If you’ve ever made regular, site-wide improvements to a website you’ve probably come across the problem of trying to please all of your visitors all of the time. You fix something because a couple of loyal buyers complain about it, then you notice your ‘new customers’ number is dropping. You simplify the cart to try and fix that, and suddenly your loyal buyers are complaining again. You look at your sales numbers & everything looks fine. Where did you go wrong? Are all of your ‘loyal’ customers unhappy, or is it just a few shouty complainers?
After a while this causes problems & slowdowns on new projects:
Watered-down projects that attempt to please everybody & fail to please anybody
Frozen action - you’re not sure what the fallout will be, so you just don’t do anything
Your internal team disagrees over how to tackle a problem & you just end up arguing
A very simple way to quickly improve a website’s performance is to pick out some key pages (eg. checkout pages, signup forms, product pages) and try out different versions of the page to see which performs best. This article explains 4 different test methods & the advantages of each…
This is a little post about something you may never have thought about before: The single, unique problem that the web solves. The extra functionality it offers that didn’t exist for the first few billion years of the planet.
It’s just a simple little fact but, when you understand it, you will understand a little more about what everyone’s doing on the web. It’s a piece of knowledge that will open new opportunities for you.
Here it is - presented in a brief history of communication…
If you’re thinking of hiring someone to write for your website, you’ll be looking at people who fall somewhere within this range:
It’s often tempting to hire the people at the lefthand side of that: their portfolios can look very impressive, they’ve often been established for many years, they’ve got a client list full of names you recognise. But it’s worth taking a few minutes to think about the skillset required online & a few of the key differences…
Here’s a TV ad for ‘Cravendale Milk’ that someone, somewhere uploaded to Youtube:
Cravendale Last Glass Ad
I’d never seen it before (I no longer have a television), but I noticed a reference to it on the Wieden + Kennedy London blog and sought it out as a result. This is a funny time in adland. The internet is simultaneously opening up new opportunities & threatening to close many doors. Keep Reading this entry –»
In 2003, O’Reilly Publishing came up with the term ‘Web 2.0′. A couple of years later, Tim O’Reilly wrote a great article titled ‘What Is Web 2.0?‘ in which he shared this graphic from their original brainstorms:
Few would disagree with the right-hand column (other than perhaps ‘napster’) & there are some seriously accurate predictions in there. But amongst the left-hand column - the Web 1.0 elements that were supposed to fade - there are a few items that are still going as strong (if not stronger) than they were back then.
I’ve highlighted them above & here they are (in no particular order) including a couple of nice ironic twists: Keep Reading this entry –»
How many seconds does it take you to read the message in this box?
This is a prime example of backward thinking. Customers are concerned enough today that they will read something like that on a signup screen. Making it difficult for them to read it only serves to diminish your brand perception (either you appear difficult, or you appear shifty).
Here are a few takeaways:
Write in a way your customers can easily understand
Don’t say it in 6 lines when you could say it in 1
Don’t use double-negatives & other language that make people feel you’re trying to trick them (’untick if you do not…’)
Every company wants to gather data around their customers & their products. For Google this is quite a unique problem:
Google’s customer-base is huge: pretty much ‘everybody online’
Google’s biggest product (targeted advertising) relies on them knowing as much as possible about their customers (you!)
Q: So what would you do if you were Google? A: Try and track as much as you possibly can; make some strategic acquisitions to build a more detailed picture; create new tools & products to learn even more about your users
Whenever you go into Google AdWords and set up a new campaign, by default it is set to appear both in search results & on the Google Content Network (pages running adsense ads). There are two problems with that:
Problem 1. Searchers & Page Viewers Have Different Motives
A searcher is actively looking for your product / service. Whereas someone viewing a webpage with AdSense ads on is probably notactively looking to buy from you. Obviously there are situations where these require slightly different ads, different keyword triggers & different landing pages. Just as there’s a difference between cold-calling someone at home, or having them call you requesting information.
Problem 2. It Makes Tracking & Optimisation 10x Harder
Because of the above difference, ads on the ‘Content’ and ‘Search’ networks perform very differently… Keep Reading this entry –»
This post is about a little piece of information that can turn around a failing search campaign; A golden nugget of knowledge that can turn an already-good campaign into an utter barnstormer; A pearl of super-condensed wisdom that can… You get the picture - it’s something really simple that offers big benefits yet hardly anyone recognises its possibilities…
Here’s a chart from the latest Enquiro search survey showing a summary of 1,086 b2b buyers answering the question (totally paraphrased):
“where (online) do you start each phase of the purchase cycle”?
65.3% begin the ‘awareness’ phase of a purchase at a search engine
