Google AdWords is a wonderful sales tool. But  the system is complex, and Google’s defaults are a far better fit for Google than their advertisers.

As a Qualified AdWords Professional, Dave Collins has worked with hundreds of AdWords accounts for more than nine years. Two facts emerge time after time:

Fact 1: Most accounts lose money without the account holder realising it.

Fact 2: The main culprits can often be fixed in minutes.

On Wednesday February 17th at 11.00 AM US Central, 5:00 PM GMT, Dave will be holding a 45 minute webinar to show you 14 ways to reduce your AdWords costs:

Beat the AdWords System: 14 ways to cut your Google AdWords costs.

No abstract theories. No complex analysis. Just 14 techniques that work.

This webinar will save you money. We expect it to be popular, and availability is limited. So register now.

REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR NOW!

Google Reader is one of those tools that I like, understand, but don’t really use. At least not until now.

I’ve been using FeedDemon longer than I can remember; certainly long before most normal people had ever heard of RSS feeds. And that’s the root of the problem with RSS: Most people have never heard of it, many of those who have don’t want to use it, and many of those who do find it more than a little frustrating.

The result of this is that until yesterday, the ‘average person’ had little or no use of Google Reader, but their new killer feature will most likely start to change that:

“Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we’re rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don’t have their own feed.”

In other words you can receive alerts when any web page has been updated. So whether you’re interested in new drivers for your graphics card, whether your local Pizza Hut will finally deliver to your address, what your competition might be up to or even want to make sure that your website hasn’t been tampered with, Google Reader might prove to be a very useful tool.

And the more you use it, the more you’ll rely on it. The more you rely on it, the more you’ll use it. It’s an inspired move by the Goooooogle folk.

Follow changes to any website

Google appear to be getting increasingly serious about the prospect of mobile search.

Last week they added the option for AdWords advertisers to target (some) specific devices, and they’ve now added the ability to target by phone service provider too.

The question is who will use this? Who needs to target their ad delivery by phone carrier?

It’s 2010. The internet is neither new nor revolutionary anymore. Given this, why is it that so many of the website mistakes that were around in 1997 are still plaguing us today? Should we not know better by now?

1. “Welcome to our web site. We are a company who pride ourselves on our meticulous attention to detail, hard work ethic, and speedy response times.“

Yes. Great. But what can you do for me? What do you sell? How can your product solve my problems or improve my life?

Think about the last time you walked into a supermarket, or any other shop. Were you met at the door by a group of suited people who wanted to talk to you about their company ethos? Or were you perhaps instead greeted by colourful displays of tempting items, special offers, and seasonal goods? I’m betting it was the latter. Your website is a shop, too – if you want to sell your product, you’d do well to treat it like one.

2. “NEWS!  Our software is now Windows 2000 compatible!“

Okay, maybe that is a slightly extreme example. Seriously, though, how often do you visit a website, discover it’s not been updated in a year or two, and leave? It’s a scenario that’s all too common.  Maybe you have been working hard on your software and neglecting your website. Perhaps there have even been a couple of new releases, which a site visitor might discover if they venture deeper into the site. But if your index page has a cheerful little “New for 2008!” graphic and your latest blog post was in March last year, it does not look good.

3. “Contact us at sneakynsuspicious@hotmail.com or PO BOX 123 12.“

You expect people to hand over their money without knowing who you are, and without any real means of contacting you? Honestly?

Online shopping might well be deemed mainstream and safe these days, but that doesn’t mean that your visitors have turned stupid. Far from it – they’re probably savvier than ever.  If they discover that you’re unwilling to provide them with a phone number or a real address, they’re likely to be just as unwilling to provide you with their credit card details.

4. “Yes, I will tell you how much this product costs if you are willing to click your way to the seventh level of hell my website.“

Why are so many people scared of making their product price easy to find? Do they believe that by forcing their visitors to read umpteen pages of empty buzz words, they will then be too exhausted to realize that the $99 you’re asking is actually quite a bad deal?

If it was up to me, the starting price would always be prominently displayed on the index page. Chances are that your visitors are working within a budget, and don’t want to waste their time looking at a $5000 application when they can’t afford to spend more than $50. If pricing is complicated and depends on a variety of factors, fine – but please make sure your pricing structure is clearly displayed and no more than a click away from any given page.

5. “The graphics? Oh yes, I had a lot of help from my cousin, my neighbour’s wife and my pet hamster, but most of them I did myself.”

Of all the places to save money, I am constantly amazed by how many people choose their website graphics. If you use your site to keep a log of petrol costs for your radio-controlled boat, or to share the latest rail-related news with other trainspotting enthusiasts, fine.  Use any old jpegs you find lying around. If, however, you’re hoping to make a serious impression and make some money from your software: use a graphic designer. Today.

A good friend told me that he’d recently been buying a lot of things in preparation for the birth of his first child. And like any red-blooded male, he’s been doing most of his shopping online. The father-to-be that is, not the child.

Following almost every order, the company he bought from sent him an email containing a coupon towards any future purchases. As any parent can testify, buying for your first child is a never-ending task. So it’s no great surprise that he’s already used many of the coupons.

From the perspective of the companies, he’s a pre-qualified customer, so they already know that he has an interest in what they’re selling. This is a beautifully effective form of marketing, that is more targeted than most other forms of advertising.

Upselling after the purchase can convert a one-time buyer into a repeat customer. And if each subsequent purchase triggers another coupon, you may be able to turn the one-time buyer into a customer for life.

Imagine you’re looking for a company to redesign your website. A quick search on Google pulls up two potential agencies.

Which one are you more likely to choose?

The second example state that “potential customers decide within the first 30 seconds whether or not to leave a website“.

30 seconds?

Wishful thinking is no competition for instant clarity.

Ever since Google settled onto their throne as the undisputed King of the search engines, people have been predicting their demise. History has taught us that no King will rule forever, and at some point, even the mighty Google will fall from grace.

Yet a pattern appears to have emerged in the online world. Interesting new services and products emerge, and as soon as they gain any sort of traction, pundits around the world start to wonder whether Google are finally about to meet their match.

Twitter, Bing, the increased use of mobile phone browsing, Yahoo!, Microsoft, SoftwarePromotions and more have all been hailed as the potential new Google, or a serious threat to Google.

Yet to date, while all of these examples have proven to be interesting, none of them have given Google anything to worry about. And like all Kings fortunate enough to sit on their thrown for any length of time, Google are by no means oblivious to the threats they face. In fact Google’s unprecedented access to a mind-boggling amount of data places them in a uniquely powerful position to see precisely what everyone is doing. What’s new, what trends are emerging, who’s rising and falling from grace and more.

Nevertheless, I believe that Google are only now facing a threat to their existence. For the first time, there finally appears to be an enemy vast and powerful enough to inflict damage. With time, perhaps even powerful enough to maim or even destroy the mighty Google empire.

It’s not Twitter, it’s not Bing and it isn’t Microsoft’s AdCenter. The biggest threat that Google face today is Google. Not through any lack of innovation, flair or expansion. But from the most basic threat of all – their complacency.

Before dismissing this as yet another “Google is about to die” harbinger of doom, let’s take a quick step back. Almost all of Google’s income is derived from their AdWords system; through ads displayed on their search engines around the world, partner sites, the content network, TV ads, radio ads and more. And as a direct result of the program’s reach, precision and power, many businesses rely heavily on AdWords. Ironically, in time, this very dependency may prove to be the beginning of the wound in Google’s side.

As the scope and complexity of the AdWords system have grown, so too have the volume of complaints by the advertisers.

Read the rest of this article – Google vs. Google.

A newspaper headline is written in large letters, and is supposed to indicate the content of the article. Front page headlines are the most important, as they need to be eye catching enough to snare the interest of passers-by.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Our own company sells services to help (mainly) software developers increase their sales.

Read the above sentence again, and see if that would make a good headline.

Of course it doesn’t which is why our front page uses two brief sentences:

“You write the software.
We help you grow.”

We recently ran some usability tests on our website, and used people with no connection to our company or industry. One of the questions they were asked while browsing the website was “What do we do, and who are we targeting”.

Each and every tester was able to correctly answer that question within literally seconds of arriving at the website.

When I arrive at your website, do I instantly know what you sell and why I need it?

What’s your headline?

If you haven’t yet heard of Jakob Nielsen, I can only assume that you have memory issues. Welcome to my world.

Jakob Nielsen has been described as the guru, king and world’s leading expert on website usability, and even the stoic Financial Times describe him as “perhaps the best-known design and usability guru on the Internet“. Perhaps.

So it is with some trepidation that I have to state that the web has outgrown Jakob Nielsen, and although interesting in principle, his views are outdated to the point of redundancy.

Allow me to explain.

Let’s assume you’ve either never heard of Jakob, or don’t know very much about him.

You go to your search engine of choice, and search for his name. At the time of writing this, the first two results from Google point to his www.useit.com website. You click on the link to his homepage, and are confronted by a page with 712 words, 109 links, two 30 pixel images and one button.

Without going into detail about his beliefs, he is primarily concerned with the awful mess that has become the web, and the general lack of usability.

In principle I agree, and I’ve been writing and speaking of the need to balance between form and function for longer than I care to remember. But a balance is required. And as his own website demonstrates, too much emphasis on theoretical usability leads to something that is next to impossible to use in real life.

Try it yourself. Go to www.useit.com and find out (1) what he believes and (2) what he proposes to do about it. For the purpose of writing this posting I went to research him, and found third-party interviews and explanations to be far more useful.

The www.useit.com website has become a classic example of how even a sound principle can be stretched enough to distort it into something fundamentally flawed and unusable. Jakob Nielsen’s ideas haven’t adapted with time and have unfortunately been rendered quite redundant.

Throughout our company’s website we have six navigational elements at the top of each page. Seven if you include the logo that goes back to the homepage.

Websites like MJT Net have eight elements in their main top nav, with more than 30 more in drop-down menus.

Amazon switched from their top nav to the most confusing dynamic nav that I have ever seen. But it appears to work.

And the BBC news website has 30 main links on the left hand side alone.

So how many is too many?

I’ve met people who think that five, six or seven are the magic numbers. They believe that any more than that will overwhelm the website visitors, and leave them unable to find what they are looking for.

Yet websites such as Amazon, CNN, the BBC and hundreds of thousands of other believe otherwise.

The magic number is clearly the minimum that you need in order to serve your customers correctly.