Lifeline Blog

After discovering the stunning results of our previous case study, we decided profiling the results of a new web design on a regular basis would be a good idea. Today we’re going to look at David’s of Port Dover, a fine dining establishment located in picturesque Port Dover, Ontario.  As always, this is not a claim or guarantee of results if you work with us, just a case study of one of our clients and the benefits they’ve seen from redeveloping their website with Lifeline.   The new David’s website was launched at the end of May / beginning of June of this year and we started hosting their website at the beginning of April, so that’s where our statistical data begins. This time around, we have about 5 months of data to work with.

When David’s originally contracted us, the largest overriding issue their site had was that it was beginning to show its age. It had a splash page (an initial page on a website that provides no real information other than a link to enter the main site) and this, among other structural issues, was likely the cause of their starting bounce rate.

Let’s take a look at the breakdown of their statistics:

Starting in March and April, everything remains fairly consistent. It’s fairly normal to have a little bit of variation (up or down) from month to month in your traffic statistics.  We started hosting the site a few days into March, so the March stats are a bit lower as well because they are missing those days. So, with around 913 visits and  440 of those visits coming from search engines, the site was doing fairly decently for its service area.  The bounce rate of around 60% is not amazing, and there is definitely room for improvement there.

In May the site was gearing up for launch; much of the extra traffic came from Lifeline as well as the client accessing the new site to build, tweak, and approve the new content while the old site was still the live front. There was a slight increase in search engine traffic as well, likely from pages of the  new website getting indexed by Google as it crawled the pages for the new website.

June and July come along as the first two months with the new site launched. There’s a noticeable increase in traffic, including traffic coming from search engines, as well as a drop in the bounce rate. There is a bit of variation between the two months, but as I mentioned before this is completely normal in statistics, so without further ado, let’s compare the statistics from the old site versus the new.

Traffic:

As you can see,  with the old David’s site was getting around 900 visitors per month; this new site launch has doubled that traffic up to around 1800 visits.  Fantastic results to be sure — who wouldn’t be happy with literally doubling the amount of traffic that comes to their website?  However,  just like our previous case study, the news only gets better as we move on to the search engine results.

Search Engine  Traffic:

Much like Ariss Valley, David’s is starting to get found through generic search terms (like “restaurant in port dover” for which they are the second  organic listing). This type of search traffic, which was almost non-existent on their old site,  is more valuable than searches for your company name because in most cases it means the visitors aren’t already familiar with your website and are learning about your business for the first time. Their new site is now getting over triple the amount of traffic from search engines, and in fact this is where a large majority of the new traffic is coming from.

Bounce Rate:

As a quick reminder,  the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who left almost as soon as they came to the website, and likely didn’t read or find much (if any) information. David’s initial bounce rate wasn’t as bad as the previous site we looked at, so the results aren’t as dramatic, but the new website still resulted in about a 60% decrease in the bounce rate. Which means 60% of the visitors who were previously leaving the site without spending enough time to learn anything about David’s of Port Dover are now staying on the site longer. Definitely good news!

This brings us to the completion of our second case study… stay tuned for more!

Today I’m going to write about a less known service Google provides that can help your website.  Sure, many people have heard about Google Analytics, and it’s fantastic for statistics tracking… but Google Webmaster Tools, while being completely different, is still extremely helpful to the website operator. It can be found at:  http://www.Google.com/webmasters/tools

In a nutshell, Google Webmaster Tools provides you with a wealth of information about your site from Google’s perspective. Why would this be helpful, you might ask? Well, think of it this way… Google is not the only source your website can get search engine traffic from, but it is certainly the biggest.  As a webmaster, it’s prudent to want to follow the advice Google gives you about your site (there are always exceptions for every rule, but that’s an entirely different topic for another day!). While there are no guarantees that following any suggestions from Google Webmaster Tools is going to increase your traffic, implementing the suggestions it provides is only going to make your site look better when it’s crawled — and you’ll probably improve your user experience as well.

There are several sections in Google Webmaster Tools (I’m going to abreviate it to GWT from here on out for the sake of brevity); they are as follows:

The Dashboard
Gives you a snapshot of some of the most important information

Site Configuration
Provides helpful information on the performance of your website

Your Site On the Web
Shows you information about your site and how Google sees your site on the web

Diagnostics
Helps you to troubleshoot potential issues on your site, both minor and major

Labs
Contains new or experimental features that are still in beta. Tools in this area may break or be removed at any time.

In this post we’ll be looking at the dashboard area and the information it provides about your site; future posts will cover the other sections, so stay tuned!

The Dashboard

Once you’ve validated your site with GWT, it will take some time to collect the initial data. Once it does,  the dashboard will provide you with some of the most important information GWT has about your site.  It will give you a listing of all the links your site has as well as to what pages on your sites the links point to.  This can help you determine what pages need more links. For example, if you are are trying to rank a particular page for a chosen keyword, and it’s not performing as well as you like, it could be due to the page not having enough inbound links. This information comes from the “Your Site On The Web” section, and you can click through to see more information than is displayed on the homepage.

Also in the “Your Site On The Web” section is the search queries section. This will show you how many impressions (how many times your site is viewed in a Google listing) you have for particular terms as well as how many times users click through. This can help you determine how well you are doing for your targeted keywords, as well as identify new ones.  If you are getting lots of impressions / traffic from a keyword but aren’t ranked very high for it, that might be a term you would want to target as getting ranked for, as it will only increase the traffic it sends you.

Next we have the crawl errors section, which ties into the diagnostics section. It will give you an overview of how many site errors (such as dead links / not found pages) the Googlebot  found the last time it crawled your site. You want to correct these errors if at all possible for two reasons. First, Google likes the sites they list in their search engines to be as error-free as possible, so fewer crawl errors are only going to help your position in the search engines. More importantly (and the reason why Google likes sites in their index to be error-free), errors generally cause a poor experience for users browsing your site. Google wants anyone who browses your website to have as positive of an experience as possible.

The final entry on the dashboard from the “Your Site On the Web” section is the Keywords entry. This will tell you what keywords Google thinks your site is associated with and how important (relevant) each keyword is. You can use this information to determine if Google is getting the right message from your site. For example,  if you sell bicycles and the Keywords section is displaying skateboards as your most important keyword, then you have a serious problem with the way your site is optimized for Google, and you can take steps to fix it.

Finally, we have sitemaps. Tied into the “Site Configuration”, this will tell you if you’ve uploaded a sitemap to Google yet, and if you have, how many pages have been indexed (added to the search engine listings). Obviously you want to have as many pages in your site indexed as possible. Generating a xml Google sitemap (there are many free and paid tools available online to do this) will allow you to help Google find and index pages on your site that it wouldn’t normally find through regular crawling activity. This is definitely a good thing.

That brings us to the end of part one! Stay tuned for next time when we’ll go more in-depth and look at the other features and tools GWT provides for your website!

The Paediatric Nurse’s Interest Group has selected Lifeline Design to redevelop their website. We’re looking forward to the success a new Lifeline site will bring them!

Lifeline has been selected by the Niagara Skin Institute to develop and market a new website for their business.  We can’t wait to see the results of the ‘Lifeline Treatment’!

Update: I changed the title to “One Ad Campaign” as that’s a bit more descriptive.

I am, of course, talking about the wildly successful online promotion that Old Spice ran yesterday, where the ad team spent the entire day taping and posting personalized responses to messages on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more.  In case you haven’t seen the new Old Spice campaign, you can watch their latest commercial here… but this campaign has been so pervasive I’m guessing most  of you have.

It’s been a few hours, so by now this statistic is already out of date, but as of this morning Youtube surfers had spent over 11 years worth of time watching the Old Spice personalized responses, and I’d imagine that’s only the beginning. Over the coming days and weeks, I’m sure their videos will get even more views.  I’m sure it wasn’t cheap to have the ad company spend the entire day crafting these video responses, but I’d be very surprised if the exposure Old Spice body wash received yesterday wasn’t a great deal more economical than the cost of a national television ad campaign. I’d also be surprised if the exposure they received yesterday wasn’t much more effective than a tv ad campaign because instead of interrupting the viewer (which is what a commercial does), people sought out the videos, watched them, and shared their favorites with their friends.

This is probably the best piece of online marketing I’ve ever seen. Not only did they leverage several forms of media, but the uniqueness of the campaign captured the attention of celebrities, popular media programs, athletes and talk show hosts, many of whom provided free promotion of the campaign to their own audience.  This helped build things to a fever pitch (and most definitely resulted in significant amounts of lost productivity yesterday), and all the while the audience was being sold something.  I’m positive that sales of Old Spice body wash are going to go through the roof after yesterday’s promotion.

It just goes to show that online marketing and traditional marketing are getting more entwined every single day, and when you get the mix of technology and marketing just right, the results are incredible. It’s already happening, but in the coming years, the blurred line between website development and promotion and traditional marketing will be completely erased.  Companies who want to survive will have to bring both adept technical and design abilities along with a keen marketing sense to the table, eotherwise they will not measure up to the needs of the market.

The last time we looked at e-mail marketing, I was less than kind… but what can I say? Sometimes the truth hurts!  It gets better today; a new email passed through my inbox this morning that does a pretty decent job,  so let’s take a look:

This email starts off great. The first thing it does is let you know why you’re getting it and how to stop getting the emails if you’ve changed your mind.  They understand that if people don’t want to be on your list, then you don’t want them on your list either.  Moving on to the email itself, they’ve made an appropriately short pitch of the product they are promoting (in this case, summer cocktails) and they link directly to a menu that lists all the cocktails available as well as their prices.  It’s short, to the point, and gets the message across.

They also get bonus points for including some editorial (non-sales) information.  They’ve linked up two videos that show you how to make a few summer cocktails yourself.  It’s always good to include some free information if it is of actual interest to your list.

I only have two complaints:

1. They haven’t included any method of tracking results. Just to be clear, you don’t have to offer free stuff for every single email… but it’s good to do so occasionally for two reasons. First, it will allow you to track how successful your email campaigns are, and  secondly it gives people a reason to allow you to continue to send them email. If you only every send ads and never send any bonuses, you’ll lose subscribers.

2. There is no social media linked from the email (Twitter / Facebook) — however, a brief search showed me that as of the date of this post, they don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, so that’s a problem that goes a bit beyond Email Marketing.

So, a much better example this time around! Next time, hopefully we can find an email piece that does everything (or almost) everything right!

Today we’re going to examine the effects of a professional redesign we completed for one of our clients (Ariss Valley , a golf course just outside of Guelph). Now before we get started, the usual legal fine print that people hide applies: this isn’t a claim or guarantee of results if you work with us, just a case study of one of our clients.  It’s not particularly scientific, as I’m looking at the limited data set we have available to us right now.

When Ariss Valley first approached us, they had a completely flash-based site.  Visually it wasn’t the worst site I have seen, but a fully flash-based site has a lot of negatives. For starters, it almost always requires web designer intervention to make any changes and updates to your content, and while there are ways around it, typically flash sites are at the very least hindered from a SEO perspective and require more work (and therefore more money) to optimize properly.

We began hosting the Ariss Valley site in late April, so that’s where our server logs start. For the month of April, I extrapolated results based on the daily average of the one third or so of the month we had stats for.  The new website we developed for them was launched around May 17th, so it was live for about 14 days in May.  Below, we have a table comparing their traffic and other stats from April to May:

Comparing the data from April (last full month with the old website) vs. June (first full month with the new website) brings about some pretty startling revelations. Let’s take a look:

Traffic

Right off the bat, from April to June they saw an increase in traffic over 70%, which is a huge jump. That’s just a stone’s throw from double the traffic! Looking at the daily stats in May, the traffic ramped up significantly around the time we launched the website and continued on to the end of the month and into June.  An improvement of this amount alone should put a grin from ear to ear on any site owner’s face, but things get even more interesting as we examine what drove this increase in traffic and how users interacted with the site.

Search Engine Visits

These represent the number of visitors that came to the site from a search on Google, Yahoo or Bing.  As you can see, the visits almost tripled from April to June… and while that’s obviously a great improvement, when you look at the search terms they were found, on the news gets better. In April, almost ALL of their search engine traffic came from terms directly related to their business name. That means most of the users that found them through a search engine already knew of or about their business and were looking for it specifically.

The June results tell a different story completely: While the searches related to their business name still remained very strong, they saw a huge increase in subject related terms such as “guelph golf courses”. We’re talking going from < 50 visits to several hundred. This likely means that users who aren’t specifically looking for them, but just want information on a golf course in their area, are now finding the Ariss Valley website.

Bounce Rate

We’ve saved the best news for last!  Bounce Rate is the amount of visitors that leave a website within 30 seconds of arriving, so like a golf score, you want it as low as possible.  A high bounce rate usually means the user didn’t find what they were looking for or didn’t like what they saw and left almost as soon as they arrived.  In April, the Ariss Valley site’s bounce rate was an abysmal 79.9% — that means for every 100 visitors, 80 of them left before spending any real time on the website. Fast forward to this month, and their bounce rate has plummeted to a much more respectable 39.6%. While there’s always room  for improvement, they’ve essentially improved their bounce rate 100% over what it was.

In Summary

While we don’t have any firm statistics on actual improvement of business, based on the traffic improvements and performance of their new site,  it’s more than reasonable to assume that people  are coming to Ariss Valley because of their new and improved site — that is, people who wouldn’t have come to them otherwise.  In real business terms, this means their new website wasn’t a cost, but an investment that is going to pay off and start earning them money.

Do you still think your website is “okay” or “good enough”?  Websites are becoming more and more important to business every day, and a “good enough” attitude could be costing your business money.

I’m branching out a little bit today, talking about marketing in general.  If you live in and around the Brantford area, you’ve probably heard about the Blue Dog Cafe, and if you haven’t, you should get out from the rock you’ve been living under and check it out.  So despite where we’re going in the bottom half of this post, I want to say before hand that the Blue Dog is one of my favorite places to escape the office for a few hours and get some work done in a laid back cafe environment.

Like many cafes, the Blue Dog has a loyalty program. This is where things make my internal marketer flip his lid a little bit. It is your standard “buy x number of drinks, get one free” program, with one important exception. You need an individual card for each drink you purchase.  So, if I go one day and buy a small coffee, I need a new loyalty card for that. If I go the next day and order a medium coffee, I need another card. If I order a large coffee the next time I need yet another card, and so on and so forth. So unless you are the type of person who orders the exact same thing every single time without fail, it can become a huge hassle to keep track of 20 different cards in your wallet or purse.

Now don’t get me wrong, I totally get where management is coming from — if I had to hazard a guess, I would speculate that they are looking to avoid the individual who will buy all small coffees and then trade in their free drink for the most expensive large specialty drink on the menu. I don’t have detailed demographic information, so this may be a valid concern that could cause the cafe to lose money, however the typical crowd that goes to an establishment like the Blue Dog isn’t price motivated… if they were, they’d likely balk at spending three to four dollars on a specialty coffee or beverage in the first place.

However,  it would be relatively easy to group drinks into categories or sizes and bring the total loyalty card combination possibility down to a reasonable level (perhaps small, medium, and large cards for example).  Currently, I don’t even bother with it most of the time I’m there because if I did, I’d end up with 10 – 20 different cards in my wallet.  What irks me about the situation is not that I’m missing out on a free drink every now and then (while that does make me a little sad!), I’m more bothered by the purpose of a loyalty program and how the Blue Dog’s system isn’t accomplishing that purpose.

Loyalty programs are developed to, if you can believe it, instill loyalty in the customer.  If you boil loyalty down to its most basic element, it will result in a choice of Business A over Business B. Sure, there are a lot of fuzzy feelings associated with loyalty,  and as a business owner, I can vouch for the satisfaction in a job well done and a customer who will be fiercely loyal to your company because of the great job you’ve done for them.  However,  looking at it from a purely economical standpoint, loyalty results in more revenue for your business at the end of the day.

The current loyalty program there is extremely inconvenient for anyone who doesn’t drink the same thing consistently, and as such I (and others I’ve spoken with) often don’t even bother with it.  As a result, when making a decision of what cafe to go to (and sometimes I go elsewhere), the loyalty program has no bearing on the decision… but if it was doing the job right, it would.

To sum it up in a sentence: I like the Blue Dog a lot, but the loyalty program drives my marketing side nuts.

Editor’s Note: I also love the Blue Dog, but this drives me nuts… I have about 8 different cards in my wallet, including one for “medium latte with flavor shot” and another for plain “medium latte”. Are you kidding me? Why not do what nearly ALL OTHER loyalty programs do, and assign a dollar value to the ‘free drink’ at the end of the card? Make it something reasonable, like $3 max. Or “any small beverage”. Or, if they wanted to go the really easy route, why not just offer a “small medium coffee or tea” (or a coffee/tea of any size, really)? That would make it easier on the baristas, the management, AND the clientele. It’s pure logic, coupled with a knowledge of other loyalty programs that actually work.

Gateway Gourmet Inc. of Cambridge, Ontario has chosen Lifeline to develop a new cutting edge website for their business.  When it is completed, it will streamline and automate several internal processes and help save their business tons of time.

We’ll be developing a brand new website for Wispers Day Spa located in Cambridge, Ontario. Wispers provides elegant spa and esthetic services, and we look forward to providing them with a gorgeous website that will show off what they do online!