Pressures on consumer spending and retail turnover are now widely reported. However, e-tailing, and online activity continues to grow strongly - see section 2. Clothing, shoes and accessories are now bought as frequently as books and travel, and growth in online spending and web advertising continues apace.
I hope, therefore, you find some material in our newsletter to help you build your own online activities, and gain your share of this continued shift of income to the web.
1. NET ISSUES
Important issues that could impact on your website approach
Web Analytics - Know your site performance
It is important to know how your business is doing. That’s easily said, but work pressures make it difficult for many site owners to really study the web statistics for their site. Plus, the language of web statistics can be very confusing, with a vast number of technical terms, many of them very similar.
We hope the following simple steps will help you to select the key measures and start a regular process for reviewing your site statistics.
Step 1 – Choose your web analytics package
This is the easy part. There are many effective packages available including Matrixstats, Webalizer, and AW Stats. If in doubt, we strongly suggest you look at Google Analytics – it is now widely adopted – it is highly intuitive, presents the data very clearly, and is easy to use. Moreover, you can choose the key measures you want to see on the tracking dashboard.
Step 2 – Decide which are the key metrics you want to track
Although there are hundreds of terms and data points, initially it may help to focus on the following three questions:
• How many visitors are you getting – and what is the trend?
• Where do visitors come from – eg which search engines, using what terms?
• What did they do on your site – ie which page did they land on/leave from; how long did they stay, and which pages were visited?
Glossary of Key Terms
On the NCS site we give a list of the key terms – please click here to visit our Web Analytics Glossary - we will be keeping this up to date, so you may wish to link to the page.
In brief, however, the following terms in the glossary cover the three key questions above:
• How many visitors – “Visits” or “Unique Visitors” - not "hits" which is highly misleading – can overstate true Visitors by 90%
• Where did they come from – “Referrers”, “ Referrals” “Keywords” or “Search Terms”
• What did they do – “Entry” “Exit” or “Visit Duration”
The glossary highlights other key measures to give you a fuller picture.
Step 3 – Define your review process
We suggest a monthly process may work best initially, but to fully understand the factors behind the visitor trends, we suggest you track the following data each month also:
a) Google Page Rank of your key pages – and of your 3 key competitors
b) The volume of Google back links, ie the links in to your site – the quality and volume of those links are a major determinant of your Page Rank
c) The ranking of your site in the key search engines – it is influenced by (a) and (b)
A simple pro-forma will enable you to track this monthly, and highlight progress on your link building and Page Rank, relative to key competitors. You will quickly want to drill further down to build a closer picture, and probably to increase the frequency of your reviews.
If professional help would help to understand the data, or to review your site’s performance, we would be pleased to give a free consultation - click here for further information.
2. NET HAPPENINGS
News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad
Digital channels are still developing strongly.......
Text messaging - In Jan 2008 volumes reached a record monthly total of 6.3 billion – up 1 billion on Oct 2007. (text-it)
Broadband adoption – 90% of web users now have broadband access to the web, ie in December 2007. (ONS)
Mobile web use – 17.3m people accessed the web in this way in Jan 2008, up 1m since Oct 2007 (text.it) – other data shows strong increase in mobile web shopping use.
Social Networking – approx 40% of UK adults regularly visit social network sites. They visit on average 23 times per month, and spend 5.25 hours each month on them (Ofcom) - 800k Britons visited a social network site each month via their mobile phone in Q1 2008. (Neilson)
Online Shopping Update - UK figures show continued strong growth…...
• UK online customers increased by 27% for November/December 2007, with a 46% increase in the amount spent. (Actinic)
• Globally, biggest growth in web spending is on clothing – up from 20% to 36% in past 2 years. Key factor is familiarity - 60% go back to the same site regularly. (Neilson/nma)
• UK internet shopping spend is likely to reach £44bn by 2012, with 2008 spend growing at c32%. (Verdict)
Internet Promotion – the shift away from traditional media continues…....
• UK online advertising spend grew at 28% in 2007, to reach £2.8bn pa. (iabuk.net)
• Total UK advertising is growing at 4.3% pa – online advertising is now growing nine times faster. (PWC)
• Online advertising already exceeds press classifieds and regional newspapers – by 2009, it is likely to overtake TV advertising. (PWC/Iab)
• NCS has extensive experience in Pay Per Click – the primary web promotion option – click here to learn more about it.
3. NET TIPS
Some hints you could consider
Pay attention to Google - Within the UK, Google’s share of search results for March was 88% - compares with Yahoo 4%, and Microsoft 4% (Hitwise/nma) – shows why your position in the Google results is so critical.
Don’t be slow – Google announced in April that they would check landing page loading times and will factor this in to the quality score for the site. We have, of course, stressed in many previous newsletters the benefits of landing pages that load quickly – if you have concerns, please contact us for an initial free consultation.
4. NCS FOCUS
News and services from NCS that might help
Site design should support Pay Per Click.
It is important to point your PPC adverts at the most relevant page. If a user searches for “1960s Stratton Powder Compact”, they don’t want to be taken to the Home Page of a site selling new powder compacts – especially if they are not Stratton!
Each search results page can have its own unique page address (url), so when we set up the PPC campaign, we can point an advert for 1950’s handbags or an advert for 1960’s Stratton Powder Compacts at the appropriate pages. In fact anything you can search for on the site, we could point an advert at.
This makes the landing pages much more relevant to the search and results in better conversion rates for the online shop.
Email marketing – management information is key
When mailing newsletters it is important to get accurate feedback on:
• who opens your newsletter
• who clicks on which links (i.e. which products they are interested in)
• which links are the most popular (i.e. which products)
• who is unsubscribing from the newsletter
• which of your email addresses is out of date causing your newsletters to bounce
Accurate management information provides the data you need to develop your mailings, target your products and manage your customer base.
NCS provides all these details via online reports which customers can access direct for all the Newsletters we send. If you would like to start sending newsletters with full online management information support, contact us.
Developments in web marketing, site design, and web services
Social Networking and Mobile web use remain the two liveliest
issues in Web marketing currently - good use of both is a platform for getting better value from your site. In the next issue, we give an action check list on Social Networking, so this month we lead on Mobile web use – I hope the article and the rest of the content help you win more users for your site.
1 NET ISSUES
Significant issues that could impact on your website approach
Using Mobile access to bring more visitors to your site
Use this approach to increase your site traffic through Mobile web access:
a) Scale of web usage - using mobiles to access the web has stepped up sharply over the past year - according to Scoot UK, web traffic from mobile devices increased by over 4000% in the last 18 months. Apple hold by far the greatest share of this - their devices now handle more than 70% of mobile traffic on the web.
Even a year ago nearly 70% of i–phone users visited web sites via their phone on a daily basis.
b) Most popular uses - the most popular use of mobiles on the web is for email (59% of users); news headlines (46%) and social networking (41%)
c) Web brands – the most popular web brands were Google (55%); Facebook (42%); BBCNews (40%); E-bay (30%) and YouTube (77%)
d) Trends - Gartner reported in May that, worldwide, smart-phone sales increased by 85% year-on-year, so web usage trend seems likely to continue growing.
Clearly website owners should consider carefully the extent of the need to tailor their sites to suit mobile phone visitors, and how best to do this.
e) Our Approach - NCS assesses the degree of mobile relevance for all sites we develop, especially potentially high usage sites, e.g. information only sites, forums, social networking, sites addressing young user market.
Lower priority sites e.g. within certain industrial/commercial sectors will be identified also with, typically, a different technical solution being offered. Optimal domain usage, i.e. whether .mobi is best option, or whether non mobile domains will be adequate, are considered also.
f) Technical solutions - the optimal technical solution will be considered, e.g. for simple sites– the existing web site will often suffice for majority of mobile phones, with minimal content change needed, and .mobi use not needed.
For complex sites, e.g. for mobile-relevant sites with high content levels, (e.g. offering a wide range of products) a .mobi domain may be appropriate; the text content may need simplification; use of the flash/javascript content of existing site may need removing and image formats may need changing.
We will consider with clients the optimal level of search spend, once the site is up, to achieve the necessary level of visibility for the site.
g) Cost - the cost of specifying and developing fully mobile-friendly sites depends on the profile of individual sites. In some instances an effective solution can be delivered for minimal additional cost, as all requirements can be incorporated within the basic site specification.
In other cases it may be necessary to radically tailor the site content for mobile visitors - effectively a separate, mobile - orientated site is needed, although it can detect the mobile device and serve up a different set of pages suitable to them.
Under all options we closely tailor the price to reflect the work needed, with maximum re-use of existing content.
2. NET HAPPENINGS
News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad
Mobile web usage - UK web traffic from mobile devices has increased by over 4000% in the last 18 months. Apple hold by far the greatest share of this - their devices now handling more than 70% of all mobile traffic (scoot.co.uk).
Social Networking - Facebook remains dominant – in the US 50% of the population is now on Facebook (Dreamgrow.com) – followed by YouTube and Twitter.
Online Shopping Update - UK online shopping is growing at 18% pa – the UK is Europe’s leading e-retail economy, with online sales likely to reach c£75bn in 2011 (imrg.org). By contrast, overall retail sales have actually shown falls in recent months.
Internet Promotion – double digit growth in online advertising spend is expected in 2011 – being driven by higher social media use, video, and display advertising. Paid search and mobile show strong growth also (nma.co.uk).
3. NET TIPS
Some hints you could consider
Use correct anchor text - when you put links to pages on your site, use terms for the clickable link which are the terms people will use when searching in a Search Engine for that activity. e.g. if you are a golf equipment e-tailer, and want to link to your new products page, don’t use “our new products” for the link, but describe the page more specifically, for example, “latest golf hybrids and drivers” – Search Engines attach far greater weight to specific terms like these.
Having said this, it is also important to vary the anchor text in your links – so don’t put the same text in all your links.
Get a long tail – long tail keywords are those which have several words, not a single word as the search term. Recent research (axandra.com) has highlighted that long tail keywords are much more likely to result in a sale than more general ones and often have less competition from other sites.
Thus, you will get both better conversion rates and more visitors if you focus on long tail keywords, rather than a single word, for your keyword.
Get on top - research (optify.net/axandra.com) has confirmed that if you get to the top positions on page 1 of Google, you not only get more clicks (the top 3 get 60% of the clicks), but you get a higher click through rate. Optify conclude that if you you double your site promotion spend to get to from 2nd position to 1st, you might triple your visits for that keyword.
NCS has 10 years experience in Search Engine marketing, so please contact us if you need help with this.
Think Firefox – the lastest Statcounter browsers statistics show that by May, Firefox held a share of 42% of browser usage - Internet Explorer was below 25% with Google Chrome increasing to nearly 26%. Clearly, Web owners need to check that their sites operate effectively with each of these browsers.
4. NCS FOCUS
News and services from NCS that might help
New Sites – we have launched a number of sites since the last newsletter – just visit our News Release page for a sample or click on our Portfolio page to see a much wider selection of our work.
Content Development - Google are reducing the rankings of shallow content sites, ie sites with minimal content. So be wary of relying on a minimal, passive, brochure site, to gain the search engine ranking you need. We have massive experience developing content for sites across a wide range of sectors – just approach us if you think your content needs enhancing.
