December 22, 2011
Website Analytics, Website Strategy
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As we come to the end of another year, our thinking has been shaped by everything ‘online’ we see around us. Here’s our predictions for what’s going to happen in 2012. They include what could be seen as a ‘plug’ for A1WebStats but that’s not the intention …
The economy influences everything
It’s been a tough year for most companies. We’ve been lucky that turnover has stayed consistent BUT we’ve had to work immensely harder to help some clients, who have found it tougher because of:
- Less people searching for products and services (because of economy woes).
- Competitors upping their game to get a piece of a smaller pie.
Without wishing to appear pessimistic, few people would deny that 2011 was just a warm up for the economic woes of 2012.
Google will make it tougher
Please be under no illusion. Google is NOT your friend. Google is a machine that does some things to make it appear friendly but ultimately it’s there to generate income for itself via Pay Per Click (PPC). It’s no more complicated than that.
In recent years, and particularly in 2011, we’ve seen clear examples of how Google are doing everything they can to push people into using PPC advertising. Don’t misunderstand me: PPC is brilliant when it’s done correctly, and when the system allows you to advertise in the way you want to. Unfortunately, it’s changed vastly and Google is deliberately making it harder to get benefits from PPC. The Google Adwords system is set up in a way that stops smaller businesses from succeeding. I could spout on for hours on this subject and provide tons of evidence but for now, take it from me that in 2012 Google will make it even tougher to gain business, whether by PPC or organic search positioning.
Google will see a decline in profits
This is a bold prediction and I could well be wrong and a little bit ahead of time. A lot depends on how people like Facebook and Microsoft get their act together. The faster those competitors to Google see the opportunities in smaller businesses, the faster they will take chunks of business away from Google.
Putting that aside, many businesses will start to realise that they’re not getting results from PPC and that Google is not really their friend. They will stop advertising and it’ll reduce Google’s profits.
On the other hand, Google know about the economic woes and will be hoping that people will throw whatever marketing budget they have at advertising via Google Adwords. Some will but many won’t be able to justify it anymore.
I’d love this prediction to be right but 2012 may be a bit early for Google to start feeling the pain of reduced profits (through its lack of awareness of how it’s system should really work).
Smaller businesses will get cleverer
At Custwin we’ve been heavily into analysing clients website traffic for several years now and we’ve used software systems that we’ve found ultimately to be inadequate. So we created A1WebStats to allow companies to get deep insights into their website visitors, without having to pay our monthly fees.
If you use Google Adwords you may have the impression that you’re getting clicks for certain phrases that you’ve set up. A future blog is going to focus on this in more detail but for now, imagine you’ve got the phrase ‘fire damage restoration’ set up in your campaign and it tells you that you’ve had 200 clicks on your advert when people have typed that phrase. However, your enquiries aren’t strong in comparison. Why is that?
The answer is that, if Adwords is set up in the way Google want you to set it up, your advert will become visible for all sorts of other things. For example, clicks that are registered as being for ‘fire damage restoration’ have come from people who have typed phrases such as:
- Iphone 3gs water damage repair
- Fire blankets damaged
- Janitorial lockers
- Marble cleaner for fire surround
All totally irrelevant and the typical Adwords user wouldn’t have a clue that’s what phrases were actually typed.
Using systems like A1WebStats, companies get to see the actual phrases that people typed, that brought people to their website. They then realise that their PPC campaigns (and other marketing) aren’t getting results, and why. They wake up and start making positive changes.
2012 may be the year when ‘website analytics’ properly comes of age. Companies are fighting to gain business and are currently spending on marketing. With website analytics (whatever system is used), there is the opportunity to fully understand where websites (and the ways they’re marketed) are going wrong.
It’s not for everyone though. Although systems like A1WebStats are incredibly powerful, it takes 3 things from companies to make them work:
- Dedication to spend a bit of time analysing website visitors patterns.
- Dedication to contact companies who didn’t make contact, having visited the website.
- Dedication to invest in making website/online marketing changes that will get stronger results.
Dedication is the word. And that’s why we created the page http://www.a1webstats.com/what-is-a1webstats/is-a1webstats-right-for-you/.
In short though, whatever webstats package is used, businesses of all types will, we feel, start to ‘get cleverer’ in 2012. It’s amazing that it’s taken so long for companies to properly (meaning: not just Google Analytics) analyse their website visitor patterns, but the economy is going to force that mindset into companies.
Social proof
Our final prediction for 2012 is that ‘social proof’ will start to become the difference between company success or failure. Again, it may take a bit longer than 2012 but the concept whereby companies are judged on how much they impress their clients, which leads to more business, has got to be a progressive way for the business world to evolve.
That ‘social proof’ can’t be all the junk that currently exists (for example, artificially engineered reviews) but needs to be so much more ‘genuine’. The technologies exist to make this possible – it just takes dedication and time for companies to make it happen for them.
We would be immensely surprised if, by 2015, all the rubbish (as it currently works and is easily engineered) that is backlinks and general reviews, Facebook likes etc, has any credibility at all. ‘Social proof’, in a genuine format, is the way forwards and any business that’s not totally nurturing their customers in every way they can, will have a lot of catching up to do.
December 3, 2011
Email Newsletters, Website Analytics
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If you send out a regular email newsletter, how many of the readers convert to business?
More specifically, what can you be doing to nurture people towards doing business with you?
One thing you can do is use website analytics to reverse engineer certain website visitor patterns back to the original email newsletter subscriber. Here’s a recent example to show how it works, in this case using A1WebStats (tracking) in combination with Campaign Monitor (used to send out and monitor the email newsletters) …
Step 1 – find something worth digging into
One of the Custwin email newsletters referred to A1WebStats, providing a link to the website. We, of course, can see where website visitors originated from. Looking at the screenshot below you can see that the person came in to the A1WebStats website, via a Custwin blog (see the ‘Referrer’ line) and they looked at the pages showing the prices and how to make A1WebStats work for them …
At this stage we think “hmmm, there may be an interest there, because they went further than the blog itself”.
Step 2 – track backwards
That person entered the A1WebStats website at 12:08. By looking at our Custwin webstats we can see that only one person was looking at the website around that time and so it has to be them. If you look at the screenshot below you can see similarities (e.g. location, browser, IP address etc.), so it’s clearly the same person. You can also see that although they appeared to spend 2 minutes 44 seconds looking at the Custwin blog entry, that was the time they went off to the A1WebStats website, which they left at about 12:09 and then continued looking at the Custwin blogs at 12:10 …
The picture we’ve built up so far is that the person who ended up on the A1WebStats website and was looking at pricing, initially landed on the Custwin website and looked at blogs. We also know that they came from our email newsletter that was sent a couple of days beforehand.
Now all we need to do is match up the date/time that the person landed on the Custwin website (2nd December, around 12pm) with our Campaign Monitor information …
Step 3 – identify the person
We looked at our Campaign Monitor data and found only one person who clicked through from our email newsletter on 2nd December around 2pm. The screenshot below shows what they were looking at on the email newsletter around that time …
Ignore the fact that the location is Camberley, vs Leatherhead in the A1WebStats information – that’s purely down to IP techie stuff. The person is actually from neither location and we know who they are.
In fact, the person is actually someone who is perfect to be white-labelling A1WebStats for their own clients.
Step 4 – nurture
So having identified the person, do we contact them and say “hey, we saw you were looking at A1WebStats and we’d love to have a chat”? We could do, but the whole ‘webstats tracking’ thing can appear a bit creepy to some people so it’s often better to be more subtle.
We actually had a message from them recently about having a catch up. We replied but nothing got organised. We’ve now been back to them again about meeting up. As part of that conversation, we’ll be talking about A1WebStats and we’ll know that they already know a certain amount about it. There will be the opportunity to show that person how it can benefit them and their clients. There are, of course, no guarantees but it’s always worth trying. If that moves forwards we may blog about it as a follow up in the future, to demonstrate how the flow of business often starts from blogs/newsletters/information and can lead onto a lot more.
Conclusion
For most companies the process of analysis is really easy and can boil down to a few steps …
- Create a regular email newsletter containing various articles, and always linking people back to your website.
- Ensure that email newsletter is sent out using a system that allows you to track when people open and click on articles. Commonly used systems are Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.
- About a week after the email newsletter has gone out, go to your webstats package and highlight the people who have landed on a particular website page (one of your articles linked to from your email newsletter).
- If any of those website visitors went further than the article(s), e.g. to look at pages showing the services you offer or people you work with, then that could be a potential buying signal. You would typically expect to see perhaps 1 in 20 people go further than the page they landed on from an email newsletter article. They become ‘the potential’.
- For those website visitors who looked as if they may be interested in more than just the article they read, reverse analyse their path to your website. This is simply a case of matching up the date/time they landed on your website with the dates/times that people clicked through from your email newsletter (which you can see from systems such as Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor).
- Then consider how you may be able to nurture that person in a non-threatening way.
Time-consuming? Yes – perhaps. A job that anyone in your company could do, if they’re taught what to look out for? Absolutely. All YOU want to know is the useful information and if you’ve got someone else who can be looking out for it then it makes sense to work in that way (says me, who has gone through the process here myself!!).
November 30, 2011
Google Adwords, Website Analytics
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We’ve been working on a Google Adwords campaign for an American client recently and the results have surprised us.
The campaign is targeting people in the US who are searching for phrases like ‘free apps’, ‘free apps for my cell phone’, and numerous variations. Although the focus of the client business is very much ‘apps’, our original thinking was that we would be attracting potential buyers searching from desktop/laptop based computers. After all, if you want to get ‘free apps’ then it’s usually a lot easier to search and view via a larger screen (than a mobile phone).
The screenshot below shows a very different picture. It shows that the vast majority of people used Android to search on those phrases (e.g. ‘free apps’). These are people who then clicked on the Adwords adverts …
The screenshot shows only the top 7 of browser/operating system combinations but it’s noticeable that Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox (all on Windows) between them only made up 302 of the 1,890 people who clicked on the Google adverts. That’s just 16%, meaning that 84% of Adwords adverts got clicked by people using mobile devices.
OK, there are two key points screaming out here:
- The business focus is very much ‘mobile’ and so it’s perhaps natural that people would search on their mobile devices and click through on the Adwords adverts.
- The campaign is running in the USA, which is, to be fair, much more ‘mobile’ in its attitude than here in the UK.
- The target market for the US client is people born in the 1990’s.
The reality (for now) in the UK is that PC/Mac based searching, is going to remain dominant for quite some time (in most business sectors). However, in some business sectors searchers will lean more towards mobile (e.g. consumer brands).
Every business, regardless of sector, should be keeping an eye on which browsers/operating systems people are using in order to find their website. The reality is that, for now, the ‘mobile’ type searchers are going to be low and so it’s perfectly acceptable to check such things once every couple of months.
How do you check which browsers/operating systems people are using?
The answer is Google Analytics. It’s free, easy to get set up on your website, and for certain types of information like this, it’s useful. By monitoring which browsers and operating systems your website visitors use, and mapping it out (e.g. on a graph) from month to month, you’ll start to see changes in trends and, at the appropriate time, may want to adjust your online presence to cater for the mobile market in a better way than it currently does.
November 26, 2011
Website Analytics, Website Strategy
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People new to me often say: “my website doesn’t get me enough business – how can I make it a success?”.
The answer to that starts with some simple maths that works as follows …
Add up
… all your website visitors during a period of time (typically, a month). Google Analytics and other website statistics packages will give you this figure.
If the total is less than around 300
… then your website doesn’t really have enough traffic to expect results from. Focus on targeted, but gradual and inexpensive, promotion of your website to raise numbers.
If the total is more than around 300
… you at least have some figures to be meaningful. So ….
Subtract the rubbish
… this means look through all the individual visits to your website and subtract all those who don’t look like being ‘useful’ visits. For example, people you can identify as competitors, students doing research from college, search engines visiting your website, you or your staff on your website. There are many types of ‘not-useful’ visitors.
This bit isn’t quite so easy with most basic website statistics packages but a free trial of A1WebStats will help you here by showing you the information that you can subtract.
Determine the ‘useful visitors’ figure
… meaning: see how many of your overall website visitors were potentially useful to you (based on what they searched for and which pages they looked at on your website, plus also companies they visited from).
Divide enquiries gained by ‘useful visitors’
… however many enquiries you gained during the month, divide those by the number of ‘useful visitors’ (NOT by the overall visitors because that gives a false figure).
If the result is anything above 5% then smile
… based on work we’ve done over the years, if you are getting at least 5% of your ‘useful’ website visitors converting into enquiries then you’re on the right path. For some sectors/focus areas we set an expectation of at least 10% Anything above about 15% useful clicks to enquiries ratio is pretty much unheard of.
Equals
Enquiries gained divided by Useful Visitors equals your starting point. Do this for 2-3 months to build up a proper picture and then consider getting help to raise the success of your website (if you need it).
October 30, 2011
Website Analytics, Website Promotion
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QR codes have been around for some time now but how do you know what you’re getting from yours (if you have one)?
And if your QR code acts as a link into your website, do you link it to a specific page or does it just go to your home page?
There are many ways (some a bit techie) that you can automatically analyse what you gain from your QR codes visibility but there is also a very simple way of analysing:
Link the QR code through to a website page that is either dedicated to it or has virtually no people entering the website via that page.
So, take the QR code below for example …
If you scanned it you would be taken to a page about tree houses. A page that has been created to use as a landing page from a QR code. Therefore, the business owner, through some basic website analytics, will be able to see how many people landed on that particular tree houses page and will be positive that the visits came from the QR code.
Where this becomes important is in advertising, particularly in print media. Let’s say you put an advert in a magazine and it costs you £Xhundred for a few editions. That advert includes your QR code linking through to one particular website page. You will know, after a period of time whether people have been using the QR code. If you’re really clever you’ll make the magazine advert have some sort of special offer that encourages people to type in a url that goes to a different website page so that you can determine whether that brings more visitors to your website from the advert than the QR code (which may also have the special offer).
The good thing about QR codes is that they’re free to create. However, if you’re not linking them through to a unique website page (and you haven’t implemented a more techie way of tracking them) then you’re going to find it hard to measure what benefit they bring you.
October 28, 2011
Website Analytics, Website Strategy
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Whatever forms of advertising you use in your business (online or offline) you generally only get one chance to win the business of people who end up on your website.
I was reminded of this via a recent experience with using outsourced contractors to do what I thought was a very simple job. The short version was that we gave three outsourced contractors the chance to prove their skills and one of them performed spectacularly badly and when we ended their contract we got a long message from them saying plenty, but including those words:
“Please Sir give me a chance, I will try my best”
After I stopped laughing and having already explained (quite nicely for me actually) how bad the work was, I thought “what a cheek asking for more work when it’s been pointed out how he underperformed compared to other contractors”.
It’s not unlike the way companies use systems like Google to make themselves visible for when people are searching for their products or services. For those three contractors imagine three businesses visible in close proximity, in the Google search results (paid or organic).
Day 1
Someone searches for the product or service and clicks through to a poor website. They’re not impressed and they leave. However they haven’t got the time to keep looking at this stage.
Day 2
The same person searches again and they see that same poor website company appearing in the Google results. The search listing effectively says to them “Please Sir give me a chance, I will try my best” but the person already knows that the website is poor and so doesn’t click, preferring instead to look at other websites, which are hopefully better.
Every second of every minute of every hour of every day … people are visiting websites and are being underwhelmed. There are no second chances in a world where people want to be quickly impressed.
You can see this for yourself by doing a relatively easy bit of analysis. Use your website statistics analytics package and see how many people land on certain pages of your website, noting what they searched for. Compare those to the numbers of enquiries/sales gained in the same time period.
Then ask yourself whether your website is acting like the underperforming contractor and whether opportunities for future business have been missed out on.
October 26, 2011
Customer Service, Website Analytics
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There’s only one thing worse than not getting enquiries via your website: getting enquiries that eat up your time and don’t lead to anything. They may look promising but how good are they really?
Our clients often benefit from being able to get a stronger understanding of each person that makes an enquiry via their website. This is best demonstrated with an example from a client. This client is an expert in Graphology (handwriting analysis) and the content of an enquiry received recently was as follows …
I am presently going through a divorce and have a problem with an anniversary card my wife sent to me, which she denies and has said I have altered. would you be able to provide a report to confirm her writing and provide an estimate of your charges?
It has the markings of being potential business because the enquirer knows that the handwriting issue could be pivotal in a divorce settlement. In theory, quality of analysis should be more important than the fees to do the analysis (there are many inferior graphologists around who would charge low rates but not do a brilliant job).
Before the client responds to the enquirer, it’s worth digging deeper by looking at their path through the website, which can be viewed as follows …
So we know that he searched Google for ‘forensic handwriting analysis’ (which brings the client up high in the search results). Therefore, he’s likely to have clicked through to the client website before any other website. All good so far.
However, he’s spent a mere 3 seconds on the home page before going to the Contact page, has filled in the enquiry form (which took him 14 minutes), and then he’s backed out of the website to the Google search results.
What this shouts out (to the trained eye) is that he fully intends to get the handwriting analysis but he’s shopping mainly on price. There’s no way he could have fully absorbed the client website and quality of service, based on 3 seconds on the home page. He will hop from website to website just pasting in the same enquiry to several Graphologists. He is highly likely to go with the cheapest one.
So what does this say to my client?
It says “be aware that he’s likely to be shopping on price and so respond to him quickly without too much effort”. In this particular case, the client would be best-served to have some standard cut and paste text ready to send back, which focuses on the differing quality gained from Graphologists and the fact that ‘cheap is not good when it comes to proper handwriting analysis’. This way, any similar website visits in future can receive the same cut and pasted response. They may still go with the cheapest option but at least they’ve been made aware of the dangers, which could convince them to go with the quality option.
This principle applies to all types of businesses, regardless of sector. For every enquiry gained, track it back to the website visitor path, assess how ‘serious’ they are, and respond to them accordingly. Then, having not wasted too much time on time wasters, use that time for other business building activities.
October 21, 2011
Website Analytics
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…. or anyone.
A client contacted me recently, saying that he’d noticed an increase in people asking for samples to be sent to them in Russia.
The samples were of a particular type of sash window glass. Not terribly expensive to send as samples, but the postage makes it more expensive – particularly to Russia.
This particular client is very much switched on to the value of analysing website visitor patterns but on this occasion hadn’t used the tools at their disposal to dig deeper … so I did.
Noting that Russia was the area of concern, I picked out all visitors from Russia to work out why they were visiting his website. If you click on the link below you can see a sample of those from the first week of October …
http://www.a1webstats.com/stats/view-report.aspx?ReportID=284F7F74-1C9F-4E74-A908-78B90EA65B74
Those 36 people came to the client website from the link http://paradiz.net/showthread.php?t=103895. Feel free to look at that link but unless you speak Russian it’s not going to mean a lot to you!
A quick translation later and I could see that it’s a website for freeloaders – people who get a kick out of getting things – ANY things – for free. And some kind Russian had posted a link to the client website. You wouldn’t think there’s much demand for free samples of sash window glass but to some people, apparently there is.
So what’s my point?
In this case it was a company, who normally sends out free samples of their product, who needed help identifying that it was a complete waste of time and money to send to anyone from Russia. If they didn’t have a strong website visitors analysis software solution in place then it would have taken a lot longer to work out what the problem was. It actually took only about 5 minutes to uncover the mystery.
My point is that there are many people who will happily waste the time or money of those in business. More typically common than samples being requested, are those people who make enquiries via websites, but who aren’t really serious buyers. Take this scenario …
Someone makes contact with Widgets Ltd, asking for a quotation for 1,000 widgets. The person at Widgets Ltd thinks it looks promising and invests time in creating the quotation and sends it off to them. They hear nothing back and even when trying to contact them later on, they get nowhere.
That person who wanted 1,000 widgets was actually shopping around. If the person from Widgets Ltd had looked at their website visitors statistics then they would have seen that the enquirer had spent only a few seconds on their website and spent less time on their enquiry form page than it would have taken to type out such an enquiry. In short, the person was copy/pasting the same enquiry to multiple websites, just to get a price of interest to them.
Had the person from Widgets Ltd known this, they may have spent a lot less time on the enquiry and instead focused on other enquiries where the website visitors seemed to interact more with the website pages, which implied more interest.
There isn’t a business out there who hasn’t experienced responding to enquiries, and then getting no response back. In many cases it’s purely people shopping around on multiple websites and they’re probably not the type of people you’d want as customers anyway. By looking closer at each enquiry gained (through website statistics) any business can save chunks of time by sending very brief response to those who appear to be potential time wasters.
September 23, 2011
SEO, Website Analytics, Website Strategy
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I was recently listening to a recording by Chris Cardell, marketing guru, and I found myself saying out loud (several times), “noooooooo!”
The recording was an interview with a company who had got to a certain position with their business marketing and wanted to get to the next stage. Here are the abbreviated facts …
- The company (http://www.oceanbathrooms.com/) get over 10,000 visits to their website each month.
- They have increased their turnover to double what it used to be (now £390K), helped along by an increase in website visitors to enquiries.
- They are top of Google for the phrase ‘luxury bathrooms’.
Chris Cardell seemed enthused that the business owner had achieved good levels of traffic through organic SEO and, even though the conversion rate was very low (in the region of 1-2%), his view was that the company should spread their marketing risk (a good idea) by using PPC advertising (a bad idea in this case).
If you have over 10,000 people coming to your website each month and the conversion rate is relatively low, then the worst thing you can do is to send even more traffic to the website – especially traffic that costs money!
From previous client work done I know that PPC phrases related to luxury bathrooms (and component parts of) cost serious amounts per click. If a company had minimal organic traffic and they were fully confident their website was brilliant then yes, PPC would be an option in this sector. But if the company has good traffic already and isn’t converting that at a strong enough level, then it’s insanity to consider PPC advertising.
What made it worse was that Chris went on to advise the company to make the PPC advertising visible internationally as well. An ever-expanding money pit was forming in my mind as I continued to listen to the interview.
It would be fascinating to get a further insight into the website analytics of that bathrooms company – to see exactly which keyword phrase types brought in the most traffic, and how that traffic converted to business. Not having the luxury of that I have to make some assumptions, which are …
Luxury bathrooms as a keyword phrase
That’s impressive to be top of Google for the phrase ‘luxury bathrooms’ but suppose that’s bringing in a significant number of the 10,000+ visitors that website is getting each month (which is very possible).
People searching on a phrase like ‘luxury bathrooms’ will mostly fall into one of the following camps:
- They’re considering having a new bathroom and they’re looking for inspiration, and probably good supplies/installations companies.
- They are looking for inspiration and may want certain products to be bought by their local bathroom installer.
- They may be doing a DIY job on their own bathroom and so will be receptive to buying from a website such as http://www.oceanbathrooms.com.
In my view, the majority of people are going to fit into the first category and certainly, very few would fall into the third category.
So, you’re interested in luxury bathrooms and you find that website top of Google. It gives you lots of ideas and you can see many types of bathroom-related products. Now what? Most people probably want the work/hassle taken on by someone else and are unlikely to buy directly. Here’s what’s most likely to happen …
They see bathroom products that look good and they refer their local bathroom installer to them. That installer has the option to buy from the Ocean Bathrooms website, or get the client to do it directly. However, they also have the option to find similar products from elsewhere, possibly at a cheaper price and also possibly building in a bit of a kickback for themselves.
The end result: Ocean Bathrooms may gain some business but they may also lose a lot more.
I’d suggest that, from the mindset of most people searching for ‘luxury bathrooms’, if they see products they like the look of then they are willing to be guided in a particular direction. And that’s where this website falls down on a big opportunity to make more money. What Ocean Bathrooms should do is research bathroom installers throughout the UK, boiling them down to one or two in each geographic location, who are committed to buy products from Ocean Bathrooms. Those bathroom installers should be committed to:
- Provide an excellent installation and customer care service to the end client.
- Pay Ocean Bathrooms a commission on each introduction that becomes a client.
Ocean Bathrooms then need to create a very visual ‘UK map’ graphic to go into each page of their website, making it very clear that they offer a UK-wide installation service. The landing page from that graphic contains numerous testimonials and bathroom pictures related to all parts of the country. The people who land on that page are invited to make contact to discuss bathroom installation.
- From the perspective of the ‘luxury bathrooms’ searcher it’s attractive to see not just bathroom products they like, but to be offered installation, wherever they are in the UK.
- From the perspective of the bathroom installers that Ocean Bathrooms sub-contract to, it’s business for little effort and they only need to pay a fee for each client won.
- From the perspective of Ocean Bathrooms, more people will buy products and they’ll have the added bonus of kickback payments from the bathroom installers.
I’ve simplified the whole concept there and it needs a bit more detail, but you get the idea.
The fact that Chris Cardell didn’t pick up on this issue about that search phrase of ‘luxury bathrooms’ not linking to a strong enough website message, deserves the “shame on you” comment.
Other keyword phrases
It’s not just ‘luxury bathrooms’ that brings traffic to the website. I searched on ‘luxury baths’ and it appeared top of Google. I navigated down to a page about V&A Limestone Baths (http://www.oceanbathrooms.com/226-v-and-a-limestone-baths) and yes, there’s a good range there but the into page has no reference to prices of each bath. I’m expected to click on the ‘View’ button to go into each one and even then there’s no pricing. I have no way of deciding whether the bath is in my budget range.
As already referred to, even if I did know the pricing, I would still like the option to find an installer (via this website) who could install such a bath properly. It IS good that they have an option to talk to one of their experts (which some people would do), but with no prices on show, most people won’t make contact for fear of then realising it’s out of their budget range.
I would really encourage the business owner to be looking at their website analytics, picking out phrases that get most traffic (e.g. ‘luxury baths’) and really think about what stops most people from making contact, having gone down each particular route within the website.
After identifying issues related to traffic that they do get then start focusing on traffic they don’t get. For example, they’re not on the first page of Google when I type ‘luxury showers’.
Analysis is key
This business owner needs to go back to basics. I can’t see any immediate evidence that he took the Chris Cardell advice about using PPC (lucky for him if he didn’t) and although the business has clearly pumped a lot of effort into their website, they’ve missed out on the importance of analysis.
Google Analytics would help a bit but it’s not really man enough to do a proper job of analysis. They need the ability to look at each individual visitor who typed particular types of keyword phrases, and then analyse their routes through the website until realising where the holes are. This is exactly what we do for clients on an ongoing basis.
There are of course, many more missed opportunities than I’ve highlighted here but this blog is already too long and if the business owner was reading this then they’d have plenty to be getting on with.
So, plenty of good marks to the business owner for having got to where they are and certainly they have Chris Cardell to thank for helping them on their journey (plus a good SEO person). But shame on you (again) Chris, for seeing a strong level of traffic with a relatively low conversion rate and advising them to go down the PPC route to boost that traffic further.
In Summary
Ocean Bathrooms are a company that have the ability to provide bathroom installations at a local level plus supply bathroom products to anyone in the UK and beyond. It would be extremely easy to significantly boost their income by becoming perceived as a company that can provide installation solutions nationwide. It’ll be interesting to see if they pick up on this blog and take action accordingly because currently their turnover is painfully low compared to the levels of website traffic they’re gaining.
September 19, 2011
Website Analytics
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LinkedIn is a system that people in business use but also don’t use to its maximum potential. And I’ll include myself in that list!
Here I’d like to share with you one way that you can use LinkedIn combined with a strong website visitors statistics analysis system.
When you have the ability to see which companies have visited your website then, if any company hasn’t made contact, you have the ability to do something about that. Here’s an example from a client website, showing that someone from a company called Contico Manufacturing visited their website on 2nd September, having searched Google for the phrase ‘dsear risk assessment’ …
The client provides that form of risk assessment but the company didn’t make contact with them. If there was a wish to see if something could be salvaged from that website visit then the client can go through the following steps …
Search for the company name on LinkedIn
The company appears and shows as having 7 employees.
See if there’s a connection
If you have a reasonable number of connections within LinkedIn then there’s a good chance that in some way you’re connected to one or more employees within the target company. Using the example of Contico Manufacturing, when I search for them on LinkedIn I see (below) that I’m connected to one of their people via one of my contacts. If my client is connected to me then they will also understand that there’s a connection.
If there’s a connection, then use it
Not all connections are strong but if you consider that the intermediary connection could be in a position to connect you up with a person in the company, then explore that. In this case, a simple question to the intermediary connection of “I’ve identified that someone from Contico Manufacturing has come to our website looking for a DSEAR risk assessment – do you think they may like a further chat about how we can help, and if so, can you bridge the gap?”. The answer may be “No” but at least you’ve tried.
If there’s not a connection then dig deeper
If the company that has been to your website is of particular interest then look up their people on LinkedIn. Some of those people may be participants in various LinkedIn Groups. By joining those groups you have the opportunity to join in conversations where that person is (adding value, NOT sales-pitching!) and a relationship may form from there. Certainly, a direct connection will form.
It’s a numbers game
I’ll admit that I have not used LinkedIn to anywhere near its potential. My business growth happens in other ways. But it’s becoming an ever more powerful tool in connecting with business people and it will pay any business to spend more time on it. There’s something like 120 Million people on LinkedIn now – that is immense. I’m directly connected to about 460 of them – that is pathetic when you consider that I was what they call an ‘early adopter’ – LinkedIn member number 229,936 – almost in the first quarter of a million.
Is there value in connecting to thousands and thousands of people? I’d say that there is, as long as there is a useful connection. If someone comes to me, having identified that I’m an intermediary connection to someone in a company that has visited their website, but I don’t really know that person well, then the connection has little real value. However, if I find time to interact with as many of my connections as possible, both online and in person where possible, then there is a lot more strength.
What can you take away from this blog?
- If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile then create one.
- If you want to find out a lot more about how to get the best from LinkedIn, then take a look at http://www.netlinked.co.uk/.
- If you have a LinkedIn profile then actively grow your connections.
- If you have a strong website visitors analysis system that shows you which companies have visited your website, what they searched for, and how they interacted with your website, then put those company details into LinkedIn and see how you’re connected. If you’re not connected in any way then that may encourage you to create more connections overall. If you don’t have the ability to see which companies have visited your website then speak to us – we have a free trial (then cheap to use) of a system that’ll open your eyes.
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