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December 2008

Get more visitors to your website

Many developers are in love with technology: they have the fastest machines, the widest screens, the latest browsers etc. etc. Unfortuntely many of them seem to forget one vital fact - your potential customers don't necessarily share the same love of technology! This leads to Websites that don't take account of the kind of machines that your potential customers are using right now: slow, small screens and using old fashioned browser technology.

Microsoft are shortly due to release the next version of their browser: Internet Explorer 8, but more than 20% of users are still using the version previous to the current one! Internet Explorer 6 was launched in August 2001 and to say it was not compliant with web standards would be an understatement: its a lot of work to get websites working well with IE 6 - but, as you can see from the stats, you'd be turning away lots of customers if you didn't take account of this.

The latest computers can display in resolutions up to 1680x1050: beautiful widescreen displays. But over 8% of customers still use screens of resolution 800x600 - half that size. Unless you take account of this, potentially 8% of your customers won't see your full website and have to scroll left and right continually in order to do so: hardly a recommendation to buy your product or service.

So, when you're starting a website development, pick a web developer who is sympathetic to older technology - unless you want to turn away potential visitors to your website from the outset!

Pay Per Click advertising... too hot to handle?

We've noticed a very worrying trend recently in Pay Per Click advertising, such as offered by Google AdWords. It just seems to be getting more and more expensive, and - in some cases - too expensive. We don't know if it is a side-effect caused by the perception of the global credit crunch, or if the market is just becoming too crowded; but either way the days of just anybody being able to setup an AdWords starter account and make money from it are long gone.

Start by ensuring that you have measurement metrics in place: you need to be able to determine the average profit returned from each click to compare with the cost per click (obviously the former needs to be bigger than the latter if you are trying to achieve profit). Target your campaigns very carefully, look for long tail key words to advertise, avoid broad matching, fine tune your ads into segregated Ad groups with carefully targeted adverts and carefully tailored landing pages, and, to keep costs down, geo-target your ads, consider day parting, ad target positioning and bid lower for the content network. Monitor your spend and ad effectiveness carefully, looking for new keyword opportunities in your web stats and be prepared to adjust bids up or down to reduce costs/boost exposure. Also look for keywords where you perform well organically and consider dropping those from your advertising campaigns.

Confused by some of the terminology that we've used? Not surprising, Pay Per Click advertising is becoming an ever more complicated field. Proceed with caution in this field; we would - genuinely - recommend that you seek professional advice to ensure you don't get your fingers burnt!