Event Date: 10 September 2009

A one day workshop introducing marketing professionals and business managers to the free Google Analytics service.

Are you confused by web analytics?

Do you want a better understanding of how your customers discover and interact with your website?

Then this one day course will give you a good grasp of how to use Google Analytics to improve the performance of your website.

This course will give you a solid understanding of the fundamentals of web analytics.  You will learn how to interpret your website data, how to use the data to shape improvements in your website, and how to improve your marketing based on your visitors’ preferences and behaviour.

Using live demonstration and case studies, you will see how other businesses like yours are using their Google Analytics data to shape their web marketing strategy.

Quite simply, you will learn how to improve your website by understanding how people discover your business on the web, how they behave when they get to your website, and the characteristics of your visitors.

Book Your Place Now

Please book your place via email and we will send you an invoice that can be paid  by credit card, BAC or cheque.

You will learn:

• Which statistics are most important to your business, and what the numbers mean, good or bad, for your website
• How to find the most valuable statistics, without wasting your time trawling through all the options
• How to configure your Analytics to suit your business needs
• How to improve the navigation, content and design of your site based on the measurable behaviour of your visitors
• How to track the key measures of success for your business
• How to interpret traffic source analysis, and lead generation metrics
• How to set up powerful Goals and Funnels analysis
• Event tracking for Flash and Video
• How to use Analytics with  Ecommerce sites
• How to use Analytics to optimise your SEO and PPC activities and budgets
• How to produce an Analytics plan that are most important to your business

Who is this course for?

You will be responsible for the marketing of your business, and actively using the Internet as part of your marketing strategy. You want to learn how you can use your web data to drive your business forward, and get the best possible results from your website.

You do not need to be a statistics expert or a marketing professional for this course;  the workshop has been designed for real business owners who need practical information quickly and in bite-sized chunks.

Date

Thursday, 10 September 2009

Time

09:00- 09:30    Registration
09:30 – 16:00   Course
16:00 – 16:30   Informal Q&A

Venue

PDW Meetings & Training Venue
Colwick Quays Business Park
Nottingham NG4 2JY

Fee

£245 + VAT (payable by credit card or cheque).

Includes buffet lunch comprehensive course notes, teas and coffee.

Book your place now

Please book your place via email and we will send you an invoice that can be paid  by credit card, BAC or cheque.

The Workshop Leader

Susan Hallam is Managing Director of Hallam Communications, an Internet marketing training and consultancy company. Susan specialises in making complex topics clear and easy to  understand, and has been delivering search engine optimisation training for more years than she cares to admit.

She is a Google Analytics accredited consultant, and regular speaker at Internet conferences, including Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, Internet World.

Google Analytics Training

A one day workshop introducing marketing professionals and business managers to the free Google Analytics service.

Are you confused by web analytics?

Do you want a better understanding of how your customers discover and interact with your website?

Then this one day course will give you a good grasp of how to use Google Analytics to improve the performance of your website.

This course will give you a solid understanding of the fundamentals of web analytics.  You will learn how to interpret your website data, how to use the data to shape improvements in your website, and how to improve your marketing based on your visitors’ preferences and behaviour.

Using live demonstration and case studies, you will see how other businesses like yours are using their Google Analytics data to shape their web marketing strategy.

Quite simply, you will learn how to improve your website by understanding how people discover your business on the web, how they behave when they get to your website, and the characteristics of your visitors.

Book Your Place Now

Please book your place via email and we will send you an invoice that can be paid  by credit card, BAC or cheque.

You will learn:

• Which statistics are most important to your business, and what the numbers mean, good or bad, for your website
• How to find the most valuable statistics, without wasting your time trawling through all the options
• How to configure your Analytics to suit your business needs
• How to improve the navigation, content and design of your site based on the measurable behaviour of your visitors
• How to track the key measures of success for your business
• How to interpret traffic source analysis, and lead generation metrics
• How to set up powerful Goals and Funnels analysis
• Event tracking for Flash and Video
• How to use Analytics with  Ecommerce sites
• How to use Analytics to optimise your SEO and PPC activities and budgets
• How to produce an Analytics plan that are most important to your business

Who is this course for?

You will be responsible for the marketing of your business, and actively using the Internet as part of your marketing strategy. You want to learn how you can use your web data to drive your business forward, and get the best possible results from your website.

You do not need to be a statistics expert or a marketing professional for this course;  the workshop has been designed for real business owners who need practical information quickly and in bite-sized chunks.

Date

3rd February 2010

Time

09:00- 09:30    Registration
09:30 – 16:00   Course
16:00 – 16:30   Informal Q&A

Venue

Euston House
24 Eversholt Street
London
NW1 1AD

Fee

£395 + VAT (payable by credit card or cheque).

Includes buffet lunch, comprehensive course notes, teas and coffee.

Please select the “Other Payment Options” if you would prefer to pay by cheque or pay by invoice.

Book your place now

Please book your place via email and we will send you an invoice that can be paid  by credit card, BAC or cheque.

The Workshop Leader

Susan Hallam is Managing Director of Hallam Communications, an Internet marketing training and consultancy company. Susan specialises in making complex topics clear and easy to  understand, and has been delivering search engine optimisation training for more years than she cares to admit.

She is a Google Analytics accredited consultant, and regular speaker at Internet conferences, including Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, Internet World.

My top 5 Internet Marketing tips for fighting the credit crunch.

The economy may be turning ugly, but the Internet offers small businesses opportunities to survive, and even thrive, during this recession we are all calling the credit crunch.

Businesses are looking more carefully at budgets, making sure we can squeeze every penny of profit out of our investments, and looking for the most cost effective ways of delivering our products and services.

And our customers are doing the same:  but they are still spending money.  They may be spending less, but we need to figure out what they’re spending their money on.  And they don’t want to risk wasting a penny.  They want to buy the right products, from companies they can trust.

And our customers’ use of the Internet will continue to grow – after all, it is free.

Marketing budgets may appear to be a soft target for businesses looking to make budget cuts.

But canny business owners will be taking advantage of the opportunities the Internet has to offer.

Here are my top 5 top Internet marketing tips for fight the credit crunch:

1.  Work Smart to Retain your Existing Customer Base

Out of sight means out of mind.  You need to keep in touch with your customers or you risk losing them.  And it is always cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one.

• Email marketing is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective way keeping in touch with your customers.  I’m not talking spam, and I’m not talking about marketing to get new customers.  You need to be sending out personalised, targeted messages to existing customers who want to hear your news.  And well crafted email messages make sales.

• Blogs are another free and easy way to publish information anbd keep in touch with your clients.  I am of the personal opinion that the majority of the UK population doesn’t know what to do with an RSS feed, but they sure know how to read blogs.

• Getting Social means engaging in conversations with your customers.  Qype, Facebook, Twitter:  these are places where you customers are reviewing your products, discussing their purchasing decisions, exchanging views on your business.  Use these tools to listen to your customers, hear what they’re talking about, learn more about your market.  And remember it isn’t about advertising, your contributions ot the conversation need to be valuable and appropriate

2.  Get Even More Visible in Front of Your Potential Clients

You have to get visitors to your website to make the sales.  And one of the best times to get found by potential clients is when they’re searching for what you’re selling.  You need to get found on the Internet, which means Google, but also means a range of other places on the Internet that your customers visit.

Spending on online marketing is continuing to grow, competition is getting more intense, and as a result it is becoming more expensive.

Now is the time to review which of the visibility tools are going to give you the best return on your investment.  Put together your plan of action for building your visibility on the Internet.

Your Tools Checklist:

• Search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, banner advertising, classified advertising, online press releases, affiliate marketing, videos, sponsorship programmes

3.  Make Your Business Transparently Trustworthy

You an do all the advertising you want, but consumers trust each other more than they trust your carefully crafted marketing messages.  I have previously written about the importance of customer reviews in building trust.

If you’re selling business to business, then recommendations from colleagues, friends, accountants, and business advisers all have the greatest impact on building trust.

• Case studies and positive stories about your business form an essential part of the content on your website

• Plain speaking in the words you write may look easy, but it takes time and effort to write well.  Make your web copy and email messages sound genuine, and not hollow marketing drivel.

• Cultivate customer reviews.   Sites like Google Local Business Centre, TouchLocal and Qype are platforms for customer reviews and ratings.  I know businesses are scared of negative reviews, but remember even bad reviews contribute to the sense of honesty and trustworthiness.  Keep an eye on your reviews, and listen to what your customers have to say.

4. Measure, Measure, Measure

If you don’t measure, then you can’t manage.  And if you’re not managing, then you could be pouring money down the drain.

Measuring means accountability for your marketing spend.  You need to be measuring against your success criteria.  You may want to measure sales, or email enquiries, or phone calls, or visits to your website.

• You may be using low-tech ways of measuring, like a clipboard near the telephone, and making a tick every time a person says they found you on Google.

• You might be using a dedicated telephone number that is associated with your Internet marketing activities, and when that phone rings you know the web is working for you.

• Or you might be using a web statistics package like Google Analytics, and set up your Goals and Conversion Tracking to see who well your website is performing.

If marketing budgets are tight, then knowing what works makes it easier to make the decisions of where to invest your cash.

5. Test, Learn, Test

And finally, there is no one size fits all answer to the Internet marketing puzzle.

You need to try something new, experiment with a technology or technique you haven’t used before.  Measure your success, and learn from the experiment.

• Experiments should be quick, cheap, and easy to deliver.

• If it works, then well done, and more of the same, please.

• And if it doesn’t work so well, then kill the experiment and move on.  No harm done.  Be quick and be ruthless.  You will have tested something, learned from it, and moving on to test something new.

Have you found this article useful?

Why not contribute to the conversation by adding a comment, or bookmarking the site using your Social bookmarks.

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I keep unsubscribing.  I keep complaining. And now I’m going public.  Those pesky Democrats in America are spam merchants.

Actually, President Elect Obama isn’t the spammer, it appears to be David Plouffe, his campaign manager guru who won’t take his foot off the spam accelerator.

I didn’t want to go public with the Democrats’ spamming reputation until they had safely won the election.  But now they have won, and it is time to point the accusatory finger.

The Democratic party use a piece of software called Party Builder to manage their hugely successful Internet election campaign.  A steady stream of emails asking for small donations proved to the key to financial success for party funding.

I’ve unsubscribed separate three times from their email broadcasts.  Twice the unsubscribes had no effect whatsoever.  The final unsubscribe took effect in August…. but the begging emails started reappearing in December.

As an expatriate American who completed and posted my proxy ballot, voting for Obama, I’m more than annoyed to be at the receiving end of spam.

The law they are breaking, of course, is the CAN-SPAM requirement to provide an easy and effective way to unsubscribe, or opt-out,  from email marketing.

Successful email marketing is getting the right message to the right people at the right time, and having the processes in place to respect the wishes of those wanting to unsubscribe.

Fix it, David!

Microsoft make a number of interesting tools available that are well worth exploring as part of your search engine optimisation activities.

Microsoft are offering more than 20 different tools, broadly grouped into Keyword Research Tools, Audience Demographic Tools, Content Analysis tools, and a few Social and Video tools.

I would recommend starting with the Demographic Prediction tool which gives a breakdown of a user’s gender and age based on Microsoft’s Passport data gathered as users search and browse the Internet.

You can use this tool to view demographic breakdown by key phrase or by visits to a particular web address.

Taking cars as an example, we an see that older men are searching for Jaguar XK8, whereas it is younger women looking for Mini Coopers.

Starting first with the Jaguar searchers, we see a 58:42 split men to women, with disproportionate number of searchers in the 35-49 age group as compared to the general search population.

As for Mini Cooper, we see a majority of younger women, aged 25-34:

You can use this data to better understand your user base, and ensure that your web design is suited to the characteristics of the visitors to your website.  It could also be used to help to shape your keyword strategy;  if it is mainly 18-24 year old men searching for what you think is your keyphrase, but you know your market is mainly 34-50 year old women, then it might be time to rethink your keyphrases you’re using on your site.

The Content Categorisation Engine tells you how how the search engines are interpreting your website, and the broad categories into which your website falls.

Looking at this website, the tool shows a strong level of confidence that this site is about Business, The Internet, People, and Small Business:

The Content Categoristion tool was designed to place appropriate advertising on a particular website, but it can give you a better understanding as to how the search engines are interpreting your website.

The Detecting Online Commercial Intention tool assesses whether key phrases indicate an intention to purchase products, or are simply seeking information about the product.  You can use this tool both to research keyphrases, but also to analyse your own website.

And finally, try out the AdText Writer tool, which generates small adverts for use as Pay Per Click advertising.  The tool analyses your webpages, and comes up with a range of 3 line ads to use in Google AdWords, oops, Microsoft AdCenter.