The ‘hit’ of not optimising for mobile devices is clear: from smartphones in particular, the bounce rate can be close to twice as high, and the number of pages viewed halves – so for as long as you don’t have a mobile site, you’re limiting your opportunity to reach and sell to your mobile visitors.

With tablet sales predicted to exceed laptop sales in 2013 and smartphone penetration continuing to soar… your future market will increasingly be using such devices to relate to, and interact, with your business. The challenge for you is to make the most of this opportunity.

Yet, many businesses fall at the first hurdle. We often speak with businesses who don’t choose the right solution and end up investing, sometimes heavily, in solutions which are not right for them… particularly Apps. These are not the same as a mobile website and, if not considered carefully, can just end up disappointing you, rather than getting you the results you want, underneath the veneer of app success is an ocean of failure.

So, here’s a quick run through of your options, and the best mobile solution for you…

Small Online Business / Low Traffic Site?

You need a mobile site, but can afford to wait until you think it’s the right timing for you. The perfect site for you is a small bespoke built mobile site (possibly using Google Mobile Site Builder) which is mobile-friendly with shorter content and simpler navigation.

The only two exceptions to this are:

• If you have ‘high ticket’ sales or customers, in which case they will not only be more likely to be using mobile devices, but your investment will be covered by the increase in business
• If you have aspirations to grow rapidly online, in which case you’ll need to plan for the future

Medium Online Business / Medium Traffic Site?

You will probably have hundreds of mobile visitors every week and, if you’ve not done anything, then you almost certainly will be losing a substantial business opportunity. You need to develop a considered, and bespoke mobile site. Don’t leave it to Google, you need something better which designed, written and managed specifically to suit your business objectives.

The exceptions to this approach include:

• News, content and media sites: you need to do much more than just make a pared-down version of your main site, you need to adapt it to integrate the full content and advertising
• Non-commercial websites: if your existing main site doesn’t earn you any direct revenue or business opportunity, then your mobile site won’t generate income for you

Large Online Business / High Traffic Site?

If you haven’t already, you need to get a mobile site for your mobile visitors in place as quickly as possible. You need to consider very carefully how the site will work – is it for lead generation, do you want to sell, are they going to search your site, does it need to integrate with the rest of your site… and, most importantly, how are you going to manage it?

You also need to think carefully about whether you need an App or not. The most simple litmus test is whether you think your mobile service would benefit from re-use: is it a shop? Is it media / entertainment? Is it interactive? If so, then an App would complement the mobile site (and can even be effectively promoted by the mobile site).

For this category, there are no exceptions. If you’re a large brand or business, you need to take mobile incredibly seriously because these are the devices of choice for the connected world we live in today, and as they improve and connections get faster, then mobile will be increasingly the way that people use online.

Are you ready? Give us a call on 01962 605 000, or email us and we’ll try to help steer you in the right direction.

As we look ahead, we’ve spotted six things that anyone involved in digital marketing should take note of… here goes:

1. Mobile Finally Delivers

It is common to get premature in excitement over new technologies. For example: the dot-com bubble was burst on the delay between the promise of the eCommerce revolution (2000/2001) to the actual fulfillment of that promise (from 2004 incrementally to today and beyond).

The same is true of mobile – yes, we’ve all replacing our old titchy ‘just call and text’ handsets with funky new smartphones for the last 3 years or so, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s an immediate payoff.

Expensive data plans, clunky interfaces, steep learning curves and lack of confidence in security has meant that many have not used these devices to their fuller potential. Now, that has changed. The devices are better, the pricing is much more competitive, the user-experience is tight (and not just the Apple iOS platform any more) and social media is driving increase in use.

Here are some stats for you to consider. By the end of 2011 these were the stand out numbers:

• Over 30% of emails are now opened on smartphones / tablets, over 50% at weekends (evenings)
• Over 40% of posts to Facebook are from mobile devices
• When incorporating tablets into ‘portable PCs’, Apple will become the world’s biggest portable PC supplier (volume and turnover)

If you have not planned for the mobile revolution then make sure you do this year. Ideally this quarter!

2. Bing Comes Second… A Good Second!

And that’s no bad thing when position one is secured by Google. You can be sure that Microsoft are going to be pressing hard to increase market share but their merger (read: takeover) of Yahoo! Search and Search Marketing, plus their ‘relationship’ with Facebook means that Bing has got a bright future and enough traction to take an increasing share of the advertisers’ buck.

3. The Social Backlash

There is no doubt that Social Media continues to gather steam – growth, use, time on site – whatever metric you want to use, it wins.

There is no doubt that IF you want to engage, speak with, understand better, relate to you customers and prospects, then Social Media is an excellent place.

However, where there IS doubt is how brands, products, services and companies can make this work to their advantage for two main reasons:

• Lack of imagination: we don’t know how many businesses do this, but many have the ‘Field of Dreams’ approach to their Pages (‘build it, and they will come’). Er – no they won’t… build it, put no creativity thought into it, and they won’t come. And for the few that do will leave. This is a social media, you need to think socially
• Narrow focus: you cannot treat social media like direct marketing and measure response and revenue out of it. If you do it this way you will fail for too many reason to mention in this article (TBC at a later date!)

At the same time, these principles need to be accepted: a ‘Like’ is worthless unless it becomes a ‘do’, impressions on your social pages are worth less than impressions on your own website, social media advertising is patchy at best (particularly LinkedIn) and the true cost of social media is the time spent managing it.

So the social backlash will mainly consist of businesses who thought (or were persuaded into) that either it would be self-fulfilling, or that it’s a straight marketing tool. Or, it may be that you have outsourced it to incompetents.

4. Companies Will Work Even Harder to Ringfence and Reward their Clients

It has always surprised us how little SMEs work to support their existing client base and reward them for their loyalty. Given that we can expect another challenging year, the competitive business will work as hard as possible on their existing contacts and make sure that they retain custom from as many as possible.

The smarter ones will also use techniques to use their existing customers to leverage further opportunity.

This will be the opportunity for true CRM – the management of actual customer relationships through a combination of media, not CRM as Salesforce describe it (sales channel – CRM with a silent ‘relationship’).

5. Limitations of Automation Will be Revealed

We get approached by many agencies purporting to have automated various things – from pay per click performance, to email response. All offering, for a monthly fee, to make our lives easier.

For the buyer this is serious compelling as the more automation, the cheaper and more scalable the services are. So, if it works then quickly, with little staff resource needed, then the benefits are clear.

However, the main question is: ‘is it better?’ And we believe that for marketing – the answer is a firm ‘no’. The main reason being that strong marketing needs two things: creativity and market knowledge. Give us a strong ad copywriter any day over an automaton: better copy, better click through, better quality score, lower spend, improved performance.

So, if you buy into automation, be very careful and test against a ‘human managed’ (ideally experienced) alternative. You may find that the only thing you’ll be scaling is your losses.

6. Performance of Apps Will Come Under Scrutiny

We’ve always maintained, when approached by clients wanting apps, that this is no gravy train… in fact, far from it, it’s more like a Ponzi / Pyramid / MLM scheme where the winners are deliberately PR’d to create the illusion of success. Yet, Apps are a thin layer of great success, covering a very deep ocean of failure.

Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon will court you, create a convention just for you, present bold plans to you, bring you into their carefully controlled circle and, if you’re very lucky, even get you a signed Zuckerburg t-shirt.

What you have to remember is that they’re taking about 40% of everything – and every app ties your users into them (as much as you, of course). So, the more apps they have, the better their reward and, actually, it doesn’t really matter which ones make it.

So, you can see why focusing on Rovio (developers of Angry Birds) and not the 100,000+ other games that die a death hides the true picture. Recent research suggests that the average Game in the Apple App Store takes £4,000 in total revenue to the developer, and games is supposed to be the most successful category.

So, we wish you all the best for 2012 and if you want any advice or help, then please call 01962 605 000 – we’re more than happy to have a chat.

1. If the adverts in the search results were less relevant to the search term, then the search engine itself would seem to be less accurate
2. If the advertising network gets paid on click-through, then to allow poor performing adverts to dominate because they’re willing to spend more means that lower revenue would be realised

So, Quality Score was Google’s smart balancing act. The premise was that if you worked hard making sure that your keyword, ad copy (in Google) and website landing page were more relevant and compelling to the reader, then you would be able to bid less for a keyword because your advert was better.

What Google SAY Quality Score Is

“The AdWords system calculates a Quality Score for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

You can read further details on the Google Adwords Help Pages. The factors include (again from the Google page):

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Now, whilst that all seems legitimate and helpful, there’s a lot that can happen behind the scenes… after all, who is to say which of these factors has much or little influence? And, just give further freedom to Google, ‘other’ is a very broad term!

What Quality Score REALLY Is

So there is a lot that can actually be changed ‘under the hood’ without any perceptible change, or even any need for Google to change it’s bullet list. What we can reveal is this: that Quality Score has changed substantially recently and these are the things you need to know

Of high importance are:

• Historical click through rate of the keyword
• Historical click through rate of the display URLs

Of low importance are:

• Account history
• Quality of landing page
• Relevance of keyword to the ads in the ad group
• Relevance of keyword to the search query
• Accounts performance in geographical region (a small enhancement of overall CTR performance)

Of unknown importance are:

• Other relevance factors

Because ‘other’ cannot really be defined.

How do we KNOW This?

Recently, we setup a test campaign for a specific service – ‘telemarketing‘. We used all the normal relevance factors: great optimised landing page on a very relevant well established site promoting telemarketing, relevant advert copy specifically promoting the telemarketing service, and a suite of well-filtered very relevant keywords promoting specifically telemarketing services. In fact, we called our Google Account Manager and they said ‘there’s nothing more you can do’.

It was pretty surprising, therefore, with all this attention to detail, when we saw that most keywords in the ad group had a Quality Score of 3. That’s right… 3 out of 10.

What it tells us really clearly, is that you can do all you can to make all the elements of the campaign and website relevant, but ultimately 70% of the score is about the Click Through Rate.

Why is this IMPORTANT for Advertisers?

The reason why this is critical is that there’s a problem here that few are aware of. The Quality Score Formula was supposed to balance spend based around click through rate.

It was not supposed to be driven by click through rate. But now, it is another name for click through rate. If you have a high click through rate, you have a good quality score, if you don’t, then they will hammer your quality score.

The problem with this is two-fold:

1. The encouragement is for adverts which drive clicks, however most successful PPC campaigns are about getting high quality traffic in – these two objectives can be, in many campaigns, incompatible
2. The message to advertisers from Google has changed from being about relevance, to being about SPEND – about revenue to Google

WHY Has it Changed?

We don’t know for sure the reason, but this is our best guess. Until recently Quality Score was to help competition for places – so that the small guys could compete with deeper pockets and if they were smart enough, then they would benefit from investing more energy and time into their campaigns and websites.

However, now that virtually any search has at least 2-3 adverts, most have many, and (we estimate) about 50% of searches are full of adverts, there is no longer the need to be generous. So, they’re starting to turn the screw – after all, shareholder value must be met.

Which is why they are also looking at limiting the amount of adverts on a page by removing the right hand column of adverts. We call it ‘search engine optimisation‘ not of positions, but of revenues.

What’s the REAL Message

So, that’s why Quality Score is no more – it is there, in name. But it is no longer what it was and certainly we would challenge their assertion in the final line of their description of quality score:

“In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

It is not a measure of quality of keyword, advert, or landing page (or website). It is now merely a stick to beat you with to make you cough up more.

Spread the Word / Find Out More

If this post has helped you, then please spread the word on Twitter / LinkedIn / Facebook / Google+ below. If you’d like to find out more about how you can combat this unwelcome development, now that we’ve identified the problem, just get in touch – contact us, or send us a mention to discuss @johnnymb.

Worse, you may never discover that a little attention could double your performance. So here are our five ways…

1. Make it obvious what is wanted

Too many forms suffer from not making it clear which information is mandatory – the common symbol for a mandatory fields is an asterisk (*). However you can now apply ticks (or crosses), field colour highlights or even tooltips (friendly text prompts) to assist with a form fill, like this one:

Can you see how, with this simple prompt, you avoid user frustration and increase conversion?

Also, make sure your descriptions are easy to understand. You may know what you want with a phrase like ‘Confidential Address’ – but is that business, home, email?

2. Make it inviting

Many forms also suffer from being bland or, in extreme cases, seemingly disinterested.

If you would genuinely like someone to contact you, then say it! There’s no reason just to put a stack of fields and nothing else.

Moreover, we recommend you actually make sure that the person knows what they will get out of it. You need to answer the ‘what’s in it for me?’ if you want someone to share their personal details with you.

Finally, make sure they know what they’re opting into, or not.

If you don’t rent or sell your list, then make it clear that you don’t. If you plan to send emails out, then give them the option to untick the ‘further contact’ box. Again, be polite about it.

3. Trim the fields

If a field is non-essential, remove it. The fewer fields there are the more likely a form will be completed.

For example, if you’re following up leads anyway, then don’t ask for the full details in the form – just enough to contact that person and then complete their details over the phone.

4. Never trust your developer to get it right

Most developers and designers only care about making sure a form functions. They won’t consider the user-experience, they won’t care about conversion rates. You need to make sure that you specify the form fields needed, the field descriptions, and then test it.

Here’s an example of how it goes wrong. It’s a search field, but the ‘save as’ and ‘save search’ are in the wrong place meaning that the search button (which is the main action button) is not triggered properly when the ‘Enter’ key is pressed:

Not only that, but what is the ‘View All’? And why is it next to the Search button? This form is from a large email marketing business who should know better!

5. Use Your Forms

Go on, try your own form or, if you’re too familiar with it, get someone you trust to take a look at it.

Ask them these questions:

• Was it easy to use?
• Did you understand what information was requested?
• Did you understand what you would get out of filling out the form?
• If you made a mistake on the form, did it guide you to what you needed to change?

Bonus Point…

We always like to offer a ‘bonus’ – here’s a tip: measure your forms! Find out what proportion of visitors to a specific page then go on to complete your form. Make some changes (based on the above) and see how it affects your conversions – you’ll find that you will get more opportunities and be more successful as a result.

If you’d like this kind of thinking applied not just to your forms, but to all of your site, then please take a look at our form – we believe it stands up to scrutiny – fill it out and we’ll be in touch with you.

If you liked this article, please share the love… Just choose your favourite social network below….

We’ve already covered some of the pitfalls in our first two articles: never commit to a monthly SEO contract and 5 critical keys to managing your SEO supplier. These give you the groundwork to understanding SEO better.

In this article we now give you the ammunition to manage your SEO supplier (rather than them running rings around you).

Before we start… important note… to make this work you need analytics. We’re working on the assumption that you’d choose Google Analytics, but any analytics package which can measure visits and search terms for those visits will do.

In fact, even more importantly, do you like driving with a blindfold on? No? Then get some analytics and then look at it regularly, or just give up on your web marketing!

So, onto the job in hand… Steps 1-4 can be done before the SEO visits, steps 5-6 in negotiation to reach agreement.

Step 1: Measure Your Brand Visitors

Firstly, importantly, identify searchers for your brand or sub-brands, or people working for your business. for these two reasons:

1. You will come top for this without ANY help from a SEO, and
2. They are not ‘new’ business as they have heard about you before

Step 2: Measure Your Current Organic Traffic

Secondly, identify your latent organic web traffic – the number of searchers who are already visiting your website (this will be your total organic traffic minus brand searches from above).

Step 3: Value a Visitor

This is very easy if you’ve done any Pay Per Click (Adwords) marketing. If you spend on clicks you will, almost certainly know what the cost is of your average visitor, if not, then  estimate what a visitor is worth to you.

Step 4: Target Relevant Keywords

Using your analytics and through your own business knowledge, you will know what keywords and phrases are relevant to your business. You will also see from your current analytics that you do get a number of visits on rather spurious keywords. So concentrate on keywords which are relevant and are likely to bring in relevant visitors.

Step 5: Meet (Suitably Prepared) With Your SEO

So, when you go to meet your SEO, then you can have a proper discussion with them. Set the ground-rules:

• All brand searches, past or future, are not a part of the SEO’s service, so when it comes to performance, these will not be included within the SEO’s measurements
• Your current organic traffic is where you are today. Again, the SEO has not contributed so they need to improve on this and should be measured on the improvement over your current visits and not be given credit for your current ones
• Any non-relevant keyword visits will be ignored as these are ancillary to the job in hand and a good SEO should be able to get you ranking for relevant phrases

Listen carefully to their reaction to these items. These are all fair, they won’t like it, but they are fair! And hear from them how they are going to go about gaining you extra traffic.

Step 6: Agree Targets with your SEO

You will then be able to give your SEO a target: tell them that your ‘break even’ SEO performance for you is their fee (almost certainly monthly) divided by your average cost per click.

For example, if they want to charge you £300 a month, and your cost per click estimate is £0.50 then they will need to give you 600 additional visits a month to break even in terms of performance.

If they cannot commit to this, then it speaks for itself: they are not able to deliver you enough traffic volume to cover their fees. Therefore they should not be appointed.

Step 7: Measure, Measure, Measure

We would support any SEO in two respects: firstly that improvements don’t happen immediately, and secondly that there’s no value in a ‘free lunch’ – you have to pay as you’re expecting them to work hard for this, probably harder than they do on most of their clients!

Tell your SEO that you will give them a three month trial to get to this target figure of monthly visitors from their work, and that you will pay them during this trial. If they achieve your target then you will continue working with them, if not then the trial is over.

Furthermore, tell them that once they’ve achieved this target you will be expecting further incremental improvements until they at least double this figure per month – because one of the myths of SEO is that your need to continue spending to maintain your rankings. This is barely true and only in a select few competitive business areas. If you cancel the contract, unless they have been using ‘black hat’ techniques, your ranking should be maintained.

As you measure your visits in analytics, you should start seeing improvements in SEO within a month and, even if your SEO doesn’t hit the full target, if they’re close then you should give them the benefit of the doubt… if they’re a long way short, either renegotiate until they hit the target or cancel.

In this way, you can manage your SEO rather than letting them run rings around you.

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This is true when it comes to social media too. With Google+ just about a month old, we’ve seen the two common responses you’d expect from this kind of launch:

1. The Enthusiast: your typical ‘early adopter’… just sooo excited by this new entrant that they’re gushing about anything it does
2. The Critic: much keener to take a contrary position and to be perceived to be knowledgeable precisely because they aren’t excited about the launch, they prefer to criticise from a distance

And, in Google+’s launch these have been polarised. The enthusiast talks up adoption rate, invites friends, promotes through other channels; the critic avoids at all costs and, often, hasn’t even tried the service in the first place.

However, in the instance of Google+ these two positions are both supportable – because it’s not going to ‘beat’ Facebook or Twitter, it’s just trying to carve it’s own furrow. Some will use it, some won’t – but the effect it has on both Facebook and Twitter will be measurable and long-term.

So, who should be most nervous about Google+?

In our view it’s Twitter. Why? Well, for two main reasons:

ONE: Because it is struggling under an ocean of mainly junk and drivel content. We love Twitter, but it’s just ‘overdose’ and as it grows in popularity, things get worse. But Google+ can do what Twitter can do in a much more managed way. Following is just one small part of Circles and Circles is way better than Lists, and

TWO: Because there’s little else to it – it’s simplicity is also it’s weakness. Whereas Facebook is a hub of social, sharing, gaming, commerce, etc. etc. etc., Twitter is just bulk communications with a little one-to-one interaction. So, if Google+ does things better than Twitter, it has nothing else to fall back on.

Will it mean Twitter disappears? We think that’s unlikely, but I’m sure there will be some furrowed brows at Twitter HQ as Google+ develops. Our view is that 100m accounts will be the key tipping point to volume communications getting going in Google+ (estimated to happen Q4 2011).

Note to Web: Google+ Hasn’t Even Got Going Yet

Google+ is still in a managed roll out phase. You can’t sign up directly – you need to be invited. Recently our personal account was limited to 150 invites and no more.

Not only that, but the linking of search to social is much easier for Google to do given their dominance of the former.

Also, Google is holding back on various roll outs we can be certain are coming:

• Business pages: which we’re confident will be better connected with Search and Advertising than Facebook or LinkedIn’s clumsy efforts
• Realtime search v 2.0: why hook up with Twitter or Facebook when you have your own platform? It comes with a massive search volume that blogs, merchants, advertisers and people want to get in front of
• All the other Google services: they’re not quite tied up as yet, but things like Google Docs will add some very interesting spice to the mix
• Mobile: Hands up who’s got a mobile platform AND a social network? Precisely!

Wrap Up

Google has had two failed attempts at social – Wave and Buzz. Wave was let down by difficulty in access / promotion and also being before it’s time – it wasn’t easy enough to comprehend and use, yet we will see Wave functionality but in other forms (like Docs). Buzz was just a weak attempt at ‘doing Twitter’. However we believe Google has learned from these two mistakes by developing an accessible and user-friendly platform which improves on what’s out there.

It’s not really Twitter or Facebook. It’s email 4.0… the start of proper unified communications that non-users can plug into (thus the need for a Gmail account). The trend is clear – email’s popularity is on the wane and social, chat and messaging is taking over – and Google+ is right in this space. And, as first efforts go – it is very good!

#1: 1 June 2011: Google Offers Launches

Google launches a new Local Offers service in Oregon with a view to expanding rapidly across the United States, hooking up with it’s search dominance and mobile phone platform (Android)… as well as murmers of NFC (near field communications) chip technology to alert mobile users.

You don’t get bigger than Google, they’ve had a couple of false starts, but can they get it right this time round?

#2: 2 June 2011: Amazon Local Rears It’s Head

Not to be outdone, Amazon rolled out local offers in Boise, Idaho. With, wait for it, a view to expanding across the United States. Leveraging it’s huge customer base and existing ecommerce relationships (with both consumers as well as transaction suppliers) Amazon is pinning it’s hopes on developing a ‘marketplace’ approach to Local where the offers are direct from consumer brands to the general public.

Amazon’s got an email list, and it’s willing to use it!

#3: 3 June 2011 Groupon to raise £750m in Floatation

Already global, the market leader fended off a takeover bid from Google earlier in the year. Now, it reveals it’s hand. It needs $3/4 bn to retain leadership and dominance of the space. The biggest deals, the biggest space, the biggest number of local advertiser relationships and the biggest salesforce. Can it make ‘first mover advantage’ really count?

Groupon’s in first place and intends to remain there.

For smaller businesses much of what they do has to involve some educated guesswork, but it is encouraging that the bigger fish, with all their access to focus groups, beta tests, online research and user feedback, also make mistakes.

Strategic Mistakes – Microsoft…

It is our view that Microsoft is currently treading a very fine line around a customers’ patience. This mainly revolves around their inability to support (or recognise) any browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Have you tried ‘Skydrive‘ – their online document storage facility? In Explorer it works, in Firefox it’s all over the shop! Yet there is no obvious reason for this happening – apart from the ‘optimised for Explorer’ mantra coming from Microsoft. Yet, with Google Docs already being the online file storage and management of choice, you can’t help feeling that they’ve pulled the trigger before taking the gun out of the holster!

This ‘blind spot’ also came to a head last week when our head of search was invited to join an online webinar on the Yahoo! Microsoft merger for search marketing. Did it work on Firefox? Of course not – it’s being run by Microsoft.

Yet, again, what this means is that we’re not as educated as we need to be for the new product and are less likely to take full advantage of it for our clients. So, again, they lose.

Does the world revolve around Explorer? We don’t think so.

Specific Problems – Yahoo! Prompts

One thing we are looking forward to from the Yahoo! Microsoft merger is the final putting to bed (/out of service) of the Yahoo! Search Marketing online interface.

If ever there was a case of not learning from the competition, then this is it. Changing campaigns, adverts and ad groups takes twice as long on this system than with Google Adwords or MSN AdCenter. Reporting is basic and unhelpful. The conversion tracking is unreliable (and in favour of Yahoo! of course)…

If it were to be summed up in a nutshell, then we’d point out this little box. It appears EVERY time you change an advert in a ad group with only one advert in it. You can’t turn it off, even though you have read the message. Not only that, it’s untrue. It must have been clicked 10,000 times by us. We can’t wait to never see that again.

Errors of Judgment -Waitrose

Waitrose has discerning customers, and they can spot a lemon a mile off. The very expensive re-design of the Waitrose website has backfired massively on customers.

It seems that even with an interstellar budget, the project was late and hurried out and had several major problems:

• Search results are too long: unless you were very specific in your searching, you often got pages and pages of results meaning a time-consuming trawl to find what you’re looking for
• Navigation: customers found it harder to find ‘shelves’ of items using the new navigation, often having to hover or click up to three items to find the area they wanted to be in. Once you got where you want to be, it wasn’t easy to find your way back
• Slow loading pages: almost certainly not due to server capacity, we fear that this is probably down to the amount of users spending longer on the site and performing more searches. We really hope that it’s not down to their shiny new technology – now that would be a disaster!

This comment summed it up:

“New Waitrose £10m website is most successful industrial espionage stratagem ever devised by Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda”

Want to see a small sample of the vitriol? Why not! Let’s hope they get it right in the end.

So, when it comes to websites, you need to bear the user in mind – because without users who actually USE your website, you have visitors, but not customers!

We don’t mean looking at the screen whilst running around it, but thinking about mobile devices.

A Quick Test For You

So, if you want to measure immediately whether you should be thinking ‘Mobile’ then do these checks:

1. How many site visitors are using mobile devices: if you have Google Analytics (or a similar service) installed on your website, you can check for yourself by going to Visitors / Mobile Devices. Here it will show you how many visits came from mobile devices and you can compare with your total volume. So, for example, in November 2010, this site had about 12% visits from mobile devices.
2. Check out your site in a mobile device: ideally try a smartphone and, if you can get hold of one, a Tablet PC (/iPad). Take a look at your site, the chances are it’ll look pretty awful if you’ve not tried to make it mobile-compatible. Check the number of page impressions from mobile users, it will be less than your normal visitors, but if it’s under half, then you’re probably not connecting with your mobile audience
3. Work out the ‘worth’ of a visit from a mobile device: multiply your revenues from normal visitors to your website by the number from mobile devices and assume a similar conversion success rate
4. Work out the ‘lifetime’ value of your mobile site: assume that your mobile site will ‘last’ for four years before being replaced, so extrapolate your monthly income. Note this is a rough estimate, but even so, assume year on year 50% growth in revenues (as mobile visitors are growing rapidly)

Once you’ve taken all this into account, you will have an idea of the revenue you’re missing out on by not having a mobile-friendly website.

Next month, we’ll be discussing some different ways in which you can then promote to mobile devices … it’s not just Apps, but there are many other ways in which you can make it work for you.

If you’re interesting in help navigating a steady course, then talk to Ergo Digital. We’d be more than happy to listen and share some ideas. Until then, Merry Christmas!

If you don’t know what we’re referring to, let me get you up to speed: Flash, a software owned by Adobe, is responsible for most of the attractive moving graphics on the web including adverts and games. This software is free to download and use, but whoever uses Flash to design needs to buy licensed software to create Flash applications.

Given that it is free, easy to embed, and a ‘one size fits all’ offering creating beautiful interactive treats, you would have thought that the Apple audience would be ideal users for Flash. Sadly, they aren’t given the option.

What initially leaked out from Apple as ‘the iPhone is not compatible for Flash’ reason last year (let’s call that ‘Episode One’), then became ‘we don’t want Flash because it isn’t Open Source’ (Episode 2), has now grown into a corporate mud-slinging match (Episode 3) with Flash ‘banned’ from all mobile devices and optional on laptop and desktops.

The irony here is huge. Because if there’s ever been a more tightly patrolled walled garden, then Apple is the curator. Every product they produce is policed. Every competitor pursued. If they really believed in Open Source then surely they would allow full access to their software, which, of course, they don’t and won’t.

Looking at this purely commercially  the real reason that Apple doesn’t want Flash on it’s phone is quite clear and is hidden in this ‘open letter‘ from Apple:

“Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.”

Though true, the reality is that with so many Flash games available free of charge, the revenues from the app store would shrink dramatically if Flash were readily available. By backing HTML5 Apple give the impression of being the good guys. But they know that there are hardly any HTML5 games available and most are of a poor quality and difficult to locate on the web… as most are supported by advertising and sponsorship using… yes, you’ve guessed it, Flash design!

Far be it for us to support Adobe, given that they’re masters of acquiring great software and then tripling the price. However this instance, for all the hot air from both sides, gives the impression of Apple protectionism.

As usual Apple, and teflon Steve, seem to come away from what amounts to a corporate mugging looking clean. However, their actions show that for all the words written and spoken, they are as commercially merciless as the competition, if not more so.