We are pleased to announce, with great pride, that Escape has become a Google AdWords Certified Partner. This achievement will  definitely provide more benefits to our new and existing clients as our service is once more highly recognized and certified by Google.

What does this mean for Your business?

• You will be in caring hands of certified experts
• Our previous service record (needed to achieve the certification status) ensures that we have ample experience in the internet marketing field thus we can provide You with great support
• Sales and traffic will increase
• You will want more! 

For more information about the service, internet marketing, please follow this link or directly request-a-quote.

• How to capitalize our SMM efforts?
• How to know in what social medial to invest more?

Actually, engineers think of economy as of a non-exact science. Many Nobel prize winning economists tried to explain economy and market behavior with exact formulas and mathematical laws. But as long as the market has a big influence on economy, there will be a stochastic value that can significantly distort all the mathematical formulas. Therefore you must be creative and smart to measure the behavior of your market niche.

So, what to do to capitalize SMM efforts and how to measure the results?

Actually it’s very easy: just look where the money is. You can combine programming knowledge, statistical tools (API) with some web-site coding. If you are new in SMM and don’t know how to do that, just don’t’ bother with high end statistical differentiation and try to normalize data. Use a simple, but still very efficient method, recommended for newcomers in SMM. Calculate the value per user of your activities or normalize your data.

What does this mean?

Simply divide your monthly # of leads (or income) with your monthly # of new members,  # of comments, # of likes or other feed back. If you do this separately for different social media efforts, after a while you will see witch normalization has the best overlapping with your goal values (Leads, income, market share or something else). Normalize your goals with your results introducing a value called Social media marketing efficiency factor or SEF.

For example:

(SEF 1) YouTube = Number of leads / Number of views
(SEF 2) YouTube = Number of leads / Number of comments

Or:

(SEF 1) Facebook = Number of leads / Number of friends or fans
(SEF 2) Facebook = Number of leads / Number of new members
(SEF 3) Facebook = Number of leads / Number of likes
(SEF 4) Facebook = Number of leads / Number of comments
(SEF 5) Facebook = Number of leads / $ per Facebook campaign

After a while you will see witch normalization factor  of SEF has the best efficiency for your results and therefore you will focus on these activities. If your leads rise 4 times because you had 2 times more new fans last month, you try to focus on recruiting new fans. If next month your number of new fans rise 7 times, and the number of leads 14 times, you’ll know that the number of new members increase the number of your leads by a rank of 2 times. Also you will know witch SEF is not so efficient you thought at first. So you will test different SEF’s. As simple as that.

The recipe is:

Make an assumption, normalize (measure) it with the use of Social media marketing efficiency factors – SEF’s and test your assumptions. Put more efforts in better SEF’s- That’s it.

Won 2 major awards – 2010 Web business Golden award for 2 entries:

bicikli.hr – won the Golden award for the best online business solution – The concept of creating an online store which sole purpose is not only to sell, this might look a bit off, but that exact concept made this case so original. Our old client had three very serious problems which we helped him solve:

• market control (pricing): local distributors had a very high price margin on the products which would render products very hard to sell thus selling other brands more. Launching an online store where a potential customer would see the “real” price made the local distributors rethink their price margin, they all lowered the prices significantly,   and enabled bicikli.hr to improve the market price control – result = happy customers!
• initially brand bikes at bicikli.hr had a very bad reputation of being overpriced resulting in very poor wholesale results. Logic suggested we needed to repair pricing image using two methods: launch the website disclosing  all retail prices followed by an e-mail campaign to all wholesale business units in the region building new price awareness – classic and improved B2B strategy (we added some rebate options of course to lure more sales in the loop) – results – it did not take long to feel the first positive results and so now in the later business stage we are talking about a significant sales growth (above what our client expected!)
• the web shop has excellent google.hr organic search results – 1st place on google for over 3 years in a row (keyword ‘bicikli’ – translated ‘bikes’), that means we know SEO, thus achieving a great market impact and repairing the high priced image.  So the web shop that was not intended just to sell secured our client significant profit, a great sales channel (10% income comes from online purchase) and yeah numbers keep growing!

Miroslav Varga, our internet marketing  guru won the prize for his innovative approach in creating an Internet marketing campaign – Vanity campaign (using GoogleAdwords). Inspired with a great idea from a fellow marketeer, Alec Brownstein, Miroslav created a campaign for all major Croatian CEO’s and marketing department heads names suggesting a meeting for further business options (activities related to internet). ROI was incredible if you consider the fact Miroslav invested only5€ in total.

• There was another great result from this campaign as we now have the unique overview of Croatia’s ‘top management’ popularity
• Recognizing the success of this campaign we plan to launch a birthday ad service  – we will not disclose any more details but plan to visit us again for more info!

What’s next?

We have a lot more great projects coming up so stay tuned and enjoy the ride.

If you want to  start or upgrade your project please feel free to contact us via our contact form or directly request a quote.

…
Izvorno.hr

www.izvorno.hr

Based on its sound business concept and great product assortment Izvorno.hr is one of the reviewed shops we liked the most. With its appealing design and attractive products including spice, tea, cheese, oil, wine and organic cosmetics line it is sure that the shop is a success.
…

Interested in more of our e-commerce work? – Visit our work section now or request a quote.

Zorin Radovančević, our project manager and lead creative had a short lecture on Web site development – why, when and how? This presentation was intro in the panel discussion What kind of web site do you (not) need? Panel was lead by Miroslav Varga, our internet marketing guy with participation of couple of other web gurus:

Jelena Jovanović, Etarget
Tomislav Šantek, Internet Softver
Krešimir Drvar, POSLUH
Božidar Komarić, Racunalo.com
Dražen Keresteny, Komponenta

At the end of the day, Damir Podhorski had a presentation about e-mail marketing, What’s e-mail marketing and what’s SPAM?

The whole event was organized by our business partner MarketingOdjel d.o.o..

Here’s some pics (sorry for the quality, pics taken with mobile phone):

What are you missing?

The Answer is pretty simple and straightforward. You need to start selling online. You need to show off your product worldwide and get a lot more  customers outside your neighborhood. But with your crowded schedule in your local shop you just cannot find time to think about your online business. What to do next?

Let us think about that.

We all already know that you need an online store. But, what it really means to start up an online store? Here’s couple of things that you have to think about before you start selling online:

• domain registration
• hosting
• design
• frontend and backend development
• content
• product categories pages
• product landing pages
• checkout process
• payment gateway
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• online advertising (Search Engine Marketing)
• public relations (Social Media Marketing)
• customers database management (newsletter)
• coupons
• special offers
• success measurement software
• conversion rate
• checkout process funnel
• keywords

Yes, this is just “a couple” of things that you have to have on your mind when going online with your business. But we can do more for your business, that is just not listed here because we don’t want you to get scared and run away.

So please feel free to to request our services, and please take a look at some of our successful online stores:
www.newurban.co.uk
www.bicikli.hr
www.konikom.hr
www.izvorno.hr
www.ekran-avc.hr

We use two different ways. Either we combine our programming knowledge and statistical tools API with some web-site code. But this is hard for beginners.

The second way is to use a simple, but still very efficient method. We would recommend this for newcomers in SMM.  Just create a new e-mail address and buy or rent a new prepaid mobile phone number that never existed before on any company memo. You can even use different e-mails and phone numbers for different Social media. The number of incoming phone calls and e-mails are the best and most accurate feedback that you can generate with no special  knowledge or training. And it is very accurate.

Why should you use it? Because it is simplest, easiest, and fastest web font solution for implementation in you web design.

How does it work?

Just follow these two steps:

1. First you need to hotlink the css from Google as the first element in the of your HTML document like this:

2. Regarding the HTML tag in your page that you want to affect you need to add/change the css rules for that element. In your css file add/change :

h1 { font-family: 'Droid Serif', arial, serif; }

And that’s it.

If you open the included css file you will see that there are three @font-face rules which are remotely downloaded fonts from Google servers.

light mode works best for single lines

Now, if this is @font-face rule it means that we could download fonts from Google servers and use it on our server. We don’t need Google Font API for this. But if we use it we do have some benefits.

Chris Coyier points out three main benefits in his article on the Google Font API:

• “Bandwidth savings (weight is on Google), Caching speed (same font used on multiple sites, browser cache kicks in), and Speed in general (Google’s CDN is faster than your site).”

These are some good benefits indeed.

You can find a great preview site including sample codes at Google Font Preview.

So go on try it out and enjoy.

Our work:

We designed and developed a web site for this beautiful family hotel which offers a wide range of services for its clients. Web site promotes basic hotel services as accommodation and some “all in one” services as RentACar or RentABoat. For each services there is a quick registration form as well as reservation form for accommodation.

We also had some custom programming for transfers reservation form, which needs to calculate different prices for different transfer locations.

Joomla was chosen as the CMS solution and some nice CSS features were implemented as well.

These people are one of our oldest and dearest clients that we plan to visit in the near future (not just because they are on the seaside ).

Web site: www.vila-sikaa-r.com

Visitor comments:

“After I visited the site I would like to spend summer vacation in luxury villa like this one. The colors of the web page are relaxing and mild, as they, by my opinion should be” – mikibm

Is this change for better or worse?

Personally, I have mixed feelings about the new interface. There are some new perks and some of the old ones are missing. But, lets start with what’s  new.

Website search box – website search box is to the right of word search box. This is a more simple and quicker solution than in old interface where you had to click on “website content” and only then enter URL of some website.

View search trends in Google insights – this is a great thing to include in the keyword tool! Next to each keyword entry you have a link to “Google insights”. I find this very helpful , because I can see if a keyword has “positive” growth or not. This kind of information can be very helpful for internet marketers.

Categories – to the left of the interface there are categories that Google has included for displayed  keywords. If you are not interested in some categories you can simply uncheck these categories. Below categories you have “Sort:Alphabetical or Highest count“.

Sort:Alphabetical or Highest count – when Keyword tool gives you results on your query, on the left side of the interface you can arrange keywords alphabetically  or by highest count. This can be very useful, but this option only appears when you are searching for “all keyword results” and not for “ideas containing my search terms“.

Ideas containing my search terms – this is the reason why most people do not like the new interface because they didn’t click on it.
Let me explain: in the “old” interface when you enter some keyword (boat) in the search box, the keyword tool will give you results that only contain your search term or are very closely associated with that keyword (boat, boats, small boat…). But, below the first results we have “Additional keywords to be considered” with keywords that are associated with our search term (bayliner, sea doo, marine…). In the “new” interface, if you do not click on advanced options – show results for – Ideas containing my search terms , you will have all the keywords that are closely associated and all keywords that are only associated with the search term in one big (only 100 results?) table. This can sometimes be very confusing.

Only 100 results for searched term – now, this is definitely a bad thing. Google should increase the number of results for the required search term. Especially now, when you can show all match types at the same time.

Match types – you can show all match types at same time now and all keywords can be seen in the results table  at same time with different match types (broad, exact and phrase). This can be very helpful if you want to see, for example,  which match type of the same keyword has bigger estimated average cost per click and how big the difference is.

No negative keywords – you could select and include negative keywords in the old interface . Not anymore. Is this oversight on Google part accidental or is this made on purpose? If you think about it a bit  (and love conspiracy theories), if you didn’t include negative keywords in your campaign, your ads will be showing on more irrelevant queries and you will end up spending more money thus giving more to Google.

No downloading in .txt file – this is also bad thing. Prior to this update you could download all keywords in one simple .txt file. I found that very useful because I just loved to work in Notepad++ with .txt files.

Mobile search – In advanced options there is now an option to turn on “mobile search”. Is this something that is showing rising importance of marketing on mobile devices? Definitely.

In the end I must say that I liked the old interface more, but, by small margin. Yeah, everything is still present in the new interface (more or less) , but there is something, very important, missing. Simplicity. Plain simplicity. Now  I know that this is only my personal opinion that is based on a long previous experience using the old interface but I can’t help wondering if the old interface was much more simple and quick.

Of course, you can always change to previous interface by simply clicking a link which is placed at the top right of the page. But, keep in mind that sooner or later Google will phase out the old external keyword tool.

What remains to be seen is if Google is going to change the new interface further according to user comments and experience or not.