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I'm excited about delivering you Update #10 this Friday!
I take these as an opportunity to look back and make some conclusions.
I also did a small evaluation of my Google AdWords campaigns and present you some insights.
There's also another tip of the week: you will learn how to set up automatic "do not disturb" rules on Android.
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Retrospection "Off to the weekend"
I had different motivations to start this newsletter in March.
For one, I want to motivate myself to write regularly and get better at it. I'm convinced that writing is an essential skill for developers and designers alike. These short texts in this newsletter are the perfect learning playground to summarize my experiences and thoughts.
Second, it's my goal to build and manage an open and transparent company and letting others take part on the journey, although it's hard to overcome the converse Swiss mentality sometimes.
Third, it's also a possibility to give interested people a better understanding of my services and way of working, smoothing the way to a potential project together.
Fourth, I simply wanted to work with MailChimp (the newsletter tool) for a long time and learn how to build up an audience.
I'm satisfied how it worked out so far.
I did manage to send a newsletter in English and German every week (except for Good Friday).
It started with four subscribers for the German and two subscribers for the English version of "Off to the weekend". Right now, I have eight subscribers (doubled!) for the German and three subscribers for the English version. The opening rate is between 60 - 100%, but it's nothing special considering the small amount of subscribers.
Of course there is still a lot of potential and I will try to get more subscribers.
If you like these weekly updates, please refer my newsletter to your interested friends. I would really appreciate that!
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Evaluation Google AdWords
In Update #5, one month ago, I wrote about how I set up Google AdWords campaigns for my services.
This week I took the time to make a small evaluation to inform my next steps.
The plan for Google AdWords campaigns is this:
- Set up specific ads for the services or products
- Monitor these ads regularly (every 1-2 weeks) and adjust the wording, keywords and bids
- Get as many visitors to the website as possible
- Define goals, which the visitors should fulfill (get in contact, download or purchase something) and track these (e.g. with Google Analytics)
- Optimize your website according to the insights from the ads and goals so that as many visitors as possible become clients
I analyzed the numbers from April and May 2017 and even though it's not end of May yet, the amount of visitors are already higher:
April
- Sessions: 98, visitors: 77, percentage of new visitors: 70.41%
May
- Sessions: 161, visitors: 128, percentage of new visitors: 74.53%
These two diagrams illustrate that the amount of paid traffic more than tripled:
 
It seems as if points 1 - 3 are already working, now I have to concentrate on points 4 and 5, because the quality of traffic is now lower:
April
- Number of sites visited: 374, bounce rate: 46.94%, average time on website: 02:54
May
- Number of sites visited: 331, bounce rate: 65.84%, average time on website: 00:53
The numbers tell me, that there are more visitors but that they visit less sites or even leave the website immediately.
For me this means that I need to better match the content of the website with the wording in the ads as well as thinking of a better user flow on the website itself.
I will look into that next month and write about it in the weekly updates.
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Tip of the week
I use an iPhone since years but I decided to get an Android device (Nexus 5X) as my business phone.
After a short time of readjustment I like working with it. There are even some features that I miss on my iPhone. I'm going to explain one of them here: automatic rules for "Do not disturb".
With this feature it is possible to define exactly at which time you want to be notified about calls, events or app notifications and when you do not want to be disturbed.
You can set these up (on Android 7.1) by going to Settings > Sound > Do not disturb > Automatic rules.
There you can add a new time or event rule, one that I've set up is this:
If you own an Android device yourself, I highly encourage you to set up such rules and enjoy less distractions from your smartphone.
I don't know about such a feature on iOS, but if automatic "do not disturb" rules are possible or there is a good app you know, please let me know about it.
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Thanks for reading.
And now off to the weekend!
Beni
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