The Google Adsense team announced yesterday that they have revamped 3 of the most used Adsense Ad units available to users. These changes have been made to optimise visual efficiency and eye candy to enhance clicks. According to the tests the team has been leading over the past weeks, these seem to get more clicks. The new versions will be rolling out over the next weeks.

Source

Creating great content is one of the aims of publishing over the web using platforms such as WordPress. Trying to monetize a blog is another aim and advertisement inclusion is always a problem especially when talking about that of Google Adsense. On this very blog, you found out a tutorial on the easy way of including Google Adsense ads with the use of shortcode in WordPress as well as how to improve the quality of your Google Adsense ads and a guest post by Kurt from Icy Tips on the most performing Google Adsense ads size to use.

Publishing Google Adsense ads in single posts content only.

The use of shortcode is easy for such inclusion and quite handy as it comes through. It actually was the way I used to include my Google Adsense ads in my code. Here’s a newbie tip if you’re going to use the shortcode in your posts. Let’s say that you have decided to publish Google Adsense ads in your posts only. You can use your PHP-fu along with your WordPress-fu to generate your Google Adsense blocks in your posts only. This is how it works out. Make sure you’ve implemented your code as described in the post here: easy way of including Google Adsense ads with the use of shortcode in WordPress.

To make sure you publish only when you’re in a single post you need to write this code in your post:

    if(is_single()) {echo "[adsense]";}

What we are doing here is basically asking the code to check if the current page is a single WordPress post page and publish the shortcode if this is the case. Easy as ever. I usually used this to publish 3 Google Adsense slots (maximum Google Adsense slots you can publish on a page) on my single page posts. When the post was published on the blog’s front page, no Google Adsense ad was visible.

Look Ma! No code!

There’s a way to go one step further! The idea is to publish your WordPress single post Google Adsense ad in your content without having to write anycode while publishing. You might not see why this might be handy but believe me, when you find yourself cleaning up hundreds of posts shortcode inclusion, you quickly try to find another way of doing it (yes, I did clean hundreds of posts manually removing Google Adsense ads in my content). There are 2 ways of doing this.

The first one which I would call the brutal way (maybe slightly more efficient for the non PHP experienced) which calls for direct inclusion of the Google Adsense tag in the code of the single post page, single.php file in the theme folder. You just need to add your Google Adsense slot before or after your content (the the_content() tag) as it pleases you:

The classy way of adding Google Adsense slots.

Now the classy way of doing things. It is the way the Google Adsense slots are set on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. I wanted to do this just to be able to style the Google Adsense slot right beside the content (the Google Adsense block had to be put right into the content and I did not want to have to put shortcodes all the time). So I had to put it directly into the content. After some research on the code I found out that I could write my own function to modify the code. Basically, I wanted to take all the content sent out by WordPress for my posts and inject my Google Adsense ad into it. Simple. So I had to create a dummy content that could be easily modified. This function must be put in the functions.php file of the WordPress template. Please not that what we are adding here is a filter.

function like_content($content) {
	global $post;
        $original = $content;
		$content = "<div class=\"pub\">";
		$content .= "<script type=\"text/javascript\"><!--
                    google_ad_client = \"pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXX\";
                    google_ad_slot = \"XXXXXXXXXX\";
                    google_ad_width = 336;
                    google_ad_height = 280;
                    //-->
                    </script>
                    <script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js\">
        </script>
                    ";
		$content .= "</div>";
		$content .= $original;
        $content .= "</div>";
       return $content;
}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'like_content' );

There you go, your Google Adsense slot will always be included directly into your content without having anything to implement. The only thing you will now have to do is to style your content through your CSS file.

One step further: Google Adsense in single posts only.

Now, let’s go even further in this. The idea was to generate a Google Adsense ad slot in the single post content. The function above has the enormous drawback of setting the Google Adsense block in ALL the content. By all, I mean all, i.e. pages and single posts. This was not the main idea was it? So we need to remove the filter from all the “pages” content. For this to happen, we need another filter function which will remove the filter if we are in a page. It looks like this:

function remove_like_content() {
  if (is_page()) {
    remove_filter('the_content','like_content');
  }
}
add_action('wp','remove_like_content');

As you can see, the code analyses if the content is in a page with the is_page() method and then removes the filter from the WordPress loop by adding this Google Adsense slot suppresion.

A whole lot of talking is going on around the new Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) TV/Radio website. It always is a major event when a major Mauritian company sets sails out for a new web venture and people can question and appreciate the job. Here, the great thing is that the tool used is WordPress which has now gone past the “blog” platform and has matured into a full grown Content Management System and even been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS award in 2009. That’s one good point but there’s a major “but” when it comes to the way the MBC managing board seems to have directed this project!

Corporate you said?

The said website is a corporate one, at least, it’s what is said on the main page title. I will not be going into an indepth analysis of the design and the website as well as its functionalities. The discussion between the webdesigner and the public is nearing trench warfare more than anything on Yashvin’s Blog with all the contradictions and accusations that go with such situations. I will not be adding to this!

My firm belief is that Mauritian companies need to mature in their use of the Internet and start working on online presence. They have to invest in development and user experience with indepth audits of user demands and conversion rates. This calls for a good deal of methodology, vision and professionalism. So my concern here is how can a huge thing like the MBC get involved in an amateur construction of its website.

Templating and project management.

To build a new website, objectives must be laid out, budgets (if any) calculated, but more important, the whole project must be managed with validation procedures, content improvement, calls to action and lead analysis. But what do we have here? A webdesigner who claims to have done the job for free by buying a template (Hello MBC managing board, don’t you even have some money to even pay for a template?) and modifying it to suit the MBC’s needs. And what does the poor chap get even with investing his own money into the project? Just a poor link to his website! This is pure slavery! The MBC might even be de-localising some of its own work to China.

So what’s the problem here? Having a webdesigner claiming high to having made just a template modification for such a big company means that all the steps required to make a real, good, managing board driving, visionary and high level website have been flushed down the toilet. All this has been boiled down to a template available to anyone and just modified. Do they care for their image? Do they have a communication & advertising department?

Amateurish and cheap.

The MBC is not the structure that bears the shiniest image in Mauritius and it would somehow have been logical that the directory board would have had the idea of making use of this occasion to buff it up but once again, the amateurs have hit home. The MBC is a leading Mauritian body and one would expect a site to its grandeur with a huge input in quality content. The whole system is heavy and loaded with glitches. Just one example, how many of you readers will ever read every word in this “About us” page. This is where the group should have had clear specifications in terms of content, design and wireframing. But none of all these are here.

An example of what “not to do”.

Overall, this whole project is a great example of how a major company should not be leading a web project. Specifications should be minute and written clearly. Each element should be made to maximise conversion and user experience. All this is done through thorough statistical analysis and user interview. Usability tests should be made to test each page, each way of delivering content and of the service and not just impose a template to any web designer. As sad as it might sound, the MBC managing committee has failed to make use of a great tool just to save money or maybe for some really obscure reason… who knows?

This article is based on a real life project. It aims to show small business owners, whatever the field, how such businesses can drive leads out of a small scale but really optimised website. I’ll be taking the example of a small scale French business (18 employees) specialised in aluminium zinc works with which I worked and which made over a gross million euros over 3 years just through its website.

Website. This word and its concept is rather unclear for a whole lot of users online. Worse, many business owners hear and talk about the Internet and websites without ever getting a grasp of the concept. Some understand the possibilities and power of using the Internet and others just do not want to even hear about “that thing”. Huge mistake, especially when it comes to small businesses. Why? Because small businesses are more flexible and faster than large scale ones which are already missing a lot on the web. Moreover, being small means being more available locally, thus having better conversions locally, therefore securing contracts easily.

Real life example: Euralu.

Euralu Zinguerie is a small family business working locally in the Rhone-Alps and Auvergne regions in France. It employs 18 persons who are all local experts in zinc works and aluminium stripping for roofs. Nothing to do with the Internet, heh? However, the founder of this enterprise is tech savvy and had heard about websites and was ready to give it a try with a relatively low investment. The idea was to compete with its closest competitor regional Dal’Alu. The latter is a big group with small franchises disseminated everywhere in France.

The process.

The Euralu Zinguerie process was rather simple. The aim was to (re)create its identity and build a website that would have permanent calls to action to generate leads. The site would also need to compete with a minimum but long lasting search engine optimisation.

The conversion issue had to be tackled even before getting into the design process. The latter had to be extremely light to be able to give more importance to content (hence content to search engines). After some tries, we settled for the possibility of getting into direct contact with the company from all the available pages. This gave the direction for the design process as well as the upcoming SEO.

Minimal effective SEO.

Based on its nature, the site was more of the static type with minimal PHP just for the contact application. Aluminium zinc works being a really specialised field, it would have been really difficult to find specialised directories, especially in France, to get the site boosted by backlinks and exogenous SEO. The other thing was that the SEO wouldn’t have to be maintained (reducing website costs).

We therefore had to base all the SEO on the content and treated each page as a single, optimised entity. Each page has been built around one theme and we even used the site’s static file structure to optimise the whole lot. Site navigation was set to have it always available at eye level and all the specialised parts have been cross linked to maximise crawling. We also made sure that the business field “zinguerie” was present in the domain name.

Results.

Analysing conversions and results for this website might be done from different points of view but, after a friendly call to the founder, I got material to analyse both sides of the medal: online leads as well as offline.

Online.

Okay, so what goes on online for this website? In 3 years, the website’s PR is 0/10. What? 0? Yes, 0 and this kills all your misconceptions on PR because the site boasts 2nd on “zinguerie aluminium” just after the national leader 4th place on “zinguerie alu” and between first and 10th place on most of its strategic keywords such as: entreprise spécialisée zinguerie.

Along with this, is the conversion rate. Here is a screenshot of the conversions over 3 years.

1.74%, not much? We had set a simple calculation of how much it would have cost to get these persons to convert. The investment over 3 years would have been $495/350€/MRU Rs 14 775. So these are the gross savings made over the Internet for new clients. All in all, about 60% of these clients have hired the company.

Offline.

One of the good ideas we’ve had on this site was to set the phone number just beside the contact form. Notice how easy it is to get contact information from any page of the website. This, on its own, has generated about 150 phone contacts (every new contact is asked how it heard of the company). Here again about 60% of the clients signed for business.

Conclusion

Many are expecting, at this stage to know how much money came in. I have no clear sum to give but this is what I got from the founder. On average, the minimum contract signed (due to the nature of the work and the involvement of raw materials and travel expenses) is 8 000€ (MRU Rs 338 000) and the maximum can go to as much as 30 000€ (MRU Rs 1 260 000). In remaining on the minimum average with an 60% full conversion rate from the web for this small business, the average contracts signed via the website over the past 2 years is a gross 1 008 000€ (MRU Rs 42 504 000). And let’s keep this in mind: Euralu Zinguerie is but a mere small scale local business.

The title might seem weird to you but let me expose the facts. It does happen that one decides to include Adsense on one’s site. That’s a good idea to base some revenue off one’s site. Trouble is that sometimes you just get some unwanted or completely unrelated Adsense ads on your pages. For example, when testing the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius in the first months, I used to get only a whole lot of furniture ads. When stepping into the detailed view of the site on Google Webmaster Tools, I found out that it was the word “Bureau” that was winning it. Weird to get “pawned” by one’s own site title.

It was necessary to find a parade to this and to improve the Adsense ads. There is a way and a quite simple one as it is. It is given in the Adsense user guide but, hey, like a lot of people, I did not read all online documentation I found as it was just for meddling around. The solution is just to tell the Adsense engine which is the main content of the page and the ads will be modified according to this content. To do this, you need to specify where the content starts and where it ends with these two tags in your code, the first one before your content and the second one after:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Once this is done, you just have to publish your page and the content will be used as a base for publishing your improved Adsense ads. These being closer to your content should be more interesting to the viewers, hence increasing the click rates.

Now for those using WordPress, you can code this directly into your templates or use this great plugin built by Jim Gaudet. It takes 2 minutes to install and it does the job pretty well.

I had a discussion with a Mauritian blogger yesterday who was explaining that no Mauritian company has really undergone a major advertising policy change to invest in online ads. Sure there are some communication agencies that would surely pay some rupees to get their clients on L’Express‘ site but none really has an aggressive online presence.

Sure enough, the market seems cold today because no one in Mauritius is bold enough to get in the ring alone and say: “I’ve invested thousands of rupees online”. Actually, the next step would be : “I’ve invested thousands of rupees online and now I’m getting contracts each worth at least thrice the price I invested.” This surely means that the company should be seeing the real power of a global marketing project where seo, sem and advertising are nothing but components.

I’m not a dreamer. I know that no Mauritian company is that far-sighted and that what is being said here will take years to become a reality. For example DCDM‘s site does not reveal the true power and driving skills of the company in Mauritius. Nothing has been invested in SEO or online presence and reputation. DCDM does not represent the Andersen group in Africa anymore but the meta description content has not been updated. Worse, a swift look in the code shows that the site has not been updated since 2001 :

Copyright (c) 1999 Thomas Brattli (www.bratta.com)
Modified for the purpose of this site by DCDM's Web Development Team @ June 2001'

And don’t you try the French version of the site. I haven’t, by the way, seen any in depth traffic analysis device on the website. Correct me if I’m wrong, they might also be using much more advanced Business Intelligence tools like Web Trends.

Does this mean that the group has missed all the Web 2.0 bubble, no online interaction with the public, no online marketing? How can this be so when a company like this has a “marketing research” unit? This analysis of DCDM‘s online presence is just to show that Mauritian companies are still lagging 10 years (approximately for DCDM) behind while the world is moving faster than ever. How? By seeing the new market shares.

The Telegraph has published a very interesting chart this morning. Weights have shifted and, in 6 months, online advertising has gained more importance than TV adverts. It symbolises the change in habits and way of consuming. People have a different approach to the Web now.

Mauritian companies would gain so much more if they approached online marketing strategies for new fields to be exploited. These needs can be easily targeted when asking people what they would like to have in terms of services like in some of the comments available on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius contest.

Your new blog has been built. You have decided to run a WordPress blog and already have a lot of ideas and themes to talk about. Another thing is that you might want to make some money off your blog just for the fun of doing it. Chances are that you will be running Google Adsense on your blog. Why is that so? Just because Google is well known, adsense integration is fairly easy and “everybody else is doing it”.

The semi-problem.

Setting up Adsense on your blog is not a problem in itself. Once your theme is ready you just have to head over to the Adsense portal and create your dedicated ad group and copy and paste the code in your template (if automatised) or in a text editor to copy and paste in each of your posts. But did you know that there was an easier way of including your ad in your text? It is called WordPress shortcode.

WordPress Shortcode.

Basically, WordPress shortcode allows you to generate a specific piece of code in any part of your post without having to write the whole code. Those who are code learned will understand if I say that it is the equivalent of a PHP include or a Java import. Those who are not will understand if I say that it helps you write the equivalent of 10 lines while you’re writing only one word. This is an integrated behaviour of the WordPress core. So you don’t have to activate anything. You only have to have access to your template functions.php file. The easiest way to do this is to use your theme editor in WordPress: Appearance > Editor.

Adsense shortcode.

Once you have generated your Adsense code you just have to copy and paste it like this (this is my ad code, you need to replace the code starting with script):

function showads() {
    return '
		<div class="publicity">
         	<script type="text/javascript"><!--
			google_ad_client = "pub-7734054350163682";
			/* 468x60, date de création 05/08/09 */
			google_ad_slot = "4764339399";
			google_ad_width = 468;
			google_ad_height = 60;
			//-->
			</script>
			<script type="text/javascript"
			src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
			</script>
		</div>
';
}

Once this is done, just add this code under the function :

add_shortcode('adsense', 'showads');

Using it in your posts.

Now you’re done. Anytime you’re writing a post now, you can invoke your ad banner by just typing the shortcode between squared brackets like this:

[adsense]

This saves you the trouble of copying and pasting your adsense code everytime you want to make use of it.

Being a musician, I couldn’t go by without reading Heavy Bag Media’s evaluation of web strategies in the musical instrument business. The evaluation is to the point and shows that the Web is gaining on in terms of solutions in the musical instrument business. This however underlines some major issues. Businesses like instrument building are based on skills that are not “web oriented”. Many of these have websites that look quite unprofessional like Vigier Guitars for example. On the other hand, others are going fast, ESP guitars‘ website, while others are taking the most out of social media like Youtube.

This eventually brought me to think about how businesses are using the web in Mauritius. Talent exists as well as ideas but the involvement of high profile businesses in the Mauritian Web world or on social media remains poor. Online sales is still trying to catch on. Rogers Group has a site that looks more like a series of print outs pasted on web pages while it could have a really colourful and high user experience website showing it knows how to use this new media. The same goes to Happy World where its value added service like “Pizza Hut” is just lost somewhere in a page talking about the company today. If we had to talk about food, maybe Kraft Foods‘ website would be an inspiration. What about a Pizza Hut Mauritius website?

Loads of businesses are lagging behind in terms of web in Mauritius and it really looks like rogue websites are cropping up every now and then and left just like that. It might seem bold on my part to say this but all these businesses will one day see that the Web might have a real added value, just like instrument building companies are going towards social media (music being social in itself), Mauritian businesses will have to make a real move towards the web, not in terms of print-pasted like websites, but in terms of community building, user experience, offers, sales and much more, not to forget the added value of being competitive over the Net.

What businesses do you think would benefit from a real web strategy in Mauritius?

What are Saas?

Saas means Software As A Service. It might seem obscure and you but you might also be using saas equivalents without noticing it. The other question is also, why Saas on a web design site? Simply because it might trigger ideas and change your way of seeing the services or solutions you are building for each client. As far as I know, Saas solutions are not actually offered by Mauritian companies.

Saas concept.

The idea behind Saas is simple. It is a full blown application that is hosted on a remote server and which is accessed through the Internet meaning that the user has access to the service only and is not hindered by the issues of upgrades, server versioning, OS compatibility or all the minor glitches that might crop up when dealing with a desktop software.

Saas example.

A simple real life example of Saas is “free” web based email offered on the Internet such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Microsoft Hotmail/Live. Each system follows a same scheme, the application is developed, maintained, managed and hosted by the vendor and the user subscribes to the service via the Internet. The software is thus maintained by the vendor and the service it offers is the only thing the user has access to.

On a much much simpler basis, an extranet can be considered as a Saas. Thus Saas can be used either by end users such as free web based email users, facebook users or blog platform (blogger or wordpress for example) users in the same way as companies can do it. For example, Campaign Monitor is an email marketing service built on the Saas concept.

How does it work and the advantages?

Contrary to traditional softwares, the Saas work on a subscription basis (free or paid, free being supported by advertising) compared to the one-time fee offered. The software is not the property of the user and s/he does bit have to download and install a software. This results in:

• Lower costs for the user.
• Smaller storage requirements.
• Fewer personnel to handle and maintain.

The vendor also gains from this as it can rely on a continous stream of income which might be more than traditional licensing. Piracy and unlicensed use of the software are also reduced and, in some cases, cleared resulting in the reduction in losses associated to these.

Interested?

Saas is getting important and more companies are adhering to it. It seems to be the future of web based services and softwares. Below are 3 articles that might help you see how Saas works in real life and what are the pros and cons of such solutions.

• Is Saas right for your practice?
• Are Saas and recession killing perpetual software licenses ?
• L’usage des Saas va progresser en entreprise.
• Saas: Reste à convaincre les late adopters.