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Top 5 Merchant Must-Haves for a Successful Holiday Campaign

October 22, 2009 No comments

Executing a successful Q4 campaign is possible for online retailers, even if the season’s shopping activity is expected to decrease due to the poor economy. Merchants who wish to succeed this year will need to be strategic, and plan ahead. In today’s edition of the holiday blogging series, we’re going to touch upon 5 tools merchants must have if they wish to execute a successful holiday campaign.

According to a recent article from RBR.com, trends show shoppers plan to pinch pennies this holiday season, while InternetRetailer.com reports more holiday shopping will take place on the web. Armed with this knowledge, merchants can tailor their tools and resources to help them better perform during the fourth quarter of 2009.

Here are some suggested must-haves for merchants who wish to succeed this holiday season:

Must-Have 1: Update Terms and Conditions

It is important to update terms and conditions on a regular basis, especially during a busy holiday season when there are likely to be increased transactions. This is necessary so merchants don’t find themselves welcoming in sales generated through methods not permitted in their affiliate program in the first place (for example, incentivization, brand name bidding, or social media links through Facebook and Twitter). While it may seem like a hassle to update terms and conditions regularly, it is far less of a hassle than the alternative; if terms aren’t up to date, merchants have to have to go back, review transactions, and evaluate if the affiliate used methods that were in violation of program. In order to avoid this headache, merchants should clarify the promotional methods with affiliates – NOW!

Must-Have 2: Marketing Tools

Linking, Banner and Email Creatives are all marketing tools that can be employed to maximize a merchant’s potential for success in the upcoming holiday season. Deep or Direct Linking has been effective in allowing affiliates to help close a sale from a potential customer. Currently available in the Share Results software, it is being used by merchants like UGHH to allow affiliates to promote a specific product. Co-branded Banner Creatives are great sales tools for affiliates to use to promote and attract potential sales. These can include a specific product, a coupon code or even a call-to-action like “Free Shipping”. HTML Email Creatives have been great tools for merchants like Zoobooks, who’ve have great success with email marketers who promote their magazine subscriptions to US families. Having attractive email creative (including suppression files and suggested Subject lines) helps a merchant’s affiliates to target specific demographics.

Must-Have 3: Effective Landing Pages & Secure Shopping Cart

Effective landing pages complete with a secure shopping cart can mean the difference between closing or losing sale. A secure shopping cart convinces shoppers they’re spending money with the right retailer. A recent DigitalHome.ca article confirmed that shoppers are encouraged to pay attention to issues like security and Privacy Policy’s of a retailer’s site. Language promoting security of shopping cart on landing page reassures customers that their personal details are protected. Generally, affiliates also want merchants to have secure checkouts as well. After all, affiliates spend a lot of effort promoting for their merchants, and if traffic doesn’t convert, then that defeats the affiliate’s purpose. A comprehensive merchant will want to research shopping carts extensively, to find the ones that are most compatible with the given business model.

Must-Have 4: Coupon Codes

You may be asking yourself why coupon codes aren’t grouped in with must have #2, Marketing Tools. That’s because coupon codes are a niche unto themselves, which can be tapped by marketers all on its own. A recent eMarketer article highlights the popularity of coupons and points out that even the most affluent online shoppers are as likely to try and save a buck this holiday season. Merchants can use this intelligence to be more selective and offer competitive and even co-branded codes. Exclusive coupon codes can be segmented for affiliates who are known or have potential to be top performers.

Must-Have 5: Affiliate or Account Manager

Given the current economic climate and the fact that shopping activity is expected to be down for Q4, merchants are going to need more than just hot items to woo customers. Having someone communicate with affiliates to answer their needs, or an account manager to liaise with partners on the merchant’s behalf, is essential for creating dialogue, negotiating better placement of an offer, and answering affiliates who want exclusive promos to promote. A proficient affiliate manager can help facilitate the process by aligning merchants with the right affiliates, and working with both parties to achieve their desired outcomes; brand exposure, increased traffic, maximized conversions and profitability.

For more techniques, tools, tips and great resources to make sure you’re getting every last drop out of your affiliate marketing campaigns, be sure to come back to the Share Results blog. Until November 27, Share Results is throwing a big Holiday Blogging Event, packed with all kinds of seasonal information regarding trends for Q4, tips to get the best deals, consumer trends and how best optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns.

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Unique offers for Learned Affiliates

September 1, 2009 No comments

Entertainment Industry Degrees Affiliates in the education sector are constantly looking for a unique offers to promote to their prospective learners and students and with good reason. It’s the back to school season and there are plenty of people looking for ways to improve their way of life. Since this area has been gaining even more interest from affiliates, here are some merchants in this field that are offering niche opportunities.

eLearners is already a very well-known online edu lead aggregator, but they also have some more targeted opportunities for affiliates specializing in this sector. For instance, did you know eLearners has an Entertainment Industry Degrees portal with matching banner creative? The program also offers a variety of financial aid opportunities, including a couple new Spanish-language banner creative for the popular OnlineStudentFinancialAid.com to help affiliates that want to promote to a Spanish-speaking audience.

Affiliates earn $25-$40 per verified US lead when they promote. If you’d like to learn more, visit eLearners’ program description.

Another merchant gaining interest is the newly launched SnagAJob.com, the number source for hourly employment in the US. This is quite the popular job search affiliate program for those focusing on lead generation. A simple registration is all that’s required and there are English and Spanish landing pages available for affiliates to help promote to a wider audience of job applicants.

Finally, for affiliates that target parents with young kids, Zoobooks is a program that offers both a subscription and purchase of their products. PPC, coupon and email marketers will probably love this merchant this most, as they are high converting and offer a fabulous array of products for kids ages 2 to 12 years. Zoobooks is currently running two coupon codes including a short-term offer that runs up to October 31, and a long-term offer that is available until Valentines Day in 2010.

All of these merchants are big on US traffic, so, if you happen to cater to this market and specialize in education and career content, it’s a good idea to explore partnerships with them all. Have any other questions about these programs, feel free to comment on this blog or send us an email with more questions about promoting these products and services.

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Unique offers for Learned Affiliates

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The art of the field study

November 6, 2008 No comments

I’m Dan Russell, a member of the Search Quality team doing user experience research. This post is part of our ongoing series to talk about the Search Quality team at Google, showing a bit of what we do in the day-to-day course of improving the quality of the user experience.

The role of “user experience” research is to try and get the inside story on what people do when they search. We’re constantly asking: What’s the user’s experience of search? What works and doesn’t work for them? What are they looking for? What DO they want?

To understand the full richness and variety of what people do when they are using Google, we spend many hours in the field, watching people search and listening to what they say as they do this. We hear it when they’re happy, and when they’re terribly frustrated. And perhaps most importantly, we also pay attention to the things they don’t say — the inexpressible “gotchas” that slow users down or get in the way of their search.

It turns out that people are masters of saying one thing and doing another, particularly when it comes to nearly automatic behavior. We find that searchers often turn so quickly to Google that they don’t really think too much about what they’re actually searching for. It’s surprising, but often we’ll see people trying to find out something about a topic, but then never actually mention the topic itself. That is, there’s often a big discrepancy between what they’ll tell me (the human observer) they’re trying to do, and the search terms they enter into Google. One person I shadowed for the day spent ten minutes trying to find the schedule of the ferry that runs between San Francisco and Larkspur, but somehow only thought of adding the word “ferry” much later in their search.

We also study eye tracking. The eye makes a complex scan path over the search results, building up a composite picture of what is presented on the page. It’s clear that what actually happens is a very rapid scan and assessment of each result as they are seen. In those milliseconds between the eye landing on the first fixation and seeing a few results, all kinds of decisions and choices are made–nearly all of them subconsciously.

In this short video, you can see three different searchers all looking for the same thing (in this case, a child’s backpack). The red dot is the searcher’s gaze moving around on the search results page. Notice how methodically the gaze moves from result title to title, occasionally inspecting the snippet text to gain more detail about the result.

(Video courtesy of Kerry Rodden)

So the job of figuring out what people actually do when they search isn’t as simple as asking someone what they search for during the day. It’s basically impossible to give an accurate telling of what you saw (or didn’t see) on the results page while actively searching for a high quality results.

Memories of your own behavior are also notoriously unreliable. People’s search behavior in the lab is often different than when they’re at home or at work. This is a natural (and expected) side effect of lab studies: people will work especially hard to please a researcher. If we ask them to search for a pair of brown shoes they’d like to buy for themselves, in the lab they’ll find the first pair that seems reasonable and then stop, satisfied. If it was real, they would go on and spend more time. We still do lab studies, but we know what to watch for, and what to ignore.

Data from field studies gives us insight into how people respond to the Google experience in ways that we can’t otherwise measure.

For instance, in several field studies we discovered that many of the people who went to the previous version of the Advanced Search page had a strong, almost visceral negative reaction when the page appeared. The text of the original page had language that many people saw as intimidating–words like “Domain,” “Usage Rights” and “Safe Search” can be a bit much if you’re not sure what they mean.

The old Advanced Search page was a little off-putting (click on the image to see a larger version):

Based on our field studies, we dug more deeply into how people were actually using our Advanced Search page, and quickly discovered that, indeed, a large number of users were going to the page, and then leaving it without ever filling in any of the slots.

Armed with this insight from field studies, we redesigned the page, simplifying it by removing terms that were unclear to the average user (the word “occurrences,” for example, just didn’t mean anything to many of the Advanced Search page users), moving rarely used features (numeric range searches, date searches, etc.) into a part of the page that was expandable with a single click. That made them easy to get to for people who knew they wanted to search with those restrictions, but out of the way in a non-threatening way.

One of the other things we noted in the field study was that people often didn’t understand how the Advanced Search page worked. So we added a “visible query builder” region at the top of the page. As you fill in the blanks, the box at the top of the page fills in with the query that you could type into Google. It was our way of making visible the effects of advanced search operators.

The Advanced Search page post-redesign (click on the image to see a larger version):

The good effect of these changes quickly became clear. The number of users that bounced out of the Advanced Search page dropped significantly. Interestingly, the total number of Advanced Search page users didn’t increase significantly… at least not yet. By improving the UI on the page, we hope to attract even more searchers to the large range of search options available on Google.

In the end, this example shows the kind of insights that field studies can bring. As with the eye-tracking example, asking someone about their emotional response to a web page just isn’t a useful way to get that data. But watching them in situ, as they actually use Google to go about their daily search lives can reveal all kinds of remarkable, otherwise undiscoverable, and actionable insights into searcher behavior.

Posted by Daniel Russell, Uber Tech Lead, Search Quality