We got this idea about using “View” instead of “Download” from folks at Marketing Experiments, but as any good Conversion Rate Experts would say, always test your hypothesis before incorporating the idea in your website.
The first thing after optimizing a page for design is to think about persuasion. It might sound easy to change the call to action and test out the variation but to convert those visits to valuable leads or sale; you have to think about the visitor.
The number one rule in persuasion optimization is Empathy.
Merriam Webster defines empathy as the following:
The success of a PPC campaign depends upon finding patterns in best converting Ads, Keywords and Ad-Groups. In order to optimize your campaign, monitoring the right variables is necessary. The 14 columns that you should monitor are:
1) Keyword - Should identify the intent of your audience/customer and the search pattern
2) Campaign - Focus on one Product/Client
3) Ad-Group - Ad-Group should focus on one theme of a campaign/product/service
We have often heard Conversion Rate Optimization experts professing about the need for statistical significance. Most Businesses look at this advice with marked skepticism. There are valid reasons for this.
1) Low Page Views
The pros and cons of using rel=”publisher” is a topic for another article. But let us see how to implement rel=”publisher” for your website. Most CMS and custom web applications will have one primary php file that control the display and logical flow of the entire website. Once you have identified the main php file, follow these steps:
1) Search for the closing </head> tag in the php file.
2) Visit your Google + page and notice the URL pattern in the browser. It would be something like:
Google Analytics has evolved into a complex analytic software. There are tons of data for analysis. But when it comes to key metrics that matches your business objective (read this article - KPI for Websites), you don’t need all of them. Google Custom Reports is the solution.
Before we create our first custom analytics report, you have to understand the difference between Dimensions and Metrics. In Google Analytics, it can be confusing.
With Google Panda Updates, webmasters and businesses across the world have realized the importance of maintaining quality pages for higher SERP ranking. You might not intentionally create low ranking web pages but once you start publishing on a regular basis, low quality pages will be created or generated.
Steps to Identify low quality pages
1) List the Indexed pages
The first step is to find out the indexed pages from your website. Start with the command
site :<websitename.com>
Go through each indexed page
Most often, we are engrossed in trending topics, news and latest developments and forget what our readers want. How should we create a content plan that will satisfy our readers? We have identified some best practices from our experience, managing a leading MBA Admissions portal.
1) Identify your target market
Start with broader markets: Investment, Insurance, Marketing, Internet Marketing, Education, Small Business Coaching etc.
2) Find your niche market
Hope you have read how to identify URL parameters for exclusion through Google Webmasters Tool. Now let us see how to do it.
1) Log into your webmasters tool
2) Under Configurations , click URL Parameters
A common problem seen in mid to large websites is the custom or CMS generated URL parameters, which can increase the number of duplicate pages indexed in Google. As a solution, Google Webmasters Tool introduced an advanced feature – URL Parameters. The parameter settings are recommendations for Googlebot. If you want to make sure that BOTS follow crawl and index settings, use NOINDEX directive and robots.txt. They are more powerful.
As Online Businesses, our time is divided between analyzing traffic trends, fixing technical issues, building links and interacting through social media. Content creation always takes a back seat. Many companies have writers on its payroll to perform this task. But as businesses, we solve customer problems on a regular basis and learn from each interaction. This gives us a unique advantage over writers who can only create peripheral articles about our Business; we have learned the hard way on what works and what does not.
Analytic software does not ignore admin and team visits by default. You have to create filters to ignore the visits. In Google Analytics, filters can be set to exclude IP address visits, and report visits only from a subdomain or directory.
Steps to create a Filter to ignore team and admin visits in GA
1) Under Admin, click the Filters tab
On August 9th 2012, Google released the guidelines for conducting A/B and multivariate tests. The guidelines were released in response to the commonly asked question – “How will testing impact search ranking?” Google has warned marketers from running the experiments for too long.
Below are some guidelines for running an effective test with minimal impact on your site’s search performance.
1) Don’t Cloak
Behavioral targeting provides businesses with the ability to serve customized marketing messages, content and products, according to the visitor's preference, demographic and behavior. From 2011, companies started implementing Behavioral Targeting in Ad networks. The result - a 670% improvement in Click Through rate. Re-targeting Ads through Google AdWords is an example of behavioural targeting. If you have seen Ads chasing you based on your browsing and search pattern, then you already know a little bit about BT.
How does Behavioral-targeting work?
Adwords Automated rules allow you to set conditions that trigger automatic account changes. For PPC marketers, this feature is useful in campaigns where frequent changes are common. As a Digital agency, you cannot ignore a campaign and expect rules to take over. The daily monitoring and changes are inevitable. But automated rules are useful if you have International clients. The time zone difference restricts you from making hourly changes. The quality and number of visitors to your landing page changes throughout the day.
After you have developed a testable hypothesis, it is to time to create the variations of your control page. Follow these recommendations before creating the variations:
1) Brainstorm
Your test is as good as your ideas. Testing tools like VWO, Optimizely and GA Content Experiments can only implement your ideas. It is your team’s responsibility to come up with variation ideas.
a) Ask your team to list variation ideas
Before you jump into creating variations of your control page, formulate a hypothesis. Hypothesis is an assumption about the occurrence of an event. For example, if you believe that changing your checkout button color from blue to green will improve conversion, then your hypothesis would be something like:
“Green Checkout buttons attract more clicks than blue checkout buttons. According to 2012 Studies on Eye Tracking; Green color has been proven to attract shopper’s attention”
Bing SEO Reports is similar to the HTML Improvements feature in Google webmasters tool. In addition to HTML suggestions, Bing creates the report based on 15 SEO Best practices. The reports are run every two weeks. The main difference between SEO Analyzer and SEO Reports is that, the later generates reports based on the domains listed in the account. Some of the SEO suggestions are:
1. The <img> tag does not have an ALT attribute defined
2. The page contains multiple titles
Microsoft has been trying hard to attract more webmasters to Bing with some nifty tools in the Bing Webmaster’s Tool collection. The latest and the most effective SEO tool is the Bing SEO Analyzer.
As the name suggests, by entering a URL, the SEO Analyzer checks any verified domain pages for SEO errors.
There will be SEO suggestions in the left-hand side with live preview on the right
Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who just access one page in a website and then leaves. If you have a popular blog, regular visitors will not access more than one page in a visit. In such cases, Bounce rate based on page view would be meaningless. Third Party Web Analytics Software like Clicky Web Analytics had been using time on page as a factor for determining Bounce Rate. According to Clicky, any visit that lasts more than 30 seconds, even if it is a single page view, is an engaged visitor.