Most effective ad banner placements

31 Aug

While each site is unique, certain web banner placement locations do tend to be more successful.

  • Ads closer to the center of the page tend to perform better
  • Ads above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold
  • Ads placed at the end of articles tend to do well, even though they’re below the fold
  • Ads placed near site navigation or by images or other rich content tend to do well, too

It’s most important to consider your users, their behavior and the page placement on the site.

Is becoming a fictional mayor worth being robbed?

23 Aug

When think of Four Square, I think of a game played on a sidewalk with chalk, 4 squares and a dodge ball.

Yeah, I’m that old.

When I heard the idea behind the FourSquare application, I gasped. I get that location-based services are all the rage. But what I don’t get is why on earth would anyone would use it? But they do. Apparently thousands of people willingly broadcast when they’re not at home. Are thousands of people really that stupid? Isn’t that pretty much saying “Hey – I’m not home. Come rob me.”

Apparently so.

Then I heard about a website called Please Rob Me. A website designed to point out just how easy it is to rob people blind on the basis of the information they posting on the Web. The site automatically scans feeds to find location check-ins that are being FourSquared, GoogleBuzzed or Tweeted out. It then posts that message and the user’s whereabouts (if known) online for all to see. Dozens of new entries hit every minute. You can filter through by city or username. The site even hints at how long would-be burglars – or surprise-party organizers – have to hatch their scheme, since Twitter and FourSquare also share when you marked your location.

I love this.

Let’s face it. Are you going to get robbed because you’re over sharing? It’s unlikely. But if nothing else, Please Rob Me pokes fun at social-media fan’s desire to share a bit too much and shows that sometimes a little discretion online can go a long way.

Writing for da web

2 Aug

How do users read on the Web?

They don’t.

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.  Here’s a few hints to increase the effectiveness of your writing on the Web:

SHORTENED WORD COUNT
The word count for an online version of a given topic should be about half the word count used when writing for print. Web users skim, rather than read. Users find it painful to read too much text on screens, and therefore read about 25 percent more slowly than print.

WRITE NEWSPAPER STYLE
Web users are impatient – they don’t like to scroll through masses of text, so put the most important information at the top to allow users to quickly find the information they want. Subheads provide a visual roadmap for readers, alerting them that something different and potentially important is coming up. To see how this works, check out CNN.

INFORMAL STYLE
The Web is an informal and immediate medium compared to print, so users appreciate a somewhat informal writing style and small amounts of humor. Keep your sentences short and simple. Long, convoluted sentences may read nicely in print but will often seem forbidding onscreen.

HYPERTEXT LINKS
You can make text short without sacrificing depth of content by splitting the information up into multiple nodes connected by hypertext links. Long and detailed background information can be relegated to secondary pages; similarly, information of interest to a minority of readers can be made available through a link without penalizing those readers who don’t want it.

Mobile is coming? Dude, mobile is HERE!

26 Jul

If you’ve yet to test how your website renders on a mobile phone, you need to start testing it with mobile emulators NOW. An emulator is a software program that replicates the behavior of devices on your computer screen. A few include:

  • Blackberry (despite the sexiness of iPhone, the largest segment of Smartphone users are BlackBerry users)
  • Iphoney (for the iPhone)
  • Opera Mini (Opera offers the best browsers for mobile phones)

Page size, low use of images (which your mobile users will thank you for as well), doc types and more are all said to be factors. Mobile search is still in its infancy, but the growth expectations for it especially on local searches over the next five years are large. Make that HUGE.

Now if you’re a smallish company that’s not looking to sell a hundred thousand pairs of jeans or airline flights, (Jamison/McKay) you’re fine. But if you ARE looking to sell a whole lotta stuff, and attract a whole lotta traffic/business, you best get on it. Being early to the battle is one of the biggest factors in winning the war in search. You can learn mobile search now or wait until it’s a necessity and you have to spend a gagillion dollars redesigning your site. I’d highly suggest choosing the former.

What’s all the hooplah about analytics?

19 Jul

Web analytics is the process of measuring site statistics and analyzing traffic behavior.

With web analytics, you’ll know how many visitors you get daily, how long your visitors stay on your website and what city they came from. You’ll know their clickstreams, the keywords they use, and how they came to be in your website (referring pages, search engines, organically etc). You’ll also be able to determine how many times a visitor returned to your website and which campaigns, if you’re running campaigns, were successful or not.

Why is this important? Well, aside from being really cool, once you’ve studied the actions of your visitors, you can optimize your website and formulate a sales and e-marketing plan based on actual facts and not hypothesis.

Making landing pages work

1 Jul

One of the factors that makes a successful ppc search campaign is a quality of the landing page to which your paid ads link to. In this case, a quality landing page loads quickly, has meaningful content and is relevant to the keywords that you are bidding for. To best optimize your landing page for a ppc campaign, your website should include the main keywords in your page title, headline, page description, and also a few times throughout the page content itself.

Be sure to design your page in such a way that engages the visitor and incites action. Your landing page needs to quickly help the visitor make the transition from click to conversion. Here are a few additional suggestions:

  • Strip out any unnecessary site navigation, menus, or links. Users intuitively want to click things, so they’ll only distract from the goal. The same goes for any irrelevant copy or imagery – only elements that help move the visitor  toward the completion of your desired action should be included.
  • Don’t make the user click to get to your offer. Ideally, the action (whether it be a registration form or an interactive assessment) should be directly on the landing page itself, rather than a link to the offer (e.g., “click here”). The less work the visitor has to do to convert, the better.
  • Include a relevant graphic or “hero shot.” Most people respond more to visual cues versus text. Providing a graphic representation of your offer/product/service is important because the user can quickly understand what the page is all about. It also helps improve the aesthetic of the page and makes it more dynamic.
  • Locate your offer “above the fold.” Make sure your offer is visible on the page without the user having to scroll down to get to it. This is called “above the fold.”

Grammar pet peeves that make us nuts

8 Jun

The words you use and how you use them create an image of who you are. Websites, brochures, blog posts, Facebook posts and Twitter streams with poor grammar tell your customers that you don’t really care. Oh, and that you’re an idiot. If you care about making a good impression, you should take care in how you speak and write.  Here are a few grammar pet peeves that make us nuts.

Who vs That. The rule: use who when you are referring to a person, and that when you’re referring to a thing. “She is someone who I have known for years.”

Orient vs. orientate. The rule: Use orient as a verb to express “to find direction”; use orientate if you want to sound affected.

Bi- vs. Semi. As in bimonthly vs. semimonthly. Bi- is two, and semi- is half. So bimonthly is every two months, whereas semimonthly is twice a month. Just remember, you don’t ride a semicycle, you ride a bicycle.

Affect vs. effect. Affect” is a verb and “effect” is a noun. When using “affect”, substitute another verb and see if it works.

Between you and I. In case you’re wondering, it’s between you and me. The exact reason and it has to do with objects of prepositions and a whole lotta other crap. You can check that out by visiting Grammar Girl. But let me boil it down: Use between you and me, because it’s correct.

Irregardless. Irregardless is NOT a word.  It communicates that you’re a trying to sound smart and fancy-like, when you actually sound like a dope.

Your vs. You’re. Ok, now this is just pure laziness. And that’s why it’s pet peeve #1.

FYI SEO isn’t a plug in

10 May

Almost every new client looking for a new or redesigned website says, “oh, and we need SEO too,” as if it’s something you buy and install on your site. Sigh. Lemme tell you a little something about those three letters S-E-O. Search Engine Optimization isn’t something that you install or plug in.

The single best thing you can do to be more visible on search engines is have plenty of engaging, readable, relevant, original content. Now there are other factors that help with SEO such as having clean code, site speed, a URL that’s not about to expire and plenty of inbound links. Not reciprocal links. Don’t be tricked by offers of link exchanges – they’re essentially worthless.

We’re sorry to disillusion people who want instant solutions, but overall, when it comes to SEO, content is king.

A terrible mistake or a marketing ploy?

20 Apr

So an Apple employee walked into a bar and left his next-generation iPhone demo model behind. Steve Jobs is currently working on a new app to virtually burn employees at the stake. Was it a marketing ploy? Or a case of Cuervo gone wrong? IOHO, that iPhone wasn’t lost. Sounds like an incredible marketing ploy to garner some attention if you ask us. Not that they need much attention. But man, is it working. Apple = marketing genius.

http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone

What is Defensible Traffic?

19 Apr

Simply put, defensible traffic is web traffic web traffic obtained from sources that don’t necessarily include search engines like Yahoo! BING or Google. It’s the best type of traffic and at the same time it is the hardest type of traffic to build and obtain. If your site is truly defensible, you could exist if search engines went out of business tomorrow.

Let’s face it – anybody with a basic knowledge of PPC and a bank account can buy traffic. And if they’re willing to pay out the nose (or more out the nose than you), they can steal your PPC traffic by paying more per click. So the only way you can defend that traffic is to pay more per click. That cuts into your ROI. And that sucks.

So the question remains.  Where do we get defensible traffic? Well to name a few, you have social networking, niche link partnerships, RSS or newsletter subscribers, online communities such as forums or bulletin boards (e.g. Craigslist), traditional advertising, word of mouth promotion etc.

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