Why we bought native trees for Christmas

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It’s that time of year again.  Companies are buying boxes of chocolates, bottles of wine, and baskets full of biscuits, jams and condiments to say thank you and show their appreciation to their customers.

Do we want to say thank you to our customers for choosing us as their partner of digital services? Yes,  of course we do!  We’ve got a great bunch of customer who we enjoy working with, and we want to show them that we appreciate them being part of our business and continued success.

Do we want to send them boxes of chocolates, plastic promotional materials with our logo on it, and jars of pickled chutney that no-one ever eats? No, not really.  The chocolate wrappers go in to landfill, the promotional material gets chucked in the bin and the chutney sits in someone’s cupboard for the next year then also ends up in landfill.

We don’t want to send out meaningless gifts. We want to give a gift that has a positive impact.  We like to do things a little differently, and so this year that is what we did.

We have purchased a native New Zealand tree for each of our customers, to help combat climate change and restore our native forests.

You can check out our tree count here.

Imagine the impact on our native forests and on the worlds environment in general if we all did this at Christmas.

We’ve also made the decision that from January 2019 we will purchase a tree for every new website we develop.

We hope you have a great Christmas and a safe and happy New Year.

 

 

 

 

Selling online to the global market

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Many of our New Zealand based ecommerce customers sell their products to markets outside of our country. For most, the global markets offer far greater opportunities for growth than just our small country at the bottom of the globe.

While overseas marketings can seem enticing, you need to ensure you have all the right information about your market, your customer and the best way to promote your business in the digital space.

NZTE have an excellent resource to help you navigate some of these areas, and even have additional information on the largest online market places for each continent.

International e-commerce opens up a world of customers, and gives you the opportunity to connect directly to your target markets. But which online marketplace is the right one to reach your target customers? What do you need to consider before taking the plunge?

Take a look at details about online platforms, read our tips, resources and guides to find out more about where you can sell, how much you may need to invest and what you need to know about each platform before you dive in.

To check out these resources you can visit here. Or contact us at Digital Operative to help you with your global digital platforms and marketing initiatives.

Top Performing Ad Sizes

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We often get asked what size should customers dispel ads be. Below you will find the top performing ad sizes from Google.com

Top performing ad sizes

Ad size Description Text ads Display ads Mobile text and display ads*
300×250

View actual size		 Also known as a “medium rectangle”. Tends to have more ad inventory available from advertisers, which can increase earnings when both text and image ads are enabled.

Performs well when embedded within text content or at the end of articles.

 ✓ ✓ ✓
336×280

View actual size		 Also known as a “large rectangle”. Tends to have more ad inventory available from advertisers, which can increase earnings when both text and image ads are enabled.

Performs well when embedded within text content or at the end of articles.

 ✓ ✓
728×90

View actual size		 Also known as a “leaderboard”. Tends to have more ad inventory available from advertisers, which can increase earnings when both text and image ads are enabled.

Performs well if placed above main content, and on forum sites.

 ✓ ✓
300×600

View actual size		 Sometimes referred to as a “half page”. This format provides a larger space for advertisers to get their message across and can offer users rich engagement.

The 300×600 is one of the fastest growing sizes by impressions and is indicative of a trend where publishers are offering more visually impactful ad sizes that are preferred by brand advertisers.

 ✓ ✓
320×100

View actual size		 Also known as the “large mobile banner”. Can be used an an alternative to the 320×50 and the 300×250.

These ads offer advertisers twice the height of our standard “mobile leaderboard”.

 ✓

Changes Affecting Google Ads in New Zealand

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Are you aware of the upcoming changes to Google’s invoicing for New Zealand customers? If not, you’ll need to familiarise yourself with the information below.

Important changes to the Terms affecting Google Ads

Assignment
As of 1 November 2018, Google Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. is assigning your contract relating to your New Zealand Google Ads account, including any amendments and related agreements (such as Service Agreements), to Google New Zealand Limited, as a reseller. This means that from that date, Google New Zealand Limited will be bound by the terms of the contract and will be invoicing you for that service. All other non-New Zealand Google Ads accounts that you may have will continue to be serviced outside of New Zealand.
If you pay by invoice, shortly after the assignment date you will start receiving invoices from Google New Zealand Limited (rather than Google Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd.) with new payment details/remittance information. When this happens, please make sure that you send payments using the new remittance information.
GST
Google New Zealand Limited is required by law to charge 15% GST (Goods and Service Tax) on its services, so you will see this appear as a new line item on your invoices from1 November 2018.
Please contact your tax advisor if you have any questions regarding the tax consequences of this change.
Changes to the Google Ads Terms
On 1 November 2018, certain sections of the Google Ads Terms will be changed. A copy of the updated Google Ads Terms will be available for your review in your Terms of Service from 1 November 2018 onwards. Neither the assignment nor changes to the Google Ads Terms should cause any interruption to your service.
You can contact Google directly if you  have any questions.

Privacy Policies

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Many of our customers, when building a new website, often overlook the importance of a privacy policy.  Below is an example of privacy policy, this may help you to develop your own.

Digital Operative Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy describes how your personal information is collected, used, and shared when you visit or make a purchase from www.digitaloperative.co.nz (the “Site”).

PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT

When you visit the Site, we automatically collect certain information about your device, including information about your web browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are installed on your device. Additionally, as you browse the Site, we collect information about the individual web pages or products that you view, what websites or search terms referred you to the Site, and information about how you interact with the Site. We refer to this automatically-collected information as “Device Information.”

We collect Device Information using the following technologies:

– “Cookies” are data files that are placed on your device or computer and often include an anonymous unique identifier. For more information about cookies, and how to disable cookies, visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org.

– “Log files” track actions occurring on the Site, and collect data including your IP address, browser type, Internet service provider, referring/exit pages, and date/time stamps.
– “Web beacons,” “tags,” and “pixels” are electronic files used to record information about how you browse the Site.

[INSERT DESCRIPTIONS OF OTHER TYPES OF TRACKING TECHNOLOGIES USED]

Additionally, when you make a purchase or attempt to make a purchase through the Site, we collect certain information from you, including your name, billing address, shipping address, payment information (including credit card numbers [INSERT ANY OTHER PAYMENT TYPES ACCEPTED], email address, and phone number. We refer to this information as “Order Information.”

[INSERT ANY OTHER INFORMATION YOU COLLECT: OFFLINE DATA, PURCHASED MARKETING DATA/LISTS]

When we talk about “Personal Information” in this Privacy Policy, we are talking both about Device Information and Order Information.

HOW DO WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We use the Order Information that we collect generally to fulfill any orders placed through the Site (including processing your payment information, arranging for shipping, and providing you with invoices and/or order confirmations). Additionally, we use this Order Information to:
Communicate with you;
Screen our orders for potential risk or fraud; and
When in line with the preferences you have shared with us, provide you with information or advertising relating to our products or services.

[INSERT OTHER USES OF ORDER INFORMATION]

We use the Device Information that we collect to help us screen for potential risk and fraud (in particular, your IP address), and more generally to improve and optimize our Site (for example, by generating analytics about how our customers browse and interact with the Site, and to assess the success of our marketing and advertising campaigns).

[INSERT OTHER USES OF DEVICE INFORMATION, INCLUDING ADVERTISING/RETARGETING]

SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We share your Personal Information with third parties to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. For example, we use Shopify to power our online store–you can read more about how Shopify uses your Personal Information here: https://www.shopify.com/legal/privacy. We also use Google Analytics to help us understand how our customers use the Site–you can read more about how Google uses your Personal Information here: https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/. You can also opt-out of Google Analytics here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Finally, we may also share your Personal Information to comply with applicable laws and regulations, to respond to a subpoena, search warrant or other lawful request for information we receive, or to otherwise protect our rights.

[INCLUDE IF USING REMARKETING OR TARGETED ADVERTISING]

BEHAVIOURAL ADVERTISING
As described above, we use your Personal Information to provide you with targeted advertisements or marketing communications we believe may be of interest to you. For more information about how targeted advertising works, you can visit the Network Advertising Initiative’s (“NAI”) educational page at http://www.networkadvertising.org/understanding-online-advertising/how-does-it-work.

You can opt out of targeted advertising by:

[INCLUDE OPT-OUT LINKS FROM WHICHEVER SERVICES BEING USED. COMMON LINKS INCLUDE: FACEBOOK – https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=ads, GOOGLE – https://www.google.com/settings/ads/anonymous]

Additionally, you can opt out of some of these services by visiting the Digital Advertising Alliance’s opt-out portal at: http://optout.aboutads.info/.

DO NOT TRACK
Please note that we do not alter our Site’s data collection and use practices when we see a Do Not Track signal from your browser.

[INCLUDE IF LOCATED IN OR IF STORE HAS CUSTOMERS IN EUROPE]

YOUR RIGHTS
If you are a European resident, you have the right to access personal information we hold about you and to ask that your personal information be corrected, updated, or deleted. If you would like to exercise this right, please contact us through the contact information below.

Additionally, if you are a European resident we note that we are processing your information in order to fulfill contracts we might have with you (for example if you make an order through the Site), or otherwise to pursue our legitimate business interests listed above. Additionally, please note that your information will be transferred outside of Europe, including to Canada and the United States.

DATA RETENTION
When you place an order through the Site, we will maintain your Order Information for our records unless and until you ask us to delete this information.

 

CHANGES
We may update this privacy policy from time to time in order to reflect, for example, changes to our practices or for other operational, legal or regulatory reasons.

CONTACT US
For more information about our privacy practices, if you have questions, or if you would like to make a complaint, please contact us by e-mail at [email protected] or by mail using the details provided below:

6B/303 Blenheim Road, Christchurch, New Zealand, C, 8041, New Zealand

Are you GDPR Ready?

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Do you send email newsletters to companies in the EU? Do you know what the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is?

Did you answer yes to the first question the no to the second? If so then you need to read on and get schooled up on what changes you might have to make to your Email Newsletters in order to comply with the regulations.

D-Day for Enforcement of the GDOR us 25 May 2018, so don’t worry you have time.

What is the GDPR?

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and was designed to harmonise data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy, and to reshape the way organisations across the region approach data privacy.

While this may appear insignificant to your New Zealand based marketing activities, the enactment of the GDPR will, in fact, present challenges for any company doing business in EU countries. You will also have to comply with tight regulations on data collection, privacy and disclosure.

Companies who do not comply with the GDPR can face sanctions of up to 4% of their Global Turnover or up to EUR 20 Million.

There are six general principles of data privacy under the GDPR:

  • Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency of data processing
  • Purpose limitation: personal data should be collected for specific, explicit and legitimate purposes
  • Data minimisation: only personal data relevant to the specific purpose should be saved and processed
  • The accuracy of data: any inaccurate personal data should be corrected or deleted. Where necessary, data must be kept up to date.
  • Retention of data: data must be kept in an identifiable format and no longer than necessary.
  • Integrity and confidentiality: data must be kept secure

What do you need to do for the GDPR?

In order to comply you can prepare by

  • Analysing what, how and why you process data
  • Assess how the new regulation might affect your current business
  • Consult with relevant stakeholders: such as customers, data controllers, data processors
  • Create processes: implement the GDPR into your company and set clear responsibilities
  • Be transparent: be prepared to show how data is transferred and processed if asked. Put consent and privacy notes in plain language.
  • Compliance: ask, how can you show you are compliant?
  • Responsive: requests from individuals and incidents must be dealt with within certain timeframes, for example, a notifiable breach has to be reported to the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours

A few tips for you

To address these new regulations and ensure your marketing is compliant. Hera are a few tips.

1. Seek Legal Advice

You may need to seek legal and or professional advice on what you need to do to ensure you comply with the new regulations.

2. Make subscribing to your newsletters clear.

You need to assess your current opt-in process. With the new regulation, subscribers must be told, and agree to, how their information will be used and what content they will be receiving — including newsletters, promotions or information about upcoming events.

You will be required to provide two separate boxes, one exclusively reserved for receiving emails and one all-encompassing terms and conditions box.

2. Use clear and concise language

You now have to carefully fine-tune messages to not only grab the attention of potential subscribers but also meet regulations by clearly defining how their information will be used.

If you plan on providing their email list to other brands, they must obtain new permission from subscribers.

If you are sharing information with other companies, you must say so directly. Using language to deceive subscribers will be a violation of the regulations.

3. Keep your email systems secure

Email security is one of the most important mandates that you must take note of. When requested, all personal data must now be entirely removed from computer and company systems, leaving no trace of it.

Also in the event of a security breach, it must be reported to the data protection officer or supervising authority within 72 hours.

To help you should use a system that allows finding, editing and removing email contacts to be done quickly and easily.

 

Hashtags in Social Media

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Did you know using hashtags in social media can be one of the most powerful ways to take part in the wider digital community. Knowing how to use hashtags is an invaluable skill when you’re on the road to success on social media.

The increase in engagements on tweets with hashtags has been measured to be between +50% and +100%. (This statistic covers all posts with tags, even bad ones. You could do even better with the right tags!)

So how do you know what the right ones are?

If you’re using our social media dashboard to manage your social media accounts then you can make us of our new handy time-saving tool so you can make sure the hashtags you’re using are helping to increase exposure.

You can search your hashtag and we’ll tell you if it’s a winner by using our green light system. Alternatively you can find a list of your recently used hashtags and see your top 5 most successful ones.

We’ve also got a new hashtag training guide.

If you don’t have an account with us then you can sign up at http://social.digitaloperative.co.nz/.

You can also contact us if you have any questions.

WooCommerce Update April 2017

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Yesterday WooCommerce released the update WooCommerce 3.0.0.

This is a MAJOR update so you need to ensure all other extensions and themes are compatible before upgrading.

This update fixes a bunch of issues from. Notable fixes include:

  • Fixed some edge case gallery issues such as galleries with no images, and zoom image sizes when flexslider is not used.
  • Fixed the 3.0 db updater to correctly set the outofstock term.
  • Fixed double add to cart issue on cart page when querystring contains add-to-cart.
  • Fix coupon removal in cart.
  • Added __sleep and __wakeup methods to data stores and data objects to avoid full object serialisation. Because of this, we were able to remove the special handling in email cron (since this is better), and remove the now defunct object caching in the data stores.
  • Prevent max on qty selectors being set to -1.
  • Improved default column definition in admin screens.
  • Fix to allow custom order item types from 2.6.
  • Fixed some bugs in the legacy API (using incorrect getters).
  • Various docblock/deprecation notice corrections.
  • Various RTL fixes.
  • Various fixes to prevent notices e.g. by casting floats when doing arithmetic.
  • Fixed API to return names instead of slugs in variation API.
  • Various REST API v2 schema and return type corrections (to match docs).
  • Removed timezone guesswork from set_date_prop method so offsets are correctly handled when the WP timezone setting is set to a UTC offset.

If you have a WooCommerce site and are not on our maintenance plan then please get in touch so we can help you with this upgrade.

Tired of having errors in free text fields in MailChimp?

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Are you tired of having errors in free text fields in MailChimp?

We’ve recently completed a landing page for one of our customers who is launching a new range of products. One of the main objectives of this site, like most landing pages, is to collect a database of potential customers.

For this customer, it’s important to be able to separate their database by country in order to get the right message to each market, but when the ‘Country’ field is free text this can become a nightmare when people use incorrect spelling or mistype the name of the country.

In order to ensure their subscriber data is accurate and easy to use they set up the ‘Country’ field to be predefined.

If you want to find out how to do this for your MailChimp lists then click on the link below to check out the tutorial.

Mail chimp Predefined List Fields

If you have any questions or need some help with MailChimp then please feel free to contact us.

What are Google Adwords

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What are Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is a pay-per-click advertising engine. Paid search is the term we use for advertising within the listings of a search engine. These normally appear at the top of a search page and are increasingly looking more and more like organic results. At the moment Google places a small green ‘Ad’ label on them.

What are Google Adwords

 

Basic Principles of Google Adwords?

Simply put you pick a number of keywords that a potential customer might use to search on Google. The terms you use will be based on extensive keywords research. This words are used to create an advert that will appear on the page of searches, based on those keywords.

Rival companies can also bid for the same search term so in order for your ad to appear you must bid on how much you are willing to pay per click. The more you pay-per-click the more likely your ad will appear in the search results.

Why might I need to use Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is one of the most effective methods of paid advertising available, and allows you to tap in to a huge number of people who search online for information about your products.

The key benefits of using Google Adwords are:

  • It allows you to focus specifically on the people who are searching for your type of product
  • It’s a flexible advertising platform which allows you to regular and quickly make changes to who you are targeting and for what products.
  • Unlike other advertising platforms you only pay for ads that people click on, and this gives you a clear understanding on what works best for your business.
  • You can see measurable results quickly

Management of Google Adwords

An effective Google Adwords campaign needs to be constantly reviewed, analysed, and amended to get the most out of your advertising budget. While a great deal of research is undertaken when you initially set-up your Adwords campaigns, it’s not a matter of ‘setting and forgetting” and letting them run. Ongoing analysis means you can identify further areas of opportunity.

With best practice knowledge, benchmarking and experience, we can establish the difference between a good, average and poor campaign and can adjust the campaign on the fly to ensure no unnecessary money is being spent on terms which just aren’t getting you the business.

If you want to find out how we can help you with your Google Adwords then get in touch.