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Set Goals and Discover Your Leads

Written by Casey Hartigan on May 14th, 2012. 1 comments

You are the only one that can tell which kind of goals are right for your business. This is why there are so many options for creating your own goals. Here are a few goals that you can setup right away that we think will be useful to a lot of businesses.

If one of the objectives of your website is to generate leads or enquiries then chances are you have one or more forms on your site that your customers are asked to fill out. We find that while these forms are useful they don't offer a true indication of how well your site is functioning as a lead generation tool. Often people can't be bothered filling out long forms, or they don't provide enough information and you can't reach a potential customer - subsequently your website records low enquiry numbers.

What your website doesn't record is the number of people who click straight onto the "Contact Us' page and give you a call or an email directly. Previously you had no way to know how many people were contacting you after seeing your website. By setting up a 'specific page was loaded' goal you can get a great idea how many people are going to your contact us page. If they visit this page chances are they're looking for your phone or email, so the number of visitors will give you a great idea how well your site is generating leads.

Tips to measure "contact us" page loads...

Topics: Measure

Analytics Statistics & Benchmarks

Written by Hamish Braddick on July 4th, 2011. 1 comments

We are often asked, "What should my bounce rate be? what is a normal conversion rate? What should I be aiming for?
With this post we bring together stats and metrics from around the world to help us formulate the most accurate and up-to-date averages most relevant to small New Zealand business, to use as benchmarks. Please keep in mind, that these averages are just that and, these figures will vary wildly depending upon your industry, your target customer, your goal types etc.

Conversion rate

In a report from Google based on website metric data from hundreds of thousands of anonymous Google analyics accounts. From November 1, 2010 - February 1, 2011.

New Zealand 1.8% - Is rather high in comparison to the rest of the world.

Bounce rate

In a report from Google based on website metric data from hundreds of thousands of anonymous Google analyics accounts. From November 1, 2010 - February 1, 2011.
New Zealand 0.42 - is somewhat lower than most other countries around the world

European B2C e-commerce is growing in waves.

JULY 30, 2007 - With an annual growth rate of 25% over the next four years, the market will triple in size by 2011, reaching $407 billion.

B2C E-Commerce Sales* in Europe**, 2006-2011 (billions and % increase vs. prior year***)

The UK, Germany and France currently dominate European e-commerce, accounting for 72% of total online sales

What Works, and What Doesn't, in Online Marketing

In an end-of-the-year survey, online marketers were asked to look back at what worked for them in 2006 and also peek ahead at their spending plans for 2007.

Search Engine Facts

The power of search engines - facts:

46% of all websites are found through search engines
55% of all online purchases result from websites found through search engines
95% of people do not look beyond the top 20 search engine positions

How websites are found:

46% by search engines
20% random surfing
20% word of mouth
4.4% magazine ads
1.4% television

sources: Neilson/Net Ratings, IMS strategies, Harris Interactive and NPD Group

Annoying Website Characteristics

Website Characteristics that US adult internet users find extremely to somewhat annoying when they visit websites to obtain information about products or services that they are interested in purchasing - July 2005

Source - Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) commissioned by Hostway, July 2005

Products purchased online by US Users

Computer Activities of US Adults by Gender - 2006

US Email Marketing Campaign metrics

US Retail Ecommerce Sales

Statistics from www.emarketer.com

Topics: , Ecommerce, Measure

Why measure?

Written by Hamish Braddick on March 8th, 2010. 0 comments

Remember, in order to get the best results from your website it is important that you are continually improving it. The process of continual improvement involves a continuous series of cycles. Each cycle should be made up of 3 phases and take approximately 4-6 weeks. The three phases are:

Measure > Review > Tune

Measure: You should allow at least 1 month for collecting data. (1 month)
Review: At the end of that period you then need to look back at the results to determine ways to improve the website further (1day)
Tune: Once you have determined the priorities for improving you then need to implement these (approx 2 weeks)

Without the measurement you never really know if the changes you are making to your website are improving it or actually making it worse. So the first step to start improving your results should be measuring your website's performance as it stands.

We can recommend ideas and changes to improve your website and we have plenty of articles to help you, but every website, business, target audience, industry and niche is different. Yes the more experience you have and the more you have studied best practices the more educated your ideas for improving your website will be, but no-one really knows for certain without measuring.

Incremental changes - An iterative approach

We recommend that you make the improvements to your website in small increments for each cycle.

If you make too many changes to your website and you find out later in the cycle that you are seeing a negative impact, it is a frustrating and time consuming task to determine which of the many changes is causing the negative results. Often the only way to find the problems is to wind back your changes and begin the cycle over again. We also understand that you have limited time and resource to dedicate to the website. There is only so much you can do each cycle to improve your website.

So with this in mind it is important that you focus your efforts on those changes that are hopefully going to have the greatest impact. The changes that are going to generate the greatest number of sales or leads.

We recommend that you schedule a regular period for reviewing your website results and making improvements.

How to measure effectively

With reporting and statistics, there is often too much information and it is easy to overload. We understand you probably have little time to analyse your reports, so we have designed our reports to deliver the most important stats to help you make a quick informed decision.

But still there is an art to understanding these reports, hence the purpose of this article. What you really need is a process or step by step guide to reading and understanding reports. You need to be able to quickly and easily find the problem areas to fix or the areas that are going really well which with some further improvement will provide the greatest return on investment.

Topics: , Measure

Website measurement is vital

Written by David Kelly on November 12th, 2009. 0 comments

You have probably heard the quote – ‘if you can’t measure it – you can’t manage it’. Before you can improve something you need to carefully measure it - only once you know how something is currently performing can you can try new initiatives to see if you can improve it.

Let me tell you a little story to illustrate my point:

A good friend of mine, John, tells an interesting story from when he worked as a business consultant in Melbourne, Australia. During this time, he worked with a client who owned a car audio business.

One of the first things John investigated on his first day on the job was the marketing expenditure of the company. On talking with the owner of the business he discovered that the business was spending many thousands of dollars (the majority of its marketing budget) on radio advertising. He asked the business owner how many sales resulted from the radio advertising on a weekly basis and was promptly informed that the business owner had absolutely no idea.

John then implemented a rudimentary measurement system whereby every customer who came to the counter to purchase some product was asked the question, “How did you hear about us?” The answers to this question were recorded on a simple chart located beside the till. After two weeks of careful measurement both John and the business owner were shocked to find that only two sales had occurred as a result of the radio advertising!

John's first recommendation to the business owner was that they scrap the radio advertising immediately. On further analysis of the results, they also discovered that the majority of the sales over the two week period had resulted due to the location of the store. People noticed the store on a daily basis because it was located next to a busy street that people used to drive to work and back again. John’s next recommendation was that they develop some better store signage and put some further effort into their window displays.

The resulting changes made a huge impact on the business and they all occurred as the result of some simple measurement!

So … how can we apply the moral of this story to our websites? If we want to improve our website results we must carefully measure the different aspects of our website's performance to discover what is working, and what is not working. Makes sense, right?

The great news is this. Measurement with a website is amazingly simpler than measurement in the real world! The invention of the computer has made possible levels of measurement that were only dreamed about by previous generations. On a website, provided you have the right systems (for example – a system created by Zeald!), absolutely everything can be automatically tracked and measured by the computer!

Make sure your website has powerful tracking and measurement systems in place. You should be able to access critical information about the results of your website at the click of a button. If you want to achieve amazing website results, great measurement is absolutely vital!