Beginning Analytics
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.
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
Writing for the Web
Writing for the web is a skill that is often neglected. For a number of reasons it’s not the same as writing for print media so sadly you can’t just recycle the copy from your brochure.
A few key things to remember when you’re writing for web are:
- Capture your audience’s attention: You have to capture you reader’s attention almost immediately – believe me if you haven’t got them interested with the first few words they’ll probably move on. Use the inverted pyramid technique and start with the conclusion and follow with the details.
- Less is more: Be clear, be concise. If you can pare an article down to a headline and a series of bullet points then maybe you should.
- Make it meaningful: Don’t waste your reader’s time. If you’re going to tell them something, make it accurate and useful.
- Have a call to action: Users time is precious so you might as well make the most of it. Ask them to buy, donate, download or simply comment. If they go on and follow your call to action you’ll get another useful insight as to whether or not your content is working.
- Don’t forget the science: Writing content for the web has another more scientific dimension. Copy must be written in such a way as to make it more attractive to search engines like Google. Of course this can be overdone and it mustn’t compromise the integrity of your message. This science bit is a facet of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and I’ll cover this in a later post.
If, forgetting for the time being item 5, this all seems very easy then why don’t you try a little exercise? Take a 1500 or 2000 word article, maybe something from a corporate brochure and edit it down to 500 words. You still have to include all the salient points and it still has to make sense.
Harder than it sounds? Let me know how you got on by leaving a comment at the bottom of the page.
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