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Talk to any business advisor and one of the aspects they’ll mention is the importance of measuring key values that govern the success or failure of your business.

For example, if your business manufacturers a product, then you’ll want to measure the number of units made per hour or day and the profit margin made on each one when it is sold. If you’re in retail, then you’ll want to measure the profit made per square foot of shop space and the turnover of product sold. You get the idea I’m sure and no doubt there are unique critical success factors that apply to your own business telling you how it is performing at any given point in time.

If your business has a web site, at some point in the past you’ll have taken the decision to commission it in order to satisfy a specific need or perform a particular task for your business. For example, your web site may be one that is designed to generate leads for your sales team or perhaps its purpose is to sell products directly off the web. Measuring the success of these types of web sites at a top level is relatively easy to do as it’s is just a case of identifying the number of leads or sales that have been generated from the web site. One good trick here is to use a specific sales enquiry telephone number on your web site or allocate a unique email address to enquiries from your site. Any sales or leads that come through these unique contact points are easy to identify as originating from your web site.

Installing a web site visitor statistics package for your web site is an essential tool for any site owner as it helps them fine tune the effectiveness of any web site marketing activity. Good ‘web-stats’ applications will offer reams of useful information about how a web site is performing. For instance, the number of first time and repeat visitors may be gauged; which pages they look at, which search engines or third-party web sites they come from and which keywords they use in the search engines to find your site.

Such information is invaluable for any web site owner as it allows them to make an informed decision about tweaking their site or alter their marketing or advertising activity, in order to take advantage of the techniques that are working and drop the ones that aren’t based upon the visitor activity on their web site.

Ask your web developer or web hosting company about the web-stats packages they can offer. One of the best ones to use is Google Analytics (www.google.co.uk/analytics) which offers a huge amount of detailed visitor information about your web site as well as measuring conversion rates and tracking goals. Added to this it’s free and is easy for your web developer to install on your site.

Jaimie Dobson is a director of Heckmondwike based digital marketing agency Keyclicks UK Ltd

Note: This original article by Jaimie Dobson was orignally published in the Business Matters section of The Weekly Press Newspaper on the26th September 2008

There are some things that really puzzle us when we look around at other web sites produced by some other developers.

Here’s one example;

This week we’ve been asked to quote for the redesign and development of a web site that was done approximately 2 years ago by one of our competitors in the region, for a Leeds based company. Reviewing the site before we engaged the client in dialogue (i.e. we ring them up), we were puzzled to see the following statement in the footer of each page on the client’s web site;

“This site is optimized for Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 5 or higher. Please download an upgraded version now”

Three things that struck us about this statement;

Firstly who the hell still uses Netscape 4 as their browser which died a death back in 1998? (It’s last version release)

Secondly IE5; two years ago, was already going out of use as IE6 was the browser of choice for most people with IE7 being launched in late 2006. Today we’re seeing IE8 being rolled out as we speak, Netscape is a dead duck, Firefox is the cool browser of choice and Google have entered the arena with Chrome.

So this statement, is completely pointless today as it was when the site was originally launched.

Thirdly, we hate to see this sort of instruction on web pages. Another common one is:

“This page is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels” or something of that ilk.

We can’t see who they are supposed to benefit and to us, they basically say - to use the site you’ve got to;

1. Download a browser the original developers like.

2. Amend the resolution of your screen to one that the site’s designers prefer in order to view the site properly. (You’ve got to be kidding, right?)

No doubt instructions like the ones above are pasted on to their client’s websites in order to “help them” with good intentions at heart. But we can’t see how and if so, such instructions certainly need to be kept updated.

The other laughable aspect of all this is that the client’s site has a CMS (Content Management System) built into it. Not unusual in itself and a useful feature for many sites; however (and get this) the thing doesn’t work in with Netscape (we tried on an old PC running some ancient browsers once the site owner had given us access to it).

What can you say!

All good things must come to end and it is with a heavy heart that we are to say goodbye to Cath Chaplin, one of our Project Managers, who is leaving us at the end of next week; namely, Friday the 19th September 2008 for pastures new at the swanky and newly rebuilt, Tong High School in Bradford.

There she will take up the position of ‘Pastoral Administrator’.

Now like us, you’re probably asking yourself what on earth is a Pastoral Administrator? Well, we asked the same and learnt that it’s someone who is tasked with keeping the staff, students and the parents at the school organised and in check. So woe betide those staff members who don’t get their paperwork in on time or those kids who whinge about losing their dinner money!

How Time Flies

Cath has been with us from the very early days of Keyclicks, joining us some four and half years ago as a part-time book keeper. Since then she’s been involved in every aspect of our business ranging from administration through to customer services before working her way up to the role of Project Manager.

Her current role with us as a PM involves keeping our designers and developers ‘in check’ (not often an easy task) and plenty of liaison with our clients, so her new role at the school should be a breeze.

It’s fair to say that Cath’s new job at the at the school offers her a lot more flexibility than we can offer her. Now that her young son, Zack is starting to sprout up the flexibility of a paid six week Summer break each year is probably worth its weight in gold. Imagine the savings in childcare! Who says teachers have it hard?

So whilst we are very sad to see Cath leave us, we can see the benefits for her and her family that the job will bring in the long term and we wish her the best of luck.

If you’re a client, associate or supplier or ours and have enjoyed working with Cath during her time with Keyclicks, why not drop her an email before she goes; cath.chaplin@keyclicks.co.uk, with your goodwill message or say hello on her Facebook profile.

Also, any donations towards the beers at her leaving do next Friday will be greatly appreciated!

As an element of interest, we’ve pointed out to Cath that the Tong High School web site is ‘lacking’ in some areas in our opinion. Once she gets her feet under the table, an introduction is in order I think.

All the best Cath. We’ll miss you.

The other day, whilst doing a spot of random searching in Google for various keyword phrases related to our business (it was a light day in the office); I came across an interesting blog based web site from a fellow called Peer Lawther who markets himself under the guise of “Rubber Genius�.

What Peer seems to specialise in is “social media� or “online social media marketing and promotional services�. For the uninitiated, this basically means adopting the concepts of the various social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace etc as a means of directly promoting a specific business, product or service or even raising awareness of one’s own personal brand.

It’s growing area within the online digital marketing sector to be fair and there’s undoubtedly some value in it for certain types companies that have identified “social media marketing� as a promotional channel.

Anyway, that aside; what makes Peer’s article interesting is that he talks about the various digital media marketing agencies in and around Leeds and how the city is growing as a media hub in the North of England. (We’re not listed on his site yet – but give it time!)

As he continues to write, Peer sets down a challenge in which he basically invites any Leeds based digital marketing and social media marketing company (or those within a 15 mile radius of Leeds) to be listed on his site.

Now, as any search engine marketing consultant who knows his onions, will tell you; good quality in bound links to a web site are perceived as “good votesâ€� by the boys at Google. This in turns helps boost back-link popularity which in turn helps boost a particular site within Google’s SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

Having read the pages across Peer’s site, I think we’d like to have a link from his site to ours as his site is relevant to the subject matter of ours (which is an important factor to consider).However, he sets out some conditions. The specific digital marketing or social media marketing company based in or around Leeds, must already be listed highly in Google for the following keyword phrases;

“online marketing leeds”, “online advertising leeds”, “leeds ppc”, “leeds seo” or “social media leeds”

At this moment in time, we’re no where to be seen in Google’s SERPS for these phrases and whilst we’d agree that a few of these keyword phrases such as “online marketing Leeds� may be a phrase that some “switched on� clients may use as search phrases when trying to find a company that will help market their business online; we’d argue that the other terms are phrases that only people who are in the industry would use. As far as we’re concerned, that’s not the sort of traffic we want to attract.

Many of our clients, both big and small; consider terminology such as “SEO� or “Social Media� to be too technical and not part of their everyday speech. In other words, it’s not a term they would use when searching for a companies such as ours and our competitors, namely the ones Peer talks about in the Leeds digital and social media sector. As such, in our mind; there’s no point in attempting to get listed highly in Google’s SERPS for these phrases.

However, having said that; we’re always up for a challenge and given that we’d like a link from Peer’s page, we’ll make it our mission to get listed in the top 20 listing results of Google for at least 3 of the above phrases and others related to to online social media marketing.If nothing else it is a good test of our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEP (Search Engine Promotion) skills.Reserve us some space on your page Peer; chocks away; here we come!

As discussed in yesterday’s blog post, Google’s new web browser; Google Chrome is now available for download from the page at: http://www.google.com/chrome

More information about their new browser may be found at

http://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en-GB/why.html?hl=en-GB

Enjoy!