The simplest option for those using Authorize.net as their payment gateway is to use the Authorize.Net SIM payment method, which is where the customer is sent to a special Authorize.net hosted payment form to enter their credit card data.  This strikes fear into the heart of many e-commerce owners as the general belief is that sending a customer off your site will scare them away / decrease conversions.

One client shared with me that Authorize.net SIM was their only option at the moment and hired me to solve: “How can we use Authorize.net SIM without hindering conversions?”

I’ll admit, from the outset I was not sure there would be much room for improvement given our limitations.  However, after careful planning and optimizing of their One Page Checkout Mod (from Altered Cart) and the Authorize.net form we achieved some surprising results – a 34% increase in customers moving from the Checkout Page to a Sale!

Listed below are the procedures used so that you might benefit from similar results.

1. Manage Expectations
2. Reduce the Information Requested
3. Maintain Consistency / Image

Manage Expectations

The first step is managing your visitor’s expectations by telling them what is going to happen next and why.  This helps eliminate any confusion or apprehension from the ‘unknown’.

So, by using Authorize.net SIM for checkout what are we doing?   We are sending the customer to a secure payment page to enter their credit card information.  Let’s make sure we communicate that clearly to them by changing both:

1. Payment method description (Located in Admin Side -> Payment Methods -> ‘Special Instructions’ field)

   

2. In the clients version of X-Cart 4.1.9 the label “disable_ccinfo_msg” also was used as it appears when a visitor selects ‘Credit Card’ on the checkout page.

The end result looks like this:

Now we are creating and managing the experience that the customer is being taken to a highly secure separate page for their payment information, so they can feel safe entering it.

Note: the Trustguard security seals were previously present.  For more information on reducing anxiety / increasing conversion with these see my post on Reducing Customer Anxiety.

Reduce Information Requested

When a customer reaches the Authorize.net SIM payment form, they’ve already signaled their intent to buy and provided us with all the information we need – except payment information (the most important!).

The primary purpose of this form becomes to capture payment information:  everything else can be removed.  Login to your Authorize.net account and click ‘Account -> Settings -> Payment Form -> Form Fields’.  Once here uncheck everything except ‘Invoice No’ and ‘Card Code’ (if you use it):

Again, you already have the customers information saved when they entered in your checkout page.  Asking for that again adds too many unnecessary fields and detracts from our managed experience of ‘securely entering credit card information’.

Maintain Consistency / Image

We want to ensure our visitors don’t feel like they’ve been sent somewhere deep in cyberspace to enter their credit card information just so it can be stolen.  To prevent this, we need to continue managing their expectations by maintaining consistency / branding during their interaction with the Authorize.net form.

Now, Authorize.net doesn’t give us a lot of flexibility in this area, but as we saw from the initial results, it appears to be enough.  To customize the rest of the payment form:

1. Color Settings – Leave these at default (Black, Blue, White)
2. Header – Here you need to place your logo (320 x 75 px is a good size) and a title name for the form “Secure Credit Card Payment Form”.

The code entered would be similar to:

<div style=”font-size: 18px;”><img src=”https://secure.authorize.net/mgraphics/logo_XXXXX.gif” alt=”" />
Secure Credit Card Payment Form</div>

Secure Credit Card Payment Form

Note: To show your logo you have to send it to Authorize.net by opening a support ticket and they will host it.   See http://www.authorize.net/support/merchant/Integration_Settings/Customizing_the_Hosted_Payment_Form.htm

3. Verified Merchant Seal – Yes we want to show this, check the box.

4.Footer – Here again we want to continue managing expectations, here is what we entered, yours should be something similar:

All set – the final result should something look like this:

Your credit card payment process is now optimized – congratulations!  Use your Google Analytics Goal Funnels report to evaluate the progress.  If you don’t have it set-up or aren’t sure if it is working properly you can request a Free Audit.

Additional Notes for Google Analytics

For those who have the Complete Analytics Package for X-Cart installed, your converting keywords information will still reported (it is not lost or overwritten by authorize.net sim).

If you are using Google Analytics (without the package) the reporting data is not affected by sending the customers to visitors to Authorize.net.  You may have issues with the tracking code itself, depending on what X-Cart version you have and how it was installed (many versions of X-Cart don’t have analytics installed correctly).  If you aren’t sure you can request a Free Analytics Audit here.

Best of luck!

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X-Cart Mod #1: Follow-up Autoresponder for X-Cart by Magnetic One

Did you know it cost 6 times as much to sell something to a new customer than a current one?   Did you also know that 68% of all business lost is lost from apathy after the sale?

The follow-up autoresponder prevents you from becoming victim of those statistics and helps boost your profits in several ways.

WHAT IT DOES:

The follow-up autoresponder allows you to send pre-written e-mails, automatically, to your customers “X” number of days after they place a sale, fill out a contact form, or completes a custom action you define.

There are all types of macros available at your disposal including the item(s) they ordered, customer information (name, address, etc) and even recommendations based on what the customer already ordered.

HOW THIS BENEFITS YOU:

In addition to increased sales there can be other key benefits: testimonials & customer feedback.

Many times customers will respond to your e-mails because if designed correctly, they should look and feel like a personal e-mail written directly by you.

These responses are invaluable in their use as testimonials (ask permission first), better customer inisight, and the opportunity to amend a problem that they might have never contacted you about (or used your business again!).

Example:

Let’s say you are selling laptops.  With the follow-up responder you can create a campaign (this should tie into your Marketing Plan) along the lines of:

Email 1: Thank You
Email 2: Checking in & Software Recommendation
Email 3: 10 Laptop Tips & Ram Upgrade Recommendation

Here you have a three touch follow-up.  The first e-mail you send goes out 15 days after their order is shipped and expresses your genuine thanks for their business and ordering “laptop” (which the follow-up responder will enter the exact laptop they ordered).  You can also state that you hope their expectations were met and if they need anything not to hesitate in contacting you.  Finally you will want to add a note that you will check in on them in two weeks (or three, etc).  For bigger impact the signature should be from the president if possible.

The second e-mail is where you again thank them for their business and check in on their satisfaction.  In this e-mail you can lightly suggest that other customers who bought “laptop” also enjoyed the following software items to greatly increase their productivity so I thought I’d share them with you.

Your final e-mail should include some relevant, HELPFUL content about their new laptop and then possibly recommend a RAM upgrade if they are looking for more performance (or maybe a new mouse, etc).

As you can see the ability to highly target and speak directly to your customers opens the revolving door of profitable, repeat business.  Some planning coupled with the power of technology goes a long way.

X-Cart Mod#2: Multiple Product Templates Package for X-Cart

Testing, testing, testing.  I’m sure you have heard of the value of testing important elements throughout your site with something like Google Website Optimizer. The Multiple Product Templates package for X-Cart is a great mod for making integration much easier.  It also allows you display your product(s) in their best possible vantage point.

WHAT IT DOES:

The Muliple Product Templates Packages for X-Cart lets you create different layouts for each of your products and categories.  This is done by allowing multiple “product.tpl”‘ files for each product you want a custom template for.  Same thing with categories.

HOW THIS BENEFITS YOU:

As mentioned above this mod is the trick to using Google Website Optimizer successfully.  In addition you get to present your product(s) in the best way possible instead of having them all squeeze into one “template” for a more personal experience with your customers.

Example:

Let’s continue with the computer store from above.  Perhaps they have a ‘Desktops’ category and a ‘Laptop’ Category.  For the desktops they want to display products in a 3 column format and for laptops, their site specialty, they want the single column format with the short description.  Multiple Product Templates Package makes this possible.  They could also use different size thumbnails on the desktops category and laptop category.

As you can see the range is quite broad at both the category level and product level.  This customization allows you to answer the individual questions your customers have about each product group and category, without over-cluttering your product pages by having them on the same “product.tpl” file.

I think the reason many people may not have this mod is its difficulty to explain properly – especially if you are not doing the web designing aspect of X-Cart yourself.  WebsiteCm has a 14 day return policy so you can try it out first hand to get a better picture if needed.

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What You Can Learn from John

I’m going to tell you a story about e-commerce store owner John and e-commerce store owner Chris. Both John and Chris decided to invest heavily in online marketing for their stores through several channels: comparison shopping engines (Shopping.com, Shopzilla, etc), Pay-per-click engines (AdWords, MSN, Yahoo) and some in-house e-mail specials to voluntary subscribers.

John is interested in measuring the performance of each channel while Chris simply hopes these campaign generate sales. Because John wants to be successful he is tagging all of his links so he can more closely monitor the campaigns performances in Google Analytics.

Tagging Links Pays Dividends to your Campaigns

Because he tagged all his links John discovers after the first month that Shopzilla generated heavy traffic but no sales and AdWords, Shopping.com and MSN all lead to several orders. Yahoo didn’t generate any sales but did lead to several e-mail opt-ins which he is tracking under Goal 2. Armed with this information John decided to stop using Shopzilla, and instead allocated those marketing funds towards AdWords, Shopping.com and MSN.

Chris is not tagging his links so he is unable to evaluate each channels performance like John was and spends the same amount each month on every channel. He doesn’t know that his money to Shopzilla is going down the toilet!

Don’t want to be like Chris? I didn’t think so!

What is Link Tagging in Google Analytics?

In short link tagging is adding special characters to the end of your URLs that will allows you to identify the traffic that uses it. You can easily tag your links with Google’s URL Toolbuilder. Google will ask you to specify the following things for tagging (three are required):

Campaign Source (referrer: google, msn, shopping.com)
Campaign Medium (marketing medium: cpc, ppc, email, banner)
Campaign Term (identify paid keywords here for Yahoo and MSN) optional
Campaign Content (used to differentiate between two competing ads) optional
Campaign Name (product, slogan, date)

To continue with our example John is preparing to tag his links for a Shopping.com feed he will be using. He decides to enter the following:

Campaign Source: shopping
Campaign Medium: ppc (since he is paying her click he is labeling it as ppc)
Campaign Term: not used
Campaign Content: not used
Campaign Name: q42009fx (this is his internal campaign tracking code).

Entering these variables in the Google URL builder with the page www.johnswebsite.com/product1.html he would end up with:

http://www.johnswebsite.com/product1.html ?utm_source=shopping&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=q42009fx

All set! In Excel for his shopping feed he could quickly append ?utm_source=shopping&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=q42009fx to all the product urls and have everything tagged.

What Does Link Tagging Actually Do?

When a link is tagged that means it will show up in Google Analytics under the variables you specified. So John would see the following if he looked at his Traffic Sources -> All Traffic Sources report after receiving traffic from these links:

This gives John the ability to monitor his traffic quality from Shopping.com: bounce rates, time on site, revenue, conversion rate, etc. Since everything is tagged he can easily view all channels performance to compare and contrast as illustrated from the earlier example.

What Should You Tag?

Almost everything! Here is a list to get you started (by no means exhaustive)

Shopping Engines
Google Base
Yahoo Paid Search
Bing Paid Search
E-mails (newsletters, blasts, signature links, etc)
Forum banners
Direct Mail Campaigns (using a vanity url with .htaccess redirect)

Tag, track and review your campaigns at least quarterly – if not monthly, for optimal profits. Good luck!

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This is a top-level plan that must answer the following:
1. The goal of the marketing
2. How you’ll meet these goals
3. The target market(s)
4. The channels you will use to reach these markets
5. Your overall marketing budget

By top-level I am referring to the fact you shouldn’t get too detailed here. This will help keep you focused while creating the plan. It will also make it easier for co-workers / employees to review. Time to begin.

1. What is the Goal of Your Marketing?

This is the action(s) you want your visitors to take: searching for your products, complete a sale, request more information, sign-up for a newsletter, call a phone number, etc. You are not limited to one action but they should fall under the same umbrella. The more measurable, the better (think: analytics!)

The goal of XYC company marketing is to increase awareness and sales of our newest product, widget x.

This is a great starting goal , the 2nd half which is directly measurable (# of sales, revenue generated). The awareness aspect is not as directly measurable but can still be tracked (visits, impressions, information requests).

2. How Will You Meet These Goals?

How will you meet these goals by convincing a prospect to choose your product or service? This is taken mostly from your value proposition / unique selling proposition: Your competitive advantage(s) or benefit(s).

This will be accomplished by positioning widget x as a superior quality alternative to the current competitor widget y by highlighting the cost savings and its 50% longer life span.

3. What Are Your Target Market(s)?

A common mistake for many e-commerce stores is trying to sell everything to everyone. It is important that you identify your target markets and make sure your marketing creative focuses on and communicates effectively to them (and just them!).

Our target market is males 28-35 who are interested in PCs, Gaming and Technology in general. We will also be targeting several current commercial vendors for wholesale distribution.

4. What Channels Will You Use to Reach These Markets?

How will you communicate your value proposition to your target markets? Choosing the right channels is just as important as the message itself. While initially you might not know which ones generate the biggest profits – with continued monitoring (analytics!) the savvy business owner will ramp up the achievers while shutting off the under performers.

E-commerce stores have a great advantage with online marketing: it is inexpensive and highly measurable. Here are the top 5 profit-boosting channels, these are of course nowhere near inclusive:
a. Analytics
b. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
c. Search Engine Optimization
d. E-Mail
e. Website / Landing Pages

For planning purposes it might be a good idea to have your channels in a bulleted list
• Google AdWords
• Yahoo Search Marketing
• Microsoft Ad Center
• Shopzilla
• Shopping.com
• Google Base
• Google Analytics
• YouTube / Videos
• SEO
• Blog Reviews
• Promotional Givaways
• Direct Mail Postcards
• E-mail

5. What is Your Overall Marketing Budget?

Whether a fixed amount or a % of project revenues you need to have a marketing budget to keep your channels accountable. Also keep in mind it costs 1/6th as much to sell something to a current customer than to acquire a new one. Follow-up marketing & exceeding expectations are two explosive profit weapons left on the table by many online businesses.
15% of projected revenues will be budgeted for marketing.

Put them all together and you get:

The goal of XYC company marketing is to increase awareness and sales of our newest product, widget x. This will be accomplished by positioning widget x as a superior quality alternative to the current competitor widget y by highlighting the cost savings and its 50% longer life span.
Our target market is males 28-35 who are interested in PCs, Gaming and Technology in general. We will also be targeting several current commercial vendors for wholesale distribution. We will be reaching these markets by effective use of:

• Google AdWords
• Yahoo Search Marketing
• Microsoft Ad Center
• Shopzilla
• Shopping.com
• Google Base
• Google Analytics
• YouTube / Videos
• SEO
• Blog Reviews
• Promotional Givaways
• Direct Mail Postcards
• E-mail

15% of projected revenues will be budgeted for marketing.
Now that you have taken time to carefully put your strategy together, set it aside – save it for tomorrow and review it with fresh eyes. Once you approve it, THERE IS NO TURNING BACK. This strategy MUST be committed to for at least six months – end of story. Changing it only dilutes your message and completely deflates your marketing (= lost profits).
So think long and hard about your strategy but once you’ve mind up your mind – DO NOT CHANGE IT.

Key Takeaway from Play 3:

Create a marketing strategy you believe in and stick to it for at least six months.

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Very often times you can find your value proposition hidden in your about us / contact-us pages. That is a good place to start digging.

What exactly is a value proposition?
A value proposition is a company statement or theme that answers the following: Why should I buy from you instead of a competitor (or find an alternative solution)?

This is a question that all of your visitors ask themselves, half of the time subconsciously, and must be addressed for business success.

A value proposition is not an opportunity for a vague “We offer the lowest prices and have the best customer service” pitch (who doesn’t?). It should instead focus on distinct benefits that speak directly to your target audience (in their terminology) and differentiates you from competitors as clearly the optimum choice to meet their needs.

Claims should be substantiated and/or quantified.

Example:

No – Xyz is a painting supply company offering the lowest prices

Yes – Xyz was rated #1 by Painters Choice Magazine for best pricing and overall value.

How do I create or refine my value proposition?
To create your value proposition you need to answer: Who is my target customer/market and why should they buy from me instead of a competitor? Try to think like your customer and what their needs / worries might be. Make sure you are honest and do not try to be all things to all people.

Focus on your customer. Remember, the more quantitative and exclusive your value proposition is, the stronger affect it will have on your bottom line. Use reviews, testimonials and success stories to support your value proposition.

For more help, download the Squeeze Juice Value Proposition Template at the end of this article.

Help! We have a couple value propositions and we can’t decide which one to use! / Ok, I’ve created my value proposition, now what?

Time to test! Take your value proposition(s) on over to your Google AdWords account and set-up an Ad Group with relevant keywords and use each value proposition as a specific ad. Example:

Value Proposition – “Xyz offers a 5,000 color “no-drip” paint selection for canvas artists and was rated #1 by Painters Choice Magazine for besting pricing.”

Alternative Value Proposition – “Xyz offers a 5,000 color “no-drip” paint selection for canvas artists and was rated #1 by Painters Choice Magazine for overall value.”

To test these we might try the following ads (make sure the under campaign settings the option ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’ is selected!)

5000 No-Drip Paint Colors
Choose From Over 5000 Colors
#1 Best Pricing by Painters Choice
www.XyzPainting.com

5000 No-Drip Paint Colors
Choose From Over 5000 Colors
Painters Choice – #1 Overall Value
www.XyzPainting.com

You can test as many variations as you’d like – just keep in mind the more testing the longer you’ll have to wait for your results! The ad that receives the highest click-through-rating / conversion rate is your winner and gives you a solid place to start.

To further assist you I have created a Value Proposition Template Worksheet that you can use to help you uncover your value proposition.

Key Takeaway from Play 2

For success online (or off) you must identify and clearly express your value proposition, through every stage of your business & customer interaction.

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Why Analytics?

Analytics is an integral key to online success – without it you might as well close up shop now. Yes, it is that important. Let me make it clear: IT IS THAT IMPORTANT.
What exactly is analytics? Well, it has many definitions depending on who you ask but for this post we will define it simply as:

The proper collection, reporting and review of visitor interactions throughout your website to improve performance & satisfaction.

What does analytics tell you?

From a top level view:
1. What is working in your business, website & message
2. What isn’t working in your business, website & message

When you ask the right questions and use the right analytics tools you quickly discover:

1. Why your AdWords or PPC campaigns are having trouble
2. Where your most valuable customers are coming from (and how to get more)
3. What online advertising channels are wasting your money
4. How your e-mail campaigns measure up and what to improve
5. What landing pages are working and the ones that need immediate help

And much more.

What analytics tools should you be using?

Well there are quite a few out there but I will touch briefly on several that I have used and work well:

Google Analytics – Well known as the best free in-depth analytics tool with many powerful features including AdWords linking, motion charts and custom reports just to name a few! X-cart has an option for enabling this so be sure that is turned on. Unfortunately that doesn’t really cover it – if you want to ensure your coverage just request your Free 7-Point Analytics Audit Report.

Web Logs – Your web logs provide a great source of data but you need to use a good log analyzer to really uncover the important stuff. Web log storming is a great tool and I’m sure there are some good free ones out there.

Statcounter.com – Great ‘hit counter’ resource. Statcounter shows you (in somewhat real time) each visitor and what they clicked on. Helps you quickly uncover any error pages or problems with your site. They have a free and paid version. (You can’t track HTTPS pages with the free version).

ClickTale.com – Lets you see your visitors’ mouse movements like you were at their computer! Their javascript tag captures visitor interaction on your site and plays it back as a movie so you can see how they moved around your site. Great for evaluating landing pages and overall usability. They offer both a free version and paid.

Crazyegg.com – Crazy egg is a ‘lighter’ version of clicktale in that it shows you where users clicked (even if it is not a link – great for discovering things visitors mistake as clickable) and generates heatmaps based on this data.

That covers collecting & reporting but those two alone won’t improve your website. You need to review your data. This can be difficult at first and you can definitely fall prey to information overload – but we will try to sidestep that.

Reviewing Your Analytics Data

The most important concept to grasp with analytics is to ask questions. You need to become a master detective that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame if you wish to generate more sales. Use the data to try and answer those questions. The more specific your question – the more actionable you can be on that data. Let’s do an example:

Question: What is my conversion rate?
Answer: .75%. This doesn’t help us much yet. It is safe to say that whatever this number is you want to improve it, so let’s ask a more specific question.

Question: What is my organic traffic conversion rate?
Answer: .50%. Now we are getting somewhere – this tells us right away that something needs to be investigated with your organic traffic because the conversion rate is 50% lower than your sites average.

This will lead us to another question

Question: What are the individual search engine conversion rates?
Answer:
Google: .10%
Bing: .70%
Yahoo: .70%

Holy cow what is going on with my Google traffic? What keywords are generating the most traffic from Google? What are the top landing pages from Google? Do they match well? – These questions would hone in directly to an actionable problem that you can now address.

Key Takeaway From Play 1

Ask specific questions to uncover what has worked (and what hasn’t) so far in order to build your marketing strategy around this information. At the very least – even if you can’t make use of it or don’t understand your data now you should still be collecting it. That way when you can (or hire someone else who can) analyze your data you have plenty of history to review.

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We will answer the following questions:

• What is customer anxiety / apprehension?
• Why is this a problem?
• How do I reduce anxiety to increase sales?
• Where should I place my security logos?
• What security logos should I use?

What is customer anxiety / apprehension?

Identity theft. Credit card information stolen. Spam e-mail, telemarketers. These are just a few thoughts of terror than run through visitors minds as they shop on the web. With more identify protection companies such as LifeLock and Identity Guard on the rise, consumers are bombarded with commercial messages highlighting the fear and horror stories of digital shopping.

Anxiety is all mental – meaning in the customers mind. Because of this it is very subjective – what may be scary to one visitor may be completely overlooked by another. And of course you are not scared of your own site because you know who runs it! This “inside the glass” view can lead to the false assumption that your customers feel safe on your site because you do. Do not fall into this mindset.

When it comes to e-commerce stores anxiety is most present in the cart and checkout pages, as well as any newsletter sign-up or registration pages.

Why is this a problem?

Lost sales. It is that simple. In a recent PayPal survey 21% of respondents abandoned their cart due to credit card security concerns. And that was just the cart page – no data was collected on checkout or registration pages.

How do I reduce anxiety to increase sales?

There are many ways you can reduce your visitor anxiety and start increasing sales. Here are some actions you can take right now to reduce apprehension on your site.

1. Clean professional looking site
2. Large phone number prominently displayed
3. About Us page with photos of staff
4. Contact Us page with physical address listed (or place address in footer)
5. Use of third-party credibility indicators such as Trust Guard, Verisign, BBB
6. Making sure your HTTPS pages work and the lock icon displays in the browser
7. Reducing the number of information requested from your visitors (ie – not requiring a phone number if possible)
8. Clear and prominent privacy policy
9. Clear and prominent return policy

Where should I place my security logos?

Because anxiety is greater on the cart and checkout pages as mentioned earlier they are two of the first places you should place your security logos.
On your cart page place it somewhere near the ‘Proceed to Checkout’ button. For your checkout page you will want your security seal near the credit card information field as this is when a customer is at their highest level of anxiety.
You can also try placing your seal(s) throughout the rest of your site – on your product & category pages, even up top near your logo if you really want to make a bold statement. Registration and e-mail capture pages are good locations for them as well.

What security logos should I use?

There are many security logo companies out there (Verisign, McAfee, Trust-Guard to name a few). I have yet to come across a “killer security seal” when testing however there are some common guidelines I have noticed:

1. GeoTrust / Commodo and Authorize.net seals are not enough to act as anxiety reducers

2. Neither are credit card or PayPal logos

3. While there is no “best seal” there are what I call ‘helpers’ and ‘downers’. Helpers are the security seal companies that help reduce anxiety whereas ‘downers’ are ones that either have minimal effect or a negative impact.

Helpers: BBB, McAfee, Truste, Trust Guard, Verisign
Downers: Anything else

To keep it simple: there are seals that help and seals that don’t. Seals that help have not shown any wide variance between themselves to declare one an overall “winner”.

In shopping for a seal, of the above ‘Helpers’ I would recommend TrustGuard. First, they have the best guarantee – increase your conversion rate or double your money back. As a certified landing page expert I can tell you strong guarantees are crucial.

Second – and most popular with many of my clients, is their flat-rate pricing. No pay per page impression nonsense or by orders like the other companies.

Finally, their seals have a neat javascript element that when a user’s mouse scrolls over them your company’s name, address, e-mail and phone number appear which helps generate instant credibility.

Reduce Anxiety – Increase Profits

Well now that you know how scary your website is are you going to make it a “safer place” and increase your sales?

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1. Not Tracking Conversions
2. Not Linking Your AdWords & Analytics Account
3. Not Opting Out of the Content Network
4. Not Using Relevant Ad Groups
5. Not Split-Testing & Improving Your Ads
6. Not Using Negative Keywords
7. Not Using Different Keyword Matching Options

1. Not Tracking Conversions

No AdWords campaign should be running without conversion tracking activated and the conversion script properly inserted into X-Cart. For detailed instructions see: How To Install AdWords Conversion Code in X-Cart.

2. Not Linking Your AdWords & Analytics Account

Using your AdWords dashboard to evaluate your account performance limits you to half of the reporting power you need. Google allows you to tightly integrating these two services by Linking Your AdWords & Analytics accounts.

This provides greater reporting information such as your Revenue generate, Cost and Return on Investment with AdWords – just to name a few. This is an excellent way to make sure your account is contributing positively to your bottom line.

You get much more insightful data from linking your accounts.

3. Not Opting Out of the Content Network

By default all campaigns are set-up with automatic enrollment into the Content Network. Because the Search and Content Network are two entirely different advertising methods is a standard best practice to keep their campaigns separated. This will help you in split-testing your ads, mentioned later.

To make sure you are opted out of the Content Network under ‘Campaign Settings’ make sure ‘The content network’ is NOT checked.

Make sure the content box is not checked

4. Not Using Relevant Ad Groups

Your Campaigns and Ad Groups need to be relevant if you want to avoid the inevitable ‘Google Tax’ of poorly organized campaigns. The simplest way I can recommend setting them up is to model your X-Cart stores category structure.

Think Category -> Subcategory -> Product = Campaign -> Ad Group -> Keywords.

As for how many keywords in an Ad Group, a good range is 1 – 30 relevant keywords. Obviously every situation is different and your mileage may vary.

5. Not Split-Testing & Improving Your Ads

Every Ad Group you set-up should always have two ads running against each other. Once you have a statistically signification winner you delete the loser and try to write a better ad. You would be surprised how little changes such as one word or display URL can make.

Correctly split testing your ads requires two steps
a. Make sure your ads settings are ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’ under the campaign settings.

b. Make sure are using a tool to confirm that the differences between the two ads are significant.

You can check manually for free using www.SplitTester.com and entering in the two ads CTRs and number of clicks.

If you prefer to save time you can use Winner Alert. I use Winner Alert because it e-mails me anytime I have a ‘winning ad’ so I can hop right in and throw up a new contender. While their webpage won’t win any design awards they have been around a long time and their tool works.

6. Not Using Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are keywords that will stop your ads from showing. They are a very important factor in AdWords and this is probably the most overlooked mistake.

How does it work exactly? Let’s say I am bidding on the broad keyword: custom wood cabinets because the client sells custom cabinetry. Using one of the two methods below I notice I have received a click from the search query : “custom wood cabinet instructions”.

Since the client does not offer or sell any instructions that would be flagged as a term for the negative keywords and I would add it to the negative keyword list (either at the Campaign level or Ad Group level). Yes this takes time, but there are tools to speed things up.

How do you find out exactly what the visitor typed in? Well there are two methods you can either use Search Query Reports or you can use your Google Analytics data (if you set it up to record this information). The Complete Analytics Package for X-Cart does include this function and a special spreadsheet tool to speed up the process (Yes that is a shameless plug!).

7. Not Using Different Keyword Matching Options

AdWords offers several keyword matching options: broad, phrase and exact.

They work as follows:

Broad matches any combination of the keyword(s) and can match even if the keyword(s) aren’t necessarily in the visitors search.

Phrase matches any search that contains the phrase entered in the quotes in that order. So “dell laptop” would match dell laptop but NOT laptop dell

Exact matches only exactly what is inbetween the brackets [].

Example
Broad- dell laptop would match: dell laptop, fix laptop dell, buy laptop dell online, etc
Phrase- “dell laptop” would match: dell laptop, buy dell laptop, dell laptop for sale, etc
Exact- [dell laptop] would match: dell laptop

Well there you have it – time to get to work on improving your AdWords performance!
It is best to think of your account like a sculpture. You should always be fine tuning and cutting away the excess while highlighting the better parts.

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Misconception#1: Google AdWords tracking and Google Analytics tracking are the same thing.

Both Google AdWords and Google Analytics use two DIFFERENT methods of capturing and reporting conversions – each which require their own special tracking script installed on your receipt / thank you page.

The Google AdWords Conversion Script (installation instructions available here) is used for reporting conversions in your AdWords Dashboard. The information your AdWords Conversion Script can report is simply:

a.) If there was a sale
b.) Amount of the sale (viewable in your AdWords Reports)

This is important when evaluating your AdWords account performance and will help you build on campaigns that are successful while optimizing or trimming down those that are not.

Google Analytics e-commerce tracking is a powerful reporting script that captures more relevant data – product name(s), shipping revenue, category, product revenue & integrates it throughout your reports. This information is the backbone of your analytics reporting and should be used when evaluating any website or online marketing decisions.

Misconception#2: Successful conversion tracking depends on the X-Cart order status

Google AdWords and Analytics tracking are completely independent of x-carts order processing system. Changing your order status from ‘Processed’ to ‘Complete’ does not update or modify the conversion information for Google AdWords or Analytics.

In order for a conversion to be successfully recorded your visitor MUST visit the ‘Receipt / Thank You’ page since that is where the tracking scripts are stored on your site. If a visitor leaves your site (say to a 3rd party payment processor like PayPal), completes the order – but DOES NOT return to the receipt page of your store after paying that sale will not be counted as a conversion.

For Paypal there is a way to automatically send your customers to the receipt page after completing a transaction. This will help you capture more transactions via Google Analytics (assuming it is properly configured – which it is not out of the box).

To enable this do the following:

1. Login to PayPal and click My Account -> Profile

2. In the right hand column click ‘Website Payment Preferences’

3. Turn on the first option ‘Auto Return’ and in the Return URL place

http://www.YOURDOMAINHERE.com/cart.php?mode=order_message&orderids=

That’s it. Place a test order to verify.

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Tracking your internal site search engine is a great way to optimize your e-commerce store. The standard X-Cart reporting of site search does very little in helping you better analyze your visitor patterns.

You can uncover more actionable data by including Site Search in your Google Analytics reports. For more help on actionable data checkout the Top 5 Actionable Analytics Reports For X-Cart post.

To accurately track internal site search for X-cart (using X-Cart’s standard search engine) you must follow two steps.

NOTE: If you are using Altered Carts Smart Search module you can skip to step 2.

Installation

1. First we must modify the code.

Navigate to skin1/modules/Google_Analytics/ga_code.tpl and replace those contents with the following tpl:

X-Cart ga_code.tpl for Google Analytics Site Search

Be sure to replace UA-XXXXXX-X with your actual Analytics account number.

Save the new file and upload it over the old (after backing up).

2. Now login to your Google Analytics account

• Click the ‘Edit’ link next to your profile and on the next page in the first box click the upper right corner that says ‘Edit’

Adjust your Site Search settings so they match below

All set! To view your new Site Search data navigate to Content->Site Search inside your profile

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