have a concise checklist to refer to when making sure everything is on track.  Although there are 5 items mentioned, each falls under either the category of convenience or simplicity.  As long as these 2 characteristics are honored, it’s hard to go wrong.  However, remaining current is also critical.  Recall that just a short time ago, retail sites weren’t required to be accessed easily on a phone. But in 2013, mobile visitors expect the merchant to be ready for them.  The checkout experience is also directly related to simplicity. This is the reason that Amazon’s one click checkout has been so successful.  Miva Merchant has a newly released one-page checkout for our customers, as well.  With One-Page Checkout, you can optimize your checkout flow and get your customers throught the checkout process quicker.  We have taken all the work out of process; it’s effortless. The consumer experience is an especially critical factor in international Ecommerce, as delivering the full landed costs including duty/tax calculation prior to checkout is also expected.  As far as images go, the more zoom and product detail you can provide to consumers the better chance you have in creating a successful conversion. Site navigation must be user friendly.  Lastly, trends in color, font, and layout change all the time.  It’s necessary to keep up with each of these traits through investing in UI/UX design which was a hot topic atMivaCon 2013!

To learn more about the topic of 5 Sins of Site Design please refer to Practical Ecommerce’s Website.

According to research reported in Inc., your returning customers spend, on average, 67% more than first-time customers.  Acquiring new customers will cost 5 to 10 times more than selling to a current customer. Long story short: if you’ve accepted their credit card once, you’ll want to find a smart way to get them back again.

In order to capitalize on the significant financial benefits inherent in keeping customers coming back, 65% of marketers have implemented a customer loyalty program.

If you’re ready to start your first customer loyalty program, be sure to do it right.  Find out who your customers are and what they want in a rewards program – and give it to them in a way that will provide value over time.

Find Out Who Your Customers Are

The first step in creating any customer-centric plan is to determine who, in fact, your customers are.  The profile of your average customer will tell you their age, gender, household size, shopping habits, purchase history, and more.

• Do they visit your store once a week, or once every six months?
• What are they buying?
• How much are they spending?

You can pull information from your POS system (if you have a physical store, as well) and your customer mailing list; you can also gain more details by asking customers to complete a short survey.  The more data you have on your customers, the better.  This data will help you decide what kind of loyalty program will appeal to your customers, provide them with the most value, and keep them returning to your business.

Decide on a Rewards Structure

There are many ways that you can structure your loyalty program.  The best structure is directed towards your specific customer profile, offers realistic and attainable rewards, and is easy to understand.  Based on your customers’ needs, choose from the following options:

• Many grocery stores offer rewards members a lower price on specific goods.  The items you provide a discount on should be those the customer is likely to buy.  If most of your customers are vegetarians, offering a member discount on beef won’t keep them coming back.
• A points-based program can be a simple way to offer an incentive for customers to return.  Make sure the points system is transparent – 1 point per dollar spent, for example – and realistically attainable.  If customers have to earn 1,000 points before they receive any benefits, they won’t participate.
• Tiered systems are appropriate for industries that aren’t conducive to discount or points-based systems.  These systems increase customer rewards over time.  Again, make sure that the rewards in each tier are both valuable and attainable.

The most important aspect is that your program is accessible to customers, according to Business.com.

Promote Your Program

A loyalty program cannot fulfill its purpose – getting customers to return to your store – if no one knows about it or signs up for it.  For that reason, it is important to promote your new program and offer incentives for customers to join.

• Feature your new loyalty program in your business’s print, media, and online advertising.
• Place signage around your business that explains the new program, the structure, the terms, and how to sign up.  Enable customers to sign up online on your website or social media pages.
• Run a promotion to kick-start the program and bring customers into your store.  Offer a free gift to the first 100 customers who sign up, double rewards points for the first month, or run a raffle in which one new member will be chosen to win a high-value gift.

When putting together your business’s first loyalty program, don’t go for the first cookie-cutter solution that you find.  The best programs are designed with your specific customer in mind. Give them what they want from a rewards program, and they’ll give you more of their patronage.

Megan Webb-Morgan writes for leading B2B resource, ResourceNation.com.  She focuses on a number of business related topics.  Follow Resource Nation @ResourceNation and on Google+!

Facebook announced in a press conference last Thursday that it has drastically revamped the all-important News Feed, turning it into a “personalized newspaper” that emphasizes what friends are sharing.

In brief, the changes consist of:

• Bigger stories and photos in the feed to provide more visual appeal;
• A new sidebar to navigate different parts of Facebook such as your timeline, groups, apps, and chat;
• Choice of seven different news feeds, including Music, Photos, All Friends, Games, and Groups, all sortable by users at their discretion — think of these as different sections of a newspaper;
• Cleaner design that allows for mobile rendering.

Why the Changes?

Facebook’s decision was based on three factors: Facebook fatigue, a cluttered interface, and reams of content flooding the News Feed.

Facebook fallout. Believe it or not, Facebook is experiencing user fallout at a steady pace. According to a Pew Internet report, 61 percent of current Facebook users say that they have taken a break from the site at one time or another, while 20 percent of online adults say they once used the site, but no longer do so.

More visual appeal. Facebook is also following current trends in interface design instituted by sites like Google+ and Instagram that allow for a cleaner look and less clutter. Facebook’s goal is to emphasize the content itself, not what appears around it.

Its emphasis on larger photos is also in keeping with a more visual approach to web design in hopes that such changes will foster deeper engagement.

Multiple feeds. Added to “Most Recent” and “Top Stories” are a sub-set of new feeds: “All Friends,” “Photos,” “Music,” “Following,” “Games,” and “Groups.”

According to sources, users will be able to switch between different feeds by clicking buttons located at the top, rather than the side column.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of what each feed contains, as reported by Facebook.

• Groups shows posts from the groups you are part of, starting with the most recent post.
• Photos shows photos shared by your friends and the Pages you like — photos from Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
• All Friends shows posts from only your friends, in the order they posted them. No ads or Page posts will appear here;
• Following shows posts from people you follow and Pages you like in the order they were posted. This is how Pages get included in the mix;
• Most Recent shows stories in the order they were posted – that way you don’t miss anything.
• Games shows updates from the games you play and what your friends are playing;
• Music shows posts from the artists you like and what your friends are listening to;
• Close Friends, Family and other friend lists show posts from just the friends on that list. To add another feed, create a list and add the people and Pages you want updates from;
• News Feed will show you the most relevant stories since you last checked Facebook. To see stories in the order they were posted, switch to your Most Recent feed.

Device consistency. Facebook has designed the new look to be consistent across all devices: desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones. In fact, the emphasis was on mobile first and the website second. That makes sense given that more than 68 percent of users access Facebook via a mobile device.

Benefits to Merchants

The redesign offers a number of benefits for merchants.

• More space for ads. The left and right columns surrounding the News Feed have been reduced in size, making more room for the feed itself.
• Emphasis on visual content. Merchants would be wise to take advantage of the emphasis placed on multi-media to produce high-quality graphics and video content. It really is all about the pictures.
• Consistency means that ads appear similar. That’s true whether they appear on desktop or mobile devices.

There are a couple of drawbacks.

• Ads will not appear in all feeds. The “All Friends” feed, for example, will only show what a user’s friends are sharing. Other feeds such as Music and Photos may not carry ads, at least at the present time. When ads do appear, they may take on a new degree of relevance. For example, a merchant who sells video games may have an ad appear only in the Games feed.
• Less emphasis is placed on ads in the right-hand column. That’s the downside. The upside is that more emphasis will be placed on in-stream ads. That favors ad units such as Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories.

Conclusion

Facebook is rolling out the new design gradually, so you may not see it immediately. You can add your name to a waiting list in hopes of getting access sooner.

Read More

• Facebook Takes on Local Search
• Barebones Social Media Marketing

Instagram is a massive social network built around a beautifully designed — and addictive — mobile photography app. As of September 2012, Instagram reportedly had 11 million active users. It was famously bought by Facebook for $1 billion in April 2012.

Instagram is creating new and exciting ways of marketing your products and engaging customers online. It’s even putting an interesting spin on product photography.

To illustrate this revolution, I’ll show how one online store, Black Milk Clothing, is making masterful use of Instagram to enhance its product views.

Black Milk Clothing’s concept is straightforward: encourage customers to take pictures of themselves wearing a Black Milk product and post these images to Instagram with a caption that includes a special hashtag. Instagram posts that contain this special hashtag are then displayed on the product’s main listing page. For example, customers are prompted to “Tag your photos using #bmamethystlegs on Instagram” in the case of the purple nylon leggings shown below.

This approach has worked marvelously well for Black Milk. It has roughly 450,000 Facebook Likes and 25,000 Twitter followers — two indicators of a large and engaged community of shoppers. The Social Sell, a social media marketing research site, published an informative piece that gives more details about Black Milk’s sustained viral growth, with comments from its founder.

There are a few reasons this strategy has been so effective.

1. Taking pictures with Instagram is fun. The app is beautifully designed and empowers anyone with an iPhone or Android device to create photographs that have a whimsical feel, thanks to a set of built-in image filters.
2. People love attention. Offering a channel for self-promotion to your customers is a powerful incentive. In this case, the customer benefits from being seen on your website while you, the ecommerce merchant, benefits from the viral marketing that this type of sharing promotes.
3. People love a (good) party. A feed showing people all over the world wearing — and, apparently, loving — your products creates a party atmosphere on your store. This builds confidence that you are well liked and that your products hold up to real use.

Adding Instagram to your Ecommerce Site

Here are pointers for adding an Instagram feed to your site.

• Add the Instagram feed using JavaScript. The public Instagram API allows searching for recent posts that contain a specific hashtag. The most flexible — and most technically demanding — way of adding an Instagram feed is to write custom JavaScript code that performs queries using this API and displays the results. This seems to be what Black Milk has done. Your web developer should be able to take it from there.
• Use a third-party tool to add the feed. If you’re not up for writing JavaScript code, there are a few, easier-to-use options, such as Instapress for WordPress and Stagigram, an intuitive Instagram front-end and rich toolset that includes a widget for adding feeds to your Facebook page.
• Be careful. You are displaying a live feed of content drawn from the Internet. You will need to monitor and control this process to make sure your product is being displayed in an acceptable way. For example, set things up to approve posts before they are displayed. You may also want the ability to blacklist specific people from appearing in your feed.
• Develop a strategy for “bootstrapping” your feed. A potential downside to adding a live Instagram feed to your web store is that it could backfire by giving people the impression of little interest in your offering if few images appear. Consider showing the feed only after you reach some minimum number of posts. You will also want to encourage your current customers to “#hashtag their recent purchases.” One idea is to hold a contest, such as “the best Instagram photo receives a $100 gift card redeemable on our store.” Another tip is to take the first few pictures yourself to show your customers how fun it can be.

If you have any questions or know of other examples of online stores making clever use of Instagram, please leave a comment below.

Jason Lawrence’s profile. >

Read More

• How to Take Gorgeous Product Photos
• Using Instagram for your Ecommerce Business

Information architecture and search engine optimization are both critical aspects of developing an ecommerce site. During the process, early decisions made about the structure of a site and its product catalog can have surprising ramifications for SEO.

Which product types and attributes are assigned as categories, subcategories, and filters within the catalog impact much more than user experience. They also impact which pages the ecommerce platform will generate and how they’re interconnected in the navigation, both of which impact SEO.

Let’s use a hair care products site as an example. Say we’re selling shampoo, conditioner, and styling products for men, women, and children. Our products are tailored to normal, dry, oily, and chemically treated hair and offer an array of benefits like curl and shine. Two ways of organizing the product catalog begin with categorizing products by product type or by gender/age.

Each contains the same product types and attributes, but arranged in different ways. The blue boxes represent categories, the aqua and green boxes are subcategories, and the lists of product attributes without boxes around them are filters or facets. Keep in mind that categories and subcategories are fixed architectural elements. The customer has to choose a category or subcategory before filter options appear. After that, filters can be added and subtracted at will to modify the product set displayed.

Will the Right Pages Exist?

In our two sample product catalogs, the first question to ask is whether the categorization scheme allows the pages we need for SEO to be created. Keyword research informs us which search phrases are most popular among searchers. It’s up to us to ensure that our sites are constructed and optimized in such a way that we can target those popular keyword phrases.

For example, the keyword research tells us that the phrase “shampoo for oily hair” is extremely popular, with 4,400 searches on average in Google a month. Looking at our potential sitemaps, the first option based on product type categories gives us a single, clear page to optimize for the phrase “shampoo for oily hair.” Not only will the page exist, it will contain products that specifically fill the expectations of people searching for that phrase, and its specific relevance will make it easy to optimize for that phrase.

The second sitemap option based on gender poses more of a problem when we look for an individual page to optimize for “shampoo for oily hair.” The first problem is that there is no genderless shampoo page. We’re forced immediately into products for women, men or children, which in turn impacts the relevance of every page in the catalog.

We can apply the “oily” filter to the “women’s shampoo” subcategory page, but that isn’t an exact match for “shampoo for oily hair.” The best we can do is to optimize each of the gender/age-based shampoo pages for “best shampoo for oily hair for women” at 12 monthly searches, “shampoo for oily hair men” at 58 monthly searches, and “shampoo for oily hair kids” at 0 monthly searches. That’s 70 potential searches to target across three pages instead of 4,400 searches that can be strongly targeted with one page in the first sitemap option.

Might one of our gender/age shampoo pages end up ranking for the trophy phrase “shampoo for oily hair?” It might, depending on how much competition there is to rank for the phrase, the authority of our domain and many other factors. But it will be more difficult because there is no single precisely relevant page to be optimized for the targeted phrase. The early-stage decision to choose one system of categorization over another determines which pages are created, which determines how well we can optimize for valuable keyword phrases even before most marketers have started to think about SEO for their new site.

Which Receive the Navigation Boost?

In addition to determining which pages are created, the product catalog’s structure also determines the site’s navigation. Category and first level subcategory pages tend to be accessible via the site wide navigation elements, like the header. As such, they benefit from a boost in authority because every page on the site links to them. These internal navigation links tell search engines which pages the site values most and gives the pages their first shot of authority.

The majority of pages in the catalog won’t be accessible via the site wide navigation and have to rely on authority passed through local or category-based navigational elements like left-hand navigation. These pages, typically lower subcategory pages and filter pages, will not benefit from the boost in authority that their higher-level brothers receive. As a result, they may only be strong enough to rank for less competitive or more specific keyword phrases.

Look at the two sitemap examples again. If we’re trying to rank for “shampoo for oily hair,” the first option organized by product type has our oily hair shampoo page as a subcategory two levels into our catalog structure. That page will very likely be included in the header navigation for the site and will receive a boost in authority to go along with the strong relevance mentioned previously.

The second sitemap option based on gender will not be able to include a relevant page targeting “shampoo for oily hair” in the header navigation. The only pages that are likely to make it into the header navigation combine the category gender and subcategory product type such as women’s shampoo or men’s conditioner.

Some of these phrases, like “mens shampoo” at 320 searches per month, are worth targeting. But if we’re targeting organic search traffic and sales as a high priority marketing strategy, then it only makes sense to use the keyword data to determine which pages need to exist and receive an authority boost while developing the product catalog structure.

Read More

• SEO: Optimal Ecommerce URLs
• SEO: When Product Facets and Filters Fail
• SEO: Putting Navigation to Work

Launched this week, Facebook’s new search product focuses on finding connections between people, photos, places, and interests. But the most interesting aspect of Facebook search is its potential in the local search space.

How Facebook Graph Search Works

With a reported 1 billion users, 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections in its arsenal, Facebook has created a different type of search. Traditional search results pull from a massive dataset of indexed pages from all over the Internet. Facebook skips the crawl and indexation stage, relying instead on the content that each user shares and the connections between them to make up its dataset. Just think of all those Likes, reshares, comments, and other content that only Facebook has full access to. As a result, Facebook’s search results can offer truly unique content and connections found nowhere else.

Facebook’s search is based on content types and filters, mashed up with relevance and popularity signals such as Likes, comments, reshares, and others. In this initial phase, search is limited to four content types: people, photos, places, and interests. For example, you might be interested in “restaurants near me that my friends like.” Once Facebook returns a results set, you’ll be able to filter the results by gender, school, marital status, location, and many other options. For more detailed examples, see “Facebook Launches a Different Kind of Search.”

If Facebook can’t supply relevant search results, it turns to Bing for traditional web search results. In addition, Bing has the sole honor of incorporating Facebook data into its search results via Facebook’s API. So whether you’re searching on Facebook or Bing, Graph Search should produce more social results to aid in content discovery. That’s in theory. In practice few people have access to the new Graph Search on Facebook yet and Bing’s integration is in its infancy.

Facebook Search Is Local Search

From a business perspective, the most exciting aspect of Facebook search is the local search angle. Recommendations from friends are a powerful inducement to try something new, and Facebook search makes it easier to discover the places and things your friends like.

Facebook has had the pieces for this new product for a while — Places and Pages to house business information, the ability to friend or follow, and the ability to check in and comment. All of these are vital pieces of the puzzle.

But each interaction with a Place or Page was merely dumped into the user’s Facebook News Feed or Timeline. The result was a fleeting stream of information that might get noticed but would probably be overlooked or quickly replaced with something newer. Those are all missed connections, missed chances to discover.

With Facebook search, these connections are discoverable at will. I probably didn’t notice that five of my friends had been to the same restaurant and liked it because the information was so briefly displayed in my News Feed. But a quick search on “restaurants near me that my friends like” will surface those scattered connections and prompt me to consider that restaurant at exactly the moment when I’m open to discovering new restaurants.

The same principle holds true for all sorts of brick-and-mortar businesses. Consider a runner in the market for new cross-trainers. He might search for “running shoes my friends like” or “sports stores near me.” Searches like these would turn up local stores or products that the searcher’s friends have liked, checked in to, and commented on. Assuming this runner has other friends who are enthusiastic about running and training equipment, his Facebook search results should offer some compelling recommendations for products to buy and stores to visit.

Optimizing for Facebook Search

If you have a physical location, you can have a Place page on Facebook. If you have many physical locations, you’ll have a lot of Places to manage. Even if you have no physical location, you can still have a Page on Facebook. The extent to which Pages will be pulled into local Facebook search results with Places remains to be seen as access opens to all users, but regardless of whether the search results are local commerce or ecommerce in nature, it behooves businesses to be present and active on Facebook now more than ever.

Whether it’s a Place or a Page, some of the same opportunities exist for optimization. Like all search optimization, think of optimization for Facebook in terms of relevance and authority.

Relevance speaks to the opportunity to describe the business accurately and using the words that consumers are likely to use, as well as your favorite marketing-speak. Make sure that every possible information field is filled in and accurate, especially the name, category, vanity URL, and information you share in the “About” section. All of these will help people find your business on Facebook.

For Place pages, ensure that the address is accurate. This is critical to appearing in Facebook’s local search results. Businesses with many locations may want to look into working with a local search agency to manage the relevance and accuracy of the content in Facebook, as well as across Google, Yelp, Foursquare, Bing, YellowPages.com, and the hundreds of other local search players.

Authority speaks to the actions of your network of friends and followers — the Likes, follows, reshares, comments and other actions that demonstrate that your content is valuable in some way. This one is more difficult because it involves engaging with and incenting your customers to interact with your content on Facebook. This one area could justify an entire series of articles. But for a quick overview, see Facebook’s guide “Reach More People.”

On the paid advertising side, Facebook hasn’t disclosed any specific plans for advertising on Graph Search. According to comments made at the announcement, Facebook is focusing first on developing the search functionality for its users and may possibly monetize it in the future if it proves successful as a feature.

Which product types and attributes are assigned as categories, subcategories, and filters within the catalog impact much more than user experience. They also impact which pages the ecommerce platform will generate and how they’re interconnected in the navigation, both of which impact SEO.

Let’s use a hair care products site as an example. Say we’re selling shampoo, conditioner, and styling products for men, women, and children. Our products are tailored to normal, dry, oily, and chemically treated hair and offer an array of benefits like curl and shine. Two ways of organizing the product catalog begin with categorizing products by product type or by gender/age.

Each contains the same product types and attributes, but arranged in different ways. The blue boxes represent categories, the aqua and green boxes are subcategories, and the lists of product attributes without boxes around them are filters or facets. Keep in mind that categories and subcategories are fixed architectural elements. The customer has to choose a category or subcategory before filter options appear. After that, filters can be added and subtracted at will to modify the product set displayed.

Will the Right Pages Exist?

In our two sample product catalogs, the first question to ask is whether the categorization scheme allows the pages we need for SEO to be created. Keyword research informs us which search phrases are most popular among searchers. It’s up to us to ensure that our sites are constructed and optimized in such a way that we can target those popular keyword phrases.

For example, the keyword research tells us that the phrase “shampoo for oily hair” is extremely popular, with 4,400 searches on average in Google a month. Looking at our potential sitemaps, the first option based on product type categories gives us a single, clear page to optimize for the phrase “shampoo for oily hair.” Not only will the page exist, it will contain products that specifically fill the expectations of people searching for that phrase, and its specific relevance will make it easy to optimize for that phrase.

The second sitemap option based on gender poses more of a problem when we look for an individual page to optimize for “shampoo for oily hair.” The first problem is that there is no genderless shampoo page. We’re forced immediately into products for women, men or children, which in turn impacts the relevance of every page in the catalog.

We can apply the “oily” filter to the “women’s shampoo” subcategory page, but that isn’t an exact match for “shampoo for oily hair.” The best we can do is to optimize each of the gender/age-based shampoo pages for “best shampoo for oily hair for women” at 12 monthly searches, “shampoo for oily hair men” at 58 monthly searches, and “shampoo for oily hair kids” at 0 monthly searches. That’s 70 potential searches to target across three pages instead of 4,400 searches that can be strongly targeted with one page in the first sitemap option.

Might one of our gender/age shampoo pages end up ranking for the trophy phrase “shampoo for oily hair?” It might, depending on how much competition there is to rank for the phrase, the authority of our domain and many other factors. But it will be more difficult because there is no single precisely relevant page to be optimized for the targeted phrase. The early-stage decision to choose one system of categorization over another determines which pages are created, which determines how well we can optimize for valuable keyword phrases even before most marketers have started to think about SEO for their new site.

Which Receive the Navigation Boost?

In addition to determining which pages are created, the product catalog’s structure also determines the site’s navigation. Category and first level subcategory pages tend to be accessible via the site wide navigation elements, like the header. As such, they benefit from a boost in authority because every page on the site links to them. These internal navigation links tell search engines which pages the site values most and gives the pages their first shot of authority.

The majority of pages in the catalog won’t be accessible via the site wide navigation and have to rely on authority passed through local or category-based navigational elements like left-hand navigation. These pages, typically lower subcategory pages and filter pages, will not benefit from the boost in authority that their higher-level brothers receive. As a result, they may only be strong enough to rank for less competitive or more specific keyword phrases.

Look at the two sitemap examples again. If we’re trying to rank for “shampoo for oily hair,” the first option organized by product type has our oily hair shampoo page as a subcategory two levels into our catalog structure. That page will very likely be included in the header navigation for the site and will receive a boost in authority to go along with the strong relevance mentioned previously.

The second sitemap option based on gender will not be able to include a relevant page targeting “shampoo for oily hair” in the header navigation. The only pages that are likely to make it into the header navigation combine the category gender and subcategory product type such as women’s shampoo or men’s conditioner.

Some of these phrases, like “mens shampoo” at 320 searches per month, are worth targeting. But if we’re targeting organic search traffic and sales as a high priority marketing strategy, then it only makes sense to use the keyword data to determine which pages need to exist and receive an authority boost while developing the product catalog structure.

Sending Emails Too Frequently

As an email marketing professional, I subscribe to hundreds of ecommerce emails. I scrutinize the emails I receive. Thus, my tolerance for high volumes of email from any one retailer is likely higher than the average recipient.

However, while analyzing Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails, I noticed one e-tailer, Toys“R”Us, that sent many more emails than the others. I received seven emails in one day from that company. Seven emails, from anyone, is more than one person can possibly process. Moreover, each email featured multiple sales, discounts, and last-minute chances to purchase various brands or toys. Where is a consumer to begin?

With two small children, I am active purchaser of toys. But I unsubscribed from the Toys“R”Us email program. Seven emails in one day was simply too many. On a busy day or weekend, I may not check my personal email for a few days. During that time, the number of emails from Toys“R”Us can grow to more than 20.

In short, increasing your frequency and the mixed messages per email — in the manner of Toys“R”Us — is simply a bad strategy.

Sending emails weekly, or even daily, can work. Understanding your customers’ purchasing behaviors, and monitoring metrics like open and click rates, and unsubscribe rates, will help determine your optimum frequency. Identify a rough sales dollar per email sent, based on historical averages. When you start to over email, you will see a sharp reduction in the dollars earned per email sent. That means it is time to reduce the number of emails sent.

Ignoring Mobile Devices

This year, the number of people opening email on their smartphones and tablets has skyrocketed — 30 to 70 percent of your email opens may be coming from these devices. That number is just too large to ignore. We’ve all read articles and attended webinars about the increasing role of mobile in email. We have learned the basic tricks to optimize our email design to render correctly on smartphones and tablets. These are all important tactics. However they are only half of the equation.

The other half is to understand how consumers use mobile devices. The purpose of email marketing, after all, is to drive traffic back to your site to convert. Keep the process as easy as possible. Effective emails convince the recipient to immediately perform the desired action, such as reading news article, or completing a purchase in your shopping cart.

The point is, don’t design your email so that it looks good on a mobile device without also strategizing how you want mobile users to interface with your website. Their behavior is much different than people using a desktop computer. Spend time analyzing the path mobile users take, and use that as a starting point to plan your mobile strategy.

L.L.Bean, for example, has a very effective smartphone version of its email, making it easy to navigate to the mobile site to browse and purchase.

Underestimating Email’s Overall Impact

Within hours of sending an email, you know how many people opened, clicked, and purchased or converted. What is hard to measure, however, is all the other ways in which an email will actually affect your bottom line.

After years of sending email and analyzing results, I’ve consistently seen a huge percentage of recipients coming back, within three days, to purchase via another channel. I have also seen large percentages of consumers use an email-only offer code while calling to place an order, or consumers calling in not to use a promotion code but mentioning they received an email. In short, measuring the effectiveness of an email through initial clicks captures only a portion of the actual impact. Similar to television or radio, email contributes to the bottom line in a way that will never be completely quantifiable.

Spend time with more advanced analysis. Look at all the sales since a specific campaign, and track which people had opened or clicked on the email. The true impact of a single campaign will likely emerge. Email is an effective branding tool, helping consumers remember a company, even when they don’t open an email.

Google+ recently launched a new component called Communities. If you are active on Google+, you likely have received invitations to join a few of these.

Google+ Communities resemble Facebook and LinkedIn Groups, enabling users to filter the ever-increasing stream of posted content and focus on relevant topics.

“Google+ has always been a place to crowd around common interests and meet new people…With Google+ Communities there’s now a gathering place for your passions,” said a Google blog post announcing the new feature.

In terms of functionality, Google+ Communities let users create and join public or private groups, add discussion elements, plan events, conduct Hangout video chats, and post links using +1 buttons on external websites.

Why Google+ Communities Matter to Merchants

Many well-known brands have jumped on the Communities bandwagon. But anyone can create a community to discuss most any topic — that includes ecommerce merchants.

The benefits to merchants who wish to create a community are two-fold.

• Introduce a brand. Communities enable focused conversation around topics of shared interest. Merchants can use Communities as yet another channel to introduce new people to their brand — recognizing Communities are not for promotion.
• Findable in search engines. Content from public communities are indexed and discoverable through search on Google and Google+.

A best practice for merchants may be to couple Communities with Google+ businesses pages. While Google has yet to devise a mechanism where the two actually intersect, a business page can serve promotional functions, while Communities focus on topics of shared interests.

How to Create a Google+ Community

Step 1. Go to your Google+ profile and look for the Communities icon in the left-hand column. Click the icon to begin.

Step 2. You will be taken to the Communities page, where you are presented with several options.

• View Communities you currently belong to.
• Discover new Communities.
• See invitations from Google+ Circles members.
• Create a community.