Half-Geek | Web 2.0 Strategy

new adwords interface coming

Google is introducing a new interface for adwords. This is a big deal for Google, the adwords product is still an unrivaled revenue stream within their business and they have not made any significant changes to the existing interface since 2003.

The official launch for the big change is at SES NYC on March 24, however, those who are interested can sign up for the new adwords beta and have a play with the new system, switching between the old a new interface at will.

The new interface incorporates a number of updates including:

• New 'account tree' style navigation
• In-Line editing of keywords, bids & ad placements
• Integrated reports on campaign management pages
• Roll-up views of all keywords, ads & placements in a campaign
• Ability to filter data faster
• Performance summary graphs to help pick trends faster

A little bit of research suggests that the new interface has already been tested by our English counterparts late in 2008. Have any of you had a play yet? If so what are your initial thoughts?

best use of bad language award

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

TwitterFox

If you are a regular user of Twitter, you may notice that the majority of the tweets do not in fact come from the web, but instead one of the many Twitter designed apps available. The core reason for this is that logging into your Twitter account whenever you feel like 'tweeting' something does take a little bit of time, while using your mobile phone or an app does make it a whole lot easier.

Not yet to take up Twitter on my phone, I am a FireFox user and managed to come across a great app, it's called TwitterFox. This app sits in the status bar of the browser and allows you to easily view everyone's latest updates, as well as make updates of your own.

Since installing the app I am much more frequent on Twitter and find it a much more powerful social networking site. It is now obvious to me it is not Twitter itself that makes it so popular, but the many ways in which you can use it.

Don't Just Watch - Buy

I recently discovered a company called Video Infusion who specialises in the making of interactive videos - videos that enable viewers to be able to view, click and buy products right from within the video. This type of technology is similar to Youtube's click-to-buy where if you are not familiar users are able to buy songs and movies via Youtube videos using link overlays (links that appear in the video). Currently, as far as I am aware Youtube is only testing this in certain countries and as yet is not available in Australia or New Zealand.

It will be interesting to see this technology evolve as so far Video Infusion seem to be main player offering more then just songs and movies. I feel it will not be long before Youtube too enables the purchase of not just songs but any products. My guess is Google Checkout will somehow be involved.

To give you an idea of how the technology works, have a quick view of the below video, courtesy of Video Infusion.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has seen this technology used anywhere else.

 

Online Shopping to Shine in a Time of Despair

It is now 2009 and depending on who you speak to regarding the future economic situation in Australia, you will hear a variety of different answers. In my view, I believe the worst is yet to come and I think 2009 is going to be a year off despair for many Australian businesses. I think what we have seen to date is no where near the worst of it and people who say otherwise are only avoiding the truth, 2009 will be a great test for many.

Now in any economic downturn there are usually businesses who actually benefit, fast food outlets such as McDonalds are a good example as people look to save money by eating cheap takeaway. Like McDonalds I think that many Australian and International online businesses will actually benefit as well, as people look to save cash by buying from online retail stores who have less overheads and are usually much cheaper opposed to your local bricks and morter retailer.

According to Hitwise, traffic to the Appliances and Electronics sector in Australia grew by 27.2% comparing December 2007 to December 2008, showing a massive increase in the span of just one year. It was also very interesting to note that the major driver for this traffic increase was paid search, many online businesses made big investments in paid search which goes to show a lot about the quality of this traffic.

I believe there is a major opportunity ahead for online business in Australia, and I predict the online shopping market will continue to hold strong in 2009 and into 2010, as many other big Australian retailers such as Harvey Norman continue to struggle.

Don't Make them Register

When developing a shopping cart for a client who wishes to sell online, there is usually one issue I don't agree on with the client, and that is if you should make registration mandatory in order to checkout and purchase something from the store. If you have done any online shopping you may notice that many of the big players in fact do make registration mandatory, and if you want to buy anything you must register. So if all the big players are doing this surely its a good business model right? Wrong. Let me tell you why.

Bill is surfing the net one Saturday and visits a online shoe store from whom he has bought shoes from before. Naturally, like many shopping carts it requires registration in order to purchase something, and because Bill has shopped here before he already has an account with them. Bill then decides on which shoes he would like to purchase next, and proceeds to the checkout. On arriving at the checkout, the site asks him to either log into his already created account (which he has) or create a new account, so he chooses to log into his previous account and enters his details, only problem being he has forgot his password. Now again like most shopping carts, there is a password reminder feature that will email his password to him, but there is one more issue, where Bill is currently he does not have access to his registered email address, and cannot get the password reminder.

As you can see Bill has just been stopped in his tracks from ordering his next pair of shoes, simply because he forgot his password. Now I am not saying that all shopping carts that employ mandatory registration work exactly like this, however the majority do, and even if your cart does have a way around this issue, in my mind it is still a bad idea.

When designing a eCommerce website or any website in fact, you need to ask your self important questions like what is the point or purpose? In any eCommerce store I am assuming the primary purpose is to make sales. So once you have this in mind you then go about building the store in order to make it as easy as possible for people to complete your goal, which in this case is make sales. Once the user has decided to trust you and make a purchase, making them sign up for an account is only giving them one more reason to leave your website and not make the sale.

Now I am not saying that account registrations are bad, all I am saying is that forcing the user to register is bad, and will hurt your conversion rate. If you feel that allowing a user to register in order to have their account details saved for a next purchase is a good idea (and in many cases it is) then by all means do that, however make it optional. You can promote the account registration in many ways including the checkout process to remind users of the facility, but don't force them.

Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking Issue

To anyone out there who uses Google Analytics (GA) with ecommerce enabled, you may want to read this post, it could save you some time. I use GA with a large number of my clients shopping carts and the other week came across an issue that practically sent me insane. Let me tell you about it.

I noticed that when pulling ecommerce reports for some time periods, the data was way off. Sometimes it would be real accurate, say within 95% - however other times it would be at 50% which didn't make sense at all to me. I spent some time trying to figure out where and what was going wrong, and then found something. One day I pulled a transaction for report for a couple of days in the past, and noticed that numerous transactions were being recorded with a $0 total, while some of the other transactions had the correct total but had a quantity of 0 which again made no sense what so ever. No wonder some of my reports were so off.

With some help we eventually figured out what it was - some sort of time delay issue. These transactions that had bogus values auto corrected themselves days later, most of them anyway. There still was the odd transaction that didn't fix itself up - even weeks later.

I would be really interested to find out why this happens and if its because GA is just struglling to process so much data. That would be my guess. If you have faced the same issue or have any input would love to hear from you.