These days, search engines and web analytics companies provide tools that allow companies to glean so many statistics from users, it’s easy to get lost in the details of visitor data. However, unique visitors – a stat that became an industry stalwart more than a decade ago – is still a crucial indicator to determine a site’s relative popularity, and should have the attention of any small business looking to improve its return on investment.
The unique visitors metric – measuring how many individual users visit a site within a given period, usually a month – is used by companies to determine activity and interaction on a website. This information is highly useful to provide a look into seasonal trends that can help you craft messaging and website improvements for your business.
Analytics tools can provide further information thanks to unique identifiers such as cookies. Among other things, these tell you what type of device is being used to access your website – important information if you want to stay on top of usage trends.
Those browsing trends are forcing more and more companies to pay attention to mobile: By the end of 2014, mobile commerce in the U.S. will grow an estimated 63 percent to around $34.2 billion, up from $21 billion in 2012, according to the Internet Retailer 2014 Mobile 500 list. Mobile will account for nearly 13 percent of all U.S. e-commerce sales, up from just over nine percent in 2012, according to the Mobile 500. In fact, to better reflect that web traffic no longer means stationary users logged into a desktop computers, Google Analytics recently changed the terms it uses to describe site traffic – visits are now called "sessions" and unique visitors are called "users."
Simply put, the more unique visitors visit a website, the more mileage they get, whether it’s simply more exposure, more potential for sales, or donations – whatever your endgame is.
Here are several additional metrics that matter, available through the free Google Analytics tool:
Knowing which marketing techniques are affecting traffic to your website can help guide future marketing campaigns that can lead to an increase in your bottom line. This also means less money wasted on ineffective marketing by tailoring campaigns to users based on the analytics above.
Along with unique visitors, many crucial indicators can be tracked using free programs, such as Google Analytics, providing the insight needed to make marketing more efficient and improve your bottom line.
What other stats or tools do you use to analyze web traffic?
You know it’s time to get your blog up and running, but you’ve got tons of questions. What kind of content should I be writing? How often do I need to write? It’s worth investigating: When done right, a blog can become the perfect platform to educate your audience about your company and core competencies.
Check out these eight tips on writing a blog that will have readers coming back for more:
Once you get started with blog content, you’ll quickly see what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. It’s OK to make adjustments when you see something that isn’t working. But likewise, if you see something works incredibly well, follow up on it with equally compelling content.
Is cloud computing ready for the financial industry? All signs point to yes.
According to research from Gartner, by 2016 poor return on equity will drive more than 60 percent of banks worldwide to process the majority of their transactions in the cloud. Ovum also comments that capital markets will accelerate their adoption of cloud services this year – on both the buy and sell sides – due to improvements in cloud security and the wider variety of applications available.
Financial services organizations handle trillions of transactions each year, and need to manage them efficiently and cost-effectively. They also must protect sensitive information about individuals, companies and other parties. Safeguarding that information is a critical component in building trust with customers. So while cloud adoption is happening, progress is slower here than in other industries.
What’s moving forward quickly, however, is the outsourcing of services such as email, intranet, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and website and microsite hosting. These are well-established in the cloud overall, so the comfort level is higher.
Meanwhile, IT leaders at financial services companies are determining the next set of jobs they can move to the cloud. These include:
Much of what gets migrated to the cloud – and what cloud model is embraced – depends on the requirements of the particular business type within the financial services sector. A commercial bank, for example, might be more likely to use the public cloud – for commoditized, non-proprietary content such as website hosting – than a broker who must protect sensitive data.
In the end, as their trust in the cloud grows, financial services companies are becoming increasingly likely to use a hybrid approach to their cloud strategy, hosting less-sensitive applications in the public cloud and others in a private cloud environment.
So you've heard all the hype surrounding SoMoLo: Social, Mobile and Local marketing. But you still don't get what the big deal is, and how it could possibly apply to what your business needs to accomplish to thrive.
Truth is, five years past the launch of Foursquare, we're firmly in the SoMoLo era, and those unwilling to adapt risk being left behind.
If you're ready to learn, check out our free webinar, Why SoMoLo is Critical for Your Business, on June 19. Hostway Senior Online Marketing Manager Alison Brehme will give you a firm grasp on what exactly comprises SoMoLo, explain what's propelled the trend forward, and give you tips on how to capitalize on this phenomenon.
We’ll discuss how increasing smartphone usage for multiple purposes demands your attention, why social media can't be ignored as a medium for customer contact, and how local businesses are finding new clients thanks to mobile technology. You will also receive an exclusive promotional offer to help kick off your SoMoLo strategy.
During the webinar, TweetChat with other participants about the ideas and concepts being discussed via hashtag #somolo.
If you're an entrepreneur, you know that keeping up with the times is an essential part to staying in business. Learn what's becoming expected of you by a new breed of buyers, and see how you can make these changes work to your advantage.
Register Here for our webinar, coming up at 1 p.m. CT on June 19.
We’d like to thank all of our new and long-term customers who visited with us at our two trade shows last month, Imagine and TechEd.
At the Magento Imagine eCommerce Conference in Las Vegas, Hostway demonstrated its continually expanding capabilities in the e-commerce space, achieved through close work with Magento as a Silver Partner. We showed off the experience we’ve accrued while testing, building, deploying and optimizing a Magento platform that is now used by 60+ Magento enterprise and community merchants. We also partnered with our friends from Clustrix on a presentation about increasing Magento database performance in the cloud, and helped our friends at Cynch discuss their Magento optimization expertise.
Meanwhile, at Microsoft’s TechEd conference in Houston, Hostway presented as part of the Microsoft Hosting Partner Pavilion, announcing our early-adopter program for our 2012 R2 FlexCloud Platform, the next generation of our public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. The infrastructure upgrades provided alongside Windows Server 2012 R2 offer three key benefits: Faster scaling, faster communication / reduced latency, and doubled virtual machine capacity.
Here are some pictures from these shows:
Shawn Haukaas (center) of August Ash was our XBox One winner. He's flanked here by Kevin Whitton (left) and Brian White from the Hostway channel team.
Randall Jarzombek (left) and Jason Ruiz attended TechEd in Houston for Hostway.
We hope to see you at more events as we roll into summer!
As a small business owner and entrepreneur, you’ve probably heard a million times that in order to attract customers in the modern age, you need to be active on social media. But when you’re Chief of Everything, who has time to keep track of Twitter mentions?
With 350 million users on Facebook, 750 tweets being sent every second, and two new users joining LinkedIn every second, the social sphere is buzzing. Not being involved could mean missed opportunities for new customers. Having a strong social presence can also mean increased brand awareness and stronger SEO rankings.
Social media management doesn’t have to be a daunting task. There are plenty of tools – most of them free! – that can help you manage your social media presence without eating up too much time. We highlight some of our favorites here:
HootSuite
Whether you have a small marketing team or you’re handling it all yourself, HootSuite is a great tool that allows you to manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, PingFM and WordPress accounts. The best part? The basic version is absolutely free! If you need a little more insight, paid plans – starting at $5.99 per month – allow you to add on Google Analytics and other analysis tools.
HootSuite’s user-friendly layout focuses on streams, constantly updating feeds of information, which are customizable by account, network or keyword. This makes it easy to keep an eye on all of your social channels in one place. The tool also makes it easy to connect with users, providing followers’ bios, Klout scores and links to their social profiles in just one click.
CrowdBooster
If you’re an SMB, you know the importance of tracking the ROI on your marketing campaigns. You don’t want to waste time on campaigns that don’t work, and you should be optimizing the ones that do. But when you’re dealing with something subjective like social media, how do you decide if your campaigns are working? CrowdBooster is a great tool that focuses on gathering data from your social profiles to determine exactly that.
It can provide analytics on impressions, total reach and engagement with your posts, allowing you to better target future campaigns. CrowdBooster will also send you alerts on Twitter users who may be a match for your brand and content. The tool also analyzes your posts and gives suggestions to improve your strategy based on when people are most likely to view your latest content.
The lowest plan of CrowdBooster starts at $9 per month and allows you to track up to 50,000 followers.
Feedly
When small businesses begin to build their social presence, they are prone to forgetting that broadcasting their own message is only half the battle. Sharing others’ content in order to engage your audience is also a crucial component, and Feedly is a great tool that essentially serves as a feed reader.
When you have several websites to keep up with, it can become cumbersome to visit each of them to stay updated on their content. Feedly aggregates all of the RSS feeds from these websites into one easy-to-manage tool that can be accessed via desktop or mobile. You can push content to your social media profiles instantly or save an article to share later. This makes the process of keeping up with and sharing relevant industry content much more streamlined and easy to manage.
Feedly plans begin at $5 per month, although you can save some cash with a $45 yearly subscription.
With the help of these social media management tools, creating an online presence for your small business doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With affordable and even free options, it doesn’t have to eat up your marketing budget either. As more customers turn to online research before visiting a business or making an online purchase, social media is a great avenue to connect with your target audience and build relationships. With 92 percent of businesses using social networks for marketing purposes by the end of 2014, you can’t afford to be left behind.
What are your favorite social media tools to use when building an online community for your business?
George Bernard Shaw once said, “The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew every time he sees me, while all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.” This statement applies just as well to our industry – ideally, the vendor should meet the customer’s needs at that time; the customer shouldn’t have to conform to the vendor’s model or packages.
In general terms, a customer will make a buying decision when the value of a product or service exceeds its cost. In Mr. Shaw’s case, the value of that custom suit exceeds the cost. He needs a suit, he wants to look good, and he’s willing to pay the price for that custom suit. Presumably, that custom-fitted, tailored suit would cost more than an off-the-shelf suit from any clothing store.
Though Mr. Shaw is willing to pay that additional cost, not everyone is so willing. But what if the custom suit is the same price as the off-the-shelf option? Wouldn’t everyone buy the custom suit? One would think so – a custom suit has a higher value to the customer. It just makes sense.
The same is true for technology. IT, with its infrastructure, resources, policies and procedures, is generally no longer thought of as a cost; rather, IT is an investment in the business – it enables the business to do what it does. And therefore, it has value.
Companies are increasingly recognizing the growing value of adopting cloud technologies, including outsourcing to cloud providers. And when they do so, they have choices to make, one of which is the choice of vendor. Many vendors have standardized, specific IT “supplies” or configurations. The customer must choose between a limited set of offerings. This is analogous to the off-the-shelf suit.
Other vendors, like Hostway Corporation, offer custom IT solutions where the customer has a wide range of options – virtually unlimited – in terms of solutions and configurations. This means that Hostway is able – and willing – to custom-design and support the solution that best fits the needs of the customer, doing what is in the customer’s best interest.
While all businesses have certain similarities, each business tries to differentiate itself from its competition, and thus each business is unique. And their IT needs are correspondingly unique.
Just like the suit analogy, a custom IT solution has more value than an off-the-shelf solution. So if the costs are similar, the choice is obvious.
At least, I believe that Mr. Shaw would see it that way.
For Memorial Day, we'd like to take the opportunity to remember the sacrifices made by those veterans who have ensured our continued protection and security. Those who gave their lives in defense of our way of life represent the most selfless, dedicated element of the human spirit.
We honor those men and women lost in combat, as well as those who live on carrying the physical and emotional reminders of their essential task. We recognize those who now serve across the world. And we support those whose service plays out in obscurity: the families sending their loved ones into service.
It’s no secret that cloud computing is playing a major role in the transformation of several industries, and retail is among the fields capitalizing most on its benefits. From breaking down silos between legacy systems to revolutionizing the Point of Sale (POS) model, cloud computing has helped both e-commerce and storefront retailers alike streamline operations and improve business outcomes.
According to a recent report from Accenture, cloud computing has spawned "A new era for retail," making capabilities previously only available to large retailers affordable and intuitive for small and medium-sized businesses. All that’s required is Internet access and a web-enabled device.
In addition, many cloud-based offerings boast transparent pricing models and scaling based on tiers, so businesses are not stuck with long contracts, legacy equipment, or upgrade and customization requirements. Cloud-based solutions offer retailers unprecedented flexibility by providing access to data and analytics in real time across business lines.
Let’s take a look at three ways retailers are benefitting from cloud-based services:
The scope of change that cloud computing is bringing to the retail industry is stunning. Web-based SaaS solutions hosted in the cloud are making their mark on every part of the business, from retail tools to human resources and ERP applications. How has your retail operation become more successful since adopting cloud-based solutions?