Posts by Louis Venter

Louis Venter is the founding director and CEO of MediaVision, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) company specialising in all areas of search. His particular interests are organic search marketing, paid search marketing, conversion strategy and online PR. More articles and bio from Louis Venter
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The power of split testing – Conversion Conference London

Frank Overbeek from Sitespect started with a case study on Vegas.com

Vegas.com is the world’s largest Vegas city destination website, sells everything “Vegas”. They faced a dilemma on what to do with mobile. According to Pew research 38% of the US market use a mobile to access the internet. Comscore research pins this as 53% of users in the EU. 7% of Vegas.com traffic was from mobile with an increase in bounce rate of 50%.
Their actions were to start small:
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4 pillars of building trust online – Conversion Conference London

Tim Ash’s keynote began with saying it’s not about the technology, its about the inside of our own skulls, and focusing on that will deliver a lot of improvement in conversion rate.

Our lives depend on trust and there are thousands of actions every day that require trust. The pinnacle of trust is family and this deprecates as we move outwards. Building trust online is really tough because: (more…)

Global Social Media Policies – International Search Summit

Massimo Burgio spoke about global social media policies but started it off with what could get you banned from Facebook.

Facebook police are active and kicking, you need to understand the risks. The following is a list of why you could be banned:

1) Not being human or using a fake name
2) Started a fan page from a personal to promote a business or organisation
3) Post copyrighted material
4) Importing too many RSS feeds to Facebook Notes (more…)

Russia , the new frontier : Yandex – International Search Summit

Andy Atkins-Kruger presented on Yandex which is the number 1 in Russia. They acheived this by solving the problem with dealing with the Russian language and being first to market.

Russian Internet Audience:
142M people, 2% of the Earth’s population. 83 federal states, 11 cities with more than a 180 different ethnic groups. Internet usage is growing, 43 million people accessing the web daily. Internet penetration differs by age group. In Moscow With 97% in age groups 18-24 whereas over 55 it drops to 20%. In other areas these figures drop substantially.
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International Reputation Management – International Search Summit

Mikkel deMib started session 3 off with a great quote on SERM.“Everyone has the right to free speech but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to hear it”

All prospects search and search results form opinions. Negative results cause people to switch brand loyalty. In general negative search results undermine a brand. It could harm investors, life-time customers and brand campaigns.
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Global SEM in an International Not-For-Profit – International Search Summit

The first session at the International Search Summit was delivered by David Carralon the head of SEM at the British Council.

The British council faces challenges like shrinking marketing budgets, scarce staff resources and increased government pressure to generate more income from English courses and exams. They have 560 websites spread over the globe. They have followed the subfolder route in terms of domain strategy which has limitations as discussed later.

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Google Analytics Weighted Sort is a License to Print Money

As I’m sure a lot of you are aware Google Analytics has recently added a magic little checkbox called weighted sort. I’m not going to go into the maths of how it works I’d rather illustrate a few great uses for it to wring out some more ROI from your website.

Firstly it appears when you sort a key column of data. If you created a report of all search traffic by keyword and sorted by bounce rate you’d get something fairly useless as the graphic below shows. (more…)

The Need for Speed in Site Performance and CRO: Time is Money!

A few weeks ago I blogged on the need for speed and enabling http compression within IIS and Apache. There have been recent posts on how http compression and crawl rate are related and how speed is now a ranking factor, albeit a small one. While crawl speed is important the effect of site speed on conversion rate can be far more devastating.

Recently we had a client that ran a live chat application that caused a load delay of around 8 seconds. We obviously got in touch quickly to let them know about the delay but they were unsure of the effect that would have. A load delay of this kind won’t affect the load speed for the crawler, (although WMT did pick it up which we will look at a little later) so really we didn’t have a leg to stand on, until we tested conversion rates. (more…)

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