1.4 billion internet users worldwide.
1.5 billion televisions worldwide.
4 billion mobile phones worldwide.

600 million IM users.
1.3 billion email users.
3.05 billion SMS users.

Top visited mobile website: Mocospace. (?)

Lots of fascinating facts to impress your co-workers at lunchtime. A handful of impossible to read colour combinations. And one mistake.

The size of the Mobile market

The following browsers will be impacted by the change:

Any browser older than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0
Any browser older than Mozilla Firefox 3.0
Any browser older than Google Chrome 4.0
Any browser older than Safari 3.0+

Note that users of these browsers will still be able to watch YouTube videos, but some new features may not be supported.

Quiz time.

Question: What’s the only thing you do in YouTube?

(a) Watch videos
(b) Other

The bigger question: Will Google have the power to move these people to a new technology?

(a) No
(b) Probably not

The biggest question: How many people (1) use these old browsers (2) use YouTube and (3) know how to install a new web browser?

(a) Less than five
(b) Less than ten

Answer: Probably a lot less than you realise.

The graphic below shows a typical trend for a product-based website, where the majority of the visitors leave within 10 seconds.

Even accounting for some random and off-target traffic, that should leave you less than happy.

In fact the graph clearly demonstrates what marketing people have been preaching for years. You have very little time to grab the attention of your website visitors.

Take a quick look at the following website home pages.

The key point is that a quick look is all that is required to instantly know what’s on offer.

mediaflex media solutions:

Clearleft:

SoftwarePromotions:

I know. It’s not to easy to communicate what you do in 3-4 seconds.

Those example sites are just lucky.

How does your website match up?

The feedback we received was fantastic, and some of the attendees (and people who missed the webinar) wanted to know if a recorded version of the webinar would be made available.

We listened. We re-recorded. And we put it on YouTube.

The result? 14 ways to cut your Google AdWords costs – and the whole thing will take up less than 20 minutes of your time.

I guarantee you’ll save money by watching it. Assuming you apply some of the techniques.

Beat The AdWords System: 14 ways to cut your Google AdWords costs

They manage to make it sound so nice, even though they’re really saying ‘get used to it – in a few weeks we’re forcing it on you’.

But many users overlook a useful feature – the ability to add comments as reminders to themselves, or as explanations for other AdWords Editor users working on an account.

I personally make notes of dates that I add keywords, pause keywords, raise/lower keyword bids, add negative keywords, change match types on keywords or negative keywords, raise/lower ad group default max cpc’s, raise/lower budgets and more.

Realistically, AdWords is all about experimentation, and some changes you make will definitely have a negative impact. Comments are a quick and easy way of tracking your changes.

But be aware of the main limitations:

- comments on ad groups or campaigns without changes won’t be exported
- comments are plain text, so multiple users should indicate their comment with their initial
- comments are sometimes erased when updating AdWords Editor

She may look familiar to you. But you probably don’t remember where you’ve seen her.

And you probably don’t realise that she might be costing you a lot of money.

This girl’s image is on a massive number of websites which are part of the content network. The websites in question have one single purpose: to make money by displaying your Google AdWords ads.

Here is a tiny sample of some of the sites:

http://5starblogs.com/
http://bli-online.com/
http://bodyhtml.biz/
http://cyberclean.org/
http://sharez.biz/
http://superpaylink.com/
http://themp3world.com/
http://thisismydevsite.com/
http://unblocksites.biz/
http://www.pistle.com/
http://myonlinesupportgroup.com/

Most of the sites using this image are basically parked domains, and can therefore be quickly and easily excluded from your content network campaigns.

If you attended our recent webinar, where I showed you 14 ways to cut your AdWords costs in only 45 minutes, you’ll already know how to do this.

If you didn’t attend the webinar, we’re hoping to have the online version up by the end of this week.

Watch this space, and watch those Google AdWords settings.

“Google has perhaps more than any other company become “The Internet Company.” It’s grown hand in hand with the internet and its entire business model has from the start been totally focused on the internet as a delivery platform.

And let’s face it, Google is a pretty interesting company. In fact, we think it’s so interesting that we put together this infographic with a ton of facts and figures about Google. We’ve been digging through Google’s SEC filings, news articles and the trusty old Wikipedia to get plenty of interesting data to include. We hope you like it!”

Google facts and figures (massive infographic)

As our company has been using ClickTracks since 2003, making the move from the familiar to the unknown has been understandably painful but necessary.

However in our initial tests, we were surprised to see Urchin significantly over-reporting the figures in their reports.

After some digging, we found the reason why. By default, Urchin reports visitors and bots together.

In other words if the home page of your website was visited by 1000 human visitors and 500 different bots on a given day, Urchin would report this as 1,500 hits to the page.

Bear in mind that some bots might hit pages on your website regularly throughout the day. We’ve seen data sets where there are more bot hits than visitors.

As a user of Urchin, why on earth would you want to merge these two data groups together?

I can see this being useful when considering server load, but for regular reporting, I can’t see any valid reason for this.

Excluding the bots is fairly straightforward, but if you’re using the default settings, you should make sure you’re sitting down when you first view your ‘real’ data.

You’re going to discover that you’re not getting anywhere near as many visitors as you thought.

The question is why would Urchin choose to set this up by default? Why distort the data?

The link points to adwords.google-ge.com/accounts/signin.html

Don’t fall for it.

If you get any such email, go directly to your browser and login as you normally would. Don’t click the links.

Let’s be careful out there.

“Microsoft and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the United States and European Union. This milestone is an exciting step in our effort to give your business a time-saving and cost-efficient way to connect with a larger combined audience of potential customers.”

Let’s face it, Google could use a little competition.

Our blog post New AdWords Ads Increasingly Getting Stuck in the ‘Under Review’ Black Hole now has 50 comments – the majority of which express extreme frustration. Many AdWords account holders are eager for alternatives.

This could be the start of something interesting.

I guarantee that tomorrow’s webinar will help you recover some of that money.

And I guarantee that you have never come across some of the ideas before.

100% original.

45 minutes.

15 ways to cut your AdWords costs.

And no, that isn’t a typo.

Register for the free webinar and find out why!

Peter Sunde was one of the ‘innovators’ behind Pirate Bay – a venture that resulted in his one year prison sentence and a fine of over three million US dollars.

Mr. Sunde and his other pirate friends are requesting a retrial, and it appears that his sentence may be affecting his outlook of the world.

Flattr is Sunde’s latest venture:

“We aim to revolutionize how people pay and get paid for content on the internet. Come, join and show the world that good content is worth some coins out of your pocket.”

To go from assisting theft to assisting revenue is an interesting U-turn, to put it mildly.

But will it work? The system will involve users setting up an account, entering credit card details and deciding an amount to be paid each month. When they don’t have to.

At risk of sounding cynical, it doesn’t have a hope of success.

I’m all for helping content providers make money, but I don’t think this will be the answer. And coming from an individual charged with assisting copyright infringement, the irony is bewildering.

What’s next – identity thieves pushing online security? Mercenaries for peace?

I know what you’re thinking. Google Wave?

No. “Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.”

And Google Talk, in case you’re wondering, is a tool to “Chat with friends and family on the internet“.

So Buzz is about conversations. Wave is about real-time communication. Talk is about chatting.

Got it?

Next stop: Google Hype. “A newer, even-more real-time tool to convey thoughts“.

And I don’t know whether to be amused or scared by this one:

Google Wave set out to be a solution to a problem that most people don’t have.

Which is why, according to Business Insider, web visits to Google Wave have dropped sharply.

Having used it myself, I can understand why. It’s confusing, buggy, and as good as pointless.

Next stop: the iPad.

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!

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

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?

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.