Monday, May 12th, 2008
On today’s special edition of the Web Hosting Show we have in the studio Emory Rowland of Clickfire.com. Emory has been an insider in both the web hosting and web development worlds for a long time - so there are many topics I would like to pick his brain about. Today though we [...]
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Monday, May 12th, 2008
I know of two more tools for analyzing web site traffic - Google Analytics and Alexa. With Google Analytics, the site owner puts a script (provided by Google) in each web page to be analyzed. The script sends Google the visitors data for analysis (hence "Thinking outside the box"). Alexa takes an "Outside looking in" approach - PC users install the Alexa Toolbar, which collects data on their browsing habits. Alexa then uses this data to estimate the number of users that go to each site.
Google Analytics offers a granular view of site traffic, how/where it originates (searches, referrals or direct visits). Reports show what visitors are doing when they come to the site. All a site owner needs to do is open a Google account and paste the script in the pages (I included the script in PmWiki's CSS file's header section). Google Analytics offers free, powerful reporting features, which can be accessed on line, or emailed at preset times to selected individuals. This service is a win-win to both user and Google. I get an incredible amount of data on my users without spending a cent, and Google gets first hand user data, which they can use for world domination.
Alexa approach is to track where people who have installed the Alexa tool bar application are surfing. From this data, Alexa can tell how visits to your site rank relative to other sites, or compare the popularity of two sites over a period of time. The validity of the analysis is based on the assumption that their traffic data can be extended to the community at large. This assumption is almost surely wrong - Alexa users are a group whose characteristics are almost certainly different from the Internet users universe. For one, Alexa's site is in English, so o English speakers likely weigh heavily in the traffic analysis. Users with privacy concerns, or under repressive regimes, may be less likely to send their traffic to Alexa for analysis, etc. As in every statistical analysis, inference accuracy drops when less data is available, i.e. when a site is not very popular. To Alexa's credit, they openly recognize this fact. Graphical information is only available for sites in the top 100,000 sites.
Still, Alexa is a nice tool for a 'quick and dirty' traffic comparison between sites. For example, I find that words2u.net has a traffic rank of 7,737,112, which is up 3,297,142 places from 3 months ago. Alexa connects to the Wayback Machine archives to provide snapshots of web sites in past time. If you do not believe in reincarnation, a visit to that site might change your mind, especially if you happen on a site that changed ownership. Web site owners can check their ranking by pointing their browser to www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/web.site.name.
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Monday, May 12th, 2008
The article by Guy Masono I’ve referred to in the past describes the last two of the 4Ts as Transact and Track. I’m going to discuss in more detail what I believe these two mean for your marketing campaign.
Transact, Masono writes, “refers to opening a two-way communication with customers and prospects based on the nature of an inquiry.” For example, your website has a lead-generating form that visitors may fill out in order to receive more information about a product or service.
The “communication” results when you or one of your employees replies to that inquiry. How quickly do you respond? Do you respond with an automated e-mail reply? With a phone call? If you don’t hear back from the customer, do you respond again? If so, how? With another phone call? With more information sent via e-mail.
Follow-up is key. It really is more than key – it is critical. Do your salespeople know what your marketing department is doing so that they may respond appropriately when a marketing campaign begins? Does your fulfillment manager have the tools, systems and processes ready to get your customers the products they order when they order it. Have a link missing in this communication/sales/fulfillment chain and just watch the chaos – and lost sales – that result.
Which brings me to the final T of Masono’s article, Track. I’ve seen it too many times – a business owner or marketing department spends oodles of dough in marketing, but keeps track of nothing. Did the direct mail piece bring in the $1 million in sales over six months, or was that the pay-per-click campaign on Google? Or a combination? Or neither? There are a number of tools out there to help you do this – some are free and some are available for a nominal cost. If you don’t know how to set these up properly, I recommend hiring someone to help you with this as the costs of setting this up will far outweigh the benefits of saved marketing dollars that are being wasted on inefficient efforts.
Track your results today and you’ll know where best to spend your marketing dollars tomorrow.
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Saturday, May 10th, 2008
Customer support is undoubtedly a topic in our industry people can get very passionate, dare I say, “fanatical” about.
So when a company, like Bobcares, dedicates its entire business to providing outsourced support as a service - and currently boasts a clientele of over 3.5 million websites - passionate could arguably be seen as somewhat of an understatement.
Serving the hosting industry for almost a decade, Bobcares says it offers support plans for dedicated administration facility, server administration plans, helpdesk plans and telephone support plans.
WHIRtv recently caught up with Amarjyoti Krishnan, co-founder of Bobcares, and gained some insight into the philosophy behind the service and where he envisions the company going in the next few years.
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Friday, May 9th, 2008
There are often odd terms thrown about in the web hosting and web development worlds that just don’t make any sense the the common man on the street. Phil drops me in an e-mail asking…“What is domain kiting? I have heard it is related somewhat with domain deletion and AdSense from Google. Do you [...]
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Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress - and use it in a lot of places but there are a lot of nice alternatives to WordPress too when you start looking around at scripts and services others are developing. Marie writes in with this CMS controversy.“I am looking to setup another web site but [...]
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Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Virtual private data centers, or VPDCs, are a new paradigm for data centers that we’ve been hearing quite a bit about in North America through companies like Layered Technologies and 3Tera.
In Europe, Q-layer has been offering a fully virtual private data center since 2005, enabling service providers to compete with next generation hosting offerings such as Amazon S3 and EC2, using the private virtual datacenter concept: utility-based provisioning and billing based on actual usage.
WHIRtv recently spoke to Niko Nelissen, VP of business development and co-founder of Q-layer, and gained some insight into his company’s vision with VPDCs.
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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
It is not easy being green, but the fast rising trend in the hosting world is to claim that you are a “green” web host.That means that you are environmentally friendly and you fall under what is a scam in my opinion with the whole carbon offset project. Bob writes in with this [...]
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Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
How come the web hosting world doesn’t have more Online networks where we can meet and greet each other? Here is another question from well, the best podcast audience ever. Speaking of groups of people who gather in one place, Mark asks:“How come there hasn’t been a web hosting social network yet? Something like [...]
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Monday, May 5th, 2008
Time to open that proverbial mailbag to see what type of questions you have been sending me. Now I do my best to answer any and all questions sent my way but here today I have picked some of the frequently asked ones to help one and all, any and everybody who might also [...]
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