Archive for 2008

Well fitted web analytics for fitted furniture company

August 11th 2008 by Andrew Banks in General, Google AnalyticsNo Comments »

Strachan, a fitted bedroom and home office furniture company in Leeds, are a client I have been working for with prego*, to give them further insight into their website traffic and online marketing activity.

Strachan’s extensive range of fitted bedroom furniture is being marketed through a range of online marketing activities but lacked deep analytical reporting to identify where marketing spend was working best and where marketing campaigns could be optimised to drive a better return on investment.

Through the work of prego*, and deep integration of Google Analytics into the Strachan Furniture website, Strachan now have a full insight into each and every enquiry coming through their website and into every penny spent on online marketing – allowing them to shape their marketing and get a much lower cost per enquiry.

AOL to buy Bebo for $850 million

March 13th 2008 by Andrew Banks in General, WebsitesNo Comments »

Various websites are reporting that AOL has come through as the buyer of Bebo for the small sum of $850 million.

The BBC is reporting “Rumours that the social network Bebo would be swallowed up by someone have been swirling around for at least a year. Google, Yahoo, MySpace and Viacom have all been names as potential suitors. Now the truth is out – and it’s AOL which has picked up the prize for $850m”

Time Warner have now confirmed this with a statement on their website and have also confirmed that this is a purely cash deal.

“AOL announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Bebo (http://www.bebo.com),a leading global social media network. Together with its AIM and ICQ personal communications network, the acquisition will give AOL a premier position in the fast growing world of social media with a network of approximately 80 million unique users.”

I strongly suspect that the ongoing saga with Microsoft trying to by Yahoo is going to force a period of consolidation between the larger players in social marketing and search as they try to strengthen their position in the market place. It’s started with Bebo and I predict we will see a lot more of this in the coming months as organisation try to strengthen their position and protect themselves from being bought out.
So who do you expect to be next and are we seeing another major dot com boom era? Should we expect the same as last time and prepare for the bust to follow?

Dear BBC - I am not blind

February 27th 2008 by Andrew Banks in Websites4 Comments »

Well it’s a sad day for the BBC Website in my opinion.

They’ve finally gone live with the new BBC homepage and I really don’t see why it needed to change. As I’ve blogged about previously, the BBC have often lead the way with their homepage but this time I think they’ve hit rock bottom.

Some excellent features have made there way into the new homepage but overall I’m just not convinced.

What I like:

• The ability to specify my own content
• Allowing me to re-organise the homepage based on how I like the page to be laid out
• Strangely, the clock. But only from a geeky technical perspective
• The fact it works just as well (or at least degrades gracefully) without JavaScript - well done to the technical team responsible for this

What I dislike:

• That 25% of my screen is dominated by the main image
• That the whole colour scheme changes dependant on which main image/feature I view - very off putting
• The size! Man, the BBC must have some research that shows the majority of their website audience are visually impaired because the sheer scale of every screen element is huge. I myself, like the majority of web user, have good vision so please don’t give me a website that is so large by default
• Web 2.0 overkill - the whole page just looks like the design team looked for every Web 2.0 cliché and put it into one page

Hopefully this will develop like all previous BBC home pages and some of these niggles I have will be removed over time.

Tracking Paid Search in Google Analytics from Microsoft and Yahoo - and other campaigns

February 22nd 2008 by Andrew Banks in Google AnalyticsNo Comments »

Just a quick post today to highlight an excellent article that has been published on the Official Google Analytics Blog.

Many of the websites I have inherited come with Google Analytics running on them and all too often these are just set up with basic stats tracking and maybe a bit of e-commerce and funnel stuff going on. Obviously AdWords campaigns are also tracked if auto tagging has been enabled in the customers AdWords account.

What many people don’t realise is the ease in which you can track Microsoft AdCenter PPC campaigns, Yahoo PPC ads and pretty much any other online marketing campaign you have running.

I won’t go into the details here as the article on the Official Google Analytics Blog covers all this. It’s definitely worth taking the time to read as being able to measure your traffic and conversion rates from each and every online source is essential if you want to make sure you are spending your online marketing budget in the right place.

Microsoft Gatineau – Is it worth using?

February 21st 2008 by Andrew Banks in Google Analytics, Microsoft Gatineau3 Comments »

I’ve recently started trialling Microsoft’s new Google Analytics challenger, Microsoft Gatineau and thought it would be worthwhile posting a few thoughts here for the un-initiated.

For those who aren’t aware of what Microsoft Gatineau is, it is a web analytics package that Microsoft has been developing based on top of Deep Metrix, which Microsoft recently acquired.

Is most website owners now use Google Analytics as their analytics tool of choice, I really wondered what I would gain from using Microsoft Gatineau over Google Analytics.

At first glances Microsoft Gatineau offers pretty much the standard bag of data including:

• Visitor tracking
• Hits tracking
• Conversion tracking

However, the user interface is slow, clunky and not intuitive and really lags a long way behind Google Analytics. It shows pretty much the same information but Microsoft have a long long way to go before the user interface and ultimate usefulness of Gatineau comes even close to Google Analytics.

A core benefit of using Microsoft Gatineau over Google Analytics is the direct integration of paid advert reporting from ad campaigns run through the Microsoft AdCenter, in the same way that Google Adwords integrates with Google Analytics.

For those without a Microsoft AdCenter campaign then there’s nothing on the surface that would convert you over from Google Analytics.

Or is there?

One absolute gem of a feature is the ability to cross segment your visitors by:

• Gender
• Age
• Occupation

Wow! Something that was previously only possible to do with logged in and registered users can now be done with general, every day visitors to your website.

Microsoft achieves this by linking up with its Passport system and by logging certain information from a users Microsoft Passport account when they hit your website. Granted, not all users have a passport account but from the websites I have been testing on I’ve seen over 50% of visitors information can be accessed.

How accurate this data is is yet to be seen but this one feature alone will prompt me to add Microsoft Gatineau to every website I launch from now on.

For most serious web marketers Microsoft Gatineau will present them with a more detailed view of who their customers are and how best to market to them.

I certainly won’t be dropping Google Analytics any time soon as Microsoft have some serious catching up to do in the analytics space but I will be running both Google Analytics and Microsoft Gatineau side by side from here on in.

Microsoft to (possibly) buy Yahoo

February 1st 2008 by Andrew Banks in General, SEO / SEM2 Comments »

If reports that are coming to the surface at the moment are to be believed, Microsoft are attempting to purchase Yahoo for $46 billion.

Although this is in it’s very early stages I can’t help wondering what this could mean five years down the line for us involved in online marketing. Microsoft and Yahoo already lag far behind Google in terms of search volumes but could their combined user base help them to catchup with Google in the search market?

The reach of both of these companies is huge, with Microsoft’s dominance in desktop computing they have the potential to push their/Yahoo’s products out to the majority of computer users at will giving them every possibility of catching up with Google. Imaging your default homepage now being Yahoo, your Microsoft Passport and Yahoo accounts being merged, your pictures on your PC being synchronised with Flickr (goodbye Picasa).

One big plus I see in this is the for the pending launch of Microsoft Gatineau. The biggest feature I see within Gatineau is the ability to profile your website users by age and gender, based on information from their passport account. If the same information can be harvested from a Yahoo account then the accuracy and validity of this data is massively increased.

There are many potential benefits to come from this deal, if it happens, and it will be interesting to see how this develops.

This also seems to be backed up by a report from Reuters and the full letter to the Yahoo Board has been publiched by the Time Online

Five tips to consider when reviewing your Google Analytics KPI’s

January 30th 2008 by Andrew Banks in E-Commerce, Google AnalyticsNo Comments »

I’m often asked by clients which Google Analytics metrics are the most important to measure, how they should be measured and what they should do with them.

As each clients business is different, the top five key metrics will vary, but these below are the five I think every business should be watching, why they should be watching them and what they should be looking for.

1. Number of visits

Although quite an obvious one to keep an eye on, the point I want to raise here is how to monitor this statistic. A lot of young web business become too concerned with this value and scrutinize it on an over regular basis. Although it’s nice in the early days to see the traffic you’re getting (we’ve all been at the stage where we check our stats daily) the best way to get value from this value is to set a target for where you want this value to be over a one, three and six month period.

Once this is in place, it’s down to you to employ a strategy to get the traffic to those levels. I’m not suggesting only checking these value at month one, three and six but instead maybe check these weekly and then fortnightly to ensure your marketing is on track to hit your one, three and six month goals. Do not concentrate on the actual visitor numbers but instead on the trend for these visitor numbers in relation to your targets.

2. Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the proportion of visitors who visit your website and leave before visiting another page. More often than not this suggests the user wasn’t happy with what they saw and decided not to continue into the site.

This can be down to one of a few things, including:

• Inappropriate content on the landing page
• Unlikeable design
• Technical issues (how many people include the Google Analytics code in there error page, which will be contributing to the bounce rate?)

The general guide with the bounce rate statistic is the lower the better and again the guide is to monitor the trend over a period of time, as opposed to becoming overly concerned with the actual figure on a day by day basis.

It’s always worth baring in mind that, on the other hand, in a few cases a high bounce rate is not always symptomatic of a poor website. In the case of blogs where each page is generally a very specific article that may have been linked to from an RSS feed, it is likely that a user will simply visit to read a specific article and not visit any other pages.

3. Conversion rate

Any website is built with a purpose, be it to get someone to contact a company, fill in a registration form or purchase a product. In the case of a blog this could be to subscribe to the RSS feed. They key is that every website has a goal which can be monitored.

The rate at which visitors take one of your predefined goals or ‘positive actions’ is called the conversion rate.

People often ask me which I see as the most important KPI when reviewing a website and for me the conversion rate is the single most relevant figure on any website. A high conversion rate simply states that a large amount of customers are doing what you wanted them to do on your website.

What impacts upon the conversion rate is huge. Generally it’s the right mix of good quality traffic (Note: not necessarily high volumes), a managed customer experience and the right product or service offering as a business.

Seeing the conversion rate as a very high level KPI is key to getting the most value out of it. Google Analytics provides a wealth of more detailed stats on the various factors that affect the conversion rates, which I will pick up on in greater detail in a future article.

Many customers experience low conversion rates and don’t know where to look for solutions, often blaming low traffic volumes or blaming it on the time of year. I’ve not found one website yet where I couldn’t increase its conversion rate, and ultimately revenue and profit, by making improvements to the customer experience. That’s a topic for a whole series of articles to come, as is how to work out whether it’s actually the product that’s at fault.

4. Traffic sources

Search engines have a lot to answer for. Over the last few years there’s been a major push by search engine marketing companies and lots of website owners are becoming savvier about SEO and are naturally moving up the search rankings. This is definitely a good thing but a lot of the business owners I have worked with lose good business sense and seem to be overwhelmed by the traffic that search engines drive to them. It’s not uncommon for a website to receive 90% of its traffic (and ultimately revenue) from visitors who started at Google.

So how many of these businesses could survive if they lost 90% of their revenue? Probably none.

The risk of having 90% of your business coming through one source is too risky and online businesses should look to diversify their online marketing in order to reduce their dependency on such dominant sources such as Google. All it takes is for Google to change their algorithm, or for a company to be removed from Google, and the impact will be felt all the way down to the business’ bottom line.

Then looking at traffic source statistics my advice is to look to increase traffic from all sources over time, but (and this is the key point) to invest more resource into the smaller traffic sources in an attempt for them to be responsible for more of your traffic over time.
Your Google Analytics pie chart for traffic sources should not show any one source of traffic dominating for a long period of time.

5. E-Commerce

If you’re running an e-commerce website and are serious about analytics then you should be using e-commerce transaction tracking in Google Analytics.

Tracking e-commerce transactions allows the actual values of your sales to be monitored which in itself is a great bonus as it allows you to monitor revenue over time. Google Analytics doesn’t just stop here though; this data now becomes available in almost all other Google Analytics reports meaning you can track, amongst other things:

• Revenue and conversion rate per traffic source
• Revenue and conversions rate per keyword
• Revenue per country
• Product performance
• Average order value
• The number of times a user visits before purchasing
• The number of days it takes a user to purchase

Understanding which of your keywords or traffic sources have the highest conversion rate, highest average order value and highest per visit value is an extremely powerful tool in deciding where your marketing spend and effort is best placed.

If you’re not using Google Analytics E-Commerce tracking then you definitely should be.

Allow the customer to find the product - GameStation.co.uk

January 24th 2008 by Andrew Banks in E-Commerce, Websites1 Comment »

Surely one of the most fundamental tasks a customer undertakes when trying to purchase, be it online or offline, is finding the product in the first place. In an online purchasing experience this boils down to one of two things - simple navigation, or more often than not, the search box.

Whilst looking online for a new XBOX game today I landed upon GameStation where I conducted a quick search for Assasin’s Creed (one of the best selling XBOX 360 games at the moment). Suprisingly, GameStation didn’t even sell the game (or so the search results told me). Having been into one of there many retail outlets I know they stock the game - so why wasn’t it on the website?

The problem is with GameStation’s broken search feature not accepting the ‘ character. I’m guessing for security reasons (SQL Injection) they’re stripping certain characters before sending the search into the database. There’s much better ways of protecting from SQL Injection that don’t impact on a customer purchasing experience as much as this approach does, if at all. To see this for yourself simply go to www.gamestation.co.uk and search for “assassin’s creed”. You’ll notice that no search results are returned and your search phrase has been cut down to “assassin” in the search box.

Regardless of the cause of this, the crux is that this will have lost GameStation a certain number of sale, especially over the Christmas period. The search works on Play, Amazon and Game - three of GameStation’s biggest competitors.

I’d be interested to know if the guys at GameStation actually know about this. My suspicion  is that they don’t, but they will be wondering why Amazon, Play and Game outsold them at Christmas.

Microsoft Consolas - A cleartype font for code

January 23rd 2008 by Andrew Banks in ASP.NET / Visual StudioNo Comments »

I’ve stumbled upon a new(?) monospace font from Microsoft developed especially for  viewing code on systems that support ClearType.

Consolas is a monospaced font, designed by Lucas de Groot. It is a part of the new suite of fonts that take advantage of Microsoft’s ClearType font hinting technology. It is bundled with Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, and is available for download for users of Microsoft Visual Studio. Among the six Windows Vista fonts, Consolas is the most similar to Lucida Console or Courier New.

Although changing the font you develop in sounds like a minor thing, it does make staring at code for8+ hours a day much easier on the eye!

BBC Homepage Beta – Jumping on the Web 2.0 band wagon

January 22nd 2008 by Andrew Banks in Websites1 Comment »

The new BBC home page is undergoing some changes and the BBC is after your feedback.

Previously the BBC has launched some excellent versions of their website and BBC.co.uk has been one of the most innovative websites in recent years.

For example, the Glasswall version was outstanding.

However, this time around I think they’ve got a long way to go before this Beta version should be released into live.

So what are the issues?

Ultimately I believe this beta version is suffering from “Web 2.0 Syndrome”, with web 2.0 design being an obvious inspiration for the graphical treatment of the homepage. There is also an abundance of Web2.0 features and technology in use on the site – such as AJAX and user generated/specified content.

A lot of the new features will be really useful and are in tune with the BBC’s ways of innovating on BBC.co.uk - such as specifying your own homepage content, mini widgets for TV and weather panels. These are great ways of using Web 2.0 functionality to allow large amounts of content to be displayed in small screen areas and the way the BBC has implemented them means that the whole page appears to be very responsive and tactile – a great positive for the customer experience.

On the flip side of this the graphical treatment of the page makes it feel like a “BBC for Dummies” website. Al the buttons and panels look like they belong on a touch screen interface as they are big enough for even the fattest of fingers to hit.

From a usability stance I don’t agree with the way colour coding has been used. Typical websites may use colour coding to define sections of a website, for example sport may have a blue nav bar and entertainment may have a red nav bar. What the BBC have done on their site is to provide coloured tabs under the main header image to flip in and out of various features. If these coloured tabs were representative of the section they took you too I would be happy, but what the BBC implemented is a full colour change of the whole page dependent on which main feature you view. It feels almost like a developer said “Hey, look what I can do, and doesn’t it look cool….” and that usability was completely discarded.

My final rant for the day is this…

Why the hell do we need a clock sitting in the top right of the BBC home page? It reminds me of 1999 when websites had JavaScript clocks that followed your mouse around the page. It’s not big ad it’s not clever.