Petit Bourgeois

The Onitsuka Tiger web site has been refreshed a couple of weeks ago. Our web agency CloudRaker and our technology partner The Plant implemented a raft of relatively small changes that had sharp impact on the site's usage patterns: page views up by 135%, bounce rate down from 30% to 12%.

So how did we achieve such results?

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After this weekend's reasonable Dam to Dam race, I've decided to actually run the upcoming New York marathon, on November 2. Nice, thoroughly pleasurable runs like this one are very encouraging:

However, I know I still have a long way to go before catching up with my colleague @eirefairy and her boyfriend The Man.

this guy?

Is it just me, or that's a strange way to put it?

"Doing things right" is paying off. Just by having common-sense page titles and descriptions, and by having a clear URL scheme, the ASICS UK site is properly indexed by Google.

A Google UK search for our brand name shows the site is quite popular and well-indexed, as several important pages are highlighted automatically:

A search for running shoes puts ASICS in 6th position on the first page of results today, the first and only manufacturer present there.

I started working on the Cloudraker offer to Onitsuka Tiger in January 2008, began supporting the ASICS office on a rent-a-brain basis in March, and became a full-time employee in May. So it's been a little over a year that I'm involved in shaping the online presence of ASICS. As I was pointing out last year, this is a highly interesting job for me, because I have the opportunity to practice a lot of what I've been preaching for years. Looking back, I'm quite happy with some of the results, although there's still much to be done.

I don't like advertising. While I must acknowledge that ads in fact do develop business for most companies that indulge, and while I'm actually a huge fan of the creative process and its better byproducts, I can't reconcile myself with the inherent waste it represents, and the fact it is based on lower instincts and tricking people.

Over the past year, my team has largely stayed away from advertising, mostly because we had more pressing priorities. This stance is currently changing as we have solved some key issues, freeing up some time, and are becoming more determined in ads, across all media. For me, the challenge will be to defend a certain quality of the engagement with people. ASICS and Onitsuka Tiger are beautiful brands with a very positive image, and we can afford to stick to the facts (apparently an immense luxury). I expect we should be able to step up our communication and amplify this image without having to betray our roots.

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The web site of France's serious evening newspaper Le Monde, as well as the newspaper itself, publish weekly a translated version of the BreakingViews.com columns (no free content on their own site). The print version allows for a quick identification of that poor content, but the web site flags it inconveniently, exposing readers to garbage without warning.

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The ASICS head office web site has been renewed a while ago to implement the designs we've developed globally.

I'm quite excited to see such a large and complex web site integrate our work. Several other improvements have gone into that new version. Congrats AQ and HQ web team!

A large disappointment: we don't make the awesome Tarther Brace RS-D 2 in my size.

ASICS Spain and a few others launched this week, we've got most of Europe now. Russia, Poland, Belgium and Switzerland still coming up.

And this weekend: check out the Paris marathon!

ASICS Germany has launched, and I'm very proud of the team for this one, which had all sorts of idiosyncratic problems, and a track record of being troublesome. So a big shoutout to Holger and Mairéad in Amsterdam, and to Doris in Neuss, keep up the good work.

But this time, I've got some extra news. It's been over 2 months since we launched the UK, and we're starting to have representative traffic stats for the new sites.

The results are very encouraging:

• with (unfortunately) no particular extra marketing effort, traffic is up more than 40%: doing the Right Thing does help, event just on its own (though of course it'd be better to have a complete marketing plan around it)
• visitors who go through the new "knowledge" section spend more than twice as much time on the site than the average
• the new Onitsuka Tiger site draws 4 times as many visits as before the relaunch, and I can't wait for the next upgrades

There are still many mountains to climb (we barely started twittering, the sections about Athletes and Events is not yet up, our email newsletters are a mess, and we're not quite fluent in the editorial maintenance of the site despite the launch of really great articles), but I feel overall we're doing pretty good.

Getting a little monotonous, but the ASICS.fr site has launched.