Free marketing dept.

Analytical?

New markets for your USP ?

I’m going to leave describing the set up and management of a Google adwords campaign for another day. The main reason behind this is my client is subject to a large VAT return at the end of the month and he has asked to delay the launch of the adwords advertising until next month.  It is super quite out ‘there’ for all types of businesses and if I had to sum up the feelings of the majority of small & medium sized companies I’ve been talking too recently, I can do so with one word;  “stagnation”

Don’t file this blog /post with the rest of the ‘Recession – Depression’ discussions just quite yet, I want to show those that don’t know or have not heard of analytics what a great, useful & powerful tool ‘Google Analytics’  is. I use it all the time and install it on all of my client’s web sites that are getting some SEO work done with me.

This post is following on from an article for businesses having their first website built, building it yourself of having a web design company / web designer build it for you. You can find some tips on how to make your first website succeed published on  ‘ehow’ and ‘scribd’ :

http://www.ehow.com/how_5621150_make-first-business-succeed.html

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22295778/How-Not-to-Make-Mistakes-on-Your-First-Website-Project

I mention Google analytics and how important it is to gather relevant information  for your success online and increasing your ‘web presence’ going forward.

Even if you’re not having SEO work done to your site you should ask your web designer to install the ‘Google analytics code’ on your web sites web pages, they may charge you for a half hour – 1 hour max to install this program / script on your site and all its pages, but best of all its free from Google and there is no cost to keep using it or any of its features.

A lot of web companies give you ‘traffic statistics’ for your web site and show you where to look them up, but this is only the tip proverbial iceberg when it comes to web site visitor information and the detail that can be provided to you from Google analytics about your customers & site visitors.

The highlight for me is type of detail that is available at your finger tips, used correctly the feedback can help you improve your web site, content, design and layout to keep site visitors on your pages for longer or to interest them enough to click on further into your web site until they either make a purchase or contact you for your services or products.

The information in its barest form is as follows:

# No. Of visits to the site

# No. Of unique visitors (1 time visitors vs’ return visitors)

# Total no. Of pages viewed

# No. Of pages viewed per visit

# Bounce rate *

#Average time on site.

# % of new visitors

This information is fed in after a 1 day time lag, and the figures are based over the last month, although you can view all the information for a particular month, week, day or the year in total or a certain period last year vs’ this year etc.   Most of the above is self explanatory – ‘Bounce rate’ is given in a % and is the number of single page visits, i.e. a visit during which the visitor left your web site directly from the entrance page – So if you have a high bounce rate it is a good indicator that you have a problem such as the content on your page is not relevant to viewers or the design or usability  / navigation of your web site is poor.

This ‘base line’ information can then be fed through a menu of choices down the left side of the screen.  This menu has 4 main categories that have a number of sub categories. There are too many to mention them all and the many ways they can give you further details on your visitors. The 4 main categories are:  Visitors, Traffic sources, Content, and Goals

I’ll break the ‘Visitors’ category down:

1# Overview – The list of the above mentioned site visit figures. (no. Of visits, no. Of unique, etc.)

2# Benchmarking – enable this feature and you can compare your site against other sites and their figures in the industry (in general) – this can help with data to gain broader context for your site and identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

3# Map overlay – Comes up as a global map for all the visits around the world. Click on the country – i.e. Ireland if you cover a nationwide market.  This then gives you the country / territory map of Ireland with the main cities or large towns (with exchanges) that your visitors came from.  So you can get the no. Of visitors from Dublin,  Kildare,  Cork and some of the larger exchanges such as Clondalkin etc.  – You can then cross reference the visits from say the Clondalkin exchange by the other factors available to you from – ‘Traffic sources’ or ‘Content’ such as the keywords they used to find your web site in the search engines.

4#  – Visitor Trending and Loyalty – very useful variations on the information about the web sites visitors, especially if you are trying to get customers and visitors to return to use your site again and again.

5# Browser capabilities

6# Network properties – Both #5 & #6 give information on the software and systems the visitor has on their computer – and this in turn gives you an indication of how your web site is viewed and in some cases if it’s viewed at all!!   -   Every computer and its software is replaced by an updated version bi- annually ( Moore’s Law),  so to know if your customers are governed by this law – or if your target market  are using older computers with a ‘low resolution screen’ and an older version of Internet explorer or a slow network connection such as dial up can help you make informed decisions around the set up and complexity of the web site.  Even a small change such as smaller images with a smaller file size will load faster, this in turn keeps the viewer on the page to make a decision to investigate what they see further – which may lead to a purchase or phone call.  However if your bounce rate is high and the majority of your target market are on older machines with slow internet – they just click off your website – you can now determine why with the help of Google analytics – is it because they’re waiting too long for your site to load, or because your web page doesn’t fit on their screen size or the majority of screen sizes viewing your site.  It can be a crucial bit of information – devices get smaller but people want larger screens to view some content.  Knowing what your visitors and target market are using can be very important to tweak this version of your website or for the next version  / re design of your website.

For a free tool analytics is very versatile and when you spend some time discovering the features you soon get to thinking, ‘ I should be paying a market research company for this kind of information’.  It is quite in depth and so much so I won’t get through it all in this post. But I will continue with the main menu categories ‘Traffic sources’ & ‘Content’ in my next blog update.

If I can finish by relating it to my own situation, as a web developer and seo analyst I have an industry perspective on this kind of feedback.  But as someone that has a construction / property related company also – I still get new and useful information.  The property market is in dire straits at the moment and everyone is cutting prices and customers are shopping around and getting deals – the whole landscape is changing. So with an eye on the overheads and armed with Google analytics I’ve been going over the information to see what the best course of action for my web site is.  Within 15 to 20 minutes of looking at the trends and information over the last 6 months ( I have looked further back as well, before I make any changes that might preclude some web viewers ) its apparent to me that I can make some changes to my pages from a design point of view – i.e. only 1% of people looking at my site were doing so on a small screen, such as 800px X 600px – this gives me more leeway to put some more information on the page, such as customer reviews of our services.  Currently the web sites pages have been designed in such a way as to make sure they ‘condense’ down to fit on a smaller screen.  Another fact I’ve gleaned from the analytics feedback is what advertisement links are sending the site traffic, time to try some new placement of ads. A clue to where to try advertising comes from the most popular network that the majority of people are using when finding and viewing my site at present,  Eircom, Google adwords will enable me to place ads on the Eircom search pages – and the high percentage of traffic already arriving at my door from Eircom suggests that this advertising spend will ‘bare fruit’ even in these tough times.

What it will do is give me a simple campaign to set up and manage on adwords – and I’ll post what’s being done and how I’m doing it here.  Of course the Google analytics will be able to tell me how many of the visitors next month come through from the adwords campaign.

The power of search….

There is no point in relaying a series of empty promises and unachievable goals, I will be the first to admit that it is tough market place for all manner of businesses at the moment. As I’ve mentioned in my last post below prices in all commercial and industrial sectors are coming down yet customers can still manage to stay away like a case of ’swine flu’ is on offer with what your selling. Products and services do need this ‘adjustment’ to the gross price to make them more attractive and meet the lowered remuneration that most people and families are being burdened with these days.  It is important to make Ireland more competitive and get some control on the cost of living.  This translates too small and medium sized companies – being competitive, running parallel to some ’stimulus’ with new products / services and  new markets / customers -  are an excellent ‘jumping off’ point on the road to the end of a recession. Lowering your costs to find these new markets and customers is what SEO is all about. As a direction it is moving away from traditional high cost media marketing that businesses find a great deal less effective in the current market.

SEO has had its baptism and there can be no doubt that a page one ranking with Google or one of the large search engines equates to larger volumes of traffic to your web site address. It can be categorized in 3 formats -

Adwords – These are paid listings normally on the right hand side and banner top of a page of search results.  The person searching (or searchee) clicks the result link – a cost is applied to the owner of the web address-  ‘Pay per click’  advertising is the industry term for this.

Adsense – takes the list of the same charged for by each ‘click’ advertisers web sites on the side of an email in an email client like gmail or yahoo mail etc. – ‘Sensing’ what words are in the email being read or the content of the web site you are currently looking at. From this sense it gives you a selection of relevant ads / web site addresses.

At www.valueaddedweb.eu we can manage both adwords and adsense campaigns for you to maximise the high volumes of traffic these advertisements can bring to your web site.  The downsides to this search marketing are : quality of the traffic can have a high percentage of other advertisers soliciting your business and the higher overhead  is attached for the pay per click campaign which brings your web site this traffic.

The 3rd format of search work is very much the more sought after result on a page or search results. It also is over and above the search result that the searching public wish to click. I am referring to ‘Organic’ search results, the central 10 results that make up the page – highlighted by the red box in the image below is the Organic result for our client – Communications Design Ltd. cctv sales and installation in county Longford in the Midlands. No. 1 of the first 10 results on the first page of results.

Number one on page one of search results.

The web site for Communication Design - www.midlandscctvsales.ie did not feature in search results with google, yahoo or Msn (bing) until we were contracted to carry out Search engine optimization works along with a placement of a live video link from a networked cctv camera. Using the feed from the distributors IP feed (Intellex) we designed a page and made changes to all of the web sites content on all other pages to make the site search, and search at the top of its chosen keywords within the markets they wish to sell and install security equipment.

Live video feed

The next stage for this client will be taken up from the analytical feed back we receive that is likened to a marketing department. What are customers using to find the site and using this and much more information we will build in a change in keywords to increase traffic further along side links to other sites that contain more information on the cctv industry, installations & sales in the Midlands.   I can come back to these sites results to show further improvements in a future post. Next time I’ll show how our Adwords campaign works.

If this is of interest to businesses or org’s out there please do contact us for some ‘organic’ growth for your company or push traffic to your web site with management of your Google adwords or adsense campaigns. The cherry on the cake from any businesses point of view is that organic SEO works no matter the size of your business and can be low cost and once off for a small business and very reasonable for larger businesses in an ongoing format.  It is flexible for the return a web site will see on the back of a page one listing on the world’s biggest search engines.  No longer do you have to make huge payments to the yellow pages just to see volumes of customers that the directory used to provide. One directory, one ad, fixed in print with just the phone to take the customers query is prehistoric compared to search and web sites.

Mike J. Fleming

Hello and welcome to my “all things web” blog…..

Hi, I’m Mike J. Fleming and I make up one half of the development team at valueaddedweb.eu – Ricki Brennan is my co-designer and ‘partner’ in our web design and seo company. We are both seasoned in the industry with a great deal of knowledge between us and the belief that we can help small & medium businesses get the advantages from trading / advertising on the Internet that our companies have benefited from without the hefty price tags associated with web design and normal forms of advertising your company.

I have a construction consultancy company called Conspect.ie that has suffered during this property market crash / construction downturn and to be completely honest the numbers of customers getting in touch with us is very low, especially during the first half of the year. I was expecting this as the bottom of the market has not been reached as far as house prices are concerned. My approach has been to wait it out and adjust the prices for our services slightly, cut my cloth to meet my measure so to speak, I could not justify pouring more and more money into advertising to try and drag just a few more customers in while some of my competitors have reduced prices by up to a third. These are the non-professional competitors forcing prices down – so I’m left with having to make sure I can discount on my prices to sign up new  clients when they ring to enquire – how can you do that and spend more on the advertising overhead?

This is the beauty of the Internet and web based businesses, the overheads are super low annually – a simple web site and a domain name (yoursitename.com etc. ) can be as little as €109 per year to keep running, out there 24 hours a day – through lunchtime – it never closes. You’d be surprised how many people email us at 9 or 10 at night or during lunchtime!  The customers always find the company because we have search engine optimization work done on our site that ensures we always appear in the top pages on a search with Google or Yahoo. I’m not talking about paid advertising on the search engines either.

Anyway since the end of May things have picked up and I’m quite busy with construction work, a flutter in the market so to speak – But to show how the search engine work can benefit a web site I’ll post up details in the coming weeks of 2 or 3 web sites that I’m working on for companies. The sites have been around for a while but they do not list anywhere with the big two search engines (Google & Yahoo)  – We have just begun our search engine works so they are on the way to making it on to page one for the keywords relating to the services they provide. The design works are basic static sites with a home, about us, services and contact page with a form for customers to get in touch.           The web design work is from the €199 package price from http://www.valueaddedweb.eu/

The search engine SEO work is quoted on a site by site basis; we view your web site and discuss your needs before we give a fixed price for either monthly work or 6 monthly contracts for SEO. There are all sorts of crazy over priced  figures given to small companies for this type of work and also a great deal of scamming companies out there promising results they just cannot provide. So watch and wait for the next post here on this blog and the details of the sites we are working on will be put up and you can follow them on the journey to page one on Google.