Feedback on ecommerce exam mock
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
January 10, 2009 [11814 views]
I was disappointed that so few people bothered to attempt the questions and have waited till the last possible minute before giving feedback. I hope that does not mean people will be poorly prepared for Monday’s exam.
The questions are a good guide to the style of questions in the real exam. Remember that I have to set questions that all of you could pass but that separate good candidates from weaker candidates.
Let me go through the questions you raised and answer them
In Q1, describe 5 changes you might make to the navigation - please help
I would expect you to discuss the current navigation as it is very confusing...
- Consider not repeating the tabbed navigation at the top with the navigation down the side. If it is to be repeated the repeat it exactly rather than muddle it up as they have done
- Reduce the number of tabs.
- What is the customer supposed to expect under the household tab? Does this overlap with Kitchen Appliances?
- Don’t have both PC accessories and PC peripherals - deal with this in the computer department
- Where is Toys on the left going to take me?
Running costs. Does this mean updating and stuff?
Yes but I am really trying to get you to remember that once a site has been built there are a huge number of jobs both to “run the business” and promote it online: changing content, prices, offers, reputation building, seasonal content, PPC advertising, link building etc etc etc. Don’t forget server costs or hosted service costs for systems such as Shopify. Running a site isn’t free.
Why use customer journeys?
Different (types of) customers need different journeys and journeys start with different actions online: a search, typing in a brand URL, referral from another site etc. Designing these customer journeys is key and that means designing landing pages, home pages, offers and content to provide a smooth clear “journey” for the visitor.
Would you use a campaign of 5% discount vouchers to get people into an online shop, or just have a landing page with a form to complete which then gives them a discount token ?
You could do either depending on who you were targetting. Running an offer for people with whom you have already made contact (your first idea) is different from offering someone a discount for giving you some information (sign up for offers). Both might make sense for your particular store.
What sort of mindframe would a “professional consultant” be in, when answering these questions?
They want business from the client and want to show off their expertise while explaining things in terms that will keep the client interested. I want the same - clear simple answers that demonstrate that you have connected with the case study in hand.
Is the marking exactly the same in the real exam? It does not seem to add up?
No, it is slightly different. I have 50 marks to allocate for this part of the real exam for 3 questions 20 + 15 + 15. You have to answer the first of these questions then you have a choice of two questions from three.
I am worried about creating a budget
This is one of the hardest things and all I am asking you to do is have a go and make sensible suggestions knowing what I have told you about costs. If you had £500 pounds to build a site for your uncle you might allocate £50 to buy a month’s Shopify license, £200 for design, £200 for set up (products, text, prices) and £50 for advertising (to get it started). These costs would allow you to charge about £100 per day for your time or for the time of a low-end designer. You would also comment that this is a totally inadequate budget for someone doing this professionally.
Discuss techniques to measure the effectiveness of a PPC campaign?
Clearly the first thing you would look at is whether you were generating any sales. You would then use analytics to see where those sales come from, were they generated from the ad or from other visitors to the site who had not clicked on ads. You would then look at which ads had been successful. You would also use the data inside Adwords to help you understand what keywords were triggering the ads and which ads were being clicked on.
Describe the factors to take into account in designing a PPC campaign - more help please
You are going to need to think about your visitors - where are they (location), what do they want (keywords), price (competitors bidding), negative terms (to eliminate other meanings of your search phrases) and ad design (to maximise high quality clickthroughs).
Recent comments:
What do you think?
On January 10, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Jamal wrote:
My understading of why little number of students participated in this activity, is due to the fact that you have confused us when you said that and i quoto "You will NOT be expected to type your answers into the survey." plus you didn't give us the link for submision. At a later stage you have sent an e-mail only to some students telling them about the zoomrang link. I and others haven't received this e-mail. My question is : Am I correctly registed on this module ? Can you confirm that I am on this module? I have submitted all 9 activities.
Jonathan replies: Thanks for the comment - I will use only the 9 activities to allocate the marks.