Google Brings RLSA To Adwords Shopping Ads With Shopping Remarketing Lists – Newsletter November 2015

 

 

 

 

The holiday shopping season is within touching distance, and having websites flowering in with customers would be on every businessman’s wish-list. Currently, having assessed the shopping season, sales are expected to go up by 3-4% in this month, through the January holiday sales. This would see sales that’d possibly account around the $965 billion mark.

 

Also, the downturn in other local & home sale prices would only give way to shoppers piling up a budget for shopping. And the advent of this season has a predicted rise of 8.5 – 9% of online shopping.

 

Improvising your site during this period would have you experiencing an audience ascendency with a lengthy shopping list. To do this, we’ve got you 9 tips that’ll help you gain a glorious shopping season.

 

1^st Tip: Redirection of last year’s product pages

Don’t let product pages of the 2014 go to waste. Make the most of the holiday promotion pages that you must have used last year. Those pages might be in some way affiliated to the products you plan to promote this holiday season. Also, bring back those items that were out-of-stock last year.

 

2^nd Tip: Put the spotlight upon Mobile Users

Today, we witness a whopping increase in mobile users, with a 160% mobile users shopping on sites coined for mobile use. While enforcing sites on mobiles, you need to test & review pages on Chrome browsers, using Google’s mobile friendly tools. Google, today, prefers mobile pages. This leads to an increase in ranking for those who are mobile-friendly.

 

3^rd Tip: Policy Pages need to be Updated

‘Contact Us’, ‘About Us’ and ‘Return Policy’ are the information pages that need to updated. From e-mails to toll-free numbers, update every element & feature in those pages. Also, you should provide ways for clients & customers to return ordered products.

 

4^th Tip: Include the ‘Gift Link’ menu on the Home Page

Being a holiday shopping season, having gift links on the home page is imperative. These should cater to men & women, both and each of their interested themes. Also, it should be present on the navigational menu, as graphical icons. Place them on the top or on the centre of the website, making sure they’re visible. Adding them upon SEO optimized pages for holiday shopping seasons is also relevant.

 

5^th Tip: Upgrade your Website via Holiday SEO

Include shopping, gift & holiday related keywords onto your homepage and other internal pages. Example: X’mas Holiday, Holiday Season, Gifts for him, Holiday Discounts, etc. Read below a set of pointers to improve your page:

• Page Title: Keywords should be included in the titles.
• Meta Description: Post around 2 reps of targeted keywords off your page on search engines.
• Header Tags: For highlighting of keywords or items on your page, use H1 sized font for one tag and 2/4 H2 or H3 sized tags.
• Body Content: Product information and details should be clear and precise. Lay emphasis on each of your targeted keyword with italicized, bolded or underlined font versions. Also, appropriately edit fonts for ‘offers’, ‘discount pricing’ and ‘free shipping.’
• URL Structure: Avoid underlines while coining a holiday page URL. Only make use of hyphens. Make use of the keywords that are closely related to the content on the page.
• Internal Linking: Internal holiday specific pages & targeted anchor text need to be linked thoroughly. Swap generic text like Gifts for Him with something a bit more creative or being linked to the season, like ‘Gifts for Christmas’ or ‘New Year Gifts.’
• External Linking: Being linked with other relevant pages or sites could also be focused upon. While you target your holiday pages on these sites, do not change the anchor text. Use the ones that you’d make use of internally.
• Updating of the XML Sitemap: Always keep a track of all the holidays & seasons that come your way and keep updating the sitemap accordingly.
• Increase Social Presence: Promoting your holiday shopping season sale upon social media websites certainly would benefit you. Instagram, Pinterest and other social platforms draw in customers, and keep increasing traffic on your site for prolonged periods. Planned strategies to promote specific gift boards increase traffic.
• Website Testing: Carefully assess every feature on your website before it goes live. Keep an eye out for graphical & grammatical errors and broken links of the website. A bad user experience would only decrease conversions.

 

6^th Tip: Enhance your Landing Pages

In order to enhance the landing page, make sure you have a precisely understandable call to action that’d lead customers to their desired page. Distinct features of the products should also be showcased. This shows how the products are different from the others on the internet. Cater to every user properly; answering each of the queries that’d make them satisfied customers.

7^th Tip: A Suitable Shopping Cart

As the customer views the shopping cart, every detail should be properly presented. Information about the cost & savings must be mentioned. In the process, security and speed are also essential features that are needed. Security allows errors to be stepped over, and a fast process that doesn’t require registration highlights the aspect of speed. These features are important to develop of a perfect shopping cart.

 

8^th Tip: Grant Gift Cards & Certificates

Gift cards & certificates shouldn’t be confined to a certain sect of customers. Every customer should be using them. This way it’d not only satisfy them but would also increase your sales. Valuetec & Opticard are those that provide custom gift cards. Through these you could format a pdf gift certificate or buy a gift certificate print template.

 

9^th Tip: Comprise Comparison Shopping

You’re not the only one out on the field. There are others who seize every opportunity in the holiday season. Comparing yourself with others would sum up your sales & progressive stats, and would help you keep a track of the traffic count among your competitors. This way, you could even eye different products, coupons and special offers, and adopt a few ways to increase your sales.

 

Google Shopping, Shopzilla, Bing Product Search, NextTag.com etc. are a few you could feast your eyes on. These brands have immense traffic and they do so by keeping customers aware & alerted about each product and its pricing. Searching for products on these websites is also easy, that makes shopping easy and lure in innumerable customers.

 

For multiple comparison shopping programs from a single interface, interested retailers could sign up with Channel Advisor. This enterprise-level provider could have your products pinned up across 100 or more different comparison shopping engines.

 

Here’s your chance to make this holiday season more exciting than ever! Adopt & make use of these tips to make shopping an everyday affair for a flourishing frosty fiesta.

 

 

 

 

 

The holidays are all about relationships and emotions. The concept of the holiday itself is based upon embracing and celebrating the relations. As a business man, what could possibly be more important to you then setting the right relations with your customers on the upcoming holidays.

 

And social media is the best platform to serve this purpose! It enables you to quickly connect with and influence your fans. Current statistics shows that nearly 75% consumers are using social media to make a purchase decision.

 

It’s essential to know “how to best use the social media to drive sales”. However, you are not the only one who is trying to target consumers via social networks so the question emerges “How will you stand out from the clutter”.

 

Below are 7 tested and proven ways using which you can drive enormous sale this holiday season.

 

1. Themed Content

Themed content is the key! Updating seasonal content that is relevant to your niche will bring you assured success. You can provoke your targeted customer’s curiosity by sharing updates, blog posts, statistics and images that are related to the holiday and your industry. It will increase the engagement rate of the audience hence increasing the credibility and trust factor of your brand.

 

2. Use Hashtags to Boost your Reach

Hashtag plays a vital role in boosting your content reach. However, hashtags stay effective for a very short interval of time. So you need to quickly research for the trending hashtags and then embed them into your content. Google+/Explore & Hashtagify.me are the easiest way to find trending hashtags.

 

3. Utilize the Secret Board of Pinterest

A great way to establish a strong connection and prompt engagement with your current admirers is to employ secret boards. The secret board will be only available to those you invite. You can use it to provide VIP promo codes or special discounts to your special customers. It will not only limit your discounted sale but will also make your customer feel privileged.

 

4. Gift Recommendations Drive Sales

Suggesting gift guides to customers as per their interest, age and gender is a great way to drive targeted sharing and traffic via social media. Ascertain your targeted audience and then structure recommendations around each one to escalate your sales this holidays.

 

5. Employ Facebook Retargeting Pixels

A well-known fact is that among all the social media, Facebook drives the most traffic to websites. So it will be beneficial to track the traffic coming to your website especially from Facebook and then target them again and again during the whole holiday season. You can do it by using Facebook Custom Audience Pixels.

 

6. Reward your Audiences

During holidays, everyone is willing to get EXTRA or FREE stuff. So running a contest is an excellent way to get more likes, shares, and comments across all social media platforms. For an idea, you can check out this article.

 

7. Choose a Worthy Cause

As I discussed earlier that holidays are about emotions and so people become a little more sentimental during this period. So supporting a cause can be a beneficial move. It’s a fact that a brand’s credibility increases in consumer’s eyes when they support a charity or cause. So choose one cause that somehow relates to your products and support it (Whether you care about it or not).

For instance: If you sell clothes, distribute clothes to homeless, if you sell dog foods, help find an abandoned dog a shelter and share it on social media and bingo! You just won appraisal and customers both.

The 2015 holidays is going to be really astonishing as retail holiday sales forecast is projecting as much as $965 billion in sales between November and January, a 4 percent increase over last year’s shopping season. And as far as we know, no one will want to miss this huge opportunity. So make sure that you are using every available platform in the best possible way to drive maximum sales.

 

And if you need any help with Social Media Marketing for your business, we can be of assistance. Just contact us and let our pros do the work for you.

 

All the best!

 

 

 

Google’s unpredictable nature again came to the forefront, when it recently gave some more hints that it might actually add the structured data in its search algorithm. This came after the company previously having denied including it for the same purpose.

 

These changes also mean that the Structured Data & Markup along with the Rich Snippets will now form a cohesive part of Google’s SERP capabilities that helps the search engine bot to understand your website’s content. From the business point of view, it means more conversions being translated from the organic results to your official web page.

 

On the contrary, Google on several previous occasions had denied saying that the new thought about changes will not be included in its search ranking algorithm to help businesses with their website’s overall search rankings. Besides that induction of these changes in your web pages won’t directly influence your website’s Google search ranking for the better.

 

But this may change altogether in the future, with Google’s John Mueller recently indicated in a Google hangout (at the 21:40 minute mark) that “over time, I think it [structured markup] is something that might go into the rankings as well.”

 

John was quoted as saying that Google currently doesn’t use it as a ranking parameter but over a period of time, it may indeed start using it. He further went on to explain the logic behind doing so as below:

 

“If we can recognize someone is looking for a car, we can say oh well, we have these pages that are marked up with structured data for a car, so probably they are pretty useful in that regard. We don’t have to guess if this page is about a car.”

 

Further, he adds:

 

“So I think, in the long run, it definitely makes sense to use structured data where you see that as being reasonable on the Web site. But I wouldn’t assume that using structured data markup with making your site jump up in rankings automatically. So we try to distinguish between a site that is done technically well and a site that actually has good content.

 

Just because it is done technically well, it doesn’t mean it is as relevant to the users as content that is not done as technically well.”

 

Here is the video embed where he mentions using it in ranking:

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Yahoo local has partnered with Yext & from now on Yext will be your go-to for all of your Local Basic Listing needs, including the free listings. However, they haven’t taken any steps towards cleaning up the bad business listings. To manage your local listings & to know more about the change click here.

 

• ComScore released its august 2015 U.S Smartphone subscriber market share report – Apple topped the chart for smartphones manufacturer with 44.1% OEM market share. On the other hand, Google’s Android is still number one smartphone platform with a 51.7% market share & Facebook retains its number one position for the smartphone app.

 

• Yelp gave fresh warnings to reviewers to not to violate its terms of services.

 

 

 

• Since the ComScore report reveals that apple is dominating the smartphone market, it’s better to know “How to rank for searches on Apple phones“.

 

• Google upgraded the user interface of Google My Business dashboards. The change is almost unnoticeable for users managing the single location, but it provides convenience to those managing multiple accounts.

 

• The current irregularity on local results indicates that we may see a lot of testing in upcoming days. Google is constantly refining its local algorithm to provide best possible results and the testing will be to ensure the same.

 

• Facebook and Pro.com have joined hands and using Facebook messenger to match potential customer and home service businesses. It seems like Facebook is planning to compete with Amazon and Google as it is somehow willing to play the role of Middleman on that specific field.

 

• Wix websites slumped in the Google results as their pages drop out of the index. However, Google is on the way to fix the issue by quickly re-crawling the affected websites.

 

• Apple maps secured the top position in iOS 9 local search results. There are also some significant changes made by Apple in order to break the dominance of Google in mobile searches. However, there’s still lot to improve and right now Google feels no threat.

 

• Google revamped its map layout and local knowledge panel. Another noticeable thing is that ratings have become more important than hand written reviews. The significance of ‘Good’ image remains the same.

 

• A recent research shows that:
• Radical SEO and good ratings help websites in securing a place in local packs.
• Close proximity is the key to appear in the local pack.
• If dropped earlier, new reviews can take website back to the local pack.

 

• Ones’ website can suffer both manual and algorithmic penalties at the same time. A website may outcome from the manual penalty by working towards it, but it will be still affected by the algorithmic penalty if the content or any other factors are violated.

 

• If you made an edit on Google Mapmaker and it is not getting attention, Google is providing instructions to help you to have success with your requests.

 

• While Yelp has given fresh warning to people who write false reviews, Amazon went one step ahead and filed a lawsuit against 1000 Fiverr’s who were submitting fake reviews.

 

• Bright locals recently published an annual survey on reviews. It reveals that now 92% of customers read online reviews and star rating is number #1 factor used by consumers to judge a business. This survey revealed some interesting results as well, like this below listed chart. To check out entire survey, click here.

 

 

 

• Google introduced Google My business API for agencies managing 50+ AdWords accounts.

 

• Uber will now provide lightning fast deliveries with UberRush. Initially, it is open for business in San Francisco, New York City and Chicago. It can be a boon for small business owners as they can deliver almost anything in minutes. They recently launched UberEats which does curbside meal deliveries at lunchtime. Way to go Uber!

 

• Facebook is now providing local business pages with Gray verification badge. To know how to get it, click here.

 

• Yahoo too has its own mobile search algorithm, Marissa Mayer the current president and CEO of Yahoo recently disclosed it.

 

• Google has recently released AdWords customizers using which one can alter text ads as per location.

 

• A little surprising thing from ComScore report is that now Bing’s market share in the US is 20%. Bing also reported earlier that since the release of windows 10, their profits have escalated.

 

• A twitter campaign in the UK urged Trip Advisor to force the customers to upload the dining receipt before they write reviews to ensure that they are not fake. Trip Advisor denied the request saying, “Only one person pays the bill while other dines as well and thus they can give reviews as well”.

 

 

Got bored of watching images without any location details? Here’s good news for you! Pinterest now enables the retailers to display the pin’s location data.

 

The pins will now have useful information like phone numbers, addresses and store hours. This will be of a great help to retailers and marketers for growing up their businesses. This will enable the retailers to provide complete and appropriate information to their current and potential audience.

 

 

Every pin will now include a preview of where it lives on the map. So, it’s now easier to get all the details, including other Pins from that spot and tips from people who’ve been there. You are just a click or tap away from making a call or getting directions from Google Maps or Apple Maps.

 

 

Users can even search for or discover nearby places that they might want to visit just by exploring the map. For now, this feature is available on iPhone and iPad and will soon go live on web too! Keep an eye on updates to enjoy this feature!

Enjoy Pinning!

 

 

 

 

Google is introducing shopping remarketing lists to extend the reach of RLSA campaigns beyond text ads to PLAs and local inventory ads (LIAs).

 

The lists will enable advertisers to customize shopping bids for cart-abandoners, loyal customers, nearby shoppers and others when they search for products on Google. Your remarketing lists from Google Analytics will be available in shopping campaigns to either target and bid or bid only on users from those lists.

 

The announcement comes just ahead of the holiday shopping season. Last week, Bing Ads announced its own remarketing capabilities for search and shopping campaigns.

 

Shopping remarketing lists can now be applied in AdWords accounts globally.

 

Need more information? Get in touch with us and let our professional team help you out.

 

 

 

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