Dorte Knights-Branch
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February event
Location:Cape Bar, Hockley, Nottingham
Date:hdjhfjdsf, 2010
- View 'Advanced Segments' video
- View 'Custom Reporting' video
- View 'Motion Charts' video
‘How to use Analytics’ slides
Making the most of Google Analytics
Location: De Montfort University, Leicester
Date: Tuesday 26th January, 2010
Thanks to everyone who attended January’s Google Analytics event and launch of our new website. Really good turnout of people - both new and returning - and we’ve had some really good feedback, so hope you all took something useful away from the evening.
Full event reports will be posted here next week when Dorte is back. For now, you can view the video recordings and slides from the event, right.
Also, the Google Analytics videos we mentioned (very short and worth looking at!) can be viwed by clicking teh links below:
‘How to use Analytics’ slides
Launch event and Case study
Location: Leicester
Date: Tuesday 8th December, 2009
Speaker: Jonny Green & Dorte Knights-Branch
We launched the eBusiness Champions programme in Leicester to a group of about 19 businesses. There was a great mix of sectors represented ranging from printers and solicitors to a conference centre and dentist software solutions.
Big picture, what’s it all about
Jonathan Green did an introduction of the changes happing online at the moment and an overview of what the eBusiness Champions programme has to offer, including the different membership levels and opportunities for sharing key performance web metrics.
Case study - Traffic Up, enquiries up, business up
The aim was to show how small changes implemented to a website can really make a great impact on a business by increasing traffic, increasing enquiries/quote requests and keeping sales up in hard times. The key themes for the case study was were:
1. Traffic
You can have the best web site in the world but unless you manage to drive traffic to it you are not likely to get any business from it. The main options are to look at organic (free) search listings and/or pay-per-click (ppc) advertising.
We looked at how Halsbury Travel managed to change the traffic source from 50/50 split between organic/ppc to mainly get traffic from free organic search and hence making significant savings. The traffic to the most important tour pages was increased 5 times in a very short space of time.
2. Content
On the other hand, you can have thousands of visitors but if your content isn’t right those visitors could all be lots potential.
The case study showed how work had been done on getting the “linear path” right, making sure it is clear for people where to go, and clear and easy for them to perform the desired goal, in this case requesting a quote. Focus was also on ensuring you optimise for a good landing experience no matter which page your visitors enters the site from. Not everyone will enter from your home page, in fact a majority of people on the Halsbury web site enters the site via a tour page.
Efforts have also been made to put content in context on the travel site. Feedback for the tours are now shown in the relevant tour pages instead of the original tired testimonials page in the “About us” section. Lots of cross referencing on the tours pages, for example by showing them other “History destination” or other “subjects to study in Paris”, have made visitors look at more pages per visit.
3. Conversions
All Halsbury tours are tailor made and hence the goal of the website is for people to request a bespoke quote. After implementing changes to the content, the number of quote requests increased by an average of 50% every month for over 2 years. A strong point was made not to underestimate the potential of getting your website to generate enquiries for you. It can be a very powerful lead generator for a business and also help free up valuable staff time. Don’t think your product or service is too complex to showcase online. The Halsbury web site can generate up to 40 quote requests a day and each request is worth a lot of £ to the business.
Summary
Apart from the need to reconfirm that all the services from the eBusiness Champions programme really are free, we had some really good feedback from the companies there and some have already confirmed that they would like to come on board as eBusiness Champions and will be attending the January event. It worked well that Han and Nigel was there who both have previous experience with the Axis Centre. We feel it will be a good idea going forward to bring a couple of the Nottingham eBusiness Champions to the Leicester events to try and bring some of the positive “old history” to the new community in Leicester and get business sharing across the counties.Making the most of Google Analytics
Location: Cape Bar, Hockley, Nottingham
Date: Thursday 28th January, 2010
Thanks to everyone who attended January’s Google Analytics event and launch of our new website. Really good turnout of people - both new and returning - and we’ve had some really good feedback, so hope you all took something useful away from the evening.
Full event reports will be posted here next week when Dorte is back. For now, you can view the video recordings and slides from the event, right.
Also, the Google Analytics videos we mentioned (very short and worth looking at!) can be viwed by clicking teh links below:
‘How to use Analytics’ slides
Christmas Event With a Practical Twist
Location: Nottingham
Date: Thursday 17th December, 2009
Event report - "The conversation" and Xmas meal
As we head towards what we hope will be an exciting new year for eChampions as a community....
17/12/09 was our very last event at CAST bar in Nottingham and the theme (other than Christmas meal and social) was 'The Conversation' follow-up to the last event in Notts where you will recall Dorte attempted to show everyone how simple changes can have a massive impact of the effectiveness of a website (Halsbury).
For the follow-up we picked on Close Encounters Travel, Hall Fast direct and Torse, all eChampions businesses who volunteered to have their sites examined, criticised by a baying mob led by Dorte at the event.
Podcast and Videos
Check out the podcast summary on the RHS of this page, recorded the morning after with Mark Spreckley from AxisCentre as guest, plus videos below:
- Video Part 1 of Notts 17/12/09 event Click here
- Video Part 2 of Notts 17/12/09 event Click here
- Video Part 3 of Notts 17/12/09 event Click here
- Video Part 4 of Notts 17/12/09 event Click here
- Video Part 5 of Notts 17/12/09 event Click here
Looking ahead
Hope you have a great Christmas and New Year. We willl be back in the office from Monday 4th January 2010,and will have events in both Nottingham and Leicester, with the Notts events switching to a larger venue; Cape Restaurant in Hockley (city centre).
We are looking into the possibilities of doing certain joint events with Web 2.0 Surgery, a Notts based community of developers and digital creatives who also operate from Cape, and a group we hope to collaborate with more in 2010.
Until then, watch the podcast and videos, and maybe even set some New Year's resolutions to do what it takes to make 2010 a stunning year for your business online.
The event
Welcome to a brief report on our eBusiness Champions November event. This was our second Nottingham event and was a real life case study example from Halsbury Travel.
The aim was to show how small changes implemented to a website can really make a great impact on a business by increasing traffic, increasing enquiries/quote request and keeping sales up in hard times. The key themes for the case study was were:
1. Traffic
You can have the best web site in the world but unless you manage to drive traffic to it you are not likely to get any business from it. The main options are to look at organic (free) search listings and/or pay-per-click (ppc) advertising.
We looked at how Halsbury Travel managed to change the traffic source from 50/50 split between organic/ppc to mainly get traffic from free organic search and hence making significant savings. The traffic to the most important tour pages was increased 5 times in a very short space of time.
2. Content
On the other hand, you can have thousands of visitors but if your content isn’t right those visitors could all be lots potential.
The case study showed how work had been done on getting the “linear path” right, making sure it is clear for people where to go, and clear and easy for them to perform the desired goal, in this case requesting a quote. Focus was also on ensuring you optimise for a good landing experience no matter which page your visitors enters the site from. Not everyone will enter from your home page, in fact a majority of people on the Halsbury web site enters the site via a tour page.
Efforts have also been made to put content in context on the travel site. Feedback for the tours are now shown in the relevant tour pages instead of the original tired testimonials page in the “About us” section. Lots of cross referencing on the tours pages, for example by showing them other “History destination” or other “subjects to study in Paris”, have made visitors look at more pages per visit.
3. Conversions
All Halsbury tours are tailor made and hence the goal of the website is for people to request a bespoke quote. After implementing changes to the content, the number of quote requests increased by an average of 50% every month for over 2 years. A strong point was made not to underestimate the potential of getting your website to generate enquiries for you. It can be a very powerful lead generator for a business and also help free up valuable staff time. Don’t think your product or service is too complex to showcase online. The Halsbury web site can generate up to 40 quote requests a day and each request is worth a lot of £ to the business.
Summary
We had lots of excellent and challenging questions from the audience and some really good conversations with people after the presentation. More people were choosing to become full level eBusiness Champions and there was a real buss of initiative and excitement from participants rearing to go. Many conversations were had with people regarding their calls to actions, how to increase their conversion rates, how do you transfer these elements to a site with ever changing and very price sensitive services etc. A really good event with excellent involvement from the audience, we are looking forward to following this up at the December event.
If you missed the event, you can see the video highlights right here on the page.
A web navigation event...
One thing is for sure; improved navigation on your website can have a radical effect on its bottom line effectiveness. We are going to hold a specific event aimied at improving website performance using improved navigation and linear path navigation will be central to this event. Hopefully March time 2010.
Slides
Traffic Up, Enquiries Up, Business Up
Location: Nottingham
Date: Thursday 26th November, 2009
Speaker: Dorte Knights-Branch
The event
Welcome to a brief report on our eBusiness Champions November event. This was our second Nottingham event and was a real life case study example from Halsbury Travel.
The aim was to show how small changes implemented to a website can really make a great impact on a business by increasing traffic, increasing enquiries/quote request and keeping sales up in hard times. The key themes for the case study was were:
1. Traffic
You can have the best web site in the world but unless you manage to drive traffic to it you are not likely to get any business from it. The main options are to look at organic (free) search listings and/or pay-per-click (ppc) advertising.
We looked at how Halsbury Travel managed to change the traffic source from 50/50 split between organic/ppc to mainly get traffic from free organic search and hence making significant savings. The traffic to the most important tour pages was increased 5 times in a very short space of time.
2. Content
On the other hand, you can have thousands of visitors but if your content isn’t right those visitors could all be lots potential.
The case study showed how work had been done on getting the “linear path” right, making sure it is clear for people where to go, and clear and easy for them to perform the desired goal, in this case requesting a quote. Focus was also on ensuring you optimise for a good landing experience no matter which page your visitors enters the site from. Not everyone will enter from your home page, in fact a majority of people on the Halsbury web site enters the site via a tour page.
Efforts have also been made to put content in context on the travel site. Feedback for the tours are now shown in the relevant tour pages instead of the original tired testimonials page in the “About us” section. Lots of cross referencing on the tours pages, for example by showing them other “History destination” or other “subjects to study in Paris”, have made visitors look at more pages per visit.
3. Conversions
All Halsbury tours are tailor made and hence the goal of the website is for people to request a bespoke quote. After implementing changes to the content, the number of quote requests increased by an average of 50% every month for over 2 years. A strong point was made not to underestimate the potential of getting your website to generate enquiries for you. It can be a very powerful lead generator for a business and also help free up valuable staff time. Don’t think your product or service is too complex to showcase online. The Halsbury web site can generate up to 40 quote requests a day and each request is worth a lot of £ to the business.
Summary
We had lots of excellent and challenging questions from the audience and some really good conversations with people after the presentation. More people were choosing to become full level eBusiness Champions and there was a real buss of initiative and excitement from participants rearing to go. Many conversations were had with people regarding their calls to actions, how to increase their conversion rates, how do you transfer these elements to a site with ever changing and very price sensitive services etc. A really good event with excellent involvement from the audience, we are looking forward to following this up at the December event.
If you missed the event, you can see the video highlights right here on the page.
A web navigation event...
One thing is for sure; improved navigation on your website can have a radical effect on its bottom line effectiveness. We are going to hold a specific event aimied at improving website performance using improved navigation and linear path navigation will be central to this event. Hopefully March time 2010.
Launch event for Axis Community
Date: Thursday 29th October, 2009
Speaker: Jonny Green
Attendance: 31
Welcome to a brief report on our first event in the all new eBusiness Champions, or eChampions for short. This was our first event and although we called it the ‘Nottingham launch’, it was a fairly informal info session aimed in the main at members of the forerunner to eChampions; AxisCommunity. The key themes/messages for this first event were:
This can work for your business
I stopped short of saying ‘this will work’ because not everyone applies the learning and insights gained. Dorte Knights-Branch has joined the delivery team after actually implementing the learning from the forerunner events, and managed to make a massive impact on the business (traffic up, enquiries up, sales up).
Dorte joins us to help all participants in this programme to do the same, namely make a real bottom line business. Dorte will be the first speaker at the first ‘proper’ events next month in Nottingham and Leicester. Don’t miss these because she’s achieved much what you are trying to do and is here to pass on the knowledge and insights of how to do it.
eChampions benchmarking & KPIs
This is all about being able to compare your business, at least the online aspects of it, to other businesses. Hotel industry does it routinely where practically every major brand/chain shares their performance with a central body, they then receive crucial stats back of how they are performing against the average/rest.
We used the example of Bounce Back (the % of users who immediately leave your site on entry without progressing to other pages). If you had a bounce rate of 25%, is that Good, bad or indifferent? The truth is you don’t know unless you can compare it to others. A key part of eChampions will be you sharing some key basic website performance data, and being able to learn where you are against others. More on this here (link to article that I wrote on benchmarking).
Business profiling
We are building in a pretty extensive business presence for you on eChampions web portal (n development) allowing you to network, make friends and form alliances with eChampions, promote your business. This will display your activity and possibly some of your basic KPIs (see above). More info to be published as the site developed. However if there is any particular wish list functionality on how your business and you as an individual within eChampions should be represented, please contact Dorte now.
Future event format
We are going for a two month cycle for our events, where we cover one subject over two events, with the cycle repeated in Leicester and Nottingham. The first event in the cycle will be a speaker delivering a 40 minute presentation of a key theme (social media, commercialising twitter, Search Engine Optimisation etc), followed by the next month a networking/informal event with subject experts and providers in the room to help you create actions plans, gain more advice and make plans to implement the learning.
We then support this with extra videos, highlights of the events as recaps, provide learning materials and links etc via the website. We then move onto the next subject and repeat the cycle. Simples!
Getting started
There are getting started sessions planned where you come to AxisCentre in Beeston, Nottingham and spend a day on a training course and planning session. However it’s possible that if you have done the eMarketing and Persuasive Content Development course at AxisCentre in the last 12 months that you can miss this and we will aim to supply the key data for this group via video. Contact Dorte for more info on these sessions. Email Dorte
In summary
The event was delivered and received in the customary good spirit and our swanky new stand went down well. I even managed to stand perfectly to have the new eChampions logo projected onto my chest, such was the level of planning and preparation which will be a key theme of this exciting new project. Many thanks to all those who attended and contributed to an entertaining couple of hours.
We now roll onto to our first ‘proper’ events at the end of November in Nottingham and Leicester. Info on next events and locations
If you missed the event, you can see a 9 min video highlights right here on the page.Social Media, (not) for everyone?!
Maybe this is wrong to admit, but actually I didn’t think social media was for every one at all! I thought there was a lot of weight behind the often posed question “how will this really benefit a corporate business?” but, cheesy as it may sound, after doing a one day taster course with Caron Lyon from CRM Creative I was actually converted!
The magic words
I fact, I suppose Sue Hallam had done a bit of the ground work for my conversion at the Online Marketing Conference in December by the words “think about what you currently do and then use Social Media to do it better” (or something along those lines).
Making it personal, or not?
Slightly following on to a “side-topic” from the recent Nott Tuesday event where Christian Payne from Documentally was the excellent guest speaker on the topic of “Social media”.
The conversation touched on the question of weather you should use a personal photo or your company logo on things like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc? Is it all about being personal and people talking to people? Do you create one account for your self and another for your business, and do you still have your own smiling face on the company account? So I fact, should lots of people within a company have a “company profile” specific for their group of customers?
Other networks to use in Nottingham
Whilst we are very busy getting the eBusiness Champions programme running, there are already a couple of other good networks that could be of interest to our members.
Web 2.0 surgery
In their own words: “Web 2.0 Surgery is an informal event where you can get answers on internet related topics from a group of experts."They host “almost monthly” events in Nottingham where business people as well as developers can come along and ask questions and get advice on Internet related topics. Web 2.0 Surgery is run by Martin Wright, and we are fortunate to have both Martin and some of his “Experts” attending some of our eBusiness Champions events, so please ask him about his next events when you see him.
