Sound familiar? Well if so, you need to get acquainted with goals and funnels within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to your website. Aimed towards marketers, rather than geeks and techies, it generates a host of useful reports on the behaviour of visitors to your site.

Most important to many businesses is the goal and funnel elements included within the package. These detailed reporting systems allow you to track which pages result in lost conversions and where your would-be customers go.

However good your site, you will find that a percentage of would-be customers disappear during the buying process. Understanding where they go, and why, can be fundamentally important in making your site more successful.

Referred to as ‘Web Cart Abandonment’ on ecommerce websites, the average percentage of customers lost during 2007 was 52.1%. These customers leave for a variety of reasons ranging from matters completely out of your hands such as wrong credit card details to those well within your control, such as technical glitches or difficult processes.

So what are goals and funnels?

The term goal is used to refer to an outcome that you see as a positive result from your customer’s visit. This may be a successful purchase, viewing a particular page of your website or using the contact form. Whatever the goal you are looking to achieve, you can use the Google Analytics system to set the goal and track its success.

Monitoring the results is made easier through the Funnel Visualisation provided within the options. This visualisation shows how your would-be customers proceed down a particular path, predefined by yourself, towards the desired outcome or goal.

A typical Funnel Visualisation

This allows you to accurately monitor where and why your customers are leaving your site, abandoning their purchase or potential interest in your services.

Armed with this information, you and your sales or marketing team (in smaller businesses you and the cat) can look for reasons within the data and make changes or tweaks as necessary to reduce the losses and increase business.

If you would like to find out more about setting up goals and funnels you can visit the Google help pages here or speak to a member of our team about our range of support packages on 01872 555933 or by emailing info@uknetweb.com.

The task of building the perfect website is an ongoing one. Continuous monitoring, tweaking and updating is the only way to ensure your site is the very best it can be.

Here are ten tips to improve your website…

1. Understand the customer – sounds simple but so many people get it wrong.

Get all your great products together with a clearly defined and communicated brand message and you’re on to a winner!

2. Make finding things easy – some sites are just so damn complicated!

Provide easy to use, fast and accurate search facilities as standard. Ensure that navigation is simple and easy to use – no hidden or difficult to find buttons or tabs.

3. Once you have their interest why not show them what else they want?

Upsell, cross-sell, showcase promotions, offers, best sellers and new products. A sure fire way to increase basket size and average order values is to show similar or slightly better products at the checkout.

4. Understand your performance.

Use analytic tools to ascertain what’s going on with your site. The information gathered could unlock areas for additional marketing, enhanced usability or missed opportunities to tap into.

5. Let them see all you have to offer.

Use rich imaging (a fancy way of saying zoom and alternative views) with professional, clear photographs throughout.

6. Tell them what you have to offer.

Make the words on your site interesting and engaging to your target audience as well as optimised for good search engine rankings. Don’t bore them with drawn out technical specs and data which could be summarised in a table elsewhere.

7. When you offer help – give it.

Don’t you just hate the little button that says ‘Sizes Explained’ (or something equally promising) that then links to a nightmare table of numbers with no explanation or help in sight?

8. Get the customer to tell you you’re good.

Positively encourage your customers to leave and publish reviews.

9. Offer other information options.

Newsletters, promotional emails, catalogues or store information should be offered for those who want it. You could make a regular customer instead of a one off sale!

10. Offer something different.

In a world where everyone has a store online being different to the competition will help your site stick in the mind of the customer and could make the difference between a sale or not. Check out your competition and see what you could do better.

The system built for Travel Smith Limited, based in the South East, required more than 400 hours of complex programming over a period of 6 months. This was needed to ensure that a range of back end systems could work together seamlessly to assist those booking holidays on the Channel Islands.

Built by St. Agnes based, UKnetweb, the new system allows customers accessing travelsmith.co.uk to book flights and accommodation through the one site building on their previous success in arranging accommodation and ferry travel for customers throughout the UK.

Although flight booking systems of this kind often appear relatively simple to the consumer using them, they involve a range of highly complex programming languages to ensure that the different parts involved in the process work together to generate the required results.

“Many people could be forgiven for thinking that the site is pretty simple, after all, that’s how the customer should see it. However, behind the scenes we have to ensure that thousands of processes work hand in hand to deliver the service they expect.” Says Toby Parkins, UKnetweb’s Managing Director.

“As a company we focus on these kind of projects which other companies find difficult. Knowing that nothing is impossible we work to establish new ways of doing things and have become nationally renowned for a number of European internet firsts.” He continued.

The Travel Smith system is not the first project of this complexity undertaken by UKnetweb, past projects have included a national sales system for genealogy store, Parish Chest and a mobile application for brand leader, Nokia.

Anyone looking to develop their own booking system, or other complex web development can contact the company at their offices on 01872 555933 or visit the company’s website at www.uknetweb.com

Writing on the subject of web cart abandonment, a subject close to the hearts of any e-commerce store owner, Toby suggests a range tactics that can be used to increase site sale conversions and insure higher online store profits.

The full feature will be reproduced on our blog within the coming weeks. In the meantime why not order your copy from subs@catalog-biz.com

*Please note a printing mistake has led to our company name being included as ‘ukneweb’ – it should of course be ‘uknetweb’. Anyone interested in learning more about the company should visit our corporate site at www.uknetweb.com

The entry looks at how sites like Wikipedia and Digg, which purport to be web democracies actually work more like an oligarchy, where a small segment of users are responsible for the majority of content and the sites general direction.

Where I find problems with Wilson’s view starts in his title. It is clear that there may be an argument to show that sites such as Digg and Wikipedia are in the control of a select bunch of users. However, these users have not been selected, appointed or employed but have risen through the ranks (so to speak) through active participation, knowledge and the support of other users.

The whole principle of the so called ‘Web 2.0′, Crowdsourcing and the Read / Write web is that it offers open access to the collective commons. It seems only natural to me that those who put the most in would naturally achieve a higher degree of ability to affect changes across those sites operating in this way.

As such the title used in Wilson’ s blog, describing ‘Web 2.0 democracy’ as a ‘myth’, does not really seem accurate or fair.

I believe that the Web 2.0 phenomenon may not be perfect and is in fact still at a relatively early stage. Where I see that it offers many advantages over the web as it existed until this time, is in the open ability for most, regardless of technical knowledge or ability to participate in a creative commons un-bound by mainstream corporate concerns, financial restrictions or censorship.

It is difficult to apply terms such as ‘democracy‘ to such a subject when countless sites struggle to provide an accurate definition of exactly what it is. If we take the literal meaning listed by About.com as ‘the will of the people’ then can anyone really argue that Web 2.0 is anything but democratic, after all, are we not all free to participate as we choose to do so.

Never one to miss an opportunity to test a new web application, I created a group for members of the network and referral organisation, the BNI, and joined a local business network created by friend, Alan Jones, for business people in the South West (UK).

So will sites such as Ning lead to the creation of ‘nethoods’, a trend prediction from Trend Watchers extraordinaire – Trendwatching.com, where smaller networks are likely to focus on small real life suburbs, villages or even streets as people search to merge life on and offline?

If you have your own social network why not include it in a comment on this blog? I have.
Visit BNI

My role within the company is to research emerging technologies, liaise with clients and potential clients, and manage some of the projects coming in.

I have started this blog to share some of our work with the world and help businesses locally or further afield tap into the many new tools emerging on the web. I will post as often as I can with links to great sites, information or tools for those interested in the internet, other emerging technologies or growing their business.I want to start by adding the following slideshow (available for download) which was a presentation we prepared for our local Chamber of Commerce featuring hundreds of embedded links to more info.

I am keen to hear any thoughts you have and welcome anyone to get in touch. You can find me on Skype, Facebook or Plaxo. (Click here for links through ‘About Aren’)

Aren

The business, previously owned and managed by Aren Grimshaw, will be incorporated into uknetweb as it moves to increase links between clients’ online and offline activities.

Uknetweb, Managing Director, Toby Parkins commented, “We have been working successfully with Galileo on a number of projects. This move comes as we work to enhance client relationships and extend partnerships with agencies offering complimentary services.”

“Aren’s experience in running his own business ideally places him to work as a project and account manager. His ability to understand client needs will allow us to ensure the highest online returns as we move forward.”

Galileo’s marketing services will be turned towards the development of more sophisticated web based systems and websites rather than the agency’s former branding and offline marketing work.

The change will take place immediately with Aren joining the team at uknetweb’s offices in The Engine House, Wheal Kitty.

Ends