(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 30 March 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.)

Last week I received a surprising email from Facebook entitled ‘Your Weekly Facebook Page Update’. It contained an overview of all the Facebook pages I am an admin of, with statistics on the number of new fans, wall posts and visits to the page.

Those of us who use Facebook and other social media sites in a professional capacity have been aching for reliable metrics to judge the success of our social media marketing campaigns.

Facebook launched its Insights tool in late 2007 as a means for page admins to gather data on what happened on their pages and get some basic demographical data on the composition of their fan base. However, since then there’s been remarkably little movement by Facebook on the analytics front.

This latest move is an indication that Facebook is starting to take the professional use of their social media platform more seriously, and can be seen as an outreach to social media marketers.

The fact that several professional web analytics vendors such as Omniture and WebTrends have recently announced new Facebook tracking features, makes this latest move from Facebook just that little bit juicier.

Perhaps Facebook is trying to pave the way for its own (paid) analytics package, that will hopefully allow admins to gain deeper insights in to how visitors reach their pages and how they interact with it.

This will hopefully help take a lot of the guesswork out of social media marketing, and allow clients of social media marketers to demand clearer ROI on their investment.

Facebook Takes Social Media Marketing Seriously is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

1. Part 1 – Choosing your keywords
2. Part 2 – Writing good ads
3. Part 3 – Create landing pages that convert

In part 1 of this guide to search engine advertising we discussed how to choose the right keywords to advertise on. In part 2 we showed how to make effective ads. Now in the final part we’ll tackle landing pages.

Search Engine Advertising – Step 3: Create Landing Pages That Convert

You’re targeting the right keywords and your ads generate a lot of clicks, so now you have all these extra visitors coming to your website. You’re paying for these visitors, so you want to turn as many of them into customers. The best way to do this is not to send them to your website’s homepage, but to a custom-built landing page.

Image you’re an average internet user. You’re looking for a new sofa for your living room, and you do a Google search for sofa’s. You see an ad on the search results page which appeals to you, so you click on it. You end up on a general furniture website’s homepage and now you have to look for their sofa’s section. Chances are you don’t have the patience for this, and you use the back-button to return to the search results and try a different website.

So you click on a second ad that seems interesting, and this time you land on a webpage that talks only about sofa’s. It shows you pictures of sofa’s, it has a nice offer for a discounted sofa on it, and there are many links from this page to various different categories of sofa’s. This site appeals much more to you, and you’re likely to stick around longer and maybe even order a sofa from these guys.

The first advertiser you clicked on made the classic mistake of sending search advertising traffic to the website’s homepage. From the homepage a web user needs to start his search all over again, navigating your website until he finds what he was looking for in the first place. The user has to go through more clicks and has to invest additional effort, something internet users are notoriously unwilling to do.

It’s much better to send the user straight to what they want to see, which the second advertiser does. This way the user doesn’t have to find his way through your website. He immediately sees content that is relevant to his search query.

Elements of a good landing page

1. Relevance: First and foremost the page you link to from a search engine advertisement needs to be relevant. Just like the ad needs to contain the keyword you advertise on, so does the landing page. If you advertise on the sofa keyword, your ad contains the word sofa, you can’t send users to a landing page discussing kitchens or chairs. You need to send them to a page that talks about sofa’s.

Be sure to include the actual keyword you advertise on clearly visible on the landing page, preferably in a headline. This tells a visitor that the landing page is relevant to the search query they typed in to start the whole process. If you use several different phrases to say the same thing, you’ll probably have to make different landing pages for each or use dynamic HTML code to show the exact keyword the user searched for.

When you advertise on many different types of keywords, you will have to create a lot of different landing pages. It’s a lot of work, but it will always pay itself back in a higher conversion rate, higher revenue, and more return on your advertising investment.

2. Clickpath: Sometimes the landing page can be the conversion page. If you offer a downloadable ebook or small specialized item, your landing page can also be the page where users can place an order. But often you’ll need to give your users additional information to guide them to a conversion – product options, specifications, accessories, etc. Guide them through the sales funnel, from general overview to detailed information to actual conversion.

An important aspect of the clickpath is that you shouldn’t make it too easy for users to diverge from it. Take away your regular site navigation if you can, try to keep the visitors of your landing page in a clickflow that guides them to a conversion. If users sidestep your clickpath and instead go to your site’s homepage or another page, chances are you’ll lose them there.

3. Calls to action: Once you get a user to click on an ad and arrive on your landing page, don’t leave them hanging. You need to take them by the hand as it were, show them where to go and what to do. Use action words like ‘learn more, ‘click here’, ‘order now’ in your content and in your links to additional pages.

4. Easy conversion: It should be as easy as possible for a user to place an order. Don’t ask them for information they don’t really want to give up. Keep your forms short and simple and only ask for the very basic information you need to complete the order.

5. Persuade: Selling is the art of persuasion. Employ tried-and-proven persuasion methods such as testimonials, special offers, guarantees, authorative sources, instilling confidence, and more. Include them on the landing page itself and on every subsequent page you send your users to.

6. Fast loading: Your landing page should load very quickly. If a user has to wait for a bit before your landing page is displayed properly, the urge to click that back-button will grow. Make your landing pages lean and efficient to optimize loading times.

7. Measure: It’s not as simple as putting your landing page out there and waiting for the money to come pouring in. It’s imperative that you know what users are doing on your landing page. Do they stay and read your content or do they leave? What links do they click on? Do they convert into customers right away or do they bookmark the page and come back later? Do they follow the whole clickpath or do they leave prematurely? If so, where do they tend to leave your site the most?

All these things and more can be measured and analyzed with a good web analytics package. A good place to start is Google Analytics, a free service that contains all the web analytics functionality you’ll need. Use the data you gather to make informed decisions about what to improve on your landing page (and your website as a whole).

8. Experiment: Creating good landing pages is never an exact science. All aspects of a landing page, from the headline to the color of the buttons, can have an impact on the conversion rate. Experiment freely, but do it in a controlled manner. Tools like Google’s free Website Optimizer allow you to perform extensive tests with all kinds of different aspects of your landing page to optimize your conversions.

Don’t test too many things at once – experiment with one or two changes at a time, no more. Allow your test to run for enough time before you make up your mind. And once you find a landing page setup that works well, use that as the basis for a new round of further tests. Never stop testing and improving.

9. Conform to the guidelines: Last but certainly not least, be sure to read the editorial policies and guidelines of the search engine you advertise on. Google, Yahoo and Live all have strict policies about advertising on their search results pages. There are guidelines you’ll need to conform to for your ads and your landing pages, or you’ll risk paying more for each click or worse, not getting your ads shown at all.

Conclusion
Creating good landing pages for your search engine advertising campaign is not an easy and straightforward task. To do it well you’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort in building and perfecting your landing pages. But it’s never a wasted effort. Again and again the results show that good landing pages turn many more visitors into paying customers, and help earn back the money you invest in seach advertising several times over.

Search Engine Advertising: a Step By Step Guide – Part 3 is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Search engines are the motors that drive traffic to your website. Getting your site ranked highly in search engines is an important factor of success. The discipline that focuses on this is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short.

In an effort to help beginning webmasters get underway with SEO Google has published a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF). It’s a very useful document that describes the basics of good SEO. Some of the topics in this guide have also been a part of previous blog posts here, such as:

• Page titles
• Site navigation
• Good content
• Headlines
• Using images
• Web Analytics

Other topics in Google’s SEO Starter Guide include description tags, URL structure, anchor text, the robots.txt file, and more. It’s an excellent guide for both new and experienced webmasters that want a solid handle on how to build and maintain a successful website.

Download Google’s SEO Starter Guide (PDF)

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Broken links on your website are bad. A broken link is a sign of a poorly maintained website. Having broken links on your site doesn’t instill trust in your potential customers. So you want to ensure your site doesn’t have any links that don’t work.

As your website grows it gets harder to keep track of all links. A change you make on your site may break an internal link, and you can’t control what other sites do that may invalidate your links to them. But there are several ways of finding broken links so you can fix them.

For internal links you can look at your web statistics and find the 404 error pages. These errors occur when someone clicks a link that points to a webpage that doesn’t exist. A link can become broken if you deleted a page, moved it to a different URL, or typed in a wrong link. Make sure to regularly check your statistics for 404 errors occurring on your website.

Another way to find broken links is to use a link checker. You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to quickly identify many errors on your site, including broken links. Another tool and a long time favorite of mine is Xenu’s Link Sleuth, a small Windows program that spiders any site you send it to and returns extensive reports on all it has found, including broken links.

An added benefit that Xenu has is that it can also check external links. By running Xenu regularly on your site you can keep track of your outgoing links and correct them if one suddenly stops working.

However such automated tools have their limitations. Nothing can replace a set of human eyeballs when it comes to checking if the pages you send your website’s visitors to still have the content you want them to see. So go through your site once in a while and click on every link and button to make sure it all works as it should.

Fix Your Broken Links is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Privacy matters to internet users. People are aware of the dangers of giving out personal information, and everyone that has an email address understands the hazards and annoyances of spam.

As a result users are less inclined to type a lot of information in a website’s form. Whether it’s a contact form or an orderform, users will be reluctant to give you their information. Many research studies show that elaborate web forms turn users away.

Every field you add to a form will make it more likely a user will not fill it in and simply go somewhere else.  Especially form fields like address and phone number throw up barriers for users that are concerned about their privacy.

It’s therefore important to keep the forms on your website as short and simple as possible. A mistake I often see is that companies base their forms on their own internal wish-list of customer information. Especially sales people want to have as much information on their customers as they can get their hands on. This usually leads to long forms that request a lot of information from users, often with little to no reward for the user when he fills it all in.

It’s necessary to use forms on your website, as a form makes it easier for a user to get in touch with you. But when you ask for much more information in the form than what you’d ask for if the customer simply phoned you, you’re not likely to get a lot of submitted forms.

Whenever you create a form for your website, keep these guidelines in mind to ensure your visitors will feel comfortable filling it in and giving you their information.

Only ask for the absolute bare minimum. For generic contact forms the name, email address and message fields are enough. For online orderforms only ask for the minimum information you need to properly complete the order process. Any additional field risks a potential customer turning away and going to a competitor.

Reward your users for giving you their information. If you really, really need to ask a lot of information from your users, give them a reward that fits the amount of information you’ve requested. This reward can be in the form of a free downloadable ebook or white paper, a possibility to win a prize like a mp3 player, or another reward that fits with your target group. Make sure this reward is clearly indicated on the form itself.

Give your form proper context and explanation. Don’t just put a form up on a web page without any explanation. The best forms are those that are short and simple and clearly indicate to the user what happens with their submitted information.

Encourage your users to submit the form. By using action words such as “submit now”, “learn more”, and “sign up today” you encourage your users to fill in the form and will make them feel good about doing so.

Include a privacy policy. Link to your privacy policy and be sure that it states you will never give your users’ information to any third party. Your privacy policy needs to be in plain language as well – hiding your intent behind cryptic legalese will not engender any trust. It also helps to state clearly on the form itself that you won’t share your users’ information.

Use a “thank you” page. When a user submits the form, send them to a “thank you” page where you confirm what you will do with their information, such as replying to the customer’s inquiry, giving them the link to the downloadable reward, enrolling them in the prize draw, etc.

Measure the submission rate.  Track how many submissions you receive compared to how many page views the form itself gets. If the submission rate is very low, you’ll need to tweak your form even more. A submission rate of 20% is a good figure for generic contact forms, so don’t be surprised if your form does a lot worse than that.

Use a simple CAPTCHA [?] to ensure your submitted forms actually come from humans instead of automated spam robots. Some CAPTCHAs are overly complex and difficult to read even for humans, which leads to real people abandoning your forms instead of just spambots.

Simple forms pay off in the long run. You may generate some additional work for yourself or your sales people with the limited information you receive, but it will result in many more contact moments with your clients and eventually in more paying customers.

Keep Your Forms Short And Simple is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Many small business owners that have a poor website don’t realize they have a poor website. This is often the case when:

A) they’ve put a lot of time and effort into building their website themselves, or…
B) a friend or family member claiming to be a web expert has built the site for them, or…
C) they spent a lot of money on a ‘professional’ web developer.

Due to the investment of time and money and emotional attachment they’re unable to look objectively at their website and see its flaws. When asked about the success of their website they usually answer that they’re quite pleased with it.

Sometimes I get the uncomfortable task of explaining to one of them that no, really, your site could do with some improvement. I usually try to drill down to the core of the issue by asking them what the purpose of their website is. What is the goal? What is your website supposed to be doing for you?

Many business owners haven’t set any goals for their website, they’re just happy to be online. Very few look at their web statistics regularly. Even fewer act upon the information.

A typical conversation on this topic goes something like this:

“So, what is the goal of your website? What do you want to accomplish with it?”
“Well, I want my information to be out there, to show my products online.”
“Okay, so why do you want people to look at your products?”
“To make them aware of what I can do for them.”
“I see. So when they see your products on your website, what do you want them to do with that information?”
“Well, I’d like them to pick up the phone or send me an email or whatever. Get in touch.”
“So your website is meant to generate leads, is it?”
“Yeah, basically, that’s it.”
“And how many leads are you getting from your website every week?”
“… I don’t know. One or two I think, I’m not sure.”
“Okay, let’s assume it’s two leads a week. How many people visit your website every week?”
“Well, eh, I’d have to look that up.”
“I see here on your web statistics package that you get about six hundred visitors a week.”
“Oh, well, that’s good. That sounds like a lot.”
“Only two of them are getting in touch with you. Two out of six hundred, that’s not a very high percentage, is it?”
“… Eh, I suppose not, no.”

That’s the beginning of a slow, painful path from ignorance to denial, anger, frustration, and awareness. Ideally this ends in acceptance of the inconvenient truth that a good website requires constant attention. If you want to make the most of your online presence, you need to commit a certain amount of time and money to it.

The good news is that it doesn’t require countless hours and infinitely deep pockets to maintain a solid website. A lot of things can be done easily and cheaply and can yield tremendous results.

So ask yourself, are you happy with your website? Should you be?

Are You Happy With Your Website? is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Having a website doesn’t mean sitting back and waiting for the money to come pouring in. A website is not a static thing, it requires constant updates and improvements.

But how do you know what changes to make to improve your website? The answer is simple: web analytics. With web analytics you can determine what works and doesn’t work on your website.

Web analytics starts with statistics: numbers, percentages, and graphs. You need to understand the basic elements of web statistics before you can graduate to proper analysis of those figures and derive actionable insights from them.

In this article I will try to explain the basic terminology of web statistics. Different web analysis programs sometimes use different wordings, but you will be able to recognize them and interpret them accordingly.

Web statistics terminology

• Unique Visitors: this is the first statistic many rookie web analysts look at, but in my opinion it’s one of the least important numbers. It refers to the number of individuals that have visited your website in the given time frame. It is always a rough estimate as due to the limitations of web technology it’s nearly impossible to accurately determine how many people actually see your website. The raw figure is not that interesting, but as a trend over time it’s worth keeping an eye on, especially if you have initiatives running to draw more visitors to your site.
   
• Total Visits: this figure indicates how many times web users have visited your website. The same user can come back to look at your site again within the set time frame and will generate two or more visits to your site. This metric combined with unique visitors determines the stickiness of your website. It’s sometimes also referred to as sessions.
   
• Page Views: this metric indicates how many pages of your website have been shown to visitors. Don’t be surprised to learn that many visitors only look at one page of your site and then leave. Some visitors will click through to other pages and log multiple page views in your statistics. Combined with the total visits this gives you the average page views per visit, which is an indication of how engaging your site is.
   
• Hits: a remnant of the old days of web statistics, a hit is every single request a browser sends to the web server your site runs on. Every single separate element of a web page, including the HTML file, CSS stylesheet, and all the images, generate hits when someone views the page. These days it’s a fairly useless number, as any given web page can generate anything from one to fifty hits.
   
• Time on Site: this indicates how long an average a visitor has spent on your website before moving on. This can be a difficult statistic to use. If for example you have a blog, most of your website’s visitors won’t go beyond the homepage. This means your web analytics program probably won’t be able to see how long those visitors actually spend on your site, as they undertake no action that can be logged. It will count all those visits as zero seconds long, regardless of how long the user spent reading your content.
   
• Bounce Rate: this metric is usually attached to a single page on your website. It shows the number or percentage of visitors that saw only that page and then left shortly thereafter (usually within 5 to 10 seconds). For some reason those visitors clicked the back button, closed the browser window, or went to a different website immediately upon entering your site. This can have many different causes, but generally a high bounce rate on a page means that page isn’t very appealing and can use some improvement.
   
• Exit Rate: similar to bounce rate but also different in a very fundamental way, this metric indicates how many people came to a page on your website and then left. This goes beyond bounce rate as it counts those users that navigated through your site prior to exiting. Some pages should have a high exit rate, like for example the “Thank You” page after a submitted order.
  Good web analytics programs calculate the exit rate while omitting the bounces shown in the bounce rate, so you will get a good sense of where your site’s engagement with its users fails.
   
• Referrals: this is not a number but a list of sources of visits to your site. This contains everything from the search engines people used to find your site to links on other websites that users clicked on to get to your site. Ideally your analytics program should also tell you what keywords users typed into the search engines to find you, and on exactly what page of an external website the link to your site was found.
   

There are other statistics worth looking at, such as the error codes (especially the 404 error) and visitor origins. But the metrics listed above are the core measurements that you need to have a good grasp on to gain valuable insights into user activity on your site.

A Basic Explanation Of Web Statistics is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

If you want to improve your website to better serve your audience, you need to know what people are doing on your site. The key to figuring out what users are doing on your site is to use web analytics.

Most web hosting packages come with some form of free web statistics software like AWStats or Webalizer. But these are merely web statistics – lists, numbers, and if you’re lucky a few graphs. These statistics don’t really tell you anything about how visitors are using your website.

Good web analytics software goes one step further. It takes the same data as web statistics but unleashes clever analysis on it that tells you a great deal more. Additionally, usually through embedded JavaScript tags that are added to every page on your website, web analytics software can tell you things about visitor behavior and the effectiveness of your site that mere web statistics could never reveal.

If you’re new to the web and/or can’t afford an expensive web analytics package like WebTrends or Unica, the best place to start is Google Analytics. This free (!) service allows you to gain a wealth of valuable insight into user activity on your site.

Most importantly, with a service like Google Analytics you can derive actionable insights that tell you what part of your site needs to be improved.

Iif you want to learn more about web analytics I highly recommend Avinash Kaushik’s blog. Avinash is an analytics guru at Google and considered one of the chief visionaries in the field.

Use Web Analytics To Improve Your Website is a post from: The Great Websites Blog