What should my minimum browser resolution be when building websites in 2012?

Posted on December 29, 2011 by David McKillen

At WebStrategies we tend to design websites with a 1024px resolution with an infinite background. Why? – because we want to try and ensure the lowest common denominator of users are able to view the site at the smallest resolution which happens to be 1024px for our sites. I thought it might be time to review these stats with the new year only a few days away to better understand what my minimum browser resolution should be when building our websites in 2012. I decided to examine our Google Analytics account and discovered something interesting – its seems we might not be out of the 1024px woods just yet.

On several sites the lowest res turned out to be anywhere from 6-9% which made me think that maybe it is close to time to bail on this low res, allowing us to create bigger and more beautiful sites with a larger browser canvass. But then I noticed something interesting – several sites where showing 1024px at a whopping 15 to 20% still. I think it is fair to say that once the percentage of users on 1024px starts to drop sub 10% then it’s at least time to rexamine things. One fifth is a pretty sizeable chunk of viewers though no? The more I looked the more I realized these were not outliers but fairly ubiquitous across hundreds of sites we have built.

So what’s the answer then?

I think for now the infinite background is the better option – no sense in cutting out a sizeable chunk of users based on a desire to make the website larger on screen. Maybe further into 2012 this might change.

However, the answer in my mind is strongly dependent not on global browser statistic averages but rather on whether or not you have data on your specific website. If you have access to, lets say, the last 6 months of Analytics data that will help you understand what the user demographic is for your particular site. Of course it’s entirely possible that there might be something about your site that causes users to require a larger resolution, or a smaller one or perhaps they prefer to visit your site from a phone. Understanding your demographic and how they interact with your online presence is key to understanding how it should be presented to them.

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Location-Based Marketing…What’s the Problem?

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Neal Lappe

Most everyone has a cell phone and about 50% of them are smart-phones.  This presents a great marketing opportunity for business but it seems others perceive a violation of privacy and other concerns.

 We heard recently that our beloved Short Pump Towne center received complaints from the ACLU about a technology they activated that tracks customerMobile Marketing movement by monitoring their cell phone signals.  It is reported the mall owners are now holding off on this technology due to these concerns.  ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Kent Willis stated “new technologies give businesses more ability to trace customers’ movements and buying habits, nothing prevents them from sharing that information with the government.”

 On the contrary, it seems that some consumers are warming to the idea of connecting with geo-location information including deals and special offers.  While many mobile users have taken advantage of their device’s ability to connect location with useful information, such as maps, directions or recommendations, comparatively few (12% or so) are catching on to the check-in trend.  But things are changing as smart-phone owners are becoming more interested in other types of location-based services—especially deals.   According to a study by HipCricket, interest in time- or location-based mobile offers had increased from 40% of smart-phone owners in 2008 to 54% this year.

 It will be interesting to see how all this comes together.  For marketers, location based marketing and promotion offer attractive opportunities.  For consumers, what’s better than knowing you can take advantage of a special offer while you are in the vicinity?  Nevertheless, the privacy concerns are legit and it will be interesting to see how the “coming together of the minds” will occur.  Hopefully (and probably) in the end, the consumer will win.

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SEO & Social Media are Most Effective Tactics

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Neal Lappe

What are companies finding to be their most effective sales and lead generation activities?  That was the objective of a recent survey conducted by Web-Marketing 123, a California based, nationally recognized online marketing company.  They surveyed over 500 US companies.  About two-thirds of respondents operated in the B2B space (marketing to other businesses) with the remainder marketing directly to the general public (B2C).  The participaSEO & Social Mediating firms were of all sizes, from firms with fewer than 10 employees to those with more than 1,000, and the mix was pretty even, making the results representative of the business community.

Asking these companies what they wanted to achieve most from their digital marketing activities, those in the B2B space wanted to generate leads on which their sales efforts could close the deal.  For those in the B2C space it was all about generating sales.  In response to the question about how they measure their digital marketing success, all companies said overall website traffic was their main benchmark, followed by lead generation and sales.

For all companies, search engine marketing (SEO and Paid Search) was their most effective lead generation and sales tactic, with 75% of companies indicating so.  This was followed by social media marketing, which was reported 25% of the time as having the biggest positive impact.  As the social media world evolves, it appears companies are learning that social media may be a more of a branding and awareness tool than a lead generation and sales tool.

Social Media Networks

Furthermore, the survey asked for responses relative to social media marketing – specifically with which social networks the participating firms were most active – and separated it between those in the B2B and B2C space.  Not surprisingly, Facebook was by far the dominant network for B2B.  For B2B companies there was a more even distribution of activity.   When asked if they had ever generated leads from their social media marketing activities, LinkedIn was found to be the most effective lead generation source for B2B, while Facebook clearly was the leader on the B2C side.

Social Media Marketing

Finally, responding firms were asked about their marketing budget allocations and how they will change going into 2012.  Historically, search engine marketing has dominated marketing budgets with 60%+ going to this medium, and 10-15% going to social media depending in what space they operate.

This is a great, revealing survey but what does this mean to you and your business, and what should you do?  The following two graphs show what has been and what will be marketing investment allocations going forward into the new year.  Here are some suggestions:

  1. Who are your main competitors and how are they positioned in the search engines compared to you?  Search engines being the most positive online lead and sales generation tactic, it is important to assess your positioning here and decide how to allocate marketing budget and what search engine strategy makes the most sense for you.
  2. Depending on what space you operate in (B2B or B2C) you should evaluate your positioning in Facebook and LinkedIn.  Are your competitors active in these mediums?  How good is their content and is this an opportunity for you to develop a specific “personality” in FB or LI and carve out a niche for yourself?
  3. Ask someone knowledgable in this space for what he/she sees working for other companies.  Search engine marketing may be the best lead and sales generation tactic, but it may not be best for your type of company.  Same with social media.  It is attractive because it is essentially free, but it can also be time consuming.  Do your customers want to interact with you on the social networks?  Are your customers even using social networks for their business dealings?  These are all questions you can ask yourself and someone else to determine where your marketing budgets should be allocated.

Marketing Spend by Type

Online Marketing Budgets

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Do more than just blog …. cast!

Posted on November 30, 2011 by David McKillen

Over the years blogging has become more than just a way of posting your favorite dog pics or family updates, it has evolved into something much more powerful. As a relatively novice blog writer (i.e. someone who thinks blogging can be fun and extremely useful/powerful but simply never has the time to become a true blog writer) I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to use my blogs to do more than just update a handful of friends who follow the my blog feed. Sure enough, turns out hardcore bloggers, the guys and gals that really know how to write do something called casting.

So a little while back we started building casting “packages”, if you will, that basically fire out your most recent blog post to about 30 different networking sites. Pretty neat! so not only will my blog post be added to the usual blog RSS feed but several of the big social networking players receive it too … Facebook, Twitter, GTalk, Friendfeed, Delicious … the list goes on.

But wait, there’s more! Not only can I reach many of my friends and associates on social sites this way, but there are also some positive SEO ramifications. Carefully worded and content rich blog posts (with useful linking and video content too perhaps) automatically become back-linked to my blog and (if incorporated) my website.

So not just a useful tool for making my life easier but extra Web marketing related benefits too?? Nice.  :)

David McKillen, WebStrategies Inc.

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Web Analytics – Breaking a Tradition of Uncertainty

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Neal Lappe

Moneyball is a popular movie out these days and it is a true story about how the Oakland A’s baseball team (and it’s GM) has to re-assemble the team and finds all of baseball’s conventional wisdom is wrong. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, the team’s GM and a partner use statistical data to analyze and place value on players who the scouts say are flawed but the data says they have the ability to get on base, score runs, and win games. These new methods challenge traditional approaches to the game and the GM is scourned because they claim he is tearing out the heart and soul of the game.  When you couple the premise of this movie with Wanamaker’s famous quote – “I know half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half” – one can’t help but embrace the advantages of using the right web analytics data to optimize marketing campaigns. 

The challenge becomes identifying the RIGHT web analytics data to use when measuring and optimizing marketing campaigns.  Following are 5 steps to making sure you are looking at the right web analytics information:

  1. Make a list of the various ways you are marketing or advertising your business.  Then go into your Google Analytics and segment your traffic to match those advertising methods.  If you can’t identify the sources in your data, then you should consider setting up some advanced segments and/or separate profiles.  This will enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of each marketing/advertising tactic.
  2. Have you decided what you want your website to accomplish?  If you have, then make sure you have tagged those items and configured your web analytics data for Event Tracking and Goals.  Combined with #1 above, you’ll be able to see how many goals you are achieving for each of your marketing/advertising tactics.  If you haven’t set goals for your website, then navigate through it and identify (or create) calls-to-action.  These could be downloading of information, signing up for newlsetter, scheduling an appointment, etc. 
  3. Look at your top Landing Pages and evaluate how well they are performing for you.  When reviewing landing page performance, look at bounce rate and time-on-page.  These are “engagement metrics”.  If you find a landing page that gets a lot of views and has poor “engagement metrics”, take a look at the page to determine how you can improve it for better engagement.
  4. Look at your top Keywords, those search phrases (keywords) that people are using to come to your site.  Evaluate keyword performance using some of the same “engagement metrics” as described in #3 above.  If you see keywords that are very relevant to your business but the “engagement metrics” are weak, then you need to evaluate landing page performance and content.   
  5. If you are doing much offline advertising, obtain some unique domain names (website addresses) that resemble your brand or what you do.  For example, let’s say you provide plumbing services and your web address is WatkinsPlumbing.com.  Get an alternative web address like WatkinsPlumbers.com or FlowingFreely.com.  Then, assign a unique web address to your print advertising and tag that in your Google Analytics account.  Now you can see how many people are coming to your website from print advertising.

Just like in Moneyball, use the data to make good decisions.  Someone might say you should pay to advertise on another site because this other site gets a lot of traffic.  You might be enamored by you getting millions of eyeballs looking at your link but if no one clicks or those that do click and come to your site don’t do anything meaningful when they get there, then that “traditional approach” may not be the best approach for you.

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Mobile Web Traffic on Non-Mobile Websites – Important Things To Consider

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Chris Leone

It’s time to get more serious about mobile. Projections have smartphone and tablet purchases outselling computers in 2011. Google predicts more searches will be done from mobile device than desktop devices by the end of 2012. People are viewing your website from a mobile device as we speak. What do you do, where do you look and what do you need to know about how the new wave of mobile activity is affecting your website and your ability to sell online?

The following are three ideas that can put you on the right track to better understanding the impact of mobile on your website.

Idea #1: What % of my visitors are coming from mobile devices:

This is the first question worth asking about our mobile traffic. While we watch the mobile industry explode all around us, we need to know how it’s affecting us right now. When it comes to profiling our mobile traffic, Google Analytics helps us answer this overriding question (among several others). When we first started reporting mobile usage on our client sites late last year, we saw usage somewhere in the 1-10% range. Now we’re seeing it in the 5-20% range.

Mobile Site Visitor Distribution

The question is: are your visitors the early adopters or laggards? Is 1 in 5 of your visitors on a mobile device? If not, when can you expect them to be and what needs to be done to address this critical shift in website user activity?

The first step is easy enough: understand the ratio and understand if the criticality of mobile will be a problem down the road or a problem right now. Next, understand the nuances within this mobile segment so you know how to tackle it.

Idea #2: Segment the mobile traffic by device type

Some assume the designation of “mobile” only applies to smartphones, but as tablet devices increase in popularity and capability, we find them establishing themselves within the broader mobile category. When it comes to functionality – e.g. user interface and operating system design –  tablets are designed more like smartphones than desktop computers. Tablets are touch devices like most smartphones and have a retooled operating system based on the simplicity of the major mobile operating systems.

tablet analytics usability

So while the functionality and feel of a mobile device is more similar to a smartphone than a laptop, there is an key attribute that influences the user experience even more: the size. While most tablets may look like oversized smartphones, the bigger screen makes the experience of using a website more like that of a laptop than a smartphone.

tablet analytics user experience

Tablet screens generally range in size from 7 inches (BlackBerry PlayBook, Samsung Galaxy Tab, HTC Flyer among others) to about 10 inches (iPad, Sony Tablet S, Samsung Galazy Tab 10.1 among others). In our research from sites we surveyed, we found only a tiny portion of tablet traffic (1-2%) come from 7 inch tablet devices. The rest of the tablet traffic are coming from iPads (~98%) which measure in just shy of 10 inches. Looking at industry data, iPads represents 68% of the global tablet market share followed by Android-based tablets at 27% and RIM at 5%. So while the industry data is a far cry from the almost unanimous preference we saw, the industry data still shows a strong overall preference for the iPad. Pulling data points from different sites, we found tablets represent anywhere from 25-35% of mobile traffic while total mobile traffic was 10-20% of overall site traffic. In other words, tablets are only a slice of a slice of the overall pie. But like everything else mobile, this segment is growing fairly consistently.

Mobile tablet visitor share

How does tablet traffic compare?

When it comes to visitor behavior, we found tablet traffic tends to behave much more like your desktop traffic than your smartphone traffic. On the sites we surveyed, we found our tablet traffic bounced 3-10% less than average, viewed 5% more pages during their visit than average and generally converted at or just below average. However smartphone traffic performed far less favorably in all of these categories – bouncing anywhere from 25-45% higher, viewing about 41% fewer pages in their visit and converting as low as 75% less than site average.

Tablet traffic tends to behave much like desktop traffic in terms of engagement and conversions. Smartphones are just the opposite.

What it means:

We may throw tablets into the mobile bucket, but tablet visitors behave just as well, if not better, than our desktop users. Smartphone visitors, on the other hand, behave far worse. When considering how well (or not well) your mobile traffic engages your site, it’s best to treat your tablet visitors and smartphone visitors as separate segments.

Why do we see this behavior?

Going back to the data above, most of your tablet traffic are on iPads with 10 inch screens. Holding up an iPad to a 13 or 15 inch lap top screen, you’ll quickly understand how much more an iPad is like the laptop on your desk than it is the smartphone in your pocket.

Our data is further supported by the nearly identical functionality between the iPhone and the iPad – the difference only being the extra 6.5 inches in screen. A difference that makes, well, all the difference.

Flash or No Flash

Most new smartphones support Adobe Flash. That is, most smartphones except Apple mobile devices. Apple made a bit of a splash when it announced its iPhone and iPad product lines would NOT support flash. Many predicted it would have a significantly negative impact on whether people choose Apple hardware.

Now we have to consider how much this matters. Going to back the sites we surveyed, we found 65-75% of mobile traffic was viewing the site from an Apple mobile device. So if your site is dependent on flash in any way, most mobile visitors are receiving a subpar experience. The number of websites using flash overall is slightly on the decline (perhaps for this very reason), but with a quarter of total websites using flash, it certainly presents an issue.

October 2011 Flash Usage Data

Time to take action: The solution is simple: have one site that services both your desktop visitors and your mobile visitors (quite the challenge!) or have a separate desktop/tablet site and a separate smartphone site. Treat them as independent sites, optimize them accordingly and analyze their visitors separately.

Now you need to ask yourself: Is mobile significant for you right now? What is the makeup of my mobile visitors? Is your website coded in a way that’s not friendly to all devices? Answering these questions will better prepare you for what the internet will transform into over the next 12-18 months.

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Google Analytics Right Now – Gaining Insight & How It Can Improve

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Chris Leone

Today, the Google Analytics team officially launched Right Now – a real time tracking feature that shows you what’s happening on your site Right Now. You can read the official announcement here.

Google Analytics Right Now - Sources Report

We’ve been fortunate to experiment with this feature the last couple of weeks. It’s pretty slick and has a high entertainment value – at least, initially. Below are some ideas I’ve put together and how I envision this new feature being used as well as some of the things I’d like to see added in the future.

Making Use of Google Analytics Right Now:

  • Checking immediate social media impact – getting the sense that something is going viral? Did you just push out a campaign across all your networks? Use Right Now to watch the impact happen as it’s happening.
  • Observing TV campaign impact in real time – if your TV campaign runs during a set time with a call to action to the web, you can watch the immediate response.
  • Debug tracking code issues. There are better ways to do this, but recently my go-to debugging tool was experiencing issues as I attempted to debug a tracking code issue. To ensure the script was executing, I opened up the Right Now content report and watched myself arrive on the questionable page. This confirmed the tracking code was being executed and that the GA .gif was sent to Google Analytics as intended.
  • You’re about to do a major update that will take a site offline for a short period of time. You’ve analyzed your hourly reports and know the time of night when the fewest numbers of visitors come to the site – minimizing the impact of taking the site offline. With Right Now, you can do a real time check on the site to ensure traffic is low before you make any changes. Right Now allows you to know the actual situation on your site before taking any major action.

With the exception of the last point, the reasons I listed above serve your curiosity more than it does business intelligence. Even if you can watch a social media campaign take off or see that your TV campaign resulted in an immediate spike, there’s not a ton of action you can take based solely on that information. In the end, we need to see how these campaigns perform in terms of outcomes – that takes time and analysis.

All of this being said, I do believe this feature has real potential, but most of it is still unlocked. Here are some ways I’d like to see Right Now improve that I believe will make it more useful.

  • Filters – currently, the data you see in Right Now bypasses profile filters. So all the nifty filters you are using to remove internal data and rewrite how the data is processed into the reports is not reflected in Right Now. Having filtered data in Right Now will allow us to both test our filters in real time and leverage all the advantages gained from filtering our data to our specifications.
  • Recording – re-watch events as they unfold. Chances are you aren’t watching an important event as its unfolding, so it would be interesting to go back and watch an event as it occurred. Being able to watch “replays” of our campaigns can tell us a lot about how information is shared and how it affects our site.
  • Integration into your menu bar – this will require API support, but this would act as your site’s heart monitor. Self updating visitor metrics, a chime when a purchase it made or a goal is achieved, an alert (see next bullet) when a sudden new trend occurs, etc. This doesn’t necessarily make Right Now more useful but it does give us more convenient access to the information.

  • Right Now Alerts – It’s fun to watch Right Now, but it’s kind of like looking up at the sky for a shooting star. You could be looking for a while without seeing anything remarkable. It would be great if you could program custom alerts to trigger right as something is happening. For example:

  1. Big rush of twitter traffic – is a link to your site getting shared?
  2. Your blog is getting major play all of the sudden – did your site just get a big mention on an important site? If you aren’t yet prepared for the influx of traffic, you can jump into action.
  3. You shopping cart funnel is more clogged up than normal – is there an issue preventing people from getting through the checkout process? Why is there an abnormally high number of people at the billing page but a disproportionate number of people reaching the receipt page?

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The only incremental intelligence you get from Right Now is that the information is delivered to you in real time. In other words, the fact that it is happening and that it’s happening NOW. The fact that it is happening AT ALL was, and still is available from other reports. When used properly, the potential for this new tool is considerable. Right now (no pun intended), I feel most of the potential is yet to be unlocked. API support and feature updates should do their part to make that potential a reality. In the meantime, there’s insight to be gleaned, but overall it’s limited.

All of this won’t stop the rush of enthusiasm and excitement. After all, this does seem like the shiniest, newest and bestest toy to come out of Google Analytics since Advanced Segments and it is an awesome achievement on the part of the GA team. But at the end of the day, the most insight to be gleaned from GA will come from inside our custom reports, in our custom built spreadsheets and most importantly, through our own analysis.

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What’s the difference between a mobile website and a mobile app?

Posted on August 24, 2011 by David McKillen

What IS a Mobile website

A mobile website is a website specifically designed for mobile phones. The width and general graphical dimensions are optimized so that they fit perfectly on a small screens. A mobile website has 3 important features: It is brief. It is concise and it is fast.

Generally speaking there is a phone number, an email and perhaps a map all of which intrinsically link to the built-in phone functions (e.g. If you click on a phone number it will ask you if you want to call that number). Because the mobile websites that WebStrategies builds are built on content management systems such as Joomla! or WordPress, they can be optimized for search engines. After all, isn’t the very reason for the existence of any website to drive traffic to your business – not simply just to have a pretty looking website!?

What’s the difference between a mobile website and an app?

There is a lot of buzz about the latest android or iphone app these days. You can’t get though a single day without hearing some reference to a mobile app of one kind or another.

A mobile app is a software application built to run on smartphones. Since it is more complex than the mobile website, building an app can be expensive, technically challenging and time consuming. Mobile apps aren’t necessarily search engine optimized either. A combination of a search engine optimized mobile website that links to a cool functionally rich app download is one way to get the best of both worlds.

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The Most Important Factors to Consider When Creating a Mobile Website

Posted on August 16, 2011 by David McKillen

It is the dawn of the mobile age. Your competitor has created a nifty new website that is actually viewable on his phone (and depressingly just as well on your phone and EVERYONE elses). You decided it’s time to make the investment and so are wondering, ok now that I have decided to have WebStrategies build me my Mobile Website, what might be considered some of the most important factors to consider when creating such a mobile site?

1)    Your mobile site shouldn’t be a mini replica of your desktop site.
It is very tempting to basically drag every bit of content from your existing desktop site over to your mobile site – don’t do it. Just as your phone is physically smaller than that behemoth of a monitor sitting in your office, so should the information contained therein. Think “brief” when building your mobile site.

2) Get to the point – to the heart of what you want your customer to know.
If you consider most users don’t have the patience to play for a long period of time on a tiny screen, also consider what you want them to quickly find on your mobile site in that short period of time. Make sure that the core purpose for having your website, or even business for that matter is obvious and front and center on your mobile site. To some degree you have a little more flexibility in terms of what you present first on your desktop website – in mobile hit the user with the most important content first and foremost. If you think about it, in most cases the customer may already know who and what you are and as such – the most important piece of information in this context? Your PHONE NUMBER! Think “concise”.

3) Make it snappy!
Generally speaking if you stick to the first 2 key features of a mobile site, that is being brief and concise then the third important feature should come naturally – speed.  9 out of 10 users expect to be able to find information from your site in a matter of seconds. Think “fast”!

4) Make sure you need a mobile site and not an app.
For many reasons, if thinking about building an eCommerce solution or something perhaps more complex, your client might be better off building mobile app not website.

5) Now is the time to move.
If the future of information and communications is on portable devices shouldn’t you consider getting a head start?

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

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Online Marketing – 3 Questions for Strategy Development

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Neal Lappe

I’m often invited into companies to consult with them about online marketing and their new website.  It happens often – a firm gets a new website developed by another company and we are invited to discuss online marketing strategy.  The chief marketing person might say something like, “We just developed a new website and now we need to do something with it.  What do you suggest?”  Having experienced this very scenario several times, we’ve developed 3 very powerful questions to begin to shape a comprehensive, long term online marketing plan.  Ready – here they are:

  1. Can your website be easily found by the people for whom you want your website to be found?  You might have an awesome website, but if it has poor visibility, then what’s the point.  Also, a peek into your web analytics data will tell you quickly if you are being found by people who already know your brand and/or by people who aren’t already aware you exist.  The answer here would most certainly drive online and off-line website visibility strategies.
  2. If the people you want to find your website can easily find it (an affirmative answer to #1), then does the website have the information they are seeking to get them to convert – however you want them to convert?  Does the content on your site connect to their problems, their pain-points, their opportunities – or is it just a bunch of blah-blah-blah?  The answer here will drive navigation paths, content and presentation.
  3. If people are finding you (#1) and you are delivering the content they are seeking (#2), then are you asking them to take the next step – ie. call-to-action?  Remember, many people using the internet don’t have long attention spans so we need to tell them what to do.  Do you want them to buy something, set an appointment, download a whitepaper?  If so, make it obvious how they can take the next step. 

Use these 3 questions to get a conversation going about online marketing strategies.  Good, honest answers to these questions will make the new website generate a return.

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