Yahoo Mail Is Still The King

I still remember those days when I used to wait impatiently to open up my Yahoo! Mail. And boy, was I glad to see some cool mails from my friends? Yes, those were the days when Yahoo! was one of the most sought after emails. As of today, Google mail, better known to the world as Gmail with it numerous cool features is catching up with Yahoo to be the #1 emailing service.

But wait a second...even though Gmail is the fastest growing email service, its still got a long long way to catch up with its pal Yahoo! Here are some number crunching figures for you to chew on.

In the academic year (lets say last year) Yahoo had added about a staggering 20 million new users to its band. Effectively, its growth in the market rose to a cool 22% which by all means can be considered the best. Factually the figures were 87.2 million which rose upto 106.2 million users. Notably, Gmail grew faster, an astounding 46% growth, but comparatively the numbers were just about 40 million, 36.9 million to be precise. Interestingly, Hotmail is second with about 47.1 million users and a growth of just 3% from the year last.

Techcrunch has noted that its surpassed the web 1.0 king AOL.

Interestingly after the MicHoo deal, Yahoo has busied itself in rebranding itself as a content and services provider. Some competition for Google perhaps? I think the growth at 22% has a lot to tell in its change in focus. The best part is that the search algo is now entirely with Microsoft which makes its focus stronger (Source: TechCrunch) to have its content promo primarily for its loyal subscribers. Google (Gmail) has also made a noticable change in its mailing system, more closer to a folder like structure with the introduction of labels.

Undoubtedly, Gmail has breathed in life into the drab emailing system and we hope it continutes to bring in new, useful features in its race to the top and yes, Yahoo will have to ensure its doing its best to beat the competition

Cyber Fraud In PPC Campaigns

In PPC advertising you have the control to choose” keywords/phrases”, and then you bid how much you’d like to pay for each click. By paying anywhere from a nickel to a $100 per keyword term, you are effectively reserving ad space on the Search engine page that comes up when someone has typed in that keyword.

So when a searcher goes to a search engine and types in one of your key phrases, your ad appears, and if someone click on it your account is then charged. When the click occurs, it will take the visitor to the landing page. That’s how its supposed to work. But like as very advantage is followed with a disadvantage we have something called “click fraud” Click fraud is simply the act of clicking on ads for the direct purpose of costing the advertiser money. It is recognized as the biggest problem today in PPC advertising. A very recent survey, “60% of people surveyed by the “Search Engine Professional Organization” have stated that fraud is a problem when it comes to PPC advertising”

The main sources of click fraud are the following four:

1) AdSense
Google Adsense does pay website owners to run their Adwords ads and compensates them per click. Google monitor this and it’s against their terms to click on any of the ads on your own site. If they find a advertiser doing this, they will lose their accounts.

2) Bots
They are automated robot programs used for clicking on the PPC Ads

3) Competition
There are chances that your competitors could be clicking on your ads over a period in order to reduce your ad budget.

4) Professional Clickers
In some countries, people are often paid to click on PPC ads. Many are not aware why they are doing it and don’t care. Most PPC networks have measures in place to protect you against fraud click. Google offers suggestions such as using “negative keywords” to avoid fraud clicks. Google asks that you contact them if you suspect fraud.

Overture tracks more than 50 data points, including IP addresses, browser info, user’s session info and what they call “pattern recognition.” They have system in place to detect fraud and a specialized team that monitors and works with the advertisers to stop it.

Google also follows the same pattern to detect click fraud Google take action to block future impressions from anyone they identify as committing click fraud. Google never bills you for any fraud clicks monitored by their system.

As website owners need to be alert to any “suspicious activity” by researching their server logs or stats. If you are experiencing lot of clicks and no sales you’ll also want to take a closer look. You need to watch for any fluctuation in traffic, usually coming from PPC source for any single keyword or phrases. The end conclusion is, you need to be very observant of your clicks in any PPC campaign.

Choosing The Right Colour For Your Website

Colour plays a very important role while designing your website for a better return on investment. A website’s effectiveness as a sales tool can be greatly affected by simply changing its colours.

All of us are aware of the fact that it is more difficult to read text on a monitor than it is on paper, so one should be very careful while choosing the colours for your website. Some colour combinations are very hard on the eye, such as a yellow text on green background. The reason you see black text on a white background so often is that it is the easiest colour combination to read, both on and offline.

We need to realize that some colours evoke different emotions. For instance:

Green is often associated with freshness;
White means purity; and
Purple is associated with royalty

Colours also have both positive and negative associations. Some common colour associations are listed below:

Red:Positive: Sense of power, strength, action, passion, and loveNegative: Anger, forcefulness, danger, impatience, violence and revenge

Yellow:Positive: Brightness, warmth and joyNegative: Caution and warning

Blue:Positive: Cool and tranquil, patience, comfort, loyalty and securityNegative: Fear, coldness, passivity and depression

Orange:Positive: Warmth, friendliness and cheerfulness, excitement and energyNegative: Ignorance

Green:Positive: Nature, growth, freshness and soothing Negative: Envy, greed, guilt and jealousy

Black:Positive: Dramatic, sophisticated and stylish, seriousNegative: Evil and death

White:Positive: Pure, fresh, easy, cleanliness or goodnessNegative: Blind, winter, cold, distant

A major goal in marketing is to evoke emotion in your audience. By choosing the colours for your website with care, you can evoke an emotional response that will increase sales.

As a general rule, one primary colour and two secondary colours should be chosen. These colours should be based on the specific target market you want to attract. If more than two or three colours are used websites tend to look chaotic, and the power of any one colour. The best advice is to keep it as simple as possible.

In designing your business website your colour choice is vital. Be sure to try different colours, different shades, and different combinations before you make your final choice.

So the choice is yours whether you want your site to be one of the most visited website with a maximum return on investments.

Click Fraud v. Click Quality Assurance

This may appear to be an incredibly obvious comment, but the interest is two fold. Firstly we learn the use of PPC Assurance, and most importantly the value the client has derived from it.

Essentially; not all “bad clicks” are click fraud, and not all bad clicks are really bad. If a click doesn’t match your campaign parameters, then it’s traffic you did not want. But I am sure you would care if you didn’t pay for it. So, where’s the issue with having visitors arrive at your web site from a paid campaign, when you didn’t have to pay for those visitors? With Google’s invalid clicks, this is what you’re getting. Most of them confuse these “acceptable” bad clicks with click fraud”.

Of course, there’s the other problem; knowing which clicks you paid for that didn’t match your campaign parameters. These are what we call “undesired.”

The more potential trouble points will rise in case of larger network. Also the narrower, and more focused a campaign is, the harder it is for the ad network to serve the ads out properly all time. PPC Assurance is all about knowing when the problem exists, and being able to easily resolve these issues.

Just using a normal analytics package doesn’t help you understand which of these clicks you paid for, and which you didn’t. Standard web analytics services are great tools for reporting on user activity within a site, and improving paths through to conversion. This is very different and extremely valuable from “Search Analytics” which is what we do.

PPC Assurance is very different from Click Fraud. The visitor behavior is being analyzed to ascertain if it is normal. In PPC Assurance follows the mechanism to resolve the issue with your service provider incase your ads do not display in accordance with the terms and conditions of your contract.

Click Fraud detection does not provide an evaluation of the quality of the traffic referred by an ad network. PPC Assurance provide everyone with a simple way of knowing every click, and monitoring campaigns so that when problem arise you will know immediately and will be able to resolve the problem without jumping through lot of hoops.

Benefits of Internet Marketing – Search Engine Optimization

Internet has become a must-see or got-to-be-there part of our lives for a majority of the people around the world. Importantly so, for the business community who might realize what benefits it can have from having owned a properly optimized website.

Whether it’s a company that sells product or services, if its properly optimized it can reap a lot of benefits for any company.

Firstly the major benefit a company who has a website would be – an increase in the revenue. Why so? Because if your website is optimized by a professional firm, what you would like to see is an increase in the sales of your company products or services and that’s what they help you to get to. An optimized site attracts visitors. A majority of the visitors would be those who are already visiting your site and are very much interested in your products or services that your company provides. This also helps in completing a sale much easily rather than completing sales with an untargeted visitor or surfer.

Your company’s brand is increased apart from the increase in your company’s revenues. People associate with your company’s brand name and its reliability as a leader in whatever product or services you offer even as they consistently visit your website.

Your company’s credibility is increased when your company has its own website in the off-line world, as its expected of the businesses of all sizes to have its own websites. Its an advantage to have your website URL and other information printed out on materials like business cards or fliers. It makes people feel your company is more credible than a competitor who does not have a website or did not take time to do so.

You might want to have a very good Internet marketing SEO firm to have your website optimized and the potential customers will be actually be able to find out what they want in prominent search engines like Google. An internet marketing firm combines the practices of internet marketing and SEO to provide their customers with the best level of service.
Internet marketing services include search engine marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, interactive marketing and viral marketing.

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of the traffic to a website. How that is measured? This is done by the search done for a particular keyword and how well you rank in the top-ranked search engines. The search done is known as natural or organic search.

Although many a firm prefers to specialize or concentrate on either internet marketing or SEO, you can be assured of maximum benefits if you have a well placed, experienced firm looking after all your needs in both the arenas.

10 Reasons Why Your Website Sucks

There are a lot of excellent websites out there and many have focused on improving the user experience in recent years, but there are still a lot of sites that fail to pay enough attention to usability issues.

 

Here are 10 facts which make it a poor website, even known or branded ones. Read on….

 

1.     Poor navigation

People visit your website to find information or the product they are looking for. Navigation should be easy to find and use, and always located in the same spot on every page, which means standardization protocols need to be followed. The maximum a user would surf your website would be just about 7 seconds, if he / she finds it too difficult to maneuver, the user would just leave your site! So, make it obvious and as straightforward as possible.

 

2.     Site intros / Interstitials

People are not willing to watch a 30 second advert before they get to the article they want to read. Some sites make it hard to find the link to do this on their Flash introduction page. A very good example of this is Forbes.com

 

3.     Too many ‘Bookmark My Site’ buttons

If people want to bookmark your site, they will do it, no need to ask them. Apart from that adding such buttons may waste valuable space on your web page. Don’t go berserk over just adding a few extra bookmark links!     

 

4.     Overlay ads

Overlays are simply awful for the user experience. Advertisers shouldn’t be buying them. It’s this sort of thing that has led to the rise of pop-up blockers and ad- skipping.

 

5.     Disabled back button

Okay, you have disabled the “Back” button. Smart eh? Wrong! They would still use the ‘X” (popularly known as the Close button) to leave your site.

 

6.     Excessive use of Flash

Flash has its uses, but we don’t think there’s any reason for using it to power your website. When done badly, it can take ability to perform multiple tasks, can confuse users and there are plenty of issues relating to accessibility.

 

7.     Hidden contact details

Prominently displayed contact details can help stimulate trust. Hiding contact details has the opposite effect.  Instances like hiding the company details including email address and telephone numbers certainly are a deterrent.

 

8.     Slow loading sites

Earlier on an ‘eight-second-loading-time-for-a-page’ was in, but with the advent of faster broadband connection, this seems to slow down the page. Any time more than this will prompt the user to hit the “back” button instantly.

 

9.     Automatic audio/video

If you want to play a video or listen to something, you will click on it.      Otherwise it is just annoying, and intrusive. What do you think?

 

10.  Poor Page layout

So here is a catch….read 2 lines from my site, go all the way down the page, r   read all those stupid ads before reading further. That’s definitely annoying. And as for the sites that automatically expand the browser window to use your full screen, well, they really suck.