NetNews our ONLINE NEWSLETTER (NetNews July 2008)
Developments in web marketing, site design, and web services
The Online Newsletter from Net Commerce Solutions
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.
Dave Abernethy,
Managing Director,
Net Commerce Solutions Ltd
Tel: (+44) (0) 870 246 7642
info@net-commerce-solutions.co.uk Web site: www.net-commerce-solutions.co.uk
Registered in England and Wales. Company number 4052885: 6 Bramble Close, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, AL5 4AN
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