(cross-posted from Shop.org)

At Shop.org's Annual Summit, digital marketing experts shared hundreds of tips and tactics to help online retailers inch further along in their quest for conversion nirvana. But according to Google’s Industry Director for Retail Todd Pollak, getting digital marketing right is a little more simple: “Apply everything you know about direct mail marketing to online marketing.” Voila! Pollak said this simple tactic can easily improve efficiency. And this little insight nugget isn’t the only helpful tactic Pollak shared in a recent Q&A. Read on for his thoughts on top trends for digital this year, common mistakes companies make when it comes to search optimization, and what to expect for the holiday season.

What are a few of the top trends you’re seeing in digital retail this year?


In no particular order…mobile, social, deals and convenience.
The cost of walking out of a store is cheaper than it has ever been. For the first time in history, consumers have the ability to save the absolute amount of time and money at zero incremental cost regardless of whether they’re standing in a store with their coveted merchandise in hand. When you have two-parent working families with kids who have more activities, an economy generating flat income growth relative to inflation and rising commodity prices, the pressure to adapt and find efficiencies to maximize your lifestyle accelerates.

Just as retailers are increasing productivity through adoption of technology like CRM, connected stores, recommendation engines, free shipping, site-to-store, etc., the vast majority of consumers are also using technology to steepen their value and efficiency curve and improve their lifestyles. Deals, recommendations, inventory availability and price comparison have become so accessible to Main Street that the traditional ways consumers look to save money more clearly than ever express their true costs of use.

Are digital technologies reinventing the relationship between consumers and advertisers? What does this mean for retailers?

Shopping tools that are always available, predicated on simplicity and elegant design combined with real mobile processing power have fundamentally changed retailing forever.
There are 330 million search results for “my 2-year-old can use an iPhone.” In short, technology is more accessible than it has ever been at a time when inventory, pricing, reviews and recommendations information have reached near 100% transparency for non-perishable goods. Today, we have easy-to-use tools that personalize, organize and filter information like Groupon, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google. Consumers’ understanding of these tools is peaking and usage has become more sophisticated overtime.

Retailers should be focused not just on where consumers spend their time researching and buying, but on how best to tailor their tactics based on the transitions people make by device and by location. From desktop at work, to tablets after work on the couch, to mobile in the aisles, focus on transitions in mindset and context. Size of screen and location impact the kinds of information people seek.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about one of the biggest social media announcements of the year – the launch of Google+. Will you share three tips for retailers looking to leverage the platform?

Social seems to have its most significant impact at the front – through awareness – and backend – through conversion – of the buying cycle. What deals are available? What brands or products do people who are like me buy and when it comes down to the final choice, which brand do people like me buy? It’s still very early days and retailers are investing in the promise of tomorrow.
Today, social signals are relatively one dimensional in that they express interest, but not necessarily intent. In the future, companies that make sense of these connections and influences by understanding their relationships will revolutionize the way retailers merchandise and personalize their stores for each customer.

At Google, our goal is to use social signals to improve consumer experiences across Google properties and partners. In the near term, we’ll enhance the relevance of intent-based queries which are already delivering the most qualified customers on the web to retailers. If someone is looking for barefoot running shoes and their friend endorses a specific result for barefoot running shoes, we believes this will improve engagement for brands, improve the relevance of generic queries and deliver higher conversion rates for our partners.

According to this year’s State of Retailing Online report, search is still the number one marketing acquisition tool for online retailers. I know you can’t tell us what’s in the Google secret search optimization sauce, but what common mistakes do you see among retail clients when it comes to optimizing their site for search?

For multichannel retailers, too many still optimize for an online conversion and view all other paid search visits to the website as waste. Many focus their investments on 2% of their traffic as though the only people who come to a website are online buyers. This happens because the organization views the website as one store, although a very profitable one, and not the gateway to the brand. The stores benefit far more from the website than the online division, they just don’t fully measure online to store activity. The first stop for any consumer – regardless of where they intend to buy – is a website. As long as online divisions are hyper-focused on converting every visit, the consumer experience, which is tied to the whole brand, will be sub-optimal. To create an optimal customer experience, online divisions need to focus less on converting every visitor online and more about the overall customer intention and experience.

The other piece of advice I’d give is to think differently about website visitation by category. People don’t buy sheets the same way they buy blenders so if you’re using the same layouts, information, attribution window for transaction across all your categories…there’s an opportunity to increase topline revenue by optimizing for each category.

As online and offline continue to blur, retailers are hoping to increase customer insight and build relationships between online and the physical world. What tips do you have for retailers looking to leverage this customer data?

The consumer has changed and as a result, retailers must structure themselves for the 21st century.
First, align your organization to optimize for delighting the consumer regardless of the channel. From the CEO down, the whole organization must commit to the idea of a single profit center where everyone is fairly compensated and media is optimized for any conversion regardless of channel. In short, start by eliminating internal friction. This is a must do, because consumers don’t see any difference between your stores and your website. Creating separate PnLs that compete for resources, media dollars, etc. creates confusion for the consumer and damages a brand. Most of our testing demonstrates that the stores benefit far more from a visit to the website than the .com.
Second, invest in continuous testing. I’m always surprised when retailers expect a single test with a positive or negative outcome to change a media mix that’s been built over 10 years. Make a long-term commitment to solving this because you have to believe that eventually 20%+ of commerce in the U.S. will happen online.

Third, invest in a single view of the customer. That means breaking down the data silos between stores, website analytics and online transactions. This will enable top line revenue growth for your company by truly understanding the lifetime value of your customers.

How are you seeing locality play out in the current customer shopping experience? 

Location is still one of the most important factors for a traditional retail business. Today’s consumer wants instant gratification as a result of technology. Price transparency and inventory availability make local shopping more important than ever before. Your customers expect that they only have to drive to your store if you have what they need, when they need it.

I don’t think that retailing has changed all that much. The foundational things still apply, but technology that can identify a customer’s current location presents all kinds of interesting opportunities to encourage a visit that never existed before.

If you’ve ever done direct mail marketing, you know that certain zip codes generate higher conversion rates and higher average order values. Apply everything you know about direct mail marketing to online marketing and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how your efficiency improves. Buying nationally is a legacy behavior, but online it ensures you’ll be spending more than you should in lower performing markets, and not enough in the ones that perform the best. When you can, maximize precision.

Mobile is accelerating the importance of a local strategy. There are over 100 million Google mobile maps users in the U.S. Some of our best performing ad units on a mobile device are brand searches and click-to-call. Consumers use their phones as shopping tools to save time looking for your store locations and calling for information. In fact, we have data that shows that mobile queries peak at the same time that offline sales peak. Those consumers who are a bit further ahead of the curve know they can find inventory availability and pricing information by store location on the web as well.
The easier the tools are to use, the smarter we become about who the shopper is and what she likes, the more opportunity there will be for advertisers to design an exceptional and personalized shopping experience for their customers.

What do you think the 2011 holiday season holds for retail?
Long lines and aggressive shoppers have been hyped by the media for the past three years. True or not, this stuff sticks with people. As a result, a greater share of transactions will shift to the web again in 2011. Shoppers will buy earlier and deal sites will see gains as consumers hunt for values. Increased use of technology in the aisles as a shopping assistant, as well as mobile and tablet usage will see exponential growth.

What is the number one recommendation you’d make for retail companies as they begin their holiday planning?

Don’t build another microsite. Increase your presence in social communities where consumers already spend time. You’ll activate a lot more users and benefit from network effects.

Posted by Todd Pollak, The Google Retail Team

Last week we took a look at the first half of a four part interview from Google Think Voices with Avinash Kaushik on how to succeed in the digital world using key insights to evaluate and refine the customer experience. Today we are focusing on the last two videos of the series.

The first video explores the leap from faith-based to data-based marketing decisions. How embracing a crowdsourcing mentality that serves as an “idea democracy” to surface both good and bad ideas can impact your business. Once the ideas are vetted in a short test, marketing decisions can be made quicker and faster than within campaigns hosted on traditional mediums.





The final video highlights the hazards of overlooking the end-to-end customer experience. Match great ads with relevant and engaging landing pages to delight consumers and encourage conversions. Leverage your website as a portal to your brand.





To get more helpful information from Avinash visit his blog, Occam’s Razor.

Posted by Keri Overman, The Google Retail Team

Google Think Voices captures a four part interview with Avinash Kaushik on how to succeed in the digital world using key insights to evaluate and refine the customer experience. Avinash reveals tips on how to elevate your marketing efforts to capture maximum consumer favorability. Here is a look at the first two videos of the series.

The first video segment details three important tracking metrics to implement for a full view of your marketing effectiveness. The metrics he highlights are:

Task Completion Rate
Involves leveraging surveys and qualitative data to understand the customer experience with your brand. This data assists retailers in making adjustments efficiently at scale to increase consumer satisfaction and conversions.

Economic Value Added
An analysis of the macro and micro conversions leading to a positive contribution to a business' bottom line. Move beyond measuring clicks and impressions to derive additional insights of the true value of acquired customers.

Bounce Rate
A measure of consumer activities tied to the effectiveness of your campaigns and landing pages. By examining the number of people that visit a site and leave immediately, retailers are able to focus on areas within the shopping cycle that could be improved.

The second video focuses on finding insights to make smart marketing decisions that result in a higher conversion rate. Avinash discusses how DoubleClick Ad Planner can help precisely target consumers that are hard to reach by linking demographic data to search behavior.

To get more helpful information from Avinash visit his blog, Occam's Razor. Stay tuned for the additional two videos in the series.

Posted by Keri Overman, The Google Retail Team

[cross-posted on the Mobile Ads Blog]

Welcome to the latest post in our Mobile Insights series featuring expert views from our mobile ads team. This week’s guest contributors are Alex Barza and Kacy Brod, who lead our U.S. mobile efforts for Retail. Here are their thoughts on the state of mobile marketing in retail gleaned from Think Retail 2011, Google’s annual gathering of retail executives.

At this year’s Think Retail event in Mountain View, mobile marketing was a hot topic.

We started the day by summarizing the most interesting retail insights from a recently conducted 5,000 person mobile survey (watch the three minute highlight video). We also noted that last year our #1 recommendation to retailers was to create mobile-optimized sites and/or apps. After a quick survey of Internet Retailer’s top 100 ranked companies, we’re happy to report the majority now have created one or both.

After speaking with many retailers and analyzing our own retail data, we identified six trends and recommendations around each to help retailers evolve their mobile strategies.

#1 -- Mobile Is Highly Engaging: There’s no other platform that can allow you to touch and engage with a product or brand like mobile can, so intrigue users to interact with your advertising campaign. Invite them to swipe, rotate, tell their own story, or upload their own personal video: the sky’s the limit. The Gilt Groupe, for instance, ran a iPad Rich Media Interstitial ad that lets users interact with multiple product images by swiping and enlarging the images in an interactive manner. Users simply tap or pinch-out and, in this case, have the option to download the app directly from the Apple Marketplace.

Recommendation: Tie mobile into other branding and channel marketing strategies and look at tapping into Mobile's unique native features to further engage customers.

#2 -- Local Drives Business: We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: we believe in local search. The most popular mobile shopping activity is locating the nearest retailer. When consumers find local information, 88% take action within a day; of this number, 61% call a retailer and 59% visit a store. (1)

Recommendation: Be discoverable and drive store foot traffic when consumers are searching for your business, products, or services. Integrate store locatiors into your display campaigns to help your customers find stores nearest to them.

#3 -- Consumers Want Offers: Google research shows that 70% of consumers use their smartphones while shopping. Why? Consumers love to compare prices while in a store. When we analyzed last year’s holiday search trends, we found a 250% increase over the previous year in searches related to offers and deals.

Recommendation: Use Ads with Offers and mobile coupons in both search and display to drive consumers into your stores and keep them there while they are comparison shopping. Include mobile to distribute promotional offers and time-sensitive coupons and designate custom mobile codes to track the return on your ad spend.

Both display and search ads deliver returns for retailers

#4 -- Consumers Engage with Mobile on Multiple Platforms: More than 165 million tablets are expected to ship in the next two years, and according to eMarketer, 41% of people say shopping is their sole purpose for buying a tablet. As a result we’ve noticed a big surge in search on tablets which has prompted us to completely redesign and optimize the tablet search results page for a touch interface. This means retailers need to have a cross-platform strategy which includes tablets.

Recommendation: Test new ad formats and redesign experiences specifically for different types of devices. Target tablets within your existing desktop search campaigns or break them out to ensure appropriate coverage, especially during this holiday season. Reach the tablet customer via new rich media ad templates that make it easy to execute a rich user experience resulting in extremely high engagement. These templates take advantage of tablets’ larger screen sizes, high-res graphics, touch screens and multimedia capabilities to drive deep engagement with mobile audiences. Take a look at our launch partner video here!

#5 -- Mobile Is Incremental: Fifteen percent of all shopping-related searches are now on a mobile device. This spells opportunity for retailers to tap into search growth by specifically targeting mobile devices and tablets.

When one advertising agency expanded their client’s business onto mobile, they saw some unexpected but very interesting behaviors. 20% of clients who conducted research on the desktop finalized their purchases on mobile devices. Seeing this incredible crossover data, they invested in mobile search advertising by leveraging Google’s Click-to-call ads to drive traffic to their call centers and also sent mobile users to an easy to use two-step ordering process on mobile and tablet sites. This investment led to a large increase of new prospects and also lowered the cost of a sale by 25% when occurring on mobile versus the call center. This is just one example of what can be achieved.

Recommendation: We see huge search spikes during the holiday season, as the above shopping query trend graph illustrates. In fact, last year Google saw a 250% increase on Black Friday related queries vs 2009 during the week of Black Friday and we’re hoping for another banner year for mobile. This is a valuable time to get in front of consumers, so have specific mobile holiday strategies in place and establish appropriate budgets. Below are two examples of how Target and Home Depot used Black Friday messaging during the week of Black Friday to capture the increased demand.

#6 -- A Word On Measurement: Mobile acts as a bridge and impacts your in-store and online channels. The opportunity is huge, but it requires innovative thinking, adapting to new realities, and challenging the assumed models. Our research shows that when consumers make purchases as a result of research conducted on their phones, 76% purchase in-store and 59% purchase online, while a smaller portion purchase on their phones.

Recommendation: Measure mobile differently; don’t measure success solely on mobile sales broadly. Think of conversions differently -- metrics such as a store look-up, customer sign-up, redemption of an offer in store, or app downloads are important. Tablets, on the other hand, have shown very strong eCommerce ROI, especially in retail, and can be measured more like desktop.

To learn more about the above recommendations, download the Full Think Retail Mobile Deck here.

For a quick snapshot of what’s available for retail in mobile now, check out our retail sizzle video.

Posted by: Alex Barza, Senior Account Executive, Mobile & Kacy Brod, Mobile Head of Display, Retail


Additional Notes (1) Google & OTX Study Q4 2010

(cross-posted on the Google Mobile Ads Blog)

Starting out on mobile can be overwhelming. Where do you start? How do you prepare for your first campaign? These are big questions that we hear every day. This is the first in a series of posts on establishing your presence on the mobile web - before you even start your first advertising campaign.

An essential part of any digital marketing campaign is the post-click experience from advertising. Is your website easy to navigate? Are there any hurdles to conversion that you can remove? These are the same questions that you should consider for your mobile user experience.

We recently conducted a study that examined the mobile post-click experience of some of our largest advertisers. After looking at over 200 diagnostic points to measure ‘mobile readiness,’ including load time, device detection and mobile site optimization, we found that only 21% of Google’s largest advertisers have a website that is optimized for mobile. That’s 79% serving up a less than ideal experience for their mobile customers.

The good news is that it’s not too late to be early on mobile! Get ahead of your competition by creating a fantastic experience for your mobile customers. Start with these 4 tips for designing a great mobile website and check in next week for some real examples of how to test and build a mobile website that works for your business.

click to enlarge image

Four Tips for designing a mobile website:

1. Prioritize what’s important. Make it easy for customers on-the-go to call or find directions to your business. Easy navigation combined with relevant and interesting information lead to happy customers and more business.
2. Take advantage of mobile-specific functionality. Users can interact through touch, sound, sight and location on their mobile device. Create a mobile website with custom content that utilizes these capabilities. 
3. Build for the mobile platform. Focus on easy navigation and remember to develop your website with touch screens in mind. Eliminating any website elements that don’t work or are slow to load on a mobile phone will keep users engaged.
4. Optimize, optimize, optimize. Be sure to add mobile analytics to your website in order to evaluate and improve performance.

Posted by Vicky Homan, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

(Cross-posted on the Google Mobile Ads Blog)

As mobile technology continues to accelerate, our phones are quickly becoming indispensable shopping tools. Whether researching a product or comparing prices before purchasing, 79% of US smartphone users have used their devices to help with shopping and 74% of those smartphone shoppers have made a purchase.*

This means that having a mobile strategy is key when engaging with these tech savvy, connected consumers. And this is especially true for advertisers focused on driving online and in-store conversions. To help you develop your mCommerce strategy, we’ve put together the following list of best practices for driving smartphone users to purchase from your site. Please note that these tips are geared towards ads running on high-end devices with full Internet browsers.

Extend your Online Brand Reputation to Mobile with Seller Ratings
It’s no secret that having a great online reputation is essential to driving online conversions. With Seller Ratings on mobile, you can extend your online reputation from desktop to mobile devices and leverage the power of the mobile platform to drive conversions on your website.

The Seller Ratings extension enables mobile searchers to see merchants who are highly recommended by other shoppers. By showcasing relevant and useful rating information for your business, the extension can help differentiate you from your competition and guide potential customers to purchase from your site. In recent studies, campaigns with mobile Seller Ratings saw a 7.5% increase in clickthrough rates when compared to campaigns without this extension.

click to enlarge image

Seller Ratings are aggregated from merchant review sites all around the web and the extension will only show when a merchant's online store has a rating of four or more stars and at least 30 reviews. To learn more about Seller Ratings, please read this Help Center entry.

Take your Customers Directly to your Desired Conversion Path with Mobile Ad Sitelinks
Ad Sitelinks enable direct navigation to specific pages of your website. Since navigating on the mobile web can still be difficult, sitelinks for mobile can be especially useful in taking customers directly to the desired conversion path on your site. For example, with sitelinks you can quickly guide your customers to the best selling products on your site or to your online store locator. Mobile users find this format particularly helpful and on average campaigns with mobile sitelinks see a 30% increase in clickthrough rates when compared to campaigns without sitelinks.

Right now a maximum of two sitelinks can appear on mobile devices with ads displaying two links across one line or stacked vertically on two lines. One-line sitelinks can show with the Click-to-Call Phone Extension and will display one link to your website alongside your phone number. One-line sitelinks can also show with the Seller Ratings Extension and will display your online store rating as well as two links to your website.

click to enlarge image

The quality of your ad will determine which variation of mobile Ad Sitelinks will show. Two-line sitelinks typically show for higher quality ads. To learn more about mobile sitelinks, please read this Help Center entry.

Drive Customers to your Store with Offer Ads
Are you running an in-store promotion? You can get the word out and incentivize customers to visit your store by placing a coupon right in your AdWords ads.

Mobile Ads with Offers enable advertisers to include special deals in their mobile search ads, allowing users to store coupons via email or SMS. Ads will also display your phone number or your business location on a Google Map for Mobile so that customers have everything they need to go to your store, redeem the offer and make a purchase. Mobile Ads with Offers are currently in beta, but we hope to make it broadly available soon.

click to enlarge image

Make it Easier For Customers to Contact you with Click-to-Call Ads
Whether you take orders over the phone or have a physical store location, you can ensure that your customers can easily connect with you by including your business phone number in your mobile search ads. Since users who make a call are showing interest in your product or service, they are more likely to make a purchase. With a call costing the same as a click to your ad, this is a very cost-effective ad format for driving quality leads and conversions for your business.

Are you specifically focused on driving calls to your business? Try the Call-Only Creative, an enhancement to the Click-to-Call ad format that ensures your phone number is the only clickable part of your mobile ad.

Do you have a vanity phone number? Use the Vanity Phone Numbers feature of Click-to-Call to display an alphanumeric phone number in your mobile ad and ensure that customers easily remember how to get in touch with you.

click to enlarge image

 

To learn more about mobile ads with Click-to-Call please read this Help Center entry.

We hope you’ll find these tips helpful in driving conversions with your mobile campaigns and look forward to developing more mCommerce ad features for you in the future.


Posted by Anna Khesed, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team
*source: US Mobile Smartphone Consumer Study, Google & Ipsos, 2010