How not to do PPC – John Lewis
On June 26th, 2009 Rob wrote on the subject of Pay Per Click.
I’m sure it’s just a clerical error but at the moment (June26) If you search for Sony LCD TV’s in Google and click on the John Lewis Pay Per Click listing the ad takes you through to their Samsung LCD TV page.Â
Anyone doing PPC will know how vital it is to have a proper landing page which responds to the what the user is searching for.   This could be costing a fortune in lost conversions for John Lewis.Â
I wonder how long it will take for anyone to notice. So far it’s been like that for a week.Â
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The listing in Google
 
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 Part of the landing page
12 things to check for your SEO Christmas checklist
On June 26th, 2009 Rob wrote on the subject of E-commerce,Online Marketing,Online PR,Reputation Management,SEO,Social Media.
Christmas 09 is only 4 months away. No doubt you’ll already have your products organised and maybe some ideas on offline marketing but what about online marketing.
Because online marketing can take 4-6 months to “kick in” there’s no time like the present to activate your Christmas strategy.  So below are 12 timely reminders on what needs to be in place to ensure that your site delivers this Christmas in a way that would make Santa Claus proud.
1. Blogging – sounds similar to ‘tobogganing’ and is just as much fun
- Simply, unless you are willing to put the time into adding useful and interesting content on your site then there really is little chance that the search engines will bother ranking you for anything more than your domain name. You have to deserve to be number one.
2. Social Media – it’s time to get social (both online and off line) – and we don’t mean just churping along with the robins
- Marketing is no longer a one way monologue. It’s all about dialogue now and if you’re not up for a chat then users won’t listen.  If you say something interesting then others will refer to it and pass it onto their friend – if it isn’t then they will talk about your competitors products instead.
3. Link Bait – lay the foundations now and reap the rewards by Christmas
- How would you like say 500,000 more visitors to your site. Content will go viral if written properly – but before it goes viral make sure that your website can take the strain of the increase in visitor traffic.
4. Mouse tracking – discover how your customers behave online and throw them a lump of cheese…
- Find out where people are clicking on your site and where they are getting confused. You’ll be surprised by how quickly and easily people get lost and move on elsewhere. Make sure buttons like “Add to Basket” are big and easy to find (and look like buttons)Â
5. Cross-selling – if your customers have a basket, fill it!
- Seems pretty obvious thing to do but many companies still miss this easy opportunity to up the customers’ spend by 10% or so. Ask your web programmers to implemenet basket based offers.
6. Communications – ensure your data management system is working for you and send glad tidings to all your customers
- I’m presuming you already have an email database. If not, why not? But continue to refine your database so that you can target relevant offers at different people.
7. Seven swans a-swimming – (well we had to give some reference to the twelve days of Christmas) Will your customers be able to swim through your site without any hold ups?
- Should you really be making your customers register before purchase? Are you hiding your delivery charges? (Hidden delivery charges are the 2nd most cited reason for people abandoning a shopping cart). Is it obvious how to make the order? All these issues will effect conversion rates. Get friends to perform specific tasks on your site and see how they perform. You’ll be surprised.
8. Content management system – check that your system will enable you to do everything you require. We’re still working on a turkey cooking programme but we are happy to cover off everything else.
- Got a great idea for a Christmas offer? Have you checked that your e-commerce software is capable of handling this type of offer. Find out now and don’t leave to last moment.
9. Reputation management – discover if you are featuring on your customers’ Christmas wish lists this year
- Find out what people are saying about you with Datadial’s reputation management software and then respond to these comments and start a dialogue. See how Love Film responded to a post I wrote about them – this was a classic bit of Reputation Management whereby they quashed my negative comment about them.
10. PPC – Pretty Perfect Christmas? We believe Pay Per Click is the icing on the cake of an online marketing strategy (never the key ingredient)
- Multi channel marketing includes PPC as well as snail mail. PPC is expensive if implemented incorrectly. Get this sorted before the Christmas rush starts.  Do all your experimenting with what works and what doesn’t or else you’ll find all the money coming in one end is going out the other end.
11. Online PR – You don’t need to bring frankincense and myrrh but if you’re doing anything quirky or different then let the blogosphere know about it
- Do not presume that your PR company can do online PR. Online PR is an entirely different science to Offline PR and most PR companies do not have a clue about how to create buzz on line.
12. Online optimisation – creeping round every corner making sure everything is as ‘friendly’ as possible
- This is the most important thing to get right – If your website is not optimised for search engines then it has no chance of being ranked for its keywords. Ask us to provide a website analysis for you. If you ask nicely we might even do it for free, seeing as it’s nearly Christmas!
If you’ve got it all covered then you can join our happy Santa on the beach
The most boring blog post ever?
On June 21st, 2009 Rob wrote on the subject of Legal and Financial.
Yes, this might indeed be the most boring blog post ever but it does have a point to make.
I recently copied the terms and conditions from www.lovefilm.com into a word document. Lo and behold, Word then revealed all the tracked changes that had been edited, presumably by Lovefilm’s lawyers.
Delightfully we are given an insight into the weasel legal world of small print; for example see how they have subtly shifted any responsibility for lost CD’s onto the member, sorry subscriber, rather than Lovefilm.
None of this is overly important, just a bit amusing but it also reveals the perils of copying and pasting from word into HTML and why you should always use a plain text editor instead.
If you’re interested, and if you are, do you have a life? – I was copying the text so that I could work out how they do their neat subscription model so that I could emulate the concept for one of our own projects.
Here are a couple of excerpts copied from http://www.lovefilm.com/info/terms_and_conditions.html
End
Boring but important – Changes to “place of supply” for VAT
On June 21st, 2009 Rob wrote on the subject of E-commerce,Legal and Financial.
VAT – are you preparing for new ‘place of supply’ rules?
Major changes in VAT legislation are on the way and it is essential that all businesses are prepared in advance to meet the requirements and avoid any possible financial penalties.
From 1st January 2010 there will be a change to the basic rule regarding the place of supply of services. This is the rule which identifies the country where services are deemed to have been ‘supplied’. Currently, if a supplier has established its business in the UK, then the place of supply will be deemed to be the UK and any services charged for will be subject to UK VAT. There are, however, numerous exceptions to this rule. Establishing whether a service falls under one of the exceptions – and if so, which one – constitutes a major headache for businesses.
The new basic rule states that if the recipient is a business customer then the place of supply is the country where the recipient belongs. Therefore, when the new rule applies, if a UK business supplies training services to a business customer in Spain and delivers the training in France then the place of supply will be Spain and the reverse charge will apply. The existing rules dictate that the place of supply is France, with the result that the UK business may need to register in France.
The new basic rule also states that if the recipient is not a business customer then the place of supply is the country where the supplier belongs.
As is now the case, there will be some exceptions, but these exceptions are in many cases different from those currently in force. It will be important to ascertain just how your business will be affected.
The changes may affect businesses which receive services from abroad. Such businesses may already account for VAT using the reverse charge mechanism, but may in future have to do this in situations where the reverse charge currently does not apply.
Another significant change, which is being introduced as an EU anti-fraud measure, relates to EC Sales Lists. Businesses supplying services to commercial customers in other EU countries will be affected. Currently, EC Sales Lists are required only for supplies of goods. Although this comes into force on 1st January 2010 you should be preparing now to collect the necessary data.
 The above was copied from an email sent to me by UK Training (Worldwide) Limited
Registered Office
4/5 The Mayflower,
Liverpool Road,
Formby,
L37 6BU.
Tel: +44 (0)1704 878988
Fax: +44 (0)1704 832124
http://www.uktrainingworldwide.com/index.asp
I have no association with them but the information is important to digest for anyone trading online.
As ever Datadial are here to assist you in implementing your e-commerce sites to the specification you desire.
Website FAIL – 30 Web Designs That Will Hurt Your Eyes
On June 9th, 2009 Matt wrote on the subject of Design.
Decent web design doesn’t cost too much these days. With the advent of WordPress and a plethora of free web templates it’s not that difficult to knock together a site that most web designers would be happy to call their own. For some reason there are those that strive to be different, difficult, or deluded.
Here are 30 of the worst sites bandwidth can buy.
Warning, be prepared to regret clicking this link! Seriously, epileptics beware! I’m not quite sure what was going though their minds when they thought this was a good idea.
http://www.paperrad.org/
I’m actually a fan of MIA, but this site seems to have been designed by the same guy as the site above, though possibly while drunk, asleep, or both.
http://www.miauk.com/
Evangel Cathedral is a church site that is in dire need of ADD medication – this site is buzzing, literally.
http://www.evangelcathedral.net/welcome.htm
You may need to take motion sickness medication to view the next site. I kept asking myself “Is THIS what Jesus would do?”
http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/
This site is actually amazing, there are no other words for it. Why procrastinate over going for a two or three column layout when you can go for five. It’s okay though we’ll make things simply by having 9 forms of navigation.
http://www.havenworks.com/
Sometimes I wonder if people are even looking at what they publish online?
http://home.texoma.net/~jimg/welcome.html
Bad site, but great product! Inflatable churches, shame it’s a whole six months to my next birthday.
http://www.inflatablechurch.com/
You’re looking forward to your big day as a bride. Who do you choose to take care of the outfits for your big day? The site that looks like it was designed by borderline crazy person of course. Missing plugins? I must be missing the one that makes this site readable.
http://yvettesbridalformal.com/
Bright colours hurt the eyes, and godawful design that scares small children. I had to highlight the text just to read it. Under construction apparently, maybe the best option would be to knock it down and start again. If I were a part of Princeton Consultants, I think I’d consider litigation.
http://home.comcast.net/~dmaneyapanda/zugorific/personal2.html
Broken links, and I’m not even sure what that is in the background. This site does partially redeem itself however by allowing the viewer to chose music, or not. Not I think.
http://ronoslund.com/
Lets see how many tables we can fit on a page. Oh look, that many.
http://www.huntgraphic.com/moto.htm
Perhaps not as offensive as the previous sites, this site definitely has been beaten with the ugly stick. I can’t believe they have the nerve to offer free backgrounds. That’s like Gordon Brown offering free PR advice.
http://members.tripod.com/fuzzymartian/
A big fat obnoxious site, with a monotonic robot voice. This page must have been designed by a former, disgruntled employee. Scrolling, flashing text and graphics actually made me have to take a break from researching this post.
http://www.esupersoft.com/lips/
If the appearance of this site means all officers are on the street protecting the citizens of West Virginia, rather than taking web design lessons, then it has my blessing.
http://www.martinsburgpd.org/
Never let so called ‘web conversion experts’ tell you that you shouldn’t put all of your products on one page. Why bother with layout, or indeed logic.
http://www.arngren.net/
Possibly not the worst site on the list, but hell, these guys are supposed to repair computers, not infect them with awful designs.
http://home.comcast.net/~computerphysicians/
This eyesore of a site at least has a nice dog picture- dogs win, web design loses.
http://frnz.de/
Jackson of Piccadilly does not fit in the ugly, flashy, boring or eye-popping categories. In fact, it is rather pretty. It has a lovely face, but no substance. Navigating this site made me want to reach for a coffee. I don’t even like coffee.
http://www.jacksonsofpiccadilly.co.uk/main.htm
As well as the wacky misspelling of the word “wizard” in the site’s name, this is a pretty gruesome site! Not the sort of design that would convince me that they’re the best people to stick a needle in my arm.
http://www.wizzardstattoo.com/
This guy actually does web design. In that case I’m a brain surgeon.
http://www.webking.com/computer-services/index.html
Does anyone have any idea what this site is even about? I really am at a loss.
http://bremen.weltregierung.org/abstraktindex.html
Someone thought that using a colour scheme based on a wounded zebra would be attractive.
http://www.izzza.com/
Maybe not typical of German efficiency and ingenuity, unless you count efficient as putting as many elements on the page as possible. Actually, maybe those crazy Germans have stumbled on something…….
http://www.ingenfeld.de/
A site of very few words. I guess they’re letting the pictures speak for themselves. I’m not sure why, but I feel a bit uncomfortable looking at this site. Maybe it’s becacuse I feel like I’m about to get run-over by those trucks.
http://www.mccormickrecovery.co.uk/
Yes, more frames, tables, bright colours, marquees, and flashing graphics – you’re spoiling us!
http://www.fabricland.co.uk/
This is actually Aaron Wall’s first site. I guess we all started off like this, myself included, mine just isn’t online anymore 
http://www.newnavy.us/
The sparse wasteland of this site is perhaps only rivalled by the grusome design of their building, which they seem to be very proud of for some reason.
http://cbm-eureka.com/
Does this chiropractic site instill trust? I think a good rule to live by is if someone can’t sort out text justification then you probably shouldn’t let them play with your spine.
http://www.proactivechiropractic.org/
With thanks to…..