A study released Tuesday by the Millard Group says that multi-channel retailers’ web sites are not as good as they should be. Only 50% of survey respondents said the item they ordered matched the online product description, and 45% said products were described accurately on the web site. Only 45% of sites had accurate inventory information, and only 40% said they could find what they wanted to purchase.

I had some negative online experiences recently that pertain directly to this study. I ordered 7 copies of the same book from Barnes and Noble’s web site. I couldn’t find the book on Amazon’s site, and it was only after I ordered that I found out that only one of the books was in stock. The other six arrived three weeks later.

If you’re in business online, it’s imperative that you are as descriptive as possible with your product descriptions. You’re selling the product, you’re the expert, and you should tell your customers the little things they need to know or may ask.

I ordered a satellite radio car antenna from the XM store, and the package came with an antenna and a small rubber piece. The small rubber piece was not listed on the web site, there were no instructions in the package, and I have no idea what to do with it.

The moral? Make it easy for your customers to find and understand your products at every step in the process.

For those of you with Google Adwords pay per click campaigns, Google announced a new feature today called Site Targeting. This feature is a new offering for the CPM AdWords product where “Advertisers can now target their ads specifically for a particular site. Site Targeting is great for advertisers wanting to promote their product to a very specific audience. This allows for much greater control for AdWords campaigns.”

To read more, see the Inside Adwords blog topic or read about how to set it up.

Yahoo announced this week that it will index paid and subscription content, specifically naming Consumer Reports, Forrester Research, FT.com, the IEEE, the New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com, the
Wall Street Journal Online, the ACM, Factiva, LexisNexis, and Thomson Gale.

Good news for those of you with subscription content that would not have normally been indexed, as your most keyword-rich and valuable content lives in protected areas.

Today, there’s a very basic primer on search engine marketing keyword strategy over at Duct Tape Marketing. It’s an article about how to take a basic keyword list and expand it so you have more keywords to bid on. The writer lists 2 helpful tools, Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool and Wordtracker, to help you expand your list. There also some free tools online (Wordtracker is a paid service) that do the same thing, though I’m not sure how reliable the data is. They are DigitalPoint’s Keyword Suggestion Tool and MIVA’s keyword generator.

California’s 1st District Court of Appeals recently ruled that Borders’ web sites and retail stores are too intertwined to be called separate companies. The decision could lead to similar rulings in California against Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. The National Retail Federation has made public that it doesn’t think the ruling will have any effect on other multi channel retailers since their online divisions are most commonly under the same umbrella as the brick-and-mortar operations and are not set up as seperate companies.

A study conducted by Penn State underscores the need for companies to include organic or natural search engine optimization in their online marketing mix.

The study found that participants viewed the organic listings first 82% of the time, while only 6% viewed the sponsored listings first (12% scanned the entire page).

The good news, especially for those participating in paid search marketing, is that 73% of participants scanned both the organic and paid results, leading to the conclusion that most searchers do not ignore paid listings.

The study also stated that searchers find organic listings more relevant than paid listings, although participants did not overwhelmingly support this conclusion.

For both paid and organic results, relevancy of the summary was extremely important to participants.

It’s still amazing to me that companies spend 12% of their marketing budget on organic search engine optimization versus 82% on paid listings. Sure, organic search engine optimization is more difficult as it often involves changing your web site, but the results gained can be long-lasting and FREE.

I also got some comfort from the fact that most searchers look at both the organic and paid listings. Most paid listings (especially in Google) are put in regions of the page that typical web users identify as ad space. Apparently, as it pertains to search, users are willing to accept the fact that some results are advertisements since it may help them find what they are looking for.

One other note I make is that the copy of your paid search advertisement is very important since study participants used the summaries to determine relevance of the listing (and thus eliciting a click).