The new position is for an Internet Savvy Account Manager to help promote our internet marketing services to our customers and to help plan and manage or Internet Marketing Campaigns. No campaign is the same. We may mix such techniques as: SEO – Search Engine Optimisation, PPC Pay Per Click Google Adwords Marketing, Social Media,  E-mail Marketing, Internet Analysis, Internet Consultancy and Web Analytics.

We have achieved outstanding results for our customers and are looking for a new member of our team who will add value to our customers.

The Job Specification is below.

New Internet Marketing Jobs at WSI

Role: Internet Marketing Account Manager
Location: Huddersfield
Salary: £20k-£25K according to experience

As the Internet Marketing Account Manager in our growing Digital Marketing Agency you will be responsible for the planning and management of SEO and PPC for client websites. You will also be responsible for analysis and research of prospects. Training will be given, and you will have access to the latest SEO and analysis tools. You will also analyse the results implemented by our SEO Consultants and liaise with clients, looking for opportunities to improve the clients’ online business. You will attend client meetings and be in constant communication with the client to ensure all Search projects are achieving their targets.

You should have hands on experience of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Google Analytics. As this role is client facing you must have strong communication and presentation skills. You will implement Search Marketing strategies and be competent in the delivery of SEO & PPC Social Media and Conversion Analysis. You will also be responsible for making ongoing recommendations and campaign improvements.

There will be significant training opportunities to further develop your skills.

If you would like to apply, please e-mail your CV and a covering letterincluding salary expectations to lisa@wsi-ebizsolutions.biz.

You can checkout the person spec on our careers page

This role overlaps with similar jobs such as

Internet Consultant, Internet Marketing Consultant, Internet Marketing Analyst, Internet Marketing Account Manager, and is based in Holmfirth near Huddersfield

Isn’t it about time you started managing your website like your sales people? Everyone knows if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Although most companies now have a website, very few company Directors get any viable and actionable information on their website, worst still many Sales & Marketing Managers don’t value their website like their sales and marketing teams.

In an economic environment where value for money is important; where everyone needs sales and new accounts and where there is extreme pressure on costs, “it is a relatively easy win for companies to make more out of their websites” says Steve Harvey-Franklin Internet Consultant with WSI, “most senior executives and marketers should seek training on at least the basics of Internet Marketing such as Search Marketing, Web Analytics and Social Media, so that they can understand the jargon, realise what hidden profits they could be tapping into and better manage their own web marketing agency.”

So what are the key steps to make more out of your internet marketing budget?

1. Start Measuring. Google Analytics is excellent for most sizes of business; use analytics to measure key statistics on a regular basis.
2. Set Goals and Targets. Identify the website behaviour that you want to encourage

Goals may include:

• Sales
• Leads
• Brochure Downloads
• Contact Requests
• Time on Site
• Specific Page Paths

Ie anything that you consider valuable economically or to your brand

Targets may include: Increasing Sales or Leads. This may be additionally broken down to include:

• Increasing Conversion rates
• Decreasing Bounce rates on a page
• Increasing visitors to the Basket
• Decreasing Basket Drop out

1. Set up a simple 1 page report of the vital information that you need either daily, weekly or monthly, depending on the intensity, importance  and volatility of your traffic and  goals.
2. Make the targets measurable and quantifiable

As your system gathers data, you can then start to hone in and ask very specific questions to determine what is making you money and what is losing you money, then your marketing investment decisions become very easy.

For Example:

Once you can focus on a specific section of the site that is driving the most interest, the marketing campaign can be fine tuned or even reduced, by focussing on what is successful or by refining what is not successful. For example,  on the same Keyword :

• Establish the best format for your advert by running 2 adverts with identical headers but different text bodies. Then reverse the test keep the best advert  body  and testing the heading. Using your analytics see which advert works best over time.
• Establish the best page layout and images for your adverts to land on, again in a controlled way varying elements of your web page, possibly running them side by side over time, to eliminate seasonal factors.

This process is known as split testing or multi variant testing

Steve Harvey-Franklin commented that he has seen “remarkable results for our customers by testing and varying significant elements on page. If we can move a client’s conversion rate from 1% to 1.5% their sales are actually increasing by 50%, who wouldn’t be interested in increasing their sales by such volumes?”

Google Landing Page Analysis

In tests that Google performed, they increased their own sign up conversion rate by 56% by testing and making 4 relatively simple changes. In the image above. The page on the right outperformed the page on the left by 56%.

Mike Smith from Ripley Training who runs courses on Internet Marketing and Web Analytics commented that “the need for this level of knowledge, and the results that our courses can drive are switching senior executives onto our new Internet Marketing Courses…….  where we educate them to improve their return on internet investment ”

Most businesses today do not take advantage of how important it is to test regularly. The key for any business wanting to achieve online success is knowing how to communicate to your target audience and knowing that all parties do not act on the same principles. This also allows you to figure out your online ad spend in an effective manner. The average online conversion today is between 1% and 2%, which means that a large portion of ad budgets is not being used effectively.

The key is really to keep the testing simple and uncomplicated and once you have established your benchmarks then you can start the process to target, measure and refine. This can be a simple process or a more complicated one but the key is simply testing, testing and more testing of the right things and you will increase your online conversion.

Steve Harvey-Franklin is an Internet Marketing Consultant
at WSI Yorkshire, the Huddersfield Based Digital Agency

The definition of bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a site who leave the site without viewing any more pages. Bounce rate is calculated using the bounce rate is: bounce rate = total number of visitors who view one page / total number of visits. A visitor can bounce by:

• Clicking the “Back” button to leave the site
• Clicking a link to a page on a different web site
• Closing the window or tab the page is being viewed in
• Typing and navigating to a new URL
• Session timeout: commonly 30 minutes

Bounce rate can vary between different data sources depending on the session timeout value. A session timeout out is where a visitors views a page, doesn’t navigate or bounce and leave the browser idle for longer than the timeout period. If after the session timeout period the visitor resumes activity and navigates on the site, it will be recorded as a new session. Bounce rate data in Google Analytics uses the period of 30 minutes.

Why is bounce rate important

The importance of bounce rate is very much dependant on the natures of the website and the “bounces.” The way bounce rate is interpreted is different for ecommerce websites, blogs, news websites, affiliate sites, social networking sites and so on. Below are some examples of the how the importance of bounce rate can vary between different websites.

Ecommerce and Bounce Rate

The goal of ecommerce websites is to convert visitors into sales. To complete a sale it is necessary to navigate through the purchase process. A high bounce rate on ecommerce websites indicates that there is an issue with traffic relevancy (visitors weren’t looking to buy the products and/or services offered) or the websites persuasion architecture (web page design, prices, content and calls to action). Bounce rate is important on ecommerce websites because it is one of the metrics that can be used to determine the performance of web pages.

Blogs, News Sites and Bounce Rate

Blogs and new websites etc provide articles about all manner of subjects. If you’re looking for information about a sports event, brewing beer, world politics, whatever is may be a good article on a news website or blog site should provide you with the information you were looking for. In which case you will bounce but the website will have achieved its primary goal. Many blogs are monetized using affiliate banners and Google Adsense, clicking on adverts is also counted as a bounce. Visitors clicking on adverts would also be one of the goals of a blog site or news website. Another reason why high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Affiliate and Adsense Sites and Bounce Rate

Some websites use search engine optimisation or paid search marketing to drive traffic to pages with an extensive amount of advertising. The intended goal of these websites is to get as many visitors to click on adverts as possible. Because clicking on adverts is counted as a bounce a high bounce rate may be a good thing. The web statistics analyst would compare bounce rate with clicks to determine what percentage of the bounce rate is from activities other than clicking on adverts. So bounce rate is also important on these websites but with clicks taken into account.

Bounce Rate: A Summary

With the knowledge of what bounce rate is and an understanding of the implications of bounce rate data for your website it’s possible to use it alongside other metrics to monitor, test and improve performance based and your websites goals. Using bounce rate it’s possible to streamline SEO, improve return on investment on PPC advertising and more!

A/B Split Testing

When designing or re-designing a website, the decision on which of the design mock-ups to use as the final version has rested with the management and been an internal decision or been out-sourced to a customer research group. Google’s A/B split testing makes it possible to let your customers (website users) decide which decide is the best by providing your online marketing team with metrics including conversion rates, goals completed and most importantly, return on investment.

There are three key areas that influence return on investment, persuasion design, calls to action and conversion architecture.

Persuasion Design

To improve marketing and sales the message from the ecommerce websites design and content need to be persuasive enough to encourage using to take an action. This can be achieved by experimenting with different images and text used and how the information is laid out (or information architecture). The effectiveness of persuasion design is affected by how hardware and software affects the user experience such as screen display size, the use of mobile browsing or browser. The website should be designed for the most popular common visitor set up (available from visitor information in Google Analytics) but different versions are recommended in some circumstances. For example, a mobile phone application website with a high volume of traffic from mobile handsets would greatly benefit from creating a mobile version of their ecommerce website.

Call to Action

The primary goal of an ecommerce website is to generate sales but there are other valuable goals such as setting up a customer account, newsletter sign ups, social media interaction etc. It is important to emphasise calls to action to make it easy for user to convert their interest into an action. Calls to action should be presented with respect to the information architecture of the page. As potential customers are persuaded to buy they should be given the option to convert during each step. There should always be a call to action above the fold on the landing page. If the page is long the call to action can then be repeated lower down the page. It is also important to put values on different types of conversions so they can be effectively prioritised in the design.

Conversion Architecture

The process of converting a customer starts when a user enters the website and ends when they complete a purchase or newsletter sign up etc. The aim of conversion architecture optimisation is to maximise the proportion of visitors to conversions by improving payment processes and sign up processes etc. Using Google’s goal tracking it is possible get an insight into where conversion architecture is failing. For example, an ecommerce website might lose a lot of potential conversions after the users have filled in their address and details and move to the payment form. With the insights from goal tracking it’s possible to test different solutions to try and decrease the number of users failing to complete a purchase. If a website only offered Paypal and Google Checkout, it could be the case that the lack of payment options was causing the high drop out rate.

More Split Testing

Persuasion design, calls to action and conversion architecture can all be improved by split testing. Improving your websites performance is an on-going processes and using A/B split testing to increase conversion rates can be more effective than investing in things like PPC and SEO. It’s better to get 2 sales from 10 visitors than 1 sale from 100 visitors.

Many online marketers will still remember when world wide awareness of the earthquake in China in 2008 was dispersed through Twitter and social media sites long before the major news channels ran with the story. Even Google was left behind as it’s major source of current events, new websites, failed to deliver articles in time.

Social Media and the Search Engines: 2010

In 2010, Google will continue to explore how information garnered from social media websites can be harnessed to provide quality, relevant information about world events, as they happen. What this means for online marketers is the importance of social media isn’t just about brand development and positive customer interaction as it has been in the past. It will be a new focus for search engine optimisation. The relevance of social media to ever evolving search engine techniques is three fold. Firstly, real-time search will feature social media sites, blogs and other sources relevant to real-time search, secondly, social media mentions of your company brand or products will in some way be taken into account and thirdly, links from sources such as Twitter and Facebook will become a valuable asset. The impact of this on internet marketing in 2010 will be higher investment in social media marketing and optimisation, with the focus on regular tweets, blogs, status updates and so on and a more diverse set of link building opportunities.

Internet Marketing 2010: Conversion Rates and Optimisation

Let’s take a step back a second and list some of the opportunities to drive traffic to your website:

• Search engines organic listings
• Search engine paid listings
• Display ads through content networks
• Social Media sites
• Email marketing
• News and Media sites
• Television advertising
• Print advertising
• Radio

That’s just 10 out of perhaps 20 different marketing verticals and counting. Internet marketing is an area full of opportunities to develop traffic, so how should you allocate your marketing budget between them? Discover which vertical delivers the greatest value for money in terms of traffic number? No, you use goal tracking and conversion tracking to see which delivers the best value in terms of profit. Google Analytics has made some significant changes to it’s conversion tracking functionality which will contribute to 2010 being a big year for the rise of conversion rate optimisation.

Conversion rate optimisation doesn’t stop at the sources you drive traffic from or the keywords you used in your campaign. Google has implemented A/B split testing, so it’s much easier to test which is the best performing design. Instead of getting a number of design versions from your web designer, you can just trial each of them and see what your users think! And finally, you can make improvements to conversion architecture, or the journey from a visitor landing on your website to completing a purchase.

Internet Marketing 2010: Some Conclusions

It appears that real-time search, social media mentions, social media links and conversion architecture are set to feature more prominently in the online marketing landscape in 2010. I think Google Analytics is going to play a more central role in campaign optimisation using improved goal and conversion tracking as well as split testing. My advice is to keep up-to-date with new features, regularly visit search engine optimisation blogs and broader internet marketing blogs so the exciting new opportunities for 2010 don’t pass you by.

Google Analytics now allows for the creation of up to 20 Goals per profile. In addition to expanding the number of goals available, Google has also expanded the types of goals available, to include ‘threshold’ goals for time on site per visit and pageviews per visit.

Tracking goals/conversions is a key performance indicator which can provide highly valuable data enabling you’re website to reach its fullest potential. If you are not currently tracking goals, you should start today!

Goal Sets

Google Analytics now allows goals to be organised into 4 sets. Each set containing up to 5 different goals. These sets introduce a new way for the additional goal data to be accommodated within the Google Analytics Reports.

Goal Types

Previously a goal was typically defined as a pageview that resulted from the completion of a valued action on a website. For example the checkout completion page following a successful online sale. Now goals can be based on actions which do not relate to the viewing of a page. Goals can now be based on how much time a visitor spends on the site or how many pages the visitor visits.

i) Time Based Goals
Time based conversions are triggered after a visitor has spent a certain amount of time on a website. A goal can now be configured to register a conversion when a user has spent a specified amount of time on a website. Interestingly time based goals can now also be configured to register conversions if a user leaves a site before a certain amount of time. This can be useful if you wish to set a goal up as a failure metric.

ii) Pageview Based Goals
Another new goal type is pageviews per visit. In a similar fashion to time based goals, a conversion is triggered when a visit exceeds a certain number of pages. Like time based views, pageview based goals can also be triggered by virtual pageviews.

iii) URL Destination Goals
Traditional goals have been renamed URL destination goals. These goals can still be constructed using regular expressions, head match or exact match to identify a page that represents a particular conversion. Now with the availability of up to 20 goals you can easily measure all of those micro conversions (RSS subscription, email signup, reaching a product page, downloading white paper… etc, etc, etc). And yes, you can still use a virtual pageview as a URL Destination goal.

Funnels

Google has spent some time updating the funnels interface. Funnels are still limited to 10 steps. The big question is, do we still need funnels now we have the ability to setup up to 20 goals. The answer is unquestionably yes! Funnels provide a nice visualisation of critical processes and in particular abandonment rate.

Summary

If in the past you have been tracking lots of goals through different profiles, you may want to consider consolidating these goals into one profile. The benefit is you can have all your conversions in one interface allowing much easier analysis.

A key point to remember is visitors can only convert at each goal level once per visit. This is the way it has always been and is likely to remain.

Creating new goals will not modify your historical data, only future data. So all newly created goals will only track future traffic!

Today we are pleased to announce and congratulate the success of one of our Internet Marketing Consultants – Chris Mann for attaining this highly regarded and recognised professional qualification.  Chris becomes one of the very first web professionals in the country to gain the new qualification.

The new qualification will allow WSI Yorkshire to further enhance its web analytics services, training offerings and mentoring services.  The Google Analytics Individual Qualification compliments our existing status as a Google Adwords Qualified Company.

http://www.wolframalpha.com

I think they are struggling with the server loads, but the idea looks good. (may need to shorten their name so they don’t sound like a Doctor Who nemesis.

Here’s what they have to say about them selves

Goals
Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Status
That it should be possible to build Wolfram|Alpha as it exists today in the first decade of the 21st century was far from obvious. And yet there is much more to come.

As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha’s core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.

Wolfram|Alpha’s knowledge base and capabilities already span a great many domains, and its underlying framework has the power and flexibility to support ready extension to essentially any domain that is based on systematic knowledge. More »

The universe of potentially computable knowledge is, however, almost endless, and in creating Wolfram|Alpha as it is today, we needed to start somewhere. Our approach so far has been to emphasize domains where computation has traditionally had a more significant role. As we have developed Wolfram|Alpha, we have in effect been systematically covering the content areas of reference libraries and handbooks. In going forward, we plan broader and deeper coverage, both of traditionally scientific, technical, economic, and otherwise quantitative knowledge, and of more everyday, popular, and cultural knowledge.

Wolfram|Alpha’s ability to understand free-form input is based on algorithms that are informed by our analysis of linguistic usage in large volumes of material on the web and elsewhere. As the usage of Wolfram|Alpha grows, we will capture a whole new level of linguistic data, which will allow us to greatly enhance Wolfram|Alpha’s linguistic capabilities.

Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is just the beginning. We have ambitious plans, for data, for computation, for linguistics, for presentation, and more. As we go forward, we’ll be discussing what we’re doing on the Wolfram|Alpha Blog, and we encourage suggestions and participation, especially through the Wolfram|Alpha Community.

Less »

Future
Wolfram|Alpha, as it exists today, is just the beginning. We have both short- and long-term plans to dramatically expand all aspects of Wolfram|Alpha, broadening and deepening our data, our computation, our linguistics, our presentation, and more.

Wolfram|Alpha is built on solid foundations. And as we go forward, we see more and more that can be made computable using the basic paradigms of Wolfram|Alpha—and a faster and faster path for development as we leverage the broad capabilities already in place.

Wolfram|Alpha was made possible in part by the achievements of Mathematica and A New Kind of Science (NKS). In their different ways, both of these point to far-reaching future opportunities for Wolfram|Alpha—whether a radically new kind of programming or the systematic automation of invention and discovery.

Wolfram|Alpha is being introduced first in the form of the wolframalpha.com website. But Wolfram|Alpha is really a technology and a platform that can be used and presented in many different ways. Among short-term plans are developer APIs, professional and corporate versions, custom versions for internal data, connections with other forms of content, and deployment on emerging mobile and other platforms.

History & Background
The quest to make knowledge computable has a long and distinguished history. Indeed, when computers were first imagined, it was almost taken for granted that they would eventually have the kinds of question-answering capabilities that we now begin to see in Wolfram|Alpha.

What has now made Wolfram|Alpha possible today is a somewhat unique set of circumstances—and the singular vision of Stephen Wolfram.

For the first time in history, we have computers that are powerful enough to support the capabilities of Wolfram|Alpha, and we have the web as a broad-based means of delivery. But this technology alone was not enough to make Wolfram|Alpha possible.

What was needed were also two developments that have been driven by Stephen Wolfram over the course of nearly 30 years. More »

The first was Mathematica—the system in which all of Wolfram|Alpha is implemented. Mathematica has three crucial roles in Wolfram|Alpha. First, its very general symbolic language provides the framework in which all the diverse knowledge of Wolfram|Alpha is represented, and all its capabilities are implemented. Second, Mathematica’s vast web of built-in algorithms provides the computational foundation that makes it even conceivably practical to implement the methods and models of so many fields. And finally, the strength of Mathematica as a software engineering and deployment platform makes it possible to take the technical achievements of Wolfram|Alpha and deliver them broadly and robustly.

Beyond Mathematica, another key to Wolfram|Alpha was NKS. Many specific ideas from NKS—particularly related to algorithms discovered by exploring the computational universe—are used in the implementation of Wolfram|Alpha. But still more important is that the very paradigm of NKS was crucial in imagining that Wolfram|Alpha might be possible.

Wolfram|Alpha represents a substantial technical and intellectual achievement. But to build it required not just unique technology and ideas, but also the experience of 20 years of long-term R&D and ongoing development of robust technology at Wolfram Research. Wolfram|Alpha’s world-class team draws from many fields and disciplines, and has unique access to experts across the globe. But what ultimately made Wolfram|Alpha possible was a singular commitment to the goal of making all the world’s systematic knowledge computable

Unlike most standard forms of advertising, PPC search-engine marketing enables you to target potential customers who are looking specifically for your service. If done right, a PPC campaign can pay for itself many times over.<!–more–>

Sharpening the PPC Saw
Pay Per Click is now a fundamental part of the online marketing mix of many SMEs. This doesn’t mean the paid search arena is saturated, or that many of these companies achieve a maximum return on their investment.

The PPC market place is huge, and provides ample opportunity for advertisers of all sizes; and just because your top key terms are beyond your budget doesn’t mean you cannot have a successful, cost- effective PPC campaign. Here are four tips for taking your paid search marketing activities to the next level.

1. Plan Your Campaign
The straightforward tools for setting up a paid search advertising campaign make it easy to get started. But taking your time with a more planned approach will allow you to apply tools that will optimise the effectiveness of your campaigns.

A well-prepared campaign will include the following elements:

• Keyword research
• Organising the selected keywords into ad groups
• Preparing creative, targeted ad copy
• Tailored landing pages that relate to your ads
• Tracking
• Analysis

While you can be up and running with your ad campaign in minutes, you will achieve the best return on your investment by working through these important managed steps.

2. Pre-qualify Your Visitors
One of PPC marketing’s strengths is the ability to pre-qualify those who click on your ads: Craft a well-worded ad to include your keywords and some details about your product. Done well, this will deter the ‘tyre kickers’ and encourage those who are ready to buy.

You may also consider offering a free download, White Paper, email course or webinar as an incentive for clicking on your ad. This will capture contact data from a high percentage of those clicking on your ads.

3. Boosting Your Budget
Bidding to have your ad positioned at the top of the search results is not always the best strategy. More traffic often comes from the second, third or even fourth position, which will save you a significant amount of money.

You can also make your budget go a little further by setting up conversion tracking. This not only allows you to identify what keywords are working best for you, but also demonstrates to the search engine that your content is relevant. This can result in your ads benefiting from better positioning without increasing your bid amount.

4. Don’t Suffer from Analysis Paralysis
Web advertising provides excellent visitor activity tracking, allowing you to achieve a greater return on your PPC advertising investment by identifying what is working and what needs tweaking.

Be careful, though, the wealth of website data can be overwhelming, especially if you are not well versed in the technology, tools and terminology of PPC marketing. The key is being able to hone in on the important stats, and then understand how to interpret them.

If you would like more help implementing successful PPC marketing campaigns, please call us on 01484 690430.