This is especially relevant to South African companies choosing to host their websites in the USA to save on hosting costs, but their main audience is a long way off. Being able to measure the site’s load speed and evaluate changes made to the website against these values can only be useful to anyone with the website.

Unfortunately there are some tweaks which need to be made to tracking codes to be able to take advantage of this, but our advice is the sooner this is implemented the sooner you start gathering data for future analysis.

The popularity of the blog and interest in the designs produced have resulted in growth and enthusiastic following, and the challenge in this move was to not interrupt any of this. Existing posts & images were transferred maintaining consistent URLs, new home experience for the website, numerous about-type pages, widgets for signing up for newsletters, facebook page setup and posting from the blog etc.

It is pleasing to see that on the first day of being live the new Skinny laMinx website has had 1,286 visitors, leaving close to 100 comments, a successful wordpress.com to wordpress.org migration.

Freeworld Design Centre recently opened their doors and needed a platform for their design centre consultants to publish regular content in the format of a blog. The solution is a simple WordPress blog allowing the team to publish their content as themselves, thereby enhancing their profile as well as that of the team at the centre.

www.freeworlddesigncentre.co.za

The Brief

The site serves as a home to Clementina’s work and the Clementina shop which carries other ceramists work as well as some other products. There is the possibility that an e-commerce component will be added to the site in the future.

Design a clean uncluttered website that will allow the work to stand out.

Provide a CMS for easy editing of pages and for the addition of news.

The Result

Working on analytics for an online application based in a social media platform has been interesting, from a couple of angles.

1. measurement of virality of the application.

You have your plan of how your user-base will grow, but only through analysis of user data will you learn what is really happening.

2. focus on user engagement

Online retail for instance wants you to buy something; look around the store, pick up a couple of things and go through the checkout. Social? Well there could be any revenue model, but what you really want is users interacting with the app, with each other, and with the thing that is generating your revenue, no clear funnel necessarily, a lot of chaos to make sense of.

I would not go so far as to say that Analytics for a retail site vs social is totally different, but the focus is slightly shifted. eg on a retail site you may ramp up your ad spend as you grow, where on social you want to get a critical mass early on and gain a groundswell of users inviting their friends as soon in the application’s life as possible.

An article on ClickZ (sponsored by Omniture) Web Analytics for Social Media starts to look at this issue, but leaves it with a lot of open questions, but with social media being such a broad area it would be tough to go into specifics.

Well really if there was one ideal lead generation system, it would not be a question worth asking or a subject worth blogging about. There are many factors affecting lead generation success and no one set of rules makes sense in all situations. I am however going to add my 2c on the topic.

Dont pay for the traffic until you are sure your conversion is at least working. There is little your PPC marketer can do if the conversion funnel is flawed.

This is so wafty it should not be called a rule but it is the crux of lead generation: Find a ballance between lead volume and lead quality. Do you want as many signups as possible? OR High quality high value leads only?

Some other guidelines I list below, the first 2 appear contradictory:

• Give them reason – clearly state the reason/advantage/benefits of filling out the form.
• Quantity over quality – a form should have low/no barriers to entry.
• Quality over quantity – gather as much information in your lead form to pre-qualify the lead.
• Visibility – a form should be prominently displayed, or easy to get to.
• Trust issues – users like to know that their information is secure. If you are not a big name you have to work “harder” to win their trust.

And here is a final rule for you, and it is the most important; Go through the process youself, get a colleague to test and test again.

My feeling is one of relief to hear that Google have enabled tighter definitions of broad match on Google adWords.

I first came accross the issues with Google AdWords definition of broad match when they started touting a feature called extended broad match. Extended broad match took the term you were bidding on and assumed you were relevant for synonims of that term too; “great I dont have to think of all those words!” RIGHT?

The issue is when a word is ambiguous like “book” (read a book, book a flight). Now I have to admit that the folks at Google got smarter at the extended broad match thing, or the algorythm got smarter, but they could have saved themselves some hasstle, and us a lot of negative keywords, by introducing what has just gone global.

What is Modified Broad Match?

The graphic below from the Google AdWords Blog shows Broad, Phrase and Exact match types, with the outer ring being the behavior of broad match without modifications.

google modified broad match

Now if only I could have had this about three years ago…

Lets take an example of one of my South African clients with a website targeting South Africa only,webmaster tools sitemap submission done 2 months ago, about 100 recognized inbound links, and climbing.

• Google:
  • pages indexed: 200
  • Visits/mo: 600
• Yahoo:
  • pages indexed: 150
  • Visits/mo: 3
• Bing:
  • pages indexed: 50
  • Visits/mo: 8

Pages indexed gives an idea of how easy/difficult it is to get content into these search engines, but the visits? There are South Africans who use these search engines but the quality of results. Where the other search engines fail is in delivering search results relevant to locals. While there have been criticisms of Google news lagging in local news content the revised index should update faster.

The above number of visitors from Bing and Yahoo is the result of low search volumes but the poor local relevancy is a significant factor. Searching on this client’s brand name on Google gives me position #1, on Yahoo I get #5 and on Bing #3. Old index or new index Google still wins local searchers with local weighted indexed content, if this is going to get better, great!