After your website has been up and running for a while it is important to start to evaluate how well it is performing. There are two sides to this, one being how many visitors you are attracting to the site and two, how successful your website is at converting these customers to sales or enquiries. There are a number of ways in which you can do this but all of them require you having some sort of statistics package to allow you to compare results over time. Since Google improved their privacy terms, it is now harder to see what searches have been made on the search engines to find your site. But you will be able to see the source of each visitor, i.e. if they have found you on Google, Bing, through a social media site or a link on another site or if they have come to you directly by typing your web address in at the top. Once you know how they have found you, you can often start to drill down to find out what pages they have visited, how long they spent on the page and which page they left at. This data can […]
How to launch a new website
If you have recently had a website designed then you will need to consider who you are going to promote it when it goes live. The search engines can take a little while to index all of your pages, and even when it does there is no guarantee that you will rank high enough to attract a large number of visitors. To make your website rank higher you need to have great SEO behind it and constantly be updating the site to not only improve the rankings but even to maintain them. A good way to get traffic straight to your website is to use paid for advertising such as Google Adwords or Facebook ads. These can go live almost instantly and if you have set the campaigns up correctly, you can get the right people to your site the day it goes live. When setting up any paid for advertising you need to know what you are doing as errors can be costly and you may find that your budget gets used up quickly with little qualified traffic to your site. Social media is another good way to promote your new site and best of all, most of it […]
Using analytics to improve your web design
Designing a website from scratch can be a tricky process and you may not know exactly what will and what won’t work until it is all up and running and you can track the progress. Analytics are vitally important to the success of your website and you should find a reliable statistics package to allow you to get the most from the results. Goole offer a great free analytics program which will allow you to track a huge number of different stats such as visitors to your site, pages they entered on, pages they left on, how they landed on your site e.g. from a search engine or referred from another site and also what device they were using to browse your website. This information can be like gold to you and your business and will give you an insight in to what your customers do. It can also show you what parts of the site they appear to like and importantly what parts they dislike. If for example a huge number of your customers are leaving at the checkout process then it could mean that it is too complicated or that they have got to that page without being […]
Digital marketing at a glance
Digital marketing has been around for some time now, but many business owners still don’t fully understand what it is and how best to use it to market their products and/or their brand. Digital marketing is the use of media such as TV, Radio, Email, Text messaging and social media along with other media formats to promote your business. Social media marketing is on the increase and many companies have quickly caught on to the benefits of marketing in this way and being able to quickly share information. Some forms of digital marketing, such as TV ads are expensive and therefore require a lot of consideration before exploring this avenue. Email marketing is done by many companies. Some send out monthly or weekly newsletters to inform their clients of any new industry or company related news and others only send out emails to clients when they have a new product launch or specific offer they want to share. The beauty of digital marketing is it is often a lot easy to track results that magazine publications or leaflet drops for example and this can allow you more control on ensuring you get a good return on your investment.
Improving the conversion rate on your website
If you have a website for your business then you may be constantly checking where you are in the search engine rankings and the number of visitors you get to your site. This is important but you should also check what your visitors are doing once they land on your site. If you are receiving traffic to the site but are not benefiting from enquiries or sales then it may be time to revisit the content within your website and have a look at what is happening when people come to your site from the search engines. There are some great analytics packages out there that will track the flow of customers through your website showing you what pages they clicked through too and also which pages they left on. If for example you find that people are leaving on the home page without clicking though to subsequent pages then it may be that your site is too busy and they cannot find what they are looking for or that maybe you are targeting the wrong audience.