Setting the scene

One of the issues we come across with websites when clients have control themselves is usually lot’s of small things that add up over time.

This small stuff can affect your site in multiple ways. One of these seems simple and obvious, but is a very big cause of your website loading slowly and very few people take the time to do something about it.

As web/graphic designers we have access to software that does a good job at exporting images for online use. We can maintain the quality/size of the image to get the balance just right.

Unfortunately clients, whilst they have control to upload images to their website don’t always have this skill set, so they just upload what they have with no idea that this is adversely affecting them or their online business.

This leads to images getting uploaded that whilst they can look fantastic, may take ages for a visitor to download (dependant on the internet connection they have), even worse if they are on a mobile internet connection.

This affects the visitors impression of your company/brand… nobody likes waiting.

Add to that Google give you small bonus ranking points if you make your site zippy to load, so it’s worth taking a few minutes more before uploading each image to optimise it.

I realise that not everyone has time to learn this skill of export and optimising or even have the software to do it, we would use Photoshop when we really want to get down to the absolute smallest size while keeping the quality.

However there is a short cut that will help reduce most images well enough that it’s worth the upload, download time, we’re talking usually seconds, not minutes and no requirement for learning Photoshop.

If you want to jump in then here is a top 5 for various online tools you can use for free.

1. https://compressor.io/
2. https://shortpixel.com/
3. https://tinypng.com/
4. https://imagecompressor.com/
5. https://kraken.io/web-interface

However before you dive in I would recommend you read on first as there are a few little downsides you should be aware of.

So the biggest warning is to always check the quality of the compressed image, sometimes it goes too far and you lose too much quality, which can also give the wrong impression to your visitors. So it’s not worth the file size saving if it looks too blocky,

If you find this happening a lot with your images then at this point you might want to look at learning how to optimise properly using software or try a different online optimising site, just go to You Tube and type in “optimising images for online use”.

The links to the optimising sites that I’ve provided will also usually strip out what’s called meta data, now some of this meta data is just things like make of the camera type, sometimes copyright info, location etc.., so if you optimise your images like this then you may be losing valuable information for Search Engines to grab on to for rankings (it’s not a great deal, but every little bit helps with Search Engine Optimisation). You can always go back in and add some back to the image, just Google adding meta data to images and there will be plenty instructions you can follow.

However if you don’t really know what meta data is or that it’s even being done to the image you have, you will most likely be safe (although copyright removal could go against terms of stock photos or photographers images you buy), just make sure you keep a copy of the original file or ask who is supplying them if they have added meta data to the images.

I’ve used these online tools for quickness, some even have plugins for WordPress to make things easier and automated but you’ll still want to check the results.

On a client project we managed to save a lot of from the file size with no loss in quality on the image, which is why I’ve written this article for others to benefit from, so here is my results below to give you an idea of the kinds of savings you could get.

Home Page Banner Optimisation Tests

Here is a couple of examples from a site we did a while ago to show just how much of a difference it can make.

Example 1

The original image’s Filesize = 348k

The compressed was Filesize = 125k

So that’s an amazing saving of 223K and if I took it into Photoshop I could probably reduce it a little more, but for a quick upload, wait, download it’s certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Also consider that single image now loads for the visitor in about a 1/3 rd of the time. If you have lot’s of images and you get a better compression rate you could save even more time loading your website pages.

Example 2

Here’s the other one Filesize = 473K

Here is the optimised version Filesize = 146K

That’s a whopping 327K saving for less than a 30 seconds effort with no visible loss in quality.

Conclusion

If you run your own website and use things like stock photos or take your own pictures, it’s well worth giving this image optimising website a go, you’re visitors will be happy at the site loading quicker and Search engines will be happy that you’re helping your visitors, so it’s a win-win.

Just remember to always check the result before you upload the image to your own website to be sure you’re happy with the quality.

Happy Optimising!

* Caveat – Our website optimises the images to keep them small on our website so the images you see in this post aren’t the same sizes as what’s mentioned. We encourage you to do you’re own tests with a large file and see what gains you can get.

Setting the scene

So I was asked by a client who’s implementing some of the digital strategy we created for them and they asked if there was a quick and easy way to track the quality and quantify the traffic from a specific social post link in Google Analytics.

The quick answer is yes by using Googles own very handy Campaign URL Builder Tool which makes it a breeze to do.

I’m just going to go over basics for this post, remember you need to be sending people to a site you have access to Google Analytics on, this is not for you to track how many people are clicking on your link to someone else’s site, there are tools for that like https://bit.ly

Also if this is the only step you ever do and don’t know how to do the reporting in analytics then later when you do learn or your SEO/Social Media company does a report on content, you’ll have all the data sitting there waiting for them. Remember Google doesn’t do retrospective data, so basically if you don’t do it now you’ll have lost all that valuable information.

If enough people comment asking me for a tutorial on the Google Analytics part, then I’ll consider writing that up as well.

Here’s the link if you just want to jump on over and start messing around with it all.

https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

However if you want a little more detail read on.

How to Use the Tool

The first thing you’ll notice when you go to that link is a bunch of fields you need to fill out.

I’ve filled out a few above to let you see what that looks like. You don’t have to fill them all out, but you might want to learn a little more on what they allow you to do in analytics in terms of reports (If there is demand I’ll write another tutorial for that).

For now, know that if you fill in the fields using the field descriptions further down the page you shouldn’t go far wrong. Here’s an image of what those descriptions are.

Once you’ve filled out the fields you’ll then see this box below

It’s very handy as it gives you a long version of the URL which you can see all the parameters in (that’s all the code looking stuff with ?, = and &), if you look at it closely with the fields you filled out you should start to see that it’s just putting a string (so one thing after another) of instructions after the main url you put in for analytics to record and store other information based on these headings/tags.

You can also create a short URL version as well that doesn’t look so complicated and potentially not frighten someone – especially with all the GDPR stuff going around these days, you can see both examples below.

Full URL

https://contact.digital/?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=Linkedin&utm_content=LinkedIn%20Pulse%20Article

Short URL

https://goo.gl/UMrCUu

What Now?

Ok so now you have filled out the fields and generated the URLs simply copy and paste them where you need to.

Now every time someone clicks that link you’ll be able to filter that traffic out in Google Analytics. This gives you a very clear idea of the quality of traffic to answer questions like:

• Does the traffic have a high bounce rate (basically are people staying on the page or leaving very quickly)?
• Are people spending the time reading the content on the page?
• Are they looking at more pages than just that one they landed on?
• If you have Analytics Goals setup then you’ll know if they have filled out the enquiry form or even better with e-Commerce how much that traffic source has made your company.

There is a lot more you can report on so figure out what your goals are in terms of what you want to measure before you fill out the fields and make sure other things are in place to be able to track and record the information to understand if those goals have been met.

Also don’t forget you can make different links for different traffic sources and context, so one for Facebook, one for LinkedIn, one for Twitter to track how well the content, service or product does from each channel from that specific post that you put up.

Even consider now that you can test the quality of traffic at a specific day of the week or time of day if you re-post the same content and then compare the results in Analytics, yes this all takes a little bit of planning, however if you’re serious about a digital strategy wouldn’t you rather know what is and isn’t working for your budget?

So now you have the ability to track your digital marketing at a much more granular level what will you do with it? Do you have any questions about the article? If you are still a little confused please let me know and answer what I can.