Sunday, 28 July 2013

Use Customer Search Data to Better PPC campaign



PPC campaign is a great way to attract crowds of prospective purchasers to your website. The paid search when placed in strategic searches can fetch great rewards for the company. But recent statistics suggest that even experienced PPC campaign builders are not able to fully utilize the potential of PPC. As a SEO professional you would be inclined to opt for product related keywords all through the campaign. It is logical, that your company website should come up when a person for any product available at your website. But the tale of searching habits suggests an entirely different picture. People do not always end up buying the same product they had searched for. They may buy something close to the searched result. This leads to cross sell. If you have your eyes open and search through the customer search data then such trends can be completely utilized.


An analysis of search results for the past few months at one reputed e-commerce store suggests that some people bought smartphones after searching for digital camera. How come? This is not an abnormality; this is rather a trend that has gone unutilized so far. There are least people searching for products on the Internet with a fixed mind. There are so many options in the online stores that often surfers would look around and buy an entirely separate product. Search engine statistics suggest that less than 50% of surfers know exactly what they are looking for. They read through the pages of a website and fix their mind while going through. In Google the exact search and buy percentage is less than 3%. This is an astounding figure given the latest feature of matching search algorithms released by Google.

What these facts mean is: you have to pay close attention to the relationship between different categories or sub-categories of products present in your website. You should track how people are ending up buying an item. If you find there are some popular cross sell terms, then build your PPC campaign around them. Customer data will make your PPC campaign more effective.

Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Mobile Web Design: The Future of Web Development


To cope up with the quickly growing mobile market the web developer companies have enhanced their mobile web design offerings. In addition to provide the mobile app development and dedicated mobile website solutions, the new bundle helps businesses meet increasing consumer demands by incorporating the responsive fit to mobile website design. So, if you want to hire web developer to design your website, always keep in mind the mobile design aspect to get better visibility.

  Earlier the website design did not have the option to design differently for different mediums. That’s why the websites did not have the proper visibility on mobile devices. But with the increasing popularity of mobile devices, many companies introduced different design for different medium or you may say screen size. But that process was so not cost effective at all. It was not possible to have different website layouts for the small and medium enterprises. That’s why, the best web developers of the industry have found out a perfect solution for it. And this solution is called; the responsive design. In this design, the layouts are stretched and shrink according to the screen size. As the number of mobile devices users is paced to pass the population, it has become an essential to adopt the responsive design to seek more traffic as well as sale.

 

As per the trend, we are going to see in 2015 that the majority of the web traffic will come from mobile devices. That’s why it is the high time to change the design of your site. And when you want to hire web developer ask him to do a responsive design for your website. The most fundamental difference between the mobile web and desktop web UX is in understanding the smartphone user’s intent and satisfying it in as few steps as possible on a much smaller screen. The tools and best practices for testing and optimizing a mobile site are not much different from those used in the creation of the desktop web. Optimizing a mobile website by minimizing code, optimizing images, caching, compressing and simulated performance testing are not new to website designers. But building a fast mobile site is hard because so much depends on performance delays that can’t be modeled with simulated performance testing tools.


Monday, 22 July 2013

How to Promote your eCommerce Store with Images?



eCommerce website developers are much in demand albeit due to the overwhelming increase in popularity of online stores. Modern consumers have found the concept of shopping from their homes, without travelling, much to their liking. Reputed e-commerce stores are having staggering sales figures. It is tough for the newcomers to compete with the popular names in the business. But it is not impossible. The task of popularizing an e-commerce store starts right when the ecommerce website developers start working upon it. They try to make the website attractive, informative and easily navigable. After the site is ready you may use PPC campaign builder and other online promotion tools. Though these methods will fetch you good results, but there is another very innovative way. As the best web designers will say words are boring, while images are more interactive. You can use the power of images to promote your e-commerce website.


When shopping, most of us love window shopping. By furnishing images of your best products, you will force the surfers to take a look through the website. Take a lot of photos and display them all the while. Do not keep on showing the visitors same images as it will bore them out. When you are selling products, customer experiences matter. You may attract customers if you display images of people using products with a happy face. This is a psychological game.

Employees are the backbone of any company, so giving their images in the website is justified. It makes an e-commerce store look real and people will not turn their backs on you for fear of being a fake website! Give images of happy employees. Your photography costs can be reduced if you hold a photo contest where the customers can send their images while using the products. This will create hype among the customers and promote your business effectively. You may also attract attention to special offers with images. At times surfers will over look the special discounts in their hurry, do not let this happen.


Wednesday, 17 July 2013

eCommerce web development: How Does a Payment Gateway Work?


You may have heard that integrating the Payment Gateway to an ecommerce website is a very important development step. Payment Gateway is run by software and it allows the customers to make payments through bank cards online. Shopping carts and payment gateway are two things an ecommerce store can’t do without. Other features of the Payment Gateway include:

·         Encrypting private data as well as data related to the payment process.
·         Carrying out a string of communication between the banks, customers and your business.
·         Authorizes payments.
·         Some Payment Gateways also have option to calculate handling cost, sales tax and shipping rates.
·         Advanced Payment Gateways also have fraud detection tools.

As you can see the Payment Gateways are filled with features that are quintessential for the smooth running of an ecommerce website. Payment Gateway integration is held as an important stage in ecommerce website development. Popular software such as PayPal and Google Direct may be used, or you may opt for personalized Payment Gateway software. As any ecommerce website developer would suggest: it is important for you to learn just how a Payment Gateway works. So, below working of the Payment Gateway is explained in a step by step process: 


·         Process initiates when a customer buys products from website through phone or online order.
·         There is a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) used to scramble all the information put in by the customer.
·         The information put in by the customer is kept safe with the website administrators.
·         This request is sent to the bank.
·         The request is next forwarded to the card association such as American Express, MasterCard, etc.
·         The card association then forwards the particular transaction information to the concerned bank.
·         Bank checks whether the person has sufficient balance in his/her account.
·         There is an authorization code sent by the bank to the card association.
·         This code is then sent to the business through the Payment Gateway. The money is funded to the company’s bank account.

All these set of complicated steps are integrated by software named Payment Gateway. It is no wonder then that in ecommerce website development implementation of Payment Gateway takes a significant while.  

Tuesday, 9 July 2013

How to Run a PPC campaign for your Business Success?


Paid search campaigns are a great way to get good search engine rankings. Creating Pay Per Click campaigns make perfect sense if the Google statistics are adhered to. Google states that business owners can have 96% of their online sales using the PPC campaign. When you use the services of an expert PPC campaign builder you can win over your closest competitors in terms of earning profits. PPC reaches you close to all the relevant searches conducted every day. By using the Pay Per Click option you get a spot on the search engine results.

The first thing to consider when creating a PPC campaign is the target audiences. You have to recognize the demography, age group and economic class of the prospective customers. The SEO experts will go through such details and find some impressive, result oriented keywords you can use to reap best benefits of the PPC campaign. Understanding what the customers may be searching by is very important. The SEO professionals will come up with a competitive set of keywords. Your advertisement will arrive with only pertinent searches, giving you maximum prospects of earning new customers. 


Bid management is also an important activity of any PPC campaign builder. When you want to secure a position in search results you will face stiff competition from other businesses. To make it a neutral affair, Google has devised the idea of bidding. Here one representative of your company will bid for the space in search results mentioning the keywords and other details. Experienced PPC campaign builder is able to fetch you the best deal. They will make sure that your advertisement gets good viewing and at the same time it gives you good worth for money.

Starting a PPC campaign is only the starting point. Monitoring the progress of your campaign and modifying it (if the results are not satisfactory) is very important. The experts monitor your progress every day and prepare detailed reports providing key suggestions. They will implement the changes in your campaign as and when required.    

Monday, 1 July 2013

How to Choose Software in any ecommerce Website Development Project?

The world of ecommerce is glorious. Within a few years of its inception the ecommerce websites have become favorite items on the Internet. Though webmasters are making huge profits from their ecommerce websites but not too many people can opt for ecommerce website development. The costs of ecommerce web development are quite high and not readily affordable. Out of the many reasons for this high price is the need for expensive software. Some webmasters are taking disastrous paths to minimize the costs. They are using their website merely to showcase products and not sell them directly. This is leading to lost opportunities every day.

If you can select the software for ecommerce website development wisely then the costs would be minimized logically and you would not have to sacrifice the features for the website. Let us take a look at some tips to select software effectively. 


  Payment Processing: Developing software specially for payment processing is a waste of time and money. Google Checkout and PayPal are third party payment software providers, but they are highly regarded and trustworthy. They have become household names and people will trust this software more than your specific payment gateway software. PayPal or Google Checkout charges a mere fee per transaction which would not hamper your profits.
·         Shopping Cart: Unless you are selling only one product, any ecommerce website developer would opine that there is a need to create a shopping cart. That does not mean you have to order for shopping cart software. There are plenty of cost effective readymade options available in the market that would do the trick.
·         All Solutions eCommerce Software: OS Commerce is the leading software that allows website owners an opportunity to start off ecommerce store without much capital investment. All features essential to an ecommerce store are present within this software. You can opt for this if your requirements are less.

As you can see it is not difficult to start off on ecommerce website development. Consult a reputed ecommerce website developer before taking any major decisions.