Here's 10 Must Do Tactics to Survive the Holiday Rush:

Great news! I know I have already mentioned this in another post but they finally did it.  This is great news for all Yahoo Store owners. You can now goto the cross-sell section of your Store Manager and set a few quick parameters and instantly your store will start showing other products in your shopping cart AUTOMATICALLY! This is great stuff to help increase conversions. Now your shoppers can add a product to their cart and when they click checkout, at the bottom of the page, they will now be shown up to 6 more products they can instantly add to their cart.

This feature has always been there but before yesterday, you had to manually add those cross-sell items yourself which honestly was a total pain in the butt. You can still do your own rules as always and those rules will show up first but if you are like most Yahoo Store owners and don't have anything at all…this is the feature for you.

On top of all that…if that was not cool enough, you can also show cross-sell items on product pages! Its setup just as the other and in a few clicks, you can start showing more items on your product pages to increase your conversions.

So, if you have not taken the time to check out this feature…DO IT! Thats more money in your pocket.

Just a quick post this Saturday afternoon in October.  Have you ever wanted to 'hide' a page from customers?

For example, say you had a print ad that offered free shipping or some other discount.  Well if you have a search box on your site and the customer types in 'Shipping Costs', the Yahoo Search will return your free shipping page.

This could be a problem for you.

So how do you fix it?

Simple.

Go to your item page.  Hit the EDIT button.  And add the following into the caption:

<!–nosearch–>

That's it.  Now the Yahoo Store search won't give your site's secrets away.

Happy Saturday.

One of the most important items from a Search Engine Optimization is the Title tag.  The Title tag is the text in the header of your browser.  It gives the search engine like Google an idea what the page is all about!

Well with the Yahoo Store the process of keeping the Title tag populated with useful data is easy!

Here is the RTML code that 'writes out' the Title tag information:

  TITLE IF test NONEMPTY @page-title

           then @page-title

           else @name

So what does this code mean?

Let's break it down step by step.

First, we are looking at the TITLE tag.  The code checks to see if the local page variable (page-title) is not empty - which means, is there some sort of text in the page-title box on your item page.  If there is text in the page-title box on your item page, then use that text for the Title tag.  Otherwise (read as ELSE), use the name of your product.

Chances are if you are using the standard RTML templates, you are using Name variable for all of your title tags.

Now, that is not a bad thing.  However, using the Name of your product may not be optimum in all situations.

So, you can use something different in the page-title variable by filling in the box.

But wait!

Where is the page-title variable?  Why is not showing up on my editor page when I look at my item.

Well… you need to override the variable on your editor page to do that.  Not sure how do that or not sure how to upload your page-title variables with a csv file?

Join our team and we will show you how do this plus hundreds of other things with your Yahoo Store.

You have a choice to make day one.

That choice is what you want your url to be.  Sure you picked the best domain name for your product…

What are you going to call it…

the www.domain-name.com

or the domain-name.com version?

Yes, it does make a difference.  I will not go into all of technical reasons why there is difference between the two, but believe it or not the www makes a difference in Google's eyes.

So whenever you give out a link, make sure that you give it out consistently - either the www version or the non www version.

Also you need to setup all of your store pages to point to one of the domain choices.

Sign up now and get the Backstage Pass to see how to set the domain names in your store.  Plus as an added feature we will show you how to setup Google's webmaster console for preferred domains in Google!

One of the common questions that I receive when playing with the RTML programming language for the Yahoo Store is

"How do I add this HTML tag or what is the RTML equivalent of the this HTML tag?"

There are a couple ways to accomplish this task.

First you can use the TEXT operator and type in the HTML. 

If you choose this method, you need to remember that anytime that you want to show a quote '  "  ', you need to escape the quotation character out - meaning you need to use a '  \  ' prior to the quotation mark.  So the finished product would look like:  \"

Also you need to remember to use an end tag.  For example, if you put in the following:

TEXT  "<td>"

TEXT  "blah blah blah"

TEXT "</td>"

This method does work but it is a little extra work.

Another method is to use the TAG-WHEN method.

It takes two arguements.   The first is the actual HTML tag (e.g. td shown above).  The second arguement is typically a "t", which stands for true.

So, say you want to add a italics to your text.  Here is what the finished product would look like:

TAG-WHEN   tag "i"

                         test :t

    TEXT "If I want to show something in italics, I use the i tag."

The result would be:

If I want to show something in italics, I use the i tag.

The TAG-WHEN method is a useful RTML function that can save you some typing and minimize the chance of mistakes because it provides the closing tag for you.

This post is more of general business concept versus specifically designing or optimizing a Yahoo Store.  Regardless, the principle can be easily applied to the Yahoo Store platform.

The Pareto principle, which is also known as the 80/20 rule is an approach that helps you focus on the critical few.  First, a couple of examples to explain what it means.

• Look in your closet, I bet out of the 100 shirts/outfits that you have, you typically wear 20 to 30 of them over and over again.
• How about your eating habits?  Consider the last three months of dinners that you have had.  I bet there are a small subgroup of meals that you have eaten at least once every other week.  Or do you get the same meal every time you go to a fast food restaurant?  Or do you buy something off the menu different everytime?
• Last example… in a 64 pack of Crayons, kids typically only use 10 to 12 colors!  (If you don't believe me, open up the box and count the number of Crayons that are shorter the others.)

The pareto principle basically states that 80% of the impact will come from 20% of the events.  Now the numbers of 80 and 20 are not exact.  Rather, it could be restated as a large proportion of the impact will come from a subgroup of the events.

So how can apply this principle to your Yahoo Store?  Well, how about 80% of your profits are going to come from 20% of your customers?  Or 60% of your traffic is going to come from 15% of keywords.

Take a closer look at your data.  Find the critical few in your day to day work.  Or find the critical few in your store and prioritize your work around these critical few.

It will be time well spent.

There is one thing that Britt and I will stress over and over again… data. 

• The use of data from your store. 
• The use of data from your subscribers. 
• The use of data from your A/B split testing. 
• And of course the use of data from your sales.

In this post, we show you how to get some of the data directly from your store.  Have you wondered how a customer found your site?  Setting up google analytics (which we will describe in another post) is one way.  But for a first pass, lets use the data that can be found in your store.

Let me show you where to find it:

First login into your store manager page.

Locate the Statistics column in your store as shown below:

Select the References link.  When the page refreshes, the following screen will appear:

This page shows you a variety of things.

• Visits - how many people came to your site from a given URL
• Orders - how many orders were placed by these people
• Revenue - how much money did you make from these people
• And finally a revenue per visit metric.

Given the fact that Google controls over 65% of the search traffic on the internet, one would expect that most traffic and revenue would come from this search engine.  One interesting thing to note though, is that, even though MSN provides a lower search volume it is the second highest revenue per visit.  So why does this matter?

One simple reason is that it allows you to potentially spend a little more money on MSN ads and still get the same return on investment compared to the other search engines.  Depending upon your margins, these couple pennies per visit could make a huge difference in your overall profits for your business.

The above provides a nice summary of the information; however lets dig a little deeper to see what drives the visitors from these search engines to your site.

Click on the 'Details' to the right of the referring URLs.  When doing so, a page like the one shown below will appear:

I hid some of the keywords in this example to minimize any privacy issues.  This page provides which KEYWORDS drove traffic to your site from the Google search engine.  A couple key points can be seen on this page.

First, the word 'shoes' is definitely important in this site.  Google sees this site as important with regards to "___ shoes".  The next interesting point is that even though a lot of traffic comes from the top 10 keywords (or search words), none of them have converted!

The 335 orders all came from other words!  These words are known as the 'long tail'.  You should dive into these searches and orders and figure out what converted.  Remember driving traffic without turning a sale is useless traffic.

Dive into the data, slice and dice it, then take it back to your site and update your site to include these new keywords.

Doing so will ultimately help you get additional sales for your company.

1. Neglecting to Split-Test Your Ads. I've gotta say one of the coolest discoveries of my whole life was, in my first week of playing with AdWords 5+ years ago, noticing that "create new ad" link and seeing that I could create a 2nd and 3rd and 4th ad and try different text.  Running them simultaneously, then seeing how teeny tiny changes made huge differences.  I still get jazzed about this.  It's like practicing psychology without a license.

2.  Letting Google Retire Your Ads Without Testing: In Campaign Settings, when you turn "Optimize Ad Serving" OFF, you declare a winner and a loser much faster.  Turn that option off if you're checking in every day.

3.  Split Testing for Improved CTR Only: At first, Click Thru Rate is the only thing you can measure.  You want it high so you get the most traffic. But eventually what REALLY matters is conversion rate and cost per new customer.  Sometimes high CTR ads don't bring buyers.  Conversion is what matters most.

4.  Ignoring the Display URL Line in your Ad: If you own www.redwagon.com, you should try www.RedWagon.com, and www.RedWagon.com/RadioFlyer, or www.RadioFlyer.RedWagon.com, or RedWagonStore.com. Tiny hinges swing big doors.

5.  Creating Ad Groups with Unrelated Keywords: Do not write an ad and dump every keyword under the sun into the ad group.  Make tight ad groups based on a narrow set of related keywords matched closely to the ads and the landing page.

6.  Muddying Search and Content Results: If you run all three streams of traffic (Google / Search / Content Network) through the same ad group, you lose the ability to distinguish among the very different kinds of traffic.  I prefer to separate Google & Search from Content, in different campaigns.

7.  Ignoring the 80/20 Principle: The 80/20 Rule says that the vast majority of outputs (impressions, clicks, leads, sales) are caused by a very small minority of inputs (ad groups, ads and keywords.)  Spend your time on the vital few instead of the insignificant many.

8.  Declaring Split-Test Winners Too Slowly: If you can declare a winner twice as fast, your site improves twice as fast.  I recommend combing through your ads as often as you can announce a winner.  If you go to www.splittester.com you can enter the # of clicks and the CTR of any two ads and it'll tell you whether the better one is really better, or if it might just be luck.

9.  Declaring Split-Test Winners to Quickly: If one ad got 1% and 5 clicks, and the other got 2% and 8 clicks, that's not enough clicks to know for sure the winner is a sure thing.  Again, let www.splittester.com decide their fate.  Rule of thumb: 20+ clicks on each ad.

10.  Ignoring negative keywords: Just about ANY ad group should probably have some negative keywords.  It should always be on your checklist.  It increases your Click Thru Rate because your ads don't get shown to people who shouldn't see them.  Less waste.

Here is a small compilation of links that I have found useful for navigating my own Yahoo Stores.

First, a direct link to the Store Manager:

http://edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/NEWEDIT.STORE-ID

And if you want to go directly into the Store Editor use this link:

http://edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/NEWEDIT.STORE-ID/index.html

Ok, so those were two easy to find and not that exciting.  But this one I have found very very useful.  No more sorting and sifting through your hundreds of products.  With the link below, you just add the ID of your product into the link and it will take you directly to that page:

http://edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/NEWEDIT.STORE-ID/9e0c6065bda0/PRODUCT-ID.html

And finally the best link of all.  It allows you to do some quick editing of a product.  It is the same as above except for the small addition after the .html

http://edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/NEWEDIT.STORE-ID/9e0c6065bda0/PRODUCT-ID.html?dired=1

Typically this last link has to be copied/pasted into your store editor to work once you are logged in.  But still a very useful link.

Have other useful links to share or time saving tips and tricks, drop us an email or add a comment below!