Build a website like you’d build a house

During this recession / economic mishap or whatever you want to call it, I wondered if it might become quite rare to see housebuilders commission new website builds, but that’s not the case at all. With cost savings, flexibility and the ability to accurately target that online brings, many are using this opportunity to hasten their move to digital, and it makes sense. Apart from these benefits, it’s worth considering that when the market does pick up (and there’s been some promising initial signs in activity so far this year), your online strategy better be polished and ready to fire on all cylinders, as your competitors will be.

With that in mind, this month we’ll take a look at practical ways to improve the design, usability and functionality of your website – whether starting from scratch or giving it a lick of paint.

Firstly a real basic, but so important it’s worth stating, ensure when making changes to your website that a structured project management process is followed. Specifically, have a key requirements specification spelling out each aspect of the site to be included. The project manager should be familiar with this process and it helps to ensure that the web designer knows exactly what you want, and how it will work. Ambiguity is a very unpleasant discovery 12 weeks into a web build!

The aim of a website is for it to operate intuitively for the visitor, and this can vary depending on factors including their age, level of internet understanding, and any disabilities they may have. With this in mind, if your target market is more likely to be affected by any of these factors, such as if you are a retirement homebuilder, then consider running design or usability testing during the website build phase.

Design testing can be undertaken on the current site by building a working prototype of the new design, then gathering a small number of potential customers and video them (and the screen) to watch how they complete a number of website tasks, such as searching for a new property in Bournemouth, or making an enquiry. Get the subject to talk through their thought process as they complete these tasks as it can throw up some very useful insights into their actions, and monitor how many clicks it takes to achieve each action – this is a key factor in whether your website usability is strong enough to work with or against the visitor.

Once the recording has been completed and analysed, some worthwhile changes will no doubt become apparent such as changing the position of certain links, amending the navigation structure to reduce the number of clicks, or reducing the length of a form. The aim is to get the website 90%+ right before launch, but for ongoing testing there are tools which can monitor how website visitors are getting on with the site and will show you where they click, their path through and exit point from the site, and even reconstruct a video of their entire session for you to play back and review. These tools can really help to understand what is going right and wrong on your site, so you can test improvements and implement the most successful version, which improves your enquiry conversion rate. Contact me if you’d like to know more about this, and I may do a more detailed article on “conversion consultancy” in a future month.

In terms of the content on the website, the public’s expectation of a website is continually increasing. If you’re just offering a stock static image and a thin description of your properties a trick is being missed. With high levels of broadband acceptance and speeds available, the use of rich media (video) should be considered. How about providing a 360 tour of an apartment, but actually have people in the video moving around and really emphasise the lifestyle of the property. See how we did this for Cunard here http://queenmary2.cunard.co.uk (select “Queens Room – Ballroom” from “Bars and Lounges menu).

I strongly recommend you think about digital engagement with your customers – you have the ability to create emotion and aid the buying process, but from a tool available 24/7/365, and without staffing costs. If you surpass potential customer’s expectations with slick online tools that make it easier to get essential information, it sends a strong message about the quality of your brand.

One area I can only briefly touch on this month is personalisation. Once you capture data about the visitor, whether from an account signup, or from what they’ve clicked on, you can start to personalise their experience. If you know it’s a mid 20s male looking for a London apartment, then stock photography could be of a vibrant city shot. Copy can also be tailored towards them, as well as search results and any promotions for example.

To create emotion, the visitor could also be allowed to customise any interior options within their new home, and when they’ve finished how about asking for friend’s email addresses so they can share what it looks like? What better way to push them towards a commitment than opening up a debate with friends on décor specifics – it helps to move the conversation past financials and onto emotions which suddenly become a lot less tangible. Oh, and there’s a great piece of viral marketing hidden in there too.

So in summary, use the tough market to make the most of interactive experiences for your potential customers – the emotions will help to drive sales. Also, when you’re building the site make sure you have a proper specification, and do budget for ongoing “conversion consultancy” to find improvements to your website conversion rate.

No matter how good the site is on “go live” day, finding those small improvements that take enquiries from 1.5% to 2% of website traffic will seem all the more important when you realise what it’s done to your bottom line.

Award wins are refreshing

In the same month that Bournemouth based digital marketing agency Refreshed Media celebrate their fifth birthday, they also pick up two Interactive Media Awards in recognition for work with Cunard Line and Bank of Ireland Mortgages.

The Outstanding Achievement Award for Travel & Tourismwas awarded for work on the launch campaign for Cunard’s latest Ocean Liner, Queen Victoria. Refreshed developed a compelling site with innovative features including an interactive ship map, countdown to launch timer, and virtual tour of the luxurious vessel including talking head video from the Captain. The launch also received a coordinated online banner placement campaign to boost website traffic.

An innovative flash game for Bank of Ireland Mortgages won Refreshed the Outstanding Achievement Award for Marketing. The game promoted the bank’s services to the key target audience of brokers, reassuring them of continued support and excellent service and to raise awareness of the up and coming Financial Advisor Awards.

The Outstanding Achievement award is the second highest honor bestowed by IMA and an extremely challenging award to win. IMA commented “Your website has excelled in all areas of our judging criteria and represents a very high standard of planning, execution and overall professionalism.” The Cunard project received over 92% and the Bank of Ireland Mortgages project nearly 94%!

Simon Melaniphy, Managing Director of Refreshed Media, said “Especially in a tough market, it is even more important to deliver a high quality product and service, and when an industry body scores our sites with well over 90% I think the whole team can feel very proud of themselves. Coming in a month where Refreshed turns 5 years old and we begin our first project for the BBC is even more reason to celebrate!’’

Showhouse November Article

Having David Tennant’s old job would have proved useful in preparing for current times, although imagine stepping out of the Tardis in 2008 to find 7 times more people searching Google for “house price crash” than “new homes London” (the latter yielded more searches only just over 2 years ago).

As the Internet matures everyone has access to more information than ever before, and that’s changing the way deals are done. Whilst Land Registry information has been searchable online for a few years, now motivated buyers can spy on when and how deep your price drops have been on sites like Rightmove from property-bee.com. With your every move laid bare, acknowledging current conditions and taking an open and honest approach in customer communications is by far the best approach. If you aren’t already, get those positive messages to a wider audience using an online PR distribution service.

Whilst there are clearly less people searching for “new homes”, (Google’s Insights for Search reports the phrase 2/3rd down from the peak, or 50% off from last year), there are still potential customers, and digital is both cost effective and measurable when executed correctly. Google is now delivering 9 in 10 UK searches, so a well run pay per click campaign on this network will certainly help bring targeted leads to your website.

And are the major builders using their PPC budgets to maximum effect? A search on page 1 for “New Homes Dorset” found 5 out of 11 didn’t mention the location at all in their advert. Relevant ad text attracts a higher click through rate (CTR) so is highly recommended, i.e. if the ad is shown 100 times and 10 click through to the site, CTR=10%. Also, half the adverts did not land the visitor on a page listing Dorset properties. Visitors have short attention spans when it comes to clicking around a site so ensure you’re monitoring your “bounce rate” to see how many are leaving the site immediately from that page, or better still land them on what they are searching for in the first place!

You may also be paying more for your clicks, as Google’s Quality Score checks the text on the landing page and rewards those sending visitors to a page relevant to the keywords used in the search. This can result in receiving adverts at a higher position than competitors, but at a lower price!

On the plus side, some adverts were using Dynamic Keyword Insertion to put my exact phrase as the advert title, which emboldens that phrase and helps to increase CTR. There were signs that at least some were also split testing the ad copy. This neat trick displays different versions of the advert before deciding which is the most successful (highest CTR), and continues to show this ad. These are just some of the factors which influence how much value for money you get on PPC and why it’s important to have it managed professionally.

If you use an agency, they may review their management fees at year end as Google withdraws “Best Practice Funding” – basically agency kickback – perhaps a good time to ensure they are competitive both in terms of pricing and quality of service.

If you’re investing to bring traffic to your website through PPC or other channels such as SEO, PPC, etc, then I strongly urge you to track conversions with a tool such as Google Analytics. At a minimum find out the volume of traffic generated by each channel, and better still, how many conversions were achieved. E.g. your £10k Google spend generated 500 brochure requests, account signups or enquiries, i.e. a cost per lead of £20.

That’s certainly better than the 43% of PPC advertisers who have no idea what their ROI is, but ideally you’ll know which channels are producing sales rather than enquiries, and this can be done if your website provider sets up your contact form or signup page to pass the referrer through to your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. This requires co-ordination with your marketing partner(s) to tag the inbound traffic, e.g. emails will use a special URL so they can be identified. Your CRM should then report on how many sales came from PPC, SEO, etc. If this all seems a bit complicated then it highlights how important it is to work with a partner agency who advises on strategy and take cares of the technical work, and if you work with a full-service agency the co-ordination becomes even simpler.
Overall it’s a great time to invest in digital, there are many ways to do it, but make sure you measure the results and work with an experienced partner.

Ready for Christmas?

Wondering when you will need to increase your search activity for the Christmas rush? Well then you’re in luck, because Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, has just conducted some in-depth research into this very subject looking at trends from Google’s vast hub of search data.
The findings of this research can be found at the Google Retail blog – http://googleretail.blogspot.com/2008/10/making-sense-of-cpcs-and-holiday-trends.html

It has some very interesting insights into consumer behaviour and online spending in the run up to Christmas. It’s all very much from an American perspective (it includes Thanksgiving as a landmark date) but there are still interesting points made here. It is suggesting that there is a large upsurge in search demand and online spending directly after Halloween. It may seem very well organised to be thinking Christmas gifts at such an early stage, but anyone who has had to brave the shops on Christmas Eve will probably appreciate why it’s a good plan to get thinking early…

In this period of increased demand, competition levels will inevitably rise and in turn average Cost Per Clicks will also go up. This is not necessarily a cause for concern, as Hal Varian argues consumers are increasingly likely to make purchases in this period, so your average Cost Per Action may potentially decrease as the Conversion Rate of your website goes up. Obviously, some websites will enjoy more success in this period than others…

Both research and shopping will start early this year – Shopping has already begun… is your marketing strategy ensuring that your brand is generating front of mind awareness throughout the entire research-purchase process and making it into consideration early on?

Consumers will spend more time looking for deals – not least because of current conditions in the economy, consumers are taking the time to research the right purchase… Brands will need to focus on having a strong presence for search and clearly express their value proposition to guarantee consideration for purchase decision making.

Is your website good enough at selling? – Are your prices right? Can users buy quickly and easily? Are you displaying your calls-to-action clearly enough? The brands and websites which best meet these conversion requirements should enjoy considerable success in this period.

Google approaches 90% Market Share in the UK

The latest stats from Hitwise show that Google is closing in on 90% of the total search demand in the UK. In June 2007, Google accounted for 78.28% of the total search market in the UK. At the end of September this figure is now 87.58%. However, the other major search providers are not enjoying the same success in the UK. Yahoo! has dropped to a market share of 3.22% from 8.58% in 2007. Ask has fallen from 4.96% to 2.59% and MSN has seen its search engine market share diminish from 5.46% in June 2007 to 3.7% in June 08 and it is no longer counted in the top 4 UK search engines at the end of September 2008.

Globally, Google accounts for around 78% of all search demand. So the UK market is a particular success story for Google. Indeed, in February 2008 Google replaced the BBC as the UK’s most popular brand, according to a survey conducted by Superbrands. It seems that in the UK ‘Googling’ is now a term synonymous with using a search engine in the same way that ‘hoovering’ means to use a vacuum cleaner. The market share is edging ever closer to 90%, so is the question really when will it surpass this threshold? If Google continues to grow its UK market Share at the same rate, then we can expect it to establish its market share above 90% in 2009.

Refreshed announced as a leading digital agency

Internet specialist Refreshed Media are now officially one of the top 5 digital marketing agencies in the South West, according to New Media Age magazine.

The “Top 100 Interactive Agencies” list is published annually in September, and is the who’s who of the digital world. This year Bournemouth based Refreshed Media appear in the “Top Regional Agencies - South West” category.

Managing Director Simon Melaniphy had praise for the staff and commented “the 17 strong team here at Refreshed have been working extremely hard on customer’s websites and digital marketing over the last 5 years and we are extremely proud to achieve this recognition in such a well respected national publication.”

This comes hot on the heels of welcoming the well known gift retailer Interflora to the client list, and work has started on a Christmas viral game campaign. Sales & Marketing Director Sarah Baker said “we are delighted that Interflora has come on board, and it demonstrates that Bournemouth companies can compete and win at a national level.”

In the same week, Refreshed also won a long term contract with one of the UK’s leading secure hosting companies “The Bunker” based in Kent. Simon said “we were very excited to be selected as search engine marketing partner for such a well respected company. We will also be delivering ‘Conversion Consultancy’, an innovative service to help clients improve their website conversion rate. Many of our customers are interested in this now as it helps them get more from their marketing spend – essential in challenging economic times.”

Refreshed take to the beach....

The Refreshed team held the first annual Beach Olympics to coincide with the closing ceremony of Beijing. With the sun shining, cold beers and flowing Pimms, mixed with a very competitive team spirit, the games began. First up was beach darts to warm up the teams and get the pressure mounting, closely followed by 3 legged relay racing, egg and spoon race and finally limbo.

The teams fought it out in the summer sun, and victory and first place was awarded to team ‘We are Cunard’, beating ‘Men United’ in a “giant connect 4” play off match, with ‘Tequila Suicide’ headed by MD Simon Melaniphy coming a close third, and in final place Sales & Marketing Director Sarah Baker’s ‘Bakers Dozen’.


We are Cunard & Tequila Suicide


Men United & Bakers Dozen