In the eCommerce world, everyone is looking for a benchmark, a standard from which they can measure their own site against. Are my 10,000 monthly visits average for my industry or am I at the bottom of the barrel? What's the deal with my 1% conversion rate? Ideally, you'd like to compare yourself to the competing companies in your industry. So why not figure out what they're earning? Here's a great way to estimate what your competitors are making on a monthly basis:

There are some great tools on the web that can estimate the traffic of a site:

In determining the effectiveness of a particular AdWords campaign for an eCommerce store we often turn to the all important cost per conversion metric. At the highest level, you can compare the amount spent per sale in a given time period to your costs and/or profit margins, and determine a return on your ad spend. However, without some tinkering, most of the reports generated from AdWords will only count one conversion per click by default. But what if one of those clicks leads to multiple sales? I'll show you how to have AdWords give you credit for multiple conversions, and determine a truer cost per conversion.

Consider the following scenario. A customer finds your website through a pay per click ad and purchases a smaller ticket item from your site. When the customer receives the item when they expected, and in good condition, they develop a trust with your site. A week later, they head back to the site directly and make a larger purchase. A pretty likely scenario, in my opinion.

Great pictures are so essential for your eCommerce website. They literally sell your product, usually more than your description. We always let our clients know this because we know how much more successful they'll be with professionally shot and edited product photos. Now, does the same go for product videos?

According to an interview with Brendon Sinclair he experienced a 300-400% increase in conversion using a video review versus a text review...and this was for a book.

Do you A/B test ad copy in your pay per click ads? Well that's great news! You've separated yourself from the lazy advertisers out there. But what about your meta descriptions and page titles? Sure, it's a little more advanced, and possibly more time consuming, but how else will you entice searchers to skip over those Wikipedia and and NYT.com search results sitting above you on the SERPS? Read on for some tips on optimizing.

PPC advertising during these "tough times" is an interesting beast. On one hand, eCommerce store owners may be underwhelmed by their sales figures and conversion rates compared to last year. On the other, with each user searching more and broadband adoption continuing throughout the world, raw search traffic has nowhere to go but up.

More searches + Less Likely Buyers + Higher Competition = More Wasted Ad Spend. Not good. Read on to find out what you should be doing to make sure your ad spend ROI isn't headed the same way as the economy.

Ecommerce has revolutionised the way trading is being carried out, has created completely new enterprises and has provided existing retailers with a platform to trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

However, having developed and worked with retailers over the last 10 years to help them create their ecommerce offering, there are still critical mistakes being made.

Given this article has been written for Boagworld, and that Paul in particular loves a “top five” list, here’s my top five mistakes being made by e-retailers:

This morning, while doing a random search in Google, I noticed a new addition to their suggest tool: ads. It seems that Google has been trying out a lot of little tweaks lately, particular focused on better monetizing their ads.

This makes perfect sense for Google; because of their sheer traffic volume, if they can identify ways to get more impressions, more clicks and more advertisers, there will be a direct impact on their bottom line.

So often we - that is, business owners or managers - spend so much of our time looking at our own promotional material that we very rarely stop and consider how we are actually being received by our customers and target audience.

With that in mind, we have a proposal for you. For every business that spends a bit of time (no more than a few minutes) looking through our website and making an assessment of what our business provides to our customers, we will do the same for them.

One of the primary aims of your small business webshop should be to turn visitors into customers. Whether you sell products online, provide information, offer services, or have a traditional bricks and mortar business, your webshop should work as a tool for you to help promote or sell whatever it is that your business has to offer.

Whether you want people to buy online, signup to a newsletter, submit an online enquiry, read about your products, register as a member, or pick up the phone and give you a call, there will be specific activities that you want your site visitors to undertake (and if there aren't you should probably review why you have a website in the first place). When one of these desired activities is carried out (whatever it is) we call it a Conversion.

News about our economic situation is ubiquitous. As we approach the Holiday season, generally a time of loose pants and spending, people are tightening their belts.

Typically, advertising is seen as the turkey and herded off to the block.

However, advertising covers a large area. Analysis is predicting that impact of the economic downturn will be slow growth not a reversal. What’s more, this analysis is supported by the continued strength of online search ads.