Daily Blog » … it’s about time.

2008

Nov

Google Analytics - we interview Google’s Dyana Najdi

We asked Dyana Najdi, Google’s Analytics Manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, for some from-the-horse’s-mouth insights into website analytics, Google-style.

So, what exactly is web analytics, and why is it so important?

The definition has evolved over the years. Traditionally it was very much targeted at the website developer or IT department, and we saw terms such as ‘collection, analysis and reporting of internet data’ and ‘web usage optimisation’.

Put simply, this is now defined as ‘the study of online behaviour in order to improve it’. A website operating without analytics has limited or no visibility on its performance, possibly making decisions on a whim rather than user-analysis. With analytics, websites can see the effectiveness of their marketing activities, analyse visitors’ collective activity on their site, identify their pain-points, and measure the effectiveness of attempts to improve these.

Can you give us some examples of how website owners use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics has an increasingly growing suite of reporting features aimed at servicing the needs of everyone from the smallest sites to large enterprise clients.

Some examples include campaign tracking for measuring the performance of marketing campaigns and understanding which keywords, affiliates, newsletters etc are performing best. By determining which sources are driving the most qualified traffic to a site, campaigns can be optimised to maximise these.

Accompanying this is the ability to measure what groups of visitors do on a site and whether the site has been successful in driving them towards completing predefined site objectives (such as making a purchase, or registering for a newsletter). Here website owners can set up goals to capture conversion rates and understand how successful their conversion process has been. For those who also want to identify missed opportunities, funnel path analysis may be used to identify where people are dropping out of a conversion process and determine why.

One of my preferred reports is Internal Site Search. This is great because whereas most reports focus on what people did on a site, this shows what people wanted to do (and may possible not have been able to). Content and navigation can be optimised by understanding what visitors were looking for, as well as identifying possible keywords to buy for paid advertising.

These are just a few examples, you can view some case studies on the Google Analytics site.

So what’s in it for Google?

We believe in transparency and want to give advertisers of any size the ability to measure the performance of their advertising campaigns. Instead of having to invest heavily in our reporting solution, we would rather that customers invest in gaining insights from these tools by hiring skilled data analysts and/or investing in training and education. Google benefits because we have better informed, savvy advertisers who are able to optimise their online presence and spend more effectively.

There must be some hidden gems - can you talk us through some of the features of Google Analytics with which users might be less familiar?

We recently announced a bundle of new features for Google Analytics.

- Advanced Segmentation which allows you to create on-the-fly subsets of traffic for current and historical data. Segments can be defined and applied to reports instead of having to create separate profiles and applying filters. These can be saved and applied to any report, or even compared against one another.

- Custom Reports allow users to create customised report views showing only information which is relevant to them. Reports can be personalised by comparing any available dimension and metric to create a report that is organised in a way which is relevant to the user’s industry or business.

- Motion Charts allow visual, multi-dimensional analysis of metrics over time. Users can plot their data across five dimensions; x & y chart axes, bubble size and colour, and time. Insights can be uncovered that may have been difficult to discover using traditional two-dimensional charts. By allowing users to select the metric for each dimension, they are given a new flexibility to investigate the combinations of metrics most relevant to their particular website.

- Google Analytics API (currently in private beta) allows users to create software programs and applications using read-only report level data from Google Analytics. The data exported can be used in any number of ways, such as building custom dashboards, creating data visualizations or interfaces, performing offline analysis, combining Analytics data with other data sources, among others.

- Event tracking for reporting on visitor interactions with flash movies, gadgets, downloads, and other user interaction with website elements that do not generate traditional pageviews

More information can be found on the Google Analytics Blog.

What other solutions does Google offer to website owners?

Most prominent is our seamless integration with AdWords which provides advertisers with the ability to measure the performance and ROI of AdWords campaigns.

Keyword autotagging means that advertisers can see their Google Analytics reports automatically populated with click, cost and other data for purchased keywords without having to manually modify their campaign URLs.

Cost data can also be automatically applied, allowing analytics to import click and spend data directly from AdWords to be viewed among other data in the Google Analytics interface.

Users are then able to measure the performance of each campaign and compare this against other traffic source segments on the website.

AdWords advertisers can easily link Google Analytics to AdWords by clicking on the ‘Analytics’ tab within their AdWords account. They can then enjoy additional AdWords return on investment reporting.

Another recently announced feature is the ability to integrate AdSense and Google Analytics, this feature is currently in private beta. This integration provides publishers with a more robust way to view their AdSense performance. In the US we also support TV and radio ad reporting.

Google Analytics is also the only reporting tool to offer an industry benchmarking feature, showing how a website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals for organisations of a similar size.

Can you give us an indication of what is planned for future releases?

Unfortunately we can’t disclose information regarding future releases, however I can tell you that we are constantly evolving the tool. Our teams liaise closely with customers to understand what features and functionality they need which may be lacking, and we prioritise development efforts around these to ensure Google Analytics is as powerful, flexible, and useful as a web analytics tool can be.

Further Information

You can get up to £75 Google AdWords vouchers and Google Analytics Automation free with selected Daily.co.uk Web Hosting and eShop accounts.

More about Google Analytics.

By Cat | Posted in Search Engines | Comments (0)

2008

Oct

Two months’ free Online Shop payment processing

We’re happy to announce that we’ve joined forces with Protx, one of the largest payment processing providers in the UK, to offer Daily Internet Ecommerce customers two months’ free payment processing.

Online shopping is big business, and the collaboration between Daily Internet and Protx offers customers an excellent, low risk way to build a business as an online trader taking secure transactions.

More about payment processing with Protx.

The payment processing offer applies to any new eShop from Daily.co.uk and is valid until 31st January 2009.

Struggling to find time to build your online shop?

Don’t forget, we also have a Managed Set-up service for eShop. We’ll be happy to step in to help build your web shop if you’re finding you just don’t have the time you’d like to devote to building your online shopping website. Just contact the Helpdesk team and we’ll discuss your needs with you and provide a bespoke quote for the work.

By Cat | Posted in Online Shopping, Online Shops, eShop | Comments (0)

2008

Oct

Safeguard your site with our new Website Backup service

We’ve all been there - losing important files when a disc crashed or you overwrote something in error. It’s frustrating and inconvenient, but just imagine how much more frustrating it is to have the same thing happen with your website! We strongly recommend that you take regular backups so that you can easily revert to an earlier version if something goes wrong, but just to make sure we’ve made this even easier with our new Website Backup service for Web Hosting accounts.

If you have a web hosting account, we’ll automatically create a daily backup of your website, stored on a separate server from your website, for just £45 pa. Or if your website doesn’t change that often you might like to consider our weekly backup service for just £25 pa.

Either way, you’ll have FTP access to your backups so you can perform a restore whenever you need. Of course, we’ll continue to back our entire system up, so you’ll still be protected for free in the unlikely event of a hardware failure. We’re just giving you the control you need to be able to restore your website or a particular file to a previous version whenever you require.

Buy or read more about the Daily.co.uk Website Backup service.

By Cat | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

2008

Oct

Four tips for the best Web Hosting Technical Support

One of our aims in Daily.co.uk Support is to make sure we resolve your issues fully and as promptly as possible. However, getting your issue resolved in the most efficient manner is very much a two way process, as obviously we are very dependent on the information you supply. Here are a few tips for information you can provide that will help us get to the bottom of your query for you as quickly as possible:

1) Tell us the domain name
It’s very important to know exactly what service you are experiencing a problem with, especially if you have multiple services in your MyDaily Control Panel. The domain name is often the best identifier so we know exactly what to look at first.

2) Be specific about the issue
If you’re not sure what the problem is, the easiest thing to do is just tell us exactly what you were trying to do and what did or did not happen when you encountered the issue. This is very important as while we do try there are always occasions when we cannot replicate a fault, so it’s really useful to have something specific on which to focus our energies.

3) Let us know whether you’ve done this before
This is one that is often overlooked, however it can be a real help to know if you have successfully done something previously but were suddenly unable to do so this time around, or if you encountered the problem the first time you tried something. It’s also useful to know if the problem is intermittent. All this can really help us narrow down the potential issues.

4) Tell us about any error messages
To most Support teams these are one of the most valuable aids in resolving your issue. Even if the error message is fairly complex or sounds very ambigious, please let us know as it can really help us pinpoint the issue.

If we’re armed with all of this information from the start, it really does make it much faster to diagnose and resolve your issue.

And one final point worth mentioning as well - although we aim to be extremely fast in our turnaround time, we can only type so fast! Please be assured that we address all emails as quickly and efficient as possible and keeping you updated is definitely a priority, so you shouldn’t need to chase up your support request. We’ll get back to you with as full a response as we can or any further questions we have that will help us resolve your question as soon as we possibly can.

Further information:

Ways to contact Daily.co.uk Technical Support

The Daily.co.uk Knowledgebase has lots of useful advice and help to tackle common questions and problems, so it’s worth taking a look. And if there’s a guide you’d like to see on here, just drop the Support helpdesk a line and we’ll see what we can do.

By Ray | Posted in Customers, Hints & Tips | Comments (0)

2008

Oct

£75 Google AdWords vouchers from Daily.co.uk

We’re delighted to announce that we now offer fabulous £75 Google AdWords vouchers FREE with selected Daily.co.uk accounts!

Thanks to the very helpful guys over at Google and our speedy dev team, our customers now have access to more free online advertising than ever before. The new £75 Google AdWords vouchers are free when you buy any one of our Web Designer, Reseller or eShop accounts.

£50, £30, and £20 Google AdWords vouchers are also available with other web hosting accounts, our website building accounts, and domain names, so Daily Internet customers can benefit from free pay-per-click advertising whatever their service.

More about Google AdWords

By Cat | Posted in Domain Names, Domain and Web Hosting Offers, Hints & Tips, Web Hosting | Comments (0)

2008

Oct

Building a website or online shop? Let Daily.co.uk help.

We know that sometimes, especially if you’re setting up or running a small to medium sized business, building a web site or web shop can take more time and resources than originally expected.

To solve that problem, we’ve got two web design services that take the pain out of getting up and running - there’s a Helping Hand for Instant Website and Managed Setup for eShop.

If you’re an online trader, whether you’re just starting out or already pay your bills on the strength of online shopping, we can take the pressure off getting your online shop sorted with our Managed Setup service for eShop. eShop is a hugely flexible product that gives you the power to build, host and take payments via a professional looking shop, and our Managed Setup service is just as flexible. Because each trader’s needs are different, the service is completely bespoke. We’ll start by discussing your requirements so that we can work with you to get your web shop just the way you want it. To have a chat with us about how we can help, just give us a call or drop us a line.

For a standard site, our Helping Hand service for Instant Website takes the hassle out of designing your website. For just £50 for up to 5 pages of content or £70 for up to 30 pages, we’ll do the legwork for you. All you need to do is have a chat with us about how you’d like your site to look, send us any text and photos you want to include, and we’ll organise the site and content on your behalf. Once you’ve bought your Instant Website, just purchase the service from within your My Daily control panel to get the ball rolling.

By Cat | Posted in Hints & Tips, Instant Website, Online Shopping, eShop | Comments (0)

2008

Sep

Web Hosting Customer Profile: Grassroots Farming Advice

We talked to Web Hosting customer Matt, a farming advice consultant from www.grassrootsfarming.co.uk about his experiences of building a website - and a business - with the help of Daily Internet.

Firstly, what made you start the business?

My background is in practical farm management. After eight years as a Farm Manager with Co-op Farms, helping to manage several large estates round the country, I was offered the position as Farm Manager at Moulton college in Northamptonshire and enjoyed the mix of farm management and teaching.

After a successful period, I was offered a position as Senior Farm Consultant with a large South West consultancy firm. During this time, I saw that there was a niche for a more personal approach to rural business consultancy offering a range of services and advice tailor-made to individuals rather than a one size fits all approach. I decided to take a chance and start my own business.

Was it an existing business that you decided to take online or is it a question of the internet really opening up a business opportunity for you?

In my view it is imperative that any business, no matter what service or product they supply, has a presence on the net. In the majority of cases it is people’s first port of call when they want to find any information. In fact I was recently told by one of my clients that they are suspicious of a business if they can’t find it on the internet! So with this in mind, having a website was an integral part of my business plan.

Talk us through the evolution of your website

The Grassroots Farming website had humble beginnings. I decided that I was going to construct the site myself, so I started by looking at all the websites that I went on and seeing what I liked about them and came up with a rough layout.

Most importantly I needed to work out what I wanted to say, as we all know prettiness and no depth leads to disaster! So I took the best bits from some of my other advertising material and built on that.

I then combined the layout and content in a well known word processing programme and created my first website. This, however, was not the best way to do it as there were issues with the coding created by this programme. As it had been suggested to me by potential clients that they would like me to design and maintain a website for them in the future I decided to invest in a web authoring programme (Dreamweaver) and set about learning some coding.

This created a dramatic improvement on the visuals of the site - and also the compatibility of the site with browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome which more and more people are now using…

I currently use Daily Internet Web Hosting, but if I hadn’t intended to produce more websites in the future I would have tried the Instant Website package.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in getting your site to where it is now?

The biggest challenge was to know when to stop! The more you learn about web authoring and the more you take notice of the good websites out there the more you want to incorporate in your own. You have to remember that it is a business tool at the end of the day and a clear, concise message is the most important thing.

Also spending time increasing the viability of the site is important. There is no quick fix to this - hard work and following suggestions in forums and articles like those by Daily are important. There are lots of businesses who claim they will get you a top ten listing in search engines - my advice is to read the small print!

What’s next for Grassroots?

With help from the website my business is growing all the time. Part of this is due to using Google Ads to place my site on relevant searches. Hopefully I can transfer some of this success to more rural businesses by providing a web authoring service for them. The Grassroots Farming Advice site will continue to evolve as time and necessity dictate.

And finally, what attracted you to Daily.co.uk?

As most rural businesses in the UK will say… Buy British! Daily is hosted in the UK and that was a big reason behind my decision. Pricing and package specs are also very competitive and communication is very good.

By Cat | Posted in Customer Profiles, Customers, Web Hosting | Comments (0)

2008

Sep

Achieving high Google rankings - some quick mythbusting

One of the most common questions we’re asked is how people can get their sites listed on the first page of Google. We explain different hints and tips to increase the chances of getting a higher ranking and often suggest our Search Engine Optimisation package, but to be on the first page is really down to several factors, including the popularity of your site and more importantly, Google themselves.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that there are several companies selling a service that apparently guarantees you a top ten Google listing. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

However, from my experience, there is no “quick fix” to get in the top ten of Google and even searching for something pretty obscure like “Bulgarian shoehorn factories” returns over 700 different results. This gives you an idea of the sort of competition that sites have for that all important top ten listing.

If you do want to buy a service from a company that guarantees a top ten listing, my advice is to ask them one question if nothing else: what happens if eleven people buy the service? It would be interesting to hear the answer! Let’s just assume for a moment that there is only one company offering this service - if they are guaranteeing a top ten listing, then technically they could only sell it to ten people who have the same type of website.

Also remember just how much a number one listing in Google would be worth in terms of advertising revenue. If you could just pay to get your site to number one, it would not be long before the number one spot is going to the highest bidder. With some domain names being sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds, you could be looking at a lot of money to get up there.

We’ve put together a guide in our Knowledge Base that provides some instructions, hints and tips for anyone wanting to get listed on the search engines, including How Do I Get Listed on Search Engines?

We’ll also be talking about the ins and outs of pay-per-click advertising and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in future articles on this blog, so why not subscribe to the RSS feed?

By Ray | Posted in Hints & Tips, Search Engines | Comments (0)

2008

Sep

NEW: Internet Marketing Tools to help you get the best from your website

We’re pleased to announce the first phase of a collaboration with Clickstream Technologies which means we can now offer Daily.co.uk customers cutting edge services website services which give the power to detect pay per click ad fraud, generate sales leads and analyse visitor behaviour so websites can be optimised to increase both sales and visitor satisfaction.

We think these tools are great for learning exactly how visitors use your website and therefore giving you the knowledge to amend your site so that it really suits your visitors. With Heat Maps and Click Maps, you can see an overlay of your website showing where the hotspots are for clicks and which areas seem to be being ignored - do you have a promotion that isn’t clicked on much because people with lower screen resolutions can’t see it so easily? Or are people mistaking a simple image for something which is clickable? Click Movies takes this idea one step further - you’ll be able to see video playback of customers’ navigation around your site, so you can see the order in which things catch your customers’ eyes. To talk directly to your customers, we’ve added an unobtrusive customer satisfaction survey. We’ll even automatically enable Google Analytics for you, so you can get the benefit of Google’s powerful web analytics without having to manually insert their code into each page of your website.

Plus there are direct revenue benefits, too. With click fraud detection you can be alerted to suspicious clicks on your pay-per-click ads, and even producing reports that you can use to put your case to the search engines for reimbursement. With Lead Generation, you can get relevant information on all business visitors to your site without requiring them to fill in a form, extracting sales leads from your website.

The Google Analytics automation service, a free ‘sales lead of the day’, and the online survey tool are all free with selected Daily.co.uk web hosting and eShop packages. If you already have a qualifying package you should find you’ve been automatically upgraded so that you have access to these new services - just log into your My Daily control panel and visit the new ‘Internet Marketing’ section. You can also opt for free trials of heat map, movie recording and click fraud detection services.

We’re already talking about some of the other great services our customers could take advantage of, so if you have any suggestions for new services and website widgets you’d like to see us offer, just drop us a line.

Further Information:

Internet Marketing Tools from Daily.co.uk

Web Hosting from Daily.co.uk

Online Shopping with eShops from Daily.co.uk

By Cat | Posted in Domain and Web Hosting Offers, Internet Marketing, Online Shopping | Comments (0)

2008

Aug

Business Website Profile: Sussex Travel Clinic

We spoke to Daily.co.uk web hosting customer Jane Bell of Sussex Travel Clinic, an independent clinic that specialises in providing health advice and vaccinations for UK travellers venturing abroad. Established in 2007 by Jane and fellow travel health advisor Helen Thorpe, Sussex Travel Clinic is a great example of trained professionals taking their extensive experience and building an independent business with the help of the internet.

Yours is an existing company which was taken online - what have been the benefits in having an internet presence?
Every business needs a website these days - it’s an essential route to market. We have found our trade via the internet is increasing month on month.

Can you talk us through the evolution of your website?
We intially purchased an Instant Website from Daily, which proved a really cheap and easy way to get us out there. After a while, we felt we wanted a more flexible professional look, so we upgraded to a web hosting account and our new website was designed this year by a professional web design company.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in getting www.sussextravelclinic.com to where it is now?
Getting listed in Google. Lots of hard work adding ourselves to local directories and ensuring the right keywords were in place. It doesn’t stop there, though - we aim to continue to promote our site and maintain our strong listings in order to continue to increase the amount of business driven by our website.

What attracted you to Daily.co.uk?
The price and ease of use with all the products on offer. We have found all the staff very helpful at Daily. The products on offer are very reasonable and are great for people like us who had no experience in this area.

More information:

Travel vaccination advice from Sussex Travel Clinic

Instant Websites from Daily.co.uk

Web Hosting from Daily.co.uk

By Cat | Posted in Customer Profiles, Customers | Comments (0)