So what exactly can you expect from Groupon? One of our clients was recently featured on the deal-of-the-day site, here’s what we observed:

• Nearly 10,000 visitors were sent to the site as a direct result of the promotion

• More than half the visits to the site happened before 11am

• 15% of the visitors to the site were using a mobile device

• At the peak, 2-3 pages were being served per second

• Groupon users tended to view nearly twice as many pages per visit than typical users

• Excluding the home page, 70% of the page views were to view product information

• The next most frequently visited pages were FAQs and contact information

• 80% of visitors arrived via the first link in the email

If you’re considering offering a promotion through Groupon it’s critical to ensure your site is prepared in order to make the most of the opportunity. Groupon’s morning email will catch people’s attention and send them to your website, but it’s your site’s job to close the deal and convince them to buy.

So what should you do to prepare your site?

1. Make sure your site is up to dealing with all the extra traffic. While most sites won’t have any issues here, it’s not unheard of for a site to be knocked offline. Use a service such as Load Impact to test your website ahead of time and make sure it can handle the load. Their free testing level is more than adequate to ensure your site will survive the onslaught.

 

2. Ensure your site is optimized for – or at least usable on – mobile browsers. Users will be visiting your site from their phones early in the morning. Their mobile experience is going to be influencing their first impressions of your business. If your site loads quickly and they’re able to easily find what they’re looking for, they’ll be much more likely to buy.

 

3. Make sure you have detailed product information on your website. Even if you don’t normally have this information on your site, add a temporary page with detailed product information for Groupon users. You may also want to consider adding a FAQ page specifically for Groupon visitors to help minimize the number of phone calls you have to field.

 

4. You’ll be given an opportunity to review and approve the email Groupon will send on your behalf. When doing this don’t just focus on the copy, make sure the links are all going to the most appropriate pages. In particular, make sure the the first link goes to your home page or to another appropriate landing page.

Website aside, here are a couple more general tips for making your Groupon promotion a success:

1. Try to structure your deal to turn a profit on its own, don’t treat it as a loss leader which will hopefully pay off in the future. Offering $60 for $30? You’ll keep $15 after Groupon’s cut. Consider your gross margins and make your offer as appealing as possible while ensuring it generates a profit on the average sale.

 

2. Be sure your staff is ready for an influx on the day the promotion is announced, they’ll be fielding dozens of phone calls from potential customers. If you have a retail presence, expect record numbers of window shoppers checking things out.

 

3. For most, Groupon will be an experiment. Being able to measure the results is a must. Know ahead of time how you’re going to track and report on sales to Groupon customers. At a minimum you’ll want to determine the average gross sale, and what percentage are first-time customers. That you do this is more important than how it’s done. If it comes down to it, have your staff write it down after each sale and compile the information later.

 

The main reason for offering a promotion with Groupon is invariably the massive exposure and potential to gain new, repeat customers. Still, when done properly there’s no reason a well designed promotion can’t turn a profit from the get-go.

Nick Oostveen is the President of Gravit-e Technologies, a Vancouver-based company which develops custom web applications and other large-scale websites. Gravit-e specializes in developing systems to help small, rapidly growing companies scale by automating inefficient and time consuming manual processes.

• Internal Linking – allows you to search for an old post of your own or browse a list of existing content and select it for inclusion in a new post.
• Admin Bar – appears at the top of your screen and contains various links to useful admin screens when a user is logged in and visiting the site. Admin bar can be hidden by going into your personal settings and unchecking “Show Admin Bar”
• Streamlined Writing Interface – new users of WordPress will find the write screen much less cluttered than before, because options that were rarely used or required are hidden by default.
• Post Formats – This is a new way of styling or changing the presentation of posts. Now you can have videos, links, images, audios, quotes, statuses, etc. all in one place, and the best part is that they will be styled accordingly
• Network Admin – move Super Admin menus and related pages out of the regular admin and into a new Network Admin screen.
• List-type Admin Screens – this allows for sortable columns for list-type screens and better pagination.
• Exporter/Importer Overhaul – new behind the scenes stuff like adding author information, better handling for taxonomies and terms, and proper support for navigation menus.
• Custom Content Type Improvements – allows developers to generate archive pages, and have better menu and capability controls.
• Advanced Queries - allows developers to query multiple taxonomies and custom fields.
• Refreshed Blue Admin Color Scheme – puts the focus more squarely on your content.
• Security Improvements - there are a few new improvements but most notably a streamlined and improved password recovery system and additional administrator types for installations with multiple blogs.

Tip: It is important to keep to keep your WordPress updated with new software because they are always improving on security functionality and vulnerabilities. If you need help creating or upgrading your WordPress site give us a call and we will be more than happy to help you out.

We were tasked with creating a cleaner, fresher and more professional site design, as well as integrating WordPress as a content management system. Our team reorganized the sitemap for more intuitive navigation and improved usability. Along the way, we also found opportunities to implement more obvious calls to action and to include social media channels: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The result is a more modern and relevant (not to mention attractive!) site that makes it easy for the users to find the information they need.

Below are ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots so you can see exactly what we did!

'Before' screenshot

'After' Screenshot

What do you think? Judging by the testimonial we got from the folks at Action-Ed, I’d say they were pretty happy with the results:

“The October 17 team is the best! Their professionalism; attention to detail; utilization of top standards and best practices; and their friendly personalities are second to none. I would highly recommend them to anyone.” ~ Regan Ross, Creator of the Civic Mirror, Action-Ed CEO

If you like what you see and are interested in finding out how we could do the same for your business, or you just want to chat, please give us a shout. We’d love to hear from you!

Now, with just a few lines of code, publishers, bloggers and businesses can easily include a button on their site that lets readers and visitors “Share on LinkedIn”.

Do you have a blog or space on your website that you think visitors might want to share with their connections on LinkedIN? You probably do! We’re about to add it to our own blog and wanted to share the news so you can be up to date on the latest in social media.

Need help installing it? Give us a bell. It’s a quick and easy job.

The new LinkedIN Share Button

Social bookmarking isn’t the same as sharing a link on Facebook or Twitter. It is more like adding the page to a virtual Favorites folder. The immediate advantage of social bookmarking is that you can access it from any system, even mobile devices. Therefore, the sites and pages that you need to go to at anytime will be at your fingertips.

Social networking can be an ideal search tool as well. If you find a user with similar interests, you are most likely to find a storehouse of information within that person’s bookmarks that will make your life easier. Most of us are used to Googling for information. However, unless you know the particular sites, you may end up wasting a lot of time sifting through the search results to find relevant information. When you search within a social bookmarking site like Delicious, you have access to the bookmarked websites that other people have found relevant. Therefore, someone has already done the sifting for you.

For instance, let’s say you are interested in mobile marketing and finding tips like how to SMS-to-Like a Facebook fan page; naturally, your social bookmarks will also include a number of relevant sites and pages on the subject. For another person looking for information on mobile marketing, your bookmarks then become a great resource of information.

Think of social bookmarking like a blogroll – someone accessing your social bookmarks can browse through content that reflects your interests. Even though it is not meant for networking, it is a great way to build knowledge sharing connections. You can share your links with short messages to make them more personal as well.

Moreover, social bookmarking does not require active networking. For instance, Delicious users do not interact with each other except accessing or sharing their bookmarked pages online and therefore, there isn’t any infringement of privacy. However, if you like to network and actively share, all these social bookmarking sites also allow you to Twitter, Facebook and Buzz your links as well.

For instance, perhaps you are a fan of The Big Bang Theory (moving to Thursday nights this fall)! You just found a site that tells you where to find all the geek-is-the-new-cool t-shirts that Sheldon wears on the show, but instead of simply bookmarking it, you can tag it and share it online. Tagging is basically adding one word or phrase to the link to clue in your readers as to what it’s all about. Tags also make it easier for people to find relevant links. So you tag the link as “Big Bang Theory, Sheldon, shirts” and then share it with a short message on Digg or Delicious. This way anyone else who is looking for Big Bang Theory related reviews will be immediately able to find it easily.

Social Bookmarking is also a great way to popularize blogs or fan pages. By digging or tweeting your own blog posts (or you can retweet for us by clicking the button on the top right corner of this post, *wink wink*), you can bring in more readers to your website. Adding social bookmarking buttons to your website is a great way to highlight this option and many websites encourage viewers to bookmark their pages online.

We found a great website that compiles a list of 75 Beautiful Free Social Bookmarking Icons here (props to snap2objects for their free sketchy social bookmark icons for our blog picture today)! Because sharing is sexy.

All this aside, social bookmarking is essentially a handy feature which makes life a little easier by allowing you to keep track of all those interesting websites and pages that you stumble across in your daily browsing.