Launching a new brand is never easy, and getting the right site design can be a process of evolution. So after 3 months of data, live user testing and working with the client on an efficient way to manage the site, we have re-imagined www.eloquii.com…well the homepage and the global footer that is!
Lovely.
(And if you’re curious, you can see the original designs here.)
Great Britain has 37 million social network users
73% of British Internet users use social network sites. In total this is about 37 million people.
Facebook is the most popular site with 64%. 24% of British Internet users use Twitter. LinkedIn
comes 3rd with 21% penetration amongst British Internet users.
Twiitter, the exception
87% of all Brits know Twitter, but only 24% uses it. The intention of shortly starting to use Twitter is large:
18% of non-users are planning to start using it soon.
42% of British social network users follow a brand
4 Brits out of 10 who have a social network site profile follow at least one brand. Four sectors are very popular: media, fashion, food and retail chains. Survey shows that people become a fan of a product after having used it. 56% of fans expect extra promotions of the brand on social media, 55% want to receive invites to events and 50% are looking forward to reading more product information.
Consumers wish to be a part of a company’s management
Some consumers are keen to be involved in their favourite brand’s management. 49% of all British social network users would love to share ideas with a company; 27% would love nothing more than to co-create new products and services with a fun brand.
About the study
• More than 9,000 respondents
• 35 countries (Europe, South & North America, Asia and Oceania)
• Sample representative for the Internet population of the participating countries
• Research realised by InSites Consulting
Last year mobile web usage increased 148% worldwide, so its high time that we offer a mobile optimised experience to our visitors. Not all of us has got the time and resources to invest in an independent mobile website. Here are few tags which can be used make existing websites ready for mobile:
The Viewport META tag
Use of <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> with width media queries. That will give your site the optimal width and your site will look the better for the device.
The Viewport META tag controls the logical dimensions and scaling of the browser viewport window in many smartphone browsers, including Safari Mobile for the iPhone, Android browser and BlackBerry browsers. The presence of the Viewport META tag indicates that the markup document is optimized for mobile devices.
A typical mobile-optimized site should contain something like the following:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width,initial-scale=1,maximum-scale=1“>
The width property controls the size of the viewport. It can be set to a specific number of pixels like width=600 or to the special value device-width value which is the width of the screen in CSS pixels at a scale of 100%. (There are corresponding height and device-height values, which may be useful for pages with elements that change size or position based on the viewport height.)
The initial-scale property controls the zoom level when the page is first loaded. The maximum-scale, minimum-scale, and user-scalable properties control how users are allowed to zoom the page in or out.
The MobileOptimized META Tag for IE:
<meta name="MobileOptimized" content="width" />Microsoft invented the MobileOptimized META tag to control the layout width for mobile markup rendered in Internet Explorer Mobile (i.e. Pocket IE). The content of the meta tag is an integer width in pixels. In IE Mobile, the presence of this META tag forces a single-column layout at the specified width, preventing the browser from modifying the layout to “fit” the mobile screen.
Some non-MS mobile browsers may also use the tag to force single-column layouts. Mobile browsers and mobile search engine spiders also use this META tag to identify mobile-optimized HTML.
The HandheldFriendly META Tag
The HandheldFriendly META tag is widely interpreted by mobile browsers and spiders as an indicator of mobile markup and a directive to display the web document without scaling. The value of the META tag is “true” for mobile markup and “false” for desktop-optimized HTML.
<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="true" />
Page Speed Service is the latest tool in Google’s armoury to help speed up the web.
ghs.google.com.Google serves requests received for your serving domain by fetching content from your reference domain and rewriting it. Check it out here...
The list of related searches usually appears at the bottom of SERPs but some significant changes have been seen in Google.com results recently. Now, Google Related Searches appears on the top and looks more organised, refined and user friendly.
Here are some suggestions for online retailers to make these changes fall in your favour:
1) Have a dedicated section for Brands on your website and create a separate page for each brand so that you can optimise that page for brand related searches like “Chanel Sunglasses”.
2) Take top keywords from internal search results and create static pages for those to target more specific searches like “Polarised Sunglasses”.
3) Get your product listed on comparison shopping engines like Shopping.com, Nexttag, Amazon, Pricegrabber, Ebay etc.
The annual eConsultancy ‘Online Measurement and Strategy Report’ was released this week and it was surprising to see some data still bucking the trends that are largely perceived to be the most important factors of Global online retailing today – the cross-channel experience and the management of the Customer throughout their life cycle (both seemingly connected by nature).
The study shows a 0% increase YOY on the important of customer life cycle information from a panel of some 800 organisations across the globe (496 client-side organisations and 344 agency / suppliers).
eConsultancy and Lynchpin
Yet its still deemed to be high priority to 34% of respondents:
eConsultancy / Lynchpin
It’s incredible that in the midst of one of the worst global recessions and in a market here in the UK where we see organisations like John Lewis reporting a 20% increase/ £61.3m in profits to £367.9m in 2010 – why are more businesses not making the connection? Look after the Customers you have and provide them amazing service – John Lewis (held as the example by many) should not just be a benchmark in your competitive analysis and your web ‘best practice’ design brief. We should learn from their approach and proposition which values the customer at its core, values and provides a great shopping experience and facilitates the cross channel /device experience its Customers demand.
Interestingly, in the same set of analysis the importance of the CPA / CPL still remains the most important set of data for a majority of the organisations surveyed – (be it down 3% YOY). This pointing to the fact that we are all very good at attracting new Customers, breaking new markets and yet as soon as we acquire them, many cease to care about what that customer costs as they continue to spend – or not.
Looking at the general retail market, these trends are not really surprising, but a reflection of the experience that many shoppers feel when purchasing online, in-store, via mail order and the plethora of channels available to us. Many retailers are yet to establish a true multichannel strategy to provide for the needs of their Customers and therefore continue to lose share to the larger players and pure plays. Have we forgotten that we are in this business to be retailers primarily and digital marketeers second – without products and Customers, who needs the banner ad’s, PPC or Google shopping feed?
What can or should be done?
Of course it’s about loyalty and the reward for loyalty, but it is not just a case of installing a ‘programme’ into the business and ticking the box. It’s recognising and harnessing many of the positive trends highlighted in the report – the fact that data and analysis (the resourcing and investment into) continues to grow both agency and client side, that there are positive trends suggesting people and the definition/implementation of the right tool for the right job are important for success.
A smart way to address this apparent Customer neglect could be to dust off the old CRM strategies, call in the geekiest of all ‘Geeks’ – the Business Intelligence experts and come up with something that’s manageable in your business and starts the culture of caring for the Customer. This might not win you awards for creativity, but its going to make you the true Customer champion in your business and of course its going to make you some money – and we all know most retailers want more of that!
Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin etc help create a real time buzz for products and services, establish brand reputation and develop a network of like minded individuals and institutions.
Of course, we can leverage these social media and online networking platforms only if we can track, measure and analyze the volume and origin of conversations and potential influencers.
Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools have been updated to allow for easier analysis of social actions on your site, how the social feedback impacts your search traffic, and the details of your more social visitor base.
You can find the social data in two locations: Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
Social Reports in Google Analytics
Google has created a specific social tracking tag (_trackSocial), which will allow the tracking of most social elements. The updated JavaScript code will track a variety of actions across popular social networks. Facebook shares, likes, and unlikes; Twitter tweets; and Google +1s are all trackable with the updated code.
Beyond seeing stats and figures for social tracking on the whole, users get access to three reports on Analytics:
1. Social Actions gives you a breakdown of the social feedback a page or site has received.
2. Social Engagement lets you see how users who interact socially with your data behave on your site. You can track all standard site behaviour (conversions, time on site, bounce rate, page views, etc.) for the portion of your audience that shared the content.
3. Social Pages lets you examine, at a glance, which pages are getting the most social feedback.
Social Reports in Google Webmasters
Google Webmaster Tools allows you, for a verified site, to look through three new reports:
1. The activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search)..
2. The audience report, enabled once you have a significant number of +1s, gives you demographic and geographic data on users who have +1′d your site.
3. The search impact report gives you an idea of how +1‘s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out.
All the information collected from Google Analytics and Webmaster can be used to make improvements to your social media message, profiles and interaction on a continual basis.
Time for a look back at 2010 and IE6. I’ve been posting some, admittedly very skewed, stats on IE6 that represent only what happens on Pod1’s clients websites. As we do a lot of luxury fashion e-commerce and a bit of travel I have a mixture of clients here to get a broad view how browsers are doing over time.
Many of us are eagerly awaiting the death of IE6 and I think it’s time to put the champagne on ice. So here come the boardroom graphs.
Traffic over 12 months from the Pod1 Sample
Interesting to see Safari do a sudden jump at the end of the year and Firefox being in a slow but steady decline. Comparing this to Chrome I guess that Googles Power Advertising is doing well for them. The good news though is that IE6 is under 5% traffic at the end of the year. Interestingly we can see IE9 pop-up in the last quarter of the year, so we see some early adopters on our sites. IE 7 is in a steady decline as well and I would hope to see it at less than 5% in two to three months.
Revenue over 12 Months from the Pod1 Sample
A slightly different picture here for Safari vs. Firefox. Where in terms of traffic Safari could overtake Firefox, the revenue generated by Firefox users is still higher than on Safari. If anyone can come up with an explanation for this, please use the comments section below. Just to be sure, the AOV on Firefox is consistently lower than on Safari (rich Mac selective users?) but the amount of transactions processed consistently higher
Again, the good news is that IE6 is under 5% and sits at 3.22% in our sample in December. At the beginning of the year we saw almost 8% of Revenue generated by IE6; largely driven by our corporate clients. That is a drop of almost 60% in 12 months. For our corporate clients IE6 though still generates about 6% of the turnover and did generate a very large 6 figure sum over the year. In total IE6-8 still generate well over 50% of the revenue across our clients websites even if traffic is below 50% in December.
When looking at individual clients the trend mentioned in an earlier post still continues. The more exclusive, i.e. pricy, the more Safari users we see and the higher the contribution to revenue by Safari. The younger and hipper the audience however, we see a shift away from IE browsers towards Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
In terms of your own site design this means that you will still need to cater for outdated IE based browsers for a while. IE9 will, once released, surely accelerate the end of IE6 but 7 and 8 will stay with us for a while. It’ll be interesting to see how Chrome will develop and how Firefox will be coping with this. On a side note. Our servers get hit by approx. 100 different Safari and Firefox versions and a staggering 357 different Chrome builds.
In Summary it all depends on your audience. Good Audience Profiling pre-launch can prove invaluable here and save you lots of bucks or in turn make you lots of bucks.
Strolling through our vast account base looking for insights to make our customers more money I stumbled upon a brand new exciting reporting feature. “In-Page Analytics”.
Lo and behold a report we’ve been waiting for. The old Site Overlay report was bug ridden and although insight full, never really satisfying.
This here is a new beast. First of all I can browse the site within Analytics and don’t need to leave and potentially have the buggy overlay displayed on all my pages. The next big thing is Filters.
On the left hand side we find some “Top Technical” or “Demographic” stats. Clicking on one of these updates the figures on screen to reflect just that. You can add filters by using the top menu as well and filter, for example by source, city, region and so on.
One thing I am particularly excited about is the bottom bit of the screen. Here we can see how many clicks were made below the viewport displayed. This is particularly interesting to see where users scroll to. I admit it is not really showing you how far users scroll down but it give us an indication about what users do at the bottom of the page and how many are actually using things like “Related Products” etc.
This is particularly important for e-commerce businesses as now they can see where to place important information to reach their top 85th percentile (or what is relevant to you). Should you place the free shipping offer on top, in the middle or stick it at the bottom of your page. Where should I place recommended products, where recently viewed.This report gives it all.Yes I am in love with this bit I admit it.
One thing I am missing is the application of Advanced Segments. It would indeed be awesome if we could segment the traffic by our carefully designed segments to get even greater insights.
Advanced segment do seem to work, it might have been a glitch when I tried initially.
The old weakness of simply counting the page views for each URL referenced on a particular page is still there as well. It would be more insightful if we could see if users click on a promotional image or use the navigation. But then, there is event tracking.
All in all we’re really excited about this new report as it allows us to demonstrate to flash loving CEOs what really matters to users on their pages. If you want to find out how to leverage Google Analytics Reports contact us.
You all know this. Our Flash loving CEO has heard that Conversion Rate is the metric of the day and wants a report on this. You have convinced him that the over-long Flash intro (stroke Splash page) isn’t helping a lot with this but then failed to convince him that conversion rate isn’t everything.
Failing to define KPIs right from the start and setting out how you want to measure them is one of the big mistakes still being made. At the end of the day, most retailers care more about money in the bank than a 4% conversion rate. Here is an example. A trusted friend had his new site done and was boasting about the conversion rate that had increased by a massive 80%. I got suspicious and asked to check his analytics. Sure enough, it turns out that the AOV and, with this, his total revenue has decreased by an equally massive 70%.
This could be a blib or simply that users now find cheaper products that were well hidden before (hats off to your Information Architect). It could be that the cross sell doesn’t work as hard anymore or any number of things. What is clear here is that the site has a problem but it isn’t the conversion rate. Would you only report on conversion rate as the only metric of importance the site would be a resounding success and it would be time for Champagne. By including other metrics, such as AOV or a broad Total Revenue you learn that there is something deeply wrong here.
The key to success and happiness is to sit down with your client and define about 10 critical success factors (Avinash thinks 3-5 is ideal but then not everyone lives in an ideal world). What are the top 10 reasons that would make you close your website down? These are the success factors and none other. Take these 10 and see if they don’t exclude each other like conversion rate and a revenue target (they assist each other if at all). You should now be down to 5-8. This is what everyone involved should be working towards to. What will Campaign X do to my Metric Y?
Implement the tagging so that you get the data you need to report on, setup some custom reports in Google Analytics, setup a scheduled email and spread the love and beauty of statistics that mean something. Talk to an ecommerce strategist here if you’d like more information on how we work with our ecommerce clients to avoid falling for the Conversion Rate metric.
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