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.
September 12, 2011
Google Adwords, Website Analytics
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Google Adwords campaigns – they’re great aren’t they? Just set them up and wait for all the lovely people to search for phrases and click through to your website when your adverts appear.
Except when something goes wrong, as can be demonstrated with a real example …
A client rang me asking if there was a problem with the PPC campaign. He wondered because he has the foresight to check his webstats regularly and they were showing him that on that day the number of visitors was way down on a typical day. He spends a lot on PPC advertising (typically about £1,000 per week) and so it’s vital that his clicks get him results.
I looked at the PPC campaign and it showed that on the day he had received many more website visitors than his webstats was showing him. So I went to his website and found that it had a problem that needed urgently fixing (which he passed onto his web developer).
The Google Adwords system will let you set up various alerts but there’s some things it doesn’t pick up on quickly – one of those is when the landing page from the advert isn’t working properly. It could have been a few days before the Google Adwords system threw up an error and in the meantime it would have been sending clicks to a black hole.
It’s fortunate that this particular client is amongst the minority who ‘gets it’ that it’s vital to keep a close eye on website statistics. Admittedly, the purpose in his case is to keep finding opportunities for refinement but on this occasion it saved him what could have been a few £hundred in wasted clicks because the situation could be rectified quickly by being on the ball.
Apart from this specific application of webstats tracking being useful (which, to be honest, is a rare problem to have), it’s really useful to help you get proper insights into what types of clicks your PPC campaign sends you, and it’s not unusual to find issues to resolve if the PPC hasn’t been set up properly in the first place.
August 30, 2011
Website Analytics
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Most people know that I’m a big fan of analysing website statistics but it’s fair to say that it can be a very time consuming process. If you’ve not got into analysing your website visitors patterns, it can be daunting just putting a toe in the water.
But come on in – the water is fine and there are no jellyfish.
A useful introduction to the benefits of analysing website visitors is to focus on just one website page and get a ‘feel’ for how website visitors interact with that page. This is worth demonstrating with an example …
The screenshot below is related to a company that offer a service called Category Management. The screenshot shows that their categorymanagement page has been viewed 28 times in the past month. That’s not a huge number (so immediately implies that more SEO would be beneficial) but it’s a number small enough to invest a bit of time analysing that website page.
By then asking the webstats analysis system to dig deeper into the website visitors details for that one page (http://www.worldofpatria.com/categorymanagement) it turns out that the 28 views of that page came from only 22 people. By looking through each visitor path that looked at that page as part of their visit, some insights can be gained. One such example is in the screenshot below …
In the case of the screenshot above, the visiting company may be of interest, as may be their interest in category management as well as the other pages they visited.
In the case of other website visitors it may present a different picture.
By investing a bit of time on analysing visits that include views of just one website page within your website you can start to form a picture of whether you’re getting the results you want, which will usually lead to changes being made.
And once you’ve dipped your toe in the water like this you may well find that you start to enjoy swimming in the waters of website visitors analysis.
August 29, 2011
Website Analytics
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ROI – it means ‘Return On Investment’ right?
Yes, it does.
But it could also stand for ‘Return on Intelligence’, which I feel is a more sensible approach.
Taking one ROI scenario related to websites …
You invest in website development work and SEO (sometimes including PPC). You expect a return on that investment. You get a few months down the line and your ROI isn’t what you hoped it would be. You see figures from the SEO people telling you that your website is getting various numbers of visitors who have typed various types of phrases. And yet your enquiries/sales are not at the level you want them to be.
Your ROI looks poor because you should be focusing on the alternative ROI of:
Return on Intelligence.
This means being more intelligent about what you’re investing in. Anyone who has spent money on website development and SEO will know that it’s not a cheap exercise but so many companies do just that, expect good results, and wonder why those results don’t always happen.
Here are some of the things that could go wrong:
- The website redevelopment work wasn’t strong enough. It may be your fault for demanding certain things to be created, but they weren’t actually good enough to impress the target market, which meant that the web developer just created what the client demanded. It may also be the website developers fault because they missed out on various important things taht should have been included but you wouldn’t know what they were.
- The SEO targeted the wrong types of people, sometimes involving wasted expenditure on PPC clicks.
- The SEO company of choice turned out to be a dud.
- Your business processes failed to capitalise on what the website and SEO were gaining. For example, each enquiry may not be logged, things get forgotten, and so potential business falls by the wayside.
In order to get a return on investment you first have to focus attention on the concept of return on intelligence. This means putting in a bit more effort than paying the bill of the web developer and SEO people. You need to have your finger on the pulse of how your website is or isn’t working. In short, from day 1 that your redeveloped and SEO’d website goes live you need to be gathering data about each individual website visitor, including:
- How they found your website (search engine, online directory, other sources).
- What they typed to find you (if from a search engine).
- What page they landed on and each other page they looked at, and for how long.
- (where identifiable) What company/organisation they were from.
Currently being used by many Custwin clients is the webstats analysis system that allows all the above (and more) to be achieved. But it needs one important ingredient for it to work:
Intelligence.
Not the intelligence that comes out of the website statistics analysis system but the intelligence of the person within your company who agrees with the following statement:
“If I am going to invest money in my website then I need to invest time in analysing how numerous visitors interact with my website. If I don’t like what I see then I will be able to take action at an early stage”.
The ‘Return On Intelligence’ is the knowledge you gain from fully understanding how people interact with your website. It allows you to ask questions such as:
“Why is it that XXXXX people landed on this website page, went to that website page, but we didn’t get any enquiries as a result?”
Within just a few weeks of your redeveloped and/or SEO’d website being launched on the world, you, through using ROI in the right way, would be in the position that you can be asking questions of the web developers, the SEO people, AND yourself, about why certain website visitors aren’t making contact with your company.
Or, you can invest in website development and SEO work and wait several months before realising that your return on investment wasn’t working as you hoped it would.
Does it take time to analyse website visitors statistics in the recommended way? Yes, of course it does. But I’d suggest that the time invested is a lot more valuable than time spent on some other activities. For most small to medium sized companies, using our new webstats analysis system (to be officially launched during September), it would typically take 5-10 minutes per day to analyse website visitors patterns and then capitalise on the intelligence gained.
That’s why we’re going to make it free for the first 30 days because when used as intended, the whole concept of return on investment is looked at in a completely different way that will give companies that ‘get it’ a huge advantage over competitors.
July 19, 2011
Website Analytics
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Most readers will be aware that it’s often possible to identify the names of companies and organisations that have visited the website, including what pages they looked at and for how long.
However, a comment often made to me is:
“That’s good to know which company came to our website, but what do we do about it if we don’t know anyone within that company?”.
There are two answers here:
- If you’re seeing various companies visiting your website and you believe there was initially genuine interest, but they didn’t make contact, then it tells you that your website may need to be strengthened in order to encourage contact to be made.
- Use LinkedIn intelligently.
The purpose of this blog is to focus on point 2 and I’ll use Custwin as the example, and first of all the ‘slow burn’ method …
The screenshot below shows that the Custwin website was visited on 15th July by someone from a company called Jacksons Fencing:
I see that they came in to an email newsletter page from May 2009. It could have been anything that brought them there but just perhaps, there may be something to build on. So I go to my LinkedIn page and search on the company ‘Jacksons Fencing’ and I find that I’m connected to 5 people there and one of them is the Business Development Manager (someone who may, at some stage in the future, be interested in how Custwin can help, but in the short term, perhaps someone to nurture). The screenshot below shows how I’m connected to that person via 10 of my own connections:
A few of those connections are people I could ring up and say “How well do you know that person?” and if they say it’s more than purely an electronic connection then I could say “Would you mind if I connected to them, via you, within LinkedIn?”. If their answer is “that’s fine” then I use the LinkedIn system to request a connection to them, with an appropriate message.
Chances are that they’d connect and after a brief initial intro dialogue via LinkedIn, the link has been made to nurture for the future. Way down the line, it could even lead to business.
You may be thinking:
“Sod that, what a load of effort just to try and make a connection that may be useful sometime in the future”, but there’s a few points to make in response to that:
- You never know where a connection can lead to. If you spend a bit of time connecting to numerous companies, who you know have visited your website, then the law of averages says that some of those will come to fruition that outweighs the time investment.
- If you’re not connected to people within certain companies then you won’t get people coming to you to request connections (which can rekindle contacts with people). I know many people who are very well connected (to genuine connections) via LinkedIn and I consider them ‘go to’ people when I’m looking for connections.
- The more connections you make on LinkedIn, the better. It can’t harm you.
Of course, there is the other method, which is faster, may or may not involve using LinkedIn to leverage contacts, but could have a more immediate level of success or failure …
- Identify the company who has visited your website and what they looked at.
- Use Google and also LinkedIn to try and drill down to the names of people within that company, who could be the right people to speak to.
- Contact them by phone, referring to someone from their company having been to your website (and what they looked at), and offering further assistance.
- Pause for either the positive or “get away from us, stalker!” reactions.
Whichever method you use, if you have identifiable companies visiting your website and your view of the website visitor path movement implies that it’s of genuine interest, then it’s got to be worth doing something about that.
May 23, 2011
Website Analytics, Website Strategy
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Launching very soon (currently in beta release) is a new software system created by Custwin, which will provide highly useful insights into how visitors interact with company websites. One of the features within that system is the ability to analyse what happened with the visitors who came to the website having searched Google for particular search phrases.
Why is this important?
Because if enough people used a particular phrase to find your website, and you feel that such a search phrase is relevant to your line of business, then in theory, you should be converting some of that into enquiries.
Using a real example (please do contact us if this new software system interests you), we wanted to see how many times a client site had been visited (in recent weeks) when people typed phrases that were a variation on ‘union jack mirror’. The results of that search are below, showing each individual phrase typed and how many people typed those phrases:
What we now want to do is look at those visitors in more detail. We can tick the boxes next to the phrases of interest to see how each visitor interacted with the website. However, we leave out phrases that we think weren’t useful – for example, this client doesn’t ship to Germany so ‘union jack mirror germany’ is not useful. The client also doesn’t have a matching rug so ‘union jack mirror and rug’ is also not useful to analyse. Everything else though is worth analysing. We then get a view that shows us the individual paths that each visitor took through the website. In all cases those people land on the union jack mirror page but what we’re interested in is where they go next (after all, we want them to buy the mirror!). The screenshot below shows that on 7th May someone had searched for ‘wooden union jack mirrors’, had landed on that page, spent 2 minutes 37 seconds on the page, then went to the page showing where the stores are located, back to the home page, then used the site search function to find the union jack mirror page again:
This screenshot below shows that someone searched for ‘wooden union jack mirror’ but went no further than the landing page, which implies they didn’t find what they were looking for, or something stopped them from wanting to buy:
By looking at all those ‘union jack mirror’ type visits the client can assess how well (or not) those visits are converting into business. After all, they’ll know how many of those mirrors they’ve sold compared to how many visits they’ve had, which is the most telling tale of all. If they’re not happy with the results then they know that action has to be taken to make the page/website stronger.
There are various pieces of software that you can use to analyse keyword phrases that people used to find your website, and to dig deeper into how those visitors then interacted with the website – it just happens that the new system we’ve developed makes it incredibly easy.
Analysis of website visitors overall is vitally important and will become a growth business in the coming years (goodbye web developers and SEO consultants as job titles, hello “website profitability consultants”). Analysing the keyword phrases that bring people to your website is just one aspect of visitors analysis but it’s a very good starting point because there’s some very simple maths involved, whatever product or service you’re offering:
Number of enquiries related to a particular product/service divided by number of website visits from that related product/service keyword phrase, multiplied by a hundred equals a good percentage or the opportunity to make your website stronger.
What relevant keyword phrases are bringing visitors to your website and how are those visitors interacting with your website?
May 23, 2011
Website Analytics, Website Strategy
3 Comments
Actually, there are two lessons:
- The need to analyse how people use your on-site search function.
- The need to make available a good range of products on an ecommerce website.
First, the tortoise eggs. Here they are below …
Recently, ‘mummy tortoise’ laid 10 eggs in the garden. If we lived in the Mediterranean that would have been ok but the good old British weather wouldn’t be sufficient for those eggs to survive. So it’s necessary to put tortoise eggs into an incubator.
Problem: you can’t easily buy tortoise egg incubators off the shelf – you have to make them. And I hadn’t made one, although did have a page of instructions and equipment needed.
I’d previously bought a tortoise light bulb from an online retailer (http://www.aquatics-online.co.uk) and it was delivered quickly without problems. Therefore, that was the first place I went with my shopping list of equipment needed. My persona as a buyer was “hell, these eggs need to be properly incubated so I don’t mind what the equipment costs, I just need it quickly and easily”.
So I used the search function on that website, looking for the products I needed. I found one of them but the second product I tried couldn’t be found, and then the third. So I did what any normal person would do and went to Google and searched for one of the products I couldn’t find on the Aquatics Online website. That led me to the website http://reptilekeeping.co.uk where I found everything I needed and ordered through that website. I also found that the tortoise light bulb that I’d bought from Aquatics Online was £11 cheaper on the Reptilekeeping website for exactly the same product – so I added one of those into the order. A few days later my order arrived and the tortoise eggs are now ‘cooking’ nicely.
So where will I go next time I need any tortoise related products? Reptilekeeping of course because they had a wider range of products that matched my requirements. Apart from the extra light bulb I bought I haven’t got a clue whether the other products I bought were cheaper elsewhere – all I cared about was having the ability to buy them all in one place and quickly. This is where things get a bit deeper …
Aquatics Online lost a sale and also a future customer. If they’re not already doing so then they should be analysing their website statistics to pick up on search phrases that people use, that bring up ‘Your search produced no matches’ pages. They would see that I had searched on ‘habistat pulse’ and got no results. They would see, over periods of time, all sorts of phrases that people searched for, which gave those people a ‘no matches’ type page. They would, I’d hope, start thinking “if people are searching for these things and aren’t finding them, then are we losing out by not having such products available?”.
In the case of Aquatics Online they lost not just a sale of one product, but a combination of products, plus the future potential business from a customer who was happy with them until this current requirement came up.
The same would apply to Reptilekeeping because although they got the sale, it could be that people are using their search function and aren’t finding what they want.
If a website has a search function on it then it’s imperative to be analysing not just the phrases that resulted in people finding products on the site, but also to be analysing what searches didn’t bring up search results … and then deciding what to do about that.
Where it starts to get more interesting is in assessing just how ‘on the button’ the successful retailer is. This blog will go live and in theory, that retailer will be picking up on when the word ‘reptilekeeping’ appears online. If they do pick up on that (easy, via Google Alerts) then they’d have the opportunity to make contact and try to get a positive testimonial from me. They may also then find out that it could be worth offering a bundled package of products perfect for making a tortoise eggs incubator – people would pay a higher than average price for that convenience.
There’s a common misperception that success from websites comes purely from getting people to the website and having enough on there to make people buy. That is, of course, important, but the ongoing success comes from digging deeper (e.g. into what’s happening with the on-site search function) and going through a process of ongoing refinements.
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