2008-02-26

Evaluate your Website

When was the last time you conducted your website evaluation ?
Or did you even conducted any at all ?

Even if you are saying "My company don't have the time or resources in maintaining the website even since it is last launched", it is inevitable to do an evaluation on your website on a on-going basis. You don't need the entire team to throughly check through it however, you could allocated a developer or programmer in conducting the evaluation.

So how do you go about conducting your website evaluation ?

Here's some elements to look into:

Broken or outdated links
One of the most commonly overlooked issue is your outdated links still lingering around live on the web. It will be bad should a potential visitor do a search on any search engine looking for information and landing on the outdated link containing obsolete or incorrect product or service information. Broken image links which doesn't help solve your potential visitors' need for the particular product picture or information.

  • Checking your path to the particular image link or whether does the image still exists on your server.
  • Verifying whether there are any outdated page /s still lingering live on web that needs to be taken off from your website.
Alignment of Layout
Conducting a routine check on whether the layouts of your website is misaligned in different web browsers. Since it is common for web browser providers, constantly updating their web browsers versions for users.

Verify your website goals and objectives again
It is good practice to ask yourself whether you are moving towards the desired goals and objectives set earlier constantly. Identify where you are now and where you're going to be heading after reaching the planned goals and objectives. If you're not setting any website goals or objectives, it is vital that you start identifying it immediately.

Don't stop after this evaluation. Make it a commitment to spent some hours monthly or even possible an hour weekly to ensure the consistency and quality of your website.

2008-02-19

Optimize Your PPC

Where does all your visitors coming into your landing page or website ?From you PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads ? Or from your organic search ?

If most of your traffic are coming based on your PPC ad campaigns, how can you increase the conversion rate or optimize it ? So as to allow your PPC ad campaigns to not only be cost effective in driving visitors and customers but also increase your overall conversion rate.

So how do you optimize your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads campaign ?


Deep Linking:
Don't lead your visitors to your default homepage or try to cross sell them. Instead lead them to the relevant or unique landing page related to the PPC ad. Try this and compare how your conversion rate increases as compared to leading them to irrelevant web page.

Relevant keywords:
Instead of targeting a general keyword term, target keywords that are specific and relevant to your product or service offering.

Deploy search term suggestion tools:
Try researching on your specific search terms with the suggestion tools offered by Google and other third party vendors and compiling your search terms research before submitting.

Listing on relevant sites that offer PPC ad service:
Having your PPC ads placement on relevant sites or your industry, you can be sure to be targeting the relevant visitors or audience. Thereby, maximizing your return on investment on your PPC ad and not wasting any dollar on blasting to visitors whom are not interested.

Relevant Copywriting:
Having relevant copywriting on the descriptions and headlines specific or relevant to the product or service you are offering rather than general terms.

Biding on lower value keywords:
You might be thinking why should I bid on lower keywords. Although biding on these keywords generate lower traffic as compared to higher value ones, however it does allows you to get the top position with just a very low bid. Though the traffic is low, you can be sure that the visitors coming to your website or landing page with their keyed in keyword is much likely to know what they are looking for.

Research Research:
The research doesn't stops here......you have to kept on researching and researching to understand what's the latest keywords or search term that are relevant to your keywords.

Research + Optimize

2008-02-18

How are your agencies sharing with you?

How are your creative or media agencies sharing the mistakes, successes and experiments with you ? Or are your agencies even sharing their experiences with you ? Are they telling you ONLY the good or nice stories and NOT the real truth behind it ? So how how can you foster a more open sharing and learning relationship with your agencies ?

Today in this video, bought to us by Marketing@Google;
Hashem Bajwa will be talking about how marketing can become a profit generating business asset through sharing successes, mistakes & experiments from their work with their clients such as HP, Got Milk and other brands that are open and loving change. Hashem Bajwa is the digital planning director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

Marketing@Google: Hashem Bajwa
Are / Is your creative or media agencies sharing honestly with you ?
You decide.

2008-02-16

8 Landing Page Optimization Tips

How do visitors come to your website ?
Did they came from search engines when they click onto your paid ads? If it is so, what are they searching for ? Have you optimized your landing page or website to conforms according to meet their needs? Are they searching for something specific which leads them eventually to your website or landing page. Are they here looking for information or are here to shop for a product or service ? If your website or landing page doesn't relate to their needs, don't blame them for immediately clicking away from your website.

It is too much of an importance to overlook or leave this very vital optimization action. Don't bring all visitors to your default home page which doesn't relate to the pay ads or PPC. Simply put your visitors don't really care about your company's history or what you are trying to tell them, what they are interested in is why they link or came to your website or landing page in the first place.

Take them directly to what they want and where they are interested in. (e.g. If your visitors are looking for business laptops, don't lead them to all of your laptop selections.)

So how do you optimize your landing page ?

  1. Leading your visitors to your unique landing page.
  2. Leading your visitors to the specific page of your website in relation to the PPC or search term.
Having determine that, what are the design elements that are essential to increase your conversion rate ?

1. Landing Page Design
  • Is the landing page design appealing ?
  • Is it browser friendly ?
  • Does the design took too long to load ?
2. Copywriting
  • Which are the key-phrase that leads them to action ?
  • Repeating the key-phrase within the headline is the easiest way in which to do this is.
  • Does your headlines captivates visitor's attention ?
  • Are your headlines prominent and bold ?
3. Content that leads to Action
Is your content related to your PPC ad ?
Simply put, why do you want your visitors to land on this particular page ?
  • Why they would be interested ?
  • What is the product or service offering ?
  • Why would they be enticed to take action ?
4. Web Forms - If your desired actions from the visitors is leading generation, is your required fill-in form too lengthy or asking too much of information in this initial stage ? What are the most important fields that is only required for this first stage ?
  • Name
  • Email
  • Contact
  • Desired interest area
5. Call to Action Buttons
  • Where is the best place for your "Submit" button ?
  • Is the "RESET" button even required ? Why you say it is not required ? Do you wish your visitors to fill up the form only to accidentally hit the "RESET" button instead of your "Submit" button and not refilling up the form and eventually leaving the site ?
6. Where are the Clicks
  • Where are the visitors clicking on your landing page ?
  • What are they clicking on ?
  • Have you tried using third party software like crazyegg for the heat map tracking, are they clicking onto what you want them to and where are they actually clicking on your landing page.
7. Testing
You will never know what works and doesn't until you track the visitors' behavior in your landing page. If you're serious about increasing your landing page conversions, you have to keep on testing and testing. Some of the landing page elements you should keep in mind when conducting your tests are:
* Hero shots picture (placements and type)
* Testimonials or Endorsements
* Calls to action button (Colors and placements)
* Headings and headlines
* Web Forms
* Product or service price range
* Copywriting
* Colors

8. Thank You Page
Have you taken into the consideration of inserting the Thank You Page after your visitors have completed the required action ? Don't leave this opportunity to thank your visitors for their time and first touch point.

Are you optimizing your landing page ?

Related Posts:
. Optimization #01: Call to action button
. Optimization #02: Test ! Test ! Test !
. Optimization #03: Landing Page


2008-02-13

Reasons why you're not testing and optimizing your website

Before we begin with today's topic....
Are you testing and optimizing your website ?
Yes ?
If yes....how often ?
On-going basis or a one time basis ?
Daily ?
Weekly ?

If your answer to the above mention is a NO.
Read on to see if you can find the reason/s why you're not testing and optimizing your website.

  • I don't have the time or resource to commit in testing and optimizing my website.
Sounds familiar ? Instead of saying you don't have the time or resource, have you tried justifying the returns on having invest your precious time and resources into testing and optimizing your website ? Why not try monetizing the potential revenue gain or lost to the management, should they fail to take action. To begin with, you could try starting testing small or particular areas of your website and show the improvements to the people involved and try to get them to recognize the benefits of testing and optimization.
  • Thinking that all visitors to your website are similar.
The most dangerous thought to harbor is thinking that all the visitors coming to your website have similar surfing habits and behavior. Similarly for consumer products from around the world, even if the products are similar in function, there is still a need to adapt the products accordingly to the local needs and wants.
  • Arrogance - Thinking that your competitors are slow to change and catching up.
  • Thinking that the web channel is just another corporate brochure.
More "NO /s" I left out ?
Or more "NO /s" to share with us ?

Time to test and optimize ?
Or ?

Related Posts:
. Optimization #01: Call to action button
. Optimization #02: Test ! Test ! Test !
. Optimization #03: Landing Page


2008-02-10

Live streaming web analysis tool

How do you know what's going on in your website ?
When someone comments on your blog ?
When someone posts in your forum ?
When someone purchases an item ?
Or ?
Using an web analytics tool you say ?

How often do you track the activities that is going on your website ?
How often do you conduct your website analysis ?
Is it possible to streams website and blog events to you live, in real-time ?
Yes ?
No ?
Now it is possible, thanks to reinvigorate Snoop.




What's so special about Snoop you say.
Simply put, Snoop is a desktop application streaming website
and blog events to you live, all in real-time.

  • If you're new to tracking your website activities, here's Snoop that you might want to give it a try first before eventually venturing into more advanced third party web tracking tools available.
  • Or if you're already have an web analytics tool up and running, you might want to consider having this add-on tool in tracking your website activities.
Alright here's 3 steps to get you started:

1. Simply just download the application,
available for Mac OS X or Windows XP / Vista

2. You will need to register at reinvigorate.

2. Once installed, it will be running in your System Tray (Windows) / System Status Bar (Mac)

3. Before it will be ready in tracking the activities in your website, you will need to insert the tracking snippet on any page you want it to be tracked.

Once the 3 steps are done, you're ready to track your website activities in real time. The next time round, whenever someone makes a comment on your blog, posts in your forum, purchases an item, gets referred from another site or a new unique user appears, Snoop will trigger an unique sound to let you know.

On top of that, Snoop also features an automatic integration with name tags so you'll know exactly who your visitors are.

Alright enough said, time to start Streaming.
Time to start Tracking.

2008-02-08

36 Facts on how to tap into the Youth Market

How are you tapping into the youth market ?
How much do you know about the youth markets ?
Which of your communications channel works and doesn't work in reaching the youth ?

Here's a interesting video brought to us by the threebillion project:

36 Youth Facts in 159 seconds



Still not convinced you say ?

Here's the 36 Youth Facts again:

  • There are 3 billion people under 25 on this planet
  • 61% of them live in Asia
  • 67% of young Asians have downloaded music in the last month
  • Only 27% paid for it
  • Hong Kong youth spend the most time online per day (4.7 hours)
  • Indonesian youth spend the least (0.9 hours)
  • Young Filipinos watch the most TV per day (6.2 hours)
  • Young Chinese watch the least (3.2 hours)
  • There are 37.5 million gamers in China
  • 90% play online games
  • Weekly, Korean teenagers will spend
    • 14 hours on the computer…
    • .12.8 hours watching TV
    • 0.7 hours reading newspapers
  • Taiwan has the highest teenage birthrate in Asia
  • South Korea has the lowest
  • 45% of young Japanese women said they were in love
  • Only 30% of young Japanese men said the same
  • 82% of Japanese teen males said they used contraception the first time they had sex
  • Only 12% of Japanese 20-year-olds use the home PC to access the internet — the same level as 50-year-olds — they’re using their mobile phones instead
  • 26% of all youth deaths in China are from suicide
  • In India, 50% of girls will be married before they are 18
  • In Nepal, the rate is 60%
  • 85% of Korean teenagers own a cell phone
  • They send an average of 60 messages per day
  • 46% of students send messages in class
  • “Our children are seriously addicted to cell phones” — Parent’s Union Spokesperson
  • Chinese people spend 10x more money on the internet than people in the west
  • It represents 10% of their monthly income
  • Who prefers a laid-back hassle-free lifestyle?
    • 14% of Chinese teens
    • 22% of South Korean teens
    • 43% of Japanese teens
  • 99% of Saudi teens use Bluetooth
  • 99% said that the device had broken social taboos
  • 85% said it was safe for communication with the opposite sex
  • 69% of messages exchanged by Saudi teens were pornographic
So are you ready to not tapped into the Youth Market ?
Or are you already tapping into it ?
How can you better communicate your message ?
You Decide.

2008-02-05

Open Source Web Analytics Tool

Today, I will be sharing an open source (GNU /GPL) web analytics tool, phpMyVisites. It is FREE to download for use. The best part is it being an Open source project which means the source code is readily available and you could also participate in the project as well. (Such as (creating new modules, personalize the interface or etc.)













So what are some of the features found in this web analytic tool versus the other FREE web analytic tools ?

phpMyVisites provides you with the required information on websites visitors, visited pages and not forgetting their very own clicks heatmap!, which shows you where your audience are clicking on your website. All the information are portrait in their relatively user-friendly GUI. With many clear graphics to present data as required.

  • Visitor statistics over a period of time (day/week/month/year)
  • Visitor Frequency: new visitors, regular (known) visitors, and how often visitors view the web site
  • Web site page classification available
  • Geographical Statistics: Classification by continent/country (quite similar to Google Analytics)
  • Technical Configuration Statistics: Web browsers, resolution, managed plug-in, etc.
  • Web Site Discovery Tools: Search Engines, Web Sites, Partner Sites, Newsletters and Direct Access
  • Multiple Web Site Overview, a summary of important web site statistics for all managed web sites. Multiple web sites may be added.
  • Receive web site statistics everyday by e-mail, by RSS feed.












ClickHeat: visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones.

Want to try an alternative FREE web analytics tool ?
Or new to web analytics ?
Try phpMyVisites

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