The poll also looked in detail at four key areas of conversion to determine their priorities. The four areas examined were as follows:

•    SEO
•    Landing page optimization
•    Email marketing
•    Web conversion/shopping cart recovery techniques

Each respondent was allowed to pick only one response in each category, forcing them to choose their top priority.

SEO Priorities

Which SEO technique would you prioritize in next 12 months

Marketers plan to focus on link building as their top priority in the next 12 months, with 42 percent stating that it is their top SEO focus. Changes to website pages to ensure they are more SEO friendly were the highest priority for 22 percent, while 21 percent plan to focus on social media integration. Site-based optimization (such as sitemaps and navigation) was the main focus for only 15 percent. There are two notable conclusions that you draw about these findings:

1)    Marketers have taken on board the changes made over recent months by Google to prioritize quality and diversity of links in search results over the content itself.

2)    Social media integration is unexpectedly high. While social media is hot for marketers, in SEO terms this is really cutting edge stuff, and it signals that marketers have recognized the importance of social media in driving traffic. In particular, Facebook’s social plugins, including the easy to implement ‘Like’ button, are beginning to be viewed as a simple ‘social SEO toolkit.’

Website and Landing Page Optimization

Which landing page optimization technique would you prioritize in next 12 months

Marketers are taking the ‘less is more’ philosophy to heart when it comes to landing page optimization. Just over half (51 percent) stated that reducing clutter was their top priority, recognizing that landing pages have been added to gradually over time at the expense of simplicity and simple, strong calls to action.

Twenty-eight percent of marketers plan to re-evaluate their text on the page with a view to increasing website conversion rates, while only seventeen percent are prioritizing removing fields from data capture forms. This is surprising as experts repeatedly emphasize the importance of having only the necessary fields on forms to increase online conversion rates.

Email Marketing Priorities

One third of email marketers plan to prioritize post purchase email marketing (such as reviews and satisfaction surveys); while another third plan to focus on pre-transactional email (e.g. abandonment remarketing including ‘browse-but-no-purchase’ and shopping cart abandonment) in the next 12 months. Twenty-two percent plan to focus on relationship building through email marketing, such as loyalty schemes and vouchers.

What’s notable from these findings is the rapid growth in transactional email, whether from a successful or an abandoned transaction. As integration between ecommerce systems and email engines has become much more pre-packaged—with the widespread availability of transactional interfaces for email—marketers are (finally) able to fulfill a long time desire to use website behavioral data to trigger targeted email marketing that is highly relevant and personal to the recipient.

Website Conversion / Shopping Cart Recovery Techniques

Which web conversion/ shopping cart recovery technique would you prioritize in the next 12 months

Organizations know that their hottest leads are with website visitors who have abandoned shopping carts, and 55 percent of marketers plan to make shopping cart recovery their top website conversion priority in the next 12 months. Marketers also recognize that price promotions are increasingly critical in the battle for online sales, particularly in the holiday season, and 19 percent intend to focus on onsite voucher pages where customers can view all active promotions. These pages are effective in driving conversions and also reduce affiliate fees to price comparison engines and promotion code websites.

A further 19 percent are prioritizing incentivized signups to capture email addresses and social network ID’s to enable the build of opt-in lists for email and social marketing.

These results, individually and collectively, illustrate the growing awareness among eMarketers that having a website in isolation is no longer sufficient. In order to achieve conversion rate optimization, organic SEO results—predominately through link building—have been proven to be more effective than PPC and sponsored links, which consumers have grown wary of. Many websites built a few years ago have been added to incrementally and now require simplification in order to ensure the calls to action are more prominent. Marketers also plan to use email marketing for more than batch-based, campaign-related emails; they intend to utilize this to build relationships with customers and potential purchasers. Finally, organizations have identified that they are losing a substantial percentage of leads as they have a high form and shopping cart abandonment rate. They are thus looking for online marketing tools that can help them recapture these hot leads through remarketing.

With Like, Facebook is set to challenge Google. Like is rapidly becoming an index of content on the web, where the index is built based on mass popularity as opposed to an arbitrary Google algorithm. The impact of this cannot be underestimated.

Facebook is the number one website in the world by page views and already refers more than twice the traffic to news and media sites than Google. Web users spend more time on Facebook than all the time spent on Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Microsoft/Bing, Wikipedia and Amazon combined.

If Facebook is the next Google, then Facebook’s social plugins are your ‘SEO’ tool kit for optimizing social commerce. Of these, Facebook Like is, by far, the most important—and also the easiest to implement with just one line of HTML.

Given the impact of Facebook’s social plugins, we decided to run an internet survey of emarketers to discover how marketing plans have changed. 476 emarketers participated in the SeeWhy Research internet poll on Tuesday, June 15^th.

It’s taken only a matter of a few weeks for emarketers to act on this: Almost 7 out of 10 of the emarketers surveyed have already implemented Facebook Like or plan to implement it.

Since it is just as easy to unlike content, emarketers need to be responsible about how they use ‘Like.’ Sending a stream of irrelevant posts to your new Fan’s wall will result in a very quick ‘Unlike.’

Next in priority for emarketers’ implementations is Facebook ‘Login with Faces’ (which replaces Facebook Connect). Facebook Login enables visitors to log into their Facebook accounts on ecommerce websites with their Facebook credentials rather than creating site specific accounts. It’s so easy to do that Facebook reports that site visitors are three times more likely to use Login than create a specific website account.

Fifteen percent of emarketers surveyed had already implemented Facebook Login, with a further eighteen percent planning to do so. That one third of emarketers plan (or already offer) Facebook Login on their websites is significant. One of the reasons is that a user signing in with Facebook Login is consenting to share their personal details with the website. This opt-in is very valuable, and emarketers know this.

Once opted in, on-site activity can be tracked and associated with an identity, and following a session, the individual fan can be remarketed to via email. This has long been high up the wish list: to be able to market to Facebook visitors with special offers and promotions. This new capability will have to be used responsibly since the opt-in permission is controlled by the Fan in his/her account settings; so it’s easy to un-login, although not as intuitive as many of the more vocal Facebook privacy advocates would like.

To find out more about Facebook’s social plugins, take a look at SeeWhy’s educational webcast looking at their impact on ecommerce here.

You might also find this blog on the Top Three Facebook Social Plugins for eCommerce useful as well.

By that I don’t mean that Facebook is going to release a search engine, but that it will become a more important source of traffic than Google for many brands. Not sure? Check out these truly amazing statistics about Facebook: 10 Eye-popping Facts About Facebook.

Still not convinced?

According to Hitwise, since the middle of March, Facebook overtook Google in terms of traffic. In parallel with this meteoric rise, Facebook released a new set of tools for marketers to use to optimize their websites for Facebook traffic.

Move over SEO

Facebook Social Plugins are the marketers ‘Facebook Engine Optimization’ tool kit, which can be easily deployed to drive deeper engagement on websites using Facebook Recommendations, Logins and Likes.

Of these, Facebook Like is undoubtedly high impact –one billion Likes were served in 24 hours following its launch. With Like, Facebook is effectively building an alternative index to the web which is already beginning to give Google a run for its money. As Facebook Like is deployed ever more widely around the web, Facebook’s index of the web, based on Facebook users’ Likes will grow in importance.

Facebook is highlighting some case studies with spectacular increases in referral traffic using Social Plugins:

But while many marketers have understood that Facebook Like is both important and easy to implement, there is only nascent understanding of the broader impact of these Social Plugins.

So here’s my attempt to accelerate that process.

These are the top three Facebook Social Plugins in importance for ecommerce:

• Facebook Like

The Like button lets users share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click. Implementing it on your product detail pages allows your visitors to tag the page with a Like which then shows up on their wall. Depending on how you implement it, they can leave a short comment as well. Since this is at the heart of Facebook’s index, this is really important. If you don’t yet have Facebook Like implemented on your product detail pages, this should be a priority. At its simplest level, it’s just one line of HTML, and just like you optimize keywords for SEO, you need to let visitors Like your key pages.

• Facebook Recommendations

The Recommendations plugin gives users personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like. What’s amazing is that you can test it out for your site here. Simply enter in your sites web address, and click in the grey panel somewhere (not the Get Code button) and it will show you the recommendations Facebook has already for your site. This works even if you haven’t yet implemented Facebook Like based on what your Fans are saying about you on Facebook and other social media such as Twitter (but all from a Facebook perspective).

Here is Target’s Facebook Recommendations Plugin:

Target has not implemented Like or any of the other Facebook Social Plugins (yet), but note how there are already some high quality recommendations, based on fans sharing. Also note how the top recommendation links to hot content, and specifically a product detail page with an ‘add to cart button’ inviting purchase.

• Facebook Login

The Login Button shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site in addition to a login button. Facebook Login replaces Facebook Connect, which now has over 100 million Facebook users logging in to other websites. While ecommerce websites have not been early adopters of Login, there is such a good fit that it is inevitable that Facebook Login will be everywhere in ecommerce within a year. Here’s why: 200% more site visitors will log in to their Facebook account on an ecommerce site than create an account. That means three times the number of visitors on your site that are now identified. And when an identified customer doesn’t buy, you can remarket to them, based on what they browsed, looked at in detail and abandoned.

Resources

If you’d like to learn more about Facebook’s Social Plugins, then I can recommend then following:

• Facebook’s Overview of their Social Plugins: http://developers.facebook.com/plugins
• Facebook’s Social Plugins Showcase with lots of examples in different sectors: http://developers.facebook.com/showcase/
• SeeWhy’s Conversion Academy On-Demand webcast ‘Leveraging Facebook to Drive eCommerce Revenues’ which is available here: http://www.seewhy.com/resources_conversion_academy.htm