Lexity's Simple Keyword Management for Search Marketing

Hello current (and future) Lexity merchants. As always, we have been working hard to improve your marketing experience, and I'm here to let you know about an exciting new feature that just went live! We've been calling it the new keyword widget, and it looks like this:

One of the lessons I've learned from analyzing data to figure out how to improve advertising campaigns is that the quality of your search marketing efforts depends heavily on these pesky Keywords. How do you pick these Keywords? You have to figure out what things people are searching for, and how these searches relate to your product catalogue. Sophie, the automated marketing manager at Lexity, makes managing your campaigns much simpler, significantly reducing the time and resources you need to spend in order to put ads on search engines like Google and Bing.

There are many factors that change which Keywords you should be advertising, the most obvious of which is past performance. Sophie calculates the expected performance for every one of your Keywords and pauses those that are performing poorly. Conversely, when Keywords are performing well and are bringing qualified traffic to your store that leads to sales, Sophie allocates a greater percentage of your marketing budget to those Keywords. Other things that may require you to change your Keywords include changes in your product descriptions, store layout and product catalogue. Managing this is a great burden, especially for SMBs who have limited time and resources to spend on marketing.

Sophie manages your Keywords, tracks your product catalogue changes, figures out how much to spend on each Keyword based on its past performance, and occasionally pauses those Keywords which are not doing well.

When Sophie thinks you need new Keywords, she will prompt you with a Task to add new keywords to your Overall Store Theme or your Specific Products Theme. We've re-designed this Task to give you much more context and ease the complication of managing your Keywords.

Notable features of the widget are:

• The right panel of the Task displays Sophie's suggested Keywords. These suggestions are broken into sections according to how Sophie generated them (e.g., by looking at the Keywords from organic search traffic that previously led to sales on your site, or by reading your entire product catalogue and finding the phrases that most appropriately represent your store as a whole).
• The left panel of the Task displays Keywords which are active (or soon-to-be active) for this theme.
• To add one of Sophie's suggested Keywords to your theme, you move it from the right panel (suggested Keywords) to the left panel (active Keywords) by clicking the left arrow next to the suggestion.
• If you've changed your mind about this Keyword and no longer want to add it to your theme, you move it back from the left panel (active Keywords) to the right panel (suggested Keywords) by clicking the right arrow, thus undoing your previous action. This Keyword will now re-appear in the original list of suggested Keywords.
• If you really dislike one of Sophie's suggested Keywords, you can hit the "X" button next to it, and that Keyword will never be suggested to you again.

One final change you should know is that we have begun to enforce a minimum requirement for the number of Keywords required in your themes. You cannot finish and submit the Keyword task until you have 30 active (or soon-to-be active) Keywords for the Overall Store Theme or for each product in the Specific Products Theme. Why have we added this requirement? When you have more Keywords, you are more likely to capture people using different terms to search for the products you're selling.

Have fun managing your Keywords with the new Task widget!

- Andrew