LeapGo Website Development Blog

With e-commerce growing at an incredible rate and becoming increasingly vital to modern-day businesses, hosted shopping cart solutions play a major role for online vendors and their customers. The two largest and most popular e-commerce platforms, BigCommerce and Volusion, offer a wide range of features as well as highly-rated customer support, and are well matched in many areas. But which one is right for your business?

If your company is looking for ways to expand its business and reach new customers, social media marketing is the way to go. However, there is no way of knowing how your social media strategy is working unless you have some way to measure the return on your investment. How does a company know if its social media strategy is working out well? Here are some factors to consider when determining the effectiveness of your strategies.

Welcome to the first official issue of LeapGo POV (Point of View).  Please leave your comments and questions below!

With businesses devoting an increasing percentage of their marketing budget to the Internet, there are some important trends to look out for in 2012. The most important items for the this year are:

In recent times, brands have become more reliant on social media networks for marketing promotional campaigns to potential, and current, customers. Known for engaging audiences and connecting people all around the world, these networks are the marketing wave of the future. Facebook, the current powerhouse, is leading the way with innovative changes to the nature of marketing platforms. They are not alone in this venture. Recently, top search engine, Google, has released their social media network, Google+. Despite having merely a small portion of the users to that of Facebook, it is growing rapidly and should not to be underestimated. When choosing social networks for your brand, consider the following:

Facebook

Every marketer knows that Google dominates most pay per click marketing campaigns. This is probably because approximately 64 percent of all searches occur on Google. It only makes sense to advertise on such a giant platform. However, what about the other search engines like Yahoo and Bing?

Though you may spend time each day maintaining your website, you are likely to miss things that might be turning visitors away. There are some simple things you can do to keep visitors coming back; there may be no need for a complete redesign of your site.

If you perform an online search for "social media tools," you're sure to be overwhelmed by the dizzying array of results that you'll get. That's the problem: The Internet is overrun with these kinds of tools. Luckily, we've done the legwork for you. Instead of enduring all of the trial and error for yourself, you should check out the following list. In it, you'll find 25 shining examples of today's best social media tools.

Google Analytics recently made some changes that many website owners are really going to enjoy. If you have not logged into your Google Analytics account recently, you will want to do so right away so that you can start using these new features to improve your website.

Customizable Dashboards

Google Analytics’ dashboards feature received a major facelift with the recent update. Now, users can create up to twenty unique dashboards that make the most sense for their site or business. The addition of new widgets that take a snapshot of visits, goal completions, source/medium, and bounce rate make it easy to customize your dashboard to your website’s specific needs.

Real-Time Data

Previously, Google Analytics’ data was delayed up to twenty four hours which forced users to delay their analysis of their website. Now, with real-time data, users are able to see what people are doing on their website, where they are coming from, and referral sources, providing the site owner with actionable data in real-time.

EdgeRank is a scoring system that determines which of your status updates will appear in a user's news feed on Facebook.  Scoring high has a lot to with the effectiveness of your marketing efforts if you participate in social media marketing on the largest social network in the world.  With over 800 million Facebook users worldwide, it only makes sense to take advantage of the marketing outlet and to master the scoring system to ensure that it works to your greatest advantage. 

There were a lot of changes to marketing trends in the year of 2011 for internet marketers. Here at LeapGo we tried a lot of new marketing concepts. Some thrived and some became known as just a fad that were time consuming and unproductive. As always, we hold on to the best and share them with our clients to contribute to your success.