Internal Web Advertising HowTo

So you've made the decision to move your site to a CMS and have gone ahead and done it. The site is growing, and you have new features you want to promote to visitors. You want to lower the "bounce" rate (% of people who look at one page and then "bounce" out of your site to somewhere else) so your site's overall page views goes up, even if the number of people coming to the site does not grow (we'll grow it in another article). How can you do this?

One way is to use the automated structure of the CMS to put random ads about your site's features in front of viewers. Lee Garner's Banner Plugin for glFusion is an excellent way to do this. Other CMSs have similar functions, or you can make use of the OpenX advertising software to do it too.

The first thing to understand about web sites today is that many visitors never even see your front page. It used to be that the home page was the most visited page on your site - it lead to the rest of the site. Not today! Today, visitors go to their favourite search engine and type in the key words they're looking for - and then they go directly to the content they are looking for from the search engine of their choice - deep linked into your site by the robots that have scanned it and found the various pages. I have some customers who have specific pages that get over 10 times the "landing" visits their home page gets.

This means that you need to provide reasons to look at the rest of your site on (almost) every page of the site - and that you can use statistics to vary the message so you will at least catch some people sometimes with something that interests them. Then you can analyze what worked well and increase the frequency of its use.

OK - the first thing to do is come up with reasons why people should look at other areas of your site. These can be literally anything and everything. Come on, surely your site has something interesting in it - interesting to someone - otherwise why have the site in the first place?

In general you probably should resist at this point highlighting products unless you have pages that deal with stuff completely different from your core business. An example might be where you sponsor a baseball team or some other activity. The pages that deal with your sponsorship should probably get some real advertising of your core products and services.

Other pages - support, contact us, even product specific pages - all should get little random notes about other features and areas of your web presence and/or your physical presence and people.

So list out the features you want to highlight: (I'm going to do this for the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, since I'm going through exactly this for their volunteers and it is an excellent and massive site)

• Highlight each article topic - there are currently 19 of them
• Highlight each camera location
• Highlight each website area - news, cameras, media gallery, forum, calendar
• Highlight "ageless" articles - articles that may have fallen off the front page but are relevant all the time
• Highlight media gallery contributors and their work
• Highlight the volunteer organization - and how/why to get into it
• Highlight the various other areas on the typical web page and why it is there (goes along with deciding if it should be there or not)
• Highlight specific reasons why the foundation exists
• Highlight membership and why it is good to be a member
• Highlight our sponsors and other benefactors

In the case of your corporate web site you might consider highlighting a department or even specific employee. You can also highlight locations if you have more than one - or features about your location (parking, access, privacy, etc.)

Once you have identified the features you want your casual viewer to notice, create the words you will use for one or more internal "ads".  At this point you can do one of two things:

1. Create simple HTML ads (I use Seamonkey's composer function - this is an offshoot of the Mozilla foundation who brings you Firefox and other open source applications) with a consistent basic format and add them to the banner facility with links pointing to the various features you highlight
2. Create one or more custom basic graphic banner backgrounds in a common theme and use them as the templates for your internal ads. 

You might start off with #1 above to try out various words and phrases to see which are more effective. If you have strict formatting policies then you'll want to go with #2 right off the bat but you can still use the basic templates to put many different word combinations together to judge effectiveness. Don't forget to try slightly different graphics too - some people completely miss some types of graphics as they blend into the background of other ads or content. You want to make your messages stand out enough that the viewer notices them. I tend to like a bit of red in my messages for example. Just use it judiciously and vary the color from time to time so it does not get "worn out".

Create the banners and place them on your site - where, and how to "weight" them, will be the subject of the next article.

Tag: banner seamonkey composer mozilla internal advertising bounce page landing page seo glfusion cms website webmaster