If we reconsider our approach we can help to shape the Web of the future.

In the last few months, there have been several articles on the evolving nature of the Web: from responsive design to new terms like future friendly. All of these articles point to a central thesis: the Web is becoming a more fluid, adaptable place where content is going to be consumed in every format imaginable. It’s only a matter of time before this becomes a reality. As such, we as designers will be looked to more than ever in influencing the lifecycle of products as content is accessed across multiple devices.

The Web is changing and designers can help change it.

Here’s a few ways how.

1. Get Involved in Planning

Much of the fate of a website’s success is determined in the planning process. Designers, and the project, benefit immensely from involving themselves as much as possible during this phase of work to iron out goals, desires, expectations and other variables. Designers adept at creating visual order out of a mess of information will be the most successful. We are, by nature, problem solvers and by being involved in planning designers can help focus the project so that it delivers the best solution possible.

Let’s face it; we often know exactly what is needed to move a project forward.

So, in this sense, being involved in the planning process from the beginning allows clients to get on board with the designer and share their vision in the earliest phase of the project, establishing a clear communication and exchange of ideas that is beneficial to all other  team members.

Designers must be proactive about involvement in planning, not only to educate the client about the process, but so they can make better decisions and learn from other team members.

2. Do Research

As nice as being a part of the planning phase is, it doesn’t always happen. When this is the case, designers should perform their own research in order to truly understand how to best execute a design successfully. As part of a collaborative, specialized team, it is the designer’s responsibility to know what works best visually. This means performing due diligence to understand the competitive landscape of their clients. Your research should uncover insights into what other sites are doing so it can be matched, and what they do not so it can be surpassed.

Also, meet with those stakeholders in order to solidify a unified direction on projects. This kind of approach will help narrow the field of variables while creating a design. It also allows the designers to make decisions based on facts and helps keep the project focus on meeting business and client needs.

3. Justify Decision Making

While this is an obvious point, it can be easily overlooked. It’s easy to forget that, as designers, our work should be end-goal and action oriented as well as beautiful. Design should be purposeful and powerful.

Designers must be prepared to justify design decisions, and the deeper the justification the better. As an example, consider how Sabina Alder, in an article on Designing Emotion into websites, lays out clearly how people experience websites based on levels of consciousness. This is a relatively new approach also practiced by Aarron Walter and Don Norman and is helping to arm the design community with ways to satisfy client needs and creative urges through an understanding of human psychology and decision making.

It points out that well designed websites have elements that serve specific psychological needs for users that we should always consider in order to make better products. Approaches and frameworks like this – or others you may appreciate in your own process – enable us to check work against specific goals and benchmarks. Remember, while we are paid for our creative capacities, the client wants that creative output to produce some sort of ROI.

4. Think About Content

Content will always be king. Websites cannot exist without it. One of the major trends of the moment is a move towards “future ready” Web design practices where we fully acknowledge that content will literally go everywhere there’s an end user waiting to consume it. Strategists are pushing ideas such as content like water, where content is so fluid and malleable that it can easily move into any glass (translation: browser or device) that the user is operating.

A great example of this is the NPR Music experience. Their content is accessible via website, smart phone,  iPad apps, newsfeeds, podcasts and traditional radio. There is a seamless experience across devices. How content would be shared across these devices was clearly an up-front consideration for the NPR design team and the result is one of the best content driven user experiences I can think of.

It’s obvious the designers really thought and researched how their work supports content in a very contextual and specific manner. This is a great example of how designs can be truly strategic instead of being developed with generic content in mind. Instead, it is dependent upon and influenced by the content that lives there so as to never constrain it. It supports and makes access to content easier.

Design is all about assets and content is the most important asset of all. The earlier this is discussed and formulated, the better the design will be. The last thing you want is to spend weeks on an aesthetically inventive, beautiful looking site only to have the client’s demand a redesign because it didn’t get their desired results.

Conclusion

As we can see, the Web is changing. It’s going to be everywhere before we know it and there is an opportunity to be involved heavily in steering it in the direction we want it to go. As designers, doing this means contributing beyond the aesthetic level and thinking about the full lifecycle of products. There are a myriad of ways for us to work more strategically and I have only scratched the surface here. However, this proactive design attitude is good not only for  a designer’s careers, but will lead to better client/agency relationships, and more successful projects with higher rates of ROI. It will also help facilitate a more successful online experience for everyone. Not to mention, a more strategic approach will position designers to become more influential in the decision making process, and conversely the future of the Web.

(I will assume that you know the basics of setting up your Google Analytics already, including goal tracking. It’s pretty well explained in the GA Getting Started section.)

1. Don’t get hijacked

When you add GATC to your website, anyone can come and copy that code, put it on their website and have their pageviews show up in your reports. Just what you need! You probably don’t want your data to be rendered useless by random pageviews. Avoid that trouble by only tracking pageview data from the domain(s) you wish to track. Setup the following filter in your profile:

2. Filter out internal IPs and known visitors

Your sales people and other internal team members are likely to be visiting your website on a frequent basis and browsing the website in a particular pattern. You don’t want their traffic to be diluting the patterns of the potential customers you’re trying to analyze on your website. One of the most effective ways of solving this issue is to filter out the office’s IP range. That can be accomplished in the following way:

Check out the Google Analytics tool that can help you write regular expressions to help cover an IP range.

Sometimes, though, you’ll have cases where people in your organization have dynamic IPs that change all the time. For those folks, you’ll want to create a unique page (say “/remove-from-ga.html”) for them to visit that places them in a Custom Variable that you can, in turn, filter out from your reports. You can go about this by adding the following line to your GATC (before _trackPageview) on the unique page to send to those you wish to exclude from  your reports:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Internal Team','Exclude',1]);

Then go into your filters and do this:

3. Track views of 404 pages

Although many tools can provide you with 404 errors by crawling your website, it’s a good idea to track how many error pages your visitors actually see. You can do this by adding the following GATC to your error page header template. What it does is appends a unique name to the beginning of the URL so that you can quickly filter those pages and figure out what the requested URL is in each case. To find the URLs that are being reached and giving a 404 error, simply run a table filter in your content section of Google Analytics.

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','/404errorpage/' +document.location.pathname+document.location.search']);

4. Monetize your goals, even if you don’t sell anything

That’s right. Even if your goals include things like the filling out of a contact us form, the clicking of a mailto: link, or the download of a PDF, you should be adding a monetary value to each conversion in Google Analytics. Come up with a number based on roughly how much revenue is made per 100 converions of X and dividing by 100. At the least, give the lowest value goal the value of 1 and work up from there. To setup your goals with monetary values, simply go into your goals area in the Admin section and add in the values:

The reason this is so important is because it will give your visitors, traffic sources, and pages all a value (besides conversion %) that is far more granular than what you’ll have with no goal monetization.

Want to take it a bit further? Setup your non-ecommerce website as though it were an e-commerce website. The main benefit of this is to not be restrained by the 20 goals allotted for in GA and to be able to track many more different types of goals as products, each with varying monetary values.

5. Tag URLs with campaign parameters

Whenever you have the power to do so, add URL tags to your links so that your traffic sources are as accurate as possible. You should be tagging the following types of links with campaign parameters:

• Emails, Tweets (before links get shortened) and other social shares, RSS (can be done through Feedburner), links in digital documents (.docs, .pdfs), TV ads (using redirects from vanity URLs or custom subdirectories), QR codes, and anything else you can think of where someone might click a link to come to your website.

The best way to organize your campaign tags are to standardize them so that you do not have an overabundance of mediums. Those should be kept at a minimum: email, docs, social, etc.

To help with tagging your URLs, you can use the Google URL Builder.

With those tips, you should be off to a good start. I will be adding five more on May 15. If you have any questions, please comment below or find me @alhankeser.

If you have not already, get a copy of Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics for a complete guide to everything GA-related.

If you have a one-page form, then all you have is the percentage of form fills to go by. And for the multi-page forms, you can take a look at your goal funnel report to find out what pages are causing abandons. But what about looking at each form field separately as a step in the funnel process, whether you have a one-page or multi-page form?

The tips below will give you the ability to track each form field as a virtual pageview and thus create either one or multiple conversion funnels.

Before we get started, let’s cover some precautions of using this technique. Tracking each form field as a pageview is likely to have the following effects on your overall analytics data:

• It will decrease time on page statistics.
• It will inflate pages/visit.
• It will influence your page depth reports.
• It will affect your goal flow reports.
• And more.

For these reasons, I advise doing two things when tracking form fields as pageviews:

• Use a separate profile to track your form field-generated pageviews and create your conversion funnels in there.
• Create a filter to exclude form field-generated pageviews from the profile(s) where you track site-wide numbers. A filter like this might do the trick for you:

Let’s get started.

Implementation:

1. Add the following code to your form fields. What this does is create a virtual pageview every time someone clicks out of a form field (using onBlur). You can also trigger the virtual pageviews when people click into fields using onFocus, but it has a tendency to mess up funnels on the last step where the visitor will click into your last field (trigger the last field pageview) then click out of that field to review their form (thus viewing your form page again). Whereas, with onBlur, that sequence of events is less likely to cause funnel reporting issues. You will want to edit what comes after _trackPageview to be what URL you want showing up in your reports for each field.

<form action="submitted.php" method="post" name="testform">

<input name="firstname" type="text" onBlur="if(document.testform.firstname.value != '');_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','/form/firstname'])">

<input name="lastname" type="text" onBlur="if(document.testform.lastname.value != '');_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','/form/lastname'])">

<input name="email" type="text" onBlur="if(document.testform.email.value != '');_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','/form/email'])">

<input name="Send" type="submit" />

2. Setup your conversion funnels. Since Google Analytics limits you to 10 steps per funnel, when dealing with long forms, you have a few options:

• Only add some of your fields as funnel steps. For example, rather than adding First Name and Last Name, only add the Last Name field and call that funnel step “Name”. Then instead of tracking each field of an address section, count that as one step in the process. You get the idea. The caveat here is that this can defeat the whole purpose of doing this in the first place by providing generic data that isn’t as actionable, especially when dealing with really large forms. I would say use this in situations where one field really is not a major pain point and where it doesn’t make sense to create multiple funnels to track a form due to it’s small size (say 11-15 fields).
• The other approach is to create separate conversion funnels for separate parts of your form. This is especially practical when your form is broken-up into multiple pages that you want to see as separate funnels.

3. Look at your reports and start optimizing those form fields!

• For tricks to improve web form design and the likehood that visitors will fill them out, take a look at 10 Ideas to Design a Better Sign-Up Form and Web Form A/B Testing: How I Increased Form Fills by 37%.
• For more ideas on how to better track your website analytics, pick up a copy of Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. It’s a great read for anyone who’s just starting off with GA or looking to fill in gaps of knowledge.

If you have any questions, please comment below or find me on Twitter @alhankeser.

The original example for this came from Brian Clifton’s newly published Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, which we’ve been reading here at BFM. We realized that there were a few small omissions in the jscript provided on page 250 (in 2012 edition) so we have corrected those below.

Objective:

Track when a visitor clicks to play a video and whether they watch it until the end. You’ll be able to see this in your Google Analytics reports in your Events section:

Implementation:

1. Place your usual Google Analytics tracking code (asynchronous) in your header.

2. Create an empty div element within the body, with an id of “player”. This is where your YouTube video will be placed shortly.

<div id="player"></div>

3. Make a script tag, and insert the YouTube iframe player API code. Don’t close the script tag, there’s still more to do.

<script> 

var tag = document.createElement('script'); 

tag.src = "http://www.youtube.com/player_api"; 

var firstScriptTag = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; 

firstScriptTag.parentNode.insertBefore(tag, firstScriptTag);

4. Create the iframe and player. Replace the ‘zLQFkztsozw’ with your video ID tag and customize your video height and width requirements.

var player; 

function onYouTubePlayerAPIReady() { 

player = new YT.Player('player', { 

height: '390', 

width: '640', 

videoId: 'zLQFkztsozw', 

events: { 

'onReady': onPlayerReady, 

'onStateChange': onPlayerStateChange 

} 

}); 

}

function onPlayerReady(event) { 

/// event.target.playVideo(); 

} 

5. Use the onPlayerStateChange method to look for events, such as the video starting or stopping. You can also close the script tag here.

function onPlayerStateChange(event) { 

if (event.data ==YT.PlayerState.PLAYING) 

{_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 

player.getVideoUrl() ]); } 

if (event.data ==YT.PlayerState.ENDED) 

{_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Watch to End', 

player.getVideoUrl() ]); } } 

</script>

I hope that this helps you get a better insight into how users are interacting with your YouTube video content embedded on your website. If you have any questions, please comment below!

So don’t sell your findings short with bolded text or bullet points at the bottom of a page. Instead, spend a few extra minutes “painting a picture.” In other words, try to simplify your results and clearly convey your message with the use of a chart, graph, or if you can, “infographic.”

Here are five graphical examples I often use to help show value and drive home the message. Note: The companies mentioned below were chosen at random and currently have no affiliation with The ROI Factor.

1. Ratio of Page 1 to Page 2 Keywords

What’s Needed: Web analytics or use of a third party competitor analysis data like “SEMRush.”
Purpose: Show the ratio of keywords on page 1 of Google SERPs to keywords on page 2.
Position: According to “SEMRush,” LegalMatch.com has approximately 16,000 keyword phrases ranking in Google’s Top 20 search results.
Result: 61% of these keywords rank below position 10 – meaning a majority of LegalMatch’s ranking keywords appear on Page 2 of Google’s search results.

Next Steps: Focus on optimizing “page 2” keywords for search engines in an effort to increase their rankings and ultimately increase targeted traffic to the website.

2. Increased Keyword Rankings to Increased Revenue

What’s Needed: Web analytics, # of visits, average sale, and conversion rates relating to specific keyword phrases. And a calculator.
Purpose: Show the potential increase in revenue with an increase in search engine rankings for specific keywords.
Position: This client has revenue generating keywords ranking in the middle of page one and on page two netting them $314,000 over the course of six months.
Result: By increasing the rankings for just these five keywords to position 2, they can expect an increase in revenue of approximately $1.9 million.  That’s a 400% increase in six months.  BOOM!

Next Steps: Look to improve SEO efforts around these keywords as well as others.

3. Your Links VS. Competitor Links

What’s Needed: Third party software that analyzes links.
Purpose: Show link earning potential for Sony.
Position: According to “Open Site Explorer,” Samsung’s website has a higher number of linking domains (which is likely contributing to better search engine rankings). Approximately 25,000 domains are “shared” – linking to both Samsung and Sony.
Result: We identified approximately 52,000 domains linking to Samsung that are NOT linking to Sony. These are potential link partners for Sony.

Next Steps: Identify link-building patterns employed by Samsung and see if they can be applied to Sony. Cherry-pick potential link partners for Sony. Run the same analysis on other competitors.

4. Search Interest over Time

What’s Needed: Target keywords, Google Insights, and the ability to take a screenshot.
Purpose: Show Seasonality in Search Volume. Use it to inform proper allocation of advertising budgets in paid search and display. Can also help time the implementation of social media strategies.
Situation: Search interest for “cheap hotels” starts to increase during the holiday months of November and December, stabilizes in March and April, and then begins to peak from May through July. July also marks the beginning of a downtrend in search volume with October typically showing the least search interest for this keyword phrase.
Result: There are clear trends in the seasonality of search volume for keywords relating to “cheap hotels.”

Next Steps: Plan advertising budgets and social media strategies accordingly.

5. Regional Interest

What’s Needed: Again – Target keywords and Google Insights. Hint: Play with the filters to get more recent metrics (I.e. in the “last twelve months”) and drill down to specific regions to get even more granular in your geotargeting.
Purpose: Target specific regions, subregions, and cities where significant search interest is present. Use it to inform proper allocation of advertising budgets in paid search and display. Can also help advise local SEO and social media strategies.
Situation: In the past 12 months, search interest for “cheap hotels” has been highest in the metro areas of Miami, Fresno, and Las Vegas. In Miami, we can see that this is even further segmented to Key Biscayne, Miami Beach and other cities.
Result: Naturally, the search terms’ popularity varies by region.

TEXT

In closing, Don’t slack on your presentation!  We want “Aha!” moments…  We want our audience leaving the presentation understanding the benefits, ramifications, consequences and implications of taking (or not taking) action.  Paint a simple picture.  Get them there quicker.  Make it stick!

Ninjas, gurus and other authorities in the arena of social media have been preaching about community and engagement since its inception, and rather than go into a discussion of Leonardo Di Caprio’s career or what the number 528491 means, I thought that, due to some news from a certain company based in Oregon, it would be apropos to give an example that any business can review, borrow or flat out use to its advantage.

The company being referenced is NIKE, Inc. – a company which has only recently adopted the technique of communicating with customers using the full suite of popular social media channels company-wide. While their lack of official presence in the social media world may have baffled some for a while, the one major understanding NIKE had (and has) is of the importance of community. Many of NIKE’s footwear have become must-have items in pop culture. Air Jordans, Dunks, Air Force Ones and the like have huge followings and when news of a new release is dropped, throngs of brand advocates show up to the nearest shoe store to become customers once again. Recent history has shown that the broadcast of such news has been through social media outlets by influencers, insiders and fans and now NIKE is positioned to distribute this knowledge directly.

To show off their newest digital presence in the U.S., NIKE has introduced Twitter RSVP to assist in the management of their product launches at physical, brick-and-mortar Nike Stores. Sneaker enthusiasts simply:

• follow their nearest Nike (owned) Store on Twitter;
• watch for the store to send an RSVP tweet on the designated RSVP day; and
• respond via direct message with the product specific hashtag, last four digits of their ID number and shoe size.

Those who respond within sixty minutes of said tweet are eligible and the footwear is awarded on a “first respond, first serve” basis. Confirmed recipients, then pick up their kicks on the day of the store launch at the specified timeframe in person and with proof of ID.

Do you see what they did there?

They’ve engaged their community using a particular social media channel, added a contest/goal-oriented atmosphere in order to gather response from the audience ultimately concluding with a sale. No, that was not a random amalgam of business related buzz terms—this is the purpose of social media marketing.

While it is true that many companies may not be able to see the ROI of their social media campaign as immediately as a company such as Nike, what we must look at is the process and how it works. The strength of this community is what made this campaign possible and social media is a great way to build a group like this. Through social media you can be empathetic with your community; you can listen to the good and the bad to make your product and experience better; you can further engage with insiders, enthusiasts and advocates. All of these activities help build trust in your brand and that is the most effective way for the sales process to begin. Additionally, these digital activities, along with your direct mail, advertising, face-to-face and other forms of communication bring something even more important to the table when done correctly: lifetime customer value—and isn’t that what we ultimately want?

I know I do.

The Nike Swoosh is a registered trademark of, owned by and the property of NIKE, Inc.

This ultimately gives me an idea of a competitor’s link building strategies, what’s successful, and how I can exploit it for my own benefit. More often than not, this will also help synthesize content strategies (to complement link building efforts) and is a great precursor to identifying the keywords we will use alongside search operators (like intitle:, inurl:, allinanchor, etc.).

Queue the almighty spreadsheet! Yes – an Achilles heel to creativity but a marketer’s best friend to data analysis. First –export a competitor’s backlink data using a “Pro” account from Open Site Explorer (there is a free trial available). Another free “link exporter” can be found at LinkDiagnosis.com (install the Firefox extension for more robust reporting). Tip: be sure to export links from all pages on the root domain as this will give us backlink data for internal pages as well as the homepage.

Format the data to a table. This will make it easier to sort the data and apply formulas en masse.

 Sort by Anchor Text.  This is a great way to quickly identify where link building efforts around target keywords are taking place.  Make note of the groups of anchor text that are keyword focused.  In other words, look for groups of anchor text that exclude the company name.

Sort by Landing Page URL.  I usually find this to be the most efficient way for spotting trends.  After all, it is a dead giveaway on which internal pages are getting links.  An important level of distinction however, lies in whether those links are a result of great content or through general outreach.  The former will better tip you on a link building strategy and the underlying content that is link-worthy.

Sort by .EDU / .Gov / .Org.  This can be done by selecting the entire column of backlinks and then utilizing the “Conditional Formatting” feature in Excel.  Create a new formatting rule for each domain extension.  For example, format the cells that contain specific text containing “.edu.”

Then format the text to a specific color and sort the column by the desired color.  This will give you an idea of any .edu link citations and patterns that coincide.

 Sort by File Path (Text-To-Columns).  In order to sort by file path, we’ll need to convert all the backlinks to columns within Excel.  For this I recommend copying the backlinks into a separate column and removing all instances of “http://www.” and “http://”. The “Text to Columns” feature can be found under the ‘Data’ tab.  Use the backslash (“/”) as a delimiter.

Segmenting and then sorting the file paths will give us a bird’s eye view of any link patterns. Using this method, I’m often able to quickly spot and organize links from blogs, articles, forums, feeds, link pages, magazines, news sources, etc.

Overall, these four approaches will help uncork dozens of link building strategies in a short amount of time. For instance, in recent months I was able to quickly spot some of the following strategies:

• EDU links obtained through donating to and/or sponsoring university clubs or their peripheral sport teams (i.e. fraternities, chess club, ski teams).
• Allowing bloggers and other relevant publishers to utilize your unique images in return for a link.
• Participating in discussion forums hosted by universities.
• Making it easier for EDU’s to associate with your website by offering an educational grant or college scholarship.
• Creating useful online tools that are free to use (ie. calculators, drop boxes, image editors).

Most of these strategies are widely known but taking this macro approach to analyzing backlink profiles is a great way to ensure your own long-term strategy isn’t lacking. It is also important to note that you can (and should) take this approach beyond direct competitors. Some of the strongest strategies may live in spaces outside your specific niche – so analyzing a non-competitor in a highly competitive industry (like travel or finance) is a great way to gain an edge on additional link building strategies.

* The following post originally appeared on the BFM blog in 2010.

A few members of the Blue Fountain Media team asked me to put together a few tips for landing page optimization, so I figured why not go all the way and make an extensive list of tips all in one place.

What I am considering as a landing page here is a page that resides outside of your website, as a page to send targeted traffic, typically from advertising. I have grouped my tips by “principles”, “elements”, “writing”, and “design”. You will find that there is some repetition since some of the tips refer to general principles of landing pages.

If you have more to add, please comment on the post or @reply me on Twitter!

Principles

• As Loveday and Niehaus note in Web Design for ROI, your landing page is like an ambassador, concierge, and superstar salesperson rolled into one. “It’s been carefully crafted to meet, assist, and convert visitors into customers.”
• Your landing page should correspond to whatever the intent of the user is as they visit the page.
• Your landing page should look legitimate.
• Your landing page should be built keeping in mind what the user wants to see, not what you want them to see. Answer the question, “what does my audience really care about?”
• Your landing page should satisfy user expectations.
• Your landing page should reflect your business goals.
• Your landing page should be able to perform the entire sales process. That means offering something that interests the user, keeps them on the page, and makes them want to take an action such as fill out a form or pay.
• Your landing page should capture a visitor’s attention quickly. You only have a few seconds from the moment a user lands on the page to when they click the “back” button.
• Build your landing page assuming that it’s the first time they’ve heard of your company.
• Your landing page should be a continuation of your advertising. Keep your messaging and call to action consistent from your ad to your landing page.
• Your landing page should keep any promises made by your advertising.
• Make the landing page appear personalized to the user.
• Show, don’t tell.
• Although not a landing pages per se, consider every page on your regular website as a landing page – each with a mission to move the visitor along down the path you have chosen.
• Don’t assume anything – always be testing.
• Good design helps support good content.
• Test every element of your landing page to continually improve conversion rates.
• Show your landing page to many different people to get feedback.
• Reduce the options on the page – there should only be one or two ways out (besides the back and close buttons).
• Track all interactions with your landing page through event and conversion funnel tracking.
• Track times of day and results associated to each hour/day.
• Create separate landing pages for each source of traffic. This will really help with tracking.
• Choose the right type of landing page: contest signup, ebook/whitepaper download, register for an event/webinar, consultation request, discount coupon, start a free trial, be notified of a launch, get a gift through the mail.
• If you are advertising for both desktop and mobile devices, ensure that you have separate pages for handle each type of device in an optimal fashion. An iPhone user should not be sent to a page that has been built for a desktop computer.
• Create different landing pages and offers for different sizes and types of potential clients. One size does not fit all.

Elements

• Highlight benefits, instead of just listing features.
• Provide positive feedback, testimonials, awards, certifications from well-known sources and satisfied customers. Do not go overboard here – curate your list to display the most convincing positive re-enforcement
• Give your customers a clear call to action.
• Use a secondary call to action in the case that visitors are not ready to go through with your primary call to action.
• Give an off-line alternative to users such as a phone number.
• Include videos if they help explain an idea. Otherwise, use an image that can perform the same task.
• Display security badges such as Verisign, eTrust, and McAfee
• On viral landing pages, make sure that you treat your share options as though they were secondary calls to action.
• Give away something useful and relevant on your confirmation page.
• Show a phone number and address.
• Don’t use pop-ups.
• If your page has audio, mute it by default with a clear way to turn up the sound.

Design

• Test your landing page in multiple browsers to ensure that it maintains its professionalism.
• Make your design appropriate for your industry. When you’re trying to sell financial services, don’t use glittering, pink bears in your background image.
• Get rid of the main navigation you would typically find on your website.
• Simplify your design to reduce distractions and place the focus on the specific offer, product, or service that you are selling.
• Don’t supersize your logo. Your landing page is about your offer, not your company.
• If you are doing banner advertising to send traffic to a page, use similar imagery on your landing page as is used in the banner ad.
• Use fewer images, but be selective. Choose images that make a convincing point.
• Bold keywords in sentences for people who skim through text.
• Repeat your call to action throughout your page if it requires scrolling so always provide a next step for the visitor.
• Avoid “false bottoms”, or design elements that make it look like a user has reached the bottom of a page. Break up those elements with an image or a title so as to indicate continued content below the fold.
• Do not ask for more information than is absolutely necessary from your users.
• Make page elements look like what they are. If a button is a button, make it look like one, otherwise don’t make images that are not clickable, look clickable. Same goes for links. Be very obvious with all page elements and use conventions.
• Look at your competitors and ask yourself what you would change about their landing pages.
• Keep elements that are critical to conversions in the upper 300 pixels of the page. Most users will not scroll past the fold.
• Use ample white space between content to encourage reading.
• Make your page load fast.
• Keep in mind the F-Shaped pattern in which users tend to read web content.
• Use the same colors, fonts, and styles in your landing page as you did in your ad.
• Place most important messages closer to middle of page, secondary information in sidebars.
• Make your web form easy to complete. If possible, place the cursor into the first field, allow for tabbing from field to field, avoid dropdowns – only use radio buttons, and – whenever possible – auto-populate fields.
• If you are using Google AdWords and your page relies heavily on images, make sure you have search engine-readable text that matches your ad copy. This is for Quality Score purposes.
• If there is ancillary information that may take up a lot of space and should only be shown to those who really want to see, use either on-hover info bubbles or daughter windows.
• Super-size buttons. You do want people clicking on them, right?
• When there is a form involved, be sure to highlight benefits directly in relation to the form, next to the form.
• Give the eye one thing to focus on.
• Use color to make your call to action stand out.

Writing

• Write copy that is grammatically correct. This is key for legitimacy and credibility.
• Match your landing page call to action to what was used in your advertising.
• Match your landing page language to your advertising. That means that tone, vocabulary, and style should remain consistent.
• If your landing page is being used to convert visits from an email marketing campaign, use the customer’s name in the copy and try to personalize the message as much as possible.
• Only focus on answering your customers’ most pertinent questions – rather than listing every detail about your service/product.
• Write in the second person. Don’t write about “we”, write about “you” (the customer).
• Deliver a persuasive message, not a demonstration of your creativity.
• Use long copy for sales and shorter copy for non-committal conversions. It’s much easier to convince someone to sign up for a free newsletter than to purchase a yearly subscription.
• If your copy is long, make sure that it is consistently building a case for your conversion goal.
• Place your most important points at the beginning of sentences and your most important sentences at the beginning of paragraphs and your most important paragraphs at the beginning of sections. You get the idea.
• Place your second most persuasive arguments at the bottom of large sections as users tend to look at the beginning of sections and ends of sections, while skipping the middle.
• Write keeping in mind screen resolutions and what text will be seen above vs below the fold.
• Answer the question “how long will this take?”
• Answer the questions “why?”
• Answer the question “what?”
• Provide numbers that are impressive.
• Keep paragraphs at no longer than 3 lines.
• Express one idea per paragraph.
• Use localized content to geo-target users.
• If you’re giving away something for free and asking for a signup, then give away some of whatever is behind the signup directly on the landing page.
• Use less text and make each word count.

If you are interested in learning more about tools that will help you with conversion optimization take a look at this video:

Conversion Optimization Tools

Google considers invalid click activity as any clicks or impressions that artificially inflates an advertiser’s costs,  or a publisher’s earnings.  Despite Google’s Ad Traffic Quality team monitoring traffic across its ad network in an effort to prevent advertisers from paying for invalid traffic, click fraud remains rampant.

And because 97 percent of Google”s $33 billion in revenue last year came from advertising, they consider protecting against this type of fraud paramount. The company recently launched an in-depth Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center designed for both advertisers and publishers so there is no excuse not to be paying attention.

Five things your team should know about invalid clicks.

1.  Monitoring your ad traffic

If you want a job done right, you should do it yourself. Of course Google is looking out for you, but you obviously have your own best interests at heart. So it only makes sense to keep an eye on it.

Here’s a few quick monitoring tips:

• Segment your ad traffic using channels.
• Be aware of who’s visiting your site, and how.
• Avoid partnering with untrusted / low-quality parties.
• Don’t click on your own ads, even if you think it’s okay to do so.
• Double- and triple-check your implementation.
• Use the authorized sites feature to prevent unauthorized use of your ad code.

2. Beware wary of third-party click tracking methods

Although you’ll want to be proactive monitoring your website and ad traffic, click tracking via third-party software or custom ad implementations can be a risky propositions for you and your busineness for two primary reasons:

• These methods can inadvertently disclose sensitive information about your website to a third-party;
• And can also disrupt Google’s ad delivery or click logging in a way that violates the company’s Terms and Conditions.

And besides, the best click tracking efforts of third-party sources may not even provide you significantly more information than your AdSense or Analytics reports. Work these channels to help gain greater insights into your account.

3. Let Google do some of the work

Google uses real-time detection and filtering systems to examine each click on an AdWords ad. In effect, they look at several sources of data points for each click, including the time of the click,  duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns.

The system uses these factors to analyze, isolate and then  filter out potentially invalid clicks before they ever reach your account. reports.

Once potentially invalid clicks are identified by the systems, a member of Google’s team examines the affected account to learn more about the source of the potentially invalid clicks.

4. Monitor, report and receive

As should already be clear, protecting advertisers’ interests through continued  monitoring  is keyto keep the network a balanced ecosystem where users, publishers, and advertisers can all grow and thrive together.

And once irregularities in this system are discovered and later determined clicks are determined to be fraudulent, Google returns  earnings from disabled AdSense accounts to affected advertisers. If you’re watching your campaigns you should be able to protect yourself from fraud.

5.  It may not be invalid clicks that has your campaign sputtering

A depleted budget early in the day does not necessarily mean something shady is going on with your account. In fact, more often than not there is a legitimate reasons as to why your daily budget gets expended earlier than you expected. Here are a few:

• Your daily budget may not be high enough to accommodate the amount of traffic that your ads receive each day. You may need to Optimize your account, decrease your cost-per-click bid or increase your daily budget.
• Changes in Web content and user behavior may affect the serving of your ad.
• Recent trends, news items, or current events at times dramatically influence the number of impressions and clicks you receive.
• Different times of the day may yield more valuable traffic for your ad.
•  If you recently changed your ad delivery method to ‘Accelerated’, your daily budget may deplete faster than anticipated.

Take a close look at the following metrics associated with the Web’s latest wunderkind:

• 1.36 million visitors per day.
• 2,702.2% increase in unique visitors over the past ten months.
• 68.2% female users.
• 44.7% of users aged 18-34.

Sound like an audience you’d like to get in touch with? If you want to tap into the fastest growing social network to date, Pinterest has 12 million users who are ready and waiting. The ever-growing and uber-addicted Pinterest fans have taken this virtual bulletin board from a lowly startup to Internet darling in only two years.

If you think Pinterest is only for soccer moms and wedding planners, you’re missing out on a largely-untapped audience of consumers. While the middle-aged female demographic largely overwhelms the site’s userbase, Pinterest’s rapid growth pattern indicates that it is far from done attracting users.

Ready to get pinning? Here are 8 essential (and easy!) steps to be successful on Pinterest:

1. Jump on the bandwagon. As we’ve established, this is one social media channel that is absolutely worth getting involved in. Already have an account? Great! Not signed up yet? Leave your email address in the comments below to get an invite.

2. Create killer boards. Establish boards that focus on lifestyles, not products. Dig deep and decide what the real ethos of your company is, and then create a board that projects your given character trait. Whole Foods gets to the heart of their consumers’ eco-friendly attitudes with a “We’re Used to Reusing!” board while the Travel Channel appeals to followers’ sense of adventure with “Daily Escapes.” Centering boards around a specific feeling or style (which may or may not happen to include your company’s products) will be far more effective than attempting to make one more sales pitch.

3. Link your accounts. Link your Pinterest account to a personal or company Facebook Timeline where your pins will be housed in a Pinterest app. All of your recent pins will appear in one consolidated Pinterest box on your Timeline which makes it easy for your fans to click through from one profile to another.

4. Beef up your captions. The success of an individual pin (determined by the level of engagement it receives) can be predicted almost solely upon the level of visual interest it offers. However, these images will be seen without any of the context provided on their original pages. A caption that captures the interesting/alluring/charming nature of the photo will increase its “sharability.” While you don’t need to provide a web address (it automatically appears under the photo when pinned), include a dollar amount in the caption and Pinterest will add a price tag to the image.

5. Check your existing footprint. Big brands and sites with lots of existing photography may likely already have some of their content “pinned” across user profiles. See if your images, products or photos have caught the eye of pinners by using the following URL (replace “yoursitename.com” with your homepage’s address): http://pinterest.com/source/yoursitename.com/.

6. Reward top pinners. One of the coolest (and also most under-utilized) features of Pinterest is the ability to create collaborative boards with your followers. If tip #5 resulted in a list of people who have regularly posted content from your site, create a board on your profile dedicated to these brand ambassadors. To do so: 1) Follow the profiles of your top users. It doesn’t matter if they follow you back 2) Create a new board or edit an existing one and next to “Who can pin?” select “Me + Contributors” 3) In the field that appears, begin typing the name of your desired contributor; click on their name when it appears 4) Save settings and you’re done! Your board will now appear on your profile as well as the profiles of all contributors. Contributor boards work best when there is a unifying theme for everyone to collaborate around, such as this “Critic’s Corner” board where contributors write reviews of recipes found on Pinterest.

7. Embrace keyword usage. Pinterest’s search function is heavily utilized, especially for recipes, home goods, decorating, style and event planning. If your area of expertise lies anywhere in these domains, it is especially important to include relevant keywords in your captions. A Mashable post from last month announced that Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ or LinkedIn, reinforcing the potential of Pinterest to send high-value visits directly to your product pages.

8. Make your content Pinnable. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes cruising through Pinterest boards will get a definitely feel for the community’s sense of style. If you don’t already, make sure to include engaging, interesting photos on your website and blog which lend themselves to the network’s vibe. While people are able to pin images from any website, adding a “Pin It” button to images adds a subtle invitation for web visitors to share your content.

Have more “Pin-teresting” tips to share? Leave them in the comments below!