Webstock 2009, the five-day web conference held in Wellington finished last Friday afternoon with a series of heavyweight speakers including Tom Coates from Yahoo Brickhouse, internet critic Bruce Sterling and Damian Conway, known as the “mad scientist of Perl”.
The key message was this:
THE FUTURE OF WEB IS IN BETTER DESIGN
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Well, it’s taken rather longer than expected.
We have, finally, moved, into our new offices office at 145 Lichfield St, Christchurch. We started the journey back in January, so it’s officially taken just over nine months after we took the big step of signing up to a long term lease.
Click to continue »Maybe it says something about my current state of mind that the more I think about the parallels between online marketing and a blind date, the more apt the analogy becomes. Whatever. Here are some rules that, I think, work equally well in either situation.
Disclaimer: I’m a guy. Consequently, some of these may seem a little man-centric, chauvinistic or outdated. Just remember that I’m (mostly) not here to give relationship advice.
Click to continue »My apologies for this article being late off the press: two new staff and being asked to author Practical Ecommerce’s Conversion Report Card has meant a bit of overload during the last two weeks. But here it is now…
So you’re spending all this money on your Google Adwords, but are they really worth the expense? I often have people tell me they’ve cancelled their PPC spend because they’re not getting a justifiable return. So what could be going wrong?
Let’s run a test search for one of your campaigns. Hopefully your pay-per-click ad shows up OK: now, click on the ad. Where does it send you to? Please don’t tell me it’s your home page!
In the previous article, I explained how landing pages designed for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are very different from the landing pages designed for search-engine optimisation (SEO). To recap, landing pages built for SEO live inside your website’s main structure and are designed to get noticed by Google. Landing pages for PPC, however, are specifically designed for conversion and not for getting noticed by Google.
PPC Landing pages have one job: to get you a conversion! You’ve just paid for a warm lead, so now’s the time to make the most of it and not leave it to chance.
Here are some ideas that can help you get more respondents to convert.
Click to continue »However a visitor gets to your site, they can only see one page first. This first page is known as the ‘landing page’, and your visitors’ landing experience is crucial to the success of your site. The catch is that, depending on where they’ve come from, exactly which page that is could (and should!) be different for everyone. Many websites are built with the idea that the first page any potential customer will see is the home page, but by providing your visitors with content that is specifically and uniquely targeted to their needs, you should experience a dramatic increase in conversion rates.
An important thing to understand is that the landing pages designed for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are very different from the landing pages designed for organic search engine optimisation (SEO).
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