SEER is getting excited to work with our first PPC client using Magento’s ecommerce platform. Here are just a couple of features we can’t wait to get our hands on:

Inventory Management Reports

With Magento’s Low Stock Report, you can view the exact quantity of remaining supplies for every unique SKU in your inventory, listed from lowest to highest remaining quantity. This allows you to anticipate dips and spikes in PPC sales volume, given that one of your top performers goes out of stock or a new shipment comes in. Having this insight provides an opportunity to develop a strategy to counteract the anticipated dip in sales volume. With the AdWords API, retailers already have the ability to integrate their existing inventory management systems with their Google AdWords campaigns to make sure that clicks aren’t wasted on products that are out of stock, but being able to anticipate changes in inventory provides additional value.

Shopping Cart Reports

Creating goals and goal funnels in Google Analytics will allow you to monitor shopping cart abandonment rates. Magento’s Shopping Cart Report takes it one step further by providing more granular, product-specific data as well. With these reports, you can sort abandonment rates by product and include additional data like product price and the number of abandoned carts containing that particular product versus the amount of orders completed containing that product. This way, if there is a particular product with an abandonment rate significantly higher than the site average, you can develop a strategy to decrease abandonment rates (like offering a coupon code for that product) and monitor the results (by analyzing abandonment rates among coupon users and non-coupon users, also available in the Shopping Cart Report).

Sometimes ecommerce store owners are hesitant to grant outsiders full access to their store back-ends for a variety of reasons – sensitive customer information, ability to modify core site elements, etc. Luckily, Magento allows site owners to grant access to multiple users with limited access (reporting only, for example).

Magento also offers Google Analytics integration and automates installation of the Google Analytics code on each page of your site once you enable the integration feature.

Landing Page Creation & Testing

Creating landing pages for A/B or multivariate testing is made simple using Magento’s Content Management System, which works seamlessly with Google’s Website Optimizer. Magento put together a nice step-by-step video on their blog, which you can watch here

International Targeting

Magento makes it easy to create multi-lingual variations of an ecommerce site. Multiple currencies and tax rates are also supported. PPC advertisers are (surprisingly) still making the mistake of developing ad copy and keyword lists in a language different from the language on the ad’s destination URL. With Magento, if an opportunity is identified in another language or country, creating multilingual variations of your site is easy.

iPhone Optimized Themes

Magento also offers iPhone optimized themes, which is great for PPC advertisers who fit nicely into the m-commerce space, making it easy to launch mobile campaigns. The layout is optimized for the iPhone, though, meaning that opting into allow ads to be displayed on iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers means that your page will not look the same for everyone.

These are just a couple of features we’re excited about!

Have you worked with Magento in the past? If so, I’d love to hear your feedback!