Cross-posted from the Chamber Connect Newsletter to which I contribute voluntarily.

As the old adage goes, “ask and you will be given”. Could you imagine going into a used car yard and never being asked if you would like to buy a car? It just wouldn’t happen! The same applies online and it is our job as marketers and business people to facilitate a conversion through smart placement of a call to action. Your call to action is asking website visitors to do “something”; usually in the web realm “something” means encouraging them to click a link or a button that will flow through towards a predetermined goal conversion. You have set goals for the website, setup analytics and are tracking conversions right?!

Call to Action Principles

Have a call to action on EVERY page

It doesn’t always have to be a huge red BUY NOW button (in many cases this is crude and inappropriate), but you should at least encourage your visitors to click through to another page on your site, contact you about the information on a page or download an important document.

Make your call to action stand out

Most people are lazy web browsers with short concentration spans so you have a very small window to catch the fish before it flips out of the net. Therefore, you must make your call to action obvious! This can be done by using contrasting colours, space around the call to action link, ensuring the button or link falls in the sight-line of the viewer and don’t clutter the page with lots of graphics and additional calls to action.

Use meaningful text to create urgency

Each call to action button or link should have some text that encourages the user to click and creates urgency. For example, at the end of an online purchase, your completion button text is better as “Complete purchase” rather than just “Submit”. When using in-text links you should use proper anchor text to describe where that link goes, eg, see our selection of red dresses, rather than just we have red dresses click here. Secret squirrel tip: keyword rich anchor text also helps your SEO!

Reassure the customer that clicking is ok

This might be through some related copy that gives product info, an association membership logo, an interactive button, telling the customer what to expect when they click and using related imagery to make the customer feel at ease.

5 Great Call to Action Examples

Homepage

The first example is the homepage of my favourite email marketing software MailChimp, a company with one core product which enables them to focus all the customer’s attention on one CTA. Once you have finished admiring the smiling monkey, your attention will likely drift to the bright coral coloured call to action button saying “Sign Up Free”. The beauty of this homepage is that every page element focuses attention on the call to action; the monkey’s sight line, the large headline text, the space around the button and the colour contrast of the coral on light blue. Also take note of how the font color of the blurb “MailChimp helps you design email newsletters,…” fades nicely into the background so that the call to action stands out. Direct link

The second homepage example is from McDonald’s. The challenge for the Maccas marketing crew is that people have many different reasons for visiting their website so one call to action (a la MailChimp) is not possible. What they have done instead is created a call to action hierarchy, clearly based around their website goals and what they believe their customers want to find.

As you can see the primary call to action is inviting visitors to “See our new range”, but they have also created a range of other clickable options below for customers who are looking for other information. Direct link

Landing Page

Insurance companies have got big bucks to spend on testing marketing campaigns, and as a result we get landing pages like this esurance sales page which is nothing short of magnificent. They certainly have checked all the boxes for a great landing page; related imagery, concise copy which doesn’t get in the way, reassurance that the company is credible and it is safe to click and a big call to action button in a high contrast colour. The other key thing you notice is that there is no unrelated clutter such as navigation menus, social media buttons, long text blocks or image galleries. This is to focus the customer’s attention and prevent them from getting distracted and clicking to another page. Direct link

Ok, so I lied when I said 5 great call to action examples because the next one is no bueno! The harsh reality is that this is simply not a good landing page and a major waste of pay per click advertising dollars.

So what’s wrong with it? There is a text overload, four different coloured graphics at different parts of the page pulling your eyeballs around like a tennis match, an incognito call to action at the top right (“begin now”), social media buttons stealing focus and the copy is disjointed and verbose. Take note, if your landing pages look like the one below, you need to redesign! Direct link

Content Page

This example is from ICAE and shows how a call to action can be easily included at the bottom of a general informational content page. The CTA is subtle enough that it doesn’t interfere with the content, but prominent enough to attract attention once the visitor has consumed all the information they need. The copy is also directly related to the page content and uses a friendly tone to encourage clicking. Should your heart desire you could also add a similar subtle call to action mid-way through the content. Direct link

So there you have it. 4 good examples and 1 not so good. I hope this will encourage you to ask your website visitors to take action through a carefully crafted call to action, all leading towards more conversions and a better web experience for your customers.

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Looking for help with creating a great call to action? Contact Zhoom to see how we can help you increase conversions!

Every website should have goals, whether you are selling buttons, campaigning to become class president or posting cat pictures for your mum to see. Some common goals are reaching a specific page (eg, the thank you page at the end of a sale), number of pages visited, time on website or a specific path through your website ending up at a specific page.

In this article we are going to look at two useful goals: tracking website form completions and tracking external social media clicks. This tutorial is based on the new Google Analytics interface and assumes you have Google Analytics installed on our website (if you don’t check out my Intro to Google Analytics post).

Goal 1: Track Website Form Completions

For this to work you must have your lead generation form set to direct to a unique page on completion. This enables us to identify the unique destination page in an Analytics goal and track hits to this page as a conversion.

For this tutorial let’s say we want to tracks a form that directs completed leads to this page: http://mywebsite.com/thanks-for-contacting-us-form123

The first thing to do is login to your Google Analytics account, click the settings icon in the top right corner, choose the profile you want to set goals for and click the Goals link to expand the list of goals.

Login and go to Google Analytics Settings

Then you will choose a name for your goal. Let’s call it Form123 Completions.

Next we define the Goal URL. In this case the full URL is http://mywebsite.com/thanks-for-contacting-us-form123 but since we don’t need the actual domain name, we can just enter /thanks-for-contacting-us-form123

The match type will be exact match. Match types are somewhat confusing, but unless you are using a substantial amount of dynamic content you will probably only need the exact match option. You can find out more about match types from Google.

You can also enter a goal value (useful if you are selling products or if you assign values to each lead generated) and track a funnel which is a series of page views leading up to the goal. But in this case we are just creating a simple greenhorn goal with no bell and whistles.

You should finish up with something like the screenshot below. Click save!

Google Analytics Goal Setup Form

Goal 2: Track Clicks on Links to External Social Media Websites

To enable this goal you must tag your outbound social media links with a track page view snippet. Here is an example of a complete HTML link with the additional Analytics code in bold:

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/myfacebookfanpage” onclick=”javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/GA-VirtualPageview/Facebook-Fanpage']);” >

If the above looks like gibberish to you just ask your web agency to include onclick=”javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/GA-VirtualPageview/Facebook-Fanpage']);” on your outgoing Facebook fan page links. You can also switch out the /Facebook-Fanpage part for any other text if you want to use this for other links.

Now you have setup your links you just follow the exact same procedure for setting up the goal in Goal 1, except enter your Goal URL as /GA-VirtualPageview/Facebook-Fanpage

What Should I Do With This Data?

So now you should have all sorts of goal conversion data pouring in – to see some of this data you can check the Goals Overview report in Google Analytics under Conversions -> Goals -> Overview (look in the left sidebar). We can use this Goal data in a wide range of reports to identify high/low converting traffic, gauge social media engagement directly from your website and check advertising costs against online sales.

Here is a sample report that shows the Goal conversion rate from different sources. To get this report you go to Goal Overview -> Source/Medium -> See Full Report

Google Analytics Goal Source/Medium Report

I can then use this report to find which traffic is converting well and which traffic isn’t. I could even drill down further to see this data by Cost per Click (cpc) campaign (useful for identifying where I am wasting cpc advertising dollars) or by other sources to test which marketing campaigns are driving traffic and converting well.

This is a very brief introduction to what you can do with Google Analytics Goals, but hopefully it will get you motivated to get some goal data flowing and apply this data to various reports in Google Analytics… Happy data wrangling!

Most of us would probably rather pull out our fingernails than delve into the deep dark world of data analysis. So to get you started, we are going to do some hand holding, back massaging and slowly climb into Google Analytics with a simple analysis of a Facebook campaign.

This article comes as a follow up to April’s feature, Getting Started With Google Analytics so please read this first if you haven’t already.

Goal: Promote event on Facebook. Gauge visitor response to landing page.

We will assume that you already have created a page on your website to promote your event. This is your landing page.

Procedure:

• Create a special Google Analytics tracking link (tracking URL) and add to Facebook.
• Shorten this link for visual effect.
• Gather Data.
• Analyse visitor data from the Facebook campaign in relation to the landing page interaction.

Create our Google Analytics Tracking URL

The first thing to do is to create the tracking URL. To do this we use Google’s URL Builder. You will need to copy and paste the URL of your landing page, then choose the campaign source, campaign medium and campaign name. There are other options (terms and content) but they are not needed in this instance.

Campaign Source: Usually where the link will be posted, in this case, Facebook.

Campaign Medium: Identifies the campaign medium such as email, social media, cost per click etc. In this case we’ll use Social Media as our campaign medium.

Campaign Name: Identifies the specific promotion, in this case we’ll call it the Bob Jones Concert.

When you are done, click the Generate URL button and Google Analytics URL Builder will generate a URL like this:

http://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social%2Bmedia&utm_campaign=bob%2Bjones%2Bconcert

You can see how your source, medium and name are now embedded in the link.

Google Analytics URL Builder Page

Hint: when building tracking URLs, try to keep consistency within your tracking fields. For example, if you use social media as a medium, this should stay consistent rather than using social media for one URL, then social networks for another. This enables you to later drill down to see data from all social media campaigns.

Shorten and Beautify Your Link

The link we are given by GA is really not very pretty so we are going to give it a makeover by using the bit.ly link shortening service. Go to http://bit.ly/, create an account the follow the guide to insert your ugly GA tracking link and shorten it to a bit.ly link. You should end up with something like this: http://bit.ly/kVwBvO.

You can even customise the link to add your own text to the end rather than the random characters bit.ly auto generates. For example, http://bit.ly/ArtistsWANTED is a link used on Darwin Hub when we called for artists to feature on the homepage.

Once you have your link, add it to your Facebook fan page… and wait a few days…

Check and Analyse Website Data Generated

It usually takes a few days for any real data to be gathered from a new campaign so give it a few days before you start checking.

Get Raw Data – Bounce Rate, Time on Site

Log into your Google Analytics account and click All Traffic Sources in the left navigation menu.

All Traffic Sources Link in Navigation Menu

This will display a table with all your traffic sources by Source and Medium, and some related data. If you don’t see the source and medium you entered (in our case Facebook and Social Media) you may need to get it to show more rows (bottom right of screen, as in screenshot below) if it is not in the top 10 traffic sources .

Show More Rows

Click the appropriate source and medium for the data you want to see and you will be taken to a summary of the data for that source/medium combination.

Click the Source and Medium

Source and Medium Data Summary Page

Data Analysis – Bounce Rate, Time on Site

Data is useless without analysis and analysis is useless without an action plan based on the analysis. If you don’t come up with something to improve on (or determine that your site is perfect … sure mate…) then your time is wasted.

Let’s look at the Bounce rate (73.81%) and Time on site (39 seconds).

This data alone tells me that our landing page is not enticing visitors to interact further, therefore they are bouncing from the site and not engaging. There are a number of reasons this could happen. Here are some of the most common:

• The landing page is not related to the text/description at the link source therefore the landing page content comes as a surprise to the visitor.
• The landing page does not encourage the visitor to take further action; there is no button to click, form to complete, product to buy, you get the idea…
• The landing page has too many calls to action and the visitor is confused as to what they should do next and do nothing.

The fix for this is to create a relevant landing page with clear calls to action and supporting text and images. Groupon does this well by really only giving us 1 option to take and supporting it with appropriate imagery.

Groupon Landing Page

Now you can give yourself a high five cos you’ve undertaken some useful data analysis! There are many other analyses you can undertake so if you have further questions or want to know more, please comment below. And stay tuned for more Google Analytics articles in the future!

Key Takeaways:

• Use Google Analytics tracking URLs when ever possible; remain consistent with your tracking fields.
• Shorten and beautify your links (also useful for Twitter or other places where you don’t want long ugly links).
• Always come up with some sort of action plan based on your data analysis. Data analysis without action is a waste of time.
• Create simple landing pages with clear calls to action.

So I have been thinking about adding Microformats to a local Darwin Events and lifestyle WordPress website I run, but never got round to implementing them. That was until I got some inspiration from the Darwin Web Standards crew at a DWS meetup group session about Microformats and their use in semantic markup.

Major props should also go to Richard Baxter for his post, Mark-up Your Events Online with Microformats as his article gave me all the info I needed to implement microformats using The Events Calendar WordPress plugin. I would highly recommend reading Richard’s article as it explains with I am doing below with find and replace.

It is very easy to add hcalendar microformats to The Events Calendar!
All you need to do is make some minor edits to single.php (The Events Calendar version, not your WordPress theme version). Below I have simply given code to find and then replace in single.php. Leave a comment if you need further clarification.

Find:

<div id="tec-event-meta">

Replace with:

<div id="tec-event-meta" class="vevent">
	<a class="url summary" style="display: none;" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a><br />

Note, I have used display:none because my titles are generated out of the functions.php file. You may just need to add class=”url summary” to your standard post title.

Find:

<dd><?php echo the_event_start_date(); ?></dd>

Replace with:

<dd>
    <span class="dtstart"><br />
        <span class="value-title" title="<?php echo the_event_start_date(); ?>"><br />
            <?php echo the_event_start_date(); ?><br />
        </span><br />
    </span>
</dd>

Find:

<dd><?php echo the_event_end_date();  ?></dd>

Replace with:

<dd>
    <span class="dtend"><br />
        <span class="value-title" title="<?php echo the_event_end_date();  ?>"><br />
       		<?php echo the_event_end_date();  ?><br />
        </span><br />
    </span>
</dd>

Find:

<dd><?php echo the_event_venue(); ?></dd>

Replace with:

<dd>
    <span class="fn org"><?php echo the_event_venue(); ?></span>
</dd>

Find:

<dd>
	<?php tec_event_address( $post->ID ); ?>
</dd>

Replace with:

<dd>
    <span class="adr"><br />
       <span class="street-address"><?php echo the_event_address( $post->ID ); ?></span>,<br />
       <span class="locality"><?php echo the_event_city( $post->ID ); ?></span>,<br />
       <span class="region"><?php echo the_event_state( $post->ID ); ?></span><br />
    </span>
</dd>

That’s it!!! Pretty easy huh?!

You can test your microformats with Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

Here is a direct link to a test of one of my Darwin Event pages.

For those wonderful little rich snippets to appear under your results in the serps, you will need to request this from Google using this form.

A number one ranking on Google is more desirable than a front row seat at the Royal Wedding and in some cases is harder to get. High Google rankings are certainly not passed down through generations, but search engine optimisation (SEO) including links back to your site, quality content and a well constructed website can go a long way to achieving that coveted first page ranking.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a young person in Darwin you need to check out Chamber Connect. Now is the time to join as Chamber Connect are giving away $3500 worth of travel vouchers to new and existing members over the next month.

Chamber Connect is a great way to meet like-minded business people who are around the same age. Not only do you get to network with great people, you also get a member’s only forum where you can learn from people in the know, a regular newsletter with ideas and promotions and exclusive mentoring sessions with some of Darwin’s top business people.

As a member and ambassador, I can say that membership (only $66 a year) pays for itself through the connections you make and the great stuff you learn.

Click here to check the awesome travel voucher competition!

Web analytics doesn’t always mean hours spent combing through pages of data reports, nor are you required to undertake in depth technical analysis. To get started all that is required is the occasional checking of website data, some quick analysis and quick creation of action plans based on your findings. Web analytics can get also pretty complex if you dare to indulge, however we’re going to ease in gently with a few basic ideas and try to avoid getting too geeky.

Getting Setup With Data Tracking Software

There are many data tracking software suites around, however I am going to talk about Google Analytics. Why? Because it is free, easy to setup, easy to use and is applicable to almost every website, whether you are the New York Times or Winsome Designs.

To setup Google Analytics (GA), you first need to create a Google Account and signup for GA. You can do this at the Google Analytics Signup page.

Once you have your GA account you simply need to copy and paste the tracking code into each page of your website. Here are the official GA setup instructions from Google.

If you do not manage your own site, ask your web agency to do it, but to be completely honest, if your web agency created your website without integrating (or at least suggesting) some sort of data tracking software, they should be fired.

Once you are setup, you should be able to login to your Dashboard.

Grab Some Analytics Data

If you have just installed your tracking code, you will need to wait a few days before data of any significance appears. Once you have some data in your account you will be able to generate reports showing all sorts of different website metrics. There are thousands of reports and options so I highly recommend you get your hands dirty and try out all the options, but here are three stock standard reports to get you started.

The Keyword Report

(Click: Traffic Sources –> Keywords)

This shows which keywords your website visitors used to find your site. You can use this to analyse the success of your SEO strategy and figure out which keywords your site is receiving traffic from. You can also drill down from this report to see which page visitors landed on from your keywords. This can help you determine if the pages appearing in search results are triggered by the appropriate keywords.

Map Overlay

(Click: Visitors –> Map Overlay)

This shows where your website traffic is coming from geographically. You can drill down to City , Country/Territory, Sub Continent Region or Continent by clicking on the map, and the report shows other data such as bounce rate, pages/visit and average time on site.

New vs Returning Visitors

(Click: Visitors –> New vs. Returning)

This report quickly gives you an idea of visitor loyalty by showing the number of visits by new or returning visitors. Keep in mind that a new visitor is not always a unique person. A new visitor could be the same person who happens to access your site from different devices (mobile, work PC, home PC, ipod etc) or anyone who has cleared their cookies recently.

Analysis

Ok, so there is a bucket load of data available to you but the data is of no use unless you can analyse it and determine what you need to improve on. Every piece of data should tell you something about your website and that data should lead to actions that can improve aspects of your site. Here are a few analyses to consider.

Online Advertising Campaigns

Analyse the advertising cost per visitor against number of sales to figure out cost per acquisition. You can then use cost per acquisition data to optimise bidding, find more specific keywords or redesign your ad copy.

You can track form completion pages against advertisement source to determine if your ads are facilitating sales. If not, you may need to change your ad landing pages or make your forms easier to complete.

With online advertising you will need to use Google’s URL Builder. This free tool appends a short piece of code such as utm_source=facebook to your target URL to ensure clicks on your online ads are tracked properly. If you use Google Adwords, this is done for you automatically.

User Engagement

Check how many pages your visitors view against the traffic source. This can lead you to creating pages that enhance visitor engagement with calls to action or easier navigation.

Track external links and see how many of your visitors click to your social media pages from your website. This can lead to better placement of social media buttons.

Funnel Tracking

If you have an online sales process, you can track your buyers throughout your sales funnel through to completion. You can also see where they are dropping out of the funnel. This can lead to redesigning forms or adding in further buyer reinforcement to encourage completion.

Remember a funnel does not need to actually sell anything. It could be a direct path through your site to a file download, form completion or click to social media site.

Take Action

As you can see, each of the above analyses, although they are crude, all come with actions. After all, what is the point of analysing your website if you don’t come away with anything to improve on? Make sure that every time you analyse your data, you come away with something, whether it is changing something on your site, optimising your marketing approach or knowingly patting yourself on the back because you are already doing a great job!

For those who are interested in jumping in to the vast ocean that is web analytics, I would strongly advise checking out the blogs by Brian Clifton (author of Advanced Web Metrics) and Avinash Kaushik (Analytics Evangelist for Google).

Of course you can also contact Zhoom if you want us to help you out!

While searching today for a local osteopath I came across a strange result… Moisture Control Services! Definitely not the sort of Osteopath I want to see

Turns out Aluminium Casthouse is a technology conference in Melbourne and has been listed in Google Places as an Osteopath in Coconut Grove. This is most likely an error by Google as they get unverified listings from the Yellow Pages and other similar directories.

Ok, so what?

Having your business listed incorrectly could mean that it shows in completely irrelevant results which is a bit like advertising swimsuits on a ski slope. Even worse, it could mean that your business doesn’t show for potential customers who are searching for your keywords.

The other concern here is that the businesses ranked 4 onwards clearly haven’t optimised their Google Places page and are now being outranked by an irrelevant business. To fix this they should add as much information as possible to their listing. You can include photos, multiple business categories, a description and much more.

Read my post on Getting Your Business Online for some other basic tips to promote your business online.

My grandmother was a schoolteacher who, in her later years, spent most of her time shopping for bargains, doing crosswords and chatting online. As a youngster, I used to think she was a little crazy, but as I grow older I realise her views on life were in fact marketing gospel.

The Proof is in the Proofing

My grandmother could smell a spelling mistake in a perfume shop and see a grammatical error in a pot of alphabet soup so naturally, anything that she wrote was proof-read to perfection.

Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress security should be at the top of every webmaster’s list, especially with the number of hackers looking for easy ways to inject their spam into your website.

One part of the overall security of your WordPress site is to change your password regularly, preferably monthly. You should also use a complex password with UPPER CASE, lower case, numbers and punctuation. Here is a strong password tool by PC Tools and Lifehacker has a great post on choosing secure, memorable passwords.

Here are the steps to changing your WordPress User password:

1 – Login to your WordPress Dashboard

2 – In the sidebar menu, click Users –> Your Profile

Go to Users --> Your Profile

3 – Once your profile page loads, scroll to the bottom of the screen. You will see a box to enter new password.

4 – Enter your new password, ensuring it the box below is green and says strong. If it does not say strong, choose a more complex password. You will then need to reenter the password in the box below.

Enter password and ensure it is Strong

5 – Click the blue Update Profile button to save your new password.

6 – Do this monthly!