Episode 16: Role of UX in a site’s marketing effectiveness with Farhad Khan

We can all agree that websites should persuade visitors to buy our products & services, right? There is a whole field that focuses on how websites do this, called User Experience (UX).

To find out what marketers need to know about UX, I talked with Farhad Khan, an Ottawa-based expert on UX. He started out working as a software engineer for high tech companies and then formed a Web development agency called Grype Solutions in 2009. He has since received Ottawa Business Journal’s Top 40 under forty distinctions and has also started a podcast called The ButterFly Effect.

Listen for his description of how design impacts a site’s marketing effectiveness, what jobs your website has, using your analytics tool to see how visitors flow through your site, making each page on your site interesting, and where sites are going when it comes to personalization.

Shownotes

User Experience
Form factors
Information Architecture
Sanke diagram (shows how visitors flow through a site)
Dynamic Web Pages
Hamburger Menu

People & Products Mentioned

WordPress vs Drupal as CMS
Leadpages.net
Grype Solutions – Farhad’s agency

October 22, 2019February 13, 2022

Episode 15: Ad Fraud and what you can do about it

This episode looks at the impact of fraudulent traffic on digital marketing. We’ll talk about how big a problem it is for publishers, ad platforms and advertisers. We will step through what advertisers can do to make their campaigns less vulnerable to attacks by fraudsters, and give thoughts on how to give your non-marketing colleagues reasons why it’s still good business to advertise, in spite of problems with ad fraud.

Shownotes:

Ideas and Products mentioned in the episode

Humans Account for Less than 40% of Global Web Traffic.

Pixel Stuffing (see ‘pixel stuffing’)

Ad Stacking

Misrepresentation ad fraud (video)

Ad injections

Google Data Centres

Ad Fraud Bots reported by White Ops

IAB.canada

Media Rating Council (MRC)

TAG standards

Blade Runner Voight-Kampff machine

Polygraph Machine

Ads.txt

Google Tag Manager Conversion Linker (Video) – incorrectly called it Conversion Looker in the audio.

Anti-drug PSA

Arthur Andersen & Enron conflict of interest

Script to find How much of your traffic uses adblockers

People mentioned in the episode:

Bob Hoffman (adcontrarian)

Reboot:

To see invalid traffic numbers and percentages in your Google Ads account:

login to your account and navigate to the campaign level
Click the Columns icon and add the invalid interaction data columns
If there are clicks you consider invalid that are not reported, you can request an invalid traffic investigation. Details are at the bottom of this page: https://www.google.com/ads/adtrafficquality/what-you-can-do.html

October 10, 2019April 16, 2022

Episode 14: The Role of Content throughout the funnel, with Lindsay Oliver

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

This episode takes us through the case of a company that seized the chance to market their product using content, tailored to each buyer’s vertical and funnel stage. Hear how they:

Implemented the email communications and marketing content into their Marketing Automation tool.
What kind of marketing resources they needed to build and maintain the platform
How to customize content for different audiences, without making too much work for yourself
How to present dashboard data such that management understands how you use the budget to create content and what business-related numbers that influence.

Shownotes:

Ideas and Products mentioned in the episode:

People mentioned in the episode:

Reboot:

If you haven’t yet built content, use the attached Content Planning Template

If you have content on your site and you are auditing its marketing effectiveness, use some of the templates shown here:

July 25, 2019October 20, 2022

Episode 13: How Content Experience Makes the Whole Funnel Work, with James Taylor

This is part of a series on Elements of Every Funnel. Today we will focus on the kind of experience we create with our content.

This is the fifth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. An experience is created with the content you write; but content alone does not an experience make. You can’t just throw together a collection of words and expect it to do anything. Here I talk with a web copy expert on how to craft content that provides a positive experience for the user. In my interview with James Taylor, you’ll hear the 12 steps he follows for creating content that measurably improves the number of users who engage and become leads.