Proving it works
So, you’re running monthly emails and collecting open and click-through data to present to your boss. If he knows his stuff, he should really be saying, “So what?”

Open and click-throughs are not an end in themselves, it is the conversion rate that is far more interesting and provides more useful data. For example, if a key objective of your email campaign and website is to generate online customer enquiries for sales staff, you should be measuring the rate at which email recipients are submitting a sales enquiry. This way you can say to your boss, “January’s email campaign went out to 5000 people and generated 50 enquiries”. You can then take that data, match it with end sales data and in turn calculate an ROI. 

Read on…

Recent Google Webmaster Blog posts highlight the new features in Google’s Webmaster Tools which webmasters and site owners can use to submit information to Google. Also highlighted is the need for businesses to keep an eye on what the search engines are asking them to do, else they risk being left behind their more savvy competitors!

I will be concentrating on Google here, but we can apply the below to other search engines.

A lot of people will already know the basics of SEO

• Create page titles which carry information, rather than just one or two word titles.
• Create the page content & copy with audience and keywords in mind.
• Structure the page using headings, paragraphs and lists in the code.
• Give images descriptive alt text and titles.
• Add metadata descriptions to your page. (This is becoming less and less important, but it is still often used on the search engine results page!)

Following the above guidelines goes a long way to achieving a good ranking on any search engine you care to mention, but any SEO consultant will be at pains to tell you that there’s a lot more you can do.

Read on…

It is, as everyone knows, best practice to use analytics code on websites to track visitors.

Pretty much every client we talk to expects metrics on their website (and we soon suggest them if the client doesn’t),  but no one seems to know that you can track visitors in Flash applications too.

Read on…

It’s not uncommon for senior managers’ eyes to glaze over when presented with web metrics. They can be technical, difficult to understand and far removed from business objectives. But select the right measures and you will get your boss’s attention. Read on…