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Drupal

Drupal similar to Joomla is also a open sourced Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP but is often used more for back-end systems with a focus on business collaboration and knowledge management platforms.  The standard build of Drupal contains many common CMS features such as the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts but offers a flexible but rich privilege/permissions system.  Other included features such as rss-feed, customised pay layouts, creation and menu management, and tied into an administration system.

Some of the options that web designer can assist with is in the creation of brochure websites, multi-user blogs, community forums and even user generated content within a community driven website.  If you need more extensive features, web developers can assist if you require new features or custom behaviour which Drupal allows in order to extend its CMS core capabilities.  The plugin modules are referred to as Contrib Modules and your developers may refer to web application framework as Drupal can be defined as a Content Management Framework because it offers sophisticated programming interfaces for developers.

Drupal can run on any hosting platform that is capable of running PHP version 3.4.5 and a database such as PostgreSQL or MySQL which stores content and site settings.

Drupal Webdesign Partners
The Lost Agency is not a webdesign or web development firm so we have partnered with a number of developers who we recommend and have found to be excellent at what they do. We have detailed some of the background about these web design partners below and if you have any questions please contact them direct via their website.

Next Digital LogoNext Digital is one of Asia/Pacific’s leading digital agencies with over 200 digital media and marketing specialists who work from offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai. Their team brings together the creativity, technical excellence and business sense needed to provide the digital horsepower behind many of Australia’s best known companies and brands including Crown, CSIRO, Wine Australia, Melbourne Cricket Groud, IP Australia, Ford, Qantas, Transurban, Office-Max, Bonds, Tourism Victoria, News Digital Media, Harvey Norman, Jetstar and Vivas Lend Lease. They are one of the leading Web Development & Web Design firms and to learn more about their you can view their digital case studies.

Joomla

Joomla is one of the leading open source content management system (CMS) platforms for publishing on intranets and the internet, based in php it stores all its data in MySQL.  Some of the included features of Joomla are inbuilt RSS feeds, page caching, automatic production of printable pages, inbuilt polls, news flash systems and language internationalisation support.

Joomla was formed by a split from the Mambo development team and can be installed on any web server that supports PHP applications.

Joomla Webdesign Partners
The Lost Agency is not a webdesign or web development firm so we have partnered with a number of developers who we recommend and have found to be excellent at what they do. We have detailed some of the background about these web design partners below and if you have any questions please contact them direct via their website.

Next Digital LogoNext Digital is one of Asia/Pacific’s leading digital agencies with over 200 digital media and marketing specialists who work from offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai. Their team brings together the creativity, technical excellence and business sense needed to provide the digital horsepower behind many of Australia’s best known companies and brands including Crown, CSIRO, Wine Australia, Melbourne Cricket Groud, IP Australia, Ford, Qantas, Transurban, Office-Max, Bonds, Tourism Victoria, News Digital Media, Harvey Norman, Jetstar and Vivas Lend Lease. They are one of the leading Web Development & Web Design firms and to learn more about their you can view their digital case studies.

Web Analytics

Web Analytics Services
The Lost Agency provide a number of web analytic services for companies, business and marketing agencies. We use the best analytics package that suits your business to assist visitor analysis and provide useful marketing information for clients. We have clients who will only use Google Analytics solutions and other firms that are more flexible and allow for multiple analytics solutions.
Setup Google Analytics
The Lost Agency has the experience to help you setup Google Analytics as our director has set it up on over 250 websites and can also assist with correctly linking the Analytic profile to your AdWords campaigns data. We can also ensure you are able to use Google Analytics to track goals, conversions, onsite search and events on your site. Since Google Analytics controls around 54% of the web analytics market it is one of the best solutions for business when looking at a hosted analytics solution.

Website Visitor Analysis

The Lost Agency can use your existing Google Analytic account and data with a set period of time analyse what is happening, possible issues with what is captured, what is not filtered out or where you might be able to improve your analytics for better future analysis. Often many web design firms don’t know how to understand the analytics data or how to make best use of what they have gathered to improve the user experience or your business revenue. It can be a common mistake for many web design firms setup an analytics account and forget about it and just put it in the too hard basket, but we can help make sense of the data for you if they can’t.
Web Analytics Analysis & Reporting
We can offer detail analysis of your current analytics packages and provide simple reporting or templates based on your business requirements. Is visitor location important for marketing, does accounts want to know value of transactions, does management want to know growth figures for particular categories or products or does IT need site errors flagged.  If you a current Omniture HBX user and not wanting to move to Omniture Site Catalyst, we can help you manage the transition to a more cost effective Google Analytics solution.
3rd Party Website Analytics Options
We can supply and support other options besides Google Analytics such as Omniture, webtrends, Clickable, Mint, Yahoo Analytics, Piwik, Unica or Woopra.  depending on your requirements and type of technology used to build your site. We will use the best analytics solution or multiple analytics solutions to help understand your website visitors. There is no reason why a website has to use just one web analytics solution,as most US companies are using 2-3 applications to get the best benefits/features of each.  To get an understanding of the limitations of many of these other analytics solutions we have used upto 8 web analytics tools on our previous website.
Advice on Web Analytics Services
If you have not used any analytics solutions before or want to know the best analytics solution for your site, we can help. The best solution can depend on if you have a a very large and dynamic website, complicated onsite search, or require more detailed user level activity within web documents or multiple pieces of content such as pdfs, video or flash to track.  Most web analytics solutions can do a majority of this but being able to understand a products limits and how to customise what is tracked/captured to make the data usable requires detailed understanding and accurate advice.
Analytics testing with Website Optimiser
We have used Google Analytics to setup testing and provide feedback on proposed website changes before web designers are engaged to rebuild landing pages or contact pages. We use can Multivariant or A/B Testing on your websites depending on the number of elements being tested and that the website receives a minimum number of website visitors to make the data accurate. Website Optimiser is a very powerful tool built into Google Analytics which allows our analyst to test changes to onsite text, colours, logos or images and how it affects user behaviour and even its impact on website goals/sales.
Implement Google Analytics
Some clients don’t require all the bells and whistles such as custom reporting, advanced segmentation, advanced filters, onsite search, goals or e-commerce tracking so we are able to assist with these quick and effective implementations of Google Analytics on a prepaid hourly rate.  Once we get access to the CMS/FTP of your website we are able to get most setups done within a few hours.

MSN Analytics

Microsoft used to provide their own web analytics a tool that is based on Deep Matrix technology that did provide a number of complex but useful options for tracking visitor behaviour which other packages didn’t offer. The benefit of using the Deep Matrix technology was that MSN Analytics was able to offer more advanced analysis information to analysts who used their software. Reluctantly MSN Analytics was closed down late in 2009 and their team advise clients to please switch to another solution such as Google Analytics.

Facebook Charity pages

Typically charities appear to have Facebook groups setup as they were the original option. There has since been a growth in Facebook Fanpages “like pages” and they offer a significant amount of added value. Mashable outlined some of the charities best using Facebook fan pages, based on their use of FBML, tabs, photos and user interaction.  Many of these methods can be duplicated and used on your charities fanpage to get increased donations and exposure to your causes.

  1. ASPCA - Best use of photos
  2. Humane Society - Best use of Facebook tools
  3. Susan G Kormen for the Cure - Best use of customised facebook apps
The problem is that as facebook is continuously tweaking its Pages product, and adding advancements the page needs to be maintained. A majority of the success from charity fanpages has be the support of a larger corporate sponsor or through a Facebook app. Target created a “Bullseye Gives” campaign where it offered to donate to 10 charities, the focus was primarily US based which limits the potential of these campaigns as Facebook is international.  A number of these charities and even corporate sponsors operate in multiple countries but the charity focus has remained on the USA at this stage which may change.
  • American Red Cross
  • Breast Cancer Research Foundation
  • Feeding America
  • HandsOn Network/Points of Light Institute
  • Kids In Need Foundation
  • Operation Gratitude
  • Parent Teacher Association
  • National Park Foundation
  • St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
  • The Salvation Army

Google AdWords Campaigns


Google search provides one of the largest advertising networks in the world is available for business to target through Google AdWords Campaigns.  The sponsored links appear as a small text ads above and alongisde your search queries on Google and across a number of Google partner search engines such as AOL and within sites using Google custom search engine. The Google network includes a number of search and content websites including blogs and other products.  The Google network is the world’s largest advertising network reaching over 86% of internet users worldwide.  The benefit of Google AdWords campaigns is that you can be certain that your ads will reach your target audience.

Search Network - The search network also includes local results with Google Maps, Google Product Search, Google Groups, Gmail and Amazon.com and some of the many Google Content network partners include:
  • About.com
  • Lycos
  • Business.com
  • FoodNetwork
  • Nytimes.com
  • InfoSpace
  • Reed Business
  • HGTV.com
  • HowStuffWorks
The biggest benefit of Google AdWords campaigns is that it can include a number of sites from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Content network placements are optional or used as an alternative to keyword targeting.  Your Google AdWords Campaign can target individual websites or flexible placements in the Google Content Network where ads will appear.  The benefits of a Google AdWords campaign is that it ensures your ads appear in the most relevant locations online so that your customers can find you.
Google AdWords with mobile - Google will be expanded its AdWords platform to include placement on AdMob one of the largest mobile advertising networks on iPhones, iPods and other hign end devices.  If selected we can expand your AdWords campaign from just computers to also include mobile devices you can target other full-browser mobile devices such as Nexus One, T-Mobile G1s, Symbian OS and similar mobile devices.  It is also possible to have a Google AdWords campaign just focused on mobile devices and utilise Google’s Click to Call for your marketing campaigns.
Maps Sponsored Listings - Google AdWords can be used to show for local or geographic queries along the bottom of Google Maps but can also be expanded to include logo’s to ensure your business stands out from the competition.  The below example is shown for a search for “new york hotels” and the Wyndham Hotel can be see easily amongst the hundreds of competitors with its distinctive blue and white logo.  These Google Maps sponsored links are a suitable way to capture the 20-40% of search queries that are local.
Google Product Results - Google Base is now known as Google Product Search and is powered by the Google Merchant Center so we can set it up so that can directly feed your inventory data into your AdWords campaign. There are two options our clients use to import their product data, the first is via a data feed which contains all your content into a XML or tab-delimited text file which you can send the feed direct via Google Merchant Center account or via FTP. We advise for larger clients or those with developers with technical experience, you can integrate your applications with Google Merchant Center using the Google Base API. The example below shows a search for jeans showing the relevant products accompanied by images within the search results.
Google Product Search Jeans
Google Content Network - Google AdWords Campaigns can also be run across the thousands of sites across the web that have Google Adsense or DoubleClick installed and have content contextually matched to your keywords.  The content network can typically reach a larger segment of the market that it might be ineffective or too expensive on a traditional search campaign.
AdWords on Google TV - Google AdWords Campaigns can already be run on Digital/Cable TV channels but as announced last week, it will be now possible to reach audiences via Sony Internet TVs, Logitech set-top boxes and via Dish Network subscribers with Google AdWords.
Google AdWords versus Link Building - We think that there is a complimentary relationship between Paid & Organic and research has shown there is a direct benefit in being shown both in the organic and paid results with increased clicks and even a lift in conversion rates.  We feel the benefit of a Google AdWords over SEO campaigns, is that we can maintain almost complete control over your marketing campaign, set maximum daily budgets, work to deliver a set number of clicks or impressions and even where and when your Ads will show.  The more advanced options for larger campaigns include being able to set dynamic cost per lead values or cost per sale values, depending on a number of factors defined by you the client.We always work to ensure that we exceed these targets but will advise if we feel the targets are unrealistic but will also work with your campaign to continuously optimise performance beyond the targets you set. It is not impossible to use the same measurement metrics for your SEO campaign but we advise clients that it can be more costly and time consuming to get a similar level of control over your SEO campaigns.  It is now very realistic to abandon and reallocate your expensive traditional offline advertising such as Magazines, Television and Yellowpages with Google AdWords or Microsoft AdCenter paid campaigns.  The biggest benefit is that unlike SEO we can typically get a campaign live within 48 hours of contacting our agency.
AdWords supports Search Campaigns - We know how much our competitors are paying to be listed alongside many of our search results for a number of terms we rank in the top results or atleast first page of the results, but we made the decision based on data gathered by our AdWords campaigns to refocus our budgets towards SEO.  Early in the marketing process of a new brand or product AdWords helps build and define your brand as well as providing data back about if the campaign will be cost effective long term and what is the estimated size of the market.
Google AdWords allows for much testing of keywords, ad messages that would not be cost effective or possible with a standard SEO campaign but the data can be feed back to ensure your Link Building activities are on track.
AdWords links with Google Analytics - The Lost Agency is a specialist agency when it comes to Google Analytics and we can assist you with integration of your Google Adwords account into your Google Analytics account.  The task can be complicated by external factors but we are able to offer this for our clients who run Google AdWords campaigns with our agency.  The real benefit of sharing data between Google Analytics & Google AdWords is the vast amount of extra data that is provided that is not possible within the standard Google AdWords reports such as the real ROI on your AdWords campaign.  It is the most transparent way that we can show you where you money is being spent and its direct impact on your website and online marketing results.
AdWords is Quick & Effective - Google Adwords campaigns are one the of quickest and most effective marketing mediums available to business, typically a campaign can be setup within 48 hours. The speed and customisation of campaigns possible is amazing, and any business who is not using Adwords to run their marketing campaigns, is missing out. We can guarantee that your competitors are currently using Google AdWords to steal leads from searches around your brands so why not ensure that you own both the paid and organic results for your brands.

Growing AdWords Platform - Like Microsoft AdCenter, Google Adwords has basic demographic targeting for a number of sites within their content network but they have recently rebuilt their platform to make it more enterprise ready with a number of advanced features.  Some of the new innovations include remarketing, search funnels, click to call and view through conversions.

Start Live within 48 Hours - We can work with your business to get an Adwords campaign running from as little as $500/month (including management).  The Lost Agency also consults with businesses who are currently spending between $500-$35,000/month. So if you need an extra boost to your business or just want to buy a that AdWords spot above your competitors AdWord contact us.
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