A few weeks ago we posted a blog about understanding your traffic and recommended you try Google Analytics.  If you haven’t already done so, here’s how to install Analytics:

1. First of all you will need a Google account.  If you are using gmail you can use those login details and if not, sign up for an account then proceed to check in with Google – click on the sign up button to get started.

2. Enter your site details including URL and timezones, click to continue then enter your contact info.

3. You will be taken to the tracking instructions.  To make sure Google knows to track your site, you must put the code given on the right hand side of your screen on your site – copy and paste it onto every page.

Once you have it set up and its been tracking traffic for a few days, you will find all kinds of valuable information that will enable you to improve your online marketing efforts and make educated decisions:

Your traffic: where it comes from (both geographically and from other sites), how often people visit, how long they stay and which pages they visit and more;

Your content: which pages they land on and where they go from there, which content drives the most traffic etc (or the least);

Your goals: track your online marketing goals  including conversion rates, funnels and Adwords campaigns.

Tips

• Filter out visits from you or your employees as they can skew your results.
• Set goals – Analytics allows you to set goals pertaining to your traffic.  You should use these to track success.
• One of the things I like best about Analytics is the ability to view data in different ways – remember to use these capabilities to view graphical representations of your data.

Having problems installing Google Analytics or no time to do so?  Just let us know.  This is just one of the many services we provide.

Thanks to songglod on Flickr for the traffic pic!

Landing pages are the pages on your site where you want users to go after clicking an ad or a search result link. If you’re running any sort of online effort, you should at least have identified a landing page and its purpose.

Landing pages are a critical part of your site because it’s the place where you’re supposed to close the deal – have a user make a download, provide you with an email, make a purchase, or service the reason your business exists online.

While every landing page depends on an overall strategy and past performance, there are a few things that, with time, have become best practices. Not all of our landing page optimization tips may apply to your case so look at these objectively and take what works for you.

Here are our top 10 landing page optimization tips.

1. Make a Clear Offer or Proposition – What do you want your visitors to do: sign up for the news letter? Join a community? Try the new demo? Constantly ask yourself what it is you want your visitors to do and optimize for it. This is important to help you understand your strategy and avoid including too many choices or unnecessary information.

2. Careful With Distractions – Some even to the extent of removing page navigation to help focus attention. Though this might or might not work for you, have in mind that it’s easy to distract your visitor with less relevant options like company information, certifications and other products for example.

3. Size Matters  (Call To Action Buttons) – Have you noticed these buttons keep getting bigger? That’s because they perform better. Seth Godin calls them “bananas” and your visitors are the monkeys. The objective is to make it easy for the monkeys to find the bananas before they give up (less than 3 seconds).

4. Contrast (Call To Action Buttons) – Contrast for call to action buttons is good.  Use colours like red, yellow and green or a colour not widely use on the rest of the page to attract attention. Careful: contrast does not mean annoying. For the love of all that is good, avoid the flashing “YOU”RE THE 1,000,000th VISITOR!” style banners.

5. Above and Bellow (Call To Action Buttons) – Make the offer visible above the page fold and at the bottom. Perhaps your visitor has already done enough research to make the decision and want to buy right away. If the button is only at the bottom of the page you risk losing the lead to unnecessary actions.

6. Add Peer Validation – If you have previous client reviews or testimonials, this is the place to showcase them. This is important to add credibility and trust. Customers believe peers much more than they believe you, the seller.

7. Deliver The Offer – Don’t just hand them offer, email it to them! Yes, it’s an extra few minutes of waiting time for your customers, but it’s a great way to ensure you’ve got a valid email address.

8. Say Thank You – Take your customers to a “Thank You” page. This important to track conversions, an opportunity to ask for more information, and it’s just plain good manners.

9. Track It – Use tools like Google Analytics to track how your visitors come and interact with the page. A great way to do this is by creating funnels.  Funnels will help you understand where to make changes to improve conversions.

10. Test It – Use tools like Google Website Optimizer to try out new variations and see which one performs better. Making minor changes – e.g. colour, text and position - can sometimes boost your conversions beyond your expectations.

Thinking about your business bottom line? Contact Out-Smarts Marketing about creating a solid Internet Marketing Strategy.

Other resources:

Lee Munroe, a web designer from Ireland, has put together a great list of good call to action buttons here: http://www.leemunroe.com/web-design-trends-call-to-action-signup-download-buttons/

Wider Funnel, a Marketing Optimization company in Vancouver, works with a very effective principle for page optimization called the LIFT model. Learn about it here:  http://www.widerfunnel.com/conversion-rate-optimization/the-six-landing-page-conversion-rate-factors

Elastic Path, an enterprise ecommerce software company in Vancouver, published this short experiment on their blog about call to action button size.  http://www.getelastic.com/cta-size/

Whichtestwon.com – Anne Holland’s weekly optimization test. It’s not only insightful but also very cool! www.whichtestwon.com

Omniture, a popular web analytics platform, also has a landing page performance guessing game here: http://www.omniture.com/en/pickthewinner?cms_site_lang=1&s_rtid=25460&etlink=gra_sub2&sfid=0033000000WN28AAAT&elq=0d8c9eeab87e4680b981e1ff4831ddc4&s_iid=25443&ct=email&cp=lead%2520acquisition

by Jose Uzcategui

Our SEO copy writing  partner Louise Desmarais of Mud Creative recently wrote a great article in their newsletter that discusses the key elements that make your website attractive to visitors.  Louise kindly agreed to allow me to share it with you:

As your site’s welcome mat, the elements of the home page are critically important in terms of communication and usability.

What’s your story? Just say it.

Visitors expect to find out in three seconds or less if a site has what they’re looking for. Jakob Nielsen, a web usability consultant, says that not explicitly stating what you have to offer is #1 of The ten most violated home page design guidelines.

If the headline on your home page says “Welcome to company X,” that’s only telling your visitors who owns the site – not what you can do for them. If your company story is buried in generic corporate speak, it is a one-sided pitch that visitors quickly see through.

In plain language with purposeful words, explain what your product or service is and how it can help your visitors. Use first person so that it feels like a comfortable conversation. Then casually direct them to other pages for more information.

Keep the important stuff above the fold – that is, above the point where visitors have to scroll down to continue reading. They may not get that far, so you want to make sure to make an impression early on.

Make the reading easy with subheads and bullets

Web readers tend to scan on-page content to decide if they want to stay or move on. (Did you know that the back button is the third most-used button on the keyboard?) To make it easier to scan and to hold visitors’ attention longer:

• Break up your story with intriguing subheads
• Use bullet points to separate thoughts
• Incorporate links into bullets to direct visitors to other pages

Where do they go from here? Don’t leave them hanging.

There are many ways for visitors to navigate your site. But it’s up to your site to show them where to go and how to get there.

Does your site have a global navigation – defined as a set of top-level navigation links (for example, Home, About Us, News, Contact Us) – that appear on every page? This helps to orient your visitors. The global navigation should be in about the same place on every page, with the page or section that visitors are currently on highlighted.

Don’t rely on your global navigation alone to be your site’s road map. Include links to important pages in the content of your story. At the bottom of the page, give readers an option to go elsewhere, such as “Contact us for more information.”

Let visitors know they’ve landed on a happening site
Today’s websites are dynamic, engaging and interactive. When people arrive, convince them that there is real value in sticking around. Some ideas for doing this are:

• What’s new? – showcase your latest projects
• Newsletter sign-up – offer free information
• Recent blog postings – prompt visitors to read and comment
• Social media widgets – invite them to follow you on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
• Post your latest podcast
• Link to your latest press release

Say no to digital barriers – open the doors wide
You want to eliminate any and all frustration around your site, so avoid the following:

• Splash landing page – you know you hate these. So do your visitors. What’s more, splash pages make your site virtually invisible to search engines
• Pop-ups – unless there’s a good reason for a pop-up, don’t go there
• Embedded scroll-down boxes – these can be confusing to visitors, and they’re not pretty
• Long sign-up forms, surveys and password requests – too much work and your visitors are reaching for that back button

When visitors arrive at your site, they already know what they’re looking for. Will they find it on your home page?

Louise Desmarais is an SEO copywriter with a loyal following of web clients from across North America. Louise operates Mud Creative, a writing company based in Calgary, Alberta.

Its lucky number 13 for the Out-Smarts podcast and this time we are fortunate to be in conversation with Louise Desmarais.  Louise is an experienced web writer and founder of Mud Creative. In this podcast she offers some truly valuable insights that must be considered when writing web site text and content.

[audio:http://www.out-smarts.com/Podcast13.mp3]

Podcast: Download

Bluelime Media has long been our preferred partner for web design and development projects. We recently sat down with their “chief code monkey”, Christine Rondeau to talk about their approach to building effective web pages and the changes she has seen in the industry in the last few years. Enjoy!

[audio:http://www.out-smarts.com/Podcast 8.mp3]

Podcast: Download

The sun is shining, the daffodils are blooming and Spring is in full swing.  If these weren’t enough reasons to be cheerful then here are some more on the Internet front.

The main reason to be cheerful this month is the release of the latest WordPress blog software – version 2.5.  I only started using it today but so far so great – my spacing problems have been resolved as have my cut and paste issues.I am looking forward to finding out what other goodies version 2.5 brings.  

Another discovery this month was the ThoughtFarmer knowledge sharing solution.  Aimed at providing organisations with an Intranet portal that enhances knowledge sharing and collaboration, ThoughtFarmer combines the best of wiki technology with social networking to allow organizations to deploy a unique and highly usable portal.

Suitable online invoicing systems are few and far between.  Some are good at handling expenses, others good at tracking time but I haven’t found one that does both well, one that is easy to use, customizable and can link to Paypal. Canadian online invoicing provider Freshbooks may just be the solution.

Looking for any easy way to involve your visitors on line?  PollDaddy is a great code generating tool that allows you to create a poll on your site (you define the question you want to ask and the answer criteria). Simply cut and paste the code to your web site and start polling your audience.

Another easy way to enhance your site and make the user experience more enjoyable is to add forms. Wufoo simplifies this by giving you a catalogue of templates to choose from (everything from customer surveys to registration forms).      

Thanks to the ZDNet blog for this very apt cartoon. Same could be said for many company websites too.

A while back it was the in thing to set up a web site that would act as a brochure, telling people who happened to visit what you have to offer. It was nothing better than a flyer in the mail. The days of the static web site done, finished, caput okay!

These days its all about interactivity and collaboration. Its easy to make websites more dynamic and to involve your audience rather than communicate at them. There are thousands of widgets out there to allow you to question is are you doing it? Go on – interact with us – you know you want to…..

Marc Canter former rock and opera singer now focuses on social technologies.  He says he’s visionary and has an uncanny ability to correctly predict the future – time will tell.   His main point is that all software needs to become social.  We need to be taking advantage of the social and open nature of technology now to extend beyond traditional realms of software.

He works with Bell Canada to create a site that takes advantage of social sharing to promote Bell’s music and movies.  He predicts Bell Canada will be an openID broker.There’s no real compelling reason to do this right now but it will be way of future.

I haven’t captured half of what Marc said so you should check out his aforementioned blog and his PeopleAggregator company.

Nice job Marc!

By this I mean Google juice and not pictures of hunky models. Here are 10 great ways you can easily improve your search engine positioning without putting your hands in your pocket and without having to be a SEO technodweeb.

1. Update your site regularly – this may seem obvious but many corporate sites rarely change.

2. Post a video – it can be short and sweet but has the added benefit of enhancing your image.

3. Add a podcast – we did it this week and you can too. Our traffic has gone up by about 50% since. Coincidence? I think not.

4. Label your images – most sites don’t bother but this is viable real estate on your site, use it. Image titles should relate back to your keywords and offering for maximum impact.

5. Use Google’s webmaster tools – make sure your site is crawled regularly, submit your sitemap (okay I concede you might need a technodweeb for that) and identify any problems so that you (or your technodweeb) can fix them.

6. Get bookmarks – book marks are like links the more you have the better. Hit on employees, partners and colleagues to bookmark your site.

7. Comment regularly on relevant blogs and always remember to insert your url correctly.

8. Spend some time developing a keyword map for your products and services so as to identify the most effective words to use and those to avoid.

9. Use bold and headings to identify key terms in your text.

10. This one should be first on the list but it seems so obvious I almost left it out. In case you haven’t done so, remember to submit your site to Google and other search engines otherwise there’s no hope whatsoever.