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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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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As an X-Cart store owner you should have a properly functioning Analytics system (X-cart statistics do not count). Not having one is like not having financial reports for your company. You have no way of knowing if your business is successful or in need of dire help!

Because Google Analytics offers more reports than you could possibly need it is easy to become lost and thus end up ‘avoiding’ your reports. To help combat this I have created a list of 5 reports that you can use to improve your website today.

Listed below are the top 5 reports I have used with other clients to help them increase the performance of their stores. This is by no means an exhaustive or ‘best of’ list, but it is meant to help you get started in turning your Google Analytics reports in actionable data for improving your visitor experience.

It is important to note that these reports assume you already have Google Analytics set-up properly and are recording both your visitors & e-commerce transactions as well as proper segmentation & filtering. By default X-cart (up to version 4.2) does not have the correct set-up for the Google Analytics code. If your profile name is ‘www.yourdomainname.com’ then chances are your Google Analytics settings are not optimized either.

Using Google Analytics that is not set-up correctly is like reading a map upside down…you’ll end up somewhere, but nowhere near where you should be! For more information on proper Analytics set-up check out
The Complete Analytics Package for X-cart.

Ok time to start crunching reports, let’s begin!

1. Top Landing Pages Assessment

To access this report click Content->Top Landing Pages in the left hand column. We are interested in the first 5 results. Take a look at these pages as they’re your websites most popular point of entry. Is it what you expected?

Look at your bounce rates for these pages…are they higher than 50%? If so that is generally an indicator that something is amiss: either in your visitor acquisition strategy or your landing page design – or both.

You should then proceed to click on the link to find more information as to what issues it might be facing. In the example above page 3 might need some attention as its bounce rate is 62.23%. Clicking on that page will take us to more detailed view:

Now we are getting more information, but don’t quite have anything actionable yet. What we need to do is look at the entrance keywords for this page. That will tell us what keywords brought your visitors to this particular page. Click on the ‘Entrance Keywords’ link in the lower right portion of the page under ‘Landing Page Optimization’.

That will bring up something like this:

Here we have the list of keywords, both paid and non-paid (you can adjust this by clicking on either link to view on or the other) that visitors typed in and were brought to your page.

Are these keywords all closely related? Do they reflect the content on your landing page in its headline, images and body copy? If not that could explain the high bounce rates and means you should work on optimizing the page to better meet the “scent” your visitors are hunting.

From the report above it looks like the first term – which brings the most traffic – also has the highest bounce rate: 83.33%. In this case it was a result of two issues: first, the client was targeting a very broad keyword which typically will lead to higher bounces and second their headline was not very clear and did not contain this particular keyword.

Using this report from Google Analytics will help you improve the performance of your top high traffic landing pages. Since these are your ‘first impression’ pages it is essential they are operating at their best!

2. Top Traffic Sources Assessment

To access this report click ‘Traffic Sources -> All Traffic Sources’ in the left hand column – once there be sure to click the ‘E-Commerce’ tab like you see above. This report is telling you the top sources / mediums that sent traffic to your website AND how much revenue each source has generated as well as its e-commerce conversion rate.

Look at your top 5 sources / mediums, is it what you expected? Which of these 5 are generating the highest revenue? Can you expand traffic generated from this source? Why is one greatly outperforming the other?

These are just a few questions you’ll want to start asking about your results. Just like the a Top Landing Pages report you’ll want to click on a link to see more information about that source / medium at which point you can drill down to the keywords those visitors used and landing pages visited to help uncover performance issues.

3. Top Keywords Assessment

You can view this report by clicking ‘Traffic Sources -> Keywords’ in the left hand menu. You will then need to click the ‘E-commerce tab’ followed by the ‘Comparison’ button on the upper right. Here we see two reports for our top 10 keywords, their e-commerce conversion rate (compared to the site average) and their revenue generated (compared to the site average).

Looking at your reports are your top keywords performing as expected? Using the example above we can see that the number 1 keyword generates a good portion of revenue…but it’s conversion rate is low. We would want to click on that keyword to find out more information as to why that could be. Again we’d look at the same things: top landing pages and sources for this keyword.

Perhaps the highest landing page for this keyword has a high bounce rate – you would want to examine the content and presentation of that page, possibly explore testing new variations to try and lower the bounce rate and increase conversions.

Also, we want to ‘mine’ this list for new converting keywords you might not know about. Clicking on the ‘Table’ view in the upper right corner and then clicking on the ‘Revenue’ column will sort the keywords in order from most revenue generated to none. Carefully eyeball this list (top 50 or so) and see if there are any keywords you are surprised by.

Are you targeting the successful keywords in your PPC campaigns and SEO efforts? If not it’s something to consider given they’ve already proved they can make the sale!

4. Checkout Process Assessment

You can view this reports by clicking on ‘Goals -> Funnel Visualization’ in the left hand menu. This is a great report because it shows you visually how your checkout process is doing. The only tricky thing about this funnel is that it is very easy to set-up improperly and not know it because it will still show some results. Proper set-up is key!

You will quickly be able to spot errors or problems in your checkout process. Is it too long? If visitors are dropping off at a particular page be sure to examine that page for any problems with assurances, anxiety, length and even technical issues.

From the example above it appears this client has some issues to workout on both the cart and checkout pages. The client was having a sale in which customers had to ‘add to cart’ to see the price which would help explain for some of the drop-offs. They also had their shipping calculator on the cart page so perhaps shipping rates are too high? Maybe the call to action isn’t large or clear enough on the cart page?

These are just a few questions you can start to ask as you examine your checkout process. You may then want to start testing variations of your checkout pages to help fix poorly performing aspects.

5. Site Search Assessment

You can view this report by clicking ‘Content -> Site Search -> Search Terms’ in the left hand column. This report shows us the top search terms used on your stores internal search engine. This is your visitors TALKING TO YOU! They’re telling you exactly what they want or are looking for on your site so its important you pay close attention to it.

Keep an eye out for non-widget terms such a help, support, instructions, contact, price, etc. which indicate your visitors are having trouble finding information on your site. Looking at the ‘% Search Exits’ column tells you who is leaving immediately after their search (meaning they didn’t see any relevant results). If these search terms are for widgets you don’t offer that may not be cause for alarm (but maybe an opportunity to expand into a new market), but if they are searching for widget you carry and leaving you will want to drill down on the search terms to uncover what is going on.

From the example above it doesn’t appear the site search engine is used a lot, this could be due to poor location or excellent site structure. In this clients case it was the latter. Clicking on the ‘Ecommerce’ tab will show you what (if any keyword) searches resulted in a conversion and is a great way to find new keywords to describe your widget(s) that you might not have thought of!

I hope you found this helpful! For desk reference you can Download the Printable PDF Guide Here

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