There are a few things that you must keep in mind when trying to reduce what we call a ‘bounce rate’. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that click onto a website, and leave again within the first few seconds without viewing another page or going any further. This is a good metric as to whether or not your site is working in an effective manner.

If your bounce rate is too high, then there is something wrong with the page that the viewer is being directed to. Be realistic though, try not to compare your site with others but as a rule of thumb, if your bounce rate is somewhere around the 50% mark you are doing well.

Bounce rates can be high for any number of reasons but usually you can narrow them down to just a few.

• The page is designed in a poor fashion, making it difficult to understand what you do.
• The information on the page the user landed on is not what they were looking for.
• It takes too long to load the website.
• There is too much irrelevant content on the website.

Methods to decrease bounces and increase conversions

1. Clarity and Conciseness: The homepage that you are directing users to is the most important part of your website. Don’t confuse customers with information that is irrelevant, make it easy for them to navigate their way to the correct information.
2. Design: Design your homepage in such a way that the users see what they want towards the top of the homepage. It should be clear and concise, tell them what they want to know on the relevant page.
3. Content: The simpler and more relevant that you keep your content, the more likely the user will take the time to find out more information. Unless the information that you place on your site directly relates to what you do and how you do it, you will be wasting your time.
4. Make the site work for you: Over time, the site will become the cheapest salesperson you employ. The cost per customer acquisition is much lower than using a salesperson when you design a site correctly, so why not provide users with offers or vouchers to help convert them into customers.

If you still believe that you have a high bounce rate, then you will need to look at what type of traffic you are driving to the site. Ensure that the person who built your site has added the correct ‘meta-tags’ so that you will be found in the right places. If you do all of this you will see a much improved performance from your website and have it working its darnedest for you.

Integrating the two is extremely important because you will be missing out on an enormous amount of potential business if the online and offline don’t work together. A prime example of this is, if a potential customer comes across an advertisement for your business without your website address in it, they won’t be able to access further information and will likely go to another business to get that information.

Another important factor is that, unless you convey the same messages across your website and brochures or newspaper ads, customers can become confused. To ensure that you get the most out of your combined marketing strategy, there are some basic tips that you should follow.

Ensure that you convey the same messages every time.
The messages you employ on your website and your online advertising needs to match your offline efforts. If your emails don’t look the same as your brochures or you use a different logo on your website to the one you use in your other advertising, people will have no way of recognising your brand and while you may not lose customers, you will have trouble attracting new ones. So make sure your messages are consistent throughout all of your marketing.

Use the same Logos
You would be surprised how many companies change their logos and continue to use brochures and cards with the old logo still on it. Don’t send emails or direct people to a website with a different logo to your printed collateral, it only serves to confuse them.

Put your website address on everything
This is the most basic but the easiest way to integrate your online and offline marketing. Surprisingly, it is usually the most overlooked. Your website address should appear on everything – there is no point having a website if you don’t tell people that you have one. Put it on your business cards, letterheads, invoices, brochures, uniforms, signage – everywhere you can. This will increase your website traffic and this will flow into sales leads.

Link landing pages to your ads
For your advertising campaigns to have any chance of be successful, they should have landing pages on your website, this way it is far easier to measure the success of any one campaign. For example, if a prospective client sees your newspaper ad with a particular offer, give them a specific address that they go to on your website and then be taken to a page that is all about the offer they saw in your ad. Your offer will generate far more leads and sales if it links to an effective landing page.

At the end of the day, successful marketing is all about consistency, so take these steps to get your online and offline marketing working together. These strategies will give you a stronger brand and more leads and sales from your marketing.

If you’re unsure as to what Search Engine Marketing (also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising and Sponsored Search) entails, there are two excellent breakdowns in brief here, or in detail here.

SEO is a blanket term that’s used to describe the process of enhancing your website, its content and its meta-data (that is, the information contained in each webpage that humans don’t usually see, but which machines – which includes Google’s search – interpret).

Undertaking SEO can be a project that varies greatly both in time & cost, and in overall effect to your business’s bottom line – the latter of which is determined by several factors. Generally, when you deal with a quality SEO agent you’ll enjoy the benefits of sitting closer to the top of results page for a handful of searches related to your business.

With any SEO service your website is modified (and sometimes re-engineered) to target a handful of specific keywords. Over time, your SEO agent will alter your website to feature the keywords (or clauses) that you’ve chosen to be ‘ranked’ for (that is, to increase the rank of one’s website in search engine results pages so that it appears closer to the revered #1 spot on Google).

SEO is a process that takes time, and one which relies on Google revisiting your website to glean new information from it – which can happen as often as every day (for very popular sites) to every few weeks (for the rest of us). Every time your website is modified to better target your keywords, along with it comes an inevitable wait for Google to revisit your website. As website rankings are constantly changing, maintaining your ranking for a specific keyword is an ongoing task that requires a fair amount of maintenance.

So for example, if you’re a plumber in Chatswood, it would make sense to choose SEO keywords such as chatswood plumber, or north shore plumbing (Chatswood being a suburb in Sydney’s north shore). These would be an example of some common keywords a customer might use to find a local plumber on Google.

Whilst being near the top of organic results for “chatswood plumbing” or “north shore plumbing” would be great for a plumber servicing Chatswood, relying on these two (and a few more) keywords alone will inevitably lead to a loss of many potential customers.

The trouble is that many more customers will search for terms such as emergency plumbing artarmon or 24 hour plumbing lindfield [where Artarmon and Lindfield are both surrounding suburbs of Chatswood]. And that’s where Search Engine Optimisation begins to fall short. With Pay-Per-Click, not only can you have your ad shown above your competitors’ organic listings, but you can also customise each message according to your audience. Examples below:

plumbing chatswood	emergency plumbing artarmon	24 hour plumbing lindfield
For our Chatswood customers (a bustling commercial and business area with many high-rise apartments) we can emphasise your speed of service.	For Artarmon customers (a mix of commercial, industrial and suburban), we can tailor your advertising to reflect cost-effectiveness.	For Lindfield customers (consisting of mostly privately-owned homes) we can emphasise personal service and guarantee for homeowners looking for a quality plumber.

 Seeing as the cost and scale of an SEO project goes up with each keyword targeted it can begin to look a little daunting for first time businesses looking to introduce SEO to their website. Just don’t expect this same sort of reach or the immediacy of pay-per-click!

Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are great for their inherent versatility. Google pay-per-click ads can be modified quickly to adapt to any changes in the market, and they can apply to more than a few keywords at once, each with individualised messages to suit your target audience.

With respect to SEO, we believe that a holistic approach to marketing your business online involves both components of search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising. After all, our aim is to get your customers onto your website and dialling your phone – and both technologies offer a different way of doing that. Search Engine Marketing happens to have the advantage of being more agile, more accountable, and with a faster, more pronounced return on your investment.

In their Christmas marketing promotion (known as Chrome For Christmas), Google are letting you give the gift of…Chrome! The web browser that is gradually picking up market share is now pushing for more with this new idea. Instead of giving the gift of new socks, Google have made it easy to give their browser as a gift for Christmas.

It’s simple

1. Go to the Give Chrome For Christmas website.
2. Select some paper which is themed.
3. Add the recipient’s name and email address!
   You can then add ‘a personal photo or video’ and personalized message to the gift.
4. Once the recipient receives the gift they can then unwrap it and are asked to download Google Chrome.

This marketing promotion is just one of many that displays Google’s intentions to push this browser onto not only the U.S. market but international markets such as here as well.

With new plug-ins, extensions and the beta version for Apple Mac now available, Google’s tilt at having ‘the browser’ to use is gaining speed by the month.

Who needs socks anyway?

The main culprit drawing Murdoch’s ire is Google, which grabs the headlines and summaries from online news websites and blogs and ranks them on the Google News service. The print mogul’s complaint stems from the traffic Google generates on the back of content generated by media outlets.

As part of his battle against the world’s largest search company, Murdoch is attempting to broker a deal with Microsoft that would see News Corp content supplied exclusively to the software giant’s fledgling “Bing” search engine, as reported on TechCrunch and the Financial Times – though the latter is behind a pay-wall.

The idea behind the deal is News Corp would receive compensation for its content – something it does not receive from Google – and Microsoft would theoretically be able to drive up the traffic to its search offering with exclusive content.

Murdoch has voiced his displeasure with online search engines in the past, though things started coming to a head when he told Sky News – which he owns the controlling interest in – that the flagship titles in the News Corp stable would consider blocking Google once a paid subscription model was in place.

“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” he said. “We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story – but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”

When the Australian-born tycoon first announced the plan to charge for access to News Corp’s titles online, the announcement was met with almost universal ridicule. Murdoch’s plan was to use the established model of the Wall Street Journal for other News Corp titles like News.com.au and its subsidiaries like The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun and The Times in London and a plethora of other titles under the company’s banner.

“Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting,” Murdoch said during News Corp’s fourth quarter earnings call.

“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.”

Creating a ‘middleman’ as Joe mentioned, is something that developers would quite easily get frustrated with. Instead of developers being able to fix it themselves, they have to work through a middleman (in this case Apple).

Rules, restrictions and a review process do not really make it a developer friendly medium to sell applications. Meanwhile the web is ‘still unrestricted and free’, if Apple made it difficult for one of the world’s biggest iPhone app developers, imagine what it would be like for all of the others? Hence why Joe Hewitt has decided to return to his roots as a web developer.

“I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.”

The Facebook iPhone app (currently the most popular application in the history of the iPhone) has had some major bugs-namely one I noticed whilst using it myself. When users try to view a friend’s profile page, each users profile reads “User has no recent posts”.

FaceBook has responded in regards to this issue:

“this is the result of a backend Platform API issue, not the iPhone app. We are pushing a fix shortly.”

Joe Hewitt’s departure from Apple iPhone application development marks the first major boycott from Apple’s App store as a result of its approval process. The store has been surrounded by controversy about their inconsistent and arbitrary approval process for developer applications; with everyone from Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor to search giant Google getting caught in its web.

If boycotting Apple’s iPhone for application development becomes a trend it may create many opportunities for both Microsoft and Google to claim market share with their own mobile app platforms. For now however, it’s just one developer (albeit a fairly well-known one) leaving the world’s most popular mobile application development scene.

The mobile advertising pioneer is a Silicon Valley success story that emerged in 2006, when Omar Hamoui founded the company after being frustrated by a lack of ways to generate traffic for his mobile site, claiming it was too hard to engage users.

“I’ve been working in mobile for over seven years now. Before AdMob, I founded two separate mobile startups that never got significant traction. It was so frustrating to build what I knew was an incredible service only to find myself unable to distribute or monetize the product without a carrier or handset deal. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one. Talk to any veteran in mobile and they will tell you just how hard it was to get things done only a few years ago,” wrote Hamoui in a statement.

These days AdMob is serving targeted and personalized advertisements on the mobile web through the use of its mobile advertising platform. According to the company website, the network claims to have served over 125 billion impressions.

The acquisition is the fourth biggest publically-disclosed deal in Google’s history, at least if Wikipedia’s metrics can be trusted. Upstaging the AdMob deal in price tag is the landmark $3.3 billion (US $3.1 billion) the company paid for DoubleClick, plus the $1.8 billion (US $1.65 billion) shelled out for YouTube and the cool $1.08 billion (US $1 billion) paid for a 5% stake in America Online – more commonly known as AOL – back in 2005.

Word also leaked that Google is rumoured to be acquiring Gizmo5, which was swallowed up in the hype surrounding the AdMob deal. The search giant is allegedly writing a cheque for US $30 million for the VoIP startup, though no official confirmation has come through yet.

Thanks to Apple’s prodigious marketing of their iPhone smartphone, and the global financial crisis ushering people to reach for their pizza coupons rather than their dinner jackets, both iPhone and pizza sales have gone up spectacularly since the beginning of the financial crisis.

Domino’s Australia has made an ambitious first attempt to finally marry the two in a free iPhone app suitably named “Domino’s”. Make no mistake; this powerful little app can have hot, fresh pizza delivered to your door within half an hour.

I can just imagine the App Store tagline-  ”Hungry? There’s an app for that.”

The true beauty of this app is the level of customisation you’re allowed for your order; everything from half an’ half to a completely custom built pizza! And all with a butterfingers-friendly and deliciously smooth user interface.

It’s not without its marketing prowess either – turning the iPhone sideways renders a more complete photo of the pizza in question, adhering to the age old tactic of placing the product in the customers’ hands. You’re also given the opportunity to track your orders from point to point, mimicking the logistics tracking paradigm – which for some people functions as a way of building up a sometimes illogical anticipation for product delivery.

You can type in those all important coupon codes and even select their special deals; and of course choose delivery or pickup. It’s a truly twenty first century pizza ordering experience.

This app is one of the first of its kind in Australia. Domino’s major competitor Pizza Hut launched their own app in the US, and with the immanent release of their localised Australian Pizza Hut iPhone App, it could spell the end of the clumsy automated voice recognition their phone-order customers put up with today.

Judging by the broad fascination of Aussies with all things iPhone and all things pizza, I would suggest that it may well take off.

I will not disagree, 30 million users is quite large-when you compare it to the population, of lets say, Australia, with a mere 22 million. However if you were to compare it to its competitors (which are much more substantial in comparison), it has a tiny 3.58 percent market share compared to the likes of Internet Explorer with 65pc and Mozilla Firefox claiming 24 pc percent of the market.

In my opinion either of these are better performing browsers; but it’s important to note that both are more established browsers and have had time to develop more of a following (more so with Mozilla Firefox). Chrome only launched about a year ago, so this increase in usership and market share is not one to be taken lightly – hence Google making this announcement.

The team that developed Chrome received a Google Founder’s award for the developments that have been made thus far (which has been won previously by the teams that created AdSense, Google Maps and Gmail). So what does this mean for us? It means that Google are definitely taking their browser quite seriously and want to compete with the big boys at Microsoft and Mozilla. With Google taking Chrome seriously, you can expect as a user of this browser to have more updates and increase in functionality as time progresses.

Having healthy competition between browser developers is a great thing because it helps them strive towards a better product for the end user. Users of any browser can expect to have an improved experience on the web because of browsers like Chrome and Opera pushing Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft to make a better product (as well as innovating more themselves). With Google Chrome’s usership bound to increase over time, it will be interesting to monitor whether it one day will be on par with Internet Explorer and Firefox- only time will tell.

Havent tried it yet?

Try Google Chrome and let me know what you think or which browser you use and why you decided to use it (Microsoft Internet Explorer users need not respond .

Services such as GeoCities offered the world a web as Tim Burners-Lee had designed it – all of a sudden anybody could stake their claim to their very own corner of the World Wide Web, without the need for in-depth technical know-how, and all for the cost of a dial up plan.

In a world predating Twitter, where the word blog was largely unknown and to own a dot-com was to merely buy into a corporate fad – Geocities gave a voice to those who were previously muted responders, forever blurring the lines between media producer and media consumer.

Within a few short years it became home to millions of tech-savvy users worldwide. It was a place to write down your thoughts, host useful and individualised information on topics of interest and upload countless scanned images, creating a loosely bound collage which peered into the lives of everyday people. It was your very own hyperlink to share with friends and family; and with enough effort – it became your own personal hangout online.

As the web entered into the 2000s and the first emergence of social media and media sharing began to gain popularity. It marked the beginning of the end for the now humbled free D-I-Y website. Services such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and blogger offered everything people wanted out of Geocities, with many times the user friendliness, and with the sole object of encouraging social interaction.

With the emergence of these outlets the web changed drastically. People are still uploading the same media, they still stake their claim to the World Wide Web, but this time it is distributed more liberally – and instead we began calling more than one place ‘home’. You’d write your thoughts on your blog, keep up appearances on MySpace, host your photos on Flickr and eventually upload your videos to YouTube and organise your social life on FaceBook. You would link them all together and create your own personal web within an infinitely larger network – not having been exposed to a single line of code.

But it’s all too easy to forget what sites like GeoCities had shown early internet users. Many a budding web designer sought their career after fumbling about the HTML which drove their GeoCities account; and many more went on to realise the internet as a medium to reach out and be heard; to connect and organise and arrange the social artefacts of our lives. So a sincere farewell to GeoCities – one of the most successful online amateur content communities and a thank you for guiding the evolution of the World Wide Web.