A co-worker introduced me to ConceptShare yesterday, and I’m definitely going to be using for my next web project. It allows teams of people to organize, share, discuss and collaborate on ideas.
Obviously this could be used for many different projects, as you can see here, but for a web design contractor, this is dynamite. Anyone on the team can mark up and make notes alongside the comp, providing instant feedback without worrying about versions flying across the email wires.
Anybody need a website? I’m dying to use this now…
Search Engine Strategies has about 3-4 large conferences each year. I was fortunate enough to attend the New York conference back in 2005, but even when I can’t attend I love it because so much happens. Not only can you virtually attend almost all the sessions thanks to Barry’s awesome coverage of the show, but inevitably, search engines wait until SES to make big announcements. Here’s a few more reasons to follow the coverage:
- Concentrated gathering of industry experts. The panelists are hand-picked very knowledgable.
- Nuggets of gold in the Q/A time after each session
- Sometimes search engine reps have a slip of the tongue and reveal too much!
I would encourage all of you small business owners to take a few minutes and read one or two of the sessions at seroundtable.com from this week’s show. Have some questions? Leave a comment, or email me and I’ll be happy to answer. I love working in the SEO / SEM industry, but maybe even more, I enjoy educated and training people to understand and utilize search engine marketing to benefit their business.
For those of you who run PPC campaigns, Google and Yahoo have both recently launched click-quality microsites with information about PPC click fraud and what each is doing to combat it. I often get asked about click fraud, and whether someone should avoid PPC because of click fraud. What I believe, based on discussions with people “in the know”, is that click fraud exists but is much smaller a problem than the media would have you believe. Google and Yahoo both understand the gravity of the click fraud, and its in their best interest to make their PPC clicks as innocent as possible.
In the end, even if click fraud subtracts 5% of your total clicks, the overall ROI of your program should be relatively high. While it’s always hard to swallow a loss, the net gain of PPC advertising should more than make up for it.
Avinash Kaushik wrote a great piece today about the usefulness of the bounce rate metric. As someone who analyzes web traffic for hours each day, I can honestly say that bounce rate is probably my favorite metric, and has been for some time. I’ve often been curious why more marketers and analysts didn’t utilize it, as I find it to be a great indiciation of the quality of traffic a website is receiving. So I’m encouraged that bounce rate is getting more positive press now!
One question I always get when training people with Web Analytics is “What is a good bounce rate?”. That’s kinda like asking “What is a good IQ score?”. Higher, obviously! Well, in the case of a bounce rate, the lower the better (you know, like golf). And while a 0-5% bounce rate is almost impossible, it’s not uncommon for well marketed sites to have bounce rates below 25%.
When evaluating bounce rate, it’s important to evaluate each segment of traffic differently. For instance, you want your bounce rate from PPC traffic to be lower than SEO, because you are paying for every PPC visitor. While a 45% bounce rate from organic traffic might be acceptable, the same percentage from PPC traffic could indicate a need for some negative keywords or ad refinement.
Finally, bounce rate can be used to discover e-commerce roadblocks. For instance, if you find that your bounce rate is very low, but your conversion rate is still poor, that might be an indication of price shopping. Consider lowering your prices, or hooking visitors in with a free shipping coupon or discount.
Bounce rate is a great metric that can be used to easily evaluate visitor quality. Almost every respectable analytics software has bounce rate metrics, including the free Google Analytics package. I would recommend you add it to your analytics dashboards and see how it can help improve your online business.
