Selling on Facebook Now Easier to Track

Selling on Facebook is now a bit easier to track as the company is readying a new analytics tool that allows e-retailers to see which ads are most effective. 

The conversion tracking tool should be a popular one, but its functionality does not give critical insights some companies might want. The people who click the ads will remain anonymous. Good for privacy, not quite as helpful to ad sellers. Still, it's a step forward for the one billion member strong Facebook as it tries to chip away at Google's stranglehold on online advertising.

Best for Direct Response Marketing

Retailers who have been considering buying Facebook ads will likely find the tool useful, and that could help sway them to advertise on Facebook rather than Google. It couldn't hurt anyway. Any insight companies can get from advertising campaigns will help in targeting the next time around.

One way the tool will help do this is to allow companies to sell new ads to people with similar attributes to those who responded to a previous ad. It's worth noting here that Facebook defines conversions as any desired action taken, like registering for a newsletter, and not just completed sales. 

Once the tool launches at the end of the month, marketers will be able to track more than just the numbers of clicks or numbers of app downloads triggered.

Facebook Ads vs Pages

Of course, there is more than one way to make money on Facebook, and trying to convert Likes into dollars is one popular way. This has its own set of pitfalls, however, and that is one of the main reasons why Facebook ads hold so much promise.

Back in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was focused on mobile, and so far that has helped the company's bottom line. For customers though, convincing them to advertise on Facebook might be a tougher sell because of the shadow of Google. Google shows relevant ads during a search, and that immediacy is hard to beat. 

Along with new features like Sponsored Stories, Facebook's tracking tool is one more piece the company can use to get advertisers on board. Tell us in the comments if you have a loyal Facebook following and if your Page is a moneymaker.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Five Strategies to Increase Product Visibility in an Oversaturated Market

With another holiday shopping season upon us, maximizing product visibility in the e-Commerce market is one of retailers’ biggest hurdles. Keyword-rich product descriptions are important, but that alone won’t be enough to differentiate your product lists from your competition’s this holiday season.

It’s predicted this holiday season’s consumer online shopping spree will be US$ 54.47 billion. To capture a significant chunk of that, retailers must rethink their strategy for pushing their inventory through the digital static to the front of shoppers’ screens.

From ensuring your site is architecturally sound for top search engine rankings, to actively seeking out online customer reviews, retailers can make easy tweaks to their websites to ensure their inventory is in plain view.

Here are five defined strategies retailers can implement to boost their products’ visibility:

1. Have a Clear Website Blueprint

Before pouring time and money into search engine optimization efforts, make sure your website has an SEO-friendly foundation. Every website needs logical site architecture to ensure that search engine crawlers can index each page effectively. Consistency in your naming conventions, sitemaps, header tags, internal links and inbound links provides search engines with a clear blueprint of your site, allowing them to determine which keywords match your offerings.

Create clean informative page titles, metatags and spider friendly URLs. Without a thoughtful structure, search engines are forced to guess your specialty, resulting in unrelated, untargeted traffic onto your site.

2. Avoid Duplicate Content

Few pain points lower a website’s search ranking faster than duplicate content. Google and other search engines refrain from listing substantially similar web pages in search results, pushing websites loaded with redundant content further to the bottom, if not off the first page.

With many e-Commerce retailers battling holiday time constraints, repetitive content becomes a major issue. Too often, online merchants copy and paste manufacturer product descriptions onto their website to save time — that’s missing a unique opportunity to add SEO value. Always rewrite product descriptions to guarantee that they’re tailored to your site, that they speak to your specific audience’s needs and that they are rich with important keywords.

Be careful not to create duplicate content inadvertently by showing the same results on two separate URLs (for example, if the only shoes your website sold were Nike, but clicking on “shoes” or “Nike” yielded different pages with the same products). Avoid these SEO penalties by sketching out a logical taxonomy for your pages, using canonical URLs and having an easy-to-use redirect tool, so you don’t need to be a web programmer to correct the problem.

3. Quality Links Matter

It is no surprise that the Web churns out large amounts of spam; SEOmoz estimates around 60 percent of all web pages fall on the more questionable side of the trustworthy spectrum. In order to provide web users with the highest quality search results, search engines analyze links to gauge a website’s trust and popularity.

Collecting link-backs from popular and highly trusted domains boosts your own site’s credibility, resulting in a significant increase in your SERP ranking. Links from industry-specific websites versus links from general or irrelevant sites speak louder to your own reputation, and boost your site’s placement above the fold. Google also considers internal links when evaluating your page rank, so be sure to incorporate internal links in your overall linking strategy.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

iPhone 5 Sells Five Million Over the Opening Weekend

 After the hype and hectic queues on Friday, the weekend proved no less busy for Apple stores and other retailers, as millions around the world flocked to buy the latest model of Apple iPhone. However, there could be plenty of user angst over scuffing of the phone and the iOS 6 Maps app. 

Apple Hits A New High

Somewhere between the prospect of a no-show and huge analyst "estimates", Apple can consider itself to have done pretty darn well out of the opening weekend sales for the iPhone 5.  The company has just announced that it sold over five million units across the 22 territories that it went on-sale.

While some analysts had gone as high as eight million, Apple will be more that delighted with five million, which smashes previous records including the 4 million iPhone 4S devices sold last year. Perhaps the analysts were expecting higher numbers based on the 5 being more of a new phone than the 4S "upgrade." 

Such is the power of those sales that the numbers will have a small but substantial impact on the U.S. and other economies, as well as toward Apple's own stock price and the huge number of supply chain partners. 

iOS 6 Thunders Along

This coming weekend, the iPhone 5 goes on-sale across the rest of Europe, so expect the numbers to keep on rising. The company also has the small matter of the iPad Mini coming in October, plus the launch of the new iTunes and iPod range, which should go even further toward boosting profits. Also on the horizon, and the next big step for Apple, will be the launch of the iPhone 5 into China, the world's biggest phone market. Will the brand continue to hold up over there?

Even better for Apple is the rush to upgrade existing devices to iOS 6. The company said upgrades have now exceeded 100 million devices, which is around one-quarter of all iOS devices out there. Keeping users who can't or won't upgrade yet happy with a new iOS upgrade may help keep them in the Apple camp until the next device rolls along. 

On the Downside

Things aren't quite all plain sailing though, a number of users are reporting scuffed iPhones out of the case, and with phone cases in short supply, looking after your new iPhone could be a challenge. Be prepared for a hell of a recall and inevitable class-action suits if this turns out to be a fault in Apple's design or manufacturing processes. 

As for iOS 6, even though flaws in the Maps app are still causing a fuss, with Apple going into lockdown mode to get the major complaints fixed, and Passbook still need lots more partner apps to go live, the new features in iOS 6.0 seem to be getting a positive reception. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com