If you think that your business doesn’t need to use social media or that it doesn’t even need a website then the following video from the clever and talented people at Socialnomics is going to make you really uncomfortable. Er… sorry.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQZAmr_-WVI

Still, not to worry; getting your company in front of some of these people isn’t rocket science. Here’s an easy to follow plan:-

• Decide what you want to achieve
• Get yourself a well designed and coded website (get it right and your site can grow and evolve with your business)
• Make sure you have some analytics installed on it (putting your efforts into your online channel is pointless unless you can measure the results)
• Write an online marketing strategy (a medium to long term plan that will make sure that you do everything for a reason -- you can tweak it as you go along)
• Learn how to use the right tools so that you’re not wasting time but make sure that you devote some time to this.

Finally some free of charge top tips (are we mad* or are we the kind of people you want to work with?):

Top tip #1: Find somebody in your organisation who is using Twitter, Facebook or maybe writing a blog and make them your social media ambassador. Give them some clear guidelines and a little time everyday and they’ll love you for it.

Top tip #2: We can help. Engage Ursus Media to design and build the perfect website for you and then let us help you join up all the elements of the what is now a very social web.

*Not mad. Absolutely the people you want to work with.

Web analytics tools can deliver a vast amount of information to you about your website and your business. Arguably one of the most useful metrics is the bounce rate. Bounce rate tells you about visitors who have literally ‘bounced’ away without visiting any other parts of your site.

A great way to measure the quality of traffic to your website, the bounce rate is easy to understand and communicate to the other parts of your business and can help identify the areas in which your site is failing your visitors.

In the following video Google’s Avinash Kaushik explains why he thinks the bounce rate metric is so useful:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppgfjo6IIf4

If your marketing efforts are effective the amount of quality traffic to your website will increase, therefore fewer users will bounce away and the percentage will go down.

So the 20 million dollar question -- what constitutes a good bounce rate? Well, the lower the better. Remember you will never be able to reduce your bounce rate to zero but a good figure for a business website is around 30%. If you can achieve this, or even reduce it, you’ll find that your all important conversion rates will go up.

A note to bloggers: don’t panic! Blogs are different. Visitors are often attracted to your site by a single relevant post, they’ll enter your site at the post and may well navigate away again after they’ve read it or by clicking on a useful link that you’ve provided. This doesn’t mean you haven’t attracted quality traffic; it’s just the nature of blogging. There’s still a rule of thumb metric for you though. If you can achieve a bounce rate of 50% or less you’re doing well.

Forthcoming related posts will include more ideas for getting the most from your analytics tools. If you want to keep up why don’t you subscribe to our feed?

Related posts:

• Beginning analytics

In the last few days Google announced that they have again made changes to their ranking algorithm. That’s the clever mathematical bit of Google that works out how far up (or down), the list your website appears.

Before Christmas we saw a major change which for the first time had Google paying close attention to real time search results. This meant that using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook suddenly had real impact when it came to position on Google’s search pages.

The latest change takes into account the speed with which web pages load and could see slow loading sites falling down in the Google league tables.

Google say that they have made the latest change because their research shows that people prefer to visit websites that load quickly. They also say in their central webmaster blog that the effect of a slow website can be cumulative: that is people remember their experience and are reluctant to repeat it.

I have to say that I agree with Google. If a web experience is poor I have to be pretty keen to persevere. I’m not the only one of course – your customers will be the same. In Google’s own words ‘faster sites create happy users’.

The good news is that Google have said that the most important criteria for search ranking is still the relevance of a page to a particular query.

If you want to test the speed of your website (or ours for that matter), you can do it here at WebPagetest.

Ursus Media produce usable, accessible, beautiful and, let’s be honest, pretty speedy websites and they’re all handcrafted here in sunny Swindon. Feel free to get in touch and if you’re in need of a new website take a look at our latest offer.

Analysis of the traffic on your website goes way beyond the simple counting of ‘hits’. Analytics gives you a real understanding of how people are using your website, what they’re doing once they arrive and where they came from. You can see conversion rates, work out what works and what doesn’t for your site and even work out the value of each visit.

A good analytics package will help you to give your customers what they want, improve your website, get more for your marketing spend and increase revenue because of the business insights it can deliver.

There are lots of great analytics packages available to you and by happy coincidence one of the best, Google Analytics, is free. Don’t be mislead by the word free, there are some very big businesses using Google Analytics every day. I have experience of using it on a site with an average of 750,000 visitors per month and I use it here on the Ursus Media website because it’s such a powerful tool. You should bear in mind that although a Google Analytics account is free your developers will charge you for the time required to set up the account and implement the code on your website.

The following video from Google gives a quick overview of interpreting and using the data from Google Analytics. Most packages deliver similar metrics so although this is Google specific it’s easy to relate to other tools.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdsb_uH2yPU

Google Analytics is a superb tool and it never fails to surprise me that it’s free (although there are some exceptions -- see Google’s T&Cs). There are of course other tools available to you but but they all give you similar information and the insights for your business should not be underestimated. This is only the beginning.

Useful resources

• Ursus Media courses
• Wikipedia on web analytics
• Technorati on web analytics
• Google Analytics