Congratulations! You have just convinced a potential customer to click through from your HTML Email, Google Ad, Banner, Social Network message (the list goes on) you have their attention and they are ready to read, buy or subscribe. So where next?

Sadly in many cases marketers are happy to link hot leads like this through to their home or product page in the hope the user will work it out for themselves. Where is the context? Is this what the user was expecting to see? Is the language consistent? Is that special offer you mentioned clearly visible? Probably not. Welcome to the world of landing pages.

Whilst good landing pages adhere to the core principles of user centred design such as strong usability, clear information layout and simple navigation they are also single minded in their push to convert, not generally inform, the user.

Here are a few golden rules:

Be consistent
It is really crucial to maintain a consistent tone of voice from the source of the click through. You could even consider having the same headline on your landing page as your upstream ad. Sure, it's repetition, but at least the user feels like they are in the right place.

If users are landing from a wide variety of sources then you should probably segment the messaging rather than trying to please everyone with boring catch all copy. The same rules should also be applied to visuals if relevant.

Grab attention and don't waffle
Keep the page to a single point and use minimal text to explain it. Then ask yourself "Does my copy answer immediate, obvious questions or concerns?"

Remove unnecessary navigation and keep refining the content as much a you can. Every item on the page needs to justify its existence. If you want to quickly test your page use the '5 second rule'. Show the page to someone fresh for 5 seconds and then ask them to explain what it was all about. If they can't or mention too many differing messages get back to the drawing board!

If you need a bit more help along the sales process and words, visuals and competitive pricing are not enough then sometimes giving away a limited free account, trial or sample can be effective conversion aids.

Learn to point
It is still quite important to keep your primary call to action (CTA) above the fold (no vertical scrolling) or to repeat the CTA throughout the page if it must be long. Arrows or oversized buttons are the usual visual metaphors for action online. Arrows can also be useful for breaking out of the standard grid lines of your design which will inevitably attract the eye.

If your design features people, face them in the direction of your CTA although resist the urge to be cheesy, authenticity is important.

Colour needs to be considered on CTAs. Red can evoke a strong emotional response although it does also represent "stop". Orange equates to an enthusiastic get-it-done attitude whilst blue is the default web colour for a link.

Use video!
Users are far more likely to watch a well crafted short video or screencast than read a long piece of text.

Only ask for the information you really need
As handy as it would be to know the age, gender and occupation of the user it is not always essential. The more you ask for, the less you will get. If you really do need to know personal information then turn it into a unique selling point e.g. "Tell us your birthday and we will send you a little present on the big day!"

Build trust
If the user clicking through is not already familiar with your brand then official accreditation or affiliation to organisational bodies, logos of well known brands you are partnered with or working for and testimonials (preferably not anonymous!) will support you in your endeavours to convert.

Don't stop the conversation!
Thank you pages are so often overlooked but why should we stop there? This is the ideal place to offer further incentives such as free ebook download or links to more information. A surprise bonus will leave the user feeling very good about the experience.

Likewise you have just converted your lead - well done! They are probably feeling at their most in love with your message at this point so add some social sharing functions here so they can tell their own community about this great product or service and help spread the word for you.

Track your results properly
If you can track the user journey you give yourself a fighting chance of learning from your mistakes as well as knowing what your conversion rate, bounce/abandonment rate and form completion rates are. How else can you tell if the campaign was worth while?

If you would like more information on tracking have a read of our blog article "Five Google Analytics tips you need to know"

I hope you have found this useful and please do leave any comments or other tips below. Also, I could not have written this article without some of the fantastic advice on http://unbounce.com/blog/

Newspaper owners across the land must have been breathing a sigh of relief when Rupert Murdoch stuck his head over the parapet and declared that he was no longer prepared to give his company's journalistic content away for free. Finally someone was standing up and saying what the vast majority of Fleet Street must surely have felt for a decade; if we want to prevent the newspaper industry going the same way as the music industry, we need to start putting a price on quality journalism.

To fill you in if you don't already know; Murdoch's plan is to erect a pay-wall around the Times Online and Sunday Times websites this summer so users will need to pay a charge of £1 per day or £2 per week to access the content online. He is also threatening to remove News International's content from Search Engines due to his insistence that Google et al are leeching it and becoming absurdly rich off the back of it - a fair accusation despite the rallying cries of the 'free web' evangelists.

Let me pin my colours to the mast; I believe in rewarding the quality, integrity and thought that goes into top-tier journalism. I believe we need to safeguard it as a legitimate career to prevent the next generation of free-thinking reporters becoming bankers, lawyers and web designers. I don't, however, want digital journalism wrapped in a sickly layer of advertising and i do want to dive in and out of content from different providers without paying for the bits i don't use. Demanding, aren't I?

News International's move is brave for a number of reasons, not least of which is that they are taking the gamble that the rest of the mainstream press will follow their lead. What they are demanding is a change in mentality of internet news consumers.

But in my view Murdoch's assumption of how online consumers perceive news is way off the mark. Rightly or wrongly, we simply don't attribute the same value to content discovered towards the top of a Google search or via a bookmark as we do to a tangible product we purchase in a newsagent. As such, if similar content is available for free from any of his mainstream competitors, Murdoch is going to lose all but the most partisan of his readership. So far, some months after the Wall Street Journal became the first of the mainstream to charge for its content, only the Economist has joined him in the UK and unless the figures start to look good pretty quickly, I would expect a fairly dramatic about turn after just a few months.

Whilst I don't think the traditional web user is ready to voluntarily pay for content they have been getting for free for a generation, I do think that the acceleration in uptake of mobile devices could be the catalyst that the newspaper industry is looking for in their hunt for revenue streams outside of advertising. The main reason for this is the emergence of the applications market. Suddenly digital content is available in product form. It is portable, available offline and, crucially from a revenue point of view, free from an expectation of freeness.

Apps such as the Guardian's are also superior to their mobile web cousins due to faster load times and the ability to tailor the content through the setting of personal preferences making it a smoother user experience.

When done well, the result is a premium product which users are willing to pay for. The Guardian iPhone App, priced at £2.39, for example, racked up 100,000 downloads within 10 weeks of launch and although that cost is a one off payment I believe that a licensing model where users pay a couple of pounds per month for the App would be met with a sizeable uptake and provide an ongoing and sustainable financing model.

Furthermore, if he carries out his threat to shut off the Search Engines, Murdoch is stifling a significant and valuable conduit to his content - latest estimates are that a third of traffic to the Times comes through search engine referrals.

As much as it pains me to say it, I agree with the premise of what Murdoch says but his approach is a metaphorical bludgeon. I believe that the way to monetise content is to look at the traditional web as a shop window, supported in part by a conventional advertising model. The main revenues should come outside of this traditional format and away from the expectation of free content and the enormous amounts of open source alternatives. It should come through the creation of paid-for applications for an ever-improving world of handheld devices, providing easily accessible content with real differentiation and quality that can be accessed where and when the user wants it; be that on the daily commute or on the loo.

In the words of Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater, "Getting the balance right between the availability of free content and access to paid-for content will be crucial [to the future of journalism]".

Brizzly is a popular third-party Twitter & Facebook interface, built by Thing Labs, that launched in 2009. We caught up with them at the recent Chirp Twitter conference in San Francisco and demoed our Webcam Snapper application - which they loved! (a demo of the Snapper in our Twitbooth website is in the video above)

So without further ado they bought the widget and integrated it straight into Brizzly. So far it has proved to be a hit with the users as well.

This is the second large platform we have integrated Snapper with after White Label Dating in Autumn 2009. We are also talking to the major Twitter photo sharing websites as well so stay posted for more updates soon!

Understanding what your competitors are doing on the web and what they are offering to customers is crucial information for your business. It enables you to stay ahead of the game (or at the very least keep up). We are often asked to do this research on behalf of our clients and these are some of the key things that we look at:

The visual design – Do the colours, fonts, lines and shapes your competitors use in their designs communicate professionalism, innovation, quality, credibility or are they perceived as amateurish or outdated? Is the design consistent throughout all of their online presence? Don't try to copy your competitors but have an idea of what does and doesn't work for them.

Usability & Navigation – How is the navigation structured and labelled? Is it easy for the user to find what they are looking for? Are there any navigation standards? Can you find their content easily and in as few clicks as possible?

Content – How informative is the site? Is the content relevant in terms of the users’ needs and expectations? What is the company’s message? Does it reflect the company’s mission?

Readability – Is the content articulate? Is the text easy to read? What fonts are used?

Structure & Information architecture – How is the website organised? Is the structure clearly arranged and easy to understand?

SEO & PPC – To what extent do your competitors run PPC campaigns and make use of SEO? How search-engine-friendly are their websites? Which keywords do they use and how well do they match the content? Look at their meta keywords and see what their priorities are, this helps you create a more unique SEO keyword strategy and also helps you see your USP’s over your competitors.

Of course, before all of this we need to determine who your competitors are. This should not only include obvious ones, but also main online competition. Usually we find 3 – 5 companies to monitor, so that the analysis is representative but not so extensive that it becomes convoluted.

The next step is the analysis itself. We evaluate competitors’ websites according to the above criteria, compare them and work out which factors either make a site a joy to use or a nightmare. A crucial factor of this analysis is to view the website from the user’s point of view. This enables us to find out which websites meet customers’ expectations and how they do it.

We also analyse competitors’ marketing activities and their effectiveness by observing their PPC campaigns, their social media activity and their rating on web information sites such as Alexa.

A thorough competitor website analysis doesn’t only tell you what your competitors they are doing, but also identifies their mistakes and therefore helps you to learn from them. Moreover it helps you to detect your own company’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. You will gain knowledge about usability and functionality, find out what users expect from your website and how you can better serve your audience. Additionally a competitive website analysis enables you to determine your Unique Value Proposition (UVP), the crucial one factor that differentiates your business from others.

As the market changes over time, it is essential to keep monitoring websites in your sector. It is recommended that you do a thorough competitive analysis at least once a year and not to ignore your competitors’ performance on the web. If you do then you are missing the opportunity to find out what your strengths and weaknesses are and the chance to take further steps to develop a successful and competitive website.

There should be no need to introduce you to Google Analytics, the most widely used web analytics application. The tool is powerful and FREE so it isn't hard to see why it is so popular. However, only a small percentage of users fully harness it's potential.

Google is constantly refining and adding new features to it's analytics service. Although you need to be a bit exploratory if you are going to make the most out of the 85 Google Analytics reports available. Lurking beneath the main dashboard Google Analytics gives you the necessary tools to analyse all of your website's data. Here are 5 under-used Google Analytics features you need to know.

1. Exclude internal traffic

Internal traffic to your site can skew your Google Analytics report. If you want to get a better picture of the traffic coming to your site, it is advised to filter out your internal traffic. Google Analytics allows you to set up a filter to easily exclude your own visits from the analytics results.

• On your Google Analytics dashboard, click on the Analytics Settings link.
  
  
• Then click on the Filter Manager link.
  
  
• The Filter Manager page will show you all existing filters for your site. Create a new one by clicking on the Add Filter link.
  
  
• In the new filter window:
  
  Enter the name of your new filter (ie: internal traffic)
  
  "Filter type" - tick the radio button "predefined filter"
  
  We want to exclude traffic from your IP address, so you will need to select "Exclude," "traffic from the IP addresses," and "that are equal to" in the three dropdowns.
  
  Enter your IP address (if you don't know your IP address, simply click on this link)
  
  Select which websites you want to filter by clicking on the appropriate website profile(s) and then clicking "Add"
  
  Finally, click "Save Changes"

Your Google Analytics report should now exclude your own traffic and you can get more accurate tracking data.

2. Set up goals and funnels tracking
(probably the most important tracking feature to set up)

Google describes a goal as a website page which a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download. Please note that if you have an e-commerce site, there is a more specific tracking feature for measuring your goals.

The "goals" feature is a simple way of tracking your business objectives for your website. A goal must be a measurable action performed by your website's visitors (such as a page view visit to a thank you page). So a business objective + a measurable action = goal

Check out these common examples:

Usually between the initial click and the visitor's action, visitors are required to make multiple steps to complete the desired action. This creates the "goal funnel", with each step being a measurable action. Your visitor can take two routes: 1) follow the intended path, which means the goal is "completed" or 2) decide to leave the process along the way in which case the conversion chain is broken and goal abandoned.

Google Analytics allows you to track visitors as they go through the different steps of the goal funnel and shows you how many potential customers abandon the process, and at which point. The funnels feature is an amazing and very valuable tool that will help you detect issues with your conversion process. With this precious information in hand, you should be able to address the sections of your site preventing you from completing your business objectives, informing future updates.

Setting up goals in Google Analytics is one of the most important actions when it comes to configuring your account. Here is how to do it:

• First you will need to define your goal funnel – When you are on your website, ask yourself what are the steps required to complete the goal? Once you know, write down the URLs that will define your funnel (or ask your developer).
  
  For example:
  1. start_registration.html
  2. enter_shipping_info.html
  3. enter_subscriber_preferences.html
  4. finalise_registration.html
  5. thank_you.html
   
• On your dashboard, click on "Goals" on the left hand side navigation and click on "Set up goals and funnels"
• Enter goal information.
  
  
  
  Note you have the choice between 3 different types of goal: URL destination, time on site and pages/visit.
• Enter goal details
  
  
  
  Set "Match Type" to either "Exact Match," "Head Match," or "Regular Expression Match. This mainly depends on the type of websites you have (ie: static vs. dynamic). You can read more about the difference between Head, Exact, and Regular Expression Match on Google Analytics help page.
  Select if the goal URL is case sensitive and finally you can add a value to a goal.
• Define Your Goal Funnel - Specify the URLs and name each steps of your funnel.
• You are done! You can now analyse your goals performance.

You will only be able to see your goals data in reports after a few days of activity but please note this feature is not backwards compatible. Once the data is collected, go to your dashboard, click on Goals and open the Funnel Visualization Report. Google Analytics will tell you the following:

1. How many people enter at each step of the funnel.
2. How many people abandon at each step.
3. How many people make it to the next stage.
4. How many people make it all the way through.

The funnel will look something similar to this:

On the left you can see how your visitors enter the funnel, on the right where they leave the funnel and where they go. Finally the middle part shows you how visitors progress to the funnel, how many continue on to each step. In the example above, you can see 33,376 started the process and 25,434 go to another section but approximately 10,000 users leave the site at the first step. We can see something must be wrong with the first step. However, the abandonment on the second step is lower, which is good. Finally, you can see the overall conversion rate is 9.98%.

If you need a bit more information about goals in Google analytics, I suggest you check out this very handy tutorial: "Google Analytics IQ Lesson: Goals in Google Analytics"

3. Set up Analytics Intelligence & custom alerts

Google analytics recently launched Intelligence Beta which is an "algorithmic driven intelligence engine". What does that mean? It means Analytics Intelligence constantly monitors your website's traffic, detects any anomaly in your traffic patterns and sends you automatic alerts of significant changes over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Clever eh?

You can also create your own custom alerts, where you set the conditions for the alert depending on what you want to monitor. Go to the left hand side of your dashboard and click on "Intelligence Beta"

You have 2 choices:

1. Set up your own custom reports for specific things that you want to monitor.
   For example, you could have just launched a campaign in a specific location and wanted to be notified how the campaign is impacting traffic from that location. You could also create another alert to see when the traffic from that location is decreasing, so you can find out when the campaign starts to run out.
2. If you are not very familiar with setting up "customised alerts" then you can select one of the templates on the "manage intelligence alerts" page. Just click on "copy" and modify the alerts so it monitors what you need.

Once your intelligence alerts are setup and triggered you will receive a custom alert, posted in your Daily, Weekly or Monthly Alerts on your Google Analytics account or sent by email if you requested that option.
For further information on the Analytics Intelligence feature, visit the Google Analytics Help Center.

4. Tracking traffic from social media

With Google Analytics you can by default analyse traffic mediums such as direct, organic etc. It also automatically tracks referrals from other websites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other networking sites. However, in your Traffic Source reports, social network visits are grouped together with visits from all the other referral links to your site. If you are only interested in social network referrals there is a trick you can use.

• Select Advanced Segments from the lower left hand side bar in your Google Analytics Dashboard.
  
  
• Once in the Advanced Segment page, select Create a new custom segment.
  
  
• Drag the "source" box which is under "Traffic sources" to "dimension or metric" window.
  
  
• Select "Matches Regular Expression" from the "Condition" drop down. In the Value field, paste the following sources:
  
  digg|aim|friendfeed|econsultancy|blinklist|fark|furl|misterwongs|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibes|
  bloglines|linkedin|facebook|del\.icio\.us|feedburner|twitter|technorati|faves\.com|newsgator|PRweb|
  msplinks|myspace|bit\.ly|tr\.im|cli\.gs|zi\.ma|poprl|tinyurl
  
  If you wish to add more domains, simply add a "|"symbol between each name. However this field is limited to 256 characters.
• Name your segment (ie: "social network traffic"), click on "Create segment" and you are done! Then from your dashboard, click on "Advanced segments – All visits" and tick the box for the social networks traffic custom segment you have just created, finally apply the changes.
  
  
• Well done, you can now start comparing your social media traffic sources in relation to your overall site traffic.

5. Create annotations on reports

Google launched this very handy feature at the end of last year allowing comments on graphs regarding events that have happened. Users can either add shared or private notes on the dashboard graph. Every time you make a change to your site, be that technical, design, content or any other updates, make sure you add a note specifying what has been done so if the performance of the site improves/decreases, you can easily explain to your colleagues who see a spike or a dip the reasons why. Watch this video to see it in action.

The "annotations" feature is a great collaborative feature that brings intelligence to data and makes your stats understandable and shareable within your company. As Google explains "A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers."

If you want to go beyond the tips we have discussed here and learn more, here is a list of Google Analytics blogs:

• Google Analytics blog
• Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Analytics Market
• Analytics talk
• LunaMetrics

I hope this post was useful and you will soon become a more knowledgeable Google Analytics user!