After finally conceding to buy an iPhone (then instantly converting to an iPhone-a-phile) it has re-awoken my annoyance at unnecessarily bandwidth hungry websites and phat emails.
Outside of a 3G service area and cast into the bandwidth wildness, I’ve becoming painfully aware of the delays and download budget impact for simple emails with bloated banners, oversized signature images etc.
I’ve also had to discard several favourite sites either because of image bloat; poor mobile device adaption. The killer is that the iPhone does not support Flash so sites using it for sales promotion and particularly for navigation have lost me and presumably other iPhone visitors.
Just to give this some context a quick scan of high profile sites under my care reveals iPhone/iPods visitors range between 1.8 to 4.6% of all visitors over the Dec/Jan period!
iPhone website visitors are out there aplenty and presumably they like to buy stuff.
Make sure you are not missing out on them through poor mobile support in your phone & emails.
In the Succinct Update Dec 09 I wrote about the real costs of blogging.
This article from by Janine Popick, Vertical Response founder titled Start Blogging! 10 Reasons Why You Think Time Wasted Might Be Time Well Spent provides some balance.
Google has upgraded Analytics to V4 with a host of new features to enable even closer scrutiny of your website’s performance.
This industrial strength yet surprisingly free website metrics system can help you understand more about how your site is performing and give clues on how to improve it to ultimately make it a viable contributor to your business sales activities.
The upgrade includes:
• More sophisticated goal tracking
• Better table filtering
• More flexible reporting
• A threshold based alerting system
If you like many are struggling with keeping up with the barrage of communications from emails, blogs, Skype & MSN chats and many more new media sources then you will be grateful for Google’s Wave.
Google developers have been toiling away breathing life into this unifying platform and it is really looking like a winner on a number of levels.
Wave is a ’single inbox’ for emails, instant messages and all other forms of online communications, but it is so much more than that.
Integration
Wave combines individual internet communications from various channels while maintaining message context similar to discussion forums threads.
This approach enables participants to have multiple message discussions (online conversations ?) independent of the platform each individual is utilising.
Chat or IM conversations are digested into Wave and displayed in near real time, while slower communications such as emails are structured as and when they arrive into your Wave inbox.
I’m just reflecting momentarily about email being described as a slow communication…
Is email being too slow for some forms of communications..?
Quite apart from the highly functional merger of disparate internet communications there are two other key aspects where I see Wave further consolidating Google’s total online world domination.
Open source
Google are producing Wave as an open source product, which fundamentally means Wave is free.
Sure there may be some costs, but if you compare these with the licences costs say for example for an equivalently functional Microsoft server solution (even though I don’t think there is one yet) there will be no financial competition.
Extensibility
The other and probably strongest reason Wave will dominate stems from the strategy to include the ability for software developers to easily integrate Wave into their own solutions.
Many applications need an online communications/synchronisation capability and integration with Wave will fast-track the realisation of many concepts into viable solutions.
Consider the plethora of iPhone applications that have exploded into existence; these are only available to you & me because of the iPhone platform’s extensibility. These applications would have continued to exist only as agonizingly brilliant concepts but not commercially viable because of the costs and impossible logistics to establish the supporting infrastructure required.
A lateral albeit non-business application is the Sudoku game in the You Tube video below that illustrates real-time multiple participant interactivity…
Geeks everywhere already know about Wave. Google is generating peer group hype by using the same limited access marketing they did originally with GMail ie can only particulate in the beta Wave program if you’re invited…
When business gets their head around the opportunities Wave represents it will explode onto our desktops.
Google are trialling Local Listing Ads; another online advertising medium designed specifically for small local businesses.
Currently in beta testing in San Diego and San Francisco, these ads are positioned as “low budget, low maintenance, a flat monthly fee ad solution…” (more…)
This simple pie chart provides a simple correlation between the major traffic sources
i.e. where the traffic to your website comes from.
Search engines
The search engines that visitors used to find your website
Major Australian search engines are Google, Bing (Microsoft) & Yahoo
Organic is the ‘natural’ method of searching
Direct
Visitors who typed the website address into their browser to visit your site.
Referring sites
Visitors who clicked on a link on another website that referred them to your site
Business Interpretation
Understanding where your website’s traffic comes from is an important element in building your website’s success. Being able to increase traffic equates to building your online exposure and hence your sales opportunities.
Search engines
If your site is featuring in search engines then it is attracting visitors based on keyword searches
Investigate the Keyword section to see what they have been searching for that resulted in a visitor to your site.
Currently in sites I manage (i.e. Australian business websites) Google typically generates 70-98% of organic visits and interestingly Bing has an increasing presence currently at 1-3%
Direct visitors are individuals who have either:
Previously been to your site and are now revisiting
This is an important activity in purchase decision making, where clients scan various websites before returning to the most desirable ones to make a final purchase decision
Regular visitors who are returning to check for updates, specials or to book again
Responded to off-line adverting or an off-line referral and are visiting the website to investigate further as part of their purchase decision making process.
Internal staff visiting the site or
Internal staff who have the website set as their home page (not recommended)
Referrals are visitors who have found your site via another (referring) website by clicking on a link. As in off-line business referrals are an key source of business, and growing successful referring sites is an important business building activity.
Analytics for business people
This is one of a series of articles to help business people extract value from their Analytics reports.
Has the hint of commercial pressure spurred Google into action to create an interesting new search architecture tagged Caffeine ?
You can try out the web developer preview version of Caffeine here:
Is Google feeling the pressure of Microsoft’s continuing battle to gain a share of the internet ?
Microsoft have invested significantly into their new search incarnation Bing and there certainly is interest amongst my clients based on recent questions
There’s even evidence that Bing is being used more now than MSN ever was; BUT let’s put that into context. This table compares the proportion that search engines are used in a popular Australian website in the last 4 weeks from 19 Aug 09
Search engine
Visits
google
93.9%
bing
2.9%
yahoo
1.8%
search
0.5%
msn
0.3%
live
0.2%
aol
0.2%
ask
0.1%
altavista
0.1%
alltheweb
0.0%
Google represents 94% of all searches that results in a visitor to the site.
At 2.9% Bing is slightly higher than I would normally expect.
Microsoft Search Network (MSN) and Live (an earlier Microsoft search engine incarnation) continue to spiral into online irrelevance
While I enjoy conspiracy theories, there is just one fact that this one over-looks and that is that Google are continuously building new solutions; enhancements and gizmos. To suggest Google have cranked out Caffeine in response to Bing ignores the amazing stream of new products and enhancements that continues to flow out of the Google online solution factory.
Amazingly most of these are absolutely free.
In fact my personal favourite conspiracy theory is that Google Wave will be the last straw in undermining Microsoft Office by defusing Outlook’s domination of the business desktop.
Feel free to share your favourite Google / Microsoft / World domination conspiracy theory with a comment.
If like me you’re a Google Chrome fan and want to see PageRank quickly & easily you will be releived to know that there is finally a solution you can download from Vasanth Dharmaraj’s blog
Note that you will need to add additional params to the Chrome start link to force it to start allowing extensions, at least in the interim anyway… Read more here
I was very pleased to hear from Wayne Van Elsen from Newport Digital today about his success with AdWords paid search.
In a recent internet marketing mentoring session I guided Wayne through some refinements and tips for his home grown AdWords (pay per click advertising ) campaign.
After these tweaks, Wayne contacted me today to say that he’d closed $1,500 worth of business for a mighty investment of less than $3 for the clicks.
Wayne had previously given up on Adwords after an intial attempt, but he’s a convert now!
NWBDC’s mentoring services funds guy’s like myself to spend quality time with small business owners and their staff to develop skills to build their businesses; in my case the sessions are on using websites as a sales tool, but there’s a range of other consultants covering a range of business services.
Wayne’s business NewPort Digital provides websites suited to folks looking for low cost entry websites, but that can readily grow into substantial online presence without major expense.
