So, what’s a printing company doing online? To quote Scott Gray, MET’s senior manager, from his first blog post on the new site: “It’s our business to communicate so we figured let’s make it easier for you to get to know us.” It’s that, and deeper. Metropolitan Fine Printers wants to connect with prospective clients in BC, and around the world, to convey their unique value for clients’ printing needs. The company continues to innovate the print industry: they were one of the first printers in the world to adopt Computer To Plate workflow, they took lithography to new limits in 2001 with 1,700 lines per inch, and in 2004 introduced MET Enviro UV special inks and coatings for a new level of print vibrancy. Metropolitan Fine Printers always has an exciting story to tell, and the company saw the web as the place to do it.

A significant challenge in this site development was to convey the quality and innovation that Metropolitan Fine Printers applies in the print environment, to a digital medium. The solution was to let the experts speak: many of the staff have spent their entire printing careers at MET, and have contributed directly to their clients’ successes. We incorporated “wide screen” video segments into the site with interviews that powerfully convey the MET message. Imagery has also been key: carefully crafted photography that shows MET quality. We also introduced a blog to the site that allows MET to communicate directly to their visitors about what’s going on at shop, in a voice that is authentic and insightful.

In the early weeks since launch, the site is successfully delivering on its mandate of connecting with clients, and generating business. Search traffic alone has increased over 500% from the printer’s previous site. And the Request a Quote feature is bringing in leads every day. Metropolitan Fine Printers, masters of print, now have mastered the digital domain.

We are excited to let you know that we just finished launching a brand new website for one of Canada’s largest chocolate retailers – Purdy’s Chocolates!

If you had ever visited the old Purdy’s site – you’ll notice a ton of changes. The design better reflects their branding, the navigation is much more intuitive, and there is more engaging and interactive content. Of course the focal point of the site, the online store, is completely revamped and we hope it makes your mouth water slightly when you browse it. What you likely won’t readily notice are the SEO and analytics techniques that we’ve also used on the site.

Yep – we’re definitely proud here. We feel it’s a great representation of how design and data-driven techniques can effectively converge in order to build a great site.

When you get a chance – check it out at www.purdys.com. And in case you’re wondering, no Hot Tomali did not put on an extra 200 pounds from taking our work home with us

Clay

Consider the following hypothetical site dataset for 10 visitors:

I won’t include the calculations, but if you perform them correctly, you get the following results:

Average Time on Site – 86 seconds or 1.44 minutes

Median Time on Site – 15 seconds

Okay – so the first criticism is that this is a hypothetical scenario with numbers that I created. True, but it’s not unusual (from my experience) to find that 75-80% of visitors leave within 30 seconds after arriving at a site. Someone might draw a conclusion that a site is performing well if they were to see the average time on site being 1.44 minutes. If I were an advertiser on that site…………….yeesh.

The second point is about functionality. I can (sort of) assess whether averages are being skewed by looking deeper into data. For instance, I can go in to Google Analytics and see what percentage of visitors are leaving within a given time range (e.g. 60% of visitors are leaving within 0-10 seconds). This is somewhat helpful, but given that GA is already calculating averages it can’t be much of stretch to include a calculation for medians either (it’s a simple function in Excel after all).

If I had immediate access to the data above (86 seconds versus 15 seconds), I would know that there is a lot of variability within the data and that a small percentage of visitors are accounting for a large percentage of time on site.

By the way – did anyone like the (nerdy) play on words in the title?

Clay

Source credibility has been studied frequently within traditional advertising circles, but admittedly, I’m not certain about blogs. Intuitively though, it would make sense that a blog that is perceived as being written by a credible source would be more effective than one that was not.

One of the problems we ran into was with a client that is a personal trainer here in Vancouver. In order to increase his perceived expertise, he writes about topics related to health, nutrition, etc. Once we encouraged him to really commit himself to blogging and he started doing it consistently, we noticed a nice spike in traffic to his website. This is what he wanted after all, so everything’s good right?

Using Google Analytics we identified that the majority of his new blog visitors were not from his geographical area – in fact, most of them were from the U.S. Sure it’s great to have traffic, but the ultimate purpose of the blog is to encourage readers to engage with the personal trainer and no one from the U.S. is going to do that with a personal trainer located in Vancouver, Canada (at least with the intent of using his services).

So the challenge is to generate qualified traffic to his blog. Our solution is actually fairly easy – use keywords and topics related to Vancouver as much as possible in the post. Basically, it’s like finding an excuse to use specific keywords (which isn’t always that easy). This way, people searching for information related to health, nutrition, and personal trainers in the Vancouver area will be likely to find his blog posts. At least his efforts won’t be wasted only on people that will never purchase his services.

So that’s what we did. Anyone else have any thoughts on how to do this? By the way, notice how many times I used Vancouver?

Clay

We’re really getting into the world of analytics and here’s a challenge we’ve encountered recently. Given all the help that other bloggers like Justin at http://www.epikone.com/blog/and Robbin at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/ have provided, we thought we’d share a little knowledge too.

Here’s the situation. We are developing a site for a new client that wants to understand the value of their online newsletter. This is a fairly easy thing to do in Google Analytics – simply use their user-defined function by adding the pagetracker_setvar function in a newsletter sign-up confirmation page and start tracking how newsletter subscribers behave in comparison to non-subscribers.

But here’s the challenge – they already have a number of existing newsletter subscribers that won’t ever reach the newsletter confirmation page because they’ve already signed up. So how do we get them assigned as a newsletter subscriber?

This isn’t a coding problem per se – that part’s easy. It’s more of an implementation problem and it doesn’t appear that we can include the pagetracker_setvar code in an actual newsletter, so here is what we came up with as the best alternative.

Send out a special, one-time email to newsletter subscribers that informs them of the new site. The newsletter contains one link that drives them to a landing page that can only be accessed through the newsletter. Naturally this landing page contains the pagetracker_setvar code and updates a visitor’s cookie to tag them as a newsletter subscriber. Of course, we don’t want any non-subscribers being able to access the page or else their cookie will be updated with that value as well.

We recognize that we likely won’t get all our subscribers since some won’t respond to the email; however, it is a reasonable approach for capturing at least some.

We’ve toyed with some other ideas, but the above one appears to be the best at this point. If you know of any more, please let us know by leaving a comment!

Clay

Google made it easier for people to search within a small number of sites by adding a second search box to the top results for those retailers.

Editor’s Note: Some retailers are upset with Google’s additional search box that allows searchers to search within a website without leaving Google. It’s not the results that upsets them, but the ads for competitors that appear alongside. Is this new feature a bonus to the end-user and good use of real estate, or is it unfair to retailers?

That second box takes advantage of the useful search operator, site:. The site: operator allows the searcher to limit results to a query to ones coming from a specific domain.

Many people may not be aware that they can type something like site:example.com and focus their search results this way. Google’s latest project, focused on a handful of popular sites, brings up the second search box so someone using it automatically searches within the domain in question.

It isn’t being as warmly received as Google may have anticipated. The New York Times discussed the feature, and a couple of retailers complained about Google doing in its search results what Google does best: stick text ads next to them.

Fierce lobbying resulted in tweaks to the bill that removed the offending competitor keyword language. Businesses that hate the practice will be keeping an eye on Google to see if the search ad giant has dropped a second search box into their results.

This generation of search technologies are designed with the user in mind. They bring into the equation user preferences and opinions, collaboration, collective intelligence, an interactive experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make web exploration more productive and enjoyable.

Some great sites to check out are:

1. Technorati (blog search)
2. Del.icio.us (social bookmarking)
3. Digg (social community)
4. Youtube (video search)
5. Flickr (photo search)
6. Facebook or MySpace (social networking)
7. Kijiji or Craigslist (classifieds)
8. Wikipedia (Encyclopedia)