End of Microsoft and the death of Google
Roger McNamee is a pretty interesting character in the digital world and a rare sight in a world filled with 18-year kids on caffeine. Over the years he seems to have got pretty wise to emerging trends and has advised a great many companies successfully. Now in his mid-fifties you might have thought he would [...]
myBookingWizard Now Uses Google Calendar
MyBookingWizard has just been through a bloody large pivot… allow me to explain: MyBookingWizard is NOT a diary management system, we never set out to build a diary management system, and we have been constantly vigilant in avoiding diary managing activities. What we wanted to build was a marketing tool. Visitors to a website will [...]
Avoid re-inventing the wheel
If you are thinking of re-designing your web-site then here are a couple of useful tips that could save you a load of development cost, reduce the hassle and speed up delivery. Just because you’re re-creating or re-building your site that is no reason to build the whole thing from scratch. Most of your visitors [...]
Google : Judge, jury and executioner?
Recently Google handed out a heavy penalty to Overstock.com because the retailer was allegedly paying for links from Colleges. Part of Google’s algorithm involves attributing “weight” to incoming links and the higher the quality of links the greater the weight is applied to the recipient site. Supposedly, Google rates colleges and universities as high-quality sources [...]
Don’t take your users’ data for granted
Privacy questions are swirling around the Internet, surrounding Google, Amazon and ISPs like a fog. So much so that the EU’s (much unused) Data Protection Directive is beginning to move front and centre in the fight for privacy. Many people have a level of distrust regarding corporate databases and are concerned that that too much [...]
Need for speed
Since Google announced in 2010 it was going to take into account page load speed in it’s search engine algorithm the web world seems to have gone speed-crazy. It’s a good thing, I remember an A/B test we did back in 2006 showing a 50% improvement by using a 30k Landing Page rather than 150k. This [...]
Achieving search neutrality
You would expect your web search results to be unbiased but are they? Are they completely neutral and without undocumented manipulation? The straight answer is no. As search-engines develop ever-more complex algorithms to drive up relevance and keep out the spammer, we have seen a full-blown fight between SEO organisations and the giants such as [...]
YouTube embraces A/B testing
Testing small changes can make a huge difference to performance, it’s an approach which rant on about to our clients on a daily basis and they, generally, listen to our ideas and frequently see campaign-changing improvements in conversion rates and corresponding drops in CPA. However, most companies test in secret and don’t reveal the results [...]
Another 2011 prediction blog post
This is the time of year that everyone and their dog seems to take out the crystal ball out and make sweeping predictions for 2011. Jumping on the bandwagon of making sweeping predictions sounds like a bit of fun, if not taken too seriously so here’s my attempt to list some dead certs that I [...]
Quickies : A/B testing in the real world
£200 million button Most web marketers know the story of how Amazon changed their check-out process; the wording on the button was changed from “Register” to “Continue” and a simple message was added (“You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To [...]
