‘Making Search Work’

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the ‘Making Search Work’ workshop at the Thistle City Hotel, Barbican, organised by UKeiG. Martin White of Intranet Focus Ltd gave a very insightful workshop on Selecting and implementing web, intranet and enterprise search. We discussed the critical success factors for search including the importance of having good content, building up user trust and having a big enough team to support your search during implementation and beyond.

The competitive nature of the search market and the deceleration in pace of development has meant that technology-wise, many vendors offer an equally efficient search solution. General opinions from this workshop thought that what makes the distinction between searches is ultimately the level of customer service and support that can be offered.

Web Managers Meetings

Over the last few weeks, Siteimprove have been finding out about regional web managers meetings all over the UK. This has been a great way to ensure we are up to date with the key priorities for our customers in a relaxed and informal environment. We were recently invited to Kent Connects’ “Digital Inclusion Group,” regularly attended by the county’s web managers from local authorities and public sector organisations. This was a great opportunity to gain an understanding of the issues being faced in the local web community and strengthen relationships with our existing customers, as well as giving a demonstration of our services to those new prospective customers.

Not content with simply attending meetings, we have also instigated a Hertfordshire web managers meeting after finding out at the ‘Building a perfect council website’ conference in July that there is currently no forum in place for Hertfordshire web managers. With Siteimprove UK based in Bishop’s Stortford, we feel this will be a great way to get to know those locally involved in public sector websites. We look forward to having an informal discussion on issues such as web analytics and accessibility... of course with food provided!

We hope that the Hertfordshire web teams will be able to continue with the monthly meetings to assist each other in web management and share ideas.

Web Analytics and SEO @ NYS Forum

On Friday the 6th of November I gave a presentation on Web Analytics and Search Engine Optimization to the NYS Forum at the NYS Cultural Education Center in Albany, New York. The presentation covered the topics Web Analytics and Search Engine Optimization.

The Web Analytics part of the presentation focused on how you can use your web analytics solution to get actionable insights instead of just providing usage statistics. Finding the metrics in your web analytics that provide information, about where you can improve your website is not a straight forward task, but it is where you will get the benefit of web analytics, compared to just reporting website usage. Picking the right KPIs and using behavior tracking tools is a large part of finding information that you can act upon to improve your website. These areas where also covered in the presentation.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) part of the presentation was split into two. In the first half of SEO we looked at the technical prerequisites for doing SEO and how to write optimized content. In the second half the focus was on the strategic parts of SEO. This includes link building strategies, selecting what to optimize and especially why it is a good idea for public sector websites to use SEO and how they can benefit from it. Finally I talked about how you can use your web analytics to help you uncover where to apply SEO and to measure the effect of your SEO.

I really enjoyed giving this presentation and the interaction and feedback from the audience was awesome. So I look forward to sharing the joy of web analytics with even more people in the future.

Siteimprove is 6!

On the 1st October Siteimprove had its 6 year anniversary. Since being established as a company in Denmark in 2003, Siteimprove has seen success after success. From starting with a single office in Copenhagen, offices have now opened in the UK and the USA with staff numbers growing five-fold.

As well as work in the Danish, British and American markets, there has also been expansion into the Irish, Swedish and Canadian markets over the years. Siteimprove has seen a steady growth in revenue since 2003 averaging around 40% increase per annum. Most importantly, the company remains debt-free and in a strong position to develop and expand in the future.

Web Analytics 2.0

Avinash Kaurshik author of the book 'Web Analytics - an hour a day' and the Occam's Razor blog has just announced a new book 'Web Analytics 2.0'. Avinash works with how to use the massive amounts of data that web analytics systems provides their users with. He doesn't work with a single tool or product, he works with methods and techniques for getting the most out of the tools and data.

His first book provides valuable insight in to web analytics for both seasoned professionals and beginners. This second book promises to take us deeper in to the exciting world of web analytics.

I look forward to receiving our copy and as soon as we have it and I have read it, I will post a full review of the book.

If you haven't got the first book already it might be a good start for getting more out of your analytics solution.

Out and about again

Siteimprove are excited to be sponsoring the 11th Annual Public Sector Online 2009 event in London on the 21st October, organised by Kable, a branch of Guardian Professional. We will be meeting with web editors, developers, intranet managers, those in media and communications and basically anyone in the public sector who has a hand in implementing and developing web-based customer services and information. We look forward to an action packed day of keynote talks and panels covering everything on websites from better customer access to accessibility to content and quality control.


Come and see us at our stand for more information on an easier to manage, error-free website! Or alternatively, for those attending, see our website for an enticing offer!

Unique users and hosted web analytics

Every now and then I'm met with a question about the uniqueness of unique users. Often the question is triggered by someone who has tested the website with their analytics solution and found that the number of unique users is higher than expected.

This imprecision in the unique users count is common in most hosted web analytics solutions. SiteAnalyze is, like most other hosted analytics solutions, cookie based. So when a user reaches the website we are tracking, we look for a cookie, to see if that user has visited the website before. If we don't find a cookie the user will be registered as a new unique user, and we'll place a cookie on the computer.

It is this cookie, that is the cause of the imprecision in unique users, and that is because cookies signify one browser for one user on one computer. Here is a simple example of one user resulting in two unique users sessions in the analytics. Imagine John Smith surfing away on his laptop in Internet Explorer and reaching your website, he will then be counted as one unique user. Later on the same day John is surfing the internet, again from his laptop, but this time he uses the Firefox browser, he will then be counted as a new unique user, even though he already visited your website. This is because the browsers don't share cookies.

He will be counted as yet another unique user, when he enters your website from his desktop computer at work, and when Jane Smith logs on to John's computer with her own user account, and enters your web site, she will also be counted as a new unique user, because cookies aren't shared between user on a computer, even though they use the same browser.

One more thing that can add to the imprecision of the unique user count, is when your users delete their cookies. Most users do this once in a while, and that will result in them being counted as new unique users the next time they enter your website.

So to sum it up, the unique users count (or unique visitors in some tools) is not an exact science. The more web savvy your users are, the more different browsers and computers they are likely to use. Which again will result in less exact unique user counts.