Web analytics. Sounds dull, but it can show you exactly what people are doing on your website. It helps you make improvements - if you’re running a business, it can even boost your bottom line.

However, it is a subject that can be difficult to get to grips with. So we asked Brian Clifton, Google’s Head of Analytics for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to explain things.

What is web analytics?

“A lot of people are mystified by what web analytics is,” says Brian. “It sounds like a complicated term, and that’s a bit off-putting.”

“Web analytics is a tool for measuring the success - or not - of your website. It’s like a thermometer, where you’re measuring the health of your website or online business.”

In essence, web analytics lets you understand how people use your website. It’s particularly important if you run a company; as Brian says, “it can translate directly into money for a business.” Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

We wrote about a typical domain name scam a couple of weeks ago. Since then, a couple of people in the office have been targeted, so we thought we’d revisit the subject in a bit more detail.

Generally, domain scams are tricks to get you to part with money, your domain, or even both. At the very least, they are a headache.

But if you rely on your website for business, they can be much more than that: if you lose control of your domain, the impact of having to change your site’s address can cost you money. Because of this, it’s worth learning how to spot the scams. Here are the three most common.

The urgent letter in the post

This ploy uses an official-looking letter to coerce you into transferring your domain to a different registration company.

• How does it work?
  You receive a letter through the mail (they use the post because it seems more official) informing you that your domain name is due to expire. These letters often have titles like ‘Domain name expiration notice’, and encourage you to renew your domain.

The notice creates a sense of urgency, often by warning that ‘failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date will result in a loss of your online identity’. However, if you reply, you would not only be renewing your domain - you’d also be transferring it away from your current registrar.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

There’s a nice post over on the Tucows blog warning about fake domain name renewal notices. Tucows is a wholesale domain name registrar, so the advice is aimed mainly at other domain registration companies, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.

Fake renewal notices are basically a variation on the phishing schemes you might have seen before. In short, unethical companies (some would use a stronger word than ‘unethical’) try and con people into transferring their domain name(s) to them.

This is how it usually works:

1. The dodgy company gets a registrant’s information and domain expiry date from the WHOIS database.
2. They then contact the registrant with a fake email telling them they need to renew the domain or risk losing it.
3. When the registrant follows the instructions in the email, they end up transferring, not renewing, the domain.

If you get conned, you can end up stuck at a new domain registrar, potentially locked into unfavourable terms or unable to administer the domain as you need to. In some cases people have even lost domains altogether. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

Last week we launched the new 123-reg webmail interface. (Blog readers got a sneak preview of it back in December.)

It offers a number of improvements over the previous version; there’s new look and it’s easier to use - plus there are a few additional features.

However, the log in method changed slightly when we switched to the new system. Instead of logging in with your account name (e.g. myaccount), you need to log in with your mailbox name (e.g. myaccount-4).

This means each of your mailboxes has its own username and password. We’ve received a few queries about this – read on to see what to do if you’re having trouble logging in to the new system.

Finding your log in details

The username and password you need are now the same ones you use to check email through programs like Microsoft Outlook Express.

If you’re not sure what these details are, you can see your username and reset the password using the 123-reg control panel:

1. Log in to your 123-reg control panel (use your 123-reg username and password)
2. Scroll down to the Additional services heading
3. Click Manage POP3 mail boxes
4. Scroll down to the Reset Password heading
5. Choose the POP account you wish to reset the password for from the POP Account dropdown box
6. Click Reset Password
7. A new password will be emailed to the address registered with your 123-reg account

Once you’ve received the password, you can log in to the new webmail by entering the following:

• Username: The name of the POP account which was displayed in the POP Account dropdown box
• Password: The new password which was emailed to you

You’ll now be able to use the webmail service as usual. Please note that you’ll need to repeat this process for each mailbox you use.

Make your password more memorable

Once you’ve reset your password, you can change it to something more memorable. Just log in to your 123-reg control panel, choose Manage POP3 mail boxes and use the Change Your Password option. Any new password must contain at least one capital letter, one lowercase letter and a digit.

Please let us know what you think of the new webmail system - you can leave a comment here, or send an email to listentomenow@123-reg.co.uk.

Comments

I have found that a good place to look for inspiration for topics to write about on this blog is Yahoo! Answers. Here I can see common questions people are asking along with a lot of the misused terminology which helps when you work in an industry and you presume everyone has the same level of understanding.

Some of the most frequent questions I see are “How do I advertise adsense?” and “How do I sell advertising on my website?” It’s clear what they are trying to ask, but the questions themselves show that not everyone is sure about the options available to make money through advertising on small to medium sized websites.

A lot of site owners think they need to contact advertisers to sell them space on their site. Only the largest of sites ever do this, employing dedicated sales teams, and even in these cases, most use a 3rd party to do it for them. To carry adverts on your site, you don’t need to have any contact at all with the advertisers.

Sign up with an affiliate network
Affiliate networks acts as a middle man between advertisers and website owners. All the major online companies are involved with at least one affiliate network and by becoming an affiliate you choose which company’s banners and text links you want to display on your site and if one of your visitors clicks on an advert and then buys something from the site, you earn commission for that referral.

Signing up to a network is free, and is a great way to gets adverts targeted to your site user’s interests. For example, if you run a site that publishes hotel reviews, you can carry banners that advertise hotels.com and so on.

Affiliate networks include:
Commission Junction
TradeDoubler
Buy.at

(Our affiliate manager would kill me if I didn’t mention 123-reg’s affiliate program here. To find out more and to sign up go to our 123-reg affiliate sign up page)

Amazon Associates
Amazon pretty much invented the affiliate channel, and their in-house affiliate program still leads the way in terms of customisation and targeting options. It works in exactly the same way as described above, however, it is worth a mention on its own thanks to the depth of products available for you to advertise.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/

Google AdSense
Google allows website owners to display Google adverts on their website, with the option to show text adverts, traditional banners, or video adverts.

The adverts are “contextual” which means the ads shown depend on the content of your website i.e. Google literally reads your website, and then decides which adverts are most appropriate. You earn money for every click or page impression depending on which option you have gone for.
http://adsense.google.com

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)
This is Yahoo’s equivalent to AdSense and works in almost exactly the same way. The advantage of carrying both AdSense and YPN adverts at the start is you can identify which network is carrying the most profitable ads for your site.
http://publisher.yahoo.com/

Terminology:
AdSense
This is simply the name of the service Google runs for website owners to sign up to in order to carry Google adverts on their website.

AdWords
Again, just a name of a service, in this case where advertisers go to write and publish their adverts

Contextual advertising
Ads are selected and shown automatically based on the content of the website. Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network use this method, and Amazon offers it as an option.

CPM: Cost per thousand impressions
How much an advertiser pays for their advert to be displayed a thousand times

CPC: Cost per click
How much an advertiser pays each time their advert is clicked on

EPC: Earning per click
This shows how much on average an advertiser pays out to their affiliates per click. Affiliate networks use this to show an advertiser’s performance to help you pick which ones to use.

Comments

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting to get ranked that high in such a short space of time (123-reg is #1 and WebFusion is #2). It’s worth noting that there aren’t any commercial rivals for this search term so both 123-reg’s and WebFusion’s page rank will have helped a lot. 123-reg has a PR of 7 and webFusion 6, which explains why 123-reg is ranked higher

Although this is a really basic test, hopefully it helps to show the importance of each of these basic and controllable web page elements:

• Title tag
• Page URL
• Body text
• PageRank (Number/ quality of links)
• Anchor text

For search terms related to your site it will be very (very) rare to get such dramtic effects so quickly, especially if you are competing with large sites or for a popular search term(e.g. “Shopping U.K”), but by ensuring you have researched and planned all the elements above, you will see your site ranked a lot higher than if you only spend a couple of minutes on them or ignore them altogether.

To research the most popluar keywords and the variations people use surrounding it, the most commonly used tool is http://inventory.overture.com. If you have a Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search or MSN adCenter account, they also offer keyword list generator tools.

(Why “Monkey shine on tree”? No idea!)

Comments

Monkey Shine on tree
I want to do a test to show how important different elements of a site are when it comes to getting ranked in Google’s natural listings. To do this, I have written the title above (which makes absolutely no sense) to see how long it takes for this post to be ranked and how high up I can get it.

To start with I have used the keywords as the title tag, the page URL and the page’s headline. To help it along, I am now going to start adding keywords into the paragraph so here comes monkey shine and now here we have on tree and to make it interesting let’s put them all together to make monkey shine on tree.

Another factor is a website’s Google PageRank (PR) which uses the number and quality of links to the site as a method of predicting relevancy, so I am going to put this exact post on to our sister site, the WebFusion blog. WebFusion has a PR of 6 compared to 123-reg’s 7, so in theory 123-reg’s should rank higher. I’m also going use the keywords in anchor text linking to WebFusion, and vice versa. So to read exactly the same post on WebFusion click on this link: monkey shine on tree.

Keyword checklist:

• Title tag
• Page URL
• Body text
• PageRank
• Anchor text

Limitations:
Obviously I can’t build the keywords in to the domain name itself, so I can’t demonstrate the importance of that.

A background to “Monkey shine on tree”
The search query at the time of writing has 96,000 results, with the top 3 being:

#1 A Flickr account picture that uses the term and a woman hanging in a tree, with a keyword in a sentance below the picture
#2 A webpage with the keywords in the domain name and a sub-directory along with use of the keywords a lot in the text
#3 An entry on quizilla.com using the keyword in the URL and another in the body of the text

Let’s see how I get on…

Comments

In the previous four parts of this guide we’ve introduced the concept of search engine pay per click (PPC) advertising, looked at how to research and choose your keywords in detail, how to write your PPC adverts, and ways to analyse PPC performance. This final part will look at how to increase your PPC ad’s conversion.

Once your campaigns are up and running, generating impressions, clicks and (hopefully) conversions, you can start optimising them. This will help you increase the conversion rates.

Continuously test your adverts

To see how different adverts increase or decrease your metrics, use at least four variations on an advert. Two of these should contain slight changes. Set your adverts to self-optimise. 

For example, if we wanted to advertise to people searching for ‘designer watches’ we could use these ads:

Batch one

Quality Designer Watches
Browse our selection of designer
watches. All with free UK delivery
www.yourwebsite.com

100s Top Brand Watches
Browse our selection of designer
watches. All with free UK delivery
www.yourwebsite.com

Batch two

Quality Designer Watches
Choose from our wide selection of
men and women’s top brand watches
www.yourwebsite.com

100s Top Brand Watches
Choose from our wide selection of
men and women’s top brand watches
www.yourwebsite.com

This way, the search engines will automatically start to present the most effective adverts more regularly, identifying the poor performers for you. Once these become clear, delete them and introduce a new batch to test. Over time, you’ll home in on the most effective text for your ads.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

Most websites are trying to sell something. It might be a physical product, or maybe just an idea. Whatever it is, the words on your website can make or break that sale. 

Selling doesn’t come naturally to everyone, so here are a few quick ways you can make your copy more effective.

1. Think about who’s reading. Everything on your website should be tailored to the audience. So stop thinking about what pushes your buttons, and start thinking about the people you want to come to your website. What will make them stop in their tracks?
    
2. Explain the benefits, not just the features. People want to know what’s in it for them. Don’t just tell them what great features your product has. Tell them how it will make their life easier or save them money.
    
3. Beware of over-emphasis. It’s fine to tell people how great your product is, but don’t overdo it. Too many capital letters make text difficult to read (definitely don’t SHOUT in upper case), and using exclamation marks everywhere can make your website look cheap.
    
4. Make it personal. Connect with the people reading your copy by making them part of the text. Use the second person (words like ‘you’ and ‘your’) rather than the less-friendly third person (words like ‘they’ and ‘their’).
    
5. Make it urgent. People don’t need reasons to procrastinate. But they do need reasons to act. If they think they might not be able to get the same deal tomorrow, then they’ll be more likely to buy right now.
    
6. Repeat and summarise. Repetition reinforces your message, so don’t be afraid to say things more than once. And if your copy has got someone 90% convinced, they might just need a summary of the salient points to make them press that ‘buy’ button.

Those are my recommendations. Do you have any of your own? Leave a comment and let us know.

Comments

Have you ever thought up a great domain name, punched it into our search tool and found - to your surprise - that it’s available?

If so, I’ve a cautionary tale for you. This chap found the domain he wanted, but took a couple of weeks to think about what he’d use it for before taking the plunge and buying the domain.

In the meantime of course, someone else had snapped up the catchy address, and his idea never saw the light of day.

You might not expect it, but there are still lots of good domains out there. If you come across one you think you’ll want to use, it might be best to snap it up quickly, rather than procrastinating and risking losing a prime piece of internet real estate. It’s your choice, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

On a similar subject, the Independent’s Rhodri Marsden wrote a good post the other day explaining why domains you’ve recently searched for sometimes get bought up. He concludes that, on balance, this is usually down to domain speculators registering names in bulk.

While there definitely isn’t anything dodgy going on at 123-reg - we don’t keep track of the domains you’ve searched for, and we certainly don’t register any in the hope of being able to sell them on at inflated prices - Rhodri’s advice is sound: “if you find that your domain is available, don’t hang around. Just buy it.”

Comments