How to increase landing page conversions by 100%

An inordinate amount of time, effort and money goes into optimising paid search accounts. If you’re good at it, you can either save a lot of money, or get a lot more bang for your buck.

Anyone that has done paid search advertising will know that you can make some big improvements quite quickly just by optimising your accounts (I say ‘just’, there can be a lot of work involved and unless you’re blessed with such talents it usually involves getting in a specialist or search agency to help).

However, there comes a point where the changes you make result in smaller and smaller gains. It’s still getting better but you’re not getting as much return on your efforts as you once did. This leads to a belief that the only way to achieve more conversions is to increase the budget.

Wrong. There is in fact, a massive opportunity staring you right in the face. The problem is you can’t see it because you’re probably looking in the wrong place. [...]

Social Proof: The wisdom of crowds

Today, I bought Chris Brogan’s book, Trust Agents from Amazon. I’ve heard a lot about it over the past few weeks, mainly from the people I follow on Twitter. So, I went to Amazon.com, read the reviews and then placed my order.

And on the way I encountered at least 15 examples of Social Proof.

You may not be familiar with the term, Social Proof, but you’ll be aware of the concept. It’s the wisdom of crowds.

Twitter statistics: UK traffic increased 22-fold in year

Robin Goad, Research Director of Hitwise UK revealed some interesting statistics regarding the growth of Twitter today.

Writing on his Hitwise blog, Goad reported UK traffic to the micro-blogging site has increased 22-fold in the last 12 months. That growth has meant that Twitter.com has leapt from the 969th most visited site (May ‘08) in the UK to 38th (May ‘09). The most impressive aspect of that growth is the fact that 93% of it has come in the first five months of 2009 alone.

As Goad rightly pointed out, that number in all likelihood should be even higher if you factor in the vast number of third party applications such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Twitterific that people use to access Twitter remotely.

Top 10 Brands Account for 45% of UK Internet Time

According to figures released by Nielsen Online this week, the 10 most heavily used brands accounted for 45% of total UK Internet time in April.  The top two brands – Facebook and MSN / Windows Live (Hotmail) – accounted for 11 billion of the 48 billion minutes that us Britons spent online.
The Top 10 brands [...]

Woolies 2.0 – Woolworths returns online

I read with interest on Econsultancy today that Woolworths is to make a comeback this summer as a 100% pureplay online store.
Bought by the owners of the Daily Telegraph, Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, the site will join their portfolio of brands (such as Littlewoods) under the Shop Direct Group banner.
As Econsultancy quite rightly [...]

Christmas Day Online Spend Breaks £100m

3.8 million Britons spent £102 million online on Christmas Day, according to figures issued by IMRG.
That’s an average of £26.80 per person -up 21% on the same day  in 2007. However, the number of people making purchases was 14% lower than the previous year – a clear indication that the online world is just as [...]

Marks & Spencer online sales up 29% – 27 stores close

I read with interest today that Marks & Spencer have announced an impressive 29% increase in online sales in the 3rd quarter of their financial year.
This comes as the retailer today announced plans to close 27 high street stores due to poor financial performance in the economic downturn.  The firm reported UK like-for-like sales fell [...]