Scott Smigler - Practical Ecommerce

Articles by: Scott Smigler

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Scott Smigler

Scott Smigler

Scott Smigler is president of Exclusive Concepts, Inc., one of the first ecommerce marketing firms. Exclusive Concepts helps retailers increase revenue, get smarter and do more with less. Services include pay per click management services, advanced search engine optimization services, conversion optimization, email marketing management, and more. @scottsmigler

Google Ads
PPC: How to Calculate Maximum Bid per Click

June 6, 2013 • Scott Smigler

"Customer Lifetime Value" is a critical metric that enables you to optimize the long-term profitability of your pay-per-click advertising. CLV answers the simple yet powerful question, "How much is a new customer worth over the long-term?" It’s an important concept that almost every l...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Third-party Marketplaces: What Merchants Should Know

May 7, 2013 • Scott Smigler

Many online merchants have embraced third-party marketplaces. They've been seduced by promises of easy revenue growth and enabled by software solutions that make it easy to sell their products on those sites. It’s true that marketplaces can pay dividends for merchants, at least for nea...
Google Ads
PPC Advertising: 5 Daily Activities to Grow Profits

April 2, 2013 • Scott Smigler

My company recently surveyed 100 small and mid-sized online retailers that do not outsource the management of their Google AdWords campaigns. We asked a simple question, "How often do you manage your AdWords account?" According to the survey results, which are summarized in the graphi...
Google Ads
Surviving Google AdWords’ New Enhanced Campaigns

March 4, 2013 • Scott Smigler

In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?," my article from Feb. 2012, I questioned whether the then unprecedented decline in cost-per-click rates would be a blip or a trend. One year later, Google apparently thinks it's a trend, as Google is requiring all advertisers to adopt its new Enh...
Google Ads
6 Rules for Pay-per-click Ad Profits

January 28, 2013 • Scott Smigler

I often hear from merchants that have tried pay-per-click advertising, but it wasn’t profitable for them. So they abandoned it. In my experience, however, many merchants could turn unprofitable campaigns into profitable ones by adopting the six rules that follow. Rule 1: Commit to PPC...
Google Ads
Pay-per-click Advertising: 7 Predictions for 2013

January 3, 2013 • Scott Smigler

2012 was a big year for pay-per-click advertising. Many online retailers saw their PPC budgets, conversion rates, and return-on-ad-spend grow nicely. At the same time, cost-per-click rates dropped precipitously for Product Listing Ads and mobile ads. Looking forward, here are my top sev...
Google Ads
7 Last Minute Holiday Marketing Improvements

November 28, 2012 • Scott Smigler

Christmas is less than five weeks away. Here are seven last-minute holiday marketing improvements you can make to maximize sales. 1. Shop Your Site from Mobile Devices Smartphone and tablet users accounted ...
Google Ads
Google Shopping: 5 Optimization Tips

October 31, 2012 • Scott Smigler

With the Google Shopping transition completed on October 17, all of Google’s organic, free product listings — those that showed a product thumbnail and price in search results — disappeared. If you want your product listings to appear in Google, you now have to buy Product Listing Ads t...
Google Ads
Primping Your Holiday Pay-per-click Promotions

September 28, 2012 • Scott Smigler

A passive approach to pay-per-click advertising often results in missed opportunities. But achieving optimal returns from your PPC campaigns isn’t complex. For holiday PPC promotions, maximizing profits means doing three things well. Create a calendar. Plan your holiday promotions wit...
Google Ads
Google’s Product Listing Ads: Cheaper, More Profitable

August 30, 2012 • Scott Smigler

I’ve previously written about why you should make Google’s Product Listing Ads a priority. If you’ve followed my advice in "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?" and, more recently, "5 Steps to Prepare for Google Shopping," there’s a good chance you’ve observed a sharp increase in pay-pe...
Google Ads
5 Steps to Prepare for Google Shopping

July 31, 2012 • Scott Smigler

In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?," I encouraged merchants to try Google's Product Listing Ads because they produce exceptional results. They are the paid version of Google’s free product listings, which for many merchants are a major source of sales. Google recently announced, in...
Google Ads
Remarketing Renaissance Helps Ecommerce Merchants

May 30, 2012 • Scott Smigler

The idea of targeting ads to visitors who leave a site and continue surfing the web always made sense to me. Until recently, however, this "remarketing" was an afterthought. It just wasn’t producing enough traffic or sales to be valuable. That’s likely to change. When Google got into ...
Google Ads
Boost Pay-per-click Profits in 5 Easy Steps

March 29, 2012 • Scott Smigler

The difference between a profitable and an unprofitable pay-per-click advertising campaign can be the post-click conversion rate. We've run hundreds of conversion rate optimization tests at my firm over the past decade. Below I’ll share five optimizations that have consistently driven c...
Google Ads
3 New Google AdWords’ Features Worth Trying

February 28, 2012 • Scott Smigler

Google continues adding new features to AdWords. "Enhanced Ad Sitelinks," "Offer Extensions," and "TrueView" video ads are three examples. I have tested each of these, and recommend them to merchants. Online retailers who use them first can start profiting before their competitors. The...
Google Ads
Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?

February 1, 2012 • Scott Smigler

Google's average revenue per click from AdWords' advertisers dropped for the first time in two years for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2011, according to Reuters. Analysts projected a 3 percent increase in cost-per-click revenue, but Google reported an 8 percent decrease. As a result, man...
Google Ads
Creating a Killer Post-Holiday PPC Strategy

January 5, 2012 • Scott Smigler

Now that the holiday shopping season is over, here are some New Year's pay-per-click advertising tips to help you continue the growth of your online revenue. Review Cost-Per-Acquisition Data on a Category Level It’s often a good practice for online retailers to organize their pay-per...
Google Ads
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Becoming More Important?

November 28, 2011 • Scott Smigler

Ten years ago a business could thrive by focusing on organic search engine optimization. My rule of thumb then was that organic rankings garnered roughly 80 percent of the clicks on search result pages while paid listings garnered less than 20 percent. A smart SEO strategy seemed to out...
Google Ads
Pay-Per-Click Ads: 5 Tips for Higher Clicks this Holiday Season

October 28, 2011 • Scott Smigler

Google’s paid-click revenue grew by an astounding 28 percent last quarter, thanks in part to a 5 percent rise in click prices. It’s likely that Google will set ad revenue records this fourth quarter also, due to the increase in holiday ad spending. To online retailers, Google’s surge i...
Google Ads
Ramping Up Holiday Pay-per-click Advertising

September 29, 2011 • Scott Smigler

The holidays are coming. For many online merchants, this means dramatically increased revenue and conversion rates. Start ramping up for holiday pay-per-click advertising now to ensure that you maximize your profits — and build momentum for 2012. Below I’ve provided six tips that shou...
Google Ads
10 Pay-Per-Click Details You Cannot Delegate

August 29, 2011 • Scott Smigler

Many ecommerce merchants manage their own pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Others use in-house PPC managers, or outsource to PPC consulting firms. Regardless of how pay-per-click advertising is managed, there are some aspects of it that need direct involvement from merchants — or t...
Google Ads
For Google AdWords, It Pays to be on Top

July 27, 2011 • Scott Smigler

The new “Top vs. Side” segmentation report announced by Google has led my firm to valuable new AdWords’ insights. We confirmed just how important it is to ensure your ads ...
Google Ads
How to Hire a Pay-Per-Click Manager; 10 Common Mistakes

June 7, 2011 • Scott Smigler

My firm is in the pay-per-click advertising business. We've managed PPC accounts for hundreds of companies for roughly a decade, and we've developed strong opinions as to what makes for a good PPC manager, and what does not. To be sure, there are many terrific PPC management firms othe...
Google Ads
5 Tips for Increasing Pay-Per-Click Conversion Rates

May 27, 2011 • Scott Smigler

Google’s Farmer/Panda update serves as a reminder to online merchants that their non-paid search traffic is subject to an algorithm that constantly evolves. Pay-per-click advertising, on the other hand, allows ...
Google Ads
Mobile Pay-per-click Advertising: 5 Ways to Improve Performance

April 28, 2011 • Scott Smigler

“Mobile” and “social” have received a lot of hype over the past few years. To a large extent that hype has been warranted. Sales of smart phones are setting records, and according to Alexa — the web-traffic-ranking firm — socially driven websites account for five of the ten most popular...
Google Ads
Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising to Sell High-Ticket Items

March 29, 2011 • Scott Smigler

Online retailers often overlook the potential of pay-per-click advertising to drive sales of expensive products. Campaigns that target these items often bring the double whammy of low conversion rates and a high cost-per-click. There are several ways you can adjust your PPC advertising ...
Google Ads
Comparing Facebook Ads to Search-Based Advertising

March 2, 2011 • Scott Smigler

Could Facebook Ads become a viable alternative to traditional search-based pay-per-click advertising? Facebook’s investors seem to think so, given its reported $50 billion valuation. So far, however, Facebook Ads have not proven to be a scalable, controllable, or profitable source of ad...
Google Ads
7 Pay-Per-Click Advertising Mistakes to Avoid in 2011

February 1, 2011 • Scott Smigler

2010 was a big year for pay-per-click marketing. Google made significant changes to AdWords, and Bing integrated PPC advertising from Yahoo! into its adCenter. Now, much to the chagrin of advertisers who prefer a “set and forget” approach to their advertising campaigns, the bar for eff...
Business
10 Resolutions for Your Pay-Per-Click Account

December 30, 2010 • Scott Smigler

With a new year come new opportunities. It is also a good time to start looking forward to making 2011 more profitable. Here are ten steps to take for the new year to accelerate your pay-per-click advertising efforts. 10. Create After-Holiday Sales As we move into the new year, there...
Google Ads
Microsoft adCenter: An Initial Reaction

December 1, 2010 • Scott Smigler

In late October, Microsoft’s Bing began powering all of the natural and paid search results in Yahoo!. Now, advertisers who wish to purchase sponsored search ads in either Yahoo! or Bing must do so through Microsoft adCenter. Given that the alliance has a combined market share of almost...
Google Ads
Pay-Per-Click Advertising: 12 Tips to Boost Holiday Performance

November 2, 2010 • Scott Smigler

A well optimized pay-per-click advertising campaign can lead to gigantic increases in both revenue and profits. Conversely, a campaign that is neglected can lead to missed opportunities or significant financial losses. To help you prepare for this holiday season, here are 12 tips that ...