MediaTrust Secret Santa
I work for an online advertising company called MediaTrust. This year we decided to play Secret Santa. We also had a Pot Luck lunch . It was a huge success! Everybody brought amazing gifts and the food tasted fantastic.
Marketing and Design
I’ve been writing a post a month for my company’s blog. If you’re interested in Online Advertising and Marketing, check them out!
-Sanders
Tips For Email Creative Design
…set your width to about 500-600 pixels. Most recipients will be looking at your email through their “preview pane” which is usually a small portion of their available screen. One of the most popular email clients is Microsoft Office’s Outlook. It’s preview pane is adjustable, but usually defaults to somewhere in between 400 and 500 pixels wide!…
…for the most part, banner design is easy. It’s just when you have to create all the different sizes… that’s where you run into problems! I like designing the 300×250 size first. I find it’s the easiest to start with. It’s like you’re designing a mini-email because the shape is similar. However, I run into problems when I try to re-size the 300×250 into a skyscraper (120×600 or 160×600). Once you take all the elements and cram them into the astonishingly small horizontal space, you can barely read your text and you may have too much vertical space than you need…
…It’s amazing – I still see people resorting to the old methods of building websites. People are still using the Table tag for layout. This method is ancient! The technology has changed enormously since then. Tables are for… DATA! Tables, usually are not meant for holding pictures in place. There is a better way to control the layout of your site. The Div tag (div is short for division) was created for this purpose. Take advantage of the DIV tag. It makes the code for you website less confusing and allows you to easily make changes to your site…
Design Roundup: Optimization Tools for Designers
…these days, you can’t just throw up a website or launch a campaign and just assume it’s going to perform well. As designers we need to know what makes a design successful. Today there are many paid and free tools that we can take advantage to figure out what we’re doing right and wrong. These tools can help us identify and correct problems. Here is a brief overview of five tools I think every website designer (or anybody in the online marketing industry) should know about…
…don’t waste time and money retro-fitting your website. Make sure you design your site with the latest technologies that support analytics. For example, if your website is a Wordpress blog, upgrade to the current version so you can take advantage of widgets and plugins. There is a free widget for Google Analytics! Awesome! Personally, I try to avoid designing Flash sites because setting up analytics on them is too complicated. You can use flash elements in your site, but an entire Flash site is bad for web analytics…
Web Analytics Workshop
My colleague, Tai Dang, and I were lucky to attend the eMetrics: Marketing Optimization Summit last week in Toronto. It was great! Thanks for sending us MediaTrust! We ended up taking a workshop on Web Analytics for Site Optimization given by Jim Novo from the Web Analytics Association.
If you get the opportunity to hear Jim Novo speak, go for it! I highly recommend attending his workshops or seminars. He is a deep well of knowledge, when it comes to Web Analytics. I guess he’s picked up a couple of tips over his career that spans 25 years! He’s a great speaker because he makes all of these complex and confusing concepts easy to understand… which is great for the creative type of guy that I am… sometimes the technical stuff is over my head!
Jim Novo:
- Former VP Programming & Marketing at The Home Shopping Network
- Co-author of “The Common Sense Guide to e-Metrics”
- Author of “Drilling Down: Turning Customer Data Into Profits With a Spreadsheet”
- Co-Chair, Education Committee, WAA
- WAA Managing Director of Education
At my company MediaTrust, we are constantly trying learn new ways to optimize websites and landing pages to improve conversion rates for our affiliates. I’m hoping to apply the things I’ve learned at the workshop, to the campaigns I’m working on at MediaTrust. This is a brief overview of some of the things I learned:
What is Web Analytics?
Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage. -WAA
Build sites with web analytics in mind
Don’t waste time and money retro-fitting your website. Make sure you design your site with the latest technologies that support analytics. For example, if your website is a Wordpress blog, upgrade to the current version so you can take advantage of widgets and plugins. There is a free widget for Google Analytics! Awesome! Personally, I try to avoid designing Flash sites because setting up analytics on them is too complicated. You can use flash elements in your site, but an entire Flash site is bad for web analytics.
Quality Traffic
Quality website visitors are more likely to be interested in your product or service and have a high chance of converting into an acquisition or sale. If you have a solid source for internet traffic, you will spend less time waiting for you analytics experiment to end. Quality traffic will convert more often and it will be easier to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Sites that have both quantity and quality traffic will collect data quickly and they get you to your next analytics milestone sooner.
How much traffic? A/B Split Test or Multi-Variate Experiment?
Not only do you need quality traffic, you also need a lot of it! Google says it needs at least 500 visitors per week for an A/B Split Test and at least 1000 visitors per week for a Multi-Variate Experiment. The reason for this is because, essentially, A/B Split Test is only 2 versions of the page… Multi-Variate Experiments make more versions from the combinations of the specific areas you defined. For example, if you mark off and test 4 areas, and each area has 3 variations… 4×3=12 pages. You will need more visitors for Multi-Variate Experiments to acquire enough data and really tell which combination is performing the best. If you take the Multivariate route, I reccomend keeping the number of testing areas and variations low. The more areas, variations and combinations you have, the longer your experiment will take. As they say, “Time is money”, so keep your experiments quick.
Define your page or site’s goal
With landing page design, usually the goal is to get the user to convert. In affiliate marketing, conversion is when the user clicks and navigates themselves to the end of your process or basically does what you want them to do. For example, in a shopping cart site, you want the user to purchase the product. Once you define your site’s goal, you will probably realize that it’s too difficult for the user to use your site and reach the end of the process (the goal). Focus on the user’s experience. Try going through your site as if you are the user.
“Humans track information like animals follow a scent”
The users of your site are trying to get information or accomplish a goal. They are looking for a trail of links and buttons to click, so they can find what they want. Jim Novo calls this a scent trail. If the scent is strong, users will follow it until they arrive at your goal. If the trail is weak, they will either abandon your process (go back to the home page), or abandon the site (totally leave). Make the scent trail to your goals strong!
If you need help finding quality traffic and/or quantity traffic, contact The Advaliant Affiliate Network. Advaliant specializes in affiliate marketing and can help you develop your site into an optimized marketing campaign.
