A great website that few people will see will not get the marketing results you desire, this is much more important now since the explosion of online marketing. The internet is now the dominant platform for online marketing yet too many businesses are failing to fully capture the potential from online marketing. Why is this you may ask? Simple, the answer is lack of knowledge of available tools and a fear of spending money without measuring the ROI. (more…)
Everyone is looking for exceptional value in 2011 as recession bites. But there are plenty of businesses bucking the trend. Here are just 4 tips to help your e-commerce business or online brochures website get a competitive edge in 2011.
Avinash Kaushik author of Web Analytics 2.0 spoke at WSI’s Excellence & Innovation conference. Avinish gave an insightful keynote speech on Web Analytics. Discussing the ways in which Web Analytics has changed.
Isn’t it about time you started managing your website like your sales people? Everyone knows if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Although most companies now have a website, very few company Directors get any viable and actionable information on their website, worst still many Sales & Marketing Managers don’t value their website like their sales and marketing teams.
In an economic environment where value for money is important; where everyone needs sales and new accounts and where there is extreme pressure on costs, “it is a relatively easy win for companies to make more out of their websites” says Steve Harvey-Franklin Internet Consultant with WSI, “most senior executives and marketers should seek training on at least the basics of Internet Marketing such as Search Marketing, Web Analytics and Social Media, so that they can understand the jargon, realise what hidden profits they could be tapping into and better manage their own web marketing agency.”
So what are the key steps to make more out of your internet marketing budget?
Goals may include:
Ie anything that you consider valuable economically or to your brand
Targets may include: Increasing Sales or Leads. This may be additionally broken down to include:
As your system gathers data, you can then start to hone in and ask very specific questions to determine what is making you money and what is losing you money, then your marketing investment decisions become very easy.
For Example:
| Question | Metric |
| Who visited this page? | Number of unique visitors |
| Where did they come from? | Referring site, organic search, PPC Advert, Social Media Influence |
| Should I be iphone Friendly? | Number of Mobile Device Visitors, & their Bounce / Conversion Rate |
| What are My best keywords? | Conversion rate on specific keywords |
| What are best / worst pages? | Time on Page, Number of page Visits |
| Is Optimisation working (SEO)? | Number of organic keywords found on |
| Is Social Media Working? | Conversion rate from Social Media websites |
Once you can focus on a specific section of the site that is driving the most interest, the marketing campaign can be fine tuned or even reduced, by focussing on what is successful or by refining what is not successful. For example, on the same Keyword :
This process is known as split testing or multi variant testing
Steve Harvey-Franklin commented that he has seen “remarkable results for our customers by testing and varying significant elements on page. If we can move a client’s conversion rate from 1% to 1.5% their sales are actually increasing by 50%, who wouldn’t be interested in increasing their sales by such volumes?”
Google Landing Page Analysis
In tests that Google performed, they increased their own sign up conversion rate by 56% by testing and making 4 relatively simple changes. In the image above. The page on the right outperformed the page on the left by 56%.
Mike Smith from Ripley Training who runs courses on Internet Marketing and Web Analytics commented that “the need for this level of knowledge, and the results that our courses can drive are switching senior executives onto our new Internet Marketing Courses……. where we educate them to improve their return on internet investment ”
Most businesses today do not take advantage of how important it is to test regularly. The key for any business wanting to achieve online success is knowing how to communicate to your target audience and knowing that all parties do not act on the same principles. This also allows you to figure out your online ad spend in an effective manner. The average online conversion today is between 1% and 2%, which means that a large portion of ad budgets is not being used effectively.
The key is really to keep the testing simple and uncomplicated and once you have established your benchmarks then you can start the process to target, measure and refine. This can be a simple process or a more complicated one but the key is simply testing, testing and more testing of the right things and you will increase your online conversion.
It has been a popular criticism of Google Analytics for some time now that it didn’t allow the creation of more than 4 separate conversion goals. All that changes today with the introduction of a range of new goal functionality.
Google Analytics now allows for the creation of up to 20 Goals per profile. In addition to expanding the number of goals available, Google has also expanded the types of goals available, to include ‘threshold’ goals for time on site per visit and pageviews per visit.
Tracking goals/conversions is a key performance indicator which can provide highly valuable data enabling you’re website to reach its fullest potential. If you are not currently tracking goals, you should start today!
Google Analytics now allows goals to be organised into 4 sets. Each set containing up to 5 different goals. These sets introduce a new way for the additional goal data to be accommodated within the Google Analytics Reports.
Previously a goal was typically defined as a pageview that resulted from the completion of a valued action on a website. For example the checkout completion page following a successful online sale. Now goals can be based on actions which do not relate to the viewing of a page. Goals can now be based on how much time a visitor spends on the site or how many pages the visitor visits.
i) Time Based Goals
Time based conversions are triggered after a visitor has spent a certain amount of time on a website. A goal can now be configured to register a conversion when a user has spent a specified amount of time on a website. Interestingly time based goals can now also be configured to register conversions if a user leaves a site before a certain amount of time. This can be useful if you wish to set a goal up as a failure metric.
ii) Pageview Based Goals
Another new goal type is pageviews per visit. In a similar fashion to time based goals, a conversion is triggered when a visit exceeds a certain number of pages. Like time based views, pageview based goals can also be triggered by virtual pageviews.
iii) URL Destination Goals
Traditional goals have been renamed URL destination goals. These goals can still be constructed using regular expressions, head match or exact match to identify a page that represents a particular conversion. Now with the availability of up to 20 goals you can easily measure all of those micro conversions (RSS subscription, email signup, reaching a product page, downloading white paper… etc, etc, etc). And yes, you can still use a virtual pageview as a URL Destination goal.
Google has spent some time updating the funnels interface. Funnels are still limited to 10 steps. The big question is, do we still need funnels now we have the ability to setup up to 20 goals. The answer is unquestionably yes! Funnels provide a nice visualisation of critical processes and in particular abandonment rate.
If in the past you have been tracking lots of goals through different profiles, you may want to consider consolidating these goals into one profile. The benefit is you can have all your conversions in one interface allowing much easier analysis.
A key point to remember is visitors can only convert at each goal level once per visit. This is the way it has always been and is likely to remain.
Creating new goals will not modify your historical data, only future data. So all newly created goals will only track future traffic!
In today’s challenging economic climate, data-driven marketing and website decision making is becoming an increasingly important aspect. Google has recognised the importance of this trend with the recent introduction of its Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ). The GAIQ course covers web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools.
Today we are pleased to announce and congratulate the success of one of our Internet Marketing Consultants – Chris Mann for attaining this highly regarded and recognised professional qualification. Chris becomes one of the very first web professionals in the country to gain the new qualification.
The new qualification will allow WSI Yorkshire to further enhance its web analytics services, training offerings and mentoring services. The Google Analytics Individual Qualification compliments our existing status as a Google Adwords Qualified Company.
