A great presentation by First Rate (a New Zealand Internet Marketing agency), highlighted the following important success factors for moving your website visitor through the funnel and how to ensure your site performs optimally:

Acquiring Customers could include the following elements:

• Affiliate marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Search Engine Marketing
• Email marketing
• Directories
• PPC advertising (Pay Per Click)
• Directories
• Portals and Publisher sites
• Banner ads
• Traditional marketing elements such as TV, Radio, Print and Direct Mail
• Branding and offline campaigns

Here’s how you could get visitors to interact with your site:

• Additional search features
• Breadcrumb navigation
• Auto login
• Usable navigation that makes logical sense
• Depth of content
• Branding and design features
• Promotions on your home page

Get others to recommend your site:

• Competitions
• Gifts
• Refer a Friend
• Tell a Friend
• Content worth sharing

Many happy returns - make your site sticky:

• Welcome email
• Product and event notifications
• Competitions
• Coupons
• Loyalty program
• New product launches
• Newsletters (sent to a targeted, segmented base)
• Personalised site (with personalised content)
• Promotional offers
• Exclusive content

Persuade visitors to take action:

• Provide deep content
• Show best sellers
• Customer reviews
• Fast payment
• FAQs and support
• One click buying
• Live chat assistance
• Offer a variety of payment methods
• Contact details and physical address
• Recently viewed items
• Recommended products
• Returns policy
• Shipping costs
• Supporting product information
• Targeted promotional offers
• Customer testimonials

Fulfill the order with the following elements:

• Gift cards
• Gift wrapping
• Inserts
• Order status and tracking
• Order history
• Order follow up
• Great packaging
• Feedback via survey
• Reserve a product

• Surveys and polls

Examples of sites that do this really well include:

Amazon.com

Ebay.com

Overstock.com

BlueFly.com

Next.co.uk

VictoriasSecret.com

As a PPC (pay per click) campaign manager running Google, Yahoo or other paid search advertising campaigns, you may find that you are experiencing extremely high and sudden Cost Per Clicks. You may be a victim of click fraud, something you need to deal with as quickly as possible.

My good friend, Gordon Choi, a respected PPC campaign manager and PPC blog author, posted the following tell-tale signs that you are a victim of click fraud:

1. Identical IP address: too many clicks from the same IP address are a time-tested sign of click fraud
2. Change in number of clicks: if you suddenly find an unexpected increase in number of clicks on a particular day
3. Sudden spike in CTR (click through rates)
4. Change in bounce rate (page views per session) - any major unexpected change is an indication of click fraud
5. Short duration of visits: if suddenly you find visitors are hanging around for less than a minute, and your average visitor duration is 2 minutes, you could have a click fraud problem

Report click fraud immediately and ensure your campaigns remain profitable.