]]> As Giants and Patriots get ready for Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis this weekend, so do 100 million viewers in US alone. Many of them will show up not for the biggest single game in US sports, but another thing it represents – the advertising industry day of the year.

While Super Bowl clearly caters to the masses, are there similar events you can use to reach your specific target audiences? What is the Super Bowl of your niche market and how do you prepare for the game day?

On Super Bowl Sunday the biggest brands from auto, retail, insurance, film, food and beverages industries, with an occasional outsider joining this traditional roster, bring out the big guns – a 30 second slot during the game will cost them 3.5 million USD, so I imagine they would certainly hope to make the most of it.

Why Super Bowl?

It is a single day when big brands can reach tens of millions of viewers at once and drive them online to socialize and create a week- or month-long buzz by sharing and commenting on new creative accomplishments they were presented with.

And since Super Bowl is a family event, there will be many people watching the game who don’t really care who takes home the Lombardi trophy, and most certainly don’t know there’s even a left guard of Croatian descent playing for the NY Giants. They will gather to spend some quality family time together, and some will be there for the commercials alone.

For these viewers it will matter more to see if Hyundai creative team beats Kia than how many times Tom Brady gets sacked by the Giants’ defensive line.

This incredible audience reach plays a major role in brand awareness potential of the event, and is the sole reason why the biggest brands come back year after year.

It has even gone so far that it has become a must for certain brands to appear – not showing up on the ad roster could be perceived as the sign of a weakening brand – just ask Pepsi how many Super Bowls have they decided to skip recently.

So, what if you had this kind of opportunity for your business – to reach out to many members of your target audience at once and amaze them? Oh, wait – you probably do…

What is your niche market Super Bowl event and how do you prepare for it?

Brands that appear in Super Bowl ads mostly prepare stories that relate to the masses, and have huge budgets to work with.

However, every industry and each niche market you’re doing business in inevitably has a “Super Bowl” event of its own, it’s only a matter of recognizing it, scaling it and preparing for it adequately.

This can be a specific trade show, an awards ceremony, an arts festival – you name it – it’s only important that you define it as a time and place where you can reach your most precious audience members. And the beauty of it is that telling your story to your target audience won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Once you have that figured out – it’s your turn to prepare a game plan and rise to the occasion.

Of course, brand awareness isn’t something that can happen in a single day, and there’s very little you can do if you don’t have a great product or service to begin with, but let’s imagine you are really good at whatever you do on a daily basis.

In that case, a Super Bowl event for your niche market is where you get the chance to be at the top of your game in front of those that matter most to your business.

Your approach can be to prepare any number of things:

• a customer-engaging campaign leading up to the main event
• a fun, emotional or educational “hope-to-go-viral” video
• a creative booth team with a stunning visual presentation of your product
• a special once-in-a-lifetime offer to your customers
• a fundraiser for an important cause
• an unexpected celebrity endorsement

I’m sure you have more than enough good ideas on how to get your message across and raise awareness, but you should definitely strive to make an impact on your own Super Bowl – after all, it doesn’t come around that often.

I believe this goes without saying, but just in case – any action you decide to take should be highly leveraged by a wide array of social media channels at your disposal.

If you manage to shine when the stakes are high, your audience will start expecting your presence on such events, and that will be a sure sign of their good will and appreciation towards your hard work – once you achieve that, that’s where the fun actually starts as you’ve only just begun.

Imagine a Super Bowl without a commercial for Bud Light or Pepsi, or a Comic Con without a Marvel booth.

Better yet – imagine a Black Friday with everyone at Best Buy taking a day off or a Cyber Monday with Amazon offering no special deals.

You should aim to become someone without whom your Super Bowl just doesn’t feel the same.

Now, what are the Super Bowl events in your niche markets? Find them, prepare for them and make sure you’re at the top of your game when it matters most.

Magento Super Bowl

We as Magento developers have one such event coming up shortly – Imagine eCommerce Conference in Vegas (April 23-25) – a showcase of who’s who in Magento and X.commerce.

The organizers aren’t even trying to hide that with this event they are actually looking to become “the Super Bowl of eCommerce” as that’s the tagline they go by – so, there you go – if your business is evolving around Magento – that’s where you should be.

Can this conference live up to its expectations? We certainly hope so, and you’ll get the chance to meet some Inchooers there in April – Viva Las Vegas!

]]> October 2011 was a very important month for us. After opening a subsidiary in Serbia, we decided to take another important step; as we have a team member – Lyssandro Reis working from Sydney for the last 18 months (you may recall his articles), we decided to nominate him our brand-new Operations Manager in Australia and New Zealand and we are now announcing that we are open for partnerships in the region. 

As you know, at Inchoo we highly value the Magento Community and have developed and are still developing strong partnerships along our way. The companies we work closely with are all Magento Partners or web-development companies with a passion for Magento e-commerce like us.

We cooperate in many ways, exchanging technologies and information, sharing projects and referring clients to each other whenever our teams are swamped with work. We even developed a partnership program that has given us a valuable experience working closer with the Magento Community.

We envision a fair and long-term relationship with exchange of knowledge and fine growth for both parties. We want to establish a win-win situation where the outcomes ensure a beautiful e-commerce experience to our clients and final users – and we mean business here.

Therefore, if you are located in Australia or New Zealand and you believe that we could work together, please give us a call or drop us an email, we are ready to talk – hopefully in person.

]]> A few interesting changes have happened within Google Analytics in the past few weeks, and I’d like to write them down and explain it as clearly as I can for the online store owners and other people reading our blog.

1. Real Time Analytics

Some of you who requested to be included into the Real Time Google Analytics beta recently received an e-mail with the happy news that real time data reports are now showing in your accounts. We were among the lucky bunch. In order to see it, you need to switch to the new Google Analytics interface (the red link in the top right) if you haven’t so far.

From what I can tell, real-time Analytics will be extremely useful whenever you’re starting a new campaign and promoting something aggressively, trying out which channel works best, or trying out which time of the day is the best for your marketing activities. You can get some nice data from it, and it really works real time, just like advertised. I tweeted a link and few seconds later, the traffic from t.co (twitter’s shortening service) went wild and perfectly corelated with the data of which URLs are being visited the most right now.

2. Keyword (Not provided.)

Nop, this is not the data from a non-linked AdWords account, this is actually organic search data from logged-in users. Google decided to protect the privacy of their logged-in users, redirecting their search queries to https and not providing the keyword they used in the Google Analytics data. This is terrible for website owners since we get less data, but good for the user as the user’s privacy is even more protected right now. The problem is, data was anonymous anyways and such a “protection” was really unnecessary. Also, PPC campaigns still show data for keywords from logged-in users, which means only organic privacy is protected (Dear Google, WTF?). Only possible explanation that I can think of is that Google wants to protect the data of how they personalize the search results, meaning PPC ads are not personalized while organic results are.

How much data is actually being protected this way?

From the data I can gather, and data publicly available, only 1-2% of organic traffic will be shown as “(Not provided.)”. This means the number of users that are searching through Google while logged-in is really low.

3. Traffic Sources – Search Engine Optimization

You probably noticed the new tab under the traffic sources in the new Analytics user interface. It’s called “Search Engine Optimization”. It can integrate with your Google Webmaster Tools account and data. The data you get from it is far from accurate and more of an approximation, but there are no “(Not provided.)” keywords for logged-in users in there (Again Google, why? Why not Zoidberg?).

Some people ask why is the average position for some top keywords so low. The thing is, the way they calculate average position is kind of stupid, data actually seams much more accurate once you understand this. In case your website appears on more than one spot in the SERP, all will be counted and avarage will be made from it. Meaning, if inchoo.net’s pages appear on first 8 results for keyword “inchoo”, the avarage position is not 1st, but rather the avarage of all of these positions, around 4th place.

]]> When dealing with online stores with a lot of products, pagination on category pages can get really problematic for search engines. Link juice gets distributed all over the place, your internal linking structure is terrible, indexing of deep page products is difficult and anchor text values that pagination sends have nothing to do with the content of the page, but there was no better way to do it. It came down to choosing between SEO and usability.

Yesterday, Google explained how they look at rel=”next” and rel=”prev” in an official blog post. It solves the great problem of paginated products on category pages of online stores.

The most important thing you need to know is that Google will treat all pages inside the pagination that have rel=”next” and rel=”prev” implemented as one unit in regards to link attribution. This means you no longer need to worry about dispersing your internal link juice to paginated pages or external link juice that’s coming into these pages. They will treat them as a whole and collect link juice from all of them, while shoving the most relevant page in the search result (most often the 1st page of the paginated unit).

I’m actually very impressed by this solution, since the best thing we could do so far was implement a rel=”canonical” which is really applicable in some rare cases I described here, but not in most of the pagination problems (since content of the page 2 is often completely different than the content of the page 1 etc.).

The technical implementation of rel=”prev” and rel=”next” is very similar to the way you implement rel=”canonical”:

It is placed in the head in this form:

<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2"/>

and

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1"/>

The first page, obviously, should not have a rel=”prev”.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

]]> So I’m doing my normal weekly backlink check to see if there are some new and interesting websites linking to us and I discover someone has built 190 “dofollow” backlinks from 43 different domains towards this article on inchoo.net. Most of these backlinks have porn related anchors. Naturally, my first thought was, some spammer made a comment on the blog post and decided to build backlinks towards this post, but there was no such comment on it. Was this built by a competitor – or someone just made a mistake during their spamy link building efforts – remains a mystery.

I quickly log-in to webmaster tools to see if Google figured out these links and see they are not there. After some googling and researching official answers from Google, I came to a conclusion that there is no need to worry about such an isolated incident. With a stable link profile and years of building unique and quality content, there is no way anyone could hurt us using this technique.

Official answers from Google employees say that if this happens to you, there is nothing you can do about it. In most cases, Google will simply ignore the link juice and anchor text value of these spam links and pretend like nothing happened. Some new domains that don’t have a stable link profile, however, could be damaged this way. So if you’re starting out fresh, the best thing you can do is pray to the Lord that no one tries to pull this on you. I know, it sucks. Someone suggested at the Search Engine Journal in the comments section that Google should make some sort of robots.txt markup that would allow us to point to links that we want to be discredited and tell the algorithm that we didn’t build those spam links and don’t want any credit from them. That would be an awesome feature but so far, there is no talk about it.

During the time I was researching this, I stumbled upon this comedic jewel inside the Google Support Forums:

Enormous Link Farm Discovered

Doing competitive research, found an enormous blog link farm. Over 500 domains. I reported it to google yesterday but I doubt they will do anything about it, so I thought I would share it here and ask what to do. Look at the backlinks for the following domain names;

www * comparewrinklecreams * com
www * electroniccigarettesreviews * net
www * buyengagementrings * net

Its one of the largest link farms I have ever seen, my niche is web design so while I dont like that they are cheating the system, at least its not destroying my rankings yet. However I found the network while researching backlinks in web design, and several page two rankings that are rising really fast are using these same links. I guess I am posting this because I fear losing my own rankings that I attained over a few years and natural linking. How can I compete with this? Should I just file the report, and does google care much about this type of behavior?

Id like to know because if google does not care then I should look into buying some links like this. And if they dont approve of this type of thing, I am asking for other webmasters help in reporting the links. Even if its not your niche, Think about it from an honest webmasters perspective. Losing ranking and income to someone who cheats seems wrong. Thoughts?

Updates:
Anyone? 3/3/10
Now that I know its called Domain Farm, can someone else place some input here? 3/4/10
Nobody? Cmon guys can I please get some feedback on this? 3/4/10
Update? 3/5/10
Thanks Anyway 3/5/10
How can I directly notify the spam team about this? 3/14/10
I read online on seomoz that google does not even read spam reports. They provided a link and tracked clicks. not on visit from anyone…but they still got the “we have completed our review of your website” email. I dont think the spam team cares as much about this kinda stuff as everyone thinks they do. If they did they wouldnt allow people do this kinda stuff. 3/15/10
Please report this link spamming so google will look at it 3/15/10
Conclusion: Build a Domain Farm or Lose the Battle… 3/16/10
Yea I decided not to waste my time doing any research for anyone on here. All I can say is Fck you Google. You dont want to enforce your own rules, dont be surprised when garbage sites build huge networks and rank number one. I am buying up pr domain names right now, and apparently google does not care. So I soon will have a page one number one ranking. Thanks for everyones help in helping me understand that google does not care about search quality, and giving excellent examples of how to build a network that can influence my rankings.

Andy 3/20/10
Update – I started building my own network. I bought some domain names from tdnam.com that are a pr4. I bought 5 of them, and then made them into one page websites with links pointing to my website as a test. Yes, it works. I jumped from page 8 to page 3. Google are fucking idiots – They not only invented this problem by introducing pagerank, but also warn against doing it while not enforcing their own rules.

My recommendation to anyone trying to gain better search engine positions is to buy domains and build your own network. Google does not give a shit, and if they do then my guess is the spam team are pretty god damned stupid. I have been trying to reach the owner of the websites originally posted, but he wont answer me. I want to see if I can work with him and get some links from his network too.

Sources I found that are great to buy domain names from for those who are also sick and tired of getting their asses kicked in google…and especially for those trying to compete with the guys with huge networks that google wont and likely can never stop;

check out;

dropday.com – expired domains sorted by pagerank
payperpost.com – pay 5-10 dollars for a post on someone elses blog that already has pagerank.

After jumping 5 pages nearly overnight I decided fuck google, an fuck their bullshit guidelines. The bottom line is someone has to enforce the rules, and if no one does, then it comes down to survival of the fittest. and Im not going to starve over it. 3/29/10

TL;DR: A guy finds a competitor is using enormously big link farm, wants to report it to Google. He figures out Google doesn’t care and starts regularly updating his original post with data on how he’s building a link farm himself so that he could compete. He gives links to the domains he bought to use as a link farm since Google obviously doesn’t care anyways.

Now here comes the punchline: The day after his last update, 3/30/10 Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team answers:

I just say thanks for this report. We got a lot of useful data from it–in addition to (just recently) taking action on things that violate our quality guidelines.

Lesson learned?

Be patient and play by Google’s rules.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

]]> Customer’s reviews are a powerful tool that strongly affect your online store’s conversion rates and – if implemented properly – click through rates in your SERPs. This article will cover just how much do they affect it in numbers and point out some of the best practices in acquiring these reviews and implementing them properly into your store.

Third party review services vs on-site reviews

Well known eCommerce solutions such as Magento have a built-in product review functionality. The problem with it is pretty obvious: the store owner can moderate the reviews and some customers are well aware of that. This means you could simply disapprove or edit negative reviews, which sounds as an awesome feature but it makes experienced users doubt in the quality of your review score.

Amount of reviews and its affect on Conversion Rate

Does amount of reviews matter? Short answer: Yes it does! An aggregate rating of 5 out of 10 stars means a lot more if 50 people left the review compared to the same rating with only 5 reviews. Most customers are very aware of this and you’d be amazed just how much a large number of reviews can increase your conversion rate.

According to Reevoo, a company that analysed 2.5 million customer reviews, there is no cap on how many reviews add to your conversion rate. The more you have the higher the rate is. Interesting part of their research is where they concluded that there is a very small difference in the range of 10 and 30 reviews in regards to improving your conversion rate (~3% vs ~3.3%).

As you can see in the graph on the left, it’s pretty much the same thing if you have 20 or 30 reviews, but conversion rate starts going up rapidly after that. There is also a pretty big difference in range of 0-10 reviews and above, raising your conversion rate by 1% with the first 10 reviews on a product.

User reviews’ affect on SEO and search engine CTR

The affect of user reviews on SEO is pretty obvious. It’s a fresh, unique piece of user generated content that search engines can index and it enhances and enriches the content you provided in product description. It also enables you to rank for “product name review” keywords which are in some niches used pretty often. Product reviews bring another thing with them that doesn’t have much to do with SEO: they improve the rate at which users click on your result in the search.

So lets move on to the numbers. Just how much improvement in CTR can you expect after implementing reviews? According to Reevoo, we’re talking about 10-20% increase in CTR, depending on the amount of reviews and aggregate score.

How do you display reviews in the search results?

In June, I wrote about Schema.org, a new microdata standard that 3 major search engines agreed upon. Schema.org has standardised markup for reviews and agregate reviews that can be implemented into your online store. If you’re trying to implement them into Magento, you can talk to us, we have lots of experience with it.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

]]> Customer segmentation is one of the most powerful tools used by marketers today. Magento offers some great segmentation options you can use out of the box with its Enterprise Edition. But, here we’ve done some of the work for you – check out the latest Inchoo Team Segmentation!

Yes, you already met the Inchooers, you got familiar with some faces on our team info page, but now it’s time to dig deeper into what we’re all about.

So, without further ado, let’s move on to Inchoo Team Segmentation.

Girls vs boys

First of all, yes, we’re mostly a bunch of geeks, but we do cherish our own geekettes, especially since there are so few of them:

Facial hair

Now, moving on to attitudes towards facial hair – we don’t adopt a strict facial hair policy at Inchoo, so some of the team members do like to show off, and you can try to guess who they are – hint – there are some pictures/videos available on our team info page

What’s a geek(ette) without their gadget(te)?

Smartphones have really upped the ante for someone to deserve the full bragging rights of being called a geek – and as we’re constantly having Linux vs Windows vs MacOS debates, what’s more charming than seeing a couple of developers arguing about Android vs iOS?

And still, there are some who are steering away from all those touchscreens and prefer to feel an actual keyboard under their fingertips.

So, let’s check out Team Inchoo smartphone usage stats:

Summertime, and my haircut is easy

With the recent heat waves came the need to cut one’s hair shorter than usual, but we still have some team members who are on the fence as to whether to cut their hair short or start preparing in time for the cold winter ahead.

Some, on the other hand, have the luxury of not having to worry about this at all

So, there you have it, part 1 of Inchoo team segmentation. Now you know more about us. Would you like to learn more? What are some key things you’d like to know before you start sending us free stuff?

Do you track this type of information about your own customers? If not, better start gathering them, otherwise you just won’t know who you’re dealing with.

All the best for your summer vacation from all of us at Inchoo – and don’t forget to visit Croatia at least once this summer!

]]> Have you ever wondered what would resolve if your robtos.txt and your meta tags had conflicting directives regarding content indexing? Don’t worry, this question can be a real challenge to even very advanced SEOs. To make this issue a bit clearer to the general public, I decided to make this guide that will show you exactly what happens in these situations.

Robots.txt noindex vs meta noindex, which one has priority?

Case 1: Robots.txt forbids indexing of a URL but meta tag allows it. Outcome: Page will be blocked by robots.txt, meta tag will never be seen by googlebot thus will be ignored, page will only be shown in results as a reference in very rare occasions (it will not have a description, only title and URL).

Case 2: Robots.txt allows indexing of a URL but meta tags forbids it. Outcome: Page will not be indexed and will not be shown in the search results at all.

Case 3: Both Robots.txt and meta tag forbid the indexing of a URL. Outcome: Page will be blocked by robots.txt, meta tag will never be seen by googlebot thus will be ignored, which will allow the page to be shown as snippet with no description in rare occasions in the search results.

Meta noindex vs meta index conflict: If a single page has both meta noindex and meta index tags, meta noindex will resolve. The page will not be shown in the search results.

Advanced stuff, passing Page Rank in robots.txt and meta conflicts

Now that you understand the cases above, lets move on to something even more advanced. When will the link juice be passed and when it will not. As you may or may not know, even pages that are forbidden to be indexed via any means can still accumulate PageRank. If you don’t know how to handle it properly, you might be wasting a large amount of your link juice that could have flown to pages you actually want to receive it.

If you forbid indexing on a URL with robots.txt, Google is not able to see the content of the page, thus no links on that URL will ever be seen and they will not be able to pass their link juice.

On the other hand, if you use meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” and don’t forbid that URL through robots.txt, Google will be able to index the page, follow the links and pass the link juice, but will not be able to show the page in the search results.

From this we can conclude that in most cases, it’s much better decision to forbid indexing through meta tag than use robots.txt for the same purpose.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

]]> Schema.org has recently been announced by Google. It’s an innitiative by Google, Bing and Yahoo to create one microdata standard for structuring web content. Basically it’s the good old Google Rich Snippets, but followed by all three major search engines and it also brought a lot of new markup.

eCommerce related microdata markup

Schema.org brings several interesting opportunities to structure eCommerce data. Here are some that would be very useful in a Magento store:

Schema.org Product markup – example:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
  <span itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwave</span>
  <img src="kenmore-microwave-17in.jpg" />
  <div itemprop="aggregateRating"
    itemscope itemprop="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
   Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">3.5</span>/5
   based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">11</span> customer reviews
  </div>

  <div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
    <span itemprop="price">$55.00</span>
    <link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />In stock
  </div>

  Product description:
  <span itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave.
  Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like
  Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.</span>

  Customer reviews:

  <div itemprop="reviews" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
    <span itemprop="name">Not a happy camper</span> -
    by <span itemprop="author">Ellie</span>,
    <time itemprop="publishDate" datetime="2011-04-01">April 1, 2011</time>
    <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
      <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1">
      <span itemprop="ratingValue">1</span>/
      <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
  </meta></div>
  <span itemprop="description">The lamp burned out and now I have to replace it.
  <div itemprop="reviews" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
    <span itemprop="name">Value purchase</span> -
    by <span itemprop="author">Lucas</span>,
    <time itemprop="publishDate" datetime="2011-03-25">March 25, 2011</time>
    <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
      <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"/>
      <span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span>/
      <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
    </div>
    <span itemprop="description">Great microwave for the price. It is
      small and fits in my apartment.</span>
  </div>
  ...
</span></div></div>

Schema.org Review markup – example:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
  <span itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwave</span>
  <img src="kenmore-microwave-17in.jpg" />
  <div itemprop="aggregateRating"
    itemscope itemprop="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
   Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">3.5</span>/5
   based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">11</span> customer reviews
  </div>

  <div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
    <span itemprop="price">$55.00</span>
    <link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />In stock
  </div>

  Product description:
  <span itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave.
  Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like
  Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.</span>

  Customer reviews:

  <div itemprop="reviews" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
    <span itemprop="name">Not a happy camper</span> -
    by <span itemprop="author">Ellie</span>,
    <time itemprop="publishDate" datetime="2011-04-01">April 1, 2011</time>
    <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
      <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1">
      <span itemprop="ratingValue">1</span>/
      <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
  </div>
  <span itemprop="description">The lamp burned out and now I have to replace it.
  <div itemprop="reviews" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
    <span itemprop="name">Value purchase</span> -
    by <span itemprop="author">Lucas</span>,
    <time itemprop="publishDate" datetime="2011-03-25">March 25, 2011</time>
    <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
      <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"/>
      <span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span>/
      <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
    </div>
    <span itemprop="description">Great microwave for the price. It is
      small and fits in my apartment.</span>
  </div>
  ...
</div>

Schema.org Aggregate Rating markup – example:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Restaurant">
  <span itemprop="name">GreatFood</span>

  <div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
    <span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span> stars -
    based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">250</span> reviews
  </div>

  <div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
    <span itemprop="streetAddress">1901 Lemur Ave</span>
    <span itemprop="addressLocality">Sunnyvale</span>,
    <span itemprop="addressRegion">CA</span> <span itemprop="postalCode">94086</span>
  </div>
  <span itemprop="telephone">(408) 714-1489</span>
  <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.dishdash.com">www.greatfood.com</a>

  Hours:
  <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Mo-Sa 11:00-14:30">Mon-Sat 11am - 2:30pm</time>
  <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Mo-Th 17:00-21:30">Mon-Thu 5pm - 9:30pm</time>
  <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Fr-Sa 17:00-22:00">Fri-Sat 5pm - 10:00pm</time>

  Categories:
  <span itemprop="servesCuisine">
    Middle Eastern
  </span>,
  <span itemprop="servesCuisine">
    Mediterranean
  </span>

  Price Range: <span itemprop="priceRange">$$</span>
  Takes Reservations: Yes
</div>

What if I already implemented Google Rich Snippets?

We have a tutorial on how to do that. For now, we’re sure Google will support the good old GRS format in the foreseeable future, but if you’re doing some major upgrade on your website or you’re starting out from the scratch, I’d switch to schema.org markup.

]]> Since we know mobile internet usage with smartphones have already grown to a market share that can’t be neglected in our marketing campaigns it is time to start using all of the smartphones’ amazing features. One such feature is ability to read QR codes, the 2-D barcodes that are likely to mark the new era in quick access to additional information.

Include a QR code in your printed materials

Do you have a printed product catalog? It is easy to include QR codes that will lead to individual product pages or offer a discount. Are you running an ad in a print magazine? Include a QR code to a special landing page on your online store that addresses the needs for additional information that this reader might have.

Give me some numbers

A recent eMarketer study shows that a pretty big percentage of all QR code usage can be attributed to mCommerce. According to the study, 23% of all US based QR code usage is for the purpose of making a purchase. The same study shows that QR codes are mostly used to get a coupon, discount or deal (53%) and access additional information (52%).

This data shows that you could really increase the amount of products you sell through your printed materials if QR codes are properly implemented into your campaign. It also shows the importance of creating special landing page for every QR code, since people will expect to be landing on content directly related to where they saw the code, not your website’s homepage or some generic landing page used in all of your campaigns.

We recently started using QR codes in our campaigns at Inchoo as well, even though these are not used in Croatia nearly as much as in the US. During the “Career Day 2011″, we printed big QR codes all over our business cards and flyers. I’ve seen people use them, but I also saw people with a big question mark above their head when they saw the QR code. Luckily, we can expect the amounts of question marks above people’s heads to start falling drastically very soon. According to a February 2011 report by Mobio Identity Systems, Inc. usage and adoption of QR codes in North America jumped 1200% in the last six months of 2010!

Although the growth in North America is mind-blowing, the global adoption is a bit slower but significant growth can be seen globally as well. The graph on the left is result of the study performed by 3gvision.

According to that study, US holds the number one position in terms of absolute number of scans in the time period. Italy holds the second position, but with the growth Hong Kong has I expect it already passed the Italy since the time this report was published. Note that this report excludes Japan, a well known leader in mobile barcode usage.

]]> AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It’s the oldest trick in the sales book, but rarely thought about when it comes to eCommerce. The idea is that a sales person should follow these four steps when pitching a product to the potential buyer. In the world of eCommerce, you don’t have your sales person, so this process is (should) be done by your online store.

Attention

Using search engines, in most cases visitors will land on product or category pages. We will concentrate on your product pages within the AIDA process. Once the visitor lands on your product page, you have merely a few seconds to grab his attention. In these few seconds, this visitor will decide weather this is what he was looking for or he’ll move along. We are talking about attention, the first part of AIDA process. In the real world, you’d be trying to catch the attention of the buyer in this step, but online, you already have his attention. All you need to do is make sure you don’t lose it.

You’ll lose the attention you’ve been given in case your product page is to crowded and doesn’t give the impression of what it’s really about from the first look. Too many distracting items can cause your visitor to think he didn’t find what he was looking for, even though he was on the right product page. You can spot this behavior if you are using Google Analytics. Try finding people that landed on the right product page that perfectly fits the keyword they entered into search engine, but right after they landed they used your internal site search to try to find the product they were looking at. In case there are none of these in your Analytics, your product pages might be built pretty good from the attention retention point of view.

Interest

In the real world, you would try to make the buyer show some interest in your product. Luckily for you, visitors that came from search engines searching for your product already showed the interest, now you need to show them why they should act. You need to make them desire the product.

Desire

The visitor landed on the product page and you managed not to lose his attention. Awesome! In this step, you need to make him desire the product. You can do this in several ways, but what really works well is good product representation – readable, scan-able product description, high quality multiple images from different angles and if possible, video showing the product. If the product can be shown “in action” that would also be a thing that encourages desire.

Look at the product page and information you provide there from the visitor’s perspective. Ask yourself if you could envision this product’s size and feel if you’ve never seen / felt it in the real life. If you can’t, work on the description, images, and video.

Action

Visitor landed, you have his full attention, you made him desire the product. Now it’s time to make him take the one last step, to click the button. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a clear call to action. Your “Buy now” or “Add to cart” button has to be the most easily found element on your product page. It has to be big, in different color than surrounding elements and on a logical spot. Bring in a person that never saw your website and show him the product page. Tell him to add the item to the cart. If he can do it without reading anything or looking around the site for more than few secunds, thats a good button. If not, you should improve it.

Some elements can distract the visitor from completing the last step of the AIDA process. Those can be different banners, or some other buttons that compete with your “Buy now” or “Add to cart” button’s attention. I know you want multiple things from your visitor and several call to actions are likely to be placed on modern online stores, but always ask your self, is it more important for you that visitor checks some other item on discount on your store, to follow you on Twitter / Facebook, to subscribe to your newsletter or to buy the item he is looking at at this point. All of these other calls to actions can be present on other pages – such as category page, CMS pages, checkout success page – but the product page should be as free of these distractions as possible.

]]> People say that practice without theory is empty, and theory without practice is blind. Yet another example of making links between theory and practice was Tomislav’s lecture about developing a successful IT company on a bedrock of blog writing and personal employee branding. It was a real eye-opener to many first-year master’s degree students at the Faculty of Economics in Osijek. In the classroom with almost hundred students and no empty seats, Tomislav talked about key factors and decisions that took Inchoo from a one-man show to a fast-growing company with world-recognized expertise in Magento consulting, design and development.

He shed light on challenges that building a company around blog writing brings. Moreover, Tomislav emphasised the importance of focusing on a niche market, building strong relationships with the customers, and having a well-defined set of human resources practices in place. The lecture was thought-provoking and engaging, and got a very good response from the students.

This wasn’t the first time Tomislav played the role of a guest lecturer. Many professors at the Faculty of Economics appreciate his expertise, entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to give back to the community. During the past eight years Tomislav was invited on many occasions to be a guest speaker for courses in IT and general management. Besides, there is a growing interest in Magento development among students, so we hope to see Tomislav and his team as the leading lecturers in Magento workshops at the Faculty. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you posted about this great synergy between practice and theory

]]> mCommerce (mobile commerce) is here to stay and due to the recently published researches, we have data to back it up and predict the growth. The only problem is, consumers seem to be accepting the change much faster than the industry is. Since both mCommerce and eCommerce are growing sectors, we know they will continue to coexist, however, eCommerce industry seems to be not very agile when it comes to upgrading their solutions to fit the small screens.

A recent article at eMarketer points out a very interesting study performed by YouGov for Antenna Software on a sample of ~1.8k US mobile phone users. This study indicates that only 24% of mobile phone users in US can’t (or think they can’t) access internet via their phone. Even though they can, 34% choose not to use internet through their mobile phones.

When asked why don’t they use the mobile internet, 44% of men and 38% of women said they don’t like the small size of mobile screen. I think they don’t have so much problems with mobile screen size but rather the design and layout of web pages that were never designed to be used on such screens, but we’ll need to dig deeper into the research to explain why.

The same groups tends to complain about the mobile internet speed – which we know will continue to grow – so we can expect that those that are reluctant to use the mobile internet due to the speed issues might change their mind in the near future. 50% of the mobile phone users aged 18 – 24 were annoyed that some website designs did not work at all on their phones. This is the group of users that “gets” where the problem is. It’s not the screen size thats broken, it’s the design and layout of the webpage.

Expanding eCommerce business to mCommerce

According to the same study, 28% of the mobile users in USA would be more likely to perform shopping via mobile internet if online stores were tailored for their screen size. Unfortunately, this study doesn’t cover the use and likelihood of using native mobile applications for online shopping.

So if you build a mobile version of your online store today, you can expect ~28% lift in mobile visitors’ conversion rate! This piece of data could help you calculate the short term ROI of building a mobile version of your online store and I hope it will persuade many of undecided online store owners to do it.

Also note that only 6% of mobile phone users said they don’t have problems with the display on their mobile phones. Since 46% said they would be much more likely to use e-mail on their mobile phone if the display problem was eliminated, we can expect more of your newsletter subscribers to read it on their phones as the e-mail and web-mail mobile clients continue to evolve.

Another study gives us one more very persuasive argument to build a mobile friendly eCommerce solution – the mobile only internet users. According to the study, ~25% of mobile internet users in the USA are using the internet only via their mobile phones. This means that if you don’t have a mobile friendly website, you are leaving these people without options, they are likely to use your competitor that has one. In some other countries the number of mobile only internet users is ridiculous, in Egypt it’s astonishing 70%!

These studies are well correlated with Jakob Nielsen’s study entitled “Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult” in which he said:

When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex Web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores.

Last year, Nielsen also performed a study on iPad native apps usability which concluded that there are some serious issues with user interface inconsistencies. I quote:

iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

From these studies we can conclude that users are adopting the mobile internet usage much faster than the industry. If we are going to make significant progress, we’ll need to develop usability standards for mobile browsing and evangelize the importance of serving a mobile version of the website or a native app to the mobile internet users.

]]> A new comment on my old post that explains how rel=canonical element (tag) works gave me inspiration to write another article about rel=canonical. This time, I’ll try to explain why and where rel=canonical is usually necessary in a Magento store.

I’ll leave technical implementation and decision should you use any of the existing extensions or go for custom implementation to you. I’ll just cover the marketing and SEO perspective on the issue.

First, you need to understand why are you using rel=canonical and NOT using 301 redirection. You are using rel=canonical over 301 because you have pages that should be accessible to users but feature identical content as some other page. This means you can’t implement a 301 redirect since you don’t want user to be redirected back to original but you want to tell search engines that the page they are about to index is actually a copy of another page and all of the SEO credit should go to that original page instead of spreading it evenly across copies and thus lowering original page’s ranking position in SERP.

The most critical point in Magento where rel=canonical implementation is extremely necessary is product listing on category pages. Lets have a look at such a page on a Magento demo store with sample products:

What we have here is a page with just 5 products that actually has at least 180 identical copies with different URLs by default (credits to Mladen for taking time to calculate the number of combinations). What am I talking about?

• You can sort them by Grid or by list
• You can sort them by Position, Name, Price and Contrast ratio
• You can show 9, 15 or 30 per page (although there is only 5)
• You can sort them ascending or descending

Each of these can be selected on it’s own or in combination with any or all of the possible selections and it will bring back identical content but with different URL. You can’t use 301 to redirect user back to the category page since you want user to be able to sort the products this way and if you redirect him he’ll see the old sorting again, so you have to use rel=canonical and redirect only search engines back to the original page.

The same thing applies to https vs http URLs, print pages, and basically any link that changes the visual elements but doesn’t change the content of the page.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

]]> If you are a regular visitor of our blog, you will know that we usually write about Magento. Sometimes about WordPress, tools we use or we are just making fun. This article is a little different. It is not about us. It is about you. We will overview 10 top world cities that visit this site. This way we wish to thank you for your visits, comments and inquiries.

According to Google Analytics, your dearest website had 663,369 uniques in 2010. Here is the list of top 10 cities where most of our visitors were coming from at 2010. There are some that you could expect and there are some surprises.

1. London, United Kingdom

Visits: 22,368
Although it is not a huge surprise that London is the top city, it is a surprise that it has over double visits compared to 2nd closest. Since there are many ISPs visitors are coming from, it looks like there is a lot of Magento development subjects that are generating majority of the visits.

2. Osijek, Croatia

Visits: 9,537
Our dearest Osijek is not a surprise also. Inchoo is located at this cozy town of 100.000 population at north-east of Croatia. I guess most of those visits came from the employees.

3. Paris, France

Visits: 9,326
Another European capital. Looks like there are French people who want to read English language after all. Magento community is strong in France, gathered around Fragento site I guess.

4. Chennai, India

Visits: 8,231
I’m not sure how did it happen, but this city of 4,6 mil people is full of Magento developers. If you google for “Chennai Magento”, you will find whole army of Magento developers, freelancers, hosting companies, courses and teachers. There is a rumor that they are building a monument for Roy Rubin at the central square. (Just joking)

5. Sydney, Australia

Visits: 6,887
Although 3 of our designers (Lyssandro, Renato and Rafael) are living or were living there, I am sure they were not the only ones who are visiting us from there.

6. New York, USA

Visits: 6,706
Ok, ok. This one needs no explanation. It would be weird if we didn’t have Big Apple on this list. We usually have cca 18 visits/day from New York, but for some weird reason on February, 4th we got 194 at the same day. 90% were direct visits. Maybe some article was published about us at some newspaper. However, it looks like we’ll never know why on this particular day number of visits increased so drastically.

7. Pune, India

Visits: 6,509
1,121 km from Chennai lies Pune with 3,4 mil people and very similar percentage of Magento developers. I am wondering if you guys are organized somehow. Do some institutions support this kind of massive specialization in your city?

8. Hanoi, Vietnam

Visits: 6,079
We know that our beloved Asia Connect guys are from this city. Long time ago they were stealing our articles, but later we made a peace pact when they started to place a credit line and backlink to original article. Beside Asia Connect, there are a lot of freelancers and companies specializing in Magento.

9. Mumbai (Bombay), India

Visits: 5,542
This wast city of over 13 million people is not a surprise. City is well known for software industry and Magento knowledge-seekers should not be much different.

10. Zagreb, Croatia

Visits: 5,283
Although this is Croatian capital, it is a little surprise. Magento is not so popular in Croatia. I believe there are only few stores here and we get only rare Magento inquiries. Despite the fact, we are very glad to have purgers on the list.

Once more, thank you our dear visitors for coming here, arguing, asking questions and sharing knowledge. We’ll be with you in 2011.

So, where are you from?

]]> What a title, right? When I say Googl’s AdWords free coupon is not free, I don’t mean like you’ll probably spend some of your money afterwards (which is also probably true) kind of not free. I mean literally, if Google gives you $100 free coupon, Google will earn $100.

There is no trick, no small hidden text, it’s all out there, perfectly clear. The thing is, it’s not the person who is receiving the coupon that’s going to pay Google $100, it’s other already existing advertisers that are going to do so.

Google AdWords is bid based system. Once you inject more money into it (free coupon), you are automatically raising the keyword bids needed to advertise. So when Google hands out a $100 coupon to a new advertiser, this advertiser’s competitors who are already Google’s most valuable paying customers are going to loose $100. Unbelievable, right? Google didn’t just attract a new customer for free, Google actually earned money by hurting its longterm customers. Do no evil… right.

Now that you know this fact, you’re probably not really happy about Google’s new campaign in which they will give $100 coupons to first 1 000 000 small businesses that sign-up for local search advertising. Yes, you got the numbers right, Google will take 100 million from our pockets for this campaign.

]]> In this blog post I will talk about some of the most critical areas of Magento’s conversion rate optimization process – Magento’s shopping cart and Magento’s checkout page.

Online store owners often don’t realize how much more money they could earn if they invested just a small amount of time and money into conversion rate optimization. Each store is unique and different, with different products and design, different customer’s demography etc. This means that each online store needs to be fine tuned to achieve optimal number of sales. This fine tuning process is called conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Although each store is unique, some things in Magento are universal and some mistakes are made very often. I will outline two of the most critical conversion rate issues with Magento’s cart and checkout page…

Magento’s Shopping Cart Page:

Shopping Cart – a place on your online store where you want your visitors to click on the “Proceed to Checkout” button as soon as possible. Remember the mentioned definition for if you stick to it while you are designing this page, you will reduce the risk of making conversion rate problems on this step.

Design of shopping cart page in Magento’s default theme is very good. The problem often appears with custom designed online stores. We had a client that had a custom design in which the “Proceed to Checkout” button was the same size and color as other buttons on this page. The cart abandonment rate was amazing 52%! After we changed the button to be bigger and in different color, we made cart abandonment rate decrease to only 19%. This means that we almost doubled the amount of sales this online store makes by changing the size and color of one button on the Shopping Cart page!

While we’re talking about the checkout button, note that there is one pretty important link in the top right corner of your Magento store that usually reads “Checkout”. As you can see on the example of this button, “Go to Checkout” sounds like very effective call to action, so I suggest you rename the “Checkout” link into “Go to Checkout!” link. Additional, here is a case study at GetElastic that supports this argument.

Magento’s Checkout Page:

Once we made our online shopper click on the magical “Proceed to Checkout” button, he is faced with the biggest challenge of his online shopping experience – completing the first step of the Magento’s onepage checkout process. This one is actually seriously flawed in the default Magento design.

Have a long critical look into this screenshot and imagine yourself in a role of typical non-tech-savvy person. Do you know what you need to do on this step?

This page makes no sense whatsoever to an average online shopper and he will have terrible time overcoming this obstacle. If your visitor didn’t leave you on this step, consider yourself lucky, for this shopper loves you very much and he made lots of trial and error attempts trying to move forward.

According to Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s study, the average user will not be able to figure out which button belongs to which part of the screen and will probably fill in the details on the right and hit the button on the left. User will repeat this behavior numerous times, not figuring out what seems to be the problem. This is caused by users not reading. They automatically fill what seems to be necessary.

Magento makes this problematic step even worse by putting the red star symbol and marking input fields on the right appear as required while they are actually not required unless you want to log-in.

I propose this solution which requires some custom programming:

As you can see, everything is in one step and requires not much thinking or reading. User have guest checkout preselected so that “Continue” button is immediately clickable. You can either show the login fields once the Log-In radio button is clicked on the same page or simply put the login form on the next step.

Enjoy your higher conversions!

]]>

Everyone knows that the ecommerce industry is growing.
But do you know how fast? Or what percent of all the retail sales it takes?

United States Census Bureau published Quarterly E-Commerce Report on November 17th, 2010.
This is the latest statistics on ecommerce available for United States.

The U.S. Census Bureau, pre-eminent collector and disseminator of timely, relevant, and quality data about the people and the economy of the United States, conducts a population and housing census every 10 years, an economic census every five years, and more than 100 demographic and economic surveys every year, all of them evolving from the first census in 1790.

3rd quarter of 2010 shows rather good results with 41,5 billion USD retail sales in ecommerce. It accounts for almost 4.2% of the total retail sales in US.

What is interesting is that the estimated ecommerce sales increased 14.1 percent in Q3 of 2010 compared to Q3 of 2009 while total retail sales increased 5.8 percent in the same period.

This proves that ecommerce is growing much faster than the overall retail market.

You can follow the growth of the share of ecommerce sales over time in this graph:

Estimated Quarterly U.S. Retail E-commerce Sales as a Percent of Total Quarterly Retail Sales:
1st Quarter 2001 – 3rd Quarter 2010

Red line shows estimates that are not adjusted.
Blue line shows estimates adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes.

It will be really interesting to see how holiday shopping season (with Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner) will affect these numbers for the last quarter.

Go Ecommerce!

Related links:

• http://www.census.gov/retail/ – Monthly & Annual Retail Trade
• http://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.pdf – Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales 3rd Quarter 2010

This is a guest blog post written by “Turnkey Ecommerce Solutions” web design and development company.
Turnkeye.com specializes in ecommerce solutions with full life cycle support.

]]> Every now and then someone in the social web world asks for eCommerce solution recommendation. One of the awesome trends I noticed in these answers is the answer of a “happy customer” that goes something like this:

I tried XYZ and it’s awesome! You should try it two. I don’t understand any of this HTML, php, CSSS mumbo-jumbo, but this XYZ cart works out of the box!

The sad part is, people tend to fall for that. What’s bad with it “working out of the box” you ask? Well, most of the open source carts I ever saw work “out of the box”, including Magento. Certain features, however, require additional set-up, and some even advanced custom development.

Did you ever ask yourself how come someone goes through years and years of learning all of this HTML and php mumbo-jumbo if they could simply use the “works out of the box” solution for everything?

Did you ever ask yourself how come big online stores whose core business is eCommerce are not using the “works out of the box” solution? Why are they spending a lot of money reinventing the wheel?

Because, we’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re upgrading, modifying and improving the wheel. We’re modifying the wheel to suit your particular target audience, brand, budget, strategy and product line. You can’t put a tractor wheel on a racing car, it simply doesn’t work that way.

Big companies with eCommerce as their core business don’t like throwing money around. They are usually very analytically driven companies that know exactly how much money they can invest into a certain feature of their online store, since they have a projection of the sales improvement it will make and ultimate projection of time needed for this feature to pay for itself (feature’s ROI).

]]> There are tutorials all around the web as well as at the Inchoo website that guide you through various Google services integration with Magento eCommerce platform. I wanted to unite all of these resources on one place and also bring something new to the table.

In this guide, we’ll talk about:

1. Google Analytics integration with Magento
2. Google AdWords conversion tracking with Magento
3. Google Base integration with Magento
4. Google’s Feedburner service integration with Magento
5. Tracking conversions in numbers instead of percentage with Google Analytics custom report

Google Analytics integration with Magento

This one is pretty simple. One of the things you might do wrong is go and include Google Analytics the “hardcore” way, putting the Google Analytics code directly into the theme file. Magento has its own way of handling Google Analytics integration from the admin panel. Tomislav wrote a detailed article on how to do it, as well as how to enable eCommerce tracking in your Google Analytics account.

Google AdWords conversion tracking with Magento

In case you use Google AdWords to promote your Magento store, you might wish to track conversions directly through AdWords interface. Magento doesn’t support this by default, however, my coworker Domagoj wrote this awesome Magento module that will enable you to do just that!

Google Base integration with Magento

Magento has its own integration with Google Base (Google Product Search), but implementing it is kind of tricky. There are several errors that very often occur. Luckily for you, I wrote this step by step guide to Google Base integration with Magento, which also tells you how to fix most of the known errors that can happen during the process.

Google’s Feedburner service integration with Magento

RSS feeds are very useful, but are generally used mostly by tech savvy shoppers. If you don’t have RSS feeds enabled, go to admin section of your Magento store and navigate to System > Configuration > RSS Feeds tab in the left column. You can enable feeds in the RSS Config section. Now you should be able to see an RSS icon on the front-end of your store. If you click on it, it will take you to a special page that lists all of your enabled RSS feeds.

Feedburner is a service that was not-so-recently acquired by Google. It is very useful service that enables you to track the number of subscribers, views and clicks per RSS item. You simply take one or more of your Magento feeds, head over to Feedburner, paste it and burn it. You will need a Google account just like with other Google services.

Google recently announced new experimental Feedburner user interface that I really like. It has enhanced usability and additional features, you can access it via this link.

Unfortunately, I can’t find a good way of easily integrating Feedburner with Magento since no one coded a module that would automatically replace all of your Magento RSS feeds with Feedburner links, so until someone does it, you’ll need to hardcode it into the template.

Tracking conversions in numbers instead of percentage with Google Analytics custom report

It always amazes me how inconsistent Google Analytics interface is. They spend so much time and effort into building an awesome analytical software and yet it lacks some of the most basic reports a person would need. For example, when you set-up a goal in Google Analytics, you can only track goal reach in form of percentage, which can be really painful if you simply wanna see how many transactions came from which source (organic, paid, referral, direct etc.).

This is why I created a custom report that I use a lot that lets me view the exact number of conversions (not percentage) by different sources. If you want such a custom report (and I know you do ), go to your Google Analytics, choose a project and navigate to Custom Reports (left sidebar) > Manage Custom Reports > Create new custom report (top right corner).

Now place your metrics and dimensions like I did in this screenshot (click on image to enlarge):