I had a client meeting that took the whole morning and I stopped off at a local fish and chip place for lunch. It was a small spot and a pretty casual atmosphere. A well dressed chap, in his mid-forties, came in and I noticed he was wearing a tie clip. I can’t remember the last time I wore one or even saw somebody with one on. I passed that comment on to him and he mentioned how cufflinks were back in style now too. I asked him what business he was in and I got a quick but brief response, “sales”. 

Somewhat ironic I thought, that a professional sales person would not have expanded on that answer. What if he was in the business of selling something I or someone in my family or business network might need? Was he embarrassed about what he sells for a living? The conversation ended. And so did a possible sales opportunity.

I had a similar feeling when a transportation client told me (that same morning) that their website was fine. It was all they needed. One of their employees designed it 5 or 6 years ago and he was happy enough with it. I mentioned to him about 5 or 6 ways it could be improved but he wasn’t all that interested. By not addressing these details, will he be out of business? Probably not, but will he lose possible sales opportunities? Absolutely yes!

The carrier in question made a few mistakes that are easily corrected. And from our research, he is not alone. These are a few things that we see often and most likely need to be addressed on your site if it was designed 4-5 years ago.

1/ If you have a 2 language site you don’t need a splash page anymore to select languages. It can all be done with programming. The same goes for a separate splash or flash opening of any kind. Get the visitor to your home page, as soon as possible.

2/ Don’t make your customer click extra buttons to get to the secure log-in area, or rate request forms on your site.

3/ If you’re like most companies with an older site, you probably have out of date information that needs to be updated. Don’t delay, it is easily rectified.

4/ Have relevant information about your core services front and center on the home page with quick links to access additional data.  It’s your best opportunity to cross sell other services to existing customers and capture the interests of potential customers.

5/ Make it easy to contact you. That is what the majority of people coming to your site are trying to do.

6/ Don’t have any text explaining your company services as an image as it cannot get picked up by the search engines and therefore, will not move you up in the rankings when people search for your service.

7/ Understand what key words are searched for in your industry and optimize your site accordingly.

8/ If the equipment pictures on your site were taken a number of years ago and they were a few years old then, you could be promoting a 7-8 year old fleet on your site.

9/ Design trends change. Sites are not left justified anymore and they take advantage of the background area to expand the graphic treatment and overall visual effect.

10/ You may have spent a lot of time and energy achieving various certifications, green initiatives, awards…are they promoted on your site and is your last posted news item current?

Lee’s quote for the day

The correlation, between marketing your company to a potential customer and dating someone for the first time, is very similar. In both cases, you need to present the best version of yourself, do something to capture their interest, do things to maintain their interests and if you want the relationship to be long term, never take them for granted.”

Google Analytics is a superb website statistics tool for measuring overall website performance, your electronic marketing campaign initiatives, and in some cases even your website’s ROI. If you’re in the transportation business, and are using Google Analytics on your website, there are several key metrics within the service that will allow you to measure and assess how your site is performing.

There are two ways which you can view Google Analytics data, through the browser and via pre-defined and scheduled e-mail reports.  Although you can customize the type of reports you receive from Google Analytics, the most commonly received report is the default dashboard report which presents a good set of key website performance metrics. The dashboard report consists of several categories, which are defined by several key metrics.

We’ll take a look at each of these categories and metrics in detail, and I’ll show you how they should be interpreted within your transportation related site. Typically most dashboards reports cover the past month, so just keep that in mind if you’re viewing the PDF report.

Traffic Sources Overview – The Four Ways Visitors Get To Your Website

There are four key traffic sources for any website. Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines and Other.

Direct Traffic refers to visitors who type in your website address directly into their browser. These visitors either have your site bookmarked, know your website address, or reference some promotional material where your website address is printed, such as an ad, a business card or some other advertising piece.

Traffic from Referring Sites is the amount of traffic you receive from other sites that carry a link to your company. It could be a transportation partner, an association that you’re a member of, or a general internet directory.

Other Traffic comes from custom defined sources. You can track your various marketing campaigns (e-mail newsletters, outlook signatures, etc) using Google Analytics, but that’s beyond the scope of this article, and we’ll take a look at that in another one.

The Top Traffic Sources subcategory shows the source of where your website traffic is coming from. Here you will see search engines like Google, or Yahoo, or a list of those Referring Sites that we’ve talked about.

The Keywords subcategory will show you the top 5 keywords or keyword phrases that are used to get to your website through a search engine. In most cases it will be your company name, as a good percentage of visitors will type in your company name into Google when looking for you. If your website is Search Engine Optimized (SEO), phrases related to your business will show up here. So for example, if your site is search engine optimized for “Canada LTL”, or “Toronto Montreal Truckload” these terms will show in this category. Keep in mind, that on the dashboard report you only see the top 5 keywords, and you will have to login into the Google Analytics service in order to view more.

Visitors Overview  - What Kind Of Visitors, and How Are They Viewing Your Website

The visitors overview page, is the third page of your dashboard overview. The first metric that you will see is the Visits metric, which will tell you the amount of visits your website has received over a specified period. Any time someone visits your website, they are counted in this metric.

The Absolute Unique Visitor metric, is the amount of “unique” visitors your website has received. It is a bit more difficult to understand. A unique visitor is someone that is visiting your website for the very first time. If they have visited your website in the past within the specified time period, they are still only counted once. You can have  multiple visits, from one absolute unique visitor. This metric is a true representation on the number of actual individuals that have visited your website.

The Pageviews metric shows how many pages were viewed on your site. If your website has just a single page, and you had 100 visitors to your site, more than likely you will have received 100 pageviews. Simple math. So the pageviews metric factors in how many pages your website has. If you have a very large site, and a large number of visitors, the amount of pageviews that you will receive is very high.

The amount of Average Pageviews shows on average how many pages a visitor has looked when visiting your website. The higher the number, the better. A higher number typically indicates a higher quality of visit. In an ideal world, a visitor will land on your homepage, go to your services pages, and then visit the contact page. You’ve just landed a potential customer, and best of all, you can track this with Google Analytics.

The Time on Site metric shows the average number of minutes or seconds that the average visitor has spent on your site. Again, a higher number will usually indicate that the visitor is interested in your website and has spent a good time browsing around the various pages.

The Bounce Rate shows how many times a visitor has left immediately after visiting the first page that they’ve landed on. While this is an important metric, it is more important to look at the bounce rate when viewing the New Visits metric.  The reason behind this, is that the bounce rate on the dashboard report factors in New and Returning visitors. A Returning Visitor for example may just be visiting in order to trace a shipment, so the bounce rate for returning visitors will higher than new visitors. New visitors to your site will have a lower bounce rate. They will be interested in the services you offer, and will look around other pages of your website. The New Visitor/Bounce Rate report is not available within the default dashboard, and you will have to login or get a report setup in order to view these stats. Contact us on how you can do this (link to contact page).

The last metric shows the percentage of New Visitors. New visitors are people who are visiting your website for the first time. If you further dig down in this metric, you can figure out how your new visitors are reaching you – if they’re coming to your website directly or if they are searching for a specific keyword or term on Google and reaching you via a search engine.

Technical Profile – Browser and Connection Speed Data

The Technical profile section shows the technical aspect of the visit, such as browser and connection speed. This data is important to know if your website has some features which may be incompatible with a particular browser.

The connection speed shows what type of connection your visitor is using. In most urban centers DSL, Cable and other high speed connections will be most common. However, if your transportation company is primarily servicing a rural area where high speed connections are not prevalent, you will see a larger number of dial up connections. In this case, it is important to optimize your website so that it loads as quickly as possible for customers with slow connections.

Map Overlay – Where Are Your Visitors Coming From?

The map overlay is the last section of the report and shows you where your visitors are coming from. The PDF dashboard report will just show you the country of origin. You will want to login into your Google Analytics account and view the information in detail by clicking the specific country that you wish to gain information on. This will give you a further break down by region and city.

In Summary

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool, and can be customized to an endless extent. If you have Google Analytics running on your site, that’s good news, because you’re already capturing all that key visitor data. If you don’t have Google Analytics, or simply wish to set more reports up to be e-mailed to you, contact us, and we’ll set you up.

It’s time to redesign our website. Our company has changed significantly over the last couple of years and our web presence should reflect that.

I gave our team the following objectives, stepped back and let them loose. You can be the judge of how well these have been achieved. A taste of our new marketing is featured in the February 2011 issue of CT&L and we needed to coordinate our new web with that release date. The directives were as follows and can act as a helpful guideline for anyone in the process of updating their site.

Message first - It’s great to be clever but it’s critical to communicate…if you can combine the two it becomes memorable and creates impact

Front door message-  Lead with your strength which in our case is 22 years of experience marketing  the transportation industry. It’s important not to cast too wide a net and weight your product offerings so that people get a real sense of who you are and what you do…in short order

Side door message - Leave the door open to other opportunities which for us is the fact that our process works for any industry. You need to back that side door message up with hard facts to make it believable.

Easy to navigate - With the help of Google Analytics you can track how customers are reacting to your site through a number of metrics. Most come to your site to get contact info and get an overall impression if this is a company they want to deal with. Ease of navigation is a key element.

Warm and personal – Our clients are becoming directly involved with a higher proportion of our staff. It’s a function of running lean and streamlining communications. In general terms, we believe it is important that your web has a personality that reflects your company. A few real shots mixed in with a stock library can help accomplish this. Yes people leave but the web can be updated very easily. It’s a more dynamic and flexible media that you can measure a return on.

Assess the brand – Take a look at your brand elements. Do they need a tweak. Is your tag line unique and does it help establish a persona for the company. In B2B you can change elements of your brand without so much as a ripple in the stream. Be open to subtle change. It can breathe new life into your marketing.

Incorporate social media – We continue to experiment in this area. Our blog efforts have shown the most return. You need a champion to lead this charge. Anything that brings fresh content to your site helps promote your company and raise your ranking on search engines

Engage SEO (search engine optimization) – There is an expense to this and it varies on the size of the site and how deep you want to go with. We plan on taking it all the way. Why? It works and you can clearly measure the results (With Google Analytics) and fine tune it for even greater benefit in the future

Meet the Deadline - It’s important to set a date and work towards it with diligence. You get a certain flow that takes the project to a higher level. When too much time goes by where the project is parked on a shelf, it’s increasingly hard to get it off the bottom of the pile and successfully launched.

Lee’s quote for the day

“Change is good and engaging proper SEO powers your site like fuel powers your vehicle. Doing one without the other doesn’t make much sense or get you any further down the road”