Keeping product data clean: five steps for quality and consistency
Whether you’re in B2C or B2B,
product data influences buyer behaviour. The quality and clarity of your data
will influence the decision making success of website visitors.
Good decisions require high quality data. The more complex the purchase decision, the higher the demand for detailed product information.
There is a direct cost to poor product data; someone has to retroactively go back and make changes, which can be incredibly time consuming.
In previous roles, I have spent long evenings correcting data mistakes because it wasn’t done properly in the first place. Not a good use of anyone’s time.
Short vs long form: hitting the target with landing page depth
It's an emotive debate this long vs short landing page one. I have read a lot of tirades against annoying sale pages that scroll and scroll forever.
However, I have seen enough of these long form pages (Here's Econsultancy's landing page) to know that people are using them for a reason. It can't be coincidence.
And some of the companies using long form are respected brands (e.g. Amazon) with digital pedigree, so why would they contravene the basic tenets of usability and user experience?
This blog looks at the approaches and tools you can use to optimise your landing pages and take the emotion out of design and decision making.
Mistakes I’ve made managing agency relationships
It’s a long road this path to digital enlightenment, and it involves many crossroads and epiphanies.
In the past 10 years I’ve been implementing digital campaigns, defining e-commerce strategy and I’ve been agency-side responsible for a challenging set of retail accounts. I’ve been on both sides of the fence when dealing with agency relationships.
This blog takes a peek at the wonderful mistakes I’ve made that today put me in a position of strength and confidence. You might well recognise some of these from your own experience, you might be able to suggest some more; we’re human after all.
Nine lessons I've learned managing e-commerce teams
When I was a boy, I thought like a boy. It's true. When I first managed people in e-commerce, I didn't really know what good management was.
I had some good and bad experiences with my own managers but had never stopped to think what my team thought of my leadership style. Ironically it took the worst Director I've ever worked for to show me how to improve my management skills.
This blog offers nine techniques that, from personal experience, I know to be effective in managing and motivating a team. Management is about people, pure and simple. Forget the numbers; if you can't lead, motivate, support and inspire, those targets are history. Please take a read and then share your thoughts.
Six handy tips for small charities to promote their websites
I’ve been working with small charities and have been struck by the struggle they face when planning what do to with their websites. The big brand national charities have the luxury of employing web managers but smaller local charities don’t have the budget and there is often no in-house experience. So what should they do?
A website is essential to get mindshare even if it’s not driving direct revenue, so I started to think of a hit list small charities could work from to get their websites beyond the purely functional.
Six rules for producing optimised web content
Content is king for many reasons but principally because content helps satisfy your visitors’ information needs, driving conversion, and it enables search engines to include your webpages in SERPs for relevant keywords and phrases.
So why do many web owners fail to keep their websites fresh and leave old content hanging around waiting to be put out to pasture? The common theme I’ve picked up on is that web teams struggle to know what content to produce and how to prove that the time invested has an ROI, so it becomes their bete-noire.
This blog tackles the first dilemma and sets out simple rules that will help structure the creation of relevant content.
The importance of knowing how to use web analytics tools
Web analytics is still a missing art in many businesses, not just retail. Analytics is the last station on the investment train ride and is often compromised to pump more money into direct revenue generating digital marketing like PPC.
But why would any sane person put more money into something they don't fully understand and for which KPIs may not be optimised? It seems a strange decision.
My gut feeling is that there are too few optimisation specialists Client-side who really get web analytics 2.0. Dashboards are created and reports circulated to tick the analysis box yet limited insight is provided.
If conversion for referral traffic has dropped off the cliff, is that good or bad? I don't know. Even your data doesn't know but hidden within are nuggets of insight, you just need the focus and perseverance to find them.
This blog looks at a few examples of how data can be turned into insight to drive commercial decisions.
Using a framework to manage your website optimisation
It’s
essential to understand what influences website visibility in search engine
results. Algorithms update frequently and strive to provide the
best customer experience, so the demands on website owners to match this
aspiration has increased accordingly.
Site optimisation is more than pure SEO: it is a blend of technical, marketing and customer service skills that aim to satisfy the demands of search engines and customers.
6 questions to ask when choosing CMS for your e-commerce platform
A CMS is just about content so it doesn’t need much attention, right? Wrong. In an e-commerce environment CMS means so much more than being able to edit and publish content.
E-commerce pages have dynamic content served by code and this content can change depending on the visitor session; given such variation, how can you weave static content into dynamic pages without screwing the display?
As the sophistication of consumers and online technology has risen, so have the demands on e-commerce managers to understand which tools are the best-fit for the business. Having worked on many CMS implementations and seen the pitfalls, I thought I’d share some advice on what questions you need to be asking.
How do you get the biggest bang for your content buck?
Producing relevant content is important for site optimisation, both for pure SEO benefit and to improve the user experience and drive conversion.
This post looks at how you can make the most of four types of web content (information pages, images, videos and blogs) and move away from a flat view where content is isolated in one place.
Much of this is common sense but I know many web teams who don’t fully appreciate the value of their content.
