Our trusty Arca Swiss B1 ball head gave up the ghost recently after over a decade of service (see Figure 1). But as we soon discovered, all is not lost. Rather than buy the new Arca Swiss Z1 head which uses a different panning clamp, we had the good folks at Precision Camera Works completely rebuild the B1. For a fraction of the Z1 price, you can rebuild your B1 and make it much lighter.
Website Optimization
PPC Optimization: Average Income Targeting
Last time we continued adding Call Only Pay Per Click campaigns to see how call only PPC ads improve conversion rates and cost per call. By adding more call only campaigns to a PPC account, we improved the overall conversion rate by more than 10 times over conventional PPC advertising.
Call Only PPC Optimization II
Last time we tested a Call Only Pay Per Click campaign against a conventional “dentist” campaign to see how call only PPC ads improve conversion rates and cost per call. By adding a single call only campaign to a PPC account, the number of calls nearly doubled, and the cost per call dropped by a factor of 3.7.
Due to the success of the call only campaign, with the client’s permission, we expanded the number of call only campaigns and dialed down or paused the conventional PPC ads. In this article we’ll look at the effects of expanding and optimizing call only PPC campaigns on cost and conversion rates.
Optimizing the Boot Time of a Lenovo T430S Laptop: Part II – Expanding RAM
Last time we looked at speeding up the boot time of a Thinkpad T430S laptop. This time we test the effects of adding more RAM and a disk cache on laptop speed.
Optimizing the Boot Time of a Lenovo T430S Laptop
When working the Web, you need a fast computer. Responsive computers boot faster, load web pages faster, and generally run everything faster. In part one of this series we’ll show how to optimize the boot time in a Lenovo laptop using a solid state drive (see Figure 1).
Case Study: Call Only PPC Ad Optimization
Last time we explored Pay Per Click optimization techniques including dayparting, bid optimization, and location targeting. For this article we’ll look at the effects of “call only” PPC campaigns on the cost per call.
Case Study: PPC Optimization
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a good complement to natural promotion of websites to deliver leads on demand. PPC can be costly, however, compared to natural promotion (see this Case Study for details). This article shows how to squeeze more out of your PPC spend to boost leads and reduce costs.
Case Study: Phone Call Tracking a Dental Website
The ultimate product of online marketing efforts are leads. Traffic and rankings are nice, but calls and emails are what drive more customers from websites. This article shows how call tracking can help optimize your marketing budget to maximize leads and minimize overall cost.
Optimizing a Complex Site for Pagespeed II
In Part I of this series on optimizing websites for Pagespeed we optimized a complex site using mod_pagespeed, some manual tweaks and WPOptimize Speed by xTraffic. We boosted the mobile Pagespeed score from 58/100 to 86/100, and the desktop score from 75/100 to 93/100. In Part II of this series we’ll explore how to speed optimize the server response of a WordPress site with caching plug-ins.
Optimizing a Complex Site for Pagespeed
With Google and other search engines factoring speed into desktop and mobile search rankings, speed is essential in website design. Google reports on speed metrics in Google Analytics and probably uses some combination of its Speed Index and Pagespeed Insights score. This article shows how we used mod_pagespeed, a speed plug-in, and some manual optimization to improve the Pagespeed score of a complex website.