Use these tools to assess and improve on-site user interaction

Time-on-site, bounce rate, page views. You've probably grappled trying to boost these metrics for a while, and it can be difficult to make big improvements. Getting the right tools can make a massive difference and really help to generate that all important engagement which lets you boost these key metrics and thus helps you rise in the SERPs and sell more products. So we took at look at 5 of the best page engagement tools so you can see which ones are right for you and give them a try.

What do these tools do?

These tools help assess and improve the effectiveness of website design including different page template types such as home page, landing and campaign pages.

Why are they important to digital marketers?

These…

Examples of the latest trends in creating desktop and mobile digital experiences

In this article I'm going to review the trends in digital experience design that we've seen so far in 2016. As a designer and developer, I’ve written about such trends before, but this is the first year where I have started to notice the more significant changes I'll describe first. In the web design/digital experience development community, there has often been separation between the way a website looks and the way a website works. This has generally resulted in differences of opinion between designers and developers. In recent years we have started to see this change, but for the first time we are seeing less of a divide with designers now paying serious attention to functionality and not just to form and design.

1. Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence will have a big impact on the way designers…

Which channels are best for delivering more personalized communications?

Relevance - Relevance - Relevance! should be the mantra of digital marketers since we know that serving more contextual messaging to our prospects and customers will give an improved experience and boost response. There is certainly no shortage of marketing services to deliver personalization, but it seems from this recent survey from Venturebeat that ability to customise messages to the individual varies a lot by channel. It's clear that email is 'streets ahead' in its usage for personalisation although, as the report notes this can vary in sophistication from name personalisation to recommendations based on behaviour. It's surprising that web personalisation is relatively rare, although we can expect it's higher in Ecommerce sectors such as financial services, travel and retail. Venturebeat:  Marketing Personalization: Boosting Relevance …

Make sure you remember your target audience aren't always like you. Write emails for them, not you.

I collect first names on my newsletter sign-up form, but I never use them. [Cue embarrassed silence and nervous shuffling among the experts out there.] Yes, it’s an email marketing no-no. The extra form field hurts sign-up rates and it raises expectations that subsequent emails will be personalized more than they are. The survival of my “first name” field is partly down to the delusion that I’ll bite the personalization bullet “sometime soon”. Call me a database coward. But it also survives because seeing those first names acts as a necessary reminder that my emails go to, um, human beings. As in many online industries, the idea that the audience actually includes sentient beings is often trampled into oblivion by our technology focus and the words that go with it: Targets, segments, cells, addresses, clusters, groups, samples, lists, databases,…

Do you know what pages are drawing valuable traffic and which aren't pulling their weight?

For all of the discussion about creative content marketing campaigns, and for all of the plaudits that they attract, there is an elephant in the room that many brands are ignoring. These brands are investing significant sums in producing campaign-led creative content, but it is the content that they already have that is arguably where that investment should be focused. Functional content, on-site content, static content or whatever term you prefer to use, is the lifeblood of your digital presence. It is what drives your search visibility, guides your users through the customer journey and reflects your brand personality. But it is all too often neglected. As search engines continue to change their approach to assessing on-page content, many organisations fail to review and update their content to keep pace with the ever changing, and ever-growing list of…

Analysing time spent on various platforms highlights where engagement is going

As marketers, we're always beeing told to check out a new platform to see if it is worth the company using it to promote itself. When it comes to social networks, we tend to use size as the key metric when we assess if it will be worth using. By size me mean the number of people using the platform, but is this really the best metric? There is a massive difference between someone that logs in to a network one a month to have a quick check of their messages, and someone who spends hours a day deeply engaged with the platform. So marketers should also consider this less talked about metric shown in the chart below, hours per user per month, or HUM as I'd like to call it. As we might expect Facebook does well on this metric, but…

Are you really getting the most value from your landing page?

While businesses often focus on getting the word out to consumers, they often fail to give the same attention to setting up the best trail of breadcrumbs. Landing pages are key to conversion, and if your snappy email sends people to a confusing or bland landing page, good luck getting anyone to answer your call to action. To create a better landing page and improve your conversion rates, you must understand the challenges in front of you, recognize your areas of weakness, and implement a data-based strategy to overcome your flaws.

Common Landing Page Mistakes

The modern Internet user has an attention span of about eight seconds. If your page requires too much focus from your site’s visitors, you’ll struggle to convince them to do anything but close the page and go elsewhere. For every second your page takes to load, say goodbye…

How to nudge your customers towards conversion

Take it as an established truth: your customers are lazy. They want you to come to them, offer your product and ask minimum effort in return. They will pay you more if you allow them to be lazy. This means your first concern is to check whether your website will be admired by anyone except you. Ask your friend to “buy” something there. Did they manage it in 4-5 clicks? Have you made your registration form too complicated? Are delivery prices and conditions clear? To scale this to a more, I recommend you run a series of user tests with services like User Testing or What Users do in this Smart Insights list of online customer research tools.  You can also review this checklist for eCommerce beginners with which you can verify your online store. For those who want to get a…

An interview between conversion strategy specialists Hugh Gage and Craig Sullivan

Structured testing to improve website effectiveness has gained a lot of traction among digital marketers in recent years. Its adoption has been helped by success stories of subtle changes such as Google adding $200m in revenue by testing 41 shades of blue on their ad links, or the $300 million button, or even the $500 million button.

These types of 'quick wins' have encouraged more structured programmes moving from simplistic conversion rate optimisation split test to a more compelling realm of driving incremental revenue and profit.

The examples of improvement above are perhaps too tantalising, since they suggest that it's easy to get started and get great results. For many, the real world isn't like that - you have to make the case to colleagues and tests may fail to give these rewards.

As part of writing the Smart Insights…

When selecting colours for your site, consider which are most popular

You see endless posts about the meanings of various colours. Purple conveys superiority, blue= calm, red= passion and yellow= happiness. This is all well and good, but misses one crucial point which should be considered when assessing site colour; what colours do people actually like? This chart shows the favourite and least favourite colours of over 200 people across various age groups, although the majority were aged 19-35. It's interesting that blue was so popular across genders, and brown was almost universally unpopular. When it came to purple there was a big difference between genders, with almost a quarter of women saying it was their favourite colour and over a fifth of men saying it was their least favourite. So it's probably best not to use too much brown…