Astria Fireplaces and Innovative Hearth Products Redeemed

Nancy McCord
Nancy McCord – has had her family’s Christmas stolen by Astria Fireplaces

In my ongoing review of Astria Fireplaces made by Innovative Hearth Products this week, I wanted to post an update.

Here is the note I sent yesterday to staff at Astria Fireplaces:

“The bank has just informed us they will not move our construction loan to a regular loan until the house is 100% complete. This is now a very big issue for us. My husband and I have still not heard anything from the district manager. We must move forward with something. We are living in a temporary apartment and want to be moved in to our new home! I am going to the Fireplace store today (Glover – who bought these two items from Astria) to start looking for alternatives, all of which now really puts us in a bind to find an alternative and get shipping at the last minute.”
“Needless to say, I am very unhappy. Communication is key to resolving problems and all it would have taken would be to say “yes these are really and truly going into production and you will have them on xx date” or “no, we are going to have a delay again and we expect them really to be out of production in xx date in 2016″. How hard can that be to be truthful?”
“To not be able to close on our new custom home over two fireplaces that have been on order since 8/26/15 is just unthinkable. I know that our 2 fireplace order may be small based on your overall business – but clearly this is a case in point of vey poor customer service that should be reviewed by management. How can dealers sell your products and how can consumers buy them when they are hostages to a lack of information and truthfulness?”
“I would very much appreciate your regional sales manager’s or US sales manager’s email so that I can plead my case for information.”
Shortly after sending that note I finally got a phone call from the Astria Fireplace District Manager and it was a good thing as it appears that Astria had pulled the product we have ordered to retool it. But they had not communicated this to customers or dealers. We are getting one of the first fireplaces put into production after product changes to improve the natural beauty of the flames, installation improvements, and improved serviceability.
The lesson learned is that communication is key! Fires can be put out quickly and easily with just a little personal touch whether it is a phone call, email, or quick Facebook response.
Remember when it’s online, the world is watching the exchange – make it work for you!

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Fixing Your Bounce Rate Part Two

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Continued from Monday…

If you’ve been worrying that your 70%+ bounce rate needed immediate remediation, you need to take a deep breath and dig further.

If your website has in-depth informational content and a blog to build authority for search engines, with the increase in mobile searches, your bounce rate may be higher than a site without this type of content. Equally your website traffic will typically be higher.

So how high is too high for a bounce rate. When the numbers get to 78% to 80%, I would start to really be concerned. But there is more to this equation than just a bounce rate percentage.

Make sure to evaluate your time on page and time on site as part of an overall review. It may be as simple as moving out of the Google Display network with your advertising or adding exclusions to your program to drop your bounce rate fast. You may be driving low cost and low quality traffic to your own site erroneously thus negatively impacting your own bounce rate.

Before you start to tease apart your content take a careful look at your website and the potential causes for a high bounce rate.

  1. Is your user experience good?
  2. Do your pages load quickly?
  3. Do you have an esthetically pleasing website design that is easy to navigate?
  4. Do you have content that matches what you are selling or to build your authority?
  5. Have you reviewed your AdWords traffic? Is it targeted?
  6. Are your ads showing heavily in the content or display network thus driving up impressions?
  7. Is your content thin or scraped from other sites. Uniqueness is important here.
  8. Are you providing thoughtful content that builds a case for the use of your services or just filler?

Bounce rate is definitely a strong indicator of a user’s vote for your website, but a higher than typical number may not necessarily mean that you have a site that needs repair.

However a high bounce rate definitely needs a careful review to assure that you do not have a problem that needs to be addressed.

 

What Should Your Bounce Rate Be? Part One

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Before the advent of more than 50% of searches done in the mobile arena, a website wanted to strive for about a 45 to 50% bounce rate. Now with “in the moment” searches done on mobile accounting for more than half of all Google search traffic, the time on a website is dropping fast and bounce rates increasing.

When I do a survey of a number of website we access here is a quick synopsis of bounce rates we are seeing.

e-Commerce Store 73.94%
Home Service Provider 75.48%
Software and Security 65.62%
Architectural Features 95.80%
Home Service Provider 62.26%
Real Estate Services 41.68%
Industrial Product 74.58%
Home Services Provider 75.80%
Aviation Industry 69.44%
Electrical Service 67.32%
Home Services 58.69%
Healthcare 69.13%
SEO Services 77.63%
Landscape Services 66.29%
Cosmetic Services 72.48%

The site average is 69.74% this is significantly higher than the benchmark of 46.9% that Google Analytics had shared three years ago as a global benchmark. Now it is not uncommon for sites with strong informational content and a blog to have a 70% plus bounce rate.

In fact the sites in our list that have low bounce rates also typically those that have lower traffic and do not have additional  informational content on their site. They are mainly brochure-type websites focused on showcasing only their own services and do not typically have a blog.

So what do you do with this new normal of a relatively high bounce rate, and should you be concerned? Please come back to read the rest of this two part series on Wednesday.