Simply having a website is not enough in today’s competitive business world. Especially as resources become more limited, it’s important to invest in great web design to attract and keep customers.
Your online presentation is an important aspect of your business, and you want the appearance and functionality of your site to reflect your philosophy and your products in a way that is accessible and easy to use.
A great website with superior content goes a long way to getting your business recognized. But if you want to convert that customer contact into a sale, some businesses require a customer to find the brick and mortar place of business. Other customers need to know where to bring items for repair, and others just ...
Web Analytics, as the name suggests is the process of colleting, analyzing and interpreting the data about the activities of online users accessing your website. This has become an integral factor in almost all online businesses as it optimizes your business by providing meaningful data about how your site is being utilized.
The holiday season is almost upon us. It’s time to start looking over the inventory, keywords, and offers to make sure you’re ready for Cyber Monday. In today’s column we offer several things to do and important don’ts that will help you have a successful holiday season.
Don’t…
Blindly test
Traffic in December is unlike any other month of the year. Conversion rates go up, and cost per conversions go down. If you are running split or multivariate tests throughout the month to see which ads or pages convert the highest, do not blindly trust that the data will carry over into January. It is not uncommon to see the highest converting pages (or ads and keywords) not be the highest performer once the buying excitement of the holidays melts away.
Make major site changes
Competition for building a profitable Web site is quite fierce. Yet many of us have dreams of a unique concept that will attract viewers, followed soon thereafter by advertisers. I'm not sure what percentage of aspirants succeed in this quest, but I would venture to guess that it's a very low percentage.
With the evolution of the Web to the Web 2.0, the task becomes even a bit more challenging. For those who aren't familiar with the term Web 2.0, Wikipedia can help out: "Web 2.0 is a living term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and Web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the Web ..." The complete definition also mentions video sharing sites.
Pay Per Click or PPC is among the most popular of all web-marketing tools. It is nothing but a small two or three line text advertisement which contains keywords and phrases. These small advertisements are usually found on the right side of search pages on leading search engines. Quite often one or two links are also highlighted on search pages. These links are termed ‘sponsored links’ and can be seen in leading search engines such as Google, MSN Live and Yahoo. These sponsored links are nothing but PPC advertisements.
The three entities involved in PPC advertising are the visitor, the host that carries the advertisement and the advertiser, who has advertised a product or service on the host website, usually a leading search engine. In this form of advertising, advertisers have to bid on keywords and phrases. Whenever someone searches a product or service using certain keywords, the search result page will feature those advertisements which contain the keywords using which the visitor actually searched in the first place.
Reader DjCarbon pinged me this morning with an interesting bit of news. Above you see the first two entries for the search “i’m a PC” in Google - Apple has essentially hijacked the dialogue about personal computers, forcing Microsoft to take a stand through their new commercials. The “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercials are odd and insidious but, as we see here, Apple has distanced itself from the profit-averse desktop PC market and created a new category. It’s not a PC you’re buying, fanboi, it’s not a beige box with a keyboard and a crappy LCD. No, you’ll never have to open the case, Mac-lover. You’ll never have to upgrade the operating system. When you walk into the Apple store you aren’t shopping for a PC - a personal computer, to reengage that acronym’s original meaning. You’re buying something much cooler, right?
Coby Electronics probably hasn’t had this much press in the existence of the company. At the CeBIT expo in Germany at the first of March, the value – oriented consumer electronics company picked up its share of the buzz because of a brand new smartbook as reported by Engadget. The buzz isn’t about great styling, ...