The homepage is dead. Power to the user!
Brand Nazis spend hours labouring over their homepage messaging, ensuring every pixel is perfectly placed (nothing wrong with that) and that every clause reinforces the brand and leads the user to the point of sale conversion.
The trouble is that users don’t enter at home pages anymore. Nope, if you’ve done your SEO properly, and you’re directing PPC traffic to targeted landing pages, most of your users will be bypassing your home page permanently.
Your customers don’t want to be persuade; they want to get specific information, or they want to transact. So, they search for the phrase that defines what they’re really interested in, they CLICK, and voila they enter your site by some page deep in your site.
Now there’s no chance for the carefully prepared branding message, they just get the content the wanted. As Jakob Nielsen might say, it’s the ultimate in request marketing. The browser clicks on precisely what interests them.
So, what can you do with pernicious prospects that trample over your brand guidelines? Embrace them, and throw the brand guidelines in the recycle bin. Give your prospects and customers what they want.
Here’s a few starting points:
1. Make sure there’s an opportunity to action on every page
2. Make sure your copy is well signposted with intelligent hyperlinking that encourages browsers to delve deeper.
3. Think about a content management system that enables you to filter content according to user profile.
Google Analytics - Big Brother or your best friend?
About 2 years ago, Google bought Urchin, which was quite a neat package that helped website owners interpret their site traffic. In typical Google style, Urchin went from being a pay for, server installed application, to an ASP model, but with no costs attached. Hence, Google Analytics.
But there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Google’s gift of Analytics gives the Search Engine Big Brother everything it needs to know about everything you’re doing. Moreover, it plugs in data from Google Adwords, Yahoo! and Microsoft, so Google now know how much you’re spending on Adwords, and its competitors, and if you use goal conversion, it knows how much you’re yielding per conversion.
Ok, that’s the health warning, if you can stomach it, you’re in for a treat. Analytics is a really powerful piece of kit. In addition to Urchin’s statistical breakdown of visitors, traffic routes, referrals etc., you get full integration with Adwords. Adword integration gives you an immediate snapshot of paid traffic vs. organic traffic.
The real jewel in Analytics and the reason for this blog is its goal conversion module. Click on the Analytic Settings > Profile Settings, and review the second panel down : Conversion Goals and Funnel.
Now all you need to do is create pages in your site that are stages in the funnel, and add them to the stages in a Goal, e.g. Home Page > Product Selection > Account Signup > Product Purchase.
Or you could set Account Signup as a goal, and build a campaign around prospect acquisition. Either way, using goal conversion gives you an easy way to manage micro-conversions along the route to the desired sale conversion.
Many Webreality customers already use Analytics, if you’d like more training on conversion/goal setting, please contact me directly.
10 top trends for 2007
I know, it’s a bit late for beginning of year lists, but it’s been a busy start to the year. Better late than never, here are my top ten predictions for the year.
1. Mainstream ad agencies will make lots of naff efforts to get with Web 2.0. Recent example was Ford Focus ad ‘written’ by a blogger trying to make it on MySpace. Aagh!
2. Google Adwords CPCs will fall, as advertisers struggle with conversion rates and desert en masse to Windows Live.
3. Content filtering and customised user experiences will become more widespread.
4. Blogging will reach its zenith in corporate appeal.
5. Use of CRMs (especially Microsoft Dynamics) will find homes in SMEs.
6. Microsoft VISTA will have some terrible security flaws which will embarrass Microsoft, but curiously their profits will increase.
7. Everyone will love the Apple iPhone, even though it will crash everytime it makes a phone call.
8. Hopefully, we’ll see some exciting new business models that will smash old economy businesses, like BlogMyBook for instance?
9. Monetisation of traffic will continue, and we’ll see some more high-profile multi-million deals. Usual formula: desperate old media firms, like ITV, buying anything that smells of Web 2.0 and has community and traffic.
10. A dominant web brand will emerge in the UK.
How do you spot a good web developer?
In case you’re not using Webreality, here’s what you should look for:
1. Someone that understands business, not just fluffy pages
2. Someone who keeps updating their skills. It *should* be a given that your site validates, and that they’re not doing layout with tables, and that useability means more than having a link to home.
3. Someone that doesn’t promise everything.
4. Someone that thinks ahead - including a scaleable technical architecture - you want to be bigger don’t you?
5. Someone that cares about detail, and cares that your site works EVERYWHERE, not just on their 21″ screen, dual core IE7 machine.
Google Webmaster tools
A while ago I posted a link to Google’s webmaster tools. This useful toolset gives you a small insight into how Google’s looking at your site, it will list any problems the Googlebot’s having with your site, and when it visited last.
To set-up your site, you need to verify your site. If you are a Webreality customer, send us the meta-tag, and we’ll add it to your header for you.
You can generate a sitemap of your site at XML-Sitemaps.com. You then need to upload this file to the root of your website, or you can ask us to do it.
Simple!
Windows Vista - is it worth it?
As usual, Microsoft is slipping on its general release date for Vista, but it looks likely it will be on general release by Jan 30th 07.
As Microsoft partners we get access to early releases of MS software, and partners have had Vista for ages. Today, I took the plunge and installed it on my main PC, and I thought you might be interested in initial observations.
The install was the easiest I’ve ever done - completely pain-free, including hooking up to the office Windows Server 2003, and Exchange.
The interface is elegant and beautiful, and is an unashamed rip-off Apple’s shiny Mac OSX. Beauty isn’t a word that usually appears in the same sentence as Microsoft, but Vista is visually striking. Its power goes beyond the surface though, in this age of information bloat, MS has given us a search engine for the desktop that’s faster than Google. Every bit of content is indexed in a SQL database, and is recalled as fast as you can type it. Contents of documents, emails, everything are all immediately accessed.
It’s Vista’s information archiving that makes it a killer app for me. After 10 minutes using it, you can’t go back - everything else moves at a snail’s pace.
So yes, it’s worth it. Can your 2 year old PC though, and buy the fastest dual-core you can afford.