Browsing www.marksandspencer.com you can’t but help notice the adjustment they have made to hovering over their navigation – they dim the lights, or put slight more descriptively they dim the background of the site.

The objectives here are clearly designed to draw the customers attention to the active and most important content – the navigational options. 

Does it work?  I’m not sure if it works or if its distracting, but it’s interesting.

I tried to find other examples or blog posts on case studies to see if other retailers had tested and shared any performance stats – unfortunately I wasn’t able to find anything, but I thought it worth sharing this example.

In device research carried out by Google found 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV. 

Two primary ways we multi-screen: In understanding what it means to multi-screen, the report presents two main modes of usage:

• Sequential screening where we move from one device to another to complete a single goal
• Simultaneous screening where we use multiple devices at the same time

The report found:

• 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal
• There are two main modes of usage Sequential and
• Simultaneous
• 98% of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task
• 77% of viewers watch TV with another device in hand (this is me!)
• Search is a critical connector as we move between devices (this is not surprising!)
• 80% of the searches that happen on smartphones are spur-of-the-moment, and 44% of these spontaneous searches are goal-oriented.

See the full post on Navigating the new multi-screen world: Insights show how consumers use different devices together on the Google Mobile Blog or check out all of the findings and what they mean for businesses by downloading the full research report.  

Last year Google told us that 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV.

Enhanced Campaigns

We live in a multi-screen, constantly connected mobile world, and marketers need to be able to easily reach people across all devices – to this end Google have announced the release of Adwords Enhanced Campaigns.  With a number of changes and features wrapped up in the new enhanced campaigns, the core change is the impact on the campaign management of mobile.

Enhanced Campaigns is a considerable change that Google are introducing and one which will have different impacts across different businesses and agencies, though two things that are likely to be  universal is a change in advertisers mobile (tablet and mobile) strategies and an increase in Google revenues from mobile search.

Coming to Account near you: Enhanced Campaigns Scheduled Roll-out

• Enhanced campaigns were announced by Google on 12 Feb 2013 and will become available to all advertisers in the coming weeks.
• Google will update AdWords Editor by the end of February to support the new enhanced campaigns.
•  The option to upgrade to the new enhanced campaigns will be voluntary until June 2013, after which all campaigns will be migrated to the new standard. This also means that all new campaigns will be created as Enhanced Campaigns and all legacy campaigns will be updated automatically.

With enhanced campaigns are coming a number of operational tweaks impacting ads, conversion tracking (search funnels), extension management, location targeting etc depending what areas of Adwords an advertiser is using, but the fundamental change is the way Google are now going to be treating mobile and tablet segmentation.

• Desktop and Tablets are now consider one device while mobile can no longer be targeted independently.
• Mobile can still be switched off in a fashion though by default new campaigns will target mobile at the same bid as desktop.
• Mobile bids will be based on multiples of desktop and tablet bids.
• Different ads can be created for desktop/tablet and mobile devices, but are controlled from same campaign.
• Bids can be adjusted based on user location.
• Sitelink management has been enhanced with more granular options.
• New conversion tracking tools such as search funnels for tracking for assisted conversions have been enhanced.

The below post will be short and is not designed to be a complete review of every feature and change coming from the rollout of enhanced campaigns, rather I am just going to focus on some early thoughts on the changes and impact coming through the aggregation of desktop, tablet and mobile into one campaign.

A number of other changes are being rolled into this significant Adwords upgrade so I would recommend advertisers do further reading – a simple Google Search for Adwords Enhanced Campaigns is a good start along with a read of Google resource centre introduction.  

Desktop, Tablet and Mobile

To date advertisers could target campaigns at either desktop, tablet or mobile collectively or individually and with varying degrees of operating system and device segmentation.

This type of segmentation meant many advertisers split desktop, mobile and tablet into individual accounts and campaigns and managed them independently.  For those advertisers who did not have a mobile or tablet strategy they could easily exclude mobile and tablet traffic.

Once Enhanced campaigns are standard advertisers will not be able to split desktop and tablets and mobile will be opted-in automatically.  

• At a campaign level you have to decide if we want to target mobile or not.
• You can no longer exclude or set up a separate bidding strategy for tablets.
• The adjustment of Mobile bids is somewhat crud - it achieved through a multiplier of your standard bid - for example at a campaign level you can choose to decrease or increase ALL bids by a percentage.
• In order to turn mobile off you need to set the multiple bid adjustment to -100% (there is no off/opt-out option!).

Some Pros:

• Advertisers will now be able to adjust bids by location at a campaign level.
• Previously site links operated in one block but now you are able to see performance by each individual site link.
• Site links will now also be available at adgroup level as well as campaign level allowing for more control over them.
• For desktop and tablet ads call extensions with a Google forwarding phone number will now be free, previously this was charged at £1 per call.
• Although not available at the moment, Google have said advertisers will eventually be able to track across devices seeing the contribution of mobile to desktop. Google AdWords Conversion Tracking tags will need to be implemented on site for this to work.

Some Cons:

• Reporting of performance by device, whilst still do-able will be a lot more time consuming.
• Whilst advertisers will be able to view tablet performance individually they won’t be able to optimise for it separately, therefore if an advertiser wants to increase visibility on tablet devices they will also be increasing their visibility on desktop. And vice versa.
• Advertisers will no longer be able to create tablet specific ad copy or site links, or up weight tablet activity at certain times of the day/day of the week.
• Advertisers will not be able to target mobile independently, to “turn mobile off” and only target desktop and tablets you need to bid mobile -100% as a multiplier, targeting mobile will automatically target desktop and tablets.
• Mobile bid management is achieved through a percentage multipler, not unique bids - the range is between -100% and 300%.
• Expect to see CPCs increase due to increase in exposure in both tablets and mobile.

Early Stage Next Steps:

• Set a reminder for when the permanent switch over will happen - June 2013.
• If you are currently excluding tablet traffic, prioritise a user experience review as from June 2013 you will be receiving Adwords tablet traffic.
• Set all campaign  to -100% on mobile bidding if you do not want to appear on mobile.
• Start to consider a mobile strategy and user experience if this traffic is going to be important to you or you want to treat them differently.
• Consider changing at least 1 campaign to enhanced so you can play with it.
• Look into bid by location - is there more value depending on where the customer is located and thus are you willing to pay more.

Summary

From an advertisers point I think Google have added some good features with a number of granular targeting options, but by the same merit I currently feel they have removed important targeting options used to best manage desktop, tablet and mobile independently and have further compounded this by only allowing you to manage mobile cpcs via a multiplier.

A cynical view would be Google are making some of these changes in order to increase CPCs. Last month Google CEO Larry Page was asked on an earnings call if he thought that mobile CPC’s would be going up any time soon, to which he responded:  

“I am very, very optimistic about it. I think that [mobile] CPCs will improve … Obviously; I mentioned that we are working to simplify our ad system for advertisers. In the light of all these changes and I am excited about our plans there:  We don’t have anything to announce today but I am very excited about our efforts there. I think that we will make rapid progress in that area.”

For consumers I think overall enhanced campaigns will be a good thing.  To date a number of advertisers have avoid investing in delivering a good tablet and mobile experience simply by turning off Adwords traffic for both tablet and mobile.

The change will likely force advertisers to review their tablet and mobile strategies and with this look to invest in improving the customer experience. 

A note on bid multiples

This needs to be clarified as I have not read it explicitly but it appears the bid multipliers work a little like compound interest. The example given is:

Say you’ve set a £1 Max CPC adgroup bid. You decide to add a +20% adjustment for London, and -50% adjustment for Fridays. Your resulting bid for a search that occurs in London on a Fridays will be £0.60. Here’s the math:

• Starting bid: £1
• London adjustment: £1 x (+20%) = £1.20
• Friday adjustment: £1.20 x (-50%) = £0.60
• Resulting bid for searches in London on Friday: £0.60

In this examples it appears on the first bid is based off the base keyword bid, after this each rule impacts the last bid adjustment.  This may not be a concern but should be noted.

Changes to Google Shopping as it moves to Product Listing Ads

Google Shopping is moving from a free channel to paid. Here’s a summary of what’s going to happen and how merchants will be affected: 

• February 13th has been pencilled as the switch on date of the new listing policies and subsequent enforcement of their new rules (the rules haven’t been announced as yet).
   
•  On this date they are going to start integrating the Product Listing Ads (PLA ads) and the free merchant centre results within Google Shopping. This will result in a drop in traffic for the free listings. I expect most merchants not using the PLAs will see a major drop in clicks within a few weeks of the live date of the new structure due to the way these algorithms affect results.
   
• The current shopping results will remain as they are under the shopping tab on Google. The content will obviously be switched from free to paid for.
   
• The ‘compare prices’ element will remain, but you’ll need to be paying for your traffic to be listed.
   
• The phasing out of the free listings will be completed by mid/end of Q2, so by summer the free listings will no longer be available. It must be assumed by the time the free listings have disappeared there will be very little free clicks as their algorithms are changing.
   
•  The major ‘implied benefit’ to the new system is that merchants can change positioning and traffic volumes through CPC bids.
   
• The organic search results within Google will no longer show the shopping results and the PLA ads on the same page. The new format will be to show a ‘commercial unit’ at the top of the organic listings / within the Google Sponsored links. The proposal is to have a maximum of 6 product ads shown in there.
   
•  The ads that are shown are going to stay the same as they are currently. There will be no links within the ‘unit’ to the compacted ‘compare prices’ pages and will simply be links to the merchants’ products.
   
•  Within the unit itself Google are proposing having extra detail filters to further narrow down the search. This however will be dynamic and of course reliant on the quality of the product titles for keywords that they can used as filters. This of course means that the quality of the feed will be even more important.
   
•  The news to date is the current interface for the PLA is not going to change much, there isn’t going to be much in the way of extra reporting. Essentially Google have strongly suggested that merchants use their own tracking for this as well as using Google Analytics to track performance.
   
• Expect the minimum bids required to appear in the ‘commercial unit’ for popular search terms to potentially be high as there are only going to be 6 spots.
   
• You can’t set individual CPC rates at a product level, but can set ad groups with differing CPC amounts (this should give a hint as to how to work around this!)
   
• There is a maximum number of ad groups of 10k for the PLA area.

I read recently “the purpose of a CTA is to move the customers mind from a passive state to an active state”. The following is a quick set of pointers predominately focused around ecommerce retail ‘buy now’, ‘add to basket’, ‘add to cart’ etc related CTAs.

A CTA needs to clearly stand out from the page, the user should not have to look for the CTA, it should be there, conveying a clear message of what to do next and what they can expect to happen.  In the case of ecommerce sites, the purchase related CTAs, should leave the shopper in no doubt about the next step they need to take to make a purchase.

A quick search online will provide dozens of blog posts providing information and examples of both good and bad CTAs.  Below are the 5 key elements it is commonly agreed should be considered.

Colour

All CTAs whether asking a user to buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, download a white paper or bookmark a page/product needs to stand out.  The button should stand out from other icons or images on the page, so a colour should be chosen which contrasts, often bright colours are chosen for this reason.

It’s also very interesting to note and consider the impact of the colour chosen on a shopper’s psychology.   Below is an interesting chart taken from seosmarty on call to action colours, which concludes that orange is the best to use.

The Colour Of Call-To-Action

Language

As the name states, we are creating a call to ACTION, so the language needs to forfil two key functions, convey the action the shopper is expected to take and direct them as to what will happen next. 

The language used should start with a verb that conveys action; ‘buy’, ‘add’ etc. Shoppers expect to see phrases like ‘add to basket’ and ‘buy now’ and ‘add to cart’, though do not be afraid to test alternative wording and review Click-through and Conversion rates.

Size

Commercially the CTA is the most important link on the page, its ultimately what I would call the ‘money link’ so it needs to stand out and be visible, and while it should not dominate the page, the shopper should not have to go looking for it or be unsure of its purpose when considered among the other buttons or links on the page. 

The general rule without going overboard is the bigger it is, the more chance it has of being noticed.

Position

The position of a CTA is critical, while keeping it above the fold is obvious, you should also consider where the user expects to see it. In the case of ecommerce, shoppers have been trained on product pages for example, to generally expect to see the ‘add to basket’ button on the right, usually somewhere near the price.

The heat map below shows the high level of attention paid to the ‘Add to basket’ button on the John Lewis website.

It should be noted: The John Lewis heat map was taken from a study in august 2009 “What people see before they buy: Design guidelines for e-commerce product pages with eye tracking data” carried out by CX Partners, and they reported participants commented that  the ‘Add to basket’ button did not standout enough due to its grey colour which is the same colour as other content on the page.

John Lewis has since updated their ‘Add to basket’ button.

Space

It’s important that a CTA stands out, and one of the key ways to achieve this, is to give it a level of dominance over other links or possible CTAs on the page.  You do not want shoppers to be confused or distracted by other links or buttons, so by giving the ‘add to basket’ CTA its own bit of space, supported by all the points above it will be a clear which button you want the shopper to click.

CTAs should immediately be visible as soon as the user requires them.  In the case of a product page, it is likely to only play second fiddle to the product image.  The CTA should factor in all of the above to various degrees, and ecommerce and web design managers should constantly be testing the various elements looking for the best conversion rates.

As it is well documented, competitors are only a click away, and with the multi tab attributes of browsers, shoppers often only spend very short periods on each page and are becoming more impatient, so once you have paid for their attention use attractive calls to actions that gets their attention.

Below are some screen grabs of product page ‘add to basket’ related CTAs I think on the face of it try and tick the boxes mentioned above. 

Image: Argos

Image: ASOS

Image: boohoo

Image: Dixsons

Image: House of Fraser

Image: JJB Sport

Image: My-Wardrobe 

Image: Play.com

Image: Topman

Google change the way Sessions are recorded in Google Analytics.

What’s changing?

Currently, Google Analytics ends a session when:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
• At the end of a day.
• When a visitor closes their browser.

If any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the visitor will start a new session.
In the new model, Google Analytics will end a session when:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
• At the end of a day.
• When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes:utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid.

As before, if any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the user will be the start of a new session.

Original and full post by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Play.com has just launched their new site design (18^th August 2011) supported by User Experience Design Agency Splendid.  First impressions are it has been well thought-through and designed, with consideration to the user experience and their path to purchase/conversion, through a clear strategy focus on an improved navigation, homepage and product pages.

It is clear from the look and general feel, Play.com have really tried to focus on the information architecture and visual saliency of the site making it as easy as possible for customers to find the product they are looking for, either via the search bar or exploding menus now supporting each department.

Navigation

Like many new site designs Play.com have completely removed the left-hand navigation and implemented a single horizontal navigation with exploding menus.  This approach allows them to shorten user journeys (clicks) with deeper menu options by incorporating Category headings and Sub-Category options.

In the previous navigation design it took 2 clicks to get to the DVD Comedy section whereas it now takes 1.

This ability to shortened click journeys means customers spend less time looking and more time browsing.

The new navigation has also been well supported with an improved faceted/attribute navigational options making it possible to refine your search by more in-depth sub-categories like television show or movie, price, actor, director, certificate and more.  

Homepage

The previous site design was split into a single horizontal element containing the top navigation and three vertical elements – as shown below.  The new site design has been split into a greater combination of horizontal, vertical and single box frame elements, giving the marketing and ecommerce team’s greater flexibility and opportunities to push messages and offers. 

The new design more clearly separates and defines promotions and messages allowing each to have an improved level of impact.

The full width rotating promotional banner is an example where the new design has allowed for improved message clarity.

One change I did find particularly interesting was the change to the Search button, from “Search” to “Go”, conventional best practice often advises using the word “Search” as it more clearly defines the actions the user is about to take.

Old Site Homepage

New Site Homepage

Product Listings

Though the changes are more subtle than the homepage, this is the page where you can really feel the improvement.  The old product listing was far more cumbersome and often felt like there was little management of the section via the CMS as you could often find the alignment of products completely disjointed and there was not a clear call-to-action to encourage the next step.

The new design address these issues far more nicely by using a light grey line to give each product the appearance of its own piece of site real-estate along with using bigger images of 180x180 vs. the old design which used 58x88 (DVD section reviewed).  This design change makes the browsing of products far more enjoyable and easy to navigate. 

In addition and possibly most importantly they have included the Buy button as a clear Call-to-Action (CTA).  My only complaint would be they are not aligned collectively product-to-product, which if done would round the design off nicely.

Old Site Product Listing Design

New Site Product Listing Design

Product/Item Page

Following the same pattern as the homepage and product listing, product item pages are now much improved, providing easy access to:

• Description
• Special Features
• Technical Details
• Customer Reviews
• Delivery and Returns information

They have also included a much larger pictures along with easy access to special features such as video trailers.

In addition it is now easy to see if the same product is available via Play Trade.  All-in-all the Product Item Pages are clean following all the best practices for usability including maintaining a nice clear call-to-action and easy visibility of the basket as items are added.

My one complaint would be that the information seems all congregate together leaving what appears and feels like a lot of wasted space to the right of the BUY button (Red box below).

Summary

While there will always be areas of improvement available to Play.com (additional features are promised in the near future) I think the new design is a good improvement on the old design. 

Rather than changing everything, Play.com have focused on what needed improving so core elements such as the centralised search bar, the shopping basket located at the top right, and the prominence of Play Trade have not been diluted.

It is clear that a large amount of user and competitor research has been undertaken and the results visually are impressive.

The design is clean, fresh and contemporary, with navigation from search to checkout much easier and smoother. 

The outstanding question is have these changes given the desired conversion rate uplift?

Double-Serving Policy - Google Adwords

Question: Can I to advertise more than one version of my website on the same Google search results page?

Answer: Sort of!

In order to protect against a single advertiser monopolising the Adwords Ads slots Google doesn’t easily allow multiple ads from the same business to appear on the same results page.

This means a single business cannot simply duplicate their product catalogue, place it under a different domain name and have both business appear for the same keywords on the same search results page.

This said the rule does not stop a business from implementing a Marketing Strategy of creating various niche sites based around their product catalogue offering of their main site provided they adhere to some compliance rules.

Example:

If a business selling DVDs wanted to attract more customers by creating niche sites based around film genres it could do so by complying with some rules Google has set out.  By following these rules a business can continue to be able to serve ads for more than one site on the same search results page.

The Google double serving rules read:

You are welcome to split up your separate business entities among different accounts. We consider websites to be double serving if they have the same purpose, over 80% product overlap, AND less than 25% price difference. As long as your websites steer clear of this criteria, you are welcome to set them up in whatever format is most convenient for you.

Lets break these rules out for easier reading:

1. Less than 80% plus product overlap: This is possibly the easiest to accommodate - try removing the lowest converting categories or products from each site.
2. A different purpose - if the product overlap is over 80%: For example one site focused on reviews and ratings, while another being for ecommerce.
3. 25% or more price difference - if the sites have the same purpose: To comply the requires on an individual product level the price needs to be 25% greater than or less than the same product on the parent site.

When reviewing your strategy to adhere to the above, it’s important to note that the Google policy statement uses the word AND to separate the three criteria and NOT OR. This means you have to violate all three to be in violation, or in other words, you only have to adhere to one, to be able to show your ads for more than one site on the same search results page.

NOTE: If you have already been stopped from appearing by Google, but have fulfilled one of the above, ask the Google Policy tem to review your site again.

As a fan of ASOS I think they have one of the best checkout processes I have experienced - their ability to take my money quickly and efficiently is excellent!!!

I came across a quick article on eConsultancy (another favourite site/blog) - Shopping basket best practice from ASOS.  Within the user comments James Hart eCommerce Director at ASOS has provided some insights to Paul Rouke Head of Usability at PRWD.

The feedback points strongly towards ASOS use of split testing, something I feel is an underused area of site functionality design and build.

The comments from James are buried within the articles user comments so I thought I would pull them out (with some slight adjustments).

James Hart, eCommerce Director at ASOS has provided some superb insights on what ASOS did in 2010 with their shopping basket:

• Completely overhauled the shopping basket in 2010, and in 2011 they are following this with a full redesign of their checkout process and account area.
   
•  Most of the basket work was backend development, although this meant that they had the ideal opportunity to update the design and user experience at the same time.
   
• They have an in-house user experience team, and they spent week’s wireframing, designing, prototyping and usability testing a large number of new features that their customers had told them they wanted over the years.
   
•  A real focus on user-centred design, where what your customers want is provided (providing there are enough customers saying the same thing of course!).

The following is a list of some of the main new features that ASOS developed as part of this redesign process:

• The ability to edit size/colour from within the basket (something which is pretty unique and a great benefit to their customers)
   
• Adding in expiry minutes for basket items that are held for 2 hours (Kiddicare have a good example on product landing pages referencing expected delivery date if ordered now)
  
  
• Product thumbnails have been increased in size so customers can see the product they are buying more clearly
  
  
• Shipping charges are now shown in the basket

Split testing different options is a key part of improving the customer experience and delivering improved conversion rates:

• ASOS split tested various features with customers. One example was with the Proceed to Checkout button, which they tested alongside ‘Pay Securely Now’. The button mentioning security received 3% uplift in customers moving in to the next stage of checkout.

Naturally it’s hard to measure and allocate all conversion rates as a result of just these initial changes, as there have been many other areas of the ASOS proposition that will have affected the results such as product offering, sale incentives and seasonality, but James makes it clear they have definitely seen uplifts in click-throughs through the shopping basket journey as a result of their redesign process.

As mentioned much of the above is taken from the user comments in relation the article Shopping basket best practice from ASOS hosted by eConsultancy.

What are Google Site Links

the following discusses Google Search Site links - Not Google Ad Site Links.

For those of you who do not know what Google Site Links are, they are the links that Google has started to display under the first search result in its search listings.  These links deeplink directly into the related website, often taking you to popular site sections and categories such as men, women, downloads, login, about us and more.

Or as Google explains it “Sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. Not all sites have sitelinks. Google generates these links automatically, but you can remove sitelinks that you don’t want.”

Google Site links have become pretty common place. 

The Example below shows the Site Links for ASOS a popular clothing retailer online:

Specifying and/or Influencing Google Site Links

To date Google have stated that the decision of which site links appear is automated and decided by the Google Bots.  The site owner cannot specify which links Google should show – if any!

This said there are people that have tested trying to influence which links the Google Bot picks and thus control which links appear.  To date reports have delivered mixed results!

The common report is that Google places high value on:

1. SERP Popularity of the Page

Popularity is likely judged based on the number of times that page has appeared in the SERPs, CTR and bounce rate.

2. Inbound Links

As with all SEO optimisation, the more inbound links a page has the more importance Google is likely to give it.

3. Search Friendliness/On page Optimisations

Again a ‘bread and butter’ SEO issue, but the more search friendly the page the more likely Google is to want to drive its users directly to it.

4. Site Theme\Subject

Google is able to understand the site theme, for example are you a retailer or a blog. Based on this Google can decide which pages or categories it thinks users are most likely to want to visit.

Removing Google Site Links

It is completely possible Google might display Site Links you do not want them to.  Fortunately while Google do not allow you to specify which links it should display (or consider!!!) they do allow you to remove/block links you do not want displaying.

Here’s what you do.

1. Login or Register at Google Webmaster Central

2. Goto Dashboard > Links > Sitelinks

2. Here you will see all Site links

3. Click “block” for those links you do not want shown.

That’s it.