How do you know anyone has looked at your website?
Where are they in the world?
What made them visit your site? Which words did they use to search?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then you don’t really know whether your investment of time and money in a new, shiny website was worthwhile or not. Even if you have customers busy in your on-line shopping cart or knocking on your door, you won’t know if these are all you could ever expect or if there is more business waiting for you out there.
In some way, your website is a part of your marketing effort and you need to know your return on investment and whether you could improve on it.
Fortunately there are tools which can be built into your site to give you this vital information.
Many web hosting providers allow you to see some statistics, but the usefulness of these varies. In the worst case all you will see is a readout of the site logfile, which gives you a lot of unhelpful data and no easy way to interpret it.
Far better to build in a system which can be used to give you a clear overview of your visitors, where they have come from and what they have looked at.
Sort Out Your Site can build in Google Analytics for you. Ideally used with a Google Adwords account, this provides a mass of information which you can interrogate on different levels of detail depending on the current focus of your marketing efforts.
It is surprising how many websites aren’t making use of this cost-effective source of information. If yours is one of them, contact Caroline Hogarth to find out how she could help you use these and other tools to make sure your site isn’t just a pretty shop window that doesn’t pull the customers through the door.
Caroline was a great help to me in developing my web strategy. She is attentive to a fault, enthusiastic and highly capable
Since Sort Out Your Site got involved, direct sales from the website have gone up to £1000 per month (more than they have ever been before) and are still increasing. When Caroline took over, late in autumn 2006, total sessions served that week were at an all time low of 536. In October 2007 we have hit an all time high of 7336 and the trend is still upwards.
Using Google Analytics, Caroline has helped me to drive up organic search traffic to the site (the sort you don’t have to pay for) by 435% in the same 5 months.
I worked with Caroline in 2005-6 on a project to decommission 90 intranet websites for a function in [..a major pharmaceutical company…], migrating their content to a new portal platform. Caroline’s contribution to the project was to facilitate and make the techie people and the business reps understand each other. Caroline has an enormous capacity to understand both sides and to draw the right conclusions from the sometimes confusing misunderstandings between the parties. She always picks out the essence of a discussion. Her particular strengths are her abilities to understand the business needs and to translate them into something that can be “Webified” and developed by the technical guys. Without Caroline we would never have been able to make the scientists understand the possibilities they were standing in front of. Or how to realize them. Caroline is also very up to date on the latest trends in the Web world. And she knows how to use it to create business values.
The project met its objectives in the required timeframe, and the senior management team which had commissioned the work was very satisfied with the outcome.
