I established a leadership consulting firm in 2002 to provide executive coaching services and leadership development courses to leaders in organizations of all sizes and types. I launched a new website in December 2009 and experimented with some advertising to drive traffic to the site. Here’s what I have learned.

Analytics
Watching where people go on your website is critical to adjust your content to match their interest. My first website was more of an electronic brochure. It was fine for people I had met in person but was not sufficient to make a first impression on its own. When I launched the new website last December the design was much better thanks to a friend of mine who is a graphic designer. The web designer who implemented the site added analytics so I could see the traffic patterns. It was amazing to see where people went on the site and it caused me to add some content. One of the most popular areas turned out to be information about my past clients so I added a client list and some client success stores to go with the testimonials I had there. These are some of the most trafficked areas on the site now.

Advertising
I initially experimented with LinkedIn Ads which worked very well. I had noticed that I was getting a lot more traffic to my LinkedIn profile than my website so I decided to try a line ad with LinkedIn to drive people to my website. It started driving traffic to my website the first day I ran the ad. The system was very easy to use and LinkedIn has a lot of profile information for their members so I could really pick and choose who you I wanted to view the ad.

I also tried Google Adwords and Facebook Ads and ultimately found Facebook ads to be the most cost effective of the three. It’s not as targeted as LinkedIn but makes up for that by being a lot less expensive. Google Adwords is a little complicated. There are two different systems. There’s the Keyword system that puts ads in Google searches that match the keywords you list for the ads. I didn’t get many clicks that way. Then there’s their Network system that places ads on appropriate websites. That’s where I got most of my clicks which were very cheap. Unfortunately not many showed up in my analytics so I suspect that some of the sites were charging for clicks that weren’t happening.

I initially paid for impressions but found paying for clicks to be a much easier way to impact the volume of visitors to my website. Most of these internet advertising programs use a bidding system to determine what ads run. I paid for impressions at first but found very quickly that I worried a lot less about the cost if I just paid per click. Watching your impressions, click through rates and cost per click can become a bit of an obsession. Paying per click eliminated all that and allowed me to impact the volume of visitors much more easily. Since I was initially in a hurry to get views to one of my programs I put in a high bid to get more clicks. The bid was more competitive with other bids so it ran more and got more clicks. The program I’m currently advertising is less time dependent so I’m bidding lower because I’m more interested in cost effectiveness. I’m getting a lower volume of clicks but at a lower average cost per click.

Website Lessons
I found that my content was not very effective at getting people to stay on my site. The ads I run land on specific pages of my website that describe the programs I’m advertising. I noticed that a lot of the visitors were bouncing, looking at just that page and then leaving the website without looking at other pages. When I looked at the pages where I was sending them I realized that there were no pictures and no links to other areas of my website, other than the standard menu. It was nothing but a text description of the program. A rookie mistake I suspect. I added pictures of the instructors for our class with links to their bios. I started to get more people to stay on the website and view other pages. I also noticed that the visitors coming from Facebook didn’t bounce as much as the ones from LinkedIn or Google. When I tracked the cost for each system I calculated the cost per no bounce visitors as my final determination of effectiveness. This is where Facebook came out way ahead. Here are the links to the landing pages for my ads.

http://www.caravela.us/pages/programs/course_effectlead.html
http://www.caravela.us/pages/programs/exec_coaching.html

The final lesson I learned is that I need a way to collect visitor data. Although I’ve had about 250 people visit my website through the ads I’ve run – I don’t know who any of them are. Our sales cycle is very long so I need a way to capture people’s contact information and stay in touch with them over time.

Good luck. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or if you have any suggestions on how to do all this better. I think we’re all still trying to figure all this out.

We have a thriving interactive community that presumably should be interested in things WordPress. Any takers?

Email jmyers at visi dot com or @jaymyers

Below is a quick run-down of what I’ve seen out there. What are you using?

Zen-Cart
Well-known and well used, with years of development behind it and an active community of developers and supporters. Powerful features, integrates with any number of payment gateways, and plenty of free add-ons/modules available, but still very old school looking. Will it ever get to Zen Cart 2.0?

UberCart
 Due to its integration with Drupal, UberCart seems to be taking off with a lot of developers. Allows for custom product fields, anonymous checkout, and one-page checkout.

VirtueMart
All the standard features you’d expect, but like UberCart and Drupal, VirtueMart’s main virtue seems to be its integration with Joomla and Mambo.

Magento
One of the most attractive packages out of the box, with the ability to manage multiple stores under one admin. Paid support available. Still very new, just out of beta, I’ve heard mixed reviews of how ready-for-primetime this software is yet.

PrestaShop
Just ran across this European offering, with a neat, easy-to-understand backend admin. Doesn’t seem to have a lot of payment gateways supported as of yet.

Ok, it’s a minor point, not a revolution, but can we start calling it “ecommerce” now? Even as I type this, I’m being told by the spellcheck it’s E-commerce, but why bother with the hyphen? And capital “E”? Please. I’m going to ignore that and hope things change. 

Do you still say Web site? How about website from now on? Is that still a debate, on how to spell it? Do we need to capitalize “Internet”? Does that really make sense anymore? 

Any other words come to mind for you? 

I’m familar with most of the pros/ cons of PNG and have utilized them for their benefits in gradients and tackled the whole IE transparency issue. The question is, would you bother with PNG?

“‘People who like cheddar cheese are inherently better than people who like gouda.’ Now that’s obviously silly.” – Dave Winer

The only thing I take issue with is the word “users”.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/

I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.

I was excited when I heard about the iPhone and although it’s way outside my budget and not really a necessity, I’d been thinking that an iPhone was in my future somewhere. Now that this Flash support issue has been a present for over a month and there’s some possibility it may not get resolved anytime soon, as a flash developer I’m thinking this may not be the phone for me.

Now I’d still tell you any day of the week that Apple is on so many levels, a better company then Adobe. Don’t even get me started about Microsoft. That said, I’ve got to start to consider what (from a Flash Developer’s perspective) is the best mobile device competing with the iPhone? Any thoughts?

“…on the phone that we were told that the website is the work of ‘a subcontractor’ and ‘we get this all the time’”. – Doc Searls

Unfortunately, Doc’s experience is far too common and it’s far too rare when a web development team has a migration strategy that doesn’t break URLs. Customer bookmarks or the site’s own linkages.

I’m excited for more of these services because the real value to these recommendations services is with very small communities. Where everyone could conceivably know everyone else. With too many members and too many contributions, another filter is needed for the recommendations, and the urge to game the system becomes too high. Defeating the whole point of peer review and contribution. So, more, small, focused ponds are better.

1. Sun Developers Network Share (SDN Share) is soliciting code samples and articles from Sun developers, then wraps the participation in a points-based rewards program (code sample = 4 pts, article = 10 pts, etc).(Disclosure: I put together the early information architecture for SDN Share)
2. MarketWatch Sync is glossier, and visually mature (design by MNteractive’s own Christopher Leighton-Brooder) financial-Digg. I think the strength of this service is bringing the member-contribution/ranking model to a less l33t hax0r audience, to the people if you will.

“If your web advertising strategy is built around page views, you’re going to have to find another way to sell.” – Terry Heaton

There’s lots of goofy web design artifacts that exist because ads are sold by page views: article pagination, skinny skinny column widths, partial text feeds, MySpace.

Hopefully, all a remedy for this insanity will be with us soon, for according to Heaton, Nielsen NetRatings will drop page views for time spent. Wow! Innovation! Creativity! Sarcasm!

Metrics that can be executed by a robot only encourages more robots. Measuring time spent just means the page view robots will be traveling much slower.

So what’s a publisher what wants ads and a advertiser that wants smaller newsholes to measure?

How about actions instead of the ever silly impressions?

How about engagement and passion instead of reach?

Later:
Searching for a ‘print’ button makes this an arms race.

Robert Scoble raises the same issue:

“I keep bugging Dan Farber about [offering full text feeds] and he says he can’t do anything about it because of the advertising model that ZDNet has chosen.”