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Make More Money: Best Practices for Ads in Search Results: Part 2

In this installment of Search Matters, we’ll continue our discussion of ads in search results. Understand what makes a good ad. Limit cannibalization. Provide ads for internal merchandise instead of third-party advertising. Pay special attention to ads on pages that appear if there are no search results.

Make More Money: Best Practices for Ads in Search Results: Part 1

Conflicting demands make many UX professionals think of ads as a necessary evil. Customers frequently go out of their way to say they hate ads, while marketers always seem to try their hardest to stuff as many of them as they can on each search results page on your site. This leaves many UX design professionals caught in the middle, trying to balance the ad equation—and frequently failing to fully satisfy either customers or marketers. For this 2-part column, I’ve teamed up with advertisement and eyetracking research guru Frank Guo to present real-world strategies for successfully integrating ads into your search results. The goal is making money without unduly turning off your customers.

How To Bid Profitably On Nonconverting Keywords

Google has a bidding methodology called Budget Optimizer that attempts to maximize the traffic you receive for the keywords in a campaign. This is useful for early buying cycle keywords. However, every keyword should be reaching some goal regardless of where it falls into the buying cycle. It was difficult to track the effectiveness of these campaigns until recently when Google made some changes to Google Analytics. Now you can more effectively bid on early buying cycle keywords, or keywords that you want exposure for, but do not have direct returns by combining the new Google Analytics goals with a budget optimizer campaign.

Increasing Online Sales: Simple Usability Problems To Avoid

When designing an online store, you have to consider many different types of customers: repeat customers, first-timers, people in a rush, etc. One thing that would help all of them is optimum usability. You can achieve this in a variety of ways, starting with eliminating the most common usability problems from your website. Fixing any one of the following eight common usability problems will get you started on the path to usability and user-experience heaven and, ultimately, more sales.

Manufacturer Sites that Sell

The job of a retail site is to attract the consumer, sell the product, and deliver it. In the case of a manufacturer site, the only difference when encountering a retail customer is that, instead of delivering the product, the site may deliver the customer—to an authorized retailer.

Selling Advertising

Considering selling advertisements on your web-site? Here are some things you should think about.

Building Mashups with JSONP, jQuery, and Yahoo! Query Language

In the previous article of this series, we introduced JSONP (JSON with Padding) as a way to overcome browser same-origin policy limitations while combining and presenting data from third-party sources. This article continues this process and shows you how to use Yahoo! Query Language (YQL), a JSONP service from Yahoo!, to build a mashup Web page using jQuery.

Designing Personalized User Experiences for eCommerce: An Information Architecture Perspective

You can think of the information architecture as the “glue” that holds a web site together - the part that hooks the content up with the user interface. It provides the large buckets to place products into and that users can browse by. It specifies the meta-information that ties pieces of content together and enables things like cross-selling.

Close the Sale With Persuasive Design

Persuasive design techniques focus on "getting the lead" or "closing the sale". Here are some techniques to help you do just that.

Turning on the Lights in Your Online Business

Ecommerce websites are typically set up as if they were just glorified catalogs: a list of products, some pictures, brief descriptions, and an order form. No human interaction at all.

E-Commerce on the Go: Selling Through the Mobile

A series of best practice guidelines for removing potential barriers between your customers and your mobile e-commerce site.

Global Navigation

97% of sites included global links to the site's top-level categories. While global links to top-level categories help reinforce the breadth of a site's offering, they also consume significant screen real estate for links that arguably are not as relevant to users as page-specific content. This is particularly true at the lower levels of the hierarchy, where there is a larger amount of semantic distance between the global links and the page content.

Your Website is for Your Most Important Customers

Well-managed websites tend to be those that are narrow in their focus. They do a few things really well rather than attempt to do lots and lots of things.

Learn From Your Customers for Usable Web Applications

Usability consultant Paul Englefield takes you on a journey to demonstrate that listening to your customers is the only way to provide the ultimate usability when designing an e-commerce site or Web-based applications. Through examples, the article weaves user-centered design techniques into the steps of designing an effective business site, focusing on gathering data about your customers' (and their customers') usage behaviors, offers two design models, and demonstrates how to integrate customers' input into the testing and evaluation process.

Revisiting Toys’R’Us

How could an $11,000,000,000 company fail so miserably in its e-commerce efforts that it had to turn its storefront over to a relative newcomer? And what is the Big Lesson we can learn from Toys'R'Us' difficulties?

Screen-Reader Usability at a Standards-Compliant E-Commerce Site

An E-commerce site was redesigned with Web standards in mind. The revised site used semantic HTML markup that usually passes validation tests and also incorporated many common accessibility features. A study was carried out with screen-reader users to determine how well compliance with Web standards and accessibility guidelines translated into actual usability and accessibility.

Online Travel Booking: What Influences Consumers?

An overview of what influences consumers when booking a holiday and what travel companies can do to offer the best user experience.

Guide to Buying Traffic

While many niches depend on PPC search traffic, there’s a wide group of sites that benifit from bought traffic from individual sites. Often times you can get very high quality traffic that converts very well from niches that tend to deal in a more direct site to site type traffic deal, rather than 3rd party ad networks. This guide is mostly to be used when buying traffic from forums, from individual websites, and from “plug” type packages, yet there are many things that transfer over to more traditional PPC outlets.

Hats Off to Your Own Web Business

Sahil Parikh built and runs his web app DeskAway a world away in Mumbai, India. In this article he shares some of the things he’s learned and hats he’s worn while creating his successful and profitable web app business.

Is There a Way Out Beyond Google to Bring in Revenues?

No webmaster worth his salt can rule out the indispensability of Google for enhancing the prospects of one's business potential the online way. The ways and means to augment your business statistics are fine as long as they are paving the way in your business interest. The fact is that end results are always important and determine the continuation of a set of strategies or tactics in the future. Notwithstanding the enormous benefits accruing from top positions in Google's rankings, you will end up to lose sight of the long term survival if you drive your business on a Google-only focus.

E-Shop Accessibility: From Theory to Reality

This article will explain how it is possible to apply WCAG 1.0 (and also how to comply with the future WCAG 2.0 and ISO 9241-151) to create an accessible e-shop shopping-cart and backend management system, analyzing the problems and the proposed solutions.

Usability Testing of Travel Websites

A usability study was conducted to identify usability problems as well as recommendations for improvement for three travel sales websites. The study performed testing on twenty participants, between the ages of 19 and 65, recruited from the university campus consisting of students, faculty, and staff. The three websites tested were Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, and Travelocity.com. Each participant was given general instructions and a pre-survey to determine their demographics and level of Internet experience. The usability study tested participants on the task of finding the same itinerary on each travel website. The participant during testing was under observation of the experimenter that maintained an observation log. A post-survey along with a debriefing session was conducted to gather additional feedback. The average testing time for participants was 30 minutes. The results of this study are presented as well as a future research discussion consisting of the development of usability guidelines for designers of travel websites.

Chinese Banks Homepage Usability Research Report

The homepages of three leading Chinese retail banks are assessed for their usability.

And Then There Were Adwords... An Introduction

If you have been looking into Internet marketing, you have probably seen Adwords mentioned now and again. Why don’t we cover the basics of the program. Adwords is the name of the pay-per-click system offered by Google on its search engine.

Issues You Will Confront When Using Third Parties To Build Out Sites

Nearly every ecommerce site revolves around a database to support inventory, listings and transactions. Building out the database can be a challenge. Here is what to expect.

The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying

Users often convert to buyers long after their initial visit to a website. A full 5% of orders occur more than four weeks after users click on search engine ads.

How FreshDirect Delivered e-Commerce Success

The lessons for FreshDirect's usability success can be applied to many e-commerce businesses.

The Best and The Rest: Rating Web Developers

When you've got the budget to implement a web project, there is no shortage of vendors who want to be your friend. But how do you determine the best choice?

What I Learned From Television

Despite the increasing number of website ads, consumers aren’t necessarily getting their feathers ruffled more, they’re getting smarter.

The Money Page

Low tech, high yield: A funny thing happened on the way to the shopping cart. One Web designer found a simpler way to make e-commerce pay. Alan Herrell shows you The Money Page.

Understanding the IBM Basic B2B Profile

The IBM Basic Business-to-Business (B2B) Profile 1.0 is a profile that, in the fashion of the WS-I profiles, enables basic B2B integration scenarios using Web services technologies. In this paper, author Chris Ferris explain the profile's purpose and technical content.

Usability in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

In CRM, user acceptance is a huge issue. End users, who are rarely the same people who choose applications in the first place, can be extraordinarily resourceful when it comes to undermining or working around new products or implementations introduced by manager. All this means that creating applications that are efficient and enjoyable to use is imperative for both ISVs and CRM implementers.