JumpFly Blog: AdWords, Yahoo & Microsoft Advertising

I’ve lost count of how many websites I’ve gone to where the immediate question comes to mind: “Hello, is anybody home?” The website looks like it hasn’t been updated for years. It’s not necessarily a color scheme issue, or a graphic design issue, or the fact that the site could just be plain ugly. It’s just the fact that there’s no indication of anything current happening on the website. It’s hard to give potential customers confidence in a site, or convince them to purchase something from a website, or entice them to fill out a contact form, if they are not sure that someone is actually minding the store.

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

Did you know that you can customize your 404 Error pages? Did you know it’s a really good idea to customize your 404 error pages? Customizing a 404 error page is a great way to prevent a lost click, a lost visitor and a lost sale or conversion.

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

Windows Market Share Below 90% for the First Time Ever 

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.