A phone number in the header on every web page is something we highly, highly recommend to every client. It’s not enough to have it buried in the bottom of the page or only on the Contact Us page. We’re talking every page, in the header where it’s immediately visible.

And it’s not because we want you to get more phone calls, but we’ve actually seen a definite correlation between conversion rate improvement and having that phone number on your website. Here’s what we think is the reason why:

1. Having that phone number gives your site a subconscious vote of confidence – it shows you are an actual business. That’s why a toll-free number is great, as it has more legitimacy. However, a local number may work well too for businesses seeking local customers.
2. It lets the visitor know that if they have a problem when ordering, that there’s someone that can help them. And if they have a problem after they order, they know they can reach you too. Even if they never need to use it, they know they can.
3. Some people are still leery of ecommerce and using their credit cards on the Internet. You can miss out on those potential sales if the only way they can order is through your website. Why lose the sale just because you don’t list your number or make it hard to find?

Those clients who we’ve encouraged to add their phone number to their websites have not necessarily seen an increase in phone calls, but they have seen an increase in conversions. The benefits clearly outweigh the possibility of getting a phone call or two. So display it loud, display it proud and put that phone number in your header on every page.

More about Nikki

Can your domain name (your website address or URL) impact your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising? You’ve probably heard that your domain is important when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and your natural or organic rankings, but it can affect your pay per click advertising too.

There’s a couple of reasons why:

• Your domain name tells people what you do and what you are about: Consider the following two (made-up) domains: www.BuyBlueWidgets.com or www.BuyBWOnline.com. If you were an ecommerce site that sold blue widgets, which would be the better domain? You probably guessed it, it’s the first one. If someone sees this domain name, they know that they can purchase blue widgets. Do you get that from the second? You know you can buy something, but not what that something is.
• It makes good use of the limited ad real estate that you get: You get a very limited amount of space to get your point across, and your Display URL, if it makes sense based on your keywords, can be an added line to use.
• It can be “bolded” in an ad: if you use your main keyword in your domain, and someone uses it in a search term (i.e. – your domain is www.BuyBlueWidgets.com, and someone searches on “Blue Widgets Sale”), than the words that they used in the search will be “bolded” in your Display URL. The display URL for our above example would look like www.BuyBlueWidgets.com, making it stand out more.

One thing that you do need to keep in mind, when choosing a domain name, is to beware of trademark infringement. If someone owned the trademark to Blue Widgets, and you own the URL www.BlueWidgets.com, it’s very likely that the trademark owner will be able to legally acquire that domain from you. I’m not a trademark attorney, but I’ve seen several instances of clients who have had to give up domains that they’ve owned for years and years to the trademark owner.

Domains are important in how they affect your identity, so think carefully about them. When in doubt, buy several variations and test them out. Domains can be bought for under $10 now, so it’s not a hardship on the pocketbook. When creating your online identity, there are many critical things to consider, but don’t overlook the importance of choosing a domain name that is going to best represent and benefit your business.

More about Nikki

If your goal is for a potential customer to call you, then why don’t you have your phone number on every page, asking the customer to call you? If your goal is for a potential customer to purchase something, why don’t you have an Add to Cart button immediately visible on the page right next to the product? If your goal is to get a potential client to send you their contact information, then why don’t you have a simple form available for them to fill out with a nice big Submit button right beneath it?

What action do you hope to entice a new customer into performing? You must ask yourself that question because you need to have an answer for it. If you just send potential customers to a page that doesn’t entice them to perform the action you want them to perform, the odds are greatly in favor of them not doing what you want them to do. Is that what you want to accomplish, especially after you’ve paid for that click with your hard-earned money? I sure hope not.

So go ahead and ask yourself that question, too.

If you need assistance with custom landing page optimization or website development, you may want to check out Webivore. They have done impressive work for JumpFly clients.

More about Jack

I’d like to offer a few simple solutions to help rectify this “empty” feeling. First, you can put up a date stamp on the site that reflects the current date. This can go in your header, near your navigation bar, or anywhere in the upper portion of the website. Yes, it’s a potentially useless bit of data that even an abandoned site could be using, but at least one of the first impressions that a new customer will get is one of “now.” And first impressions are absolutely critical for first time visitors, especially in the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising arena where you are paying per click for each one of these new visitors.

Second, put up a current bit of news about your company, your business category, the products you sell, the brands you carry. Date the news and update it about once a week. Again, it’s all about giving the website a “lively” feeling, that someone is actively minding the store, putting up fresh current tidbits of information. The news really could be about anything, but you’ll get more mileage out of it if it relates to your business and products. This could include starting a blog, which is very similar to this. Or you could just carve out a small space on the home page and update that with some timely bit of information every week or so.

Finally, and I think most importantly, give your calls-to-action a sense of urgency by giving them an end date that’s no more than a few weeks or a month out. If you offer Free Shipping, then also mention the month in the same sentence. For example: Free Shipping in December! Maybe you will offer Free Shipping in January, but then again maybe you won’t. The same thing goes for any sales you might run. If everything is 5% off, then offer 5% off in December. Maybe you will offer 5% off in January, but maybe you won’t. If you leave Free Shipping or sales offers open-ended, then you don’t give customers a strong incentive to buy now. They’ll think they can just come back later and get it, but of course then they have a good chance of never coming back at all. Once they are on your site, you need to do everything you can to close that sale as soon as possible. This all ties back to giving the site a sense of being “current.” By putting an end date, or a month name, into all of your promotional pushes it gives the site a sense of being “alive” and “fresh.”

More about Jack
JumpFly PPC Account Executive

First off, what is 404 error page? Let’s say you’ve updated your website and all your URLs have changed. Natural, or organic listings can take awhile to catch up, and someone could click an old listing and land on a 404 error page. Same with bookmarks. Unless you’ve taken the time to automatically redirect every old URL on your site to your new pages, that visitor is going to land on a 404 error page. Another way to land on the 404 page is if someone misspelled a page of your site, or forgot the “L” at the end of the “.html.”

Now here’s why creating your own custom 404 error page is a good thing: The standard 404 error page is pretty generic, it really doesn’t explain what a 404 error is and every server displays different error text. It can also be pretty confusing for a visitor. After all, the page they get is not what they are expecting. They could just leave, and you don’t want them to do that after they took the time to visit you. Custom 404 errors are good customer service. Think of it as one more way of being extra helpful and friendly.

So, here’s what to include on your new custom 404 error page:

• First, apologize. It might not be your fault, but that’s okay. Just say you’re sorry, but the page they are looking for doesn’t seem to exist.
• Give them reasons why it might not exist. Maybe they spelled a word in the URL wrong. Maybe all your pages end in HTML, and they missed the “L” on the end.
• Give them a few links of where they could go, like Home, About, Products, or maybe the top five pages on your site.
• Include a search box. But a search box should be the last resort, not the only option.
• Brand it as your site, without overwhelming them. This page should be simple without every choice possible.

Another school of thought is sending 404 errors to the home page (and before you give me a hard time, yes, I know the JumpFly website 404 error page goes to the home page. I’m not in charge of our site. And this Blog is just a matter of my opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the owners of JumpFly.). However, sending 404s to the home page can confuse users because they’ll wonder why they ended up back on the home page. You could also send someone to your sitemap, but again, they’ll wonder how they got there, and why. The point is, we’re trying to help visitors, not confuse them more.

I’m not going to go into the mechanics of HOW to create your 404 page. There are a couple of good sites out there that explain how – here’s two that I think are decent resources:

• www.plinko.net/404/custom.asp: explains the mechanics of how to create a custom 404 page based on the server your site is hosted on
• www.404errorpages.com: much more technical on what exactly a 404 error is.

More About Nikki

For the first time ever, the Windows operating system has dropped below 90% market share, according to recent data released by Net Applications, Inc., a popular Web metrics company. Last month, only 89% of the users who connected to websites did so from Windows powered systems. This drop was the largest dip by Windows in the last two years. Meanwhile, Apple Inc.’s Mac OSX posted its biggest gain, growing to 8.9% market share. This was the third month in a row that Mac operating systems remained above 8%.

My grandfather used to say, “It’s hard to be all things to all people,” and he was most likely correct. This statement also holds true when it comes to online business. Your website needs to be as compatible as possible for every visitor, and this can be hard to accomplish. When it comes to PPC advertising, you’re paying for every visitor. If that visitor can’t use your website due to compatibility issues, you have just wasted your money.

Let me ask you this; What does your website look like on a Mac? How does it work?

Last month Internet Explorer’s market share dropped below 70%, while Firefox increased to 20.8%.

How does your website look and work with Firefox? How about Safari?
(Safari now has 7% market share)

I recently had a PPC management client whose website worked great with Firefox but had problems with Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, the designer only used Firefox and never bothered to check his design work on I.E. He just assumed it would work. Can you imagine? This client was missing out on 70% of his traffic until this issue was fixed.

It’s not uncommon for a shopping cart to work perfectly in Internet Explorer, yet have serious functionality problems in other browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome (BETA). Different browsers react to code irregularities in different ways. Without checking, you will have no idea how your website behaves on different operating systems and browsers.

Ok, so you basically have two options for checking compatibility; check it out yourself, or use a tool.

There are tools available that will show you how your website looks through different browsers and on different operating systems. A free option is an open source tool called Browsershots.org. It can show you how your website looks on 4 different operation systems with dozens of different browser variations, with the ability to download screen shots for review. Of course, this will only show you how it looks, not how it works.

The best and most accurate solution is to actually check your website out yourself. This can be as easy as downloading the latest versions of these alternative browsers onto your own computer. Of course, you might not have a MAC system at your house, so a visit to a friend’s house might be needed. Your local library might have a token MAC available, or you could always demo one of the cool new systems at your local Apple store.

It doesn’t matter if your visitor is arriving from a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing campaign, or from a well placed organic listing, if the visitor can’t use your site you are going to miss out on the lead or sale. By checking your website’s compatibility on the different operating systems and browsers you could be opening up your business to a substantially wider audience while providing the best user experience possible to your new visitor.

I have clients that have forms for requesting more information, for signing up for a newsletter, for accessing whitepapers and PDFs, for viewing demos, signing up to view MLS listings and more. Most website visitors understand that they will have to give their name and email address to get information from a company on a website. But your form can pull people in or turn them off from your site.

When it comes to what fields you include in your form, the rule of thumb is: LESS IS MORE. Capture the least amount of information possible on your initial contact with the person. People are leary of passing out too much information on the Internet, so the more you request, the less likely they are to fill the form out. If all you need is a first and last name and a email address, don’t ask for a mailing address, phone number, fax number, and how likely they are to purchase. A rule of thumb that goes with less is more: people are likely to give more information when what they are receiving has a higher perceived value. Valuable whitepaper = more information (name, email, phone, address, company name, information pertinent to the whitepaper). Sign-up for a free newsletter = less information (name and email address).

I’ve actually been on a website that in order to let me request information about the company’s service (information that was free and would have helped me decide if I wanted to buy from the company) I had to supply my credit card number (and on an unsecured webpage no less). Do you think I filled that form out? Not on your life, and I left the site and didn’t go back.

And that’s another thing, if you really, really want to include a few fields on your form to capture things like buying potential, operating system, etc, and you don’t NEED that field to give the person what they want, don’t make it a required field. There’s nothing more annoying than filling out a form on a site and fields that don’t apply to me are a required field. If I’m a consumer buying a product online that has nothing to do with my business, why should I have to fill out a company name, or a fax number? If you are going to have a salesperson contact someone who filled out the lead form, don’t make that person supply information that the salesperson can just as easily ask them, unless that information helps you determine how to actual handle the lead (like the state they live in or the operating system their company works on).

And speaking of numbers, if you’re capturing something like a phone number, make sure to let the person know what format to fill it out in. Another annoying things is filling out a phone number like 877-239-9610 and having the form *yell* at you when you hit submit that it should have been 8772399610. Even more annoying? When the form yells at you AND loses the information you just inputted.

Fill out the form yourself, and better yet, have multiple people in your company or friends and family fill it out. You’d be amazed at how you think something should work, and how it actually works when real people actual use it. See where the people get hung up or question what they are supposed to enter. Get their feedback on if the information you are asking for is too much information. Those hang-up points or annoying spots are the spots where you are likely to lose that person because they decide it’s not worth the effort and they leave your site.

And one final point of lead forms, put that form on every page that it makes sense to. Put the newsletter sign-up form on every page of your site somewhere in the header or navigation. If you offer whitepaper downloads on your product pages, put the request form on every product page. If you offer information packets on a service page, put the form there. Don’t make your visitor have to click one more place to do the action that you want them to. Having the form right there in their face means they’re more likely to do it as it takes less effort and they are less likely to forget.

At JumpFly, we offer suggestions to our clients all the time at making that lead capture form as easy and hiccup-free as possible. Make filling out the forms easy and uncomplicated, and at the moment you’ve peaked their interest, and you’ll capture more leads and more potential business, making PPC advertising more successful.

Next topic – Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang and the entire Yahoo! board of directors are currently fighting to keep their jobs. Carl Icahn continues to press Yahoo! shareholders to vote them out of position, and Proxy Cards have been sent out to investors. Yahoo! shares have plummeted since the Microsoft deal has been allegedly taken off the table.

Meanwhile, Jerry Yang believes that Yahoo! is well positioned to embrace the future of Internet advertising with their pending new advertising management platform called AMP! from Yahoo! (View video) . Per Yahoo!, “the AMP! platform will ultimately help marketers buy across search, display, local, mobile, and video inventory – all from a single, integrated interface.” Yahoo! is currently the leader in display advertising, and is banking on the convergence of search and display advertising going forward. So, does this mean that Yahoo! is poised for greatness?

While Yahoo! may actually be in position to better capitalize on their 500 million+ monthly users, various former top Yahoo! managers appear to disagree. Just days after Yahoo!’s announcement that talks with Microsoft ended, three executive vice presidents, two senior vice presidents and numerous other well-regarded employees announced their intention to leave. Very interesting. That is certainly not a vote of confidence from Yahoo! management. I guess we’ll learn more in coming months. AMP! from Yahoo! is scheduled to begin roll out in phases, beginning this fall.

Regardless of how this plays out, there is an ongoing need for professional PPC advertising assistance, whether it be with search advertising, display advertising or whatever future technology may emerge. Internet advertising can be incredibly powerful, but is increasingly complex. New features and capabilities arise every week; It is more or less impossible for an individual (with anything else to do) to stay on top of this on his or her own, which is why professional PPC management is frequently the appropriate choice.

Also, use the header area to tell a potential new customer how long you’ve been in business, what your strengths are, if you’ve won any type of awards, or where you are actually located if you are running a local business. Use the header to tell a potential customer about any special offers or shipping deals. This is prime selling/information space and should be use to its utmost potential.

Make it easy for a new customer to contact you. Make it easy for a new customer to learn who you are. Make it easy to instill confidence and excitement in a new customer who likely has no idea who you are upon first landing on your site.

By making productive use of your header, you can use your PPC campaigns to land customers as close as possible to the product they are looking for and still give your website a strong sense of identity.

First of all, do you have a website, and is it ready to work for you? Having a worthy site to promote is the starting point. This is your big chance to make a first impression on a lot of people. There is a lot to consider when designing your site. Competition is abundant, and without proper education, thought and execution, a smooth path to your desired results can be difficult to find. A well designed website has to accomplish a few basic things to start.

1. Provide Credibility – Credibility represents the things that make a person feel comfortable doing business with you. Credibility builders include: a clean and professional design, clear contact information, company history, return policies and service agreements, testimonials, references, pictures of your work, your business and your team, awards, company news and events. The more comfortable and credible your website feels to your visitors, the more desired actions you will achieve.

2. Compel Users to Action – An action refers to the process of getting your visitors to interact with your website. There is no way to gain personal information about your visitors unless they offer it to you. Your website needs to compel the proper visitors to action in a simple effective way. Website actions may include a filled out form, a sale, a phone call, or an email. Each action you want your visitors to take must be well planned and clear to the user. For example, good landing pages are a powerful tool to compel users to act, as well as great tool to analyze your efforts. Nikki is currently writing a detailed blog series on landing pages for your reference. Think about what your visitors are looking for, and give them a clear path to find it quickly and easily.

3. Build “SEO Friendly” – Last of the basics to consider is visibility. When designing and creating a website there are standards to meet to take advantage of your site getting indexed properly across search engines and directories around the world. This is a small part of a larger practice called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If your website is not built to certain standards, it will lead to roadblocks slowing visibility through these channels over time. Make sure your designer is up to speed on designing SEO friendly websites. SEO itself is a very broad list of tasks that is always changing and always ongoing. Designing a site to be SEO friendly is step one. It is the foundation that will lead to all the other high level SEO tasks having a greater chance of success if you choose to pursue further SEO tactics in the future as a means of visibility.

In wrapping up, I’d like you to ask yourself these questions…What do I want to accomplish with my website? Does my website “sell” my goals as if I were in front of the visitor giving my own personal pitch? Does my business, products and services, pricing, and website stand up to the competition listed on page one when I search for keywords important to my business at Google?

Once you are comfortable with your website, there are many options to consider to promote your site. I will get into website promotion over my next few entries.