Website Response Times

The response time of a website (that is, the time it takes for a page to load for a visitor) corresponds directly to the success of your website. Choosing a quality web hosting company to deliver your content is important, and as your website grows it’s important to pay attention to if and how the load time changes based on higher traffic levels.

Jakob Nielson conducted a great eye-tracking study using Norton’s website – the blue circles on the image below represent eye fixations.

Jakob Nielson

The image near the top of the page took an average of 8 seconds to load for visitors to the website – and you can see how the delay affects how the page is viewed. A quote pulled straight from Jakob Nielson’s article states:

A snappy user experience beats a glamorous one, for the simple reason that people engage more with a site when they can move freely and focus on the content instead of on their endless wait.

Keep in mind there are a variety different connections speeds and those speeds can vary from region to region if you have a national/international audience. Nielson reports websites that improve website response time as little as 1/10th of a second often see “juicy lifts in conversion rates”. Nielson recommends keeping your website response time within 3 seconds, and I completely agree. If your website currently takes longer than that there are a a variety of things a web development firm can do to speed up the site. From script optimization to lowering the quality/number of photos – it all helps. If the web development company runs out of ideas to optimize for speed, it may be time to look at upgrading your server or switching to a new web host. It’s also worth noting that different web firms will have different ability levels when it comes to this type of work.

The cost of bandwidth and hardware has fallen substantially over the past few years and many web hosts are charging older clients outdated rates. Take a look at competing web hosting companies to see what they’re offering for the price you’re currently paying. In fact the server this website is hosted on was recently switched for that exact reason – 1/3rd the price for an improved hosting experience was a nice upgrade.

The Changing Value of Ad Impressions

The web is being consumed in an ever increasing variety of ways. Mobile phones, wifi-connected televisions and Internet connected gaming consoles like the Sony PS3 are all changing the landscape in subtle ways. Aside from the iPhone/iPad not supporting Flash animated ads, the way these devices are used is distinctly different from the way we use our desktop PCs.

For example, you have an iPad in your hands and you’re reading a Castanet article. The text is slightly too small to read by default, so you’ve zoomed in, which coincidentally moves the advertising off screen. Is an iPad ad impression worth the same as a regular desktop ad impression? Or maybe you’re sitting with a half-dozen friends in your living room watching YouTube videos through your Playstation 3 web browser. Any ads displayed have technically received 6 ad impressions, so is an ad impression delivered to a Playstation 3 or wifi-connected television worth more than the typical desktop ad impression? Newspapers and magazines often presume the average issue is read by multiple people – it’s probably time for online advertising to start considering the same approach.

Publishing companies will need to consider this when attaching values to their display advertising options. Ad networks have already started allowing advertisers to target specific types of devices – Google Adsense allows it’s users to enable or disable delivering ads to mobile devices. Advertising firms will also have to consider the format they are building ads in – Flash is the most popular format to use, but iPhones and iPads won’t display Flash ads, so it’s becoming more important with every passing day to supply both Flash and static creatives. For publishing companies selling online ads, they will need to detect what type of device the visitor is using and swap Flash ads out with static ads if the device doesn’t support Flash. That’s where the opportunity lies, at least temporarily.

When publishing companies first start delivering ads specifically to mobile devices like the iPhone, that creates the perfect opportunity for the appropriate advertiser to swoop in and buy some exposure at an introductory price. If you have an iPhone app to promote or an iPhone friendly website, you might be surprised at how well these ads can perform for the price. iPhone/iPad targeted advertising won’t be the bread and butter of most online publishers, so the fact that it’s an afterthought should keep prices low. This same concept applies to game console targeted advertising if that type of audience/platform suits your brand.

Quick Tips for Facebook Advertising

Facebook is a great advertising tool for a number of reasons. Regardless of the controversy surrounding how Facebook plans to use the personal information the social network collects, it’s still used by millions and millions of people around the world. At the end of the day, the ease of setting up a campaign and the targeting options available make Facebook a great place to advertise online.

• Don’t trust the estimated cost per click rate until your campaign is live – it’s almost always higher than advertised. Some will say that your new ad entering the marketplace forces the cost per click rates up, which is true to a degree, but I’m consistently seeing cost per click price increases of more than 20%. Make sure you factor this in to you campaign expectations.
• You don’t have to accept the cost per click you’re being charged – a little trick that works for me from time to time is to change your targeting ever so slightly. For example, instead of targeting people 40+ years of age, target people 39+ years of age. I’ve personally seen cost per click rates drop 10 cents by using that exact technique.
• Create as many ad variations as you can think of, and then create some more! Facebook advertising is half advertising, half market research. Create different ads for different products, use a variety of photos and think outside the box! You never know what you might learn, and the most successful ads may not be what you would expect.
• As a follow up to the last point, use what you learn with Facebook advertising in other marketing efforts. Or even use Facebook to research a specific demographic if you’re looking at a bigger advertising buy elsewhere. What type of message/imagery should you use in that new magazine that reaches a demographic of 45+ green thumbs? Why not target the same general audience with Facebook and run 10 ads with different flower imagery, different headlines, different angles to your pitch. It may not be a completely perfect comparison, but it’s far better than guessing!

I can’t give away free tactics without following it up with my own sales pitch, so my 5th tip is simply send me an email and I’ll take care of everything for you!

The death of a marketing cliche

Here it comes:

Half of my advertising works, I just don’t know which half!

I’ve heard it used as a joke and I’ve heard it used in a completely serious manner – I’m just happy I focus primarily on Internet marketing. Here’s why this phrase is dead to me:

• With $1,000 you employ me to launch a Facebook campaign for your brand which directs visitors to your website where you sell [insert product here]. For the sake of this article, I’ll use handmade chocolate gift packages which are sold through your website.
• Targeting just a single city, I segment your audience into groups. Males of three specific age ranges and females of three specific age ranges.
• 10 different ads are created for each segment – a total of 60 ads are launched for the campaign (60 may seem like a lot – more on that later)
• After the campaign is live, I review the statistics and learn:
  • Males age 24-30 don’t respond to ads with heart related pictures
  • Females 30-35 respond strongly to “catch your man off guard this valentines”
  • Males & females both seem to like the “surprise that special someone this Valentine’s” message

So at this point we have a leg up on print and other traditional means of advertising. We were able to run 60 ads simultaneously targeting specific demographics, but it doesn’t stop there – now the visitor is on your website:

• You have 4 packages ready for sale, each at different price points:
  • A variety of chocolates plus a teddy bear
  • Heart shaped chocolates with chocolate body paint (my favorite)
  • Dark chocolate package (the healthy choice)
  • The highest of high end product for those chocolate aficionados out there
• With proper tracking, you can learn which of the above groups are most likely to purchase the teddy bear package versus the heart shaped package.

So in the end we’ve learned that 25-30 year old males have a tendency to opt for the teddy bear package, while the females aged 35-40 spring for the dark chocolate package. These are purely speculative results, I don’t have any clients in the chocolate business.

So we’ve proven this cliche wrong and more. At the Facebook Ad level we’ve learned which advertisements grab our audiences attention – yes we had to create 60 ads instead of one or two print ads but it was well worth it. Then we’ve also followed the visitor from Facebook along with his or her information straight through the purchase phase. We’ve learned what messages work, what imagery works, and what demographics are interested in which products. This is part advertising, part market research – pass this information on to your sales representatives to help them suggest the right products on the floor. There’s a legitimate reason to double the advertising budget you had in mind!

I have one critically important addition to this fabricated campaign – let them sign up for your email newsletter after they’ve made the purchase! Let them tell you special dates so you can send email reminders in time for their anniversary. They’ve taken the time to make a purchase, now grab a quick chunk of information from them so you can generate future sales.

Online advertising ingenuity

Electronic Arts is releasing a new game called Dante’s Inferno and an ad agency commissioned to promote the game came up with a very unique campaign. The agency, Wieden-Kennedy, starting off with a fairly traditional move – they bought banner ads on six different video game websites. The ingenuity came into play when Wieden-Kennedy communicated a rather strange request to the six gaming websites. These six gaming websites were to include text based art in the source code of their websites – something that wouldn’t be visible on the website itself, but instead would only be seen if someone looked at the actual source code of the website. In this text based art, or ASCII art, a URL was hidden along with a password. Each of the six websites had a different password. When you visited the secret URL you were asked to enter all 6 passwords which would then let you in to the website to download exclusive, pre-release content.

The campaign ran for nearly two weeks and generated 26,000 visits to the ‘secret’ website. While the typical person really has no reason to look at the source code of a website, Wieden-Kennedy was betting that the audience interested in Dante’s Inferno would not only know how to find the hidden messages, but that the concept alone would give the campaign more legs than the standard banner ads would have. And they were right, because here I sit as an online marketing consultant with relatively no interest in the game, admiring the creative of the online marketing campaign.

Kudos to Wieden-Kennedy!