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I will show you a case study of a company increasing sales 40 fold in 10 months by reading the back number of »Web site revenue UP skills can be alone – web analytics Case Studies. You can do it if you learn how to use the basic web analysis way of thinking and presentation without needing a good knowledge of computers or internet. This article is recommended for people who are new to web, e.g. managers of companies who do not know how to use a computer to make home pages but want to develop new business opportunities!

Web personnel / work | Case / interview
Time to read： about 10 mins

 This article is recommended for people who are new to web, e.g. managers of companies who do not know how to use a computer and make home pages but want to develop new business opportunities!

Disposal and recovery of surplus and recycled products “Akutaya” I’m going to show you a case study of Akutaya, a company that deals with disposal and recovery of surplus and recycled products in Sapporo, Hokkaido.

The owner the established this company in 2012. In the beginning he was getting business from friends but couldn’t attract new customers. He wondered what he can do to grow his company and hire more people.

This is the list of what he was thinking:

• He wanted to attract new customers but he had just started the business and the only inquiries he got were from friends. As a business, it was hard to do both sales and operate the company by himself.

• He wanted to make a homepage but he didn’t know how to use computer and couldn’t afford a high capital outlay to have one made for him. 

• He had only the used internet for shopping and he’d never sent business e-mails. He didn’t know what he needed to put up on a homepage to attract costumers and he had no idea what would happen after he made a homepage.

• His company mainly dealt with the disposal and recovery surplus and recycled products but they also offer other services Other than the main business, they also deal in estate sale, house cleaning, packing, snow removal, and cleaning. But they didn’t know how to let customers know about it.

 

• They wanted to increase the opportunity for customers to give feedback so they could have more confidence in their work. If they had the opportunity to talk to customers, it would increase the chance to get more business and they can offer the right service to each customer but they didn’t have such a mechanism in place.

It was time to make a new homepage and put their business and homepage on to the right track. It is hard to know what the company needs are likely to be just from seeing company data. To implement the right initiatives and suggestions, the owner and consultant decided to do these 2 things.

• Owner：learn basic use of computer to be able to make website.

• Consultant：research the industry to understand the flow of work.

 

Making a homepage strategy from「real experience」and「web analysis」.

Through research, the consultant learned there are many users who want the disposal of garbage and surplus supplies and people are having trouble disposing of large items and large amounts of rubbish. 

As they made the website, they did web analysis, trend analysis, key word analysis and other company website analysis and they found these things:

• There are many competing major recycling business.
• Rival companies have adopted a package fee
• It is difficult to immediately rank in the top results when searching keyword such as “surplus”, “recycling”,
• There are many recycling related key word on Google so it is hard to judge which key word to use to get customers easily on SEO.

They decided to make a simple website that targeted 3 things; 1. Initial cost reduction
2. Attracting customers with little competitive keyword
3. Efficient business cycle achievement. 

They started rethinking about the company rules and systems while making the homepage.

 We are a recycling company but our main business is garbage disposal

They realized that there are many major competing companies with the key word “recycling” so it was hard to find them on Google and hard to bring their company up on the Google ranking quickly, so they decided to design the website from the point of view of the “user’s voice”, “owner’s story”, “customer story”, and “web analysis”.

People who are looking for a recycling shop want to get rid of their stuff so that is why they use the key word “rubbish disposable”. When they got an inquiry or a request for a quote, they first asked customers if they wanted to purchase services or dispose of items, then offered the service that matched the customer’s needs.
They focused their target on the local community base and targeted search keywords to “regional name” and industry related word (garbage disposal).

They made website to get phone calls form customers as a top priority.

It was not ideal for the owner to correspond with customers by mail so they designed their website that if a customer wanted to make an inquiry they need to call.

There are pros and cons of customers not being able to e-mail directly from the home page. But for their business, when they make a quote they have to listen to customers to decide how much recycling they have to gather and whether they need to dispose any rubbish or not. Because the owner was not experienced with e-mailing customers and he didn’t want to miss a chance to get a contract, it was much better for customers to call him directly.

They didn’t use the packaging price system that rival companies used and they explained their fee system in an easy to understand way to differentiate their company from others.

By presenting a quote matched to what the customer want after having talked directly with them, they could offer customers cheaper deals than rival companies.

It is important to make goals so they decided to aim to be the No.1 rubbish disposal company in Sapporo.

The boss’s to do list

• Learn to use a computer. Even though customers’ contact them by phone now, as the company grows he needs to be able to respond to more inquires. In the future he will need to use an inquiry form on their website. When updating his homepage to more effectively attract customers he has to share web analysis data with the consultant and then maximize its benefit.

 

• Refine the procedure from inquiry to job completion. Showing what action the company takes after a customer makes an inquiry; they describe the flow of events from inquiry to completion to make customers feel secure. To do this process, he needed to organize his business to make it flow better.

Provider side work to be done:

• It was hard to use listing adverts to reach the stage of ranking first with the key words “Sapporo rubbish disposal” with their budget, so they made their website with SEO initiatives in mind so it would rank at the top using a natural search. Before they made their homepage, they only had about 10 inquiries a month.

• To increase the number of phone calls, they placed their phone number on every page on their website. If customers click phone number on their smart phone, we could count which page they clicked. This showed us which pages customers were looking at. When we had a call, we asked customers what they had seen to decide to call and used this information for web analysis.

 

Step up into the level of”efficiently attract customers”

By doing SEO with the key words「Sapporo rubbish disposal」,they reached number one on the search engine ranking. Then they started getting many phone calls.

I started the website small given the company size and budget but as inquires increased we started facing the challenge of how we can secure customers more efficiently. Looking at the web analysis data we chose two initiatives.

Method of web analytics 1;

I considered, the number of page views, visits, and bounce rate data from the time zone graph.

• PV number peaked at 11 am. Is the reason PV number peak at 11 am because housewives are viewing the site at this time rather than business people and companies?

• PV number goes up again at 9 pm. It might be housewives who viewed the site earlier visit again after discussing with their family. That means it is likely to be likely to be families using the web site most.

• Even though they have some PV access 2 o’clock at night the bounce rate decreases sharply. Does people accessing the website at night means people want to get their rubbish collected at night?

 

Method of web analytics 2;

• To match the target layer and the time to roll out a campaign Discount campaigns that targeted housewives and elderly. We increased the number of female staff to give customers a safe feeling.

• Campaign to targeted families We performed this campaign in Sep. and Oct. when people are thinking about moving and getting ready for the winter

• We performed a midnight pick up campaign for people who access at night. We ran PDCA cycle that is analyzed the performance then we used the data to take advantage for next time.

 

Method of web analysis 3;

Find bottleneck pages and update them
Compare before and after improvement. We found pages that needed to be updated immediately, for example those that haven’t led to an inquiry. Then we considered; 

• What amount of information is best?
• Whether the content is easy to understand for our customers?

As a result, for all the updated pages the number of clicks grew and for the highest priority pages the number of clicks more than doubled.

When you first make a homepage, you needn’t make all pages properly. If you are planning to add more, you need only make categories. For the contents, only introduce customer your service briefly, then as the business grow enrich the website content.

Web analysis technique 4;

Create a mail form to increase inquiries.
By making homepage, he increased sale and as the company grew he was able to hire more staff. To grow his business further, he started taking inquiries by e-mail as well as phone. 

This is what he put on his to do list when he start making the homepage and because he had achieved this he could go to next step. 

Web analysis technique 5;

Raising the ability to attract customers through enhancement and internet advertising of website content.
When using a phone inquiry system, he had to do detailed explaining over the phone but since e-mail making inquiries available he needed to make the homepage easy to understand so he added detailed explanations.
He also aimed to attract new customers so he put out listing advertising. Based on the hypothesis I mentioned above, I focused on time and location to be displayed and made advertisements to each target.

Within 10 months of making the website, his company sales increased x40.

Before he set up his homepage, he had less than 10 phone calls a month but now he gets more than 120 calls per month. 14 months have passed since starting the website and sales are still growing.

He is doing small PDCA cycles as he goes through web analysis;
Using web analysis data he can now do things he couldn’t before.

• They talked about future development and aims and they prepared ahead.
• This is the result of sharing web analysis data with staff. They talk about their thoughts and ideas for the company.

For example, on their homepage;

• If it says 「We offer service with a smile」then staff have to smile for the customers.
• If it says 「We take pride in our presentation」then staff must always be well presented.

They always try to the company lives up to all claims made on their website to avoid customer disappointment and encourage returning customers. This helps integrate the website into general company operations.

By linking up their website and company operations, they are improving both at the same time.

This is the site of LIFEBOX, a large commercial and household waste disposal and recycling company. They have more than 10 staff at this company and the company is growing to provide additional services. The business scale has increased so there are more things they can do in the future.
They are making a website for a large commercial/household waste disposal and recycling company. They enhance the homepage of company they were running and made a plan for how to run the company. By linking up their website and company operations, they are improving both at the same time.

Lastly：It is important to have “Web analysis necessary for a company’s business” rather than “Advanced web analytics”.

One important thing I consider is the speed of the clients’ business.
Managers require consultation, lots of thought, to do list, and they ma not be able to do some things.
Especially as the company gets bigger, the scale of what you can do is limited.
The success in this case may be because they started out with a single owner.
But a big reason for their success is web analysis. They studied, learnt, spent time together and in this way they grew their partnership which led to a successful business.

The main purpose at WACA is “to improve the outcome for businesses” and “to contribute to business”. It is important to give the correct web analysis to suit each company’s needs.

Most of this study case is basic web analysis but even though it is basic, if the customers grow with the business it is possible to achieve a positive outcome.

Even though “Akutaya” business will grow bigger in the future, what they are going to do is these 3 basic things.

• Create a combined site that grows with their business
• Share the analysis of website data, then conduct small PDCA cycles to match the site and home page. 
• This is essential so it is important to keep these simple things in mind and continue to adhere to them.

I hope you have read this article and realized that web analysis is a great tool and even a small company you can achieve a lot by using it! ・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・ Author for this article

Fumiyasu Ishino

I was born in Hokkaido.
I took a job in real estate in 2001 where I learned about business.
I got involved in IT work through sales over the internet.
I have been working as a computer lecturer, sales worker, running the WACA web analytics certificate course and web analytics seminar and as a consultant for small and large businesses to improve business success using web analytics.
I established web analytics office AITIE.