Mobile user experience has been evolving over the course of the past decade, with a greater percentage of online searches being performed on mobile devices every year. Addressing this trend, Google has made strong efforts to accommodate mobile audiences, tailoring its search results to favor sites that are suitably optimized for mobile use. For example, a responsive-designed website will always perform better in search results than its non-mobile optimized counterpart in mobile searches, and mobile-friendly sites are marked with an appropriate “Mobile-friendly” tag in search results, increasing their click-through rate from search engine results pages.

The ranking boost you get from having your site optimized for mobile has been significant, yet not overwhelming. Millions of sites have fared just fine despite not being optimized for a mobile user experience, and yours may very well be one of them. Unfortunately, this respite will not last much longer.

As announced by Google in a recent blog post, Google is currently working on a significant structural algorithm change that will increase its emphasis on mobile-usability as a ranking factor. Once rolled out, the algorithm change is expected to have a significant impact on search results; Zineb Ait Bahajji, a member of Google’s Webmaster Trends team, was quoted at SMX Munich as saying that the new mobile-friendly algorithm change will have more of an impact on search rankings than either Panda or Penguin, two of its most impactful search algorithm updates Google has ever rolled out.

For more information go to this source http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/03/31/is-your-website-optimized-for-mobile-you-have-until-april-21-to-get-it-done/

The famous Contact Form 7, one of the most used plugins to create contact forms, being download more than 15.5 millions time by the day this post was created.

However tracking conversions on Analytics has been an issue lately. Since Google have changed their GA code from the classic way to the Universal code, the script that we have set up on the Additional Settings is not longer valid; therefore the user once they hit submit to the form button the ajax confirmation is not displaying and the form it doesn’t clear.

So here is the code for both type of Analytics Code.

Setting up a Goal in Google Analytics

So let’s start by setting up the goal in our Google Analytics account. Login to GA and head over to the Admin panel of your select domain profile. Select Goals from within the View (Profile) menu:

Next click on ‘Create a Goal’ to begin setting up the new goal that you’d like to track for Contact Form 7. In Step 1 click on ‘custom’ rather than ‘template’ from the initial set-up option. Now within Step 2 simply choose a name for your goal like ‘Contact Page’ and choose ‘Destination’ from the ‘Type’ options:

Finally in step 3 choose ‘Equals to’ for the destination and set a ‘fake’ URL that we can use to track the goal. I’ll explain later on why this Goal Destination is ‘fake’ but for now, simply pick a URL that doesn’t exist (and would therefore 404) that you can assign to the goal.

Complete the goal as necessary to finish the set-up of your new goal. Remember your ‘fake’ Destination URL as we’re going to ‘ping’ this imaginary path in the Contact Form 7 plugin next.

Pinging the GA Goal from Contact Form 7

As I mentioned earlier, CF7 forms work as AJAX applications – which means the data is submitted and processed within an AJAX event. When users successfully complete a CF7 form, they’re not taken to a new ‘thank you page’ URL by default, which can make tracking the event tricky.

However, both the Classic and the new Universal Google Analytics provide functions that allow you to trigger or ‘ping’ page-views whether you’re actually on that specific page or not. To take advantage of these functions, Contact Form 7 includes a really useful JavaScript Action Hook called ‘on_sent_ok’ that can trigger custom JavaScript events when the form has sent successfully. Depending on whether you’re using Classic (ga.js) or the new Universal (analytics.js) Google Analytics code, you’ll need either one of the following lines of code:

Universal Analytics Code

on_sent_ok: "ga('send', 'pageview', '/your/url');"

Classic Analytics Code

on_sent_ok: "_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/your/url']);"

Remember that Goal URL that we created earlier in Google Analytics? Swap /your/url in the code above for the path that you set up. If you now navigate to your individual Contact Form 7 form settings, scroll down to the bottom to to the ‘Additional Settings’ field:

 

Paste in the line of code like in the example above. Now, once our form is successfully completed, the on_sent_ok Action Hook will trigger our ga() or _gaq.push() functions that will ping our goal within Google Analytics.

That’s it!

Today the internet is a huge thing and it can be used to display information in many different and effective ways. Surprisingly, a lot of small businesses do not take advantage of the internet in order to promote their business. A lot of the time it’s because business owners don’t know what the web can offer them and the effectiveness it can have on their business today.

Are you still doubting promoting online? Here’s some examples on how you could benefit!

Sell your products online

A great importance in today’s economy! A website can allow you to sell your products online which is quite efficient and can also be less stressful to control. So instead of receiving phone call orders from customers, they can simply visit your website any time of the day to purchase products from you. There is no opening time and closing time on an online website!

Save time by having a FAQ page

Do customers contact you regularly by phone asking you questions? With a website you can set up a frequently answered questions (FAQ) page allowing people browsing your business website to read. You could also setup contact pages for customers to contact you rather than using the phone. Once a contact page has been filled in and submitted you will receive the query via your business email address.

Create A Blog Page

Every business website should have some kind of blog. This will keep customers up to date with the latest happenings of the business. Sometimes customers like to read company blogs as it keeps them educated and gives them the urge to check the website more often.

Offer Newsletter Subscriptions

Instead of having customers visit your store (if you have one!) regularly for product or business news updates, you could create a monthly newsletter for the business, keeping customers up to date with new product updates. Customers who visit the business website will have the ability to subscribe via email for these monthly newsletters.

Customers voices are important!

With an online website you also have the ability of setting up a feedback page which could help you improve your business by receiving customer feedback and thoughts. Remember that your customers voice matters!

Social Network Promotion

Once you have a business website setup you can promote it through Facebook and Twitter. They are two of the most effective tools of online promotion and it’s all free to use! Both of these networking sites allow people to keep updated with business news. It’s also a very good way of getting your name around. Customers can also promote your business through Facebook and Twitter.