We attended the Google Partners Masterclass yesterday at the Pullman Hotel. The Masterclass is a bi-annual event and the presentations cover a wide range of topics. In yesterday's Masterclass, the topics covered Google Adwords, Analytics and Mobile friendly design. I'll tell you briefly about the more important features.
The presentations given by David Booth (from Cardinal Path) were exceptionally good. David spoke about the latest features in Google Analytics and Adwords and one of the more exciting features is the Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting in Analytics.
Google Analytics has always been a poor player when it came to reporting in-depth on a site's online sales but with the addition of the Enhanced Ecommerce tool it has allowed site owners to track things like abandoned carts and best selling products easily.
Also mentioned was a change in Adwords which now allows close variant matching on all exact and phrase keywords. This may seem like a small change but it can lead to a poorer CPC and Quality Score if the variants include words which you don't want your ad to show on.
David also spoke about responsive design and how a responsive design doesn't always equate to a good mobile experience. The design may adapt to fit the size of a user's device but it may still be an extremely unusable site.
What was interesting was that a survery found users will rate a responsive site with poor usability as being worse than a site which has no responsive design at all.
The moral of this story is: don't frustrate your customers with poor usabiliy and a poor user experience, especially if you are selling online, they will go to your competitor in a heartbeat.
There were many more ideas and discussions on best practices and the marketing team are keen to try them all out. Let's hope they remember everything David talked about ;)
Pictured below: Victor enjoys an almond and mocha cake while Dave enjoys a deliciously crisp glass of water.
