Clarihon blog

• Welcome to Clarihon Web Service’s blog

We all suffer from information overload these days, but it is certainly worthwhile taking a bit of time to review the information that can be gleaned from web statistics.

One key consideration is to understand the purpose of the site and therefore determine which metrics will help you most.  For e-commerce sites it is important to check the detail on why visitors are not completing online orders, for a brochure site it is more likely to determine which pages visitors are going to.

Here are a few of the insights you can get from reviewing your web stats:

• how did visitors arrive at your site?  Web stats will reveal if they arrived from another site, a search engine or a referring site and also what the search terms were that led them there.   All vital information to help you with your marketing efforts and search engine customisation.

• if visitors are looking at lots of pages is it because the site is informative and they are drawn further in or is it that they are unable to find what they want?  Analysing the paths your visitors take through your web site can help you structure the site and internal links better.

• are visitors arriving at the page you want them to from a search? If not, revising the targeted page should address this – and raise your search engine rankings too.

• web stats will report on errors/pages not found so that links can be amended and pages replaced.

• you can check on customer loyalty – are visitors coming back, how long are they staying on the site, what information are they particularly interested in.  Can you do more to keep them coming back?

• if you’re running an online marketing campaign, in Google Analytics you can link your Adwords account to your Analytics account. This will provide information to track revenue, bounce rates and conversions.

• in Google Analytics you can create your own filters from all the data collected enabling you to customise the information and reports.

• the location report will reveal how many hits the site is receiving from around the globe.  If you find that a number of visitors are beyond your expected audience you may want to customise areas of your site, or even extend it,  to accommodate this wider audience.

Over time you can build up a good picture of how visitor-behaviour has changed.  Are you keeping your website up-to-date with any changing patterns?

All businesses want to increase their sales, reduce marketing costs and retain customer loyalty – all these are potential benefits of making the most of the information you can glean from web statistics.

As part of our drive for growth and to reach bigger clients, Clarihon have joined the Plymouth Chamber of Commerce.

We’ve already attended the ‘Getting the most from your membership’ evening meeting and look forward to attending many more CoC events.

Networking is our primamry aim so we’ll be planning to attend as many of the networking events as possible – especially those not advertised as such!

The following may seem quite obvious, but many sites fall down in one or other of these areas:

Legibility – make sure the text is easy to read.  There should be good contrast between the font and the background but avoid bright text on a dark background.   Also avoid using a text size that is too small or too large; keep the larger text sizes for headings and sub-headings.

Readability – remember that reading from a screen is not as easy as reading from paper and it is widely acknowledged that people scan rather than read web pages.  Web content needs to be brief and punchy.  Use bullet points to make the content easy to scan and remember that it should be written for the reader not the writer!

Emphasis – make sure your keywords stand out by using bold, italics or a different colour but not underlined as this causes confusion with hyperlinks.  Use headings and sub-headings so that the reader is well signposted on the page.

Appearance – white space is important, too much text is off-putting to the reader.

Check the content – spell check and proof read to make sure there are no typos or grammatical errors, both of which make a site look unprofessional.

These are just a kew key pointers to making website content more appealing, but why not apply them to websites you look at and you will soon realise how many of them could benefit from following a few basic tips.