webqem have had 4 men attempt to grow moustaches this month. Even though they may not be the most amazing and stylish mo’s this month they did attract $745 in donations to go to awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and depression in men.
We would like to thank everyone that helped out and donated.
Google Analytics has been the preferred web analytics tool for webqem ever since Google made the rebranded solution available in 2005. All new sites we develop use Google Analytics as a matter of course, providing an enterprise-class analytics solution to clients and developers.
A Google Account is required to access your Analytics reports. However any email address can be turned into a Google Account simply by going to google.com and clicking on the “Sign in” link on the top right-hand corner of the screen. On the next screen click on “Create an account now”, and then fill in the details on the next page, including the email address you wish to use and the password you would like to use when accessing Google Account features. Google will then send an email to your usual email inbox for you to confirm creation of the Google Account.
Access to Google Analytics is from the URL http://www.google.com/analytics/. Click the big blue button “Access Analytics”, and enter your email address and Google Account password.
If you cannot see any Analytics accounts listed in the dropdown box at the top right of the screen, then your email address may not yet have been granted access to the Analytics Account for your website. webqem can easily add access for your chosen email address to the Analytics Account.
There are two levels of access available for Analytics Accounts:
1. Read-only access
2. Administrator access
Administrator access is required to add other users, to edit settings, to define conversion goals, and to add any filters. Read Access allows viewing of all reports.
webqem prefers to use multiple profiles, for each website using Google Analytics.
1. A “raw” profile, without any filters or goals, reporting the data exactly as provided by Google.
2. Additional profiles, with goals or filters.
Filters are most useful when a website includes multiple subdomains, or when rewriting of URLS is required, to simplify reporting. For example if you have multiple sites, such as blog.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com and shop.yourdomain.com, by default Google does not include the full URL in reports, and the index.cfm page on each site would be hard to distinguish in Analytics Content reports, unless filters are used to include the full address in reporting.
Filters are also useful for excluding traffic from particular IP addresses, such as your office, or test locations.
Conversion Goals should also be defined for each site, to measure the success of each component of the site, and different traffic sources. Measuring goals also allows use of Google’s AdWords Conversion Optimiser.
Interaction with specific components of a page can be measured by placing additional tracking code on page components. This may include tracking controls and buttons in Flash movies, tracking downloads, or tracking specific links on a page, using Google Analytics Event Tracking.
If you have an AdWords account, it is recommended to add the AdWords data to your Analytics Account. Access is granted through the AdWords account. Additional information is available through Analytics that can enhance your understanding of AdWords performance.
Many content management systems append parameters to the URL, for example when paging through search data, or when cacheing information. These parameters can be stripped from URLs for reporting purposes.
If your site has an internal search function, identifiable by a parameter, for example yourdomain.com/search=keyword1, additional reporting is available within Analytics on the search keywords.
An excellent introduction to Analytics is available at http://www.google.com/analytics/ as the Product Tour.
For more detailed information, the official YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/googleanalytics?hl=en provides many hours of training on advanced features.
The Energy and Water Ombudsman NSW’s (EWON) redesigned site launched this week. EWON provides a free, independent dispute resolution service for electricity, gas and some water customers in NSW. As such, they needed to display relevant information clearly and concisely to potentially frustrated users who are engaged in a dispute with their supplier.
The new site provides information and advice around the complaint process, rights as a customer, and allows customers to make a complaint online all presented within a fresh and easy to navigate site.
webqem has met Google’s requirements as a Google AdWords Certified Partner company, after long-time search addict Chris Raynor passed the exams in AdWords Fundamentals and Search Advertising recently.
We’re looking forward to receiving our first batch of 20 promotional coupons worth $100 each for new client accounts, which Google is due to mail at the end of September.
We can now proudly display the Google AdWords Certified Partner logo on our website, and can be found through the Google Partner Search.
Why not give us a call, and see how webqem can help improve your performance at Google and other search engines.
The new Fidelity Investment Managers website www.fidelity.com.au is now live after many months of collaboration and hard work between webqem and Fidelity’s teams.
The new Fidelity site is another in webqem’s growing collection of Mura-driven sites. It provides Fidelity with a flexible and easily adaptable CMS, well placed to target content toward specific audiences and market segments, and attract new user registrations.
Specific goals for webqem’s information architects, design and development teams included:
One of Fidelity’s goals for the new website is to deepen its relationship with targeted audience segments and to expand the range of investment tools and knowledge-based insights available for Advisers. Financial Advisers can also access educational content on the site and be awarded CPD (industry-recognised) points toward their continuing professional development.
Fidelity previously had a number of third party tools and applications hosted in disparate locations and with wide variance between visual styling. All tools have now been incorporated within the new site and redesigned to reflect Fidelity’s new visual identity.
All roads now lead to the website. With lots of new reasons to visit.
webqem has been managing AdWords campaigns for a number of clients over the past four years, in financial, retail, health, and software markets.
For the last few months we have been running paid advertising campaigns at Google AdWords, Facebook and LinkedIn, observing striking differences between the three platforms. A major factor would be due to the different levels of targetting possible.
Each platform does allow a measure of targetting, as follows:
AdWords campaigns can be targeted:
Facebook campaigns can be targeted:
LinkedIn campaigns can be targeted by three of geography,company size, job function, industry, seniority, gender and age. Note that interests cannot be specified with LinkedIn.
Each platform allows bidding by CPC or CPM, and we tested both for each platform.
We compared the results of advertising a new online retail site providing hire services across the three platforms.
LinkedIn’s lack of targetting by interest or keyword left it lagging in third place, with the lowest click through rate, and by far the highest cost per click. LinkedIn’s suggested price for the demographic we targeted was over $4/click. LinkedIn visitors typically stayed on site for less than 30 seconds, and converted poorly.
Facebook provided the lowest cost-per-click – around 2/3 the cost of AdWords visitors. Facebook visitors tended to stay on site for around a minute, but only 10% came back for a return visit. They also converted very poorly. CPC advertising was clearly better than CPM advertising on Facebook for our client, with a much higher effective click through rate.
AdWords was a clear winner, with excellent click-through-rates, high pages per visit, low bounce rate, and solid conversion rate. The cost-per-click was acceptable, with the highly targeted campaign having excellent quality scores and numerous keywords with double-figure click through rates.
It does have to be said that organic traffic also performed outstandingly, with a high time on site, and double the conversion rate of the paid traffic. This was true for both Google and Yahoo, although Google provided 30 times the amount of traffic as Yahoo.
Google Adword’s ability to target an audience by keyword at a time when they are actively searching for infomation made it the best performer by a long way, for return on investment.
However as a branding platform for a new site, Facebook did provide a cost-effective method for a large number of impressions.
Here are illustrative figures from Google Analytics:
The Adobe eSeminars are a great way to learn from the masters through live presentations. Our very own industry expert Larry Adler will show you how to make dramatic improvements to your business with Adobe Connect Professional.
You’ll discover how to:
You’ll also get all the tips and best practices for effective online marketing campaigns, covering communication tasks such as live meetings, on-demand presentations, e-learning and rapid content creation.
After months of hard work and much collaboration between YHA and the team at webqem, we’re very happy to announce that the redesigned YHA site is now live! The YHA site redesign was a large project, considering the site has over 2,500 pages. We worked extensively with YHA to better align the website look and feel to YHA’s brand, and to provide better visual weighting to all site elements, to improve user interaction and navigation.
There were also a number of technical objectives in the YHA site redesign:
• Utilise CSS layouts as much as possible throughout the site
• Implement the Mura Open Source CMS, to give YHA greater flexibility and control over content editing
• Increase page speed across the site, by utilising site speed optimisation best practice (CSS Sprites,
separate image domains, compression, content caching)
• Utilise latest HTML 5 techniques including dynamic font rendering
• Widen site pages from 800 pixels to 1024 pixels
The end result is a faster, technically and visually cleaner site that YHA have much greater flexibility in managing going forward.
Adobe has released Presenter 7.0.6, why should you upgrade? The “The Update will install Adobe Presenter 7.0.6 patch on top of Adobe Presenter 7.0.5. It provides fixes for connect issues and also the limited support for Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.”To help you out, Philip Roy from Massey University has created a tutorial. When you’re done upgrading have a look around the Massey eLearning site, it is full of useful tips and tricks around using Adobe Connect.
Adobe has released Presenter 7.0.6, why should you upgrade? The “The Adobe Presenter 7.0.6 Update will install Adobe Presenter 7.0.6 patch on top of Adobe Presenter 7.0.5. It provides fixes for connect issues and also the limited support for Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.” To help you out, Philip Roy from Massey University has created a tutorial. When you’re done upgrading have a look around the Massey eLearning site, it is full of useful tips and tricks around using Adobe Connect.
E-Commerce is influencing the direction of companies more than ever. Forrester Research Inc, have just released an interesting report on Online Retailing in Australia 2010: Technology Investment.
The report supports the notion that E-Commerce is becoming a strong influencer in the direction of companies, with 69% of merchants intend to increase their investment in technology in the year ahead. Further more from these results, 53% nominated the base e-commerce platform as their technology investment priority for the coming year.
Is it time for you to look into E-Commerce for your business? Contact us today to explore the many solutions we offer.
