Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Reducing Bounce Rate - Soft vs Hard Bounces


In the last few days I found a lot of interesting articles about how to reduce the bounce rate. I found very helpfull the below articles:
http://www.inc.com/guides/2011/01/how-to-reduce-your-website-bounce-rate.html
http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/07/7-ways-to-lower-your-home-page-bounce-rate.htm

But there is one more thing missing there. I was reviewwing analytics of a site that has brave ammounts of incoming traffic and found out that some pages are both "Top Landing Pages" and "Top Exit Pages" at the same time. Also another thing that I found interesting is that those pages contained articles about specific topics that were covering the keywords on search engines. This for me creates iself a statement. The visitor came in. Read a nice written article that covered a part of the information the visitor wanted to see. And left site without doing any other action. So is this a Bounce? What if the visitor spent a good amount of time reading? The hard definition of Bounce Rate says this is still a bounce. But for me in order to make some bussiness statements, if the page provided good information or not, it is not a bounce.

Friday, September 30, 2011

Best way to track email campaigns

A lot of people are being concerned the latest years about their personal data and how all those information are being out there in the internet. The truth is that the majority of internet users are exposing themselves in a way they thing they control. But is this true? I doubt, but this ia a big big discussion and I am sure I can find statements in both lanes.
So let's move on the campaign tracking! It is so easy and your big ally is going to be an email campaign tool like Mailchimp (or any other email-campaign tool) and of course Google Analytics. The latest API of GA gives you the ability to track the basics about your campaign(campaign name,medium and source) but also gives you the ability to store up to 5 User Defined Variables. The power of user defined variables is insane! Imagine a scenario where you can send email to your list and afterwards track all the visitors activity and see who visited what and what information he liked most and so many other statistics. The big deal here is that you should not use sensitive information inside your google analytics like names phones or emails.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

As months go by, some truths are becoming lies!

It was April 2010 when Steve Jobs announced his thoughts about flash: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

In one of his last paragraphs he says:
"Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short."

Almost 1 year later Samsung announces at MWC 2011 its new powerful device.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Have you ever tried OSMF to create your videoplayer?



Intro
As I remember myself from the first steps of my career I am developing every year a new video player. The reason behind this loop is the different challenges every year. I am always trying to create a reusable videoplayer that can come through every expectation that you or your employer-client may have.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Hello Blog!

On my first post I would like to introduce myself. My name is Sotiris Boukouvalas and the last 2 years I work as Senior Interactive Developer on customedialabs. customedialabs is a US company with its main headquarters in Philadelphia (Wayne PA). Also has offices in Athens and Larisa in Greece.