Hit’s Versus Visitors – What Are Your Webstats Really Telling You About Your Website?

One of the most common queries I come up against time and time again from my clients is the confusion surrounding the difference between visitors and hits on sites. It’s a common misconception that is used to great effect in marketing and PR to dazzle target audiences with mid boggling statistics on the huge amount of hits a newly launched sites have received during its first month.

Working in the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and New Media field as a whole for many years, this has long been a bug bare of mine and I hope to dismiss some of the myths surrounding it in the hope of educating consumers when deciphering their own webstats in the future.

First of all, Website owners should be most concerned with Visitors whom account for individual activity on a site. The difference between a Visitor and a hit is that a hit is created every time an action on a webpage is recorded or a page is loaded up.

For example logo’s, images, files, and graphics loaded as HTML, CSS and Java Script all create a hit when the page is loaded. This means that massive scores and counts can be created merely by one visitor navigating their way around the website depending on the amount of content on each page providing unrealistic totals.

It is also worth baring in mind that page counters are similarly misleading, as quite often they are set up to count page views, not unique visitors. Page counters are also susceptible manipulation, adding a new count every time the page is refreshed allowing webmasters to creative massive distortion in terms of actual recorded activity simply by continuously refreshing their site.

So there we have it, I hope that my mini rant about the ambiguous manner in which Webstats can be presented has helped to dispel some of the myths surrounding this issue. So next time you come across a press release boasting of hits instead of visitors you’ll know the score!
For further information on this, Email Marketing, SEO, Adword Campaigns and other new media please visit http://www.webbeads.co.uk/

Ecommerce Tips for Christmas 2007!... Already

Although most of us have only just unpacked from our Summer Holidays the retail year marches relentlessly on, as I discovered to my horror in my local supermarket over the weekend. Keen to stay ahead of their competitors, giant retailers are unabashed at panicking their customers in to preparing for Christmas with the ever expanding array of seasonal foods and gifts available from September onwards.

Despite the palpitations it evokes in most of us it does bring home the importance of preparation for this period and it couldn't be more important to retailers this year as research shows that in the UK alone consumers will spend over £10 billion pounds in the run up to the festive season.

As a web design and development company Mancala Technology have begun to contact our Ecommerce clients with the following 7 top tips to ensure that we all receive a little Christmas cheer this year:

1) Planning is everything.
Take a tip from the high street and get organised early. Give your business or web development supplier enough time to produce timely and effective marketing campaigns on your behalf. This includes making sure your online marketing is in place, now is the time to make sure your Adwords Campaign is up and running and optimised to get the best return on investment (ROI),

2) Relevant Design.
Take the edge off the wide spread panic which Christmas normally induces by developing a seasonal motif that works along side your branding and creative copy but highlights the coming period.

3) Target your Homepage.
Your Homepage is the first port of call for most online shoppers so gearing it towards a creative and hassle-free shopping experience will seriously boost your traffic. Think carefully about your use of copy, the availability of useful information, and don't forget to ‘get creative' by providing quick solutions to finding the right gift. This may include the option to shop by budget, product or recipient for example. We truly believe that by providing a clear route around your site and providing ideas, will reduce your bounce rate.

4) Delivery.
This is always a bit of a hot potato with retailers. Eager to push ahead with proactive marketing, the logistics of delivering your product or service can often be neglected. By making sure you reconcile your stock, man power and realistic delivery times and dates, you should avoid the usual pitfalls. Remember that communication is the key and a concise explanation of your delivery policy from your Homepage (see top tip no. 3) should keep everyone in on the loop.

5) Email Marketing.
By drip feeding your customers with a well planned email campaign about the products and solutions you can provide for the coming Christmas you should create awareness with your customers and hopefully begin to reap Christmas related profits sooner rather than later.

6) Packaging
If, like me, you're a sucker for pretty packaging then you'll know how irresistible the option to spend a little extra to put the finishing touches on a great gift and be. It's an easy opportunity to generate extra revenue and also offers your customers a more complete service which they are more likely to re-use. However, remember the importance of planning to avoid becoming bogged down in the detail however pretty it may look!

7) Monitoring.
Finally, make all of the marketing tools you've used and developed over the Christmas period work for you throughout the year. By measuring your website traffic, sales, feedback, performance and statistics you can learn more about your customers shopping habits and how your service can be developed in the coming year.

We hope that these top tips help to take the edge off the Christmas madness, further advice can be found at our website http://www.webbeads.co.uk/

Don't forget to Email your Client List

It is easy to forget that you have a list of clients who have bought your services/ products before. Don't forget to get in touch with them. Assuming you have done a good job they are more than likely to buy from you again - and it is a lot easier than trying to find new clients.

Make sure you make the effort to send an email out to them. See what happens

Email Marketing Newcastle

Christmas is coming! Well not quite but it is time to start thinking about it

A reminder popped up in my calender today telling me to start my campaigns for Christmas. 'Its only September', I thought, 'Fenwicks haven't even started to clean there windows for there Christmas Display'. However I new my reminder was correct as Christmas does have a habit of creeping up.

This year I will be telling all my ecommerce clients to check their AdWords campaigns to ensure they are allocating the correct budget and are testing the campaigns so they are getting a maximum return on investment (ROI).

It is amazing how well AdWords campaigns perform at any time of year, but during the Christmas season it is the only sure way to get traffic to your website. There is another reason why you should be spending time now on getting this right - AdWords and the keywords you choose are ranked based on how much you want to pay per click (PPC) and also the 'quality' of you advert - if your advert has a high click through rate then it is likely that it will appear higher in the list of adverts. The higher it appears the more likely you will get someone clicking on it - so if you get started on your AdWords campaign now then come the crucial months of November and December you will (hopefully) have good quality ads showing high on the left hand side of the page.

I love Adwords. I really do believe it has been a revolution in marketing (not just online, any form of marketing). Of course if you are not sure what to do about getting your site promoted using adwords then get in touch.

Welcome to Online Marketing for SMEs

Hi my name is Deryck, and welcome to my first post on Online Marketing for SMEs. I have been working in IT for 18 years, the last 8 of those years I have been involved with business large and small promoting them online. Currently I run Newcastle Based Web Design and Online Marketing Agency Mancala Technology Limited.

I decided to start this blog because I often come across ideas and suggestions that will help businesses like yours get a competitive advantage in the world of online marketing.

What is online marketing?
Online marketing covers a whole range of functions - I will list a few, but this is not an exhaustive list.

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the ability to get your site listed high is search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN (to name but a few). As someone once told me, getting to the top of Google does not happen by accident. By implementing a good SEO strategy over time you will see your site climb the rankings.
  
• Google AdWords Campaigns, or Pay Per Click (PPC). PPC campaigns allow you to target the customers who are looking for you! Think about that for a minute. You only target people who are interested in what you have to sell at the moment thet are thinking about it - what other form of advertising lets you do that? I had a client come into my office yesterday who had tried all forms of offline advertising, back of newspaper, specialist magazines etc - he also tried Google AdWords and now he is scrapping all other forms of advertising. Why? Because the ROI from Google AdWords was streets ahead of any other marketing he did. I, of course am a compete convert to AdWords and I am now an Accredited Google Advertising Professional.
  
• Email Marketing, how often are you getting in touch with your clients and prospects via email? for most SME's it is not often enough. The best chance of future work and product sales are through people who have bought from you before.
  
  There are two types of email marketing that could benefit your business - Broadcast Emails, where you send all or a specific group of people an email containing an offer or any enticement. And then there are Auto Responders - these are great and I will be covering these a lot over time - basically an auto responder will allow you to set up a sequence of emails to go out over time. The recipient will receive these emails dependent on when you started sending to them.
  

That is the start of what I will be covering. I will try and get a post up every week, if not more often and I will be sharing my experiences which will hopefully in turn help you.