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Using the New Facebook Privacy Settings

Almost a month ago Facebook rolled out some new privacy setting features giving you greater control over who can see what on your Facebook account. It has taken me a while to get around to reviewing how to use these new settings and if you were like me, you may not have reviewed them yet.

First, you can access these settings once you login to your account by clicking privacy on the top links where you would access your profile settings. Mouse over the link called settings and a drop down box will appear with an option called “Privacy Settings”. You will have several options in each of the links that appear on the next screen. You will be offered setting updates for your profile, search, news feed and wall, and applications.

Work your way through each setting deciding whether you want videos and photos to show and to whom in your network. You can even select if photos you are tagged in will appear on just your wall or your friends’ walls. You can choose how much or how little to show in each category.

Additionally, the new settings allow you to control exactly what from your friends shows on your wall as well. For me, as I am friends with young people in my family but use Facebook for work and personal combined, I do not necessarily want business acquaintances to see what the young people in my network are doing and saying. Another really big thing that I have just started using, in addition to the privacy settings, is the Facebook grouping feature. I’ll talk about that Wednesday so make sure to check back.

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Using AdWords for E-Commerce Third Party Shopping Carts

I’ve just recently run into this situation and wanted to share some tips with you on how an e-commerce store can best use Google AdWords.

First, it is important that if you are using a third party shopping cart that you understand that you really must create shopping category pages on your own front end website under your domain name if you will be promoting your product categories using Google AdWords.

Here’s an example, let’s say your domain was www.ILoveShopping.com. Your main domain only had a few pages residing there, your about us page, contact us page, and your site home page. When someone clicked your “buy dog toys” category link in your website navigation they were sent to bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom/dog-toys-for-sale.aspx.

For AdWords you could not point to this category page in your ads as the destination URL if you wanted your display URL to be www.ILoveShopping.com. You would instead have to have your Display URL be bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom and the destination URL be bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom/dog-toys-for-sale.aspx –  right?

Well, at least this is supposed to be how it works, but just recently Google would not even allow an advertiser  use this format. It may be the max URL count for the destination URL is over the 1024 that are allowed or that the shopping server really does not exist and is a redirect page set at the store server level. And besides that who wants to be doing AdWords and have customers lose confidence when they see a weird display URL like: bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom instead of ILoveShopping.com?

So, without being able to link to the category page suddenly your quality score on dog toys slips to 7 or even 5 and you start paying a chunk of cash to promote this popular category for your store.

If this is your situation, before you start promoting your store on AdWords you really need to address this by creating a category page that is keyword dense and lists your products by name or categories and then from there links to the store. Not only will this help with your AdWords quality score, it sidesteps the Display/Destination URL problem mentioned above, increases conversions, and will even help your main front-end site place organically as now your parent domain has new keyword dense relevant content to what you are selling.

If you have tons of products and say nah, I am not going to do this, you may want to consider creating a landing page for the category you are promoting on your main website that then showcases only your top sellers and has a prominent link to the complete category page in the third part store. Whatever your plan, to send the customer for a specific category to your home page where there is no specific content on this category or products to buy is wrong and a fails miserably when it comes to building a great quality score and increasing conversion.

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How to Use IE Web Slices in Your Web Pages

IE 8 has a cool new feature that some websites can and should use, it is called a web slice. In essence this is a small section of your page that you update either manually or dynamically with a script shows content that a reader can subscribe to. With this snippet subscribers can see any new entries you add in their browser when you add them.

Here is an example on one of my own pages: http://www.mccordweb.com/web-design/web-design-templates.php. On the right of the content you will see a gray box that says MWS New Templates. If you mouse over this box and have IE 8, a green icon will show to the top left of the content. Additionally take a quick look in the browser bar and you will see a new green web slice icon has also been illuminated. If you mouse over the slice box in the content you can choose to subscribe to this snippet. IE will place a link to this snippet over the tabs section.

Once you have subscribed, anytime I change this section, add a new link, a new photo, etc. your browser link will show the new updated content. You can view the content on demand. If you even want to remove this code snippet. Just right click the item above the tabs and select delete.

I have to say I spent a few hours learning how to set up  and style the snippet to make it look good. Here is a great tutorial on how to make the code that I used at CODE Magazine. The code is pretty straight forward. What took time was to figure out how to style the snippet that showed in IE. I found the first div tag controls the font color, size, and back ground. If you do not style this first div tag IE will pick up your own website body tag background and coloring which in some cases can be a problem. Testing and tweaking to style it properly may take a bit of time using trial and error, but once you get it, you will be able to quickly add the same syntax to other pages or web slices.

How would a website use web slices? Well the possibilities are endless. Some sites may choose to show current coupon codes, showcase  new features, highlight new products, introduce specials or other timely information. You don’t need to programmatically insert information. I am not a programmer and once your shell is styled and set up to your liking you can embed this on any page and just change the content using regular HTML.

So take a look at my web slice page, subscribe, and see what you think.