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SmartSearch Marketing Provides Tips to Catalogers at ACCM
May 8, 2006
By Christine Blank, Contributing Writer
cblank@dmnews.com
Adding comparison-shopping charts to landing pages and improving tracking of search campaigns are just a few of the search marketing tips experts will share with catalogers at the Annual Conference for Catalog, Internet & Multichannel Merchants in Chicago, May 8-10.
Patricia Hursh, president of SmartSearchMarketing; Heather Lloyd-Martin, CEO of SuccessWorks International; Lee Odden, president of TopRank Online Marketing; and Lisa Papageras, manager of e-commerce for Whatonearthcatalog.com share their tips with online retailers and catalogers today during the “15 Sizzling Hot Search Ideas for Merchants” session.
Think outside the box when choosing keywords to buy, Ms. Papageras suggests to other catalogers.
“When you work in a company for a long time, the terms you use may not be the terms people use [when searching for products],” she said.
E-commerce catalogers should put themselves in the consumer’s place when choosing keywords, Ms. Papageras said.
“You have to sit back and say, ‘If I’m just looking around the Web, what would I do?’” she said.
For example, a gift cataloger wanting to draw attention to its Mother’s Day gifts could expand from keyword phrases such as “Mother’s Day gifts” and try phrases such as “Best Mother’s Day gift” or “best gift for mom.”
Once a consumer clicks on the cataloger’s ad and goes to its Web site, Ms. Hursh suggests providing a chart on the landing page that compares the cataloger’s products to other companies’ products or to the various products that the retailer carries.
“If you sell 20 different digital cameras, you could have a chart showing, ‘This is a product of ours you could buy,’” Ms. Hursh says.
“Comparison shopping ... is one of the main ways people use the Web,” she said. If people are going to compare products anyway, catalogers should provide information that helps them choose the right ones.
Ms. Hursh recommends that online catalogers provide a unique, specific call to action to get consumers to click on their search ads.
“It should be unique, compelling and specific, instead of ‘Buy now’ or ‘Click here.’ Four years ago, that might have worked, but now it is pretty competitive,” she said.
Ms. Papageras and other experts also will help e-commerce sites understand how to track their search marketing campaigns in a separate session today, “Measuring and Maximizing Your Search Marketing Conversions.”
Ms. Papageras discovered that her site needed better tracking of search marketing campaigns because the company did not know how customers found the site.
“We had all these marketing programs in effect, but the order wasn’t telling us where people came to see us from,” she said. “We have four levels of tracking now.”
Now Whatonearthcatalog.com attaches a code to each URL in a search campaign to determine which keywords are converting.
“I am able to tell what keyword generated the order,” Ms. Papageras said.
Posted on May 8, 2006 10:16 AM
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