Bear with me …

It was a cold and wet windy night in Maidstone, when we had finished our Entrepreneurs Circle meeting, hosted by the one and only Ian George.   Most people had gone home, except those who were drawn towards the hotel bar.

Cutting to the chase, the picture below depicts Ian’s Audi A6 just after the arrival of the RAC man

Ian had achieved something quite unique – filling the Audi boot up with boxes and somehow, at the same time, dropping his keys into the boot before shutting.   We’re not sure exactly how (possibly a button being pressed by a box), but the car deadlocked.

After the initial amusement to all, Ian called for help.  Many miles from home, and unable to get into his house anyway (his house keys being on the same bunch as the car key), there started the wait for the RAC man to arrive.

After arrival there was several hours of attempts to get into the car with various rods combined with immense patience.   Efforts were not helped by the fact that the only solution was to somehow get to the boot area, which was blocked by boxes on the back seat.

Much effort later (meaning: hours), the RAC man had got the boxes on the back seat forwards enough to pull down the back seats a bit …

… to be greeted by two big heavy boxes that somehow needed to be moved.   A surgeon would have had an easier job on a complex operation!

At this point I contemplated including the video footage taken over the hours but it was hard to find bits that had little swearing in them.  For those that know Ian though, I can, of course, be persuaded to share.

So there we were, eventually at nearly 1am, an expensive car, normally capable of a good and comfortable ride, but totally useless to the owner, who was beginning to get deflated (which is rare).

Here’s where the website success references come in …

• A company website can be quite an expense, as was the car.
• A company website that works to expectations, provides a useful output.  As does a car.
• A company website that has someone fiddling about with it, with inadequate knowledge or tools, is not going to provide the best result.  A deadlocked Audi A6 with an RAC man trying to get a result with various rods, did not achieve results.

This is something we see all the time: websites that have cost companies good money but aren’t going anywhere (like the Audi).  We see people who (often with good intentions) try various things to get more results from the website but ultimately aren’t equipped with what’s needed.

In our view, website owners need to use the best tools to fully understand where websites have opportunities to improve.  Those tools help to unlock the potential of the website to thrive.  And of course, one such tool is A1WebStats.

Back to the Audi A6 with the keys locked in the boot, the answer came in the form of smashing a window, climbing in, and retrieving the keys, that would let the car come back to life and fulfil its full potential.

A1WebStats acts like that smashed window – when used properly, it cuts straight to the meat of website problems so that they can be addressed quickly and effectively.

As for the poor RAC man – he’d only ever been beaten (without resorting to smashing) by one car before and this was his number two.  It became a matter of pride but however much he tried with the tools available, they weren’t good enough.  This is much like people in companies plodding away with websites, unable to make them get the best results.   Being empowered with the right answer though (for the car: smashing the window; for the company website: A1WebStats) leads to success.

Do you have an ‘Audi A6 with keys locked in the boot’ of a website?   Please do feel to speak to us – we’re happy to give some free advice, and to back that up with evidence as shown through website statistics data.

• A1WebStats
• Lead Forensics
• Leads Explorer
• WOW Analytics

While all systems differ in terms of functionality, there is one factor that’s particularly important to consider:

How many visitors can be tracked within the monthly fee charged?

The price of data

Data related to website visitors, particularly data that’s been refined into something that makes sense to people, isn’t hugely expensive but at the same time, it’s not free.   Granted, anyone with a bit of knowledge could find out more about their website visitors but it’s generally considered to be hard work in comparison to the various website analytics solutions on offer.

In short, if it doesn’t cost too much to get such website visitors data, then it’s probably worth it.

It also depends on what type of data is gained.  While some people are happy with having the company name, url, and phone number, others may want full address details.

Many people want more than purely being able to identify the basic information.  They may want to look deeper into how that visitor interacted with the website, whether they’d been to the website before, and more.    They may also want to do more with the data – for example, edit with their own comments and email onto a colleague.

Ultimately, it’s not a case of there being a price for the data itself, but there being a price for the whole package being offered, which includes the data and how it can be used in various ways.

But what about limitations?

We often get people asking us what the limitations are on the numbers of visitors that can be tracked (per month) within A1WebStats.   The reason they’re asking is because they’ve been quoted prices (from other analytics software suppliers) that are based on a certain number of visitors.

For example, someone was being quoted over £100 per month just to have access to a maximum of 1,000 visitors.  That may work out at very little cost per visitor in reality, but for businesses that have higher levels of website visitors it can get costly.

The purpose of this blog is, when researching a supplier of website visitors data, for you to ask the question:

How many visitors can I have tracked per month, and for what price?

… and then make sure there’s documentary proof of that!

At A1WebStats we keep it very simple – all subscribers, regardless of level of subscription, can track up to 20,000 visitors per month.   Before you get your calculator out, that’s very cost-effective!  That includes access to all information related to each visitor.

One of the reasons that we give a free 30 day trial is because it gives people a chance to see exactly what they’d get if they carried on to pay after the trial.   In 99% of cases, our subscribers all fit within the standard 20,000 visitors per month and for the rare 1% there are easy and cost-effective ways to keep full access to the data.

So the takeaway from this is to first of all have an idea of your typical number of monthly website visitors (Google Analytics will show you that) so that you can ask relevant questions when considering a supplier such as A1WebStats or other companies that provide similar systems.

I got lazy

He was licking his wounds because he lost a client when it was completely avoidable.  That loss was £500 per month off his income.

Going back in time over a year beforehand we’d discussed A1WebStats with that agency, including how they could white label the system and offer it to their clients.  The message from us was words to the effect of:

If you give your clients extra value, through the power of A1WebStats, then you will retain loyalty and also gain extra business when the stats show that clients need more of your help.

What happened to the agency was that they didn’t think it was important enough to buy into the concept of detailed stats analysis.  The £500 per month client they lost was a company that discovered it was possible to identify companies who visited their website, and boy were they unhappy that their web agency hadn’t brought such knowledge to them!    The reality was that the end client had lost huge amounts of potential business over the months purely because they weren’t picking up on details of companies who had visited their website (and then acting on that information).

So, with the web agency sacked and them now having (painfully) learnt their lesson, they’ve bought into the value of what we offer them in order to strengthen client relationships.

Another disaster waiting in the wings

Yesterday we contacted another company – this time, one that deals specifically in SEO.  We noticed a blog they wrote related to IP lookups and thought it’d make sense to offer them a trial of our system.  Amongst their response were the words:

I am aware of your service but it is not of any interest to us

That came from the marketing manager and demonstrates a total lack of awareness of the danger they cause themselves, plus the damage they’re doing to their clients.

So we looked at their client list and identified that, although many had Google Analytics installed on their sites, there was nothing stronger than that.  In short, their clients are missing out on knowing which companies are going to their websites, plus a lot more useful data on top of that (which Google Analytics can’t provide).

This brings us onto …

What could happen in the future

Let’s call the SEO company ‘Complacency Ltd’ and their competitor ‘Proactive Ltd’.

Proactive Ltd are actively looking for business.  They have bought into the concept of strong analytics software (regardless of which provider they choose to use – it doesn’t have to be A1WebStats).

Proactive Ltd notice that the clients of Complacency Ltd don’t have strong analytics and so they approach those clients directly, offering them something free to whet their appetite (for example, details of companies visiting their website within a period of time).  That gets their foot in the door and also allows them to see more data related to the Complacency Ltd client.  That data could include weaknesses in the work they’ve been doing for their client (e.g. inefficient Adwords setups).

Within a short period of time Proactive Ltd demonstrate to the client that Complacency Ltd aren’t giving best value, and so they take the client away from Complacency Ltd, having proven it with the data available.

Why would agencies be against using such software?

The answers to this include:

1. They prefer to keep the client in the dark about the work they do for the fee they charge.
2. They feel there’ll be ‘something else to learn’, which will take time.
3. They believe that Google Analytics is the answer to everything.
4. They’re not yet uncomfortable enough (i.e. they currently have enough business).

In our view, such attitudes are like cancer eating away at businesses – in particular, businesses that are the end clients of agencies/those who are supposed to be helping them.

Success from websites doesn’t come purely from SEO, or great content, or social media, or anything else.  It comes from a combination.

If you took an everyday healthy person, they would be combining some of the following factors:

1. Good diet
2. Exercise
3. Good state of mind

The combination gets them to their optimal level.

For business websites the same is needed and includes …

1. SEO
2. Great content
3. Social media
4. Measurement and analytics

Notice that we put measurement and analytics at the bottom of the list. In reality it should be at the top because from that element, decisions can be made about the others.

The days in which businesses could rely on one factor (e.g. driving traffic to a website) to make them successful, are long gone.  The combination is important.

What consistently disappoints us

There are so many businesses around the world that aren’t doing well via their websites.  Many of those businesses take the advice of external resources that are supposedly working in their best interests (for example, SEO services).   However, the providers of those services aren’t going far enough and the end result is that their clients suffer.

From the perspective of companies who provide web-related services (e.g. SEO companies) there’s a risk that detailed website analytics will uncover weaknesses in the work they’ve been doing.  That’s true, but at the same time, by identifying such weaknesses in-house (they don’t have to give the end client access to the webstats system) before the end client realises it, and making amends, the client relationship becomes stronger.

The alternative is that someone else will take that client away.

However, many companies aren’t set up in a way that makes them easily identifiable to us (particularly, but not exclusively, smaller companies).  So, Joe Bloggs from Widgets Ltd comes to your website from his unit on an industrial estate and he just appears as something like ‘British Telecommunications’.

We’d like to be psychic and tell you more than that but unfortunately, there are many cases where such visitors can’t be identified.

So what happens when you get a website visitor, where there is no identified company name, but you are sure they know who it was, and you’d like to make that clearer in your data in the future?

That’s where you need the ability to edit the details within your version of A1WebStats (nothing gets changed outside of your version).   Obviously, you need to be pretty convinced that a certain website visitor was who you thought it was or you’ll have misleading data appearing.

Walking you through an example

The partial screenshot below shows a website visitor, who we know for sure came from a particular company …

There was nothing about that visitors IP details that gave anything away about who they may be.  However, we happen to know that on that date and time we got a trial signup. In your case, it could have been someone who contacted you at a certain date and time and you could match that up to their website visit.

You can also see that they had been to the website 19 days before and when we click on that link from the screenshot above, we can see that they’ve been to our website before, as you can see in the screenshot below …

We are now convinced that we know who that visitor is so we decide to edit their company details in our view of the system.  We can do this from any view in which we see their details and we click on that link called Edit Details, shown in the screenshot below …

When we click on that link it opens up a window that lets us edit the details.  This starts off like the screenshot below …

We can then edit as much or as little of that information as we want to.  If we didn’t know the phone number or website url then we would enter ‘N/A’ for now (we can always change it later).  For the purposes of this example though, we’ve entered some dummy data …

By clicking on ‘Save Details’ you can see the record changes in the database …

So, any time that visitor comes back to the website, we will see the company details that we entered for them.  Also, as you can see from the screenshot below, the historical data for that company is also changed …

Where it could go wrong

While many people have static IP addresses, there are some that would have regularly changing IP addresses.  In these cases there would be no point in using this functionality because after you edit the company details, that person could come up as a different IP address in the future.  So, you’ll be wondering why that company has never come back to your website when in reality, they may have done – but you couldn’t see them.

We always recommend that you only edit company details if you are absolutely convinced they are the company and that their IP address isn’t going to change.

Any questions?

Got any questions about how to use this functionality?    Please do contact us – we’ll be happy to help.

1. Stupid advertisers
2. Stupid magazines

ROI from existing advertising

How many magazine adverts do you see where it either has no website url, or the website url is the home page?

The advert is published and the advertiser waits for the enquiries and sales to roll in.  When the ROI is bad the advertiser thinks that it was a poor investment and probably develops distrust in other magazine advertising sales people (hoping to get their business in the future).

It’s not always easy to measure ROI from magazine advertising though.  Some people may make contact directly from the advert, whereas others may search for the url they find.  Usually, part of the problem is that the business that placed the advert doesn’t have a strong process in place, which makes it hard to measure their ROI.

How to do it right

When placing an advert in a magazine, the following steps help in starting to assess what was gained from the advert …

1. Ensure that the advert has something that provides a benefit, which can be quoted when contact is made with the company.  For example: “Quote Code MAG1 for a 10% discount”.
2. Ensure that the advert contains a url other than the home page.  For example, an advert about carpet cleaning in care homes could have a url of www.carpetclean.co.uk/care.
3. Record enquiries gained.  This is where many businesses fail, often because there are multiple people taking enquiries and there are also people who don’t value the importance of recording enquiries.   Every enquiry gained, regardless of how it comes into the business, should record the following important information (apart from contact details of the enquirer):
   1. Date of enquiry
   2. Time of enquiry
   3. Perceived source of the enquiry (e.g. magazine advert)

A period of time after the magazine advert has been published it’s then time to measure what was gained from that advertising.   There should be an accurate log of enquiries (as per point 3 above) and some of those can be easily verified by using webstats data.

Taking that url of www.carpetclean.co.uk/care and using analytics software (for example,  A1WebStats), you can see how many people landed on that website page during the time of the magazine advertising.   If that website page doesn’t typically get many people landing on it, then it could safely be assumed that most new traffic has come from the magazine advertising.

If there was a specific enquiry gained on a particular date and time, and the analytics software shows that someone had come into that page www.carpetclean.co.uk/care at around that enquiry time then it could mean that the magazine advert had done its job.

Where this becomes interesting is if there aren’t many people identified as having either landed on that url, nor have found their way to that page.   If the magazine advert itself had an attractive offer (e.g. 10% off) and a specified url, but the numbers of people getting to that url are weak, then it implies that the advert hasn’t done its job.

The concept of the attractive offer also applies to other forms of enquiries taken (e.g. by telephone).  If people aren’t quoting the offer (e.g. MAG1) to get their discount, then it implies that the magazine advertising wasn’t effective enough.

As long as there is a rigid company process whereby all enquiries are recorded, including date and time, then there is the opportunity to analyse those enquiries in more detail.  If the total number of enquiries gained are really poor then it could be assumed that the magazine advertising had failed.  In cases where there were enquiries gained then it’s important to get more insights into what led to those enquiries – this can be done through both human interaction (e.g. someone quoting a discount code) or through analytics (finding matches between enquiries gained and people who were in that specific part of the website at the time of enquiry).

However, all this is assuming that the advertiser knows to advertise in certain ways.  This is where we get onto the subject of …

Stupid magazines

If a magazine wants to get a repeat advertiser then it makes sense to guide advertisers on how to get the best out of their advert.

They should certainly be advising advertisers to be logging all enquiries gained.   They should also be advising them on how to create an advert that will generate best impact, and that can be measured in some way (e.g. a discount code or distinct landing page on the website).

Unfortunately, this is rarely seen.  Most magazines want to get the sale of the advert and then that’s their job done.  They rarely think beyond that, including what it would take to get the advertiser to spend with them again.

Our view of the perfect magazine advertising department would include people that:

1. Give good advice on how to track ROI from magazine advertising.
2. Provide feedback on the suggested advert (to go into the magazine).  This means not being afraid to tell the advertiser that their advert is weak.
3. Offering no-risk deals.  This means giving the potential advertiser the input of points 1 and 2 above, and also allowing them to run an advert totally for free first time round.

If following the path above, the adverts would be more effective and the advertiser would have a way to measure what they did or didn’t gain from their magazine advert.   There would also be an “our magazine actually cares” feeling so that even if the advert didn’t generate great results, there may still be an open door to create future adverts.

Hands up how many people would welcome some free magazine advertising, on the condition that they act on recommendations that make their advertising and measurement more effective?!

Just One Thing (JOT) are a series of blogs and articles that are designed to focus on just one thing you can do with your website in order to get stronger results.

Sometimes the JOT will involve using the A1WebStats software to demonstrate the point, but this isn’t always essential (other analytics software may be able to work in a similar way).

Traffic from Google Images

Do you know how much of your website traffic is coming from Google Images searches?

And if you do, do you know how useful that is?

And what can you do to gain more benefits from Google Images traffic?

The answers are here …

Step 1 – Question Yourself

Is it at all feasible that someone ‘useful’ could find your website via a Google Images search?

Let’s look at a typical scenario …

Mrs Jones wants to buy an oak kitchen.  She could do a normal Google search or she could go to Google Images and search on ‘oak kitchens’.   Is she more likely to respond to a view like this …

Or this …

????

We suspect that she’s going to be more visually-led and will browse through those Google Images until something jumps out at her.  Then she’s going to click through to websites related to kitchens that appeal to her.

But we don’t all sell kitchens.

What is it that you sell and could it be something that someone may use Google Images to search for?

If you think it is then go ahead and use Google Images to search for what you offer and see what appears.  If you don’t appear in those results then there are plenty of opportunities to capitalise on (ask us if you need some free insights).

If you don’t think that Google Images could bring you relevant website traffic then you may still gain something by searching on keyword phrases and seeing if any of your competitors appear.   Maybe it’d be worth thinking outside the box a little – you may think that image searches have no relevance to your website, but with a bit more digging you could change your mind.

As an example, you may offer car leasing.  Ask yourself the question: “do people interested in certain models of cars use Google Images searches?”.   That person may be initially thinking about a car they like, perhaps thinking about buying it.  If they find images of that car and click through, they may then think “hmmm, actually, leasing could be a better option”.

In short, just because competitors may not use Google Images as part of their strategy to pull in website traffic, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t bother investigating further.

Step 2 – Analyse Your Google Images Traffic

If you’re using A1WebStats then it’s easy to see how many visits you’re getting from Google Images visibility.

Simply use the Referrers report and you’ll see Google Images appear, similar to as shown within the screenshot below …

By clicking on the tick box (next to Google Images) and creating a report, you can get a full report on each individual person who came to the website via Google Images, including which pages they went on to look at.

For an example of this type of data you can see, click on the link below:

http://www.a1webstats.com/stats/view-report.aspx?ReportID=9B7D261C-F465-46DC-8751-D4367AC02E11

What this shows you is information that often includes the search phrase typed into Google Images and it always shows you the path that each person took through the website.  As you can see from the example link above, a click from a Google Images search can lead to lots of pages being viewed.

Step 3 – Raising your visibility in Google Images

Being realistic, the majority of people that search for something in Google Images, are not going to be potential buyers.  They could just be casually interested or need an image for something they’re working on.

What you should be interested in are the small percentage who ARE potentially useful to you.

Take the example of that link http://www.a1webstats.com/stats/view-report.aspx?ReportID=9B7D261C-F465-46DC-8751-D4367AC02E11 – that shows just 7 visitors who went to the website (from Google Images) and looked at a few pages (within a week).   There were actually a lot more Google Images visits but we’ve shown just those that are of most interest/value.   If that business had only those 7 visitors in a week then the opportunities to convert them to enquiries/business aren’t great.  But what if they had 70, 170, 270, more …

Quite simply, the more traffic there is from Google Images, the more potential there is that some of those visitors are going to be potentially useful.

The business given in that example create highly exclusive swimming pool designs that are only affordable to a tiny percentage of the world population.   Of the visitors to their website (coming in from Google Images), it would be surprising if even 1% were the target market.  Therefore, by raising the visibility within Google Images, the chances of getting useful visitors becomes higher.

If you use the Referrers report within A1WebStats you’ll see how many visits you get (from Google Images searchers) within a period of time (e.g. a month).   If the number is quite small (and you see the value on using images to bring traffic to your website) then you need to identify ways to boost your visibility in Google Images (again, ask us how if you’re not sure).

Step 4 – Consider calls to action

Assuming that you’ve got reasonable levels of visitors coming into your website pages from Google Images visibility, what do you need to do in order to get more of those people interacting with you more?

Ignoring the majority of visitors (those who have no wish to buy anything) and focusing just on the minority, what calls to action are there on the page(s) they land on?

As an example, if you sold oak kitchens then calls to action could include:

1. Link to look at a bigger gallery of kitchens completed.
2. Link to a guide on how to keep an oak kitchen maintained.
3. Link to a page showing which regions are served.
4. Link to a testimonials page.

Calls to action will differ between industry types.  Here at A1WebStats we’re not big fans of the common “give us your contact details to receive something exclusive” approach.  However, we do like the idea of linking people off to something else, which doesn’t require their contact details, but which may make them more receptive to having a dialogue.

What’s in the mind of the person who has found you via Google Images?  How can you give them something that takes them further than the page they landed on?   If you’re not sure, then feel free to contact us – we may have some (free) ideas that would be useful to aid your thinking.

Step 5 – Ongoing measurement

It will certainly be useful to record, from month to month, any increases in visitors via Google Images.  This gives you incentive to continually increase those figures.

You can also use A1WebStats to create automated reports that will show you how well your Google Images visitors are interacting with your website pages.  Through the Advanced Reports function you can set up a monthly report that will show you the number of people who came from Google Images and went on to pages that are important to you (for example, a link to another page from the page they landed on). By recording the percentages of people who go further than the landing page you always have a figure to be trying to beat, which usually comes from ongoing tweaks to the landing pages that will persuade more people to dig deeper into what you have to offer.

Google Images joy

It’s a great feeling to get to the point where you know for sure that a Google Images search has ended up as a useful enquiry.   We’ve seen this happen with various clients and although it is a numbers game, it’s free traffic to a website and so is well worth considering.

Just One Thing (JOT) are a series of blogs and articles that are designed to focus on just one thing you can do with your website in order to get stronger results.

Sometimes the JOT will involve using the A1WebStats software to demonstrate the point, but this isn’t always essential (other analytics software may be able to work in a similar way).

Product/Service page views vs Enquiries/Sales

Within your website you’ll have a number of products/services that are hopefully going to generate you enquiries/sales.

The purpose of this ‘JOT’ is to analyse those website product/service pages to assess whether they’re getting you enough results (or not).

In short, are you gaining enough enquiries related to each product or service, compared to people who visit those pages?

Step 1 – Identify

Using your chosen website analytics solution, bring up a view that shows you products/services pages that have been viewed within any given time period.  For example, using A1WebStats on a website, we can see that within one month, these were the service pages that had the most visits …

This shows us that:

• The Dermal Fillers Training Courses page had 244 visits
• The London Training Courses page had 222 visits
• The Botox London page had 199 visits
• The Botox Manchester page had 190 visits

Step 2 – Dig Deeper

Taking each page that had the most visits, we can dig deeper into the data to see how many actual visitors there were.

For example, in the bullet-pointed list above, those 244 visits to the Dermal Fillers Training Courses page were actually from 166 unique visitors.  The reason for the difference in numbers is that one person may visit a website page more than once during their visit to the website.

Taking the examples from the screenshot above, those break down to the following number of unique visitors to each page …

• Dermal Fillers Training Courses – 166 visitors (from 244 visits)
• London Training Courses had – 165 visitors (from 222 visits)
• Botox London – 127 visitors (from 199 visits)
• Botox Manchester – 113 visitors (from 190 visits)

Step 3 – Compare

For the time period chosen, compare the number of visitors to each service/product page to the number of enquiries/sales that you’ve gained related to each service/product.   Here’s a hypothetical example, based on the data above …

• Dermal Fillers Training Courses – 166 visitors became 6 enquiries (3.6%)
• London Training Courses – 165 visitors became 5 enquiries (3.0%)
• Botox London – 127 visitors became 10 enquiries (7.8%)
• Botox Manchester – 113 visitors became 9 enquiries (8.0%)

Step 4 – Assess

For each service/product that you offer, assess whether the number/percentage of enquiries/sales gained are favourable when compared to the numbers of visitors to those website pages.

In that example from Step 3, it’s clear that the Botox London and Botox Manchester pages resulted in stronger levels of enquiries than the pages that had more visitors.

You will be able to identify some strong performers and also some weak performers from your own data.

Step 5 – Take Action

When you identify service/product pages that have an unfavourable level of enquiries (compared to people going to those pages) then it’s time to determine the reasons why.

If using the A1WebStats software you can extract data that shows you the full website movements of each person that got to an individual service/product page.  By looking at each of those people you will build up a feel for:

• What brought them to the website
• How they navigated through to the service/product page
• Where they navigated to after the service/product page

It can take time to do, which means it’s worth saying …

Don’t bite off too much!

We recommend focusing on just one service/product page to start with.  You may have gone through Steps 1 – 3 above but when it comes to Step 4, it’s best to just focus on one service/product that gives you most reason for concern (usually the one that has lowest enquiries/sales compared to people who go to that service/product page).

By analysing the ‘problem’ page in more detail (and pages that lead people to that page) you will usually be able to identify reasons that are stopping more people from making contact/buying from you.

Need more help?

We’re here to help.  If you’re an A1WebStats trial or paid subscriber, just tell us about your products or services services and we’ll (free) help you to use the system to:

• Identify weaknesses
• Do something about those weaknesses

Got any further questions?

Whether it’s about this subject or any other subject related to gaining more business from your website, please do feel free to contact us or respond to this blog.

You do NOT need to be an A1WebStats subscriber to benefit from this blog.  Google Analytics is perfectly adequate for this basic level of analysis.

The Google Zoo

It’s been some time since the Google Penguin and Panda updates and there are still many companies running around panicked that their SEO has been hit.

Whatever form of major update Google do, it generally has a name.  However, there are numerous ongoing updates that aren’t talked about much and that aren’t high profile.  But they still have an impact on SEO.

Our view is that it doesn’t really matter what Google call their updates.  What matters is that you’re in one of the following positions:

1. You’re not affected by any such updates.
2. You’re affected, know it quickly, and can respond to it.

You’re not affected

Lucky you!  It probably means that either:

1. You’ve not used any frowned-upon methods to drive traffic to your website, or;
2. Your website has low traffic in the first place!

You’re affected and know it quickly

Here we can use the example of two very different A1WebStats subscribers …

Subscriber 1

Had been using A1WebStats for 7 months and was (sensibly) keeping a close eye on their overall level of website traffic, and, more importantly, the levels of traffic landing on individual pages that were important to them.

From month to month, Subscriber 1 kept a spreadsheet of their important landing pages and how many people had entered via those pages during each month.  They added in a graph to see if there were any positive or negative changes over time.

Because of some historical poor quality SEO work, the Google changes hit their overall search engine positioning and in particular, the numbers of people landing on important pages.  They were lucky (we would say “had the foresight”) that they were tracking their traffic closely because they were able to jump onto the problem quickly when it showed up in their recorded statistics/graphs.

Subscriber 2

Had been using A1WebStats for a bit longer (9 months) but was purely interested in the companies that visited their website.  Although it had been recommended, they didn’t want to keep statistics related to traffic going to their website pages overall, nor to individual pages.

What happened here was that they got hit by the Google update but didn’t know it.  It took them a few months to come to us with words to the effect of “we don’t think your system is tracking companies properly” and when we dug into it we saw that it was purely a case that they were getting less traffic due to being penalised by Google for SEO methods that had been used.

Had they been recording information about overall website traffic and numbers of people landing on certain pages, they could have discovered the problem and reacted a lot sooner, saving them a lot of lost business through the worsened Google results positioning.

The moral of the story

SEO methods that have worked in the past don’t work now.   Some of the methods that work now won’t work in the future.  Google is always changing the ‘game’.

What’s important is for any business to be routinely recording data related to overall website traffic.  It’s best practice and regardless of who’s ‘fault’ it is that a website has been hit by a Google change, early awareness means that actions can be taken before the damage becomes too great.

For those businesses that aren’t using their website statistics to monitor certain patterns (even at a basic level), there’s another one from the ‘Google Zoo’ that applies (as it did with Subscriber 2) …

Name of Update: Google Ostrich

Affects: companies with their heads in the sand

Feeds on: complacency

Frequency: ongoing

Impact: loss of business

Fixes: change of attitude within the business

It’s an odd question because it could imply confusion in the minds of those people investigating the right solution for them.  This is because we don’t view the Lead Forensics system as being ‘analytics’.  Rather, it could be better classified as ‘lead generation’.

What is analytics?

‘Analytics’ as a concept is (in our view) all about using software to interpret how to get the best out of your website (and the ways in which you market that website).

The most commonly known analytics solution is Google Analytics, which offers a huge range of analytical potential (if you’re of the mindset to convert it into actionable information!).

Our own product is much more ‘analytics’ than anything else.  Yes, it shows you which companies have been to your website and what they looked at, BUT, to use a human biology analogy, the ability to view companies would be the ‘eyes’ whereas the ability to dig deep into the effectiveness of the website would be the ‘brain’.

The ‘eyes’ see that companies have been to the website (which may be useful information but has limited shelf life).

The ‘brain’ looks into the reasons why website visitors (including companies) don’t make contact at a stronger rate (which can lead to beneficial changes in the website and the way in which it’s marketed).

Without eyes you could get through life.  Without a brain you’re dead.  This concept applies to website success – if your brain (website analytics) is helping you get the best out of your website, the eyes only have to look at the resulting successes instead of “what might have been” (i.e. companies that didn’t make contact).

Evolution of business mindset

The evolution of business mindset (when it comes to getting the best from websites) has been painfully slow.  Around 7 years ago we predicted that within a couple of years, businesses would be so much more ‘into’ analytics.  We were very much wrong!

But things are gradually changing – with bold, italics, and a bright neon sign on ‘gradually’.

We still find it amusing when people say “wow, I didn’t know you could find out which companies are going to your website”.  Those people aren’t being thick – it’s purely that the concept of analytics hasn’t risen to the forefront of consciousness – particularly within smaller companies.  It’s also not been helped by Google Analytics being tough for mere mortals to use, which makes the whole subject seem a bit ‘black art’.

This is where products like ours and Lead Forensics actually help to change mindsets.

In the case of Lead Forensics, the product is basically saying “you can see which companies have been to your website and what they looked at, and can contact those companies to see what you can salvage if they didn’t make contact with you”.  Although (in our view), such an approach is limited in proactivity, it does at least help to make business owners get into the concept of looking at website visitors in more detail.   Therefore, awareness is being raised, which can only be a good thing.

With A1WebStats the focus is more on “we can help you be aware of which companies have been to your website, and you can act upon it but hey, utilise the other 95% of our system functionality to dig deeper into the reasons why those companies didn’t make contact in the first place (and then dig even deeper into more that you can learn about your website visitors)”.

Enjoying what we do

We hugely and genuinely enjoy the conversations we have with our subscribers.  There is nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a subscriber have that lightbulb moment when their website analytics has shown areas that they can improve on.

In particular, we enjoy having conversations with people who totally ‘get’ the value of analysing website visitors in detail because it’s that “twins separated at birth” feeling in which we think “yes, there are other people like us out there!”

Analytics in two years

So here’s the big question: where do we see ‘analytics’ two years from now?   We believe that we’ll see:

1. Large companies buying into analytics more and more, making them even more powerful over smaller companies (who will wonder why they’re not getting enough business when it’s been within their potential control for years).
2. Many more smaller companies buying into the concept of identifying which companies have visited their website.
3. More, but smaller numbers of companies who buy into the concept of using website analytics a lot more intelligently.

In our, not remotely unbiased view, those companies that skip point 2 and jump straight to point 3 will be those who win in the medium to longer term.

We also feel that, over time, if there’s a convergence of SEO, analytics, and lead generation, to become a hybrid of “website success” then that would be a good evolution that can help so many businesses to prosper.

On any page within your account you will see a new date picker in the top right of the screen, which when selected looks like the above.

To select multiple dates, simply click on the first date (this would be the starting date) and then the second date (this would be the end date for the analysis period of choice).  Then click the Apply button and the date range will be used to display the required data.  Here’s an example below, showing a selected date range from the 18th December 2012 to the 10th January 2013 …

If you want to select a longer date range, simply use the arrows to the left and right of the months to scroll backwards or forwards.

Also, if you want to quickly select a month then click on the month name.  For example, in the screenshot above, if you click on the words ‘December, 2012′ it will highlight all dates within the month and you then click on ‘Apply’.

You may also spot that the Quick View is still available on the date picker (in the bottom left hand corner).   The Quick View functionality is still useful because it lets you quickly select date ranges within the following parameters:

• Today
• Yesterday
• Last 7 days
• This month
• Last month

As always, please do feed back to us with your thoughts about how we can make the system work best for you.