Jenni recently spoke at an event held by Fresh Business Thinking on the subject of internet marketing and more specifically how small businesses can start to engage with social media and some practical tips of how to get going with your digital strategy.

See the video and view the accompanying slides for a breakdown of:

- five easy tips to get you started with social media
- some examples of how we have been using these approaches with our own clients
- a list of must reads for those bookworms who want to know more

Like what you see?  Sign up to receive more of Jenni’s and our collective wisdom from our range of free, no nonsense ebooks for marketers.

Would you like to book Jenni to speak at your event?  Please get in touch with me, Ruth Baker, Marketing Co-ordinator to discuss the possibilities.

Hello, I would like to introduce the latest chapter in our series of eBooks; Social Media Usability, the great and the good, essential reading for marketers.

Discover how to nurture your users and make them love you back by adopting a great social media usability strategy. Written by our in house social media usability expert, the lovely Louise.

Download the PDF from our ebooks section, and sign up for notification of future chapters while you’re there.

Happy reading!

Photo courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/philwoodphoto/

The analytics tool we use most often in NixonMcInnes websites is Google Analytics. Analytics tools help you gain detailed insight into how your customers are interacting with your website.

Google launched a new version of their free Google Analytics package a few weeks ago.

Benefits of the new implementation include:

• More reliable tracking capabilities
• Lighter code
• Advanced features and sophisticated reporting
• New Multi-line Graph (beta feature) that graphs two different metrics against each other over time
• Reports available in six additional languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25

The basic Google Analytics setup has the following features and benefits:

Statistical Analysis

Google Analytics helps you incrementally measure and improve visitor experience by tracking how users arrived at your website and how they navigated through the pages and then providing statistics about those visits. These include:

• Absolute Unique visitors
• Page Views
• Average Page Views
• Time spent on site
• Bounce Rate
• New Visits
• Geo-location
• Visitors browser and operative system

Each statistic can be drilled down and segmented. Different time periods can be compared to show the website’s progress (January 2007 against January 2008, for instance).

Keyword and Campaign Comparison

Track and compare all your ads, email newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, paid links and keywords on Google and other search engines.

Custom Dashboards

No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom Dashboard that you can email to others or schedule to be sent automatically.

AdWords Integration

Buy keywords on Google AdWords and use Google Analytics to learn which keywords are most profitable to your business.

Trend and Date Slider

Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long-term trends.

Site Overlay

See traffic and conversion information for every link as you browse your site (no download required).

Email reports

Schedule or send ad-hoc personalised report emails that contain exactly the information that you want to share.

Geo-Targeting

Find out where your visitors come from and identify your most lucrative geographic markets.

Additional benefits can be reported by Google analytics when setup correctly. These are:

E-Commerce Tracking

Trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics and identify your revenue sources.

Funnel Visualisation

Find out which pages result in lost conversions and where your would-be customers go – great if you need an answer to these questions:

• What is the rate between visits and purchases
• How many transactions were made? How often?
• What is the average order value?
• How many products were purchased?
• What is the average number of product sales per order?
• Which are the top revenue products?

The image below represents the Google Analytics eCommerce overview panel displaying these benefits:

Google Analytics Funnels are steps the users take to achieve a specific goal, tracking a user’s page by page path on the website. Provides insight to:

• How many users achieved the goal?
• What pages have they visited to get to the goal?
• How many users left the website on which page? Understanding why reviewing these will help improve your site’s performance over time.

Here is an example of a goal called “Search to Purchase”:

The advantages are clear and provide answer to the following questions:

• Where do users leave the site via external links?
• Are the users having problems going through the checkout process?
• Which page in the checkout is has the highest “abandon” rate?
• Which are the most profitable products?
• Which segment (region, affiliate) is most profitable?

In practice

We recently completed the build of an eCommerce website that is now hosted on our staging server, pending final data and client approval.

It is running the latest Google Analytics code and it is exciting to see the test results showing up every day and to know that our client will have the advantage of knowing exactly how their online business is performing.

The website was developed using the following open-source applications:
• Joomla content management system
• VirtueMart, a Joomla eCommerce plug-in
• Google Analytics Tracking Module, a plug-in compatible with VirtueMart
• External Link Enhancement plug-in to track external links (exit points) on your website

Note:

Watch out! The old code is not compatible with the new one, so make sure you only install one of them on your website.

Old code will be supported for the next year but after that will cease to work. Best to take advantage of Googles’s innovation sooner rather than later – if you need a hand we’ll be happy to help.

For further details on what metrics to track and why, check out our latest ebook Chapter 6: Essential Web Analytics.

Read the latest chapter in our ebook series and find out how you can make sense of the endless stream of data generated by your web analytics package. Define the numbers that matter and use them to generate actionable insights for you and your colleagues.

Download the PDF from our ebooks section, and sign up for notification of future chapters while you’re there.

‘Essential Web Analytics’ is part of our FREE e-book – “A Marketers Guide to Social Media”.

This is a user-friendly, no-jargon guide with great examples and useful tips of how to use the latest digital techniques to make your online campaigns successful. Essential reading for marketers.