Who should blog? How do you know if you have anything to say that will be of interest to others? Do you need to be a really good writer?

Well, without really answering any of these questions, but more in order to “practise what we preach” and as a little experiment, we in the eBusiness Champions team shall now be blogging!

Videos and links from our January Analytics events are now online. See details for the Nottingham event or the Leicester event.

Thank you to everyone who has attended the Google Analytics events in both Leicester and Nottingham.

Really good turnout of people at both events, both new and returning, and we have had some really good feedback, so hope you all took something useful away from the evening.

Video links
Here are the links to the Google analytic videos. They are very short and I think very useful to have a quick look at!

Advanced segments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvkvMjPJXmM 

Custom reporting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WUoGWtQyK0

Motion charts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4QePIt_TTs

Slides are online
http://www.slideshare.net/eChampions/google-analytics-event-jan-2010  

 

Full event reports from these events will be available online after next week when Dorte is back from holiday :o)

New year, new venue, new opportunities! We are kicking of the year with the topic "search", starting with Google Analytics.

How do you manage your web stats?

Google Analytics isn’t new and many of you are already using it to collect data for you site. We highly recommend that if you haven’t already got this installed on your site that you get it implemented quickly. However, one thing is installing it, another thing is how you subsequently manage and react to the data it provides you with.

The stats on their own won’t improve your site. But monitoring your stats regularly and responding to them by doing tweaks and changes, can however significantly improve the performance of your site, both in general and also for anyone using Google AdWords. But how often should you look at the stats, which are more important and how do you respond to them and improve them?

What's on offer?

The aim is to make sure everyone knows how to make the most of this tools. Some of the things we will be covering are:

• Which metrics are the most important to focus on?
• Have you got the right filters in place to for example filter our internal traffic?
• Have you got goals defined?
• Are you aware of the benchmarking feature and customer reports available?
• How do you improve the stats. For example how do you improve a bounce rate? How do you get visitors to look at more pages?

Launching the new website!

We will also be launching the new official eBusiness Champions website this evening. We have great expectations of the site, and hope it will be the main tool for connecting us and all the program participants. This is where you will showcase your services, look up the other companies, benchmark against each other and progress your business plans.

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Location

Cape Bar, 23 - 27 Victoria Street, Hockley, Nottingham NG1 2EW

Timings

• 7.30pm Arrive and registration
• 7.45pm New web site & Google Analytics
• 8.30pm Q&A
• Light food and socialising

Transport & Parking

The venue is in the heart of the city centre and easy reachable by bus or tram. For people driving, Fletcher Gate car park is only 2 minutes walk.

Location: Leicester
Date: Tuesday 8th December, 2009
Speaker: Jonny Green & Dorte Knights-Branch

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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.

Report from Nottingham Launch event of eChampions.

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).

Multi award winning Malk Hall, owner of Hall-Fast Industrial Supplies, one of the fastest growing online businesses in the UK has signed up to participate in eChampions, the new online eBusiness improvement community led by AxisCentre Castle College, Nottingham.

Variously referred to as “A private Facebook for eBusinesses”, and a “self-help-group for SME website owners”, eChampions targets a series of UK first innovations in helping small to medium business from across the East Midlands identify and achieve a commercial return from the web.

A brief outline of the planned website performance data sharing and benchmarking proposals for ‘full eChampions’ participants.

Part of being a ‘full’ eChampion (ie not basic member level) is being able to track your performance and progress, including your performance against your previous month, and crucially against other businesses involved. This is important in demonstrating value for money to the ESF sponsors of the programme, but much wider than this, it’s one of the best opportunities to improve your business online.

Bouncing back...

This is known as benchmarking and brings abstract individual figures to life. How? For example, bounce back rate is the % of visitors to your site that leave immediately within seconds and do not continue to the deeper pages beyond the homepage.

 

Against an impressive field, Radford based developers Tineke Ltd have won the tender to develop the eChampions website, a key part of a new exciting East Midlands based eBusiness community project.

Variously referred to as “A private Facebook for eBusinesses”, and a “self-help-group for SME website owners”, eChampions will feature a leading edge web portal developed by Tineke Ltd to enable events, learning, networking to support businesses participating in this eBusiness improvement programme.

Joomla & open source chosen

For the technically well informed, the winning tender from Tineke was based on an adaptation of ‘Joomla’, an emerging open-source development platform, and part of the move towards lower-cost adaptable web technology solutions that employ powerful yet easily reusable modules of web code.