It’s hard to believe that we are now approaching half way through the year. Time really has flown by this year and I put that down to us all working very hard to make sure 2015 is going beat the previous year. And looking back at the month that has just passed, May appears to have been a very positive one for everyone. I have been away for around half of the month, but I’ll try and be as comprehensive as I can!

Reports of healthy sales

Looking at some of the conversations online, as well as information passed on to me by various people, it does appear that May has been a pretty good month on the sales front. It looks like a strong May will head into a good start for June as the traditionally busier period for our industry starts.

At our own place, sales have been very healthy, and exactly where we expected them to be at this time of year. We have also had our biggest ever order passed through our local planning department, so the sales figures for June are going to be even better!

I’d still say though that lead levels for us aren’t blazing past the amount we had last year. The difference this year being that the average order value has shot up, and conversion rates are high as well. So we’re making the best out of what we get.

Big news stories

It’s fair to say that throughout May we had some pretty meaty stories to get our teeth stuck in to:

• The accusation that PVC prices are being rigged right from the very top
• A++ rated windows from BFRC
• Masco announces it is to buy timber alternative company Evolution
• FENSA announced it’s Pay As You Go scheme for non-MTC companies
• The results of the 2015 General Election

Plenty of topics to get into and talk about until the cows come home. The Masco announcement and the election results were stories I was unable to cover as they broke while I was away on holiday, hence the delayed analysis. Still, they were great things to write about!

DGB

On the DGB front, I had two bits of good news and one bit of bad news. On the stats front, both my visitors and unique visitor numbers were up massively compared to May 2014. Part of the reason was that last May I closed DGB down for a few days while I gave the site the biggest revamp it had ever had. It was a huge undertaking and took a little longer than I hoped, so I missed out that month on some valuable days traffic. This time round there were no down days so I was able to improve those two data sets hugely.

However it is also the same reason that my page views were down this May compared to last May. As I had made a lot of new changes to DGB this time last year, there was a lot of interest in the new things that I had done. This meant people were exploring many more areas of DGB than in previous versions. So that curiosity drove a huge spike in the number of page views not just in May, but the coming months too. Not only that, but I did some background work on the site which improved the search results of quite a number of my already existing posts.

Now though, that surge has calmed as normal reading habits have returned. Plus I was on holiday for much of May, meaning I wasn’t able to promote content anywhere near like I normally do. So the pressure is very much back on me to make sure that on the page views front things continue to grow. The plus side though is that for the year so far, I am well up on visitors and unique visitors compared to the same period last year!

Monthly stats

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