I’d like to talk about the conversion funnel.

Firstly, what is ‘the conversion funnel’? Well, the conversion funnel is the steps which a website visitor has to complete in order to fulfill your desired goal, whether the final outcome is a lead or a sale. Each step in this process is vital. After all, if a website visitor does not complete all of these, then the sale has not been made.

Most online marketers only look at the end result. However, it is important to consider the non-converting cases in order to discover at what stage the sale process was stopped. This information can then be used to improve the process and increase the conversion rate.

What happens if your website achieves a lot of downloads, but few sales? Could it be the checkout process? How secure does a user feel when they are completing their purchase? Are they been offered too many alternatives at this final step? These are all important questions to consider.

I believe in the KISS principle. Keep it simple, stupid. The fewer steps a website visitor needs to take to complete your desired goal, the better. Just by improving the final steps within your conversion funnel, you can greatly improve your overall conversion rate.

Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can track the user’s progress through the different stages the checkout process. This allows you to monitor your conversion funnel metrics and learn valuable information which can be used to improve your website.

From an SEO standpoint, the importance of having a blog on your website is paramount. Having a well written, industry-related blog will not only contribute to earning your site a higher Google ranking, but it will also dramatically increase traffic and maybe earn your site one or two extra inbound links.

Blogs are also an excellent way to keep informed about what’s happening in your industry. Starting the day by checking the industry related blogs like Inside Adwords and TechCrunch have began part of many people’s daily routine.

In fact, the pressure to turn out a daily blog has become so great that companies have begun adding blogging onto the job specifications of their SEO strategists. Some companies have even gone to such lengths as hiring bloggers specifically for the task of writing blogs for the company websites.

The quest for rankings causes its own set of problems as the Internet becomes saturated with copycat blog posts. The danger occurs when bloggers copy other blogs and post it as their own. If you find an interesting industry blog at your favourite blog site the chances are that you will find at least three other blog posts that have copied the original blog verbatim and published it under another name. The pressure to blog can sometimes lead some to these black hat tactics.

Micro-blogging, which has always thought to be a useful social networking tool, has emerged to be a source of marketing potential as well.

Micro-blogging websites like Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook are excellent applications to get your ideas and news out fast. These websites can be used as tools to make industry connections as well as to pass information to these connections quickly and en mass. With micro-blogging, you can keep track with what your connections are doing and vice versa.

It is no wonder that Google purchased Jaiku in October last year.

Google Analytics has introduced a data sharing policy which it says, will provide users with transparency, choice and improved product experience.

By sharing your analytics data with Google you are helping improve the products provided by the search engine. Users who opt to share their data with Google will have access to improved ad-specific services.

With Google Analytics Data Sharing you are able to share your data with Google and in return you are able to make use of benchmarking and have access to specific ads-related features such as Conversion Optimizer.

The Conversion Optimizer is an optional feature within AdWords which can automatically adjust your bids to maximize conversions at the minimum price. Currently, only users who opt to share their data with Google are eligible to use this feature.

To share your data, go to the Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings page within your account to opt in to sharing your data “With Google products only” or “Anonymously with Google products”.

If you select “do not share my Google Analytics data” in your Data Sharing Settings, you will not be able to use benchmarking or any of the other improved ad-specific features.

You can also choose to share your data anonymously. Google will remove all identifiable information about you and your website and then combine the data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in similar industries and then place this data in an aggregate form.

Google Analytics Data Sharing will not affect a customer’s existing account without express and explicit permission.

Clicks2Customers has joined forces with yet another high flying client - innovative local airline Kulula.com

Clicks2Customers has just signed Kulula.com as a client to increase search-engine traffic to its online travel website.

www.kulula.com offers low cost domestic airfares as well as package deals which include car hire and hotel bookings. Kulula is currently South Africa’s biggest online retailer, with over R1.3 billion in revenue generated via its Website annually.

Carl Scholtz, Kulula’s executive manager of IT, said: “Kulula turned to Clicks2Customers because of its reputation and expertise in online marketing and managing pay-per-click campaigns, especially in the travel and tourism sectors.”

Clicks2Customers has had an excellent success rate with travel websites and is keen to use this expertise to increase the awareness of Kulula’s products and services.

The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to increase the visibility of your website by achieving a very high ranking in the SERPS (Search Engine Results pages) by ensuring the most pertinent keywords describing the content of your site are effectively used throughout.

The higher up the search results you appear the more likely it is that prospective customers will find and visit your website.

The latest Comscore data tells us that 91% of Internet users use search engines. Websites are a dime a dozen so being on page 2 is just not good enough. People trust Google to give them the top 10 options and rarely search further.

The world of SEO cannot be fully explained in one blog post alone, but just employing the basic principles listed below will make a difference to the performance of your website.

So how can SEO improve your website over that of your competition?

Here are the fundamentals behind any SEO campaign:

• The first and most important component of your site is content.

Your website needs to have relevant and original content that accurately describes what your company is about. Google will know if you have plagiarized content from someone else. The more unique, content-rich pages your website contains, the better chance your website has of achieving a better ranking.

• Keywords

You need to identify what keywords best describe your company or what keywords you are going to be using as search terms. Once you have done this you need to incorporate these keywords into the content (if you have not done so already) and metadata without overdoing it. You don’t want to run the risk of spamming the search engine. So write for humans, not search engines!

• Links

The third step is to identify which websites to partner with your site. The more quality inbound links your website has, the better chance you have of increasing your Google ranking and as a result, your inbound traffic. An important point to remember is that quality is better than quantity - it doesn’t matter how many inbound links your site has, what matters is their site ranking.

Adding a few outbound links won’t hurt either, it proves you know who else has great content, but not too many. SEO isn’t an exact science, but its best to keep it simple. What you want is a clean, easy to navigate, content-rich website that is relevant and does what it advertises. You want the client to leave happy, and if possible, having bought something.

Good SEO doesn’t happen overnight and despite popular belief, it isn’t free either. If you’ve done your job well your website will rank and you will have increasing incoming queries, sales, website conversions and blog comments.

Your website is an investment. SEO is there to help your website be better than all the other websites out there. With a little time and money it can be.

For anyone who has ever uploaded a video into YouTube knows, the question that has always been unanswerable is “How do I find out who watches my video?”

Finally, YouTube has volunteered a solution to this problem to the delight to thousands of its subscribers.

On the 26 March, YouTube launched YouTube Insight, a free analytics tool modelled on Google Analytics. The tool is designed to help subscribers understand more about where the viewers watching their videos are and how those viewers found their videos.

Insight enables YouTube subscribers to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload into the site. This information, previously unavailable to YouTube users, allows subscribers to monitor how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

Using these metrics, YouTube subscribers can increase their videos’ view counts and improve their popularity on the site.

Now, the makers of the videos can watch those watching them.

A colleague recommended that I take a look a free SEO tool available at http://www.websitegrader.com

If you want to do a quick SEO analysis of a website all you need to do is paste the URL of the website into the box provided and click at the bottom of the page. Within seconds you have a detailed report of the website which includes an on-page and off-page SEO analysis of the metadata, traffic rank, the date of the last Google crawl, Google rank, Blog information and readability level. The report even gives your website a grade.

The website grader is completely free and is a fantastic tool to test whether or not your webpage is looking the way it should be. It’s very simple to use and doesn’t contain a lot of jargon so even if you don’t know a lot about SEO the report will give you valuable pointers on how to improve your website.

I ran a test on the Clicks2Customers website and was pleased to see that we had result of ninety-five out of hundred. Our Google page rank is six and our blog and RSS feed earned our site some extra points. What was interesting to find was our traffic rank. According to http://www.websitegrader.com, our website has an Alexa rank of 256,529 which is in the top 2.14% of all websites.

Website Grader does give you option to track your competitors web activity as well which makes a very handy tool to have.

Without Website Analytics search marketers would only be obsessed with generating endless amounts of traffic.

There are many analytics tools on the internet that a webmaster or analyst could use to monitor where their traffic is coming from and how users navigate through their website.

Personally, I just make use of Google Analytics and also sometimes install CrazyEgg.

Most of you probably know what Google Analytics is all about, so I am going to focus on CrazyEgg.

One of the main features of CrazyEgg is the Heatmap, in fact this is the main reason why I sometimes include CrazyEgg on the websites I build.

In a nutshell the Heatmap allows you to see what’s hot and what’s not and it illustrates this is such an easy way to analyze.

I think CrazyEgg is a very important tool for webmasters that care about what their users do and in return aim at optimizing usability for their users.

I noticed the other day, CrazyEgg promoting a new feature called Confetti. According to their website, this allows you to dig a little deeper and find out where people click based upon things like: Top 15 Referrers, Search Terms, Operating System, Browser etc.

Although CrazyEgg is not a completely a free service, it does a allow you to track 5000 visitors per month.

With the combination of these two services (Google Analytics and CrazyEgg), I can get many useful bits of information from my website visitors.

This is just really a simple introduction, most analytics services offer a lot of more information including Bounce Rate, Top Entry and Exit pages and also allow you to setup goals. I will write more about this in another post, so watch this space.

The whole idea behind a negative match is to cut out irrelevant impressions, and possible clicks, on your advertisements. Irrelevant clicks are similar to unwanted customers, or even shoplifters coming to your store. Of course, if you’re running a large campaign thats generating a lot of traffic, it becomes difficult to monitor your traffic.

This brings me to my principle argument. Negative matching is not always a helpful procedure, and in fact, if done wrong will ultimately be damaging to your campaign bottom line. For instance, if I’m selling goods for a merchant who sells organic products, but does not stock pumpkin seeds, I will most likely have to use negative matching for certain keywords. I’ve structured my account in such a way that I have made one campaign for organic skin products, and another for various organic food products. Now to the negative matching. Instead of running negative matches on [pumpkin seeds], [cheap pumpkin seeds], and [what are pumpkin seeds], I simply need to broad match the negative keyword ‘pumpkin’ on a campaign level.

The more complex negative matching happens when you have conflicting keywords in similar campaigns. For instance, your food campaign contains different brands of poppy seeds, as well as various brands of sunflower seeds. ‘Organix’ has both types of seeds, while ‘Natures Way’ has only sunflower seeds. Broad negative matching on a campaign level, for either the brand, or product in this case creates a problem. In this situation negative matching should ideally be done on an ad group level, using broad match types.

For a campaign with 100 000 keywords though, where the merchant has a vast product line, this process is very time consuming. The ideal is that you want to cover the long tail of negative matches, giving you a high CTR, with relevant copy, and a great landing page for every keyword you’re running, but more often than not, the time requirements of these bigger campaigns do not allow for this. If you don’t have the time for group level negative matching, then the second best thing is to look at your high density and high traffic keywords…either before or after the campaign has launched.

If it’s before the campaign launch, you can use Google’s traffic estimator tool (allows for bulk operations), and then run your high traffic keywords through the keyword tool. In this case you can do some head negative matching pretty quickly for all your high traffic terms.

If you want to do negative matching afterwards, take your existing information on your high impression keywords as a pointer of where the work needs to be done.

Lastly, with regards to negative matching for newly generated keywords. Personally, I feel that instead of exact negative matching all keyword terms that are irrelevant, I would firstly look for patterns in your irrelevant keywords that you could generate strong broad negative matches for. This will get to the root of the word, and avoid any possible misspellings/variations that could come up the next time you do new keyword research. By simply running exact negative matches, you are not accounting for the sheer amount of semantic variation that Google has to deal with on a day to day basis.

Any other thoughts on improving your CTR through negative matching?

Thanks to Vinny for this one, I just had to post it almost as is - a great repository of CSS goodies, not to mention the rest the site has to offer:

CSS is important. And it is being used more and more often. Cascading Style Sheets offer many advantages you don’t have in table-layouts - and first of all a strict separation between layout, or design of the page, and the information, presented on the page. Thus the design of pages can be easily changed, just replacing a css-file with another one. Isn’t it great? Well, actualy, it is.

Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without. They are essential and they indeed make our life easier. Let’s take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites. - http://www.smashingmagazine.com

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/19/53-css-techniques-you-couldnt-live-without/