David M. Williams 15/10/13

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Swansea Itec – ITQ Diploma for IT Users Level 2

APPLICATION OF NUMBER

PROJECT

Index

1. Introduction & Hypothesis

2. UK Visitors

3. Website Visitors in 2012

4. Custom Reporting

5. Referrals

6. Search Query Position

7. Final Comments

David M. Williams 15/10/13

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1. Introduction & Hypothesis

The purpose of this project is to analyse, review and report on the new

website’s performance (www.advancedheatingwales.com).

The data will be collected from three different sources - Google

Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Pickaweb Cpanel AW Stats. All

three sources will provide various facts and statistics relating to our

website’s performance and its visitor’s behavior.

I hope to use the data collected to help improve the website and

company’s performance. One way I plan to do so, is by comparing the

visits to the three following pages: Servicing and Landlord Certs,

Maintenance Work and Contact Us. I hope that the amount of visits to

the ‘contact us’ page is similar to visits to the other two pages,

suggesting that visitors are not put off by our callout rates.

I will be comparing the key phrases used. At the moment, most of the

searches seem to relate directly to the company name and I hope to see

an increase in successful searches using more generic phrases relating to

our industry, such as ‘boiler service swansea’ or ‘cheap boiler change

cardiff’.

I will also analyse the location of our visitors. I would expect the majority

to come from Swansea with other South Wales regions following closely

behind.

I also plan to review our referrals. Our company became members of the

Ospreys RFC Executive Club last month, which entitled us to have a link

to our website from their site. At present, we have had 10 referrals in

total. I hope to see a steady increase in the future. We are also currently

waiting for a link to be added from the Penlan RFC website. Once the link

is present, I will compare the amount of referrals received from both

sites. Although the Ospreys site has far more visitors, I feel we may get

more referrals from the Penlan RFC site, as our company directors have

been members of the club for many years. I expect this to be a large

factor as all the current members (who will be using the Penlan RFC site)

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are aware of the long standing affiliation between the club and our

company.

Finally I will compare search query ranking with Google, using

Webmaster tools. I will compare Webmaster tools average position with

the actual search position when searching while logged into Google and

while searching ‘in cognito’ mode. The ‘in cognito’ masks any ties or

memories the search engine may have with the browser or PC that you

are using. This will allow me to accurately see where our website ranks

with search terms when searched by potential customers on their PCs /

browsers. When searching while logged into Google, I may be getting

inaccurate records when manually checking ranking on Google as the

search engine may be linking our website with my search and ranking

the site higher than normal.

2. UK Visitors

The following data was collected from Google Analytics on 18th October

2012. It details all the UK visits to the website between 17th September

and 17th October 2012.

Region Visits Pages / Visit Avg. Visit Duration

England 75 2.99 00:01:58

Wales 55 3.42 00:03:24

Scotland 2 1 00:00:00

132 3.14 00:02:32

Initially I was surprised to see that the website had had more visitors

from England than Wales. Our website is mainly aimed at customers in

the South Wales Region, and although we still expect some visitors from

England, ideally the volume of visitors from Wales should be greater. It is

no surprise that the level of visitors from Scotland is so low, as they are

outside our target area.

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There are two main reasons that I believe best explain the cause of the

higher traffic levels:

1. We have recently completed a Tesco Store project in Leicester, a

Sainsbury Store project in Boscombe and have recently started a

Sainsbury project in Swindon – all of which are in England, which

may have raised our profile through word of mouth, site presence

and signed vans being noticed.

2. There are several companies in England with similar business

names to ours such as ‘Advance Heating’, ‘Advance Heating –

Milton Keynes’ and Advanced Heating Technologies. Customers

may have been looking for these companies and accidentally

landed on our site.

0

10

20

30

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60

70

80

England Wales Scotland

Visits

Visits

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

England Wales Scotland

Pages / Visit

Pages / Visit

(I chose a bar charts for this data as it clearly compares one quantity to another)

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Although there have been more visitors from England in the selected

period, the above chart suggests that the visitors from Wales have been

more interested in our services, as they have viewed more pages per

visit on average.

The chart below also suggest more interest from the Wales-based

visitors, as they have been spending more time on average browsing our

pages.

(I chose a bar chart for this data as it clearly compares one quantity to another)

After analysing the statistics, I conclude that although we may very well

be experiencing some increased traffic from England due to our work

presence in the country, our site is also having several visits in error from

customers searching for similarly named companies. My conclusion is

backed up by the fact that the England-based visitors are spending less

time on the site and browsing less pages than their Welsh counterparts.

This is because once they open our website and see ‘Advanced Heating

Wales’, they are probably realising that they have found the wrong

company!

Despite my initial conclusions, my findings could also indicate that we do

receive a lot of genuine interest from England. The visits to our site may

be shorter as the website currently displays South Wales as our main

covered region, which will put off customers from England. I will be

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closely monitoring the England-based traffic in future and if it continues

to exceed the traffic from Wales, our company may have to review our

coverage area, and possibly consider employing engineers nearer to or

in England in order to target the work opportunities there.

3. Website Visitors in 2012

The data table below was taken from the AW Stats in the Pickaweb

Cpanel.

Since July 2012 the Website has experienced an increase in visitors,

showing steady growth. This so happens to coincide with the publishing

of the new website. The first draft was published on 16th June 2012.

Since then, each month has shown increased traffic as I have been

developing the website as my main project.

October shows a decrease in visitors as we are only partly through the

month (18th) and by the end; I expect to see a further increase on

September’s visitors.

Month Unique visitors Number of

visits

Jan-2012 109 162

Feb-2012 97 121

Mar-2012 95 123

Apr-2012 97 115

May-2012 89 104

Jun-2012 77 104

Jul-2012 137 228

Aug-2012 164 306

Sep-2012 154 343

Oct-2012 253 473

Nov-2012 306 581

Total 1,578 2,660

(I chose to present this information in a table as the months and results are clearly detailed for thorough review)

I would expect increased traffic to the website during the colder months,

as customers’ heating and plumbing needs increase. January and

February of this year were particularly, but our website attracted more

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visitors in August. The only logical explanation for this is that the website

was hugely improved during my project.

As a result, I expect to see continued increase in visitors as we enter the

winter period, peaking between December and February.

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

Jan-2012

Feb-2012

Mar-2012

Apr-2012

May-2012

Jun-2012

Jul-2012

Aug-2012

Sep-2012

Oct-2012

Nov-2012

Vis

ito

rs

Website Visitors in 2012

Unique visitors

Number of visits

(I chose a line chart to present this data as it clearly shows the increase in visitors to the website over time)

The above graph clearly shows that both the number of new and

returning visitors has increased since the publishing of the new site.

Despite both sets of visitors increasing, the fact that we have had a

bigger increase in returning visitors suggest to me that the appearance

of our website has been significantly improved as more and more

visitors are returning to the site for a second look.

These statistics all support the fact that our website has been improved

and demonstrate that to date my project has been a success!

I aim to continue analysing the monthly traffic, and hope to maintain

steady growth. If we begin to experience less traffic, I aim to use the

skills I have learned at Swansea Itec to find out why and make any

necessary improvements.

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4. Custom Reporting

I set up a custom report on Google Analytics to compare the amount of

customers visiting the two pages on our site that display rates in

comparison to the amount visiting our ‘contact us’ page.

I had hoped that the visits to the ‘contact us’ page would be near to the

amount of visits to the two other pages combined. This report will

hopefully provide reassurance that our call out rates are not too

expensive and do not put potential customers off contacting us.

The table and pie chart below show that we actually had more visitors to

our contact us page than to the rates pages in the selected period

(18/10/2012 – 29/11/2012).

Maintenance

Rates

Gas Cert Rates Total Visits to

Rates Pages

Contact Us Page

32 33 65 69

Maintenance Rates24%

Gas Cert Rates 25%

Contact Form51%

Page Visit Comparison

(I chose a pie chart to present this data because it gives an instant idea of the proportions of visitors to each page)

Although some of the visitors to the ‘contact us’ page may have been

looking for our contact details in the first place and not even viewed our

rates, it is still the positive result I had hoped for.

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My findings have reassured me that our company rates are competitive

as a lot of our websites visitors are showing genuine interest in

contacting us and are not simply looking at our rates and leaving the

site.

If the number of visitors to the ‘contact us’ page was to drop below the

number of visitors to the rates pages in the future, I would consider

carrying out some market research on our competitors to review their

rates and make sure ours are still competitive in the current market.

5. Referrals

(I chose a bar chart for this data as it clearly compares one quantity to another – these 3D cylinders also helped improve the

appearance of this document)

The above bar chart shows the number of referrals in the month of

November.

As mentioned in my introduction, we currently sponsor Penlan RFC and

have an Executive membership with Ospreys RFC. Both of which entitle

us to a website link from their site.

We have quite a low number of referrals in the selected period so there

wasn’t much information to analyse. One thing this has brought to my

attention is that from a marketing perspective the large sum of money

paid to become an Ospreys Executive member, isn’t going to be

recouped from increase in sales resulting from web exposure. Although

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our employees and customers do enjoy attending the game and

executive suite as our guests!

That said, we had twice as many referrals from the Ospreys site as from

the Penlan RFC site, which indicates that the Ospreys site is a better

marketing place for our company. We would however have to measure

the costs to see whether we would be better off sponsoring several local

sports clubs as opposed to one larger organisation like the Ospreys.

I was not expecting to see ‘advancedheatingwales.com’ as one of the

referrals. I can only assume this is from internal links on our website,

which is of no benefit to us as the potential customer must have already

been viewing our website.

6. Search Query Position

Below is a table of data showing our expected search query position

from Webmaster Tools in comparison to the actual position searching

while logged into Google and compared to searching ‘in cognito’ mode.

Table info from Webmaster Tools dated 01/11/2012 - 16/01/2013

Query Impressions Clicks CTR Avg.

position

Actual

position

logged

into

Google

16/01/13

Actual

position

in cognito

mode

16/01/13

cheap boilers 320 <10 - 31 24 24

advanced heating 200 <10 - 4.9 2 2

advanced heating wales 70 60 86% 1.0 1 1

advanced plumbing 35 <10 - 10 8 8

advanced heating and plumbing 16 <10 - 6.8 4 4

plumbers swansea 12 <10 - 48 21 21

plumbers cardiff 12 <10 - 210 >400 >400

advanced heating swansea <10 <10 - 2.0 1 1

gas safe login <10 <10 - 45 >200 >200

plumber swansea <10 <10 - 28 >200 >200

cardiac itu <10 <10 - 7.2 >200 >200

gas safety certificate cardiff <10 <10 - 19 18 18

insurance call center <10 <10 - 22 >200 >200

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bellway homes swansea <10 <10 - 47 25 25

advance heating <10 <10 - 19 4 4

commercial heating swansea <10 <10 - 7.5 5 5

advanced plumbing and heating <10 <10 - 11 34 34

cheap boiler <10 <10 - 35 41 41

gas safe swansea <10 <10 - 13 12 12

(I chose to present this information in a table as the months and results are clearly detailed for thorough review)

I have highlighted the columns of interest in green.

The search terms were taken from the first page of terms provided on

the Webmaster tools report. Some of which are of no use to our

company as they have no relation to our business.

For instance Webmaster Tools has our website ranked 7.2 for the term

‘cardiac ITU’. This is because towards the end of 2012 I posted a blog

regarding some sponsorship money raised by our managing director for

the Cardiac ITU at Morriston Hospital after doing the Cardiff half

marathon. After posting the blog, Google obviously gave the blog page a

high ranking due to it’s contents and wording.

The reason I chose to analyse this data is because until I had a

conversation with my tutor (Stella), I was not aware that my search

terms may rank higher when searching on my PC or when logged into

Google than if someone independent was carrying out the same search.

This means that when manually checking search terms in the past, I may

have thought that our website had a better ranking for certain key

searches that than it actually has.

To my surprise, all the terms had the same ranking whether searching

‘in cognito’ or while logged into Google. I am unsure why this is, but it

does reassure me that when I have previously manually checked our

ranking for other key terms, I have had an accurate reading.

There are some big differences in Webmaster Tools average rankings in

comparison to the actual rankings. I believe this is because the

Webmaster Tools is an average taken over a longer period, where as the

actual rankings were taken from searches made in a single day.

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7. Final Comments

All the points that I have discussed and analysed prove that a website

will never remain succesful if simply left with no updates, alterations or

development as many of the rankings will drop. The data also suggests

that certain changes actually lower rankings. All this has increased my

understanding that I must continue to maintain and closely monitor our

website and it’s performance in order to improve it’s effectiveness. This

also reassures me that the company made the correct decision in

allowing me to attend this course in order for us to create and maintain

the webiste ‘in-house’ as opposed to continually employing an external

company to do so, which would cost a small fortune!

I hope I have been able to clearly demonstrate the skills and knowledge I

have gained while studying at Swansea Itec, considering I didn’t know

anything about website building and development before I started. To

date the course has provided me with great opportunity to learn new

skills and build my confidence in ICT. I now look forward to the prospect

of continuing to do a level 3 qualification this year and further develop

my skills.