Usability Consultancy, Website Reviews, Website Optimisation

In all types of advertising and marketing (up until the Internet became mainstream) there were few clear ways to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement.

• Tracking printed adverts via coupons with reference numbers that customers forgot to mention or sales staff forgot to ask for.

• Putting a unique offer in a specific advert but, during the buzz of receiving an enquiry, sales staff forgot to record which advert the enquiry came from.

• Using different phone numbers in each advert or publication but most people didn't record the number of calls on each number.

• Trying 0800 numbers, 0845 and 0870 numbers but only looking at the year end figures to determine if they added to the bottom line.

• Testing different adverts, usually on a rotational basis but, again, in the buzz of receiving an enquiry, combined with being busy, most people forget to analyse the data.

The data has always been there but not so simple to record and analyse, until now.

SEO Data – Your Website Statistics

 

Tracking the results of your search engine optimisation requires just a few clicks with most statistics. The most commonly used stats include AWStats, Webalizer and Google Analytics. There is no longer any reason to wonder whether your 'advertising' is working. The details are right there, ready for your monthly management meetings.

 

You can track the essential information about your site visitors and what they looked at, how long they stay, which pages they arrive at and where they leave from. Just look at this section of Google Analytics report menu and you see you can analyse:

• Top Content. The pages that are viewed most frequently (expect your home page to be in this list almost constantly).

• Content by Title. This is a full list of all pages on your website and shows how often each has been viewed, average time spent on each page, how often it is the last page people see, and more.

• Content Drilldown shows all pages but by file name (unlike the above) and includes all the important statistics per file.

• Top Landing Pages tells you which pages most people arrive on. This is excellent for working out which links in the search engines are actually bringing in traffic. From this data you can determine where your sales message needs to start. However, if you have a high bounce rate on any pages, you know that the page is not relevant to the searches people are doing in order to come across that page.

• Top Exit Pages tells the where people are leaving. You learn so much from this, especially if there are surprises. Ideally you want people to be leaving from your 'thank you' page after making a purchase or enquiring about your products or services. If you have a lot of people leaving from your top-level pages without spending much time on the site, you have problems.

There is just so much data about your website and so many things you can analyse in order to constantly improve your visitor's experience and, ultimately, your conversion rate. With the help of the data, you can start to ask questions, like:

• Why do people not stay very long?

• Why do visitors only view one or two pages?

• Why do they leave from the same page they arrive on?

• Why did so many leave from 'that' page?

• Why do they not respond to that fantastic offer?

• What time and day do most people visit the site?

• Did the new design make any difference?

• Does the conversion rate improve at certain times of the day?

• Do more people buy on weekends than weekdays?

• Did the blue header work better than the red header?

 

Although you should always track each and every sales enquiry your business receives so that you can determine which customers originated from your printed adverts, which ones from your Yellow pages advert etc., or which ones came from viewing your website (they won't all fill in your online forms), data relating to enquiries received through your website is automatically being stored for you, live, 24/7. All you have to do is view it and decide what to do next to improve the performance.

 

How Koss UK can help

 

As part of the service you get from Koss UK is constant monitoring of your website statistics so that we can assess your site's strengths and weaknesses and doing something about it. In the same way we would monitor your competition and your positions in the search engines and assess ways of improving your positions.