A merchant’s landing/destination page can be thought of as a window into their store where a first impression is made upon potential customers.

It is a chance to inform, gain the trust of, and win over an audience who may or may not have heard of you before. It can also be the difference between a customer leaving, never to return; or in building a lasting relationship with your site.

Below then is the first in a series of posts of advice that we at CPC Strategy provide some of our merchants that all retailers should look out for in making sure that their landing pages lean toward the latter scenario.

After all, only so much can be accomplished in driving quality, relevant traffic to your site; the rest has to be done on the merchant’s page itself.

And since you’re likely paying for each visitor to your site, you want to ensure that that first impression is indeed a memorable one.

We’ll start with a few of the odd ones (they’re ordered in importance ) and finish off the rest at a later date:

1. Page Load Time – One sure way to guarantee that no purchase is made by a user upon clicking through to your site is if your page takes an inordinate amount of time to load, as research has shown:

…16% of people leave the page if it loads longer than 10 seconds and only every second person will wait more than 15 seconds…

In general then, the quicker the load time the better. Longer load times can easily result in lost visitors, thus translating to a reduction in your overall bottom line.

Try to keep large images and flashy effects to a minimum, or even eliminate them altogether. If complex coding is absolutely required, it should be reserved to other sections of the site, but as a rule of thumb, your goal should be to minimize the size/loading time of your landing page as much as possible.

For further details of the importance of load time and optimization tips, be sure to take a look at what Google has to say on the matter.

3. Good Image(s) – One of the biggest deterrents for many when making online purchases compared to more traditional means is the inability to physically feel and “test out” the purchase.

The best way then to alleviate this is with a big, clear image of the item being sold, giving users a chance to really feel as if the item is right in front of them, greatly increasing the chances of a user applying the principle stated in #3.

Descriptions such as shapes, sizes, colors, etc. can all be handy as well, but nothing can beat a nice, clear picture. Multiple images are preferable, though may not necessarily be realistic for those with massive amounts of products.

One particular merchant of ours, Titanium-Jewelry saw their sales practically double after revamping their image system to the one seen below (click to view):

So while it might be a major project to rehaul an entire library of your product images, for certain merchants it may just be worth the investment as was the case with Titanium Jewelry.

In our next post, we’ll cover more about not just selling specific items, but selling your company as well.

Until next time, we’ll see you on the engines–with a nice, simple landing page hopefully.

-Tien

Google Base and Google Product Search are great tools that can drive relevant, and free traffic to your product listings.

While we’re sure everyone reading is familiar with the potential value of these services, my conversations with merchants of all sizes lead me to believe that there is definite confusion regarding the best way to track traffic from Base and Product Search using Google Analytics.

The confusion doesn’t appear limited to just webmasters either. Google’s own Base team posted an entry on their blog last year suggesting the following:

At first glance, it would seem tracking listings from Google Base would be simple. However, since Base listings often appear within the regular search results on Google, it can be tricky to differentiate traffic from the two sources. One way to differentiate traffic is to create unique landing pages on your website specifically for Base listings. You can do this by simply creating two versions of the same page on your website, but giving one a slightly different name. Here’s an example:

Regular landing page: http://example.com/page1.html
Unique Base landing page: http://example.com/page2.html

By creating two versions of the same page on your website and submitting the unique landing page URLs to Base, Google Analytics can show you exactly how much traffic is being sent to your website from Base.

Creating separate pages for Base Traffic? Not only would this be extremely time consuming, particularly for merchants with high amounts of product listings, but it stands in direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines according to Google, and ultimately would result in a drop in natural search traffic/relevancy-

So what is a merchant to do? Luckily the engineers working on Google’s Analytics product had good foresight and have a very simple method to create custom source attribution in Google Analytics. Simply append this string:

&?utm_source=googlebase&utm_medium=comparsionshopping

to the end of your URLs, and Google Analytics will be able to track any incoming traffic originating from Google Base.

For more information on how UTM Attribution works check out the Google Analytics Q and A documentation.

Happy Tracking!

Greetings merchants and fellow comparison shopping engine enthusiasts,

We at CPC Strategy would like to welcome you to our newly created blog, where we promise to keep the content fresh, and the insights deep.

As a full service comparison shopping/data feed management consulting company, we pride ourselves in being a leader in providing high level, personalized services toward our clients and their needs (be sure to check out our merchant center for more information).

The goal of our blog then will be to attempt to reveal some (but not all ) of the findings that we’ve uncovered over the years as a complementary experience to our current merchants, along with those interested in learning more about one of the fastest growing spaces on the web.

Our founding team consists of several members who came from the comparison shopping engines themselves, so you can be sure that our knowledge is based on real world experiences, rather than on hearsay and conjecture.

Future entries are to include:
*the importance, and keys of having a quality site and landing pages
*dispelling certain myths behind keyword bidding
*a simple method  to make product cuts with minimal sacrifices in overall revenue

So feel free to add us to your RSS’s, bookmarks, or even tell a friend or family member about us, and we’ll make sure to keep you in on the skinny with unfiltered, uncut content, as we try to make the comparison shopping industry work for you.

We’ll see you on the engines (literally).

-Tien (tien at cpcstrategy.com)
Director of Marketing & Technology