WebDev

The first article of this series discussed page views per session as a kind of early warning system key performance indicator (KPI) for your website. The second discussed time on site as another warning flag. Both of these articles show specific measurements used to forecast site problems. There are lots of KPI’s you can set up to warn you of impending doom or better show your successes but to go through each one would take me till the end of next year. So to wrap up this series, this article will discuss the general metrics you should be looking at as an ‘e’ business and more importantly why you should be looking at them.

‘e’ Business metrics

The term ‘e’ business was coined by Ogilvy and Mather for IBM in November of 1997 and has stuck around ever since. Great advertising, of course it came from e-commerce which was a general term, but I can still remember the IBM jingle and the ads showing IBM’s vision of networked computing. There was nothing wrong with the IBM idea or their adverts. However, one problem with this ‘e’ part is that for some reason people decided that the Internet was not like other marketing mediums.

Why time spent on your site is important

All websites regardless of type should measure this KPI, simply because all websites can use it as a gauge to see how compelling their offers are as well as check web site performance. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a content portal or an e-commerce sales operation, time spent on your pages is an important metric to measure. If you have for instance a commerce site you need to know how long your offers hold your audience.

Time spent on site is also another KPI that warns you when things aren’t going well.

Why you need warning signals

Life is full of warnings. Your body warns you with pain when there is something you shouldn’t be doing. If you don’t exercise enough and sit in front of a computer screen for too long you get muscle aches and pains, or a repetitive strain injury. That’s your body telling you to do more physical stuff or else!

Similarly if you twist or turn too quickly and strain a muscle, it’s your body giving you a not so gentle reminder that you should either stop overextending yourself or feel pain.

The problem with most e-commerce marketing strategy today is that companies don’t understand how they use things like web analytics. Most e-commerce directors or web marketers are given a budget and told to stick to it, and good analytics don’t usually come cheap. Without web analytics you can’t even begin to measure key performance indicators (KPI’s), which should be a part of any good e-commerce strategy. We often see that marketers face a problem in that they know they need Web Analytics, they just don’t know why they should pay for it and don’t know what to measure. This three part series of articles will hopefully help clear up some of the things that marketers should measure as key performance indicators concentrating on one KPI per article.

What is a key performance indicator?

In website measurement terms a key performance indicator is a metric which will help your organization define and measure progress toward your websites business objective. Key Performance Indicators are quantifiable web site measurements that reflect whether you are successfully meeting or falling short of your websites business goals.

One sure-fire way to loosing out big time on your business profits is from incidences of excessive refunds and chargeback requests. If the number is high in any period you could risk loosing your third party merchant account altogether. So what do you do when there are some who will request a refund within 15 minutes of purchasing your product? Or even more pettier are those who will wait until the last possible moment to request a refund. Well not all is lost because merchant account providers are very well informed as to the credit card numbers of persistent refund and chargeback claimants. Just like their list of fraudulent credit card users, stolen credit cards etc they have a database of what I call “Refund Junkies”. There appears to be no end to the unethical tactics some people will use to get your product for free.

Use the following tips to further safeguard against refunds and expensive chargeback costs. The good news is that refunds are easy to process and do not carry any additional fees. However as a merchant you want to ensure that refunds are kept to a minimum.

1. Clearly State the Billing Name

Often the simplest Web stores have the most success. But shoppers like special features depending upon the type of store you have, how you market and use them, and if you don’t overwhelm the shopper. Below I list as many features as I could think of, just to jog your creativity.

Coupon Codes: This seems like a no-brainer, but sometimes shoppers who don’t have a coupon code feel cheated, like, "someone’s getting a discount, but not me." You might want to consider labeling it, "Voucher Code," or "Promotional Code," or some other term which does not necessarily imply a discount.

Continue Shopping Button in the Basket Screen: When a shopper at your store gets to their basket, do you give them the option to shop some more, or is your site pushing them to checkout immediately? Continue Shopping buttons should take them to the last product or category page, or, worst case, the store home page.

Remember Me: Amazon does it, and people like it. Upon returning to the store, the shopper is greeted with, "Welcome Back, Bob Smith." This could be enhanced with order histories, preference settings, recommended products based upon purchase history, etc.

Understanding business and product sales can sometimes put me in a whirlwind. My job tends to get me involved with loads of different opportunities dealing with all sorts of product lines. It is not my job to understand every single type of product, but it is my goal to assist my clientele with the broadening of their product market.

The tidal wave of the E-Commerce platform is just starting to build up speed. The US Census Bureau explains that E-Commerce sales are "sales of goods and services where an order is placed by the buyer or price and terms of sale are negotiated over an Internet, extranet, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) network, electronic mail, or other online system." Although the overall percentage of E-Commerce sales in comparison to total retail sales may seem small, the acceleration rate is indeed enormous.

What does all this mean?

Take a look at a business associate of mine that sells cleaning supplies. He has a small warehouse in Las Vegas that moves a little over 10 million dollars worth of product a year. Without any Internet presence whatsoever, 100% of his sales come from conventional marketing near and around his local market. He services the greater part of the West Coast, but doesn’t venture too much outside of that boundary.

Overview:

What is web advertising?

Internet Advertising is popularly known as web advertising. Internet webadvertising giving Opportunity to the advertiser to target geographic country wise, subject wise, targeted Customers only from more than 200 countries worldwide. Online Advertisers having a full control on Advertising budget in web advertising. as per performance results, advertisers can increase or decrease budget of webadvertising.

For getting started Internet online web advertising, you or your company must have online Products/services catalogues website. This website will be your online sales channels, your Online office or your online shopping store/shop. Your prospective buyers will come through Internet search engines or many other following online places we are discussing here. You must have a good web traffic analysis tool to know about performance of your online e-marketing efforts. This online visitor’s traffic analysis tool must provide keywords details which is your prospective buyers typing in search engines and business to business trade directories, this tool also must provide geographic details of prospective customers visitors of your website.

Why web advertising?

Internet becoming a biggest marketplace and growing rapidly day by day. Online emarketing can bring buyers traffic through using web advertising.

Paypal is one of the wonders of the web. Never has it been easier for individuals or small business to receive payments though the web & to be able to accept payment though debit or credit cards without having to own a merchant account. You can have a paypal account setup within minutes & accept payment straight away.

One of the most widely used examples of how paypal is used to sell goods, is with Information Products such as ebooks, special reports or software.

If your using paypal to offer information products, you can simply setup your site to accept payments & deliver the product automatically. Get it right and you could be earning money in your sleep!

The most basic setup is by using Paypals return page tag in the following format.

(Change all [] to when entering the html code)

[input type=”hidden” name=”return” value=”http://www.yourname.com/thanks.php”].

Insert this into your paypal code & when a successfull payment is made your visitor is simply diverted to the page you specify. Most of the time it will be a “Thanks For Your Order Page”, but additionally you can include the products on this page for your visitor to download straight away.

There are F words in business. We have seen many small businesses on the internet flourish and fulfil their dream, but sadly we have seen some flounder and fail because they had the wrong product.

To be successful in a new business:

The Internet began as a male dominated medium, but those days are long gone and merchants are advised to make sure their websites are female friendly to faciliate the rising surge of busy i-Moms shopping online for their family and friends.

Women now account for 51.7% of Internet usage according to a 2005 Lucid marketing study but that’s only the tip of iceberg. When it comes to online purchasing, women are clearly leading the way. According to a Bizrate survey, women accounted for 62% of online purchases in the fourth quarter of 2004!

The above statistic shouldn’t be that surprising when we consider that women are busy household managers and make many financial decisions across the United States. According to Small Business Administration, “women currently make up 80 percent of consumer spending. They currently purchase more than half the automobiles that are sold in this country. They consistently purchase more groceries, apparel and durable goods than men and they have become the primary ones to make healthcare decisions in 75 percent of American households.”

Other research shows that women are less likely than men to use the Internet for entertainment purposes, but rather they are looking for information, household tips, low prices, and, especially, ease of use in purchasing online.