Having been approached a few weeks before Christmas by some online stores keen to boost their sales in peak season, last year, may I point out that planning your Christmas paid search activity should be in progress, now?
For maximum impact, you’ll want purpose-designed landing pages to optimise conversion. That usually means running some experiments. You should be conducting those experiments before the peak selling season starts. For example, coming up to Christmas, your visitors may become more anxious than usual about delivery schedules and packaging – especially if you can handle seasonal gift wrapping and personally imprinted cards. Delivery costs can sometimes decrease in significance, and receipt before Christmas can dominate – meaning that normal factors for your standard pages for the rest of the year are turned topsy-turvey.
We see many sites with poorly configured web analytics, unable to track conversions and hence unable to tell whether changes are having any effect – time to get that sorted out. Site designers will be looking at scheduling Christmas activities, so your opportunities to fix up your site, if you rely on outside help, may be limited if you wait much longer. Some site designers for SME’s can’t, IME, wrap their heads around the difference between the analytics code that goes on every page and post-purchase order conversion code… Working out what your real conversion rate is when someone just stuck conversion code on every page of the site, can make life rather complex – think “300% conversion rates – up from 1%, this week only”. If the designers can’t get back to your site to fix it for a few days or even weeks, it really messes with the stats. Note that these are not invented scare stories, but examples of practical problems that I’ve experienced in the last year.
IMO, you should now be working on extracting key management data from your web analytics, in order that testing new landing pages for what is, for some of you, peak selling season, is as effective as possible.
Oh, and one more piece of advice… Don’t rework the store coming up to your peak season, especially if you rely on SEO. I’ve been called in for more rescues this year, than ever before, from store owners who have accidentally killed their own sites in the run up to Christmas with a steroid-pumped video game full-Flash site – and no search engine presence at all, as any keyword loaded links now get a 404. Switching site technologies and making major information architecture changes needs some serious planning before the switch, especially if you get any volume of traffic from organic search.
IME, there is a great urge to switch the site just before the peak of activity. If the new site turns out to be less effective, you’ve just shot yourself in the foot – and new sites can be less effective, easily. Why does a new site have decreased conversion? Because it usually forgets customer needs that were baked-in to the old site, emphasises graphical branding over the ability to work out what the offer is, fails to reduce purchase fears or to make the next steps obvious. Note that good graphical design can enhance sales – but the graphics designer has to be suitably briefed and the CEO mustn’t get overexcited by a heading graphic featuring something irrelevant to customer needs, like video walkthrough of the new extended warehouse and good receiving area, that consumes two thirds of the page on a 1280×1028 monitor (but looks quite small on the agency’s 1920×1200 screen). Again, all experience within the last year – though I changed the description of the “missed the point” headline graphic to avoid embarrassing a client ;)
Summary
Make sure your web analytics are capable of measuring conversion rates and sources (down to search queries in paid search) with some accuracy.
Start designing landing pages now, using experience from previous Christmas selling periods – not your normal year round experience. What special offers and discounts can you offer that will trigger a higher CTR than your competitors, and generate higher conversion volumes?
Schedule time for testing responses – looking at bounce rates, time on page, the conversion path, heatmaps, etc.
Avoid switching your site now. Unless you have a dedicated team and a fast cycle time with well organised analytics, you are probably too late to change and fix up a site ready for a Christmas rush, with optimised conversion paths and effective paid search. It took time to make the old site work – it’ll take time to raise the performance of the new site. Honest.
Focus on what customers are trying to achieve, not what you are trying to sell – you can square the circle by making them want what you’ve got, by pointing out how what you have matches their needs, rather than flogging the features. And make it a good reason to buy from you, not a competitor – returns policy, unwanted gift policy, accreditation, endorsements, testimonials, guaranteed on-time delivery, official reseller logos, etc…
Do it now. Even waiting another month will likely lose traction.
