It is good to know where your web site visitors come from and what they do after they arrive. This and other information is available, using special software, from your web site’s access logs. It can be a good idea to outsource this type of work for reasons of economy (doing it properly requires investment on several fronts) expertise and impartiality. If you do then you should expect human analysis as well as tables and charts, and you should get reports that actually help with the planning, running and assessment of your web site and marketing campaigns.

Web analysis is how you discover who comes to your web site and what they do there.

It is one of the most important, flexible and useful of all web marketing activities and can help you optimise the design, development and marketing of your website – both in general and in great detail. It is also the quality-control tool par excellence, and provides insights into:

• your web site’s large and small-scale development opportunities and priorities;
• design flaws in certain pages, or across your whole site, that reduce the number of leads or purchases you should get;
• how effective your marketing is;
• your customers’ ‘demographics’, overall performance data and lots of other information that helps you build up a picture of who is using your site, when they are using it, where they are coming from and how they are using it.

A web analyst relies fundamentally on your web site’s access logs. These log files come in various formats; some formats are better than others for web analysis, but all hold raw data that can be broken down into an impressive range of useful information. While data mining programs are used to extract the data from the log files, it is the web analyst who decides what to extract and how to interpret that data. The log analysis software can also generate automatic reports, useful for gathering data according to time and date ranges, ‘hits’, the volume of data, geography, etc.

Despite the obvious advantages web analysis gives to a site manager, it is still one of the most under-utilised marketing activities, particularly among smaller businesses who ironically have the most to gain from it. I believe that’s because:

• they don’t understand how useful it is;
• they don’t have a marketing or development strategy for their web site;
• none of their acquaintances do it, so they don’t either (sheep mentality);
• it’s not an ‘active’ activity (a bit like financial reporting);

If you are the kind of person who likes to run your business in a haphazard sort of way, ruled by guesswork and hunch, then you probably don’t need web analysis and probably will never see the benefit of it. Yet, for the right kind of business, analysis provides the ‘intelligence’ to help you make good decisions and be a good manager. It is the only available source of website performance data, and people who believe they can manage a business-critical website without it are, in my experience, little shy of deluded.

So what is the right kind of business? Well, if any of the following ring any bells then you should be doing web analysis as a matter of course:

• your business relies on your web site, and/or getting people to it;
• you are an ecommerce business;
• your web site is an integral part of your company and has a development budget;

Web analysis has had some bad press though, and many people have the impression that it’s limited to providing large round numbers of general and semi-useful (except for bragging purposes) information. And unfortunately, they are often right, which is the fault of unscrupulous, if not downright dishonest, web companies who peddle such services. But that is to proper web analysis what Bernard Mathews is to healthy eating.

Web analysis can answer subtle questions like:

• how much of my advertising actually leads to sales or enquiries;
• which campaigns are the most successful (and which are failing);
• do my visitors come back – if not, why not;
• what are my visitors interested in;
• are my products well-placed, is my shopping cart designed well, what about my enquiry form;
• does my web site have any structural problems that prevent people reaching places I’d like them to reach;
• which parts of my web site might be most worth expanding?

You can hypothesise use-case scenarios and story-board notional users all you like, but in the end that’s all just a dress-rehearsal. You can live on hunches and guesswork too if you like gambling. But you don’t have to settle for either option because, ultimately, analysis will tell you how good your web site and marketing strategy really are.

Some of these points are covered in other articles, but I thought it would be good to collect them here for your convenience, and so I have a single article to point to when people ask me about Actinic (which is often enough now for me to take the time to write this article).

First off, this article isn’t a how-to or a manual, it is an overview of the main features offered by the Actinic ecommerce system, and some comparisons between it and other systems of the “home-made” variety.

Secondly, some nomenclature: I’ll refer to Actinic as, well, Actinic. However, when doing so I actually mean Actinic Business Client (there are a couple of other lesser versions you can consider if your needs are very simple). And I’ll refer, for historical reasons, to other systems built to order by companies around the country as “Bespoke”. Bespoke is actually something of a misnomer (referring as it does to high-end tailored clothes), your local ecommerce provider might refer to their particular offering as custom, bespoke, in-house, built-to-order, purpose built, or any other form of words that means basically - “we made it specially for you”. For my purposes they are all Bespoke.

Overview of Actinic’s main features

• flexibility:
  Actinic steals the socks off the competition when it comes to general purpose retailing features. It can deal with (almost) any retailing model except those with very specific requirements (see below), you can bundle products or split them into smaller products (components), product management is graphical and comprehensive, there are advanced features for setting up complicated types of products.

  This makes it perfect for selling groceries, musical instruments, records, wine, books, hardware and electrical items. It is not as suitable for selling, for example, curtains which often require complicated relationships between a product’s components: ie. a length of curtain might be sold by the metre, to a particular template, and with optional gathering, types of heading and pelmets (which also have their own styles and options). That sort of retail model might be better suited to a bespoke system.

• marketing and sales features:
  Actinic comes with a lengthy list of marketing and promotion features that includes sophisticated discounting, related products, also bought, top products and new products. Products can be priced according to volume, quantity or any other metric you need to use. Discounts can be applied to customers with a particular sort of account, for instance, you can give your trade customers a VAT-free experience, your regular customers a 10% discount, or any customer a discount based on their order total. The flexibility is really impressive and is able to cope with pretty much all the most common forms of price marketing.
• secure order system:
  Actinic downloads orders straight to your desktop and it interfaces with numerous payment providers (for instance Paypal or Worldpay). In fact Actinic is a desktop application, which has many benefits for you as a shopkeeper. The secure order processing though is a vital facility which again comes with a variety of options according to the type of order processing you want to do. Want to download your orders and swipe the card details yourself? No problem. Want your customers’ details to be processed in real-time by your bank? No problem. The options don’t end there either, however the subject starts to get a bit technical so I’ll move on to…
• reliability and pedigree:
  This is an overlooked but fundamental “feature” that ecommerce system vendors ought to take more seriously than they sometimes do. Your ecommerce shop is, in many cases, your livelihood. You can’t afford for it to be crashing or getting mixed up between whose order is for which customer, or sending orders off to the wrong address. Do not underestimate the number and gravity of the sorts of problems that you can find with an ecommerce application.

  Your system needs to be rock solid, thoroughly tested, and all the main facilities need to work properly 100% of the time. Aside from the potential inconvenience and headaches system bugs can cause, they can thoroughly damage your business’s reputation too. Unlike your friendly neighbourhood bespoke systems, Actinic has eight years of solid, continuous development to call on. It is robust, secure and as near as damn it bug-free (it’s certainly free of category 1 bugs). It is also designed, built and supported by a large company with experience in EPOS and traditional secure retailing. And there are regular updates and patches to keep your site secure from hackers.

• time to market:
  Most people, once they’ve taken the decision to start doing business online, want to just get on with it. They do not want to wait for several months for a bespoke system to go through the design, implementation and testing phases (which they absolutely require). And why should you have to wait around for someone to re-invent the wheel, particularly when they have little chance of improving on it? In the 3-4 months you wait for your bespoke system to roll out, your competitors could have stolen a march on you. Using Actinic, you can get a basic ecommerce business up and running in days. For more complicated sites it might take a few weeks from start to finish.
• maintenance and development
  No system lasts forever. Needs, priorities and tastes change over time and your shop needs to change accordingly. If your competitors start offering new features you need to keep up. You will, anyway, want to change things about your shop as time goes by: as you gain experience as an online retailer, as you think up new ways to do things, or as you notice ways your current site could be improved. The engine that runs your ecommerce business needs to be able to cope with this natural evolution as much as possible. Actinic is updated regularly with relevant new features and the features in the current versions are more than enough for most businesses. Even if you want to upgrade your whole application this is not going to break the bank. On the contrary, bespoke engines are very expensive to develop and upgrade. This is mainly because it’s time consuming to do that (as the system needs to be redesigned, rebuilt and retested), and unfortunately, as the sole customer, you usually have to bear the brunt of those development costs.
• other Actinic features:
  • Stock monitoring.
    Actinic can monitor your stock levels and withdraw products from sale if they’ve run out. It can also continue to display them but with an out-of-stock message.
  • Office integration.
    Actinic can import and export data to Sage Line 50 and Quickbooks.
  • Growth potential.
    It is capable of dealing with high volume sites and product catalogues containing up to 20,000 products. You can be sure, if your hosting is up to the task, that Actinic won’t crumple under the weight of your success.
  • Go worldwide.
    Actinic also has excellent delivery and tax options, which can be configured independently for different regions and zones (UK, Europe, US, Rest of the World, for example). You can choose how delivery is calculated using a variety of measures that obviously includes weight or quantity, but which can also determine how much to charge for larger orders or where the customer opts for a slower or faster delivery service.

The million dollar question

In most cases cost is a deciding factor. Actinic is in my (humbly expert) opinion, the best value ecommerce system on the market - by a mile. Even a shop built using the top of the range Actinic Business client can start from as little as a thousand pounds, with prices increasing according to how much design customisation you want. This is a fraction (literally) of what a bespoke system would cost you for comparable features and power, and it would arrive soon after order bug-free and ready to rock - quite unlike your bespoke option which teeters out to first testing after a long gestation like a new born deer with wobbly legs.

Free and easy

There is a class of ecommerce system that I haven’t mentioned. Because I don’t think you should consider them. I’m talking about the ‘free’ systems that most hosting companies bundle next to ‘Javascript Hit Counter’ and the other free software that comes with your hosting control panel. Now these systems take longer to customise than Actinic, offer a pittance of features, and generally can’t be customised beyond the product catalogue (so your customers check out in something rather less than style). On top of all this, by the time you’ve paid a developer to customise it for you, I guarantee it will have cost you more or as much as an equivalently styled Actinic Catalogue site. These free systems aren’t free, and are the equivalent of shabby market retailing. If you really can’t afford to set up shop properly I advise you to forget it and trade on Ebay or Amazon instead.

Truly Bespoke

Ok, Actinic is not the last word in ecommerce. I started this article saying that it has limitations, and it does. I don’t recommend it, or any pre-built system, for big ecommerce enterprises. Big retailers who have a lot to gain and lose need a relationship with their ecommerce provider that must by need go beyond that which Actinic is capable of providing. Sometimes they need to be able to request innovative and forward-looking features that pave the way for off-the-shelf packages to follow. They might need several development scenarios to choose from, comprehensive documentation or security systems in place, any of which will require a bespoke solution.

However, here I’m talking about Bespoke with a capital ‘B’, where the word fits it’s original meaning of a high-quality product designed specifically for a wealthy client. This option is, without argument, the ultimate ecommerce option, but it’s available only to a very few - because it costs a fortune to create and develop. There are many reasons to go bespoke - but these days they apply to a small percentage of ecommerce retailers - those who can afford the time and who have the resources, and (usually to their chagrin) those whose business models don’t allow them to use off-the-shelf solutions. Going for a bespoke solution without a real need or more importantly the time and money to do it properly is a brave decision.

Conclusion

You know what I’m going to say. It’s a no brainer! at least for almost all small or medium-sized businesses. You will pay ten or fifteen times the price for a bespoke system that is as powerful, making them easily the best ecommerce websites available. Which, obviously, they would have to be for Kilroy James to recommend them.

Waiver:

Neither John Kilroy or anyone at Kilroy James has been bribed by Actinic in the making of this article

Specialising in French and Italian red wine, and champagne, marc1wines has a growing reputation for quality wine from rare and small (sometimes boutique) producers. This is an excellent site for anyone who buys wine online, and features some lovely photos of wine.

The owner Marc Medland runs a successful wine merchants in Aldeburgh. The marc1wines.co.uk website is a new venture for him and he has been keen to do it well from the start, getting in designer Chris Keeble (of Keeble and Hall) to produce some photography and a conceptual design. Marc chose to base the website on the Actinic ecommerce system, which is a good choice as it boasts class-leading features, security and power. We’re very pleased with this site and think it’s a great base for marc1wines to grow from.

Why is it when MySpace churns to a stop (as it frequently does) that for a whole minute, while my browser waits for MySpace to decide if it’s too much trouble to actually serve the content I asked for, that nevertheless the adverts all appear. I know most of those ads originate off-site on different servers, but it still doesn’t seem fair, rather like getting stuck on the shopping channel, with only ads for comfort. And how come the ad companies can keep up with the traffic, but MySpace can’t?

Aside from these visible changes, there are more subtle evolutions taking place in cyberspace. This is exemplified in particular by the growth of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr et al. These sites have millions of children and adults alike salivating at the potential to get themselves Out There, keep up with friends and ‘meet’ others with similar interests. I read recently in the Guardian newspaper that this is not, strictly, using the web to communicate (as one might by using a newsgroup, web blog or forum), so much as to ‘build relationships’, which made me wonder, considering all the stories you hear, quite who was doing the building and what sort of relationship were they after? This strange language being used by the social networking sector is actually familiar to me from my days with a brand development agency. We used to talk about ‘building relationships’ between brands and consumers – and actually, if you use any of the social networking sites, you will see immediately that all this is actually to do with the advertising. It is the advertisers who want to build relationships with the sites’ users, and the incredible monetary value of these sites is testament to how badly they want to do this and that it works, extremely well.

Marketing and advertising are both leading growth areas on the web, and as ever at the centre of the action, the latest US figures show that for the first time ever US companies spent more money advertising online than they did on print advertising. Considering how young this industry is (although in my thirties I feel a bit like a granddad sometimes) this is a strong indication of where business marketing will be focused over the coming decade. I see this already everyday. For example, small businesses seem to be deserting Yellow pages en masse, in favour of cheaper, more profitable marketing activities on the web. It makes sense for them not just because it is cheaper but because the web is now where most people look when they want to find a supplier, service or business. Indeed I don’t even know where my yellow pages directory is; and, I’m faintly surprised to discover (via a small informal poll I’ve just conducted), neither do any of my friends!

Fosse Way magazine’s “Ask the Expert” column, June 08.

And it works! really well. There are things you can’t do with it easily, and for advanced web page design it’s quite limited (as you’d expect). But for the people it’s aimed at - those who want to run their own website, as easily as possible - it’s brilliant: simple administration, easy ways to organise pages and information, and most importantly a well-thought-out and well-featured web page editing facility.

Anyway, back to our website. If you notice any problems we haven’t spotted, please let us know. If you find yourself here having expected a different page, then you have probably followed an old link that we have redirected here.

Even the most extreme search engine optimisation won’t, on its own, jet-propel your web site up to position 1, or even to page one, on Google necessarily. Good positions are best achieved by running a well-rounded web marketing strategy, SEO is just one of the many tactics such a plan would employ.

Although this article deals with the Google search engine, a real web marketing strategy will always aim for good spread across a considered (researched) list of other search engines. Afterall, Google may have a very dominant position serving 63% of all British web search enquiries³ (compared to 47% in the US), but that’s no reason to ignore the rest.

The basic elements of web marketing are:

1. Research
2. Search engine marketing
3. Non search engine marketing
4. Web site analysis and optimisation

Research

Research underpins all web marketing activities; even relatively straightforward things like search engine optimisation cannot be properly done without it. Research is conducted with an eye on three factors relating to your business: what type of business you have, your target markets and your web site.

Web marketing is not a one-size-fits-all activity, because businesses differ, markets differ and web sites differ. It is through research that you will discover which opportunities are appropriate for you, your budget and customers.

You can do a lot of research or a little, it depends what your ideas and aims are; generally, you can stop when the picture you are building stops getting much clearer. Some marketing activities benefit more from research than others do, and some types of businesses should do more research than others. Either way, research comes first – before any actual marketing activity takes place.

Once you have surveyed the scene you can choose an entry point, usually that entry point is…

Search engine marketing

Like it or not, search engines are currently the most important way to get people to your web site, and in Britain most first-time web site visitors arrive from one or another of them. Getting on the right side (which is usually the top) of the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN – is a major focus of web marketing and there are lots of ideas about how that is best achieved.

I’ve written quite a lot about the subject of search engine marketing, but the key activities you will want to do to improve the position of your listings are:

1. optimise your web site (also known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO);
2. start a link network;
3. submit your web site to other relevant databases;
4. get listed on certain directories (some you will have to pay for);
5. ensure that your web site is relevant and useful.

Don’t settle for a search engine marketing plan that only offers to search optimise your web site. On its own this is unlikely to get you where you want to be, and over-optimising it will have a negative overall effect.

And also remember that a web page must be optimised for certain key words. These words should be the same as the search terms you want that page to be found with, and they will have been identified during your research. It is often not in your interest to try and optimise a page for too many keywords, so choose them carefully – optimising for the wrong terms will do you little or no good.

Choosing the right key words is not as straightforward as you might imagine. In most cases the your first (or best) guesses are wrong, which is why it is vital you research them.

Non search engine marketing

This covers advertising and other ways that you can get people to your web site without involving search engines.

Most commercial web sites advertise in one way or another using, for instance Google, Yahoo and Overture ’sponsored’ ad campaigns (this doesn’t really count as search engine marketing), banner or box adverts on suitable web sites, partnership promotions or email. The opportunities here vary widely but the best will be identified by your research.

Don’t spend very much unless you’ve done the research – research costs much less than advertising and it will help to ensure that you don’t waste money. Also, it is usually worth getting your advertising agency or consultant to optimise any sponsored ads you take out. These have become increasingly sophisticated and even minor tweaks can have a dramatic effect on their effectiveness.

The process and output from this form of web marketing naturally cross-over with ‘real world’ marketing (the Internet isn’t the only place you should advertise your web site), and consequently you may have to get someone to develop your campaigns or ads for you. Budget for this as developing good material can sometimes be as expensive as the space it occupies.

Where possible, try to make good use of relatively cheap opportunities like text-based adverts, referral schemes, directory listings etc.

Web site analysis and optimisation

Getting people to your web site is a big part of the plan, but the final goal is to do business with them. Your web site has to be up to the task of facilitating or encouraging this, and ironically it is here that many web marketing efforts fail.

It is a fact that the great majority of web sites are not built properly and are badly designed¹ – containing flaws that stop visitors doing what they or you want them to do. This is partly the fault of the people who designed and built them, but it is also due to inappropriate production processes and clients who prioritise the wrong things or ignore advice.

Web analysis will spot these flaws and help you fine tune your web site, but it can only help after-the-fact and it is always better to ensure in the first instance that you commission experts to produce your web site, and that you listen to their advice.

Aside from spotting problems with the your web site, web analysis can also show how well particular advertising campaigns are working – allowing you to tune them and focus on those that work best.