I’ve worked with a few different companies over the years and have had the ‘pleasure’ of using a variety of different web platforms for their CMS (content management systems) and ecommerce offerings.

It still amazes me how far behind the pace some of these platforms are in terms of usability and SEO (search engine optimisation).

Some of them are so bad that it would almost be funny if they were not costing the businesses using them a lot of money!

A Bad Platform Is…

• One that makes updating content a headache and only doable by a technical person
• One that reproduces your entire website on a separate live domain which is freely accessible by humans and search engines
• One which uses horrible url’s full of meaningless querystrings (?id=xxx&page=1234…)
• One which will only let you adjust page title and meta tags on ‘top – level’ pages
• One which uses such a convoluted way of performing 301 redirects that it makes adding in manual ones virtually impossible
• One which the stock answer from the developers is ‘No’ to every change request (or even worse ‘Well, it’s on our schedule and we hope to be getting to it within the next 3 – 4 months…’)

A Good Platform Is…

NONE OF THE ABOVE!

Argh…

I had the misfortune recently of helping a company with the online marketing efforts who were using a CMS and eCommerce platform which had all of the above ‘features’.

Having moved to the platform 6 months prior to my involvement and losing all (yes I mean ALL) of their search engine rankings they wondered what the issue could be.

The Moral of This Rant Story

Deciding on an eCommerce (or CMS) platform when starting out on your ecommerce adventure is a big decision so, do your research, try to speak with existing users of the options you are considering, and, if a web development company, speak to more than one company.

Getting 6 or 12 months down the line with an inadequate web platform could spell disaster for your business, or at the very least mean a lot of inconvenience for you in switching at a later date.

How would you like to increase the amount of organic visitors to your website by 22% without spend any money at all?

Sounds good eh?

Well it’s pretty easy to do, simply start a blog on your ecommerce website, post a few articles, and put your feet up.

The Reason for My Blogging

One of the outcomes of my recent mini crisis was a decision to try and convey our expertise more through the website.

At the end of the day we are experts in our field however I didn’t feel that this was really put across well on our site, my fear was that people were simply shopping on price and we were losing out to cheaper imitators of our products.

Knowing that our products were far superior to what else was being offered on the market was frustrating to say the least, but it also left us an opportunity to do something about it.

We had a blog which we had some existing content on but to be honest it was not updated very often, I felt this would be the perfect place to post some content attempting to display our expertise and overall business philosophy.

Type of Content Published

Okay, the decision to publish more content was made, but what type of article should we be putting up there?

Well, my first port of call was writing a list of the biggest questions we get asked by customers and seeing if we could address some of these in article format.

I also looked at writing something which attempted to speak to our core audience and then relate to them why our solution was the best one for their needs.

Finally I put together some content featuring our key products and writing why certain decisions had been made and the logic behind them.

11 Articles in 3 Days

To be honest I didn’t specifically set out to write 11 articles, they just seemed to flow one after another over the space of 2 – 3 days.

In terms of length they started at around 600 words running all the way up to a mammoth 1,200 word essay!

We didn’t post them all at once, the first one went up the 10^th April and the last one went live on the 19^th.

To promote the content on the site we did two things. Firstly we included links to two of the articles directly from the site homepage, we have a space for featured news which I updated.

The next thing we did was link from our computers category page to an article which provided an overview of our products, this article then linked to some more in-depth content pieces taking about specific options in detail.

This linking helped drive visitors to the content and will also have helped the search engines find the content quickly to index it.

Traffic Increases

For the three week period after the first bits of content went live our organic traffic levels increased by 22.01% compared to the three week period directly before it launched.

It should be noted that the previous period did include the Easter break however our organic traffic remained pretty consistent across that period. If we compare back to a period at the end of March the increase was still over 20%.

Keyword reports don’t really show any particular new keywords that amassed the bulk of the traffic increases, it was more a combination of terms which each drove more visitors collectively giving the overall boost.

One of our articles focused on laptops and organic traffic including this keyword jumped from 1 visit to 27, similarly we had a large content piece talking about trading computers, visits including the trading keyword jumped over 33%.

People entering the site through the blog pages directly (i.e. they searched on Google and it returned a blog page in the results) jumped 136% however this only accounts for 26.7% of the extra traffic, this means that adding the content must have also increased the rankings of other non-blog pages to account for the rest of the traffic increases.

Side Effects

I must say that since loading the content orders have increased as have enquiries, whilst I can’t put all this down to the blog content it would be silly to think that it has had no impact.

Overall I think what is clear is that these extra content pieces have helped drive more visitors and also helped convert more of these visits into enquiries and sales, not bad for a few days’ work really!

Do you have a blog section on your site? If not it may be time to put one up there, the benefits are well worth the effort.

It’s been a busy few weeks in my world of eCommerce and focus has been dragged from this blog on to more pressing matters I’m afraid, hence the lack of updates.

Sorry…

What follows is a ridiculously long winded account of my recent troubles.

2012: Progress So Far

After a great start to 2012 in terms of sales and revenues for my ecommerce site things began to quieten off a little in March. Nothing too major, but despite website traffic remaining at decent levels, there seemed a marked drop in enquiries.

My revenue / profit target for March was eventually met, however this was more due to a few bigger orders finally completing than anything else.

April started really quiet as well and half way through I was staring at the possibility of the single worst month since records began! (Well for the last 2 and a half years anyway.)

Having spent much time analysing performance, checking competitors and re-looking at my own pricing decisions led to some uncomfortable conclusions.

What’s Gone Wrong?

Anyone who has been in the eCommerce game for a while understands that there is a ton of stuff to look after, in no way can you simply upload products, set pricing and then sit back and relax, it just doesn’t work like that.

Well, I guess if I’m brutally honest I think I kind of took my eye off the ball with some pricing decisions I’d implemented at the end of last year.

There was a worldwide shortage of hard drives due to flooding in Thailand (I think?) and the net result was that prices of these components shot up, some more than tripled in price.

Once we had burned through our stock we started getting hit by these price hikes so I made a decision to adjust online pricing. Not so much for our PC’s but for the upgrades i.e. people deciding to add in another hard drive to a build.

My thoughts were that we could absorb the majority of the cost in our PC systems and didn’t want to raise the prices of them.

Anyway, as 2012 has progressed prices have started to drop on these drives, there still far more than they were mid 2011 however they have dropped a fair amount.

Guess who didn’t drop the price of them on our upgrade options?

I think these have made us look expensive overall.

I don’t think that this one factor would have singlehandedly caused such a drop off in orders however there are some more factors to take into account.

The Next Problem

Our product range includes a series of high end multi screen stands, the ones we use are top quality in terms of construction and adjustability however they are expensive, very expensive.

This hasn’t been so much of a problem so far as it has always been difficult to actually source these types of stands from other suppliers, and we knew from working with other manufacturers products that they weren’t much cheaper and were far worse in terms of usability and construction.

Now, in mid 2011 we got offered the chance to import some similar stands in from Taiwan, this is something I seriously considered. The pricing on them was cheap, we are talking in some instances up to £250 a unit cheaper than what we were currently purchasing them for!

After looking at a sample though the quality of these imported units was low, combined with the fact that we would have to place very high minimum orders, pay upfront and have a 6 – 7 week lead time meant that I turned down the offer.

I just didn’t want to be in a position whereby I held around £40k – £50k in stock of stands which I didn’t believe were very good.

This wasn’t the only reason though, we had been in touch with a UK manufacturer of AV equipment and had been working with them to develop our own range of stands.

Now for one reason or another this design and development process got dragged out far longer than I originally thought but we stuck with it because we genuinely believed that the new range would offer at least as good quality as the ones we were currently using at a considerably lower unit cost.

Wouldn’t you know it, these cheaper imported stands started turning up on a fairly major computer component retailers website. I could tell by their pricing that they were happy to make around £20 – £30 a unit on them!

Obviously due to being stuck with these higher cost stands meant that if a customer found one of these cheaper stands and then bought their own monitors and cables then we were looking pretty high on the pricing front.

What a nightmare.

Anybody directly price shopping on us against competitors must have thought that we are a right rip off!

The Trifecta

As if the above wasn’t bad enough we noticed that a company who were traditionally more mass market then us on the PC front had started heavily marketing in our niche.

Now I’m not one to shy away from a bit of competition however due to the way their site works they were advertising computers starting from something like £300!

If you actually follow the process and add some essentials like Windows and more than 1GB of RAM(!) and match our spec then we are very competitive on a pricing basis with them.

The problem for us is that they let people downgrade the spec so that a customer could walk away with a computer for a lot less than we would go down to.

In reality it’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges as the computers and spec the competitor offer in this low price bracket are pretty crap.

There are good reasons why we don’t drop our spec so much but I guess that’s just down to a difference in philosophy really.

All that being said I think we have to be realistic and think that there are customers who will always opt for the cheapest thing, combined with our small mistake on component pricing, and massively more expensive stand hardware it would be easy for anyone looking to think we are way out on pricing.

Worry & Stress

When you suddenly realise all the above it certainly makes you focus!

I won’t lie and say that there wasn’t any sleepless nights, there have been plenty but I am the kind of person who thinks that a positive attitude and a bit of hard work generally pay off.

The Plan

The first (and easiest) thing to address where the pricing issues on our upgrades, this was done and I also took the opportunity to completely review what upgrade options we offer overall.

I’m very pleased with how they look now and pricing is very competitive, I even managed to teach the site a few new tricks so that upgrade options for our computers work far better than before.

The next issue to tackle was the stands.

Do we bite the bullet and stock the cheaper low quality imports?

It’s an easy answer but with difficult consequences, NO.

I will not start selling stuff I don’t believe in.

Cue a phone call to our new stand manufacturers and a few nudges here and there and we finally got a date to look at some finished units.

To say I was hoping they would be good was an understatement, the fact is they needed to be otherwise we would have wasted the last 8 months waiting for them.

Well, they arrived today and all I can say is that they are AMAZING! Woo Hoo!

The build quality and finish of them is just superb and they look like a real premium quality product, far superior to the cheaper imported units and better in virtually every aspect to the range we are currently selling.

Unit cost on them is much better than we are currently having to pay and they will really allow us to compete against these cheaper imported units.

Overall a massive relief.

Our first major delivery is just a few weeks away and having looked at where our new pricing is going to be I just know they are going to be massively successful for us.

The final problem is what to do about the competitors selling low spec / low quality computers / low priced computers?

Well, like the stand decision, I will not sell crap and I stand by that decision.

I think we can adjust pricing slightly which always helps, let’s not kid ourselves.

But the main thing I think we need to do is establish our business as the experts in our field.

Historically we have always offered top quality products at realistic prices, we are not bargain basement by any stretch, but likewise we are certainly not overpriced either.

I think we need to build on this and actually put more time and effort into showing potential customers why our products are better, why our systems will be far more suited to their needs and ultimately why they should trust us to deliver what they need.

I’ve been writing like a maniac over the past few weeks and publishing lots of content to our blog (the ecommerce site blog, not this one!), and really thinking about what makes our stuff special.

I’ve had ideas about maybe restructuring the site a little, increasing the range of products we supply, and looking at how we communicate everything to website visitors.

Not everything we have thought about will get implemented, I have to keep reminding myself that even though there are some real issues which need resolving, we are still a good business and have until very recently being doing pretty well in a difficult economic environment.

April Update

Just to bring you right up to date, we have picked up a few decent orders over the past week and it seems like with a bit of luck we will just about stumble across the end of the month in a low, but manageable position.

I’m hoping that changes made so far have influenced this mini upturn and have my fingers crossed that we will start getting back on track soon.

So, that’s where we are, and I guess the above is a longwinded excuse for not posting more content here…

I promise to get back on track with this blog, I also have some great ideas for content here as well.

At the moment I’m positive, enthusiastic, stressed and tired all at the same time, the joys of owning a business I guess!

If you’re looking for a new source of customers for your ecommerce website then consider this…

How would an influx of targeted visitors which you only pay for if they actually buy something? Sound interesting?

I’m talking about affiliate marketing, and for the right types of business it can be a great additional traffic stream.

How Does It Work?

With affiliate marketing you have a number of people (called affiliates) acting on your behalf to promote your website. You set them a commission rate which is either a % of sale value or a fixed amount.

The affiliates then go out and promote your site with a special affiliate code, this code ensures that when a visitors arrives at your site through an affiliate link they are tagged as a particular affiliates traffic source.

If a visitor who has been referred from an affiliate completes a sale online then the affiliate earns their commission.

The whole tracking system is handled by affiliate software and it is a fairly automatic process once set up.

Would It Work For You?

Let’s be clear, affiliate marketing is not a good match for every ecommerce site.

Generally the best affiliate programs are when both the retailer and the affiliate are able to earn a decent profit, this means that you have to have a decent margin on your items.

For example, let’s say that your average transaction value was £35 and your gross profit margin was 30%, this would equate to a profit per sale of around £10.50.

If you offered affiliates a 10% commission level then they would earn £3.50 of every sale leaving you with £7 of profit.

The things to consider with this example are:

• You are giving away a third of your gross profit margin (£10.50 / £3.50) – Could you still operate at enough of a profit to make your business worthwhile at this level?
• You may have won the sale without paying an affiliate, if your products are only available at your site then a determined customer might have found and bought from you directly.
• Does your website generate enough sales to make it worthwhile for an affiliate to bother promoting you? If an affiliate can promote a competitor or another related service and earn more money then they will.

If your answers to these considerations are all positive then implementing an affiliate program could be a very good move for your ecommerce store and should definitely be looked into further.

In future articles I’ll cover more details about affiliate marketing and the different options you have for running a programme.

(Image Credit: Images_of_Money)

Google Analytics is a key tool in your arsenal when running and growing your ecommerce (or any online) business however this often little under used trick can make it even more useful.

Let’s say you’re using Twitter to promote your business and interact with customers, it follows that at times you will include a link back to your website.

People who click on the link will normally get recorded in Analytics as a referral from twitter.com, it’s useful to be able to see these visitors separate from your other traffic sources which you can do easily by looking at your website referrers report.

Wouldn’t it be far more useful though if we could see exactly which Twitter messages and links they clicked on? With this trick you can.

The method we want to use is called link tagging and it’s really easy to use.

How to setup link tagging

When pointing a link back to your website simply add the following to the end of it:

?utm_source=SOURCEWEBSITE&utm_medium=TYPEOFLINK
&utm_campaign=SPECIFICCAMPAIGN

You then just need to replace the sections I have capitalised with whatever references you want to show up in Google Analytics.

Let’s go back to our Twitter example, we could choose to fill in the link tag as follows:

• SOURCEWEBSITE = twitter
• TYPEOFLINK = referral
• SPECIFICCAMPAIGN = msg3d280212

The source website is twitter, it is a referral from there, and it was message 3 sent on 28th Feb 2012.

If your website was called example.com then the full link you would place on twitter would be:

http://www.example.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=msg3d280212

If you were placing the link in an email instead and wanted to link to a specific page on your website you could use the following link instead:

http://www.example.com/folder/page1.htm?utm_source=emailnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=febnewsletter

How to find these visitors in Analytics

Okay, so you have setup your links, but how do you find the stats in Google Analytics?

This short video shows how to quickly locate the visitor stats:

As you can see, it’s pretty easy to set all this up. Once done it makes your marketing analysis far more effective and you can quickly build up a picture of exactly what type of messages people are responding to. Let me know how you get on with it.

(Also let me know what you thought of the video…)

One of my first ever consulting jobs was on an ecommerce website that specialised in selling children’s furniture.

It was run by a husband and wife team from their home and most of the furniture was shipped straight from manufacturers directly to customers.

This was quite a few years ago, probably around 2005, so ecommerce was still a fairly new endeavour at that time.

Their site was basic, they had no ecommerce platform at all and had manually built each page by hand, this lead to many issues for them.

For example, payments were handled through Paypal, this meant they had to manually insert a Paypal ‘buy now’ button on every product they sold, pricing had to be manually entered into the code of each button separately, not an easy thing to maintain over the long term.

Another issue was managing customers and orders, the only notification they received when an order was placed was the standard Paypal payment email.

Once this arrived they printed it off and manually wrote down the details in an order book, next an email was composed and sent to the customer confirming the order, this was also printed off.

All printed emails were then filed in a filing cabinet.

Emails were then sent to the suppliers to place the order, manually again, and then you’ve guessed it, this email was printed and placed in the file.

When I arrived I couldn’t believe how much work it took them just to take an order, I asked the obvious question ‘Why don’t you move across to an ecommerce platform?’ the answer was that they were too scared of losing their search engine rankings!

Now on the face of it this could seem a reasonable answer, their thinking was that if they lost their search rankings then it wouldn’t matter how they took orders because they wouldn’t have any.

The problem for them was this was not the right decision.

They were drowning in paperwork, getting stressed out and customer service was suffering because of it.

Their SEO concerns were valid in some respect however with some planning and a bit of on-going care the rankings would be maintained, at worst there might be short period of fluctuating positions but it would have been sorted within a few weeks.

They should have bitten the bullet and moved across but they didn’t.

I didn’t end up carrying out much work for the couple, we parted on good terms though and I wished them all the best for the future.

Periodically afterwards I’d check on their site, just out of curiosity more than anything else. They never seemed to move across to a platform and I always imagined they were still buried in paperwork.

To be honest I kind of forgot about them for a few years however I recently fired up their website. I was pretty shocked to find that the site was gone and in its place was a landing page advertising the domain name for sale at SEDO.

I checked back the WayBackWhenMachine and from what I could tell they never moved to an all in one platform.

I’m not saying that this was the reason for the business failing however it certainly couldn’t have helped.

Their lack of a proper ecommerce platform will have restricted their growth prospects. Imagine if they had invested all that time they wasted messing around with paper systems and updating their manually built site into working on building their business, they could have been so much further down the line.

This is a sad story with a cautionary message behind it.

Yes, they should have moved to a proper platform but that’s not the real thing to takeaway, they should have had the ability to step back from the day to day running of their business and make the right decisions to enable them to move forward.

Unfortunately they lacked this vision and I think they paid the price.

Don’t make the same mistake, business is hard and full of tough decisions, but you need to make them and have the ability to see the long term gain over the short term pain.

If you have an on-going problem that is sucking up your time then you must deal with it, it will be worth it in the long run.

(Image Credit: mattwi1s0n)

With the available pool of unregistered domain names getting ever smaller a lot of new businesses end up going with longer names or decide to use one of the newer domain name extensions.

I’ve already covered why you should stick with the most commonplace extensions, and having a long domain name has its own set of drawbacks including looking spammy and being difficult for customers to remember and type in.

What option do you have then?

Well, why not consider buying a premium domain name?

When I talk about premium domains I’m really talking about ones that have already been registered but may be available for sale privately.

There are various websites that list registered domain names for sale, popular ones include SEDO and NameDrive, but a quick Google search will bring up others.

Let’s say I wanted to setup a new website selling computers, if I can’t find any decent unregistered names then a quick SEDO search for the word ‘computer’ returns over 38,000 results, plenty to look at then!

Adding the term ‘buy’ narrows the search down to almost 800 results which is a bit more manageable

If I sort by list price then there are some expensive names there however moving through the pages gets you to some pretty cool names for realistic prices.

For example, the name thepcshop.com is listed at $1,500 USD, yes it’s not cheap but what a great name for an ecommerce site.

Lower down the list prices you can find desktopcomputershop.co.uk for just over £300 or buyanewpc.com for under $500 USD.

Bear in mind that these are the asking prices for the domain names and you can usually submit any bid that you want so you should be able to secure a name for lower than the list price, sometimes well under.

I once came across a name for a project and the asking price was around £2,000, after a bit of negotiation I had the name in my possesion for under £700.

Premium names can be worth the cost for the branding potential alone in my opinion but they also have another fairly major benefit if you are clever about it.

Exact Match Domain Names

For many different reasons which I won’t go into here, the search engines usually give a ‘boost’ to a website which has the same domain name as a search term.

For example, say you had a site on a domain buyanewpc.com, with only a minimal amount of SEO work your site would rank very highly for the search term ‘buy a new pc’.

These domain names are often called ‘exact match domains’ and whilst an exact match domain for a very popular search term can be more expensive they can also be very valuable for your business.

For arguments sake lets say that you paid for a PPC advert for the term ‘buy a new pc’ and it cost 70p per click. If it got 100 clicks a day that would cost you £70 which would equate to just over £2,000 a month.

If you bought the domain name, spent £1,000 with an SEO company to ‘promote’ it and you achieved the no.1 position then you would probably get more than 100 clicks a day on it at an on-going cost per click of £0.00!

In less than half a month’s AdWords spend you would have a valuable asset to your business which would generate more and more clicks over the longer term for only a fraction of the AdWords cost.

Taking all this into account, premium domain names can start to loook like a very attractive proposition for your new business.

You should at least consider them, what do you think?

Forced Registration Is Bad

One question that gets asked regularly is should you make customers register for an account on your website before making a purchase?

There have been lots of studies and testing into this and the outcomes are pretty conclusive, yet so many sites still get it wrong!

The short answer is that in most cases you should not force potential customers to register before making a purchase, here are the reasons why:

1. Long Forms Turn People Off

Just like in the real world, when someone is confronted with a form asking for lots of details most people are turned off.

There are few things more boring than filling in forms and it’s exactly the same online.

If you knew that a product was available at two different places and one needed a form filling in before buying and one didn’t, with everything else being equal you would most likely go for the one without a registration form.

2. Testing Results

There have been lots of split tests carried out on checkout procedures where people have tested a checkout process with registration versus one without it required.

Pretty conclusively the results show customers prefer not having to register, see some of the tests for yourself here:

• Get Elastic – Checkout Split Test
• Forrester Research – Checkout Registration Report
• Get Elastic – Shopping Cart Abandonment Reduction Tips

3. Privacy Concerns

If I want to buy something online then it’s pretty much a given that I will have to give out my delivery address and contact details, along with payment details. I know this upfront and am prepared for it.

When a site starts asking me for extra details such as mother’s maiden name, alternative email addresses, or shopping preferences then I think, what are they possibly going to do with all this extra information other than bombard me with more sales messages.

The eCommerce site doesn’t need this info to complete my order so they shouldn’t be trying to force me to give them it in order to make a purchase.

4. Interrupting Checkout

There are enough interruptions in the online world and too many competitors just a short hop skip and a click away.

You should always be striving to make sure your sales funnel is as simple as possible, moving from browsing your products to entering payment details should ideally be as easy as possible.

Adding in a long form interrupts this sales process which will never help your sales conversion rates.

5. There Is No Reason To Do It!

Taking into account the above, there is one final reason not to force customers to register…

There is absolutely no reason for it!

Most of, if not all the information you need to create an account is entered during the process of a normal checkout process anyway.

Why not let people checkout normally without a registration form, then at the end offer customers the chance to create an account by simply entering a password.

The account can then be setup automatically as you can reuse all the details you already collected for the order without requiring users to enter it again.

This is the best of both worlds and should be how most eCommerce sites work, unfortunately it isn’t. There are countless examples of sites which don’t adhere to these best practice guidelines.

How does your site handle registrations?

Despite the fact that Google has been running its AdWords program for over 10 years now, some people still struggle to understand exactly what it is and how it works.

Read on for an overview of Google AdWords and how it plays a massive part in the online advertising world.

History of AdWords

Google started life as a search engine, it scanned the Internet and built up a database of websites that it discovered, it then used sophisticated computer algorithms to rank these sites based on a variety of factors for different keywords and phrases.

This allowed anybody to go to Google, perform a search and return a list of sites which matched their search terms.

This functionality is great for end users however businesses that didn’t end up at the top of the search results received hardly any visitors from Google. This eventually led to the search engine optimisation field developing with people attempting to artificially ‘push’ sites up the rankings.

Google saw an opportunity to insert paid adverts around the normal search results for which it could charge businesses, AdWords was born.

Which Sections on Google Are AdWords Ads?

When you perform a Google search you usually get a set of Google AdWords ad’s returned along with the normal search results.

The following picture shows a search results page on Google, the sections highlighted in blue are Google AdWords adverts:

As you can see they take up a lot of space on the page.

How Do I Get My Ad Shown?

To show your advert for peoples searches you need to sign up for a Google AdWords account, you can then create adverts and insert the keywords which you would like your ad to show up against.

There are many intricacies to the AdWords billing system however in basic terms you decide the maximum amount you are prepared to pay for every click on your advert, this is called the Cost Per Click (CPC). Once your ads are running Google basically decides exactly how far up the results you are shown based on how much you have bid.

As mentioned, it is more complex than this and positioning does depend on more than your bid prices however we will go deeper into this in future articles.

One other thing to mention is that you only pay when somebody clicks on your advert, if it gets shown 1,000 times but gets no clicks it costs you nothing.

The Benefit of AdWords

AdWords is a revolution in advertising, being able to display an ad for your product or service at the exact time that somebody is actively searching for it has never been possible on a national (or even global) scale before.

Because it is closely integrated with Google Analytics you can drill down and see exactly how effective your various ads are performing, this can help you create a highly effective advertising system for your business.

Potential Downsides

As with everything there are some downsides to using Google AdWords.

It can be expensive. Very expensive. You have to be careful when setting up ads and bid prices, set bids too high and you can quickly spend a lot of money. I’ve seen examples of people burning through hundreds or thousands of pounds in the space of a few days with next to no return on it.

It can also be quite an effort to manage large campaigns. I have run accounts which have had literally tens of thousands of keywords and hundreds of different ads spending up to £10,000 a month before. Managing this yourself could almost be a full time job without the proper skills and experience.

Some areas are also very competitive, you sometimes find AdWords is simply not a good match for your business. For example if you are selling branded products you will find much larger businesses running AdWords campaigns with bigger budgets than you have employing dedicated AdWords experts. This can make competing very difficult.

A final negative is that once you stop paying Google, your ads stop. Run out of budget and your AdWords presence vanishes instantly, there is no direct residual effect from this advertising.

Overall AdWords can be a massive part of your business, it should be at the very least considered by any business with an online presence. It doesn’t work for everyone, but on the flip side there are countless examples of business which would die without their AdWords traffic.

Do you use AdWords for advertising your business? How do you find it?

Things have been a little quiet on the eCommerce blog for the last week or so and for that I apologise.

I have made some progress with the blog though, firstly we have a new design which I feel is far superior to the old look. Along with the design we have been able to incorporate some better styling elements in posts which will make them even better!

For anyone interested I use the excellent Thesis framework for the blog which is a really powerful wordpress implementation and leads to nice looking and coded sites.

Over the next few months I aim to expand on what I’m calling our foundation articles, these are more informative posts which explain a concept or procedure in more detail, all with an eCommerce angle of course.

I’m also going to be experimenting with some screen capture posts and possibly full motion video sections where appropriate so look out for them and let me know how you find them.

Finally, I’m putting together some more ‘owner interviews’ to give real world insight into eCommerce sites and operation by founders themselves.

If you know anyone suitable, or like the idea of being interviewed yourself simply let me know.

Thanks again for reading and I wish you all the best with your eCommerce adventures.

Darren

P.S.

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