Congratulations! You have just convinced a potential customer to click through from your HTML Email, Google Ad, Banner, Social Network message (the list goes on) you have their attention and they are ready to read, buy or subscribe. So where next?

Sadly in many cases marketers are happy to link hot leads like this through to their home or product page in the hope the user will work it out for themselves. Where is the context? Is this what the user was expecting to see? Is the language consistent? Is that special offer you mentioned clearly visible? Probably not. Welcome to the world of landing pages.

Whilst good landing pages adhere to the core principles of user centred design such as strong usability, clear information layout and simple navigation they are also single minded in their push to convert, not generally inform, the user.

Here are a few golden rules:

Be consistent
It is really crucial to maintain a consistent tone of voice from the source of the click through. You could even consider having the same headline on your landing page as your upstream ad. Sure, it's repetition, but at least the user feels like they are in the right place.

If users are landing from a wide variety of sources then you should probably segment the messaging rather than trying to please everyone with boring catch all copy. The same rules should also be applied to visuals if relevant.

Grab attention and don't waffle
Keep the page to a single point and use minimal text to explain it. Then ask yourself "Does my copy answer immediate, obvious questions or concerns?"

Remove unnecessary navigation and keep refining the content as much a you can. Every item on the page needs to justify its existence. If you want to quickly test your page use the '5 second rule'. Show the page to someone fresh for 5 seconds and then ask them to explain what it was all about. If they can't or mention too many differing messages get back to the drawing board!

If you need a bit more help along the sales process and words, visuals and competitive pricing are not enough then sometimes giving away a limited free account, trial or sample can be effective conversion aids.

Learn to point
It is still quite important to keep your primary call to action (CTA) above the fold (no vertical scrolling) or to repeat the CTA throughout the page if it must be long. Arrows or oversized buttons are the usual visual metaphors for action online. Arrows can also be useful for breaking out of the standard grid lines of your design which will inevitably attract the eye.

If your design features people, face them in the direction of your CTA although resist the urge to be cheesy, authenticity is important.

Colour needs to be considered on CTAs. Red can evoke a strong emotional response although it does also represent "stop". Orange equates to an enthusiastic get-it-done attitude whilst blue is the default web colour for a link.

Use video!
Users are far more likely to watch a well crafted short video or screencast than read a long piece of text.

Only ask for the information you really need
As handy as it would be to know the age, gender and occupation of the user it is not always essential. The more you ask for, the less you will get. If you really do need to know personal information then turn it into a unique selling point e.g. "Tell us your birthday and we will send you a little present on the big day!"

Build trust
If the user clicking through is not already familiar with your brand then official accreditation or affiliation to organisational bodies, logos of well known brands you are partnered with or working for and testimonials (preferably not anonymous!) will support you in your endeavours to convert.

Don't stop the conversation!
Thank you pages are so often overlooked but why should we stop there? This is the ideal place to offer further incentives such as free ebook download or links to more information. A surprise bonus will leave the user feeling very good about the experience.

Likewise you have just converted your lead - well done! They are probably feeling at their most in love with your message at this point so add some social sharing functions here so they can tell their own community about this great product or service and help spread the word for you.

Track your results properly
If you can track the user journey you give yourself a fighting chance of learning from your mistakes as well as knowing what your conversion rate, bounce/abandonment rate and form completion rates are. How else can you tell if the campaign was worth while?

If you would like more information on tracking have a read of our blog article "Five Google Analytics tips you need to know"

I hope you have found this useful and please do leave any comments or other tips below. Also, I could not have written this article without some of the fantastic advice on http://unbounce.com/blog/

There should be no need to introduce you to Google Analytics, the most widely used web analytics application. The tool is powerful and FREE so it isn't hard to see why it is so popular. However, only a small percentage of users fully harness it's potential.

Google is constantly refining and adding new features to it's analytics service. Although you need to be a bit exploratory if you are going to make the most out of the 85 Google Analytics reports available. Lurking beneath the main dashboard Google Analytics gives you the necessary tools to analyse all of your website's data. Here are 5 under-used Google Analytics features you need to know.

1. Exclude internal traffic

Internal traffic to your site can skew your Google Analytics report. If you want to get a better picture of the traffic coming to your site, it is advised to filter out your internal traffic. Google Analytics allows you to set up a filter to easily exclude your own visits from the analytics results.

• On your Google Analytics dashboard, click on the Analytics Settings link.
  
  
• Then click on the Filter Manager link.
  
  
• The Filter Manager page will show you all existing filters for your site. Create a new one by clicking on the Add Filter link.
  
  
• In the new filter window:
  
  Enter the name of your new filter (ie: internal traffic)
  
  "Filter type" - tick the radio button "predefined filter"
  
  We want to exclude traffic from your IP address, so you will need to select "Exclude," "traffic from the IP addresses," and "that are equal to" in the three dropdowns.
  
  Enter your IP address (if you don't know your IP address, simply click on this link)
  
  Select which websites you want to filter by clicking on the appropriate website profile(s) and then clicking "Add"
  
  Finally, click "Save Changes"

Your Google Analytics report should now exclude your own traffic and you can get more accurate tracking data.

2. Set up goals and funnels tracking
(probably the most important tracking feature to set up)

Google describes a goal as a website page which a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download. Please note that if you have an e-commerce site, there is a more specific tracking feature for measuring your goals.

The "goals" feature is a simple way of tracking your business objectives for your website. A goal must be a measurable action performed by your website's visitors (such as a page view visit to a thank you page). So a business objective + a measurable action = goal

Check out these common examples:

Usually between the initial click and the visitor's action, visitors are required to make multiple steps to complete the desired action. This creates the "goal funnel", with each step being a measurable action. Your visitor can take two routes: 1) follow the intended path, which means the goal is "completed" or 2) decide to leave the process along the way in which case the conversion chain is broken and goal abandoned.

Google Analytics allows you to track visitors as they go through the different steps of the goal funnel and shows you how many potential customers abandon the process, and at which point. The funnels feature is an amazing and very valuable tool that will help you detect issues with your conversion process. With this precious information in hand, you should be able to address the sections of your site preventing you from completing your business objectives, informing future updates.

Setting up goals in Google Analytics is one of the most important actions when it comes to configuring your account. Here is how to do it:

• First you will need to define your goal funnel – When you are on your website, ask yourself what are the steps required to complete the goal? Once you know, write down the URLs that will define your funnel (or ask your developer).
  
  For example:
  1. start_registration.html
  2. enter_shipping_info.html
  3. enter_subscriber_preferences.html
  4. finalise_registration.html
  5. thank_you.html
   
• On your dashboard, click on "Goals" on the left hand side navigation and click on "Set up goals and funnels"
• Enter goal information.
  
  
  
  Note you have the choice between 3 different types of goal: URL destination, time on site and pages/visit.
• Enter goal details
  
  
  
  Set "Match Type" to either "Exact Match," "Head Match," or "Regular Expression Match. This mainly depends on the type of websites you have (ie: static vs. dynamic). You can read more about the difference between Head, Exact, and Regular Expression Match on Google Analytics help page.
  Select if the goal URL is case sensitive and finally you can add a value to a goal.
• Define Your Goal Funnel - Specify the URLs and name each steps of your funnel.
• You are done! You can now analyse your goals performance.

You will only be able to see your goals data in reports after a few days of activity but please note this feature is not backwards compatible. Once the data is collected, go to your dashboard, click on Goals and open the Funnel Visualization Report. Google Analytics will tell you the following:

1. How many people enter at each step of the funnel.
2. How many people abandon at each step.
3. How many people make it to the next stage.
4. How many people make it all the way through.

The funnel will look something similar to this:

On the left you can see how your visitors enter the funnel, on the right where they leave the funnel and where they go. Finally the middle part shows you how visitors progress to the funnel, how many continue on to each step. In the example above, you can see 33,376 started the process and 25,434 go to another section but approximately 10,000 users leave the site at the first step. We can see something must be wrong with the first step. However, the abandonment on the second step is lower, which is good. Finally, you can see the overall conversion rate is 9.98%.

If you need a bit more information about goals in Google analytics, I suggest you check out this very handy tutorial: "Google Analytics IQ Lesson: Goals in Google Analytics"

3. Set up Analytics Intelligence & custom alerts

Google analytics recently launched Intelligence Beta which is an "algorithmic driven intelligence engine". What does that mean? It means Analytics Intelligence constantly monitors your website's traffic, detects any anomaly in your traffic patterns and sends you automatic alerts of significant changes over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Clever eh?

You can also create your own custom alerts, where you set the conditions for the alert depending on what you want to monitor. Go to the left hand side of your dashboard and click on "Intelligence Beta"

You have 2 choices:

1. Set up your own custom reports for specific things that you want to monitor.
   For example, you could have just launched a campaign in a specific location and wanted to be notified how the campaign is impacting traffic from that location. You could also create another alert to see when the traffic from that location is decreasing, so you can find out when the campaign starts to run out.
2. If you are not very familiar with setting up "customised alerts" then you can select one of the templates on the "manage intelligence alerts" page. Just click on "copy" and modify the alerts so it monitors what you need.

Once your intelligence alerts are setup and triggered you will receive a custom alert, posted in your Daily, Weekly or Monthly Alerts on your Google Analytics account or sent by email if you requested that option.
For further information on the Analytics Intelligence feature, visit the Google Analytics Help Center.

4. Tracking traffic from social media

With Google Analytics you can by default analyse traffic mediums such as direct, organic etc. It also automatically tracks referrals from other websites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other networking sites. However, in your Traffic Source reports, social network visits are grouped together with visits from all the other referral links to your site. If you are only interested in social network referrals there is a trick you can use.

• Select Advanced Segments from the lower left hand side bar in your Google Analytics Dashboard.
  
  
• Once in the Advanced Segment page, select Create a new custom segment.
  
  
• Drag the "source" box which is under "Traffic sources" to "dimension or metric" window.
  
  
• Select "Matches Regular Expression" from the "Condition" drop down. In the Value field, paste the following sources:
  
  digg|aim|friendfeed|econsultancy|blinklist|fark|furl|misterwongs|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibes|
  bloglines|linkedin|facebook|del\.icio\.us|feedburner|twitter|technorati|faves\.com|newsgator|PRweb|
  msplinks|myspace|bit\.ly|tr\.im|cli\.gs|zi\.ma|poprl|tinyurl
  
  If you wish to add more domains, simply add a "|"symbol between each name. However this field is limited to 256 characters.
• Name your segment (ie: "social network traffic"), click on "Create segment" and you are done! Then from your dashboard, click on "Advanced segments – All visits" and tick the box for the social networks traffic custom segment you have just created, finally apply the changes.
  
  
• Well done, you can now start comparing your social media traffic sources in relation to your overall site traffic.

5. Create annotations on reports

Google launched this very handy feature at the end of last year allowing comments on graphs regarding events that have happened. Users can either add shared or private notes on the dashboard graph. Every time you make a change to your site, be that technical, design, content or any other updates, make sure you add a note specifying what has been done so if the performance of the site improves/decreases, you can easily explain to your colleagues who see a spike or a dip the reasons why. Watch this video to see it in action.

The "annotations" feature is a great collaborative feature that brings intelligence to data and makes your stats understandable and shareable within your company. As Google explains "A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers."

If you want to go beyond the tips we have discussed here and learn more, here is a list of Google Analytics blogs:

• Google Analytics blog
• Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Analytics Market
• Analytics talk
• LunaMetrics

I hope this post was useful and you will soon become a more knowledgeable Google Analytics user!

Let's get back to basics. Sometimes we get so carried away with the projects we are working on or the Next Big Thing that we forget that not all of our clients are web experts. Some are new to the web and need to try to make sense of the whole thing - once we have delivered a project there is a sense of 'well now what?!' They have their website but how do they drive people there? In the digital age of search engines, social networks and blogs, how do you get your business noticed and more importantly, how do you drive relevant traffic there? We’re going to cut through the digital jungle and give the rookies out there 5 crucial things that you should focus on when launching your website:

Search Engines:

Everyone with a website needs to have search engine presence at the top of their list of priorities when developing their strategy for driving traffic. Not just because 82% of the internet population use them for finding products and services, but also because it really is the one medium where global, blue chip companies and small, local businesses can compete on a level playing field as search engines prioritise the relevancy of a website to the search query over budget.

There are 2 sides to search engines: Natural Listings and Sponsored Listings. The Natural Listings are on the left, Sponsored are on the right (and sometimes the top 2-3). Only 30% of people using search engines actually click on the Sponsored Listings so getting into the Natural Listings should be your priority.

To do this you need to understand that, in order to rank you in the search listings, search engine ‘spiders’ crawl your website looking to understand what your site does and which search queries you are relevant for. Therefore think about what you want the spiders to see when they get there, what keywords should they see in your copy? Is the structure of your site clear and methodical? Is anything obstructing the spiders? There are various ways that you can increase your presence in the natural listings, and if you think about it early on it won’t cost you a penny.

Sponsored listings (also called Pay Per Click) are the revolutionary way that search engines have developed to monetise their businesses, in a nutshell you pay every time someone clicks on your listing, how much you pay varies depending on multiple factors.

There are many benefits to PPC listings over natural, they are instantaneous (unlike natural which can take months before you see results), you can control the ad copy and change it as often as you like. You can control your budget down to the penny and track every one of those pennies back to actions on your website. Every business should try PPC safe in the knowledge that you can see the results almost in real time and pause the activity whenever you like.

Directories & Local search

If you’re a business that services a particular area you need to get into the local directories, such as Yell.com. This is where the majority of people will find you now that the Yellow Pages is a thing of the past. You can also set up your sponsored search account so that you only target specific areas, this saves money and wasted time following up irrelevant leads.

Blogs

There is no point in starting a blog unless you intend to do 2 things. 1. Update it regularly, 2. Say something useful and interesting. If you manage these two things then a blog can be a great way of giving your audience a reason to keep coming back to your site. You can choose from many of the blog publishers available, such as WordPress. For something a little more impressive, consider having your own bespoke blog built to your specific needs, like Vikki Chowney did.

Social Networks

Unlike your blog, this isn’t about what you have to say. It’s about listening to what your existing and potential customers are saying and using this information to improve their customer experience and therefore your business. The trick is to know your audience and where they spend their time. A quick search of any social networking sites will give you an idea of whether or not people are talking about your brand, if not see what people are saying about your industry and join in the conversation. You should also see what your competitors are doing in this space and what they’re saying, this is one area where you always need to be ahead of the game.

Display & content advertising

And I don’t mean flashing banners on hotmail telling people they’re the lucky one millionth customer. Display advertising has come a long way from being just an annoying distraction. Now you can be much more clever about the ways that you target people, delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. The aim here is to create interest, rather than distracting people into submission. There are various networks out there that can help you set up a campaign.

Google even helps you to design and distribute your ad creative.

The web can seem like a maze at first and trying to develop a marketing plan feels like an impossible task. The key is to experiment and learn as you go, understanding what doesn’t work is an important part of the journey to a long term and prosperous digital strategy.

Bunny taking off!

Just checked our stats on the new Google analytics site (got myself on the beta). Looks like "Highway to Bunny Heaven" http://bunny.codegent.net/ (a game developed in our labs) is taking off, people from all around the globe playing the game. Following some of the referers back I found the game listed on Inbox Junkies, and to my surprise we are top of the rating chart with 90%. This really rocks as we haven't really started seeding it in a big way, and its already gaining popularity up on viral game sites.

One interesting thing from the stats was that roughly 80% of people visiting the site have flash player 8 already installed. If you havent upgraded to 8 yet, you should do it today. I can think of two good reasons:

1. Security: a recent vulnerability in all older versions of flash was identified by Microsoft (funny eh, Microsoft finding bugs in other people's software). This is a critical issue, which basically means if you want to be safe on that interweb better upgrade sharpish. You can do that easily using the link below, it only takes a mo.

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/

2. Our Bunny game! Normally we have to code to version 7 with games (6 if we are working for Auntie). However using the latest player for games has some big performance and rendering adavantages. This helps keep the game running smooth even though there is quite a lot going on. If you haven't already, install Flash 8, checkout Bunny, and email to all your friends.

Oh and happy easter all. (its easter soon right?)

- Luke