Ralph van der Pauw

Customers want to get in touch with you brand, faster and on a more personal level – for whatever reason. Either it’s a bank’s customer service about your card, or a local restaurant to reserve a table for tonight. Often they still pick up the phone to get it done quickly, but what could be a suitable alternative?

Online Customer Service

Some company’s took live customer service to their website by offering live-chat functionality. It’s an effective way to quickly get in touch with customer service and my experiences have been fairly positive. Apart from one …

There are different kinds of holidays and trips. There’s the all-inclusive Bahamas holiday where you travel to a nice sunny place and get some peace and quiet in an all inclusive beach resort. These holidays can be perfect to relieve stress and get away from the hectic world we work and live in.

Then there is also the kind of holiday where you grab a backpack and travel to a faraway part of the world. About one year ago I took the plunge and booked a return ticket to Asia to start a solo backpacking adventure. Probably the best decision I had made in quite a while. It brought me …

We’re heading towards Christmas, which is (for most) people associated with joyful memories of snow, presents, family diners and eggnog. Unfortunately not for marketers, for us it’s all about the Q4 activities. Think of campaigns to reach End-of-Year targets, optimizations for Christmas shopping and finalizing the campaign plan for next year. While it’s a busy period I will try to offer some support in looking at digital marketing for 2014 as to what I expect will be the areas to focus …

At the Adobe Summit I attended an inspiring session by John Watton, who had wrapped his session on behavioral targeting around a story of Bob the local wine salesman. Bob is a retailer who is very acquainted with his customers, which enables him to offer them the best service. The story immediately spoke to me, because it is one of those local shops you just love to visit because you know you will end up leaving with great products recommended to you by someone who knows what you …

Analytics rock stars: Roll with the pros to rock your analysis:
The first breakout session at the EMEA Summit I attended was about tips and tricks for working with Adobe Analytics & Discover. Brent Dykes who led the session, started with breaking up the analytics profession into two different areas. There’s ‘Setup-land’ which focuses on translating business goals to analytics requirements, tagging the website and building reports. The other area he defined was ‘Action-land’, this is where you focus on the optimizing – which is usually the fun part, getting value from your insights.

So the session initially started with some really basic tips on using Sitecatalyst, …

Last week I wrote a dutch blogpost regarding the implementation of SEO in a project. I promised several English colleagues to make the content available in English on my own blog.

The decision has been made: a new website is being launched! The new website is either replacing an existing website or built from scratch for a new domain. Either way both projects share similarities during the process and have the same goal: Go Live. When the new website is finally operating bug-free, the serenity seems to be reinstated. Unfortunately not for long. As soon as the organization starts …

Not to long ago I wrote a short piece on the importance of a Google+ Marketing Strategy. We’ve seen Google trying to boost the use of their social network by using their Monopoly in search, forcing SEO’s to embrace Google+. Rich Snippets are another step in some-what forcing the social network upon search engine marketers. First off, Rich Snippets are definitely NOT new. Remember those yellow star-ratings behind search results? In this post I am addressing the authorship …

Yesterday I wrote about tracking error pages with Google Analytics _trackEvent. I suggested _trackEvent over _trackPageview for it has the ability to add different dimensions to the event and you wouldn’t want 404 pages to increase your pageview count. Tim (Leighton-Boyce) pointed out that a 404 is part of the visitor session, you should be able to track if people bounce on 404 or click through on suggested links or perhaps even use a search box. A very fair point and I stand corrected. I would definitely add the _trackPageview line to the GA tracking …