ThatsWiki - Digital Learning to develop Strategic Thinking and Execution.

Gartner conducted a survey in UK, canada and USA with 315 marketing executives and predicted the figures of digital marketing spend will increase by 17% in the year 2015 as most of the respondents are pro digital marketing expenditure. Gartner research director Jake Sorofman, also mentioned that is's very difficult to gauge upon how much spend is going to increase as the companies are maintaining seperate digital marketing budgets.  Although, digital platforms are transforming the ways of marketing, Print and broadcast still dominate the advertising spend as many companies yet to hit double digit mark in sales revenue from digital platforms apart from UK.

Google has released a new feature to track the mobile usability issues in webmaster tools. A link has been placed under Search Traffic in left menu of the webmaster Tools interface.  Mobile usability reports show usability errors of various types such as Viewport not configured, touch elements too close, small font size, flash usage, content not sized to viewport. One can observe all these in the below image to get better idea. ​ How to use mobile usability reports? Webmasters can start using this report to measure the mobile webpages performance and corresponding errors. This report helps to identify the grey areas and fix them to make the website compatible for several devices. in.linkedin.com/in/srikanthakella/ http://www.thatswiki.com/

Let's understand the difference between Exit rate and bounce rate. During a session if the visitor views multiple pages and leaves at a certain point will contribute to Exit rate. If the visitor leaves the page as soon as after landing on the page without pageviews will contribute to Bounce rate. Page exit of any form, including bounce rate criteria, will be used to compute the page exit and reversal is not true. Also Read: User Behavior Causes of Bounce Rate.   Behavior:Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate Leave a Website? 1) Bad Navigation one of the main reason why a visitor leave your website. Visitor often confuse how to find the related content or unable to identify the links to your important sections due to bad navigation. Group all the important links of your website and place them in main menu and don't bury the links into the content. 2) Too Many Ads may cause the website visitor leave your website which often causes to page exit and bounce rate as well. This

Google Rolled out Pirate algorithm update and many torrent sites were affected. Sitemaps: We all know that sitemap submission is an important part of the optimization and XML sitemaps are big in size downloaded less frequently than RSS/Atom feeds which are quite small with latest updates only.Never include the duplicate pages of the canonical pages as they the original copy has been already included. Also, Don't include the url's blocked by robots.txt into the sitemaps. How to bring your local business into online to improve the common goals such as increase revenue? Maile Ohye explains it indetailed: Get your local business listed in local business search results of google by creating a google plus page. Once you fill the form with correct address, google will send you a post card with a PIN number to be entered online in your account to verify the store presence. Once you are done with the verification process your business listing will appear in the maps and lo

2014 Insights of Search Engines Optimization: Website elements for SEO Search engine Rankings matters as long you can attain traffic from keywords that are relavant which cannot generate macro and micro conversions. This gives raise to several questions on what you should focus on: 1) Should focus on most important/profitable products or services. 2) Making changes to the website to increase the conversions. 3) Identify high converting keywords and Ubersuggest and Keyword Planner from Google helps to find more related terms to your main keyword to develop keyword strategy. In addition you can use the tools such as Semrush and Majesticseo to know more terms used by your rivals. 4) Prepare and execute keyword strategy to use them effectively in your website. 5) Start Using long tail keywords which in turn include your main keywords as most of your competitors still focusing on the two-term keywords. Long tail keywords can easily be incorporated into the scentence

Google releases new tag manager helps to digital marketing to gather fast and flexible data to analyse the use behavior on which you can depend for further analysis and make smarter decisions. Little head's up with terminology change in rules vs triggers. What once called as rules are now triggers and macros are variables .  Image: google.com ​ Predictive analytics is going to play bigger role to develop digital marketing strategy in identifying market trends and understanding customer needs and preferences. IMG source: api.ning.com To get best out the predictive analytics make sure you define the goals of your digital marketing strategy. This could leverage the below advantages: 1) Nurture the leads. 2) Customer centric. 3) Design the campaigns according to market trends. 4) Create opportunities and revenues. 5) Improve user experience. 6) Be the first to predict the changes in the market trend. ​

Google's top 25 U.S. search-ad buyers alone spent $1.34 billion last year.  Amazon spent $157.7 million on Google U.S. search ads in 2013, by far the most by any company, according to Ad Age DataCenter's first ranking based on data from AdGooroo, a Kantar Media company focused on search marketing.   adage.com Amazon.com Google's 25 largest U.S. search-marketing advertisers in 2013 Top 25 Companies by Ad Spend Walmart and Sears, amazon's competitor in retail e-business stood 7th in the paid search expenditure with $59.7 million. Homedepot, BestBuy, Target and Macy's couldn't be able to make in the top 10 and stood 15th, 18th, 20th, and 23rd respectively. Core strengths of Amazon.com are Search & Social traffic, wide affiliate networking, excellent customer satisfaction alongside wonderful user shopping experience using the cloud computing and web Services.

No interaction whatsoever with entrance/first landing page of your website by the visitor during a session shall be treated as bounce rate. Causes of bounce rate: 1) Usability issues     Bookmark a page to load in a browser tab everytime user opens a new browser and not interacting with the page can be considered as bounce rate.     Several other attributes constitute to user behavior that can be considered as bounce rate. 2) Site Design     Though the pages are tagged properly and still experiencing the high bounce-rate try change the design and layout of the landing pages.     Optimize the pages with relevant search terms that bring more users.     Use Menus with links that can lead to more appropriate information which user may find relevant (or intended to visit) to the entrance page. 3) Found the information required quickly and left the page. You can do very less about the this case except changing the time settings in analytics to appropriately measure your bounce rate. 4) Singl

Local inventory ads now available in the USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia. Local inventory ads help the shoppers to check the availability of the item at their nearest store before they visit and 83% of the shoppers are using store-only product ads now available on desktop devices. This would allow the retailers to list their inventory to right customers at the right time. Local inventory ads help the customers to find the low price options during the times of online out of stocks and last minute shipping cost increase. Local inventory Ads Google Manual Actions on PBN's Private blog network? Google has reportedly taken action on sites participating in private blog networks, also known as PBNs. On September 18th, Google sent out widespread manual action notices via Google Webmaster Tools to these sites for "thin content" spam. what type of queries trigger the structured snippets from showing up in the search results? Structured snippets are avai

Sometimes we find it too hard and unable to understand the facts behind drop in the rankings and traffic. One of the best places as a webmaster/website owner is to visit the Links to Your Site section in the Google webmaster tools. Review all the three sections "Who links the most", "Your most linked content" and "How your data is linked" and record all changes to compare with your previous data to observe and understand the changes. I recommend, all the webmasters should maintain a back-up of these metrics periodically and If you don't have the past data please start taking backup's from now onwards. In either case, follow the below steps: 1) Identify the links which are relevant and try to analyse the strength of the links. 2) Identify the links which are not relevant. 3) Try to find out the links with repetitive/irrelevant anchor text from both sets you identified in step 1 and 2. 4) Based on the Strength and Anchor Text of the li

What is a bounce rate? Bounce rate is a percentage of single page visitors to a website. Most website owners like the visitors to participate/complete in either macro or at least micro conversions to monetize their website or to increase the loyalty. Micro conversions include fill out a form, read more, subscribe to newsletter etc. Macro conversions are to register with website or buying a product or service. But if the visitor bounces soon after landing on the page it indicates:  1) Visitor didn't find what he's looking for  2) The website/page is too difficult to work with (Ex: taking too much time to load, Many pop-ups or ads) How to overcome Bounce rate issues? Use the benchmark averages of bounce rate given below and define your expectations/goals inline with industry standards.  Retail/E-commerce Sites: 20-40% Lead Generation: 30-50% Content Websites: 40-60% Blog: 70-85% Landing Pages: 70-80% Service Sites: 10-30% Tip: For low organi

When it comes to content marketing there is a fierce competition via online media. So, it's time to power-up your content with high quality, enticing and attractive with visuals to grab the attention of the target audience. Visuals help you to increase the user/customer engagement, loyalty and conversions. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter have started accommodating more videos and images on to their news feeds or posts to grab more attention and participation of the visitors to increase the engagement and returning visitors. Pinterest, being 4rth best social media site, is taking steps to accommodate more visuals into their feeds for better user experience. Not convinced? Read below reasons how visual content helps. "A picture speaks thousand words." 1)) Visual content grabs the attention of target customers/visitors. Huge volumes of content units are generated on Daily basis with 2 million videos and 140 million tweets. With all those content w

Hootsuite.com help to manage all your social profiles at one place. Webmaster/Social-Media-analyst  can compose and send updates to their facebook, twitter and many other social media streams such as pinterest, linkedin and Google+. Hootsuite offers the following solutions to any website owner who want to manage social streams/activities quite easily at one place: Social Media Management:  Manage your entire social lifecycle from one dashboard by scheduling Tweets and Facebook posts. To measure your social ROI you can create and customize analytics reports. Streamline your workflows to share and assign tasks and receive real-time notifications. Distribute workload amongst team members irrespective of location and access  conversations. Scale your team securely without sharing your passwords and work together with clients and team members to increase productivity with appropriate permission levels. Social Marketing:  Optimize the influence of the socia

After planning in the project management the project will enter into the Executing the project. Various techniques to execute the project includes: Techniques and Tools: Executing the baseline project plan: The job of the project manager is to initiate the execution of project activities, acquire and assign resources, orient and train new team members, keep the project on schedule, and assure the quality of project deliverables. Monitoring project progress against the baseline project plan. Using Gantt and PERT charts  can assist the project manager in doing this. Managing changes to the baseline project plan. Maintaining the project workbook. Maintaining complete records of all project events is necessary. The project workbook is the primary source of information for producing all project reports. Communicating the project status. This means that the entire project plan should be shared with the entire project team and any revisions to the plan should be communicated

Cookie policy in europe law insists that the website owners must give information about the cookies installed in their website user/visitor systems. Cookies help the website to store the information locally in the web browsers of the visitor to track the future visits and advertising purposes.  Cookiechoices.org is produced by Google to provide the publishers with easy-to-implement tools to help publishers, which can help them meet their legal obligations to get user consent. These tools also help to gain appropriate consent on websites and mobile apps. For mobile apps one-time pop-up alert is adequate you can customize the language in which you can present the alerts.  For the ease of Implementation google provides code examples for both forms of 2 basic tools they offer such as 1) splash screen and 2) navigation bar. 

Performance and it's control in an advanced project is a cumbersome activity and especially to overcome the difficulties associated with measuring performance & it's success. The key is to focus on the important and basic aspects of any project, Namely:  1) Timescale 2) Resource 3) Quality 4) Scope  Also, Project manager has to focus on the performance analysis to enable a better management of the project. Timescale: Timescale is obviously an important aspect and requires a special perspective to manage it better in advanced projects. Project manager has to understand what lies beneath the timing and not just timing as advanced projects deal with difficult and most advanced tasks to be accomplished. The general direction of the final goal to be achieved keep changing while progressing through the project which makes it more complex.  As shown in the above figure lack of certainty at the start of the project gradually improves as the project progres

"Google's Panda update 4.0 is aimed at low quality sites like content farms." Google introduced series of algorithmic updates before penguin to filter the low quality webpages and to improve the quality of Google SERP's by reducing the pages with thin and unauthentic content. According to Matt Cutts, Content developed/rewritten should be of high quality and panda should not be able to match at least any 2 pieces of the content on the same topic of the original content and this entire exercise is to offer content which adds significant value to the users of it. Many classifieds and property portals will rely heavily on Google for traffic with/without adequate details due to which the visitors may be misguided with the partial information that is available with the listing which users provide. Classifieds and listings website(s) such as yellowpages.com and yelp.com should be able to gather adequate information from the visitors for business/property/job/services

How to evaluate a webpage to perform well in search engine results page (SERP's) and give the user a better experience? Search engines literally dominated the usage of internet and they continue to play such role with most relevant and accurate responses for the given user search queries. Search engines are also deciding the ways to use the internet as they are helping the internet users not only by crawling, indexing and updating the web (billions and trillions of webpages) but also responding with faster, accurate, helpful results on demand of what user are looking for from their index. Hence search engines put highest price and value around quality and user experience of each SERP in response to the user query. So, It's obvious search engines choose the best, informative, high-quality and helpful webpages to display in their search results page.   How do search engines choose best quality webpages? Search engines use a bot (nothing but a software program) to crawl and

A good navigation will help visitors and search engines to navigate and crawl respectively within the website to ensure all the related topics are more accessible for the users and search engines. Like, I mentioned in my internal links post search engines can't understand the links after performing a search and pull downs. Also, they won't perform any search on your behalf to understand the several important internal links available after the search. Hence it is strongly recommended to make the links to important sections of your website available within several clicks or possibly on the home page. As a part of optimizing the Internal links develop multiple pages with at least or more than 300 words to describe a specific topic and it's subsequent topics. Don't practice this task as a part of generating multiple pages.   in detailed with exclusive & meaningful content. This would help to generate more internal links while expanding the content, which will

Internal links are the references given to different pages within the website. Search engines will count these internal links or references from different pages to a specific page, say A, as impressions to page A which that they would like to rank or eligible to rank. Search engines consider those pages with relevant impressions to a specific page A from different pages or internal links should be relevant to the page A topic or contents of the topic.These internal links tend to bring lot of relevance to Page A provided the anchor text & page contents of the sources from which page A received impressions should also be relevant to the contents in page A. Example: An Insurance Page with several internal links from Movies pages may not  be very relevant to the contents of the Insurance page though the anchor text used is related to the contents of the insurance page. Hence it's not just the internal links are sufficient but the contents/theme of the page from which Insu

Whenever a search engine bot request a page web server sends a status 200 which means every thing is fine but if it returns: 404: Page not found and you may come back. 410: Page not found and please do not come back or no need to come back. 200: OK Some property and classifieds listings will get indexed and they can use this 410 response status to make sure their listing no longer exists in the index and no need to come back. The property and classifieds listings expire very fast as soon as the deal closed and in those scenarios webmasters can use <meta http-equiv="expires" content="date"> . If you wanna continue with the page content in a different URL you can also use the below technique to move the content permanently. 301: Search engine friendly permanent redirection i.e the page has been to moved permanently moved to a new location. This redirection can also be used if you have multiple urls to reach a single page and use canonical url to make

Google asks to choose a verification method to ensure the identity of the website before they allow webmasters to add their sites and allow corresponding sitemaps. 1) Add a meta tag Google display's the meta tag with verification code and you need to include it into head section  of your website which you would like to verify and then upload it into your root web server for further accessibility of googlebot to verify the site upon clicking the verify button. 2) Upload a html file. Google offers you to download a html file which includes verification code in it. We need to upload that file into the root section of the webserver where the website has been hosted and then click verify. Google then access the file via given URL and make allows you to further submit your sitemap. 3) Add a new DNS record: Verify your domain name via service provider such as name.com or 123-reg.co.uk. In order to use this method, webmasters must be able to access domain name provider or host

 Identify the components of your business which may include Rich Media experience to interact with Videos, Social Media, Community Forum, Blog, Mobile Website/APP and a cool Website. Try to figure out how these components are connected which may defines your visitor journey to conversion(s). Now we shall go through the steps of building Search Engine Optimization strategy.  1) Searcher Persona Workflow: Typically, a visitor journey will follow the steps shown in the below diagram. Firstly, visitors enters a search term to perform a Search in a search engine. Secondly, visitors will look for relevant results in SERP to click and enter a website which may offer the intended information, products or services.                                  Figure 1.1 - Searcher Persona Workflow   Third, visitors may go through the content of your page(s) if the visitor selects your result in search page and then goes to the last step of conversion provided if the visitor(s) satisfy wit

Project managers who assume to get past the steering group approval & business case can help them to start the work may not be heading in the right direction by skipping lead activities in advanced projects as this is another time consuming stage of project initiation. During the initiation phase of advanced projects project managers need to take risks such as starting the activities which are yet to be approved. It's not that you start working on all the activities in the very beginning but all some of the activities which require early attention. After identifying such tasks you may need to approach the suitable line managers to make sure they would help in their respective fields and convince them to identify the unapproved resources. Two more problems you may face here are these line managers are ready to help or reluctant to extend the help. These line managers needs to be encouraged to indulge in the tasks and should define boundaries within which they need to operat

Project manager must maintain high standards to produce the business case for the advanced projects as there are large investments involved. Poorly devised business case will make the company nervous and continue to prevaricate the project. Generally, building the business case is the responsibility of the project sponsor and involves lot of time to develop. Hence, project manager spend adequate time on rest of the 3 themes rather than focusing on business case. Project managers should actively participate in all the 4 phases regardless of who is responsible and must ensure best business case in in place to contribute project success. Project sponsors welcome any kind of external help offered to build the business case. Project managers must avail this opportunity and contribute to the business case development. Adding production of business case to the targets often make the project sponsor sidelined and feel inferior. This may result in that the project sponsor may not sign the

" Stakeholders are those who are interested in the project are affected by the activity of the Project." ex: External regulators, Project Management Office (PMO), Project Manager(s), Project Sponsor/Executive, Suppliers and Users etc. Management of stakeholders is often overlooked and it's a very important that project managers should pay special attention to them to attain several benefits involved which helps to run the project smoothly. Project managers should avoid looking at this task (Stakeholders management plan) as an activity that is to be completed as a part of project management life cycle. The main purpose of the stakeholders management plan is to make sure the relationships among the principal people involved in the project have been discussed and the information flow between them is agreed. In contrary, these principal people won't pay much attention to this task and they actually allow the relaxations on project deadlines and complain about that t

"A Good Start is half done". An effective project manager should overcome the challenge of optimizing time during this stage as several elements and people come into picture in which lot of time is consumed to decide and makes it difficult to carry the initial momentum. With experienced Project managers this stage can be short and successful. A project manager sets out and adopt a project life cycle in which he defines range of activities and tasks and the order in which the tasks needs to be undertaken and executed. Most of the advanced projects will be disintegrated into several smaller projects and shall be run in parallel to share the same final goal in order to optimize the time and resources. Small projects in turn will have their own life cycle and people involved in these project operate in different ways to deliver and in contrast the people in the long term project life cycle operate in a more relaxed manner which give raise to frustration and conflicts among t