Strategies for Online Marketing and Characteristics of the Google Merchandise Store

Part A – (1000 words. Worth 50% of the marks for this assessment)

The importance of setting appropriate advertising objectives to Re- Market to these potential customers regardless of your business type,

In today’s world many businesses rely on online sales but sometimes customer don’t always follow through with their purchase. The question is why? Brands then have to create a new marketing strategy to get the customer to buy the first time they shop. How do they do this? I have laid out an explanation below on how I think it should be done. For companies in today’s world they really need to focus on their advertising, customers feeling and the challenges of online use. Customers get there information on product from a lot of online sources. They read reviews that are written by customers that have already purchased and used the product. They would base their buying decision on what they have heard about such product.

If companies want to set objectives to re-market their product they need to look at many things such as promoting the brand, having client engagement, creating relationships with clients and increasing online and offline sales. (Smyth, 2018).

Companies need to promote that brand in the best way possible. They need to create a good logo and slogan and what the brand stands for. Customers want to know about the brand before they buy. They want to support a brand that is well known to the public eye. You want to associate your brand with a good image. A way for a brand to get this image across is by using social media. On social media brands can make their posts connect with customers and with the brands ethics. If brands want to have loyal customers they have to be loyal to them by giving them honest and clear posts. Down the line it would draw in new customers as it shows them that you are a loyal brand.

Get Help With Your Essay

If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help!
Find out more about our Essay Writing Service

Client engagement and creating relationships with clients is very important when you want to re-market a brand. Brands need to have a good relationship with existing customers to draw in new ones. Nowadays everyone is writing reviews online and potential buyers are reading them. For brands to get positive reviews they need to give the customer a positive experience. Then if a customer gives a negative review you need to handle it professional and reply in a professional manor but also in a way that the customer feels ok to comment in that way as they won’t get backlash.

Brands also need to increase their sales online and offline. They can increase their online sales by create new ads, placing them in different places and at different time. They can also use their key words to influence customers to buy. Example you are selling runners and somebody searches shoes your runners will come up pas it is one of your key words. Also online you can have a PPC plan. For sales offline it is a little trickier as you need to draw the customer into the shop from the outside. This could be done by placing ads into local magazines/newspapers or placing information on the shop window.

How companies are attempting to understand their customers as they journey online and offline.

For brands it is very important they understand their customer and the customers experience online and offline. They need to look at the customer’s path to purchase, there buying habits, touch points and use of devices.

The path to purchase has four stages that companies can look at such as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase and Loyalty. This is a long process for brands as there is so many stages to it. Brands need to make sure customers are aware of their brand and know it’s out there. They also need to watch a customer when they are considering to buy to see will they go through with the purchase. When the customer does purchase the product the brand need to take note of this so they can analyse their purchasing decision. Brands hope that when a customer purchases a product they will become loyal to the brand and continue to shop there. This is process could be used to monitor customers who search the product online and then purchase it instore.

Use of devices is becoming bigger and bigger by the day. Its important brands understand this as many people have access to laptops/tablets/smartphones. Many people do their first search on a device. They look at the product they want to buy and research it online. Brands should make their websites and ads friendly to all devices as customers are not only purchasing on laptops but smartphones and tablets. All ages are now using their phone as a first form of contact to a product. They also would carry on to purchase the product on this device as well.

Touch points is also an excellent way to get a better understanding of customers. It tracks the customer before, during and after their purchase. With touch points you can interact with your customer through email, devices, apps, websites, social networks and many more. This is an excellent way for brands to understand the customer and reach out to them. They can get a better understanding of the customer by doing this.

When you understand your customers buying habits, you are at a real gain for your brand. You will be able to tell if your customer is buying online or offline, how much they spend, did they buy straight away or not? You also attain a lot more information that is useful to the brand to get a better understanding of their customer. Also when you understand your customer better you can then retarget products you may thing they would wish to buy to them.

The challenges of measuring the true impact of online display advertising.

Measurement mainly consists to see did customers return to the store to buy the product. Brands can measure the customer’s interactions on social media by looking at the number of likes, shares and comments on posts. This way they can calculate the amount of engagements the post is receiving. Brand also need to watch when a customer leaves the website and figure out why? Is it because the website hard to navigate or they just didn’t want to complete their purchase.

Part B – (1000 words. Worth 50% of the marks for this assessment)

Review how well the overall Google Merchandise store website is performing in the three month period August 1 2018 to October 31^st 2018 related to the same period in the previous year.

When reviewing the page at a first glance I could see a great comparison from this year to as to last year. First off we could see that the amount of users was severely low comparing to last year. It was down by 27.5% which is significantly low comparing to last year. The stores new users and the amount of sessions were also down considerably both in in a deficit of 20%.  Page views were also down by 11%. This would be a worry to the google merchandise store as new customers are not purchasing or visiting the store. Luckily for the store the number of sessions per user was up by 5% which showed that customers who were on it before have returned to the store. This is an advantage to the store as it shows their website must be attractive to the eye as they are returning to the store. The pages/sessions are also up by nearly 15% which is great to see comparing to last year. The views on the page are going up. The time customers spend on store is also up by nearly 19%. Overall this is very good as customers may be searching for more products to buy or see what the website is like. The bounce rate is also down by 20% which is very good, the store must have changed their homepage to make customers the stay on the website, and google must have seen a low rate last year and have made changes this year.

Describe the characteristics of all visitors to the Google Merchandise Store during the period in question (demographics, geographics etc). Suggest how you would use this information for digital advertising purposes.

Visitors to the google merchandising have come from all over the world at different ages, genders. The devices they look at store on etc.

Location: First off from analysing there analytics we could see that majority of the users have come from the United States (US) in both 2017 and 2018, but there has been a decrease in the amount of people logging on compared to last a drop of 22% in total. This tells us that although the US has the most viewers they have dropped significantly compared to last year. The case of this may be that customers aren’t returning to the store for some reason and new customers aren’t logging on to the site.  After the US is India they also have had a drop in users of 9%. This isn’t as bad as the US but also a concern to the site. The store may want to monitor their activity and see why the number of customers has dropped.

Language: The main language used on the site is US English which is quite understandable as the US has the most users on the site.  What I find most interesting is that India has the second most users of the site but there language doesn’t make an appearance on the language side of things. This shows that most people in India that use the site must speak English or another language.

Age: The majority of customers using the site are in the age bracket of 25-34 years. 37,217 customers of this age used the site this year and 45,729 people used it last year. It is obvious there has been a drop of 18.6% in this category.  The reason for this may be that the items they used to buy are no longer available in the store anymore. The second highest age group is 18-24 year olds. But they also had a drop of 44% of users from the year 2017. One might wonder why these two age groups are at the top but it is very obvious. This is an age of people that grew up with the use of technology and do nearly everything bit of shopping online. And to prove my point that these are the most technological age group we can see that from 55 years up there is a significant low number of ages. 55-64 years had only 5,000 users last year and a drop to 2,000 users this year. The 65+years had 3,910 users last year and 1,165 users this year. The google merchandise store (if they want) would have to start a better targeting campaign to get this age bracket onto their site.

Gender: The Male gender have the most interactions with the website with 92,672 users last year and 58,514 users this year. There has been a drop here of 36.86%. The Female gender had 43,008 users last year and 27,361 users this year. A total of 36.38% in deficit. Both the percentages for male and female are quite similar even though there number of users are dropping but at different rates.

Visitors: From looking at their analytics I can see that most of their customers are new users. The new users are buying items but they are not returning because when I looked at the stats for returning customers they were very low.

Conclusion: As with many other stats this is a concern for the google merchandise store. Customers are coming to the website once may make a purchase but are not returning again. Many of their stats are down such as transactions, the amount of session people do, new users, returning users, revenue to name a few. The google merchandise store would want to take action straight away to increase their figures and start bringing in revenue to the store for the year 2019. On a digital advertising purpose I would look very closely at this information and use it to my advantage. We can see where the store is losing money and I would try and re target the whole store by placing search and display ads at every opportunity I get. I would want my ad to be popping up everywhere. I would use specific key words that would make my products appear straight away when searched.

For the same period, explore how effective the Google Merchandise Store’s AdWords campaigns are at bringing good quality traffic to the site.

Campaign: When looking the campaigns the Google Merchandise Store used it is very hard to compare as most of the product are new and weren’t for sale last year.

Keywords: The store is spending a lot of money placing keywords for their ads but the ads are not generating money for them. It also looks like google have changed their key words comparing to last year as some ads are bringing money this year compared to last year. But the case could also be that these items were not on sale last year.

Suggest improvements to the Google Merchandise Store’s AdWords campaigns using insights you gather from Google Analytics.

The google merchandise store really needs to look at their AdWords campaigns and Keywords. Over all the keywords transactions are down by 11.56% and the cost was up by 45%. And for the campaigns the transactions are down by 13.33% but the cost was also down by 75.45%.

The Keywords need to be improved so customer are logging on and buying products, the store is making no money from these.

The campaigns was a good thing to see when the cost was down but transactions are still down. This is a sign that sales are not coming through.

The improvements they need to make is lower their spending, change their campaign and keywords approach to something that would generate sales.

Disclaimer: All statistic/graphs/images above have been obtained from The Google Merchandise Store demo analytics account.

Bibliography

• Smyth, C., 2018. Week 3-Ad objectives. s.l.:s.n.