by Nevin on January 30, 2012
12 critical elements every homepage must have
In order for a homepage to work, it needs to meet its purpose and contain key elements that attract traffic, educate your visitors, and convert browsers into buyers – the typical internet marketing best practices. Here’s a neat infographic that explains the 12 critical elements every homepage must have. Bonus link: 5 signs of a great user experience
3 keys to online retail in 2012: doing more with less
The American National Retail Federation released its numbers projecting US retail sales should rise 3.4 percent this year, down from an increase of 4.7 percent in 2011. According to some, this doesn’t mean 2012 will be a lost cause in the US; by focusing in three key areas – evaluation, improvement, and testing – retailers can not only survive, but grow their businesses in the coming year. Read more here. Bonus link: The Ecommerce Revolution Is All About You
How to increase clicks on your tweets
Using Twitter to build community and engage with customers can be a lot of work , and one of the most gratifying measures of social media success is when people are actually clicking on the links you send out via Twitter, either to interesting content you’ve found, or back to your site (where these visitors from Twitter can hopefully be converted into paying customers!). Here are some great tips on how to increase clicks on your tweets.
YouTube: Use analytics to build an audience
In terms of volume, YouTube is the second largest search in the world, and is a great way to promote your business, become recognized as a trusted expert in your field, and generally build community. But there are few rules for businesses to actually use this powerful marketing channel effectively. Luckily, YouTube offers plenty of detailed advice, including how to use analytics to build an audience.
What is Pinterest? And why is it important for retailers?
Pinterest is a website that allows users to “pin” things online; users can follow friends on Pinterest and “repin” things that they have already pinned on your Pinterest boards or browse a live feed of items that are being pinned by strangers. And now Pinterest has becomes the top traffic driver for retailers (inforgraphic)
Bonus marketing links:
JumpStartWeb is a Victoria internet marketing company
by Nevin on January 23, 2012
Usability vs. search engine optimization
Many people believe that SEO is simply optimizing a website for search engines. In reality, SEO is optimizing a website for people who use search engines. Likewise, many people believe that website usability is simply making a website easy to use. Easy to use for whom? The developers? Website owners? Web searchers? SEO professionals? Check out the fundamental building blocks of web usability to help become more visible to search engines, and hopefully help get more customers. Read more here.
5 tactics to get more customers
Keeping the funnel full is a challenge facing every local business. In a hyper-competitive marketplace, the company that fills its funnel full of opportunities is the one that manages its lead generation strategies most effectively. Here are 5 tactics to get more customers.
Improving the online customer’s journey from click to payment
A 2010 Forrester survey found that 88 per cent of online shoppers abandon their shopping baskets. This doesn’t have to be so - here are a few steps that can help cut the number of shoppers who abandon their carts and convert them to paying customers.
Most people rely on search engines to find local businesses
60% of adults say they get news and information about local businesses other thanrestaurants and bars. When they do, 47% say they rely most on the internet, including 36% on search engines, and 16% specialty websites. Read more here.
How to find your social media stride
What steps should a social media maven take in order to avoid running out of steam? These five steps can help you put things into perspective:
7 ways to use social media for instant feedback
Another use for social media: collecting critical feedback that advances your business objectives quickly. Here are some of the ways you can leverage social networks beyond your typical posts and updates. Read more here.
21 tactics to increase blog traffic
It’s easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic, and more traffic means – ideally – more customers. Here are 21 tactics that can help everyone from independent folks, to those seeking to monetize, and marketing professionals working an in-house blog from tiny startups to huge companies increase traffic: read more here.
JumpStartWeb publishes Monday Marketing Madness each week on search engine optimization and other topics.
by Rob on January 20, 2012
I noticed today that MailChimp offers a QR code to link to a mobile version of your subscribe form.
Pretty cool if you’re at a trade show and want to promote newsletter signups in an actionable manner – just put the large version of the QR code on your signage and you’re good to go.
I’m sure there’s a million other applications for it as well.
Best of all, the novelty factor of QR codes should help maximize signups.
Try it out with our own newsletter signup QR code for our monthly Online Marketing Insights (I was able to scan it right off the screen):
by Rob on January 20, 2012
Just getting started with Google Analytics? You’ve come to the right place!
Google Analytics, the free analytics tool from Google, can be confusing when you first dive in.
Fortunately, once you get familiar with the basic terms, it becomes easy to use and opens whole new worlds of insight regarding your web traffic.
In this first post, we’re going to start at the start and have a look at the Standard Reporting Audience Overview (or “Visitors Overview” as it’s often called). This is the first screen you generally see when you log in and looks like what you see below:
So… what are we looking at?
- The date range is shown in the top right and can be changed to any range you like by clicking on the drop-down arrow.
- The line graph you see represents the number of visits by day and can be changed to include other metrics (although we’ll leave that for another post).
- The Pie Chart at the bottom right shows the proportion of New Visitors (people who Google has not tracked as having previously visited your site) versus Returning Visitors, who as the name suggests, are visitors that Google has tracked as having visited your site previously.
Note that your Returning Visitor stats are likely under-reported in practical terms as visitors who come to your site from multiple different computers or browsers will be shown as New Visitors.
The metrics shown on the left side of the interface are defined as follows:
- In “#### people visited this site, “people” refers to Unique Visitors (below).
- Visits refers to the total number of visits to your site. Many visitors will come to your site more than once, which is why Visits is virtually always significantly higher than Unique Visitors.
- Unique Visitors refers to the total number of visitors from the same computer/browser. For instance, if you had 400 Visits from 200 Unique Visitors, this means that your Unique Visitors visited the site an average of 2 times each.
- Pageviews refers to the number of individual pages that were viewed during your date range.
- Page/Visit, as the name implies, is an average of how many pages were viewed on each visit to the site.
- Avg. Time on Site is the amount of time (in minutes) that were spent per visit to your site. In this example, visitors spent an average of 1 minute and 59 seconds on the site.
- Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors who landed on a single page on your site and left the site without navigating to a second page. In general, bounces are considered “bad” although in some cases (i.e. if someone is looking for your phone number and finds it on the first page), it isn’t necessarily a negative thing.
- % New Visits refers to the percentage of visits where the visitors where not tracked as having previously visited the sites.
Upon reviewing these stats a lot of folks wonder what their stats “should” be. My typical answer is “there is no right number as every business is different.” What I usually recommend is that folks look at which stats they can work on improving and try to bump up the numbers in those areas. For instance, if you improve your site to make it more “sticky,” you’ll hope to see a corresponding increase in the Pages/Visit.
There are any number of examples like this but we’ll save them for future posts!
In our next post we’ll have a look at the Traffic Sources Overview page (which is possibly the most important section of all!).
