Archive for the ‘Audit’ Category

How to deal with the EU cookie law

April 30th, 2012

On 26 May 2012, the EU e-Privacy Directive will come into force in the UK. It’s known as the ‘cookie law’ because it requires all websites to get the informed consent of users before setting a cookie (a small text file that remembers details such as logins and email addresses) on their computer.

Businesses that don’t comply could face a fine of up to £500,000 as well as negative publicity. Here’s how to make sure you stay on the right side of the law:

1. Do a cookie audit. You need to be aware of exactly what cookies your website is using and what they are used for.

2. Get rid of the trash. This audit will probably reveal a lot of cookies that aren’t really used for anything anymore. These should be removed from the site immediately.

3. Classify your cookies. You need to break down the cookies your site uses into the following categories:

i. Essential. For example, a cookie used to mark a visitor as a logged-in user

ii. Non-essential but benign. For example, remembering a user’s email address on a login form. This isn’t essential for website functionality but makes it easier to use.

iii. Moderately intrusive. These cookies are used to track user behaviour but in a minimally intrusive way. For example, the default cookies used by Google Analytics are available only to the owners of the site the user is browsing and don’t reveal personally identifiable information.

iv. Highly intrusive. For example, the Facebook ‘Like’ button or cookies that track products you’ve looked at on a retail website and send you adverts for those items when you visit other sites. Highly-intrusive cookies leak user information to third parties or track personally identifiable information about your users.

4. Don’t worry about the essentials. You don’t need to get user permission for cookies that are essential for the operation of your website, such as remembering logged-in users.

5. Create a compliance plan. For all the other classes of cookie you need a plan to answer two questions:

i. How can we prevent our website from using this cookie? This is something for your IT/web team to determine.

ii. How are we going to ask the user’s permission to use this cookie? For example, you could have a pop-up box, ‘cookie status’ bar or warning bar on the website. Each option has pros and cons you need to analyse.

6. Decide how risk-averse you feel. Breaking the law can carry a fine of up to £500,000, but anything other than minimal compliance could put businesses at a competitive disadvantage. Unfortunately, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is currently giving out mixed messages – suggesting it may not prosecute businesses using less-intrusive cookies.

7. If you’re conservative, cover everything. A risk-averse business should implement a plan to require user consent for all non-essential cookies before the 26th May.

8. If you’re feeling brave, do nothing. Businesses with a larger appetite for risk or those for whom highly-intrusive cookies are important for revenue can adopt a ‘wait and see’ strategy. As it becomes clearer how the law will be enforced and what breaches the ICO prosecute first, they can implement an appropriate compliance plan.

9. If you’re in the middle, just go for the worst offenders. The middle way, and one that will be appropriate for most online businesses, is to require consent for (or simply don’t use) highly-intrusive cookies.

10. Stay up to date. This law is big news for any business with a website – and particularly those with e-commerce platforms – and no one is quite sure how it will be applied. Keep your compliance plans handy and be ready to implement or change them depending on how the law develops.

Want to know more? Please contact Richard Fergie

Why businesses need a digital audit

August 16th, 2011

Economic recovery or double-dip recession? Business targets achieved or way off the mark? Regardless, now is an optimal time to assess your digital marketing capabilities, to shave off any inefficiencies (both in terms of Pounds and practices) and to bolster your revenues and profit margins. Yes, you heard me right: digital can be inefficient. Comparative to traditional marketing it might come cheaper, but there are swathes of improvements to be found and made. These are improvements that lurk in the data and in day-to-day operations.

The best way to make these improvements is to have a digital expert audit your SEO, PPC and social media efforts. An audit provides the best opportunity for you to discover meaningful ways to extract full value from your digital endeavours. This is because an audit not only tells you where your digital practices stand in relation to current industry best practices, but also gives you an actionable strategy to close whatever gaps exist between where you are and where you ought to be.

It’s easy for the people behind brands to become overwhelmed by and abandon the very technology meant to enhance their digital efforts; technology can be a false friend that way. It’s also easy for the people driving a brand’s digital presence to get complacent once their efforts have achieved a certain level of success. With today’s economy demanding more output from less resource, unless a strategy is failing outright, people don’t have the time to see if that strategy could be improved. It’s easier still to leap into new digital channels before creating a sustainable strategy because of the sense of urgency created by the impression that every other brand is already on Facebook or Twitter. You feel like you need to run to catch up, but what you wind up doing is running just to stay in place. And along with all that wasted effort is wasted money.

The easiest thing of all, however, is to seek expert assistance in assessing and addressing the gaps between where your brand currently stands and where it would stand if you optimised your approach to digital.

Reform’s SEO audit takes into account overarching brand objectives and makes suggestions for website changes in that specific context. It also provides a thorough examination of every aspect of your website and guidance on how to comply with SEO best practices, adherence to which will culminate in the brand’s increased presence in natural search results.

Our PPC audit uses the same holistic approach. Rather than examining individual AdWords campaigns, a brand’s PPC strategy and performance are looked at in their entirety and refined to better meet the brand’s online objectives. This can range from increased share of voice on Google to increased website traffic and increased revenue from ecommerce.

Our social media audit simultaneously demystifies the world of personas as well as the best methods to engage with customers. It lays the foundation for the brand’s influence to grow and to improve its ability to listen to, interpret and participate in important conversations. Consultants performing a social media audit are careful to identify different target markets and create optimal strategies for each. They also take the time to build your brand’s personas; they don’t just look at what the competition is doing. This is not an exercise in keeping up with the Joneses; it is an exercise in developing a mature, sustainable strategy to drive your brand’s objectives.

Each audit will separately improve a brand’s digital performance. Taken together, the audits provide a powerful mechanism by which to enlarge a brand’s entire digital footprint.

These audits – separately or together – also save money by increasing efficiency and making digital efforts more effective. Ultimately, the consultants who perform audits deliver strategies that allow brands to squeeze more out of less by creating greater efficiency and greater efficacy – a fitting solution in today’s economy.

Blog post by Samantha Horwitz, Product Development and Projects Director at Reform