Market customers love to order online because they get first pick and convenience. You'll love their loyalty and the sales that are made before you even load the truck.
simon.huntley's blog
Forget everything I told you
Posted May 15th, 2008 by simon.huntleyWith the recent focus here on this blog on how to use analytics software, I think it is also important to step back from the numbers.
I received an email from a Small Farm Central member who has become a friend:
Have been enjoying learning about Bounce Rates, etc. Our numbers go up and down like GM stock, but I think the real meaning is who it reaches, not necessarily the numbers.
He goes on to detail some interesting connections he has made through the website such a local reporter and a customer looking for fertilized eggs.
That's exactly right: your farm website is never going to get traffic like Amazon.com or Ebay and that isn't the point. You are looking for quality over quantity.
People in your area want to create a long-term relationship with a farmer just like you. What is a website visitor worth who will buy a CSA share every year for the next 10 years? will become a great friend or ally? or order a side of beef every fall?
Having friendly and open communication on your website is a step in turning these visitors into supporters.
It doesn't matter what your bounce rate or new visitor percentage is: keep making connections consistently and it will be good for the long-term health of your farm and your local food economy.
Examining trends & analytics terminology (Google Analytics #2)
Posted May 8th, 2008 by simon.huntley
The Google Analytics Dashboard
Last week, you installed Google Analytics on your farm website. If everything worked correctly, the software has been quietly collecting statistics about your visitors. Now let’s look at that data and see how it may affect your web marketing.
The Dashboard
Login to your Google Analytics account and the first screen you will see is “The Dashboard” which gives you a good overview of what is going on with your site.
At the top right of the screen you will see a date range such as Apr 5, 2008 – May 5, 2008. Click the gray arrow to right of the dates to select the range of data you will see throughout the analytics software. As you get more data, you may want to view data for a single day or for a whole month.
One very useful tool is comparing date ranges. This is only applicable when you have a bit more data in your site, so if you just installed last week, just keep this in mind. When you click the down arrow to the right of the date range, select a date range and then in the “Comparison” drop down menu instead of “site” select “date range.” Then you can select the comparison date range that you would like to look at.
See the screenshot below for how this will look. The original date range will be shown in blue while the comparison is shown in green. Hopefully throughout the months and years, traffic on your website is growing and this is a great way to determine success over time.
One question that people often ask is: how many hits should I be getting? I suggest thinking in trends – as long as traffic is steadily increasing, you know you are you going in the right direction with your web marketing.
The comparison feature is very valuable for this type of assessment. If you are following some of the basic marketing tactics that I suggest: keeping your website fresh, sending your web address with each email in your footer, distributing your web address at markets or wherever you connect with the public, sending a weekly mailing list, you can’t fail over the long run.
Just keep doing the right thing every day by connecting consistently with your customers and the time you spend on your website will pay off.
Going further
Now go further into the software – there is a pretty amazing amount of detail you can get on your visitors. Take a look around. Keep these terms in mind as you look around:
Bounce Rate - Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site…
First Time Unique Visitor - The number of Unique Visitors to your website that had not visited prior to the time frame being analyzed.
Keyword - A keyword is a database index entry that identifies a specific record or document. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.
Referrals - A referral occurs when any hyperlink is clicked on that takes a web surfer to any page or file in another website; it could be text, an image, or any other type of link.
Unique Visitors - Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.
View more terms at: http://empoweryou.ca/2007/04/22/glossary/
Is there more?
There is a lot more to talk about with Google Analytics, but I’ll let this be directed by the readers. As you look around are there any specific questions you have on how to use the software?
Using Google Analytics to understand your farm website
Posted April 28th, 2008 by simon.huntley
Since you spend precious time keeping your farm website fresh, you need to determine how effective your website is in engaging visitors. What sites do they come to your site from? What are they
searching for on search engines when they visit? Do they visit from
bookmarks or email referrals? How long do they stay when they visit?
What pages do they like the best?All of these questions can be answered using a web analytics package. The standard these days is Google Analytics mainly because it is free, but also because it is a very impressive piece of software that provides lots of detail on your website and it integrates well into other Google services.
Over the next few weeks, we are going to delve into using Google Analytics to understand the visitors to your farm website. What's bounce rate? How many visitors a day is a good rate? What is a referral? Click here to get updates right in your inbox when we update the blog.
Installing Google Analytics on your website
The first step is getting Google Analytics the data it needs to track visitors to your site. The basic concept is that a small piece of code needs to reside on each page of your site. Obviously, this process differs based on how you developed your website and who hosts it. It may be difficult to do this if you developed your website yourself in pure HTML, but if you use Small Farm Central (or have advanced functionality on your site) it is easy. I am going to describe this process in relation to installing analytics on a Small Farm Central site, but the steps will be the same for any site except how the code is added to your pages.
- Go to: http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html and sign in with an existing Google account or create a new account.
- On the resulting screen, click "Sign up."
- You will be asked for your "Website's URL." This is the address that your customers type in their browser to get to your farm website; such as http://www.yourfarm.com. The default for the account name is fine.
- The next two screens will ask for your contact information and for you to agree to the user agreement.
- The last screen gives produces the code that needs to be included on each page of your website -- you will see "Legacy Tracking Code (urchin.js)" about 1 inch down the left side of the page. Copy all the text in the textbox below which should look something like this:
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-5555555-1";
urchinTracker();
</script>
Add the code to your website
Now we are ready to get the code on your website so the analytics package can start to record your stats. This process is different depending on how you developed your website; of course if you are running a Small Farm Central website, it is very easy. What follows is an explanation for farmers that are using the Small Farm Central system.
- Log in to your control panel as usual.
- Navigate to the "Script block" section of the control panel:
Display / Template settings / script block - Paste the code from above into the text box provided, click submit. If there is any code existing in the text box, do not alter it. Simply paste below the existing text and click submit. Now the code will be included on every page requested by your visitors.
Take the time to add Google Analytics to your website now; in the next few weeks I will describe how to interpret your results. So, if you add the tracking code to your website, you will have something to look at when the go further into how to use the stats. Click here to get updates right in your inbox when we update the blog.
(Photo by el7bara)
You may also be interested in:
Getting right with google and other farm website visibility techniques
But I grow food not blogs - starting your farm blog
Add an interactive map to your farm website
New ideas at the farmers market: easy for farmers and customers
Posted April 15th, 2008 by simon.huntley
I have worked farmers markets. I have gotten up at dawn to pick, clean, and pack produce. I have started the drive to the farmers market in the mid-afternoon sun, set up a stand that highlights the abundance of a farm in the summertime, sold produce for several hours, packed the truck, driven back to the farm, unloaded after dark and to bed.I understand how exciting markets are, but I also understand the work that goes into them. That is why Small Farm Central is helping farmers streamline the ordering process and increase sales at their markets.
We are offering a new stand-alone service (or in conjunction with a full website) that allows you to pre-sell your farmers market products online. Again, you do not need have a regular Small Farm Central website to take advantage of this service.
Some customers just want "easy"
There are many customers who come to a market to socialize with friends, take a walk with the kids, and interact with many different farmers and vendors. These are the types of people that make farmers markets one of the vibrant expressions of community that we have in small towns. These people are not in the market for online ordering.
On the other hand, there are always customers who rush out of work as soon as possible to get to the market only to be disappointed by the quality of products that are left near the end of the market and may or may not complain to you. It is likely that they don't come back to your stand or the market.
For these people, the possibility of ordering online a day or two before the market makes a lot of sense. These are working people who are online most of the day and can take a few minutes at lunch to place an order and will be very excited to think that they have a box waiting for them at the market when they get there late. This type of customer will be likely to order their whole week of food from your farm instead of shopping around because you have made it so easy. If you could get 20-30 of these customers to make a $20-30 purchase on your site as a pre-sale each week, you have $400-900 in extra sales each week.
Easy on you too
Like the rest of the Small Farm Central system, the farmers market pre-sales component is designed for use by farmers without technical knowledge. Create the items you want to sell, list the inventory you have available, and your store is ready to go.
Many farms will have a window that the online store is open. If your market is on Thursday evening, perhaps you list your inventory and open the store at 8am on Monday morning. When the store is open, you will send out a mass email to your customers telling them the store is open for orders. The store will stay open until 6am on Thursday when you click one button in the control panel to disable access to the page.
Then you can create a report that lists all the sales made from Monday at 8am to Thursday at 6am. One feature of the reporting capability is that in additional to listing individual orders, it also lists an aggregate total of items that were ordered, so you can see how many bunches of kale or pounds of ground beef were requested in all of the orders. This report will help you easily plan for picking and packing the truck.
For more detailed info see:
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/market-preorders-details
Payment processing
Once the customer has created an order, you still need to get payed.
You have the choice of sending the customer through a credit card processor (we use an easy to set-up service called Google Checkout) or having the user create an account with their contact information. If you choose the second option, the customer can come back the next week and just type in their user name and password so they do not have to re-enter contact information. This helps you identify particular customers and track them over time. Using the second option also has the advantage of saving the 2% of sales that the payment processor will take.
One feature that will aid some farmers in payment processing is the ability to have "private store" pages, which are only accessible by certain types of users. A farmer may have a committed group of customers (this works really well for restaurants and CSA sales, but could also apply to farmers markets): they can limit a particular ecommerce page for access only by users within a particular group. This has the potential to eliminate the payment processing fees, but also limits orders to trusted customers, so there are not any fraudulent orders.
The possibilities!
Online pre-ordering is not a new concept -- many farms have been running an email list with products for sale and working responses into an Excel spreadsheet. The difference here is that a little technology makes this process much less time-consuming for the farmer and enticing to the customer.
What if you had a few hundred dollars in sales in your pocket before you started picking, packing, and driving?
Getting started..
Currently we have a special going to get you started with farmers market pre-ordering this year for $185 -- this includes the new member fee and 6 months of service (normally this would cost $220). For each month that you want to use the service beyond that, it is $20/month. You only pay when you are using the service, so you can let the service lapse in the wintertime and restart it for the 2009 season without payment of the new member fee again.
If you are ready to get started:
http://smallfarmcentral.com/buynow
If you want some more information on farmers market presales and ordering see:
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/market-preorders
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/market-preorders-details
Farm ecommerce brings direct, local sales to farms
I hope everyone is having a productive Spring. I know you are busy preparing the fields, fixing machinery and planting, but I really think online pre-selling is one way to vastly improve your marketing this year without breaking your rhythm in the fields.
Keeping your farm website fresh
Posted April 11th, 2008 by simon.huntley
A farm website with fresh content encourages return visitors, deepens your relationship with customers, and will lead to increased sales in the long run. The problem is always time: there are struggling transplants to water, your livestock are giving birth, there’s the orchard to prune.
I have to admit missing a full week of blogging here at the Small Farm Central because there were simply other, more pressing tasks to attend to. I don’t think you need to always stick to a rigid schedule for freshening your website. That would ignore the realities of farming. If you have a commitment to communicating your vision and telling your farm story, the rest will fall into place.
The best advice I can give is: make it easy.
Even if you are committed to communicating, writing, and posting pictures throughout the summer season because you truly believe in the long term benefits, it isn’t going to happen if posting to your website is hard.
Do you need to re-learn HTML and CSS every month? What’s the FTP password again? How do I change the title of the page? These are questions you don’t want to answer deep the summer season when there are more pressing concerns in the fields.
Schedules are meant to be broken
Make a schedule, but remember that schedules are meant to be broken. I plan to post one blog entry here each week throughout the year, but I would rather post quality content that helps farmers think about their web communication and commerce rather than something inadequate that shows I just didn’t have time. Each contact must add value to your customers experience with your farm or they won’t spend the time to read that next mailing list email or come back to your site to look at farm photos.
I have already seen such an improvement in farm websites this Spring as farmers sign on to Small Farm Central. There are farmers blogging, posting photos regularly, keeping an updated calendar, and sending weekly emails to customers, and selling their goods through their website.
I hope that however you decide to solve your web communication and commerce needs, you can see the long-term benefits of honest, value-adding communication with customers. This isn’t something that will help you this month or even this season; this is for the long term health of your farm and business.
Hi, I'm Simon Huntley, the lead developer here at