Over 170 guests from the oil heating industry celebrated the OFTEC Awards for Excellence at the Central Convention Centre in Manchester. There were eight categories of awards, and our client, Grant UK, had a fantastic evening winning 3 of them.

A Gala dinner, followed by the awards ceremony was then followed by the US comedian, Rich Hall, who as expected, was extremely funny.

Grant UK, a leading renewable heating company, received it’s 7th award for ‘Best Training Centre’ since the centre opened in 2003. Their Grant CombiSol product won the ‘Innovative Product of the Year’ award, whilst the icing on the cake for Mayfly was the final award they won which was for ‘Best Website 2012′.

It’s great to see that Oftec have recognised the carbon neutral website. Here at Mayfly, the Grant website was completely rebuilt last year to offer customers greater ease of use and more information at the touch of a button. One of the most recent updates includes a Biomass RHI calculator, which has been designed to assist property owners in exploring the financial and carbon benefits of installing a wood pellet boiler, opposed to a fossil fuel alternative in non-domestic premises.

The latest change to the Grant UK website has seen the homepage redesigned after a period of user testing and conversion tracking.

For more information on the award winning heating products, visit Grant UK.

For award winning web design in Liverpool, look no further than Mayfly Internet Marketing!

Award winning websites from Mayfly Internet Marketing….

Well, we would say that they are worthy of awards, but now, the proof is in the pudding!

This Thursday, 18th October, sees the OFTEC Awards for Excellence 2012 held at the Manchester Convention Centre.

One of our long standing clients, Grant UK, have been nominated in the ‘Best Website’ category.

The Grant UK website has long been a front runner in the oil & renewable heating industry which we are proud to have designed, built & maintained for the last 4 years.

As well as building individual areas for homeowners, installers & merchants, we have designed other useful tools such as PV calculators and engineer & merchant searches – it’s great that OFTEC have recognised this. Added to this, we are constantly striving to attain high search engine rankings for some of the toughest & competitive search terms in their industry – we are pleased to say that Grant constantly have top 5 rankings for all of their key search terms.

The OFTEC awards evening is surely going to be a great evening. A black tie event with gala dinner, awards, a comedian and live acts. We look forward to attending!

For information about efficient heating solutions, visit the Grant UK website.

OFTEC (The Oil Firing Technical Association) establishes the standards for competence within the domestic oil heating and cooking industry. By ensuring the quality of people and businesses working in this area, OFTEC maintains standards for reputable companies and consumers alike.

The 2nd award is an equally impressive nomination for the fantastic charity, Caring Alone Support Service.

Caring Alone are a Liverpool based charity who’s website offers a free online social/support service for young carers aged between 16-30. They have been nominated by the Prince’s Trust in the ‘Celebrate Success’ category. The lads who run the charity have performed really well and are shortlisted to the final 6 nominees for the North West area.

If they win this, they then go through to the national final. The awards ceremony is being held at FACT, on Wood St in Liverpool on the 13th November.

We were really happy to work with Caring Alone. We came up with their logo, and put their ideas together to build and design the website. The website has been designed to work as a social platform, similar to Facebook, where carers can sign up, and interact with fellow carers, both in Liverpool, and nationally. There was nothing like this out there for any young carer, so this made this an additionally motivating project

Since it’s launch, the website has been a great success, and if they can win this Prince’s Trust award, as well as the added publicity, it will give the lads behind the charity the recognition they deserve! Good luck.

The Power of Google Analytics

Many readers have been emailing me to shed some light on Google Analytics, its features, and how to get the most out of it. You could fill a whole magazine going through all of its qualities, how to find them in the dashboard, and how to get the most out of them. For those unsure what Google Analytics (GA) is, it is Google’s free website analytics’ software package. Installation only requires a Google account, and some tracking code placed onto your website. Once this has been done, you have access to a wealth of information about your website. If you don’t have this, I urge you to have it installed.

This is by no means a complete guide to GA, but here are some very useful elements to take a look at. Next to each feature, I have added the instructions of how to get here once logged into your analytics account.

Filters. (Admin –> Profiles –> Filters)

As the name suggests, you can filter certain traffic and remove it from your statistics. My advice here is to filter your IP address (this is the address of your own computer). If you or your staff are regularly on your website, adding your IP to filters means you can be sure that all search figures for your site are real visitors, and just people from within your organisation.

Adwords. (Standard Reporting –> Advertising –> Adwords)

Do you have Google Adwords running for your franchise website? Linking your Adwords into your GA account as well as being very simple to do is a great way to see how your Adwords traffic interacts with your site. It will show each of your campaigns and how each keyword drives traffic to your site, but also show you how that visitor interacted with your site. Bounce rates & length of time on your site are shown for each keyword.

Search Engine Optimisation. (Standard Reporting –> Traffic Sources –> SEO)

This is a relatively new features and requires you to link your GA account with your Google Webmaster Tools account. Once done, you can see which are your better performing keywords in Google’s organic/natural results, how often those terms are searched for per month, your average position, and the amount of clicks those keywords generate for you.

Mobile Traffic (Standard Reporting –> Audience –> Mobile)

With my own client’s sites I am noticing a huge increase in the number of visitors through mobile devices. It was only about 18 months ago where the average percentage of mobile traffic was around 5%. Most of our client’s sites are now nearer 15%, with some receiving up to 30% of their traffic from these devices. Why does this matter? If a quarter of your visitors look at your site on their phone, are you sure that they can see everything? And does everything work? You need to make sure it is mobile friendly, and if it isn’t, you might want to look at bringing out a phone app, or designing a mobile version of your site, or redesigning your site with a responsive layout. GA will show you which devices are being used to view your site which will help you decide whether you need to take one of the above steps.

Goals/Ecommerce (Standard Reporting –> Conversions)

What is the purpose of your website? Encourage sign-ups? Newsletter sign-ups? Leads? Recruitment emails or product sales? By setting up Goals for all the above, except for ecommerce, this feature will tell you when you have had a conversion, but if you enable all of the other features above, you will see where that conversion came from, the cost of it (if it came from Adwords etc), and also how they got to your conversion page. This is all useful information to use to improve these rates.

Visitor Flow (Standard Reporting –> Audience –> Visitor Flow)

This tool was introduced at the beginning of the year and is a great visual aid to show you how your traffic flows through your website. At each stage or page, it shows where your traffic went to next, and the amount of traffic that dropped off or exited your site. One of the great things with this is that you can filter your traffic to show how Paid traffic might behave differently to traffic from referred sites or from mobile traffic.

Site Search (Standard Reporting –> Content –> Site Search)

For those of you who are running extensive sites with lots of content, for example franchise directories, you may already have a ‘Search’ box where users can search for something within your site by typing in a keyword. By activating this within your GA account, all keywords that are entered into the search box will be recorded. This is especially useful for telling you what people are searching for, and if this content doesn’t exist on your site, and then you can add it.

A new EU cookie law was introduced on the 26th May 2011, and although this was passed largely without a fuss, the 12 month grace period to make sure all websites comply is almost upon us.

Some would argue that this is a pointless new legislation, but non-compliance can lead to very heavy fines!

Come the 26th May, you will notice lots, probably not all, of websites will start asking your permission to use ‘cookies’ on their website. For many websites, we think that this will lead to many people clicking off the website as users will have no idea what they are agreeing to.

Cookies are small text files that are used for all sorts of things on websites from tracking users (for Google Analytics purposes, but also more advanced tracking uses), remembering your login details, for sites such as Facebook, but also for remembering your details when making a website purchase or completing an enquiry form.

Cookies really are essential to how websites work, so what does this new law require?

For more information on this, read our Franchise World article where we have written a more in-depth article on this EU cookie law.

In a nutshell, you will need to carry out an audit on your site to see what cookies are being used, then decide whether all of these are required. The final step is to then tell all of your website visitors what the cookies are used for, and they will need agree to these being used. The crazy thing about this is if a user understands what a cookie is in the first place but don’t agree to them used on your site, the site probably won’t function correctly!

Useful Info:

Find what cookies your site uses with the Chrome Cookie Detection Tool

Information Commissioners – these will be enforcing the law.

Our Franchise World article.

This Thursday, 26th January, sees the official launch evening of Hatch! at Hannahs Bar, on Hardman St.

Hatch! is a free advisory service which aims to help would-be business owners to get their business off the ground. The service also extends to those who have recently started their business.

Here at Mayfly we are extremely pleased to be part of the Hatch! team and to be able to offer our own knowledge of getting a business off the ground. The other business advisors from the Hatch team include RMC Accountancy, Delve PR, Emerald Law & Greenleaf UK business coach.

The event at Hannah’s Bar is free to attend, and includes a free drink on arrival plus nibbles. To register your interest, please go to http://www.hatchbiz.com and send an email. All attendees will be entered into the evening’s free raffle with some excellent prizes on offer including a website, an accountancy package, adverts in Liverpool based property magazine, Your Move, PR & Aromatherapy vouchers to name but a few.

To take advantage of the Hatch! service now, visit http://www.hatchbiz.com or call 0151 2291171.

Our relationship with Ovenu, the UK’s largest network of oven cleaning franchisees, has flourished even more with the order to rebuild and redesign the websites for all of the Ovenu franchisees.

This originally started as a project to test a couple of new designs on a segment of the franchisee sites, but such was the success with the new design, conversions and ease of editing through the admin panel, Ovenu decided to have all of the websites rebuilt. We are over half way through this project, and hope to have all 110+ websites up and running before Christmas.

To have your oven cleaned by your local Ovenu franchisee, follow this: ovenu.co.uk

Mayfly have recently launched a website for Barnes & Woodhouse. The Teeside based company specialise in heat treated timber, wooden crates & packing cases. The site went live last week, and have received 5 jobs through the site already!

Yes, ‘Cyber Monday’, how was it for your online business? ‘Cyber Monday’ is the busiest day of the year on the Internet for online sales. Many of Mayfly’s customers had almost a months worth of sales yesterday, lets hope the sales continue for the rest of the month. If you would like to discuss how to generate more sales on your website, or even if you don’t have a website, we have solutions to market your products through other shopping channels, please get in touch.