Florida Community Bank – Special

Our friends at Florida Community Bank are having a special to invite new customers. We’ve worked with a few banking institutions in the area and we’ve been happiest with the FCB branch in Logger’s Run Plaza. It’s the best customer service we’ve ever had at a bank.
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Disclosure: Sometimes an article like this would involve compensation – a “sponsored post.” This is not the case here. We are customers of FCB and happy ones, but received no compensation whatsoever.

Brooklyn Water Bagel Opens Monday, May 12th

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We received a press release from Brooklyn Water Bagel that their new West Boca location will open on Monday, May 12th. We previously wrote about them when we noticed they were working on it: Brooklyn Water Bagel Coming to West Boca.
bagels
Some key details from the press release and follow-up e-mails:
1. Located at 22191 Powerline Road – It’s behind the Olive Garden in what used to be a Hurricane Grill. When we looked on Google Maps it shows in the “elbow” of the plaza when it’s actually at the end.
brooklyn-bagels-boca-map
2. Hours are from 6 am to 3 pm. They’re open early for breakfast and they serve lunch too, but no dinner.
3. It is next to a kosher market, and there are a lot of Jews living nearby who keep kosher. Readers asked us and we asked them about it. Here’s their answer:

The Original Brooklyn Water Bagel Co. is not kosher.

Note that there is already a kosher bagel place just to the north: Boca Kosher Bagel on Powerline.
4. They’re big on bagel sandwiches. We have friends who rave about them and we’re eager to give them a try.
Bagelwiches
5. They’re also big on their iced coffee. That’s not something we’re into, but we know a lot of people who do like it.
iced-coffee

Chamber Breakfast May 13th

jerry-libbin-chamberThe West Boca Chamber will have its monthly breakfast next Tuesday, May 13th. The featured speaker will be Jerry Libbin, President and CEO of the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce.
As usual, the event will be at Boca Greens Country Club. Cost is $20 if you register in advance, or $25 at the door.
Register on the West Boca Chamber website.
The West Boca Community Council usually has its monthly meeting the same day in the evening, but we have not seen any word of it yet.

Hobby Lobby Update and Michael's

Image from Wikipedia
Image from Wikipedia

West Boca News consulted with an industry insider about the soon-to-open Hobby Lobby in West Boca. It will be in West Boca Square, the plaza on the northwest corner of 441 and Palmetto, with Target, Burger King and Chili’s, replacing the Beall’s that closed this past summer.
Screen Shot 2014-05-02 at 2.28.59 PMWe asked the insider (who preferred to remain anonymous) about the impact of Hobby Lobby on the Michael’s store in Somerset Shoppes (northeast corner of Glades and Lyons). She said the new Hobby Lobby will destroy that Michael’s for a few reasons.
First, the Hobby Lobby’s location will cut into nearly all of Michael’s customer base west of 441, as well as much of their business west of Lyons.
Second, the Hobby Lobby will be twice as large as the Michael’s store, so the selection will be better. Note that we previously reported the Hobby Lobby would be 78,000 square feet. We had that wrong. Hobby Lobby said in a press release that the store would be 52,000 square feet, which is still more than twice the size of the Michael’s. The property appraiser lists the building at 78,000 square feet so we’re not sure what’s happening with the extra space.
Third, the Hobby Lobby will be newer and that naturally draws customers. Our insider said she’s seen Hobby Lobby in other states and they do very well.
She did offer one caveat. Hobby Lobby has restricted hours, closed on Sundays and open only until 8 pm the rest of the week. She feels that will leave some business for Michael’s, but probably not enough to survive.
West Boca News thinks there are two other challenges for Hobby Lobby that may help Michael’s survive. Michael’s has been in that location for a while and has some local customer loyalty to rely on. Meanwhile Hobby Lobby has had some rough spots recently with the Jewish community and with political liberals over their Obamacare lawsuit. Both are substantial parts of the West Boca market.
Black arrow points to new Hobby Lobby; Red points to Michael's.
Arrows point to new Hobby Lobby (lower left) and to Michael’s (upper right).

Hyperlocal, Google Analytics, and Odd Cities

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Here we are building a “hyperlocal” website and we notice this weird thing in our Google Analytics data. Why are we getting so much traffic from Sky Lake?
In the image above you can see that our traffic is pretty concentrated in the Boca Raton area, but there are a couple of obvious outliers. The top arrow points to a concentration in Sky Lake, a place we did not recognize, a three hour drive away near Orlando, with a population of only 6000 people. The lower arrow points to Hialeah, which is larger and closer (about an hour drive), but still doesn’t make a lot of sense for reading news about what’s happening in West Boca Raton.
When you look at our top ten cities (below) there’s a third one that doesn’t quite fit – Davie. It’s closer but still odd.
cities-list
For readers unfamiliar with our area, five of the other seven “cities” are in Boca Raton. Parkland is just south of us, and Delray Beach is just to the north. Many people in those communities work in or frequently visit Boca Raton. So they still fit our natural audience.
After spending some time looking through our Analytics data, we figured out what’s going on. At first we obsessed about Sky Lake and noticed that a company named Omniture has significant operations there. Since they’re in online marketing and web analytics, we thought maybe they were running bots onto our site. We checked to see who the service provider was and we saw another thing that confused us:
sky-lake-service-provider
What the heck is “service provider corporation?” We’re used to seeing cell phone company names or cable providers. Jeffalytics describes it as a “United States based provider of IP Addresses to various phone providers.”
Phone providers? That led us to the answer, or at least a partial answer. We looked at “device category” as the secondary dimension while looking at the Sky Lake in Google Analytics.
sky-lake-devices
Aha! 97% of the users from Sky Lake are on mobile, 2.5% on tablets, and only 0.23% are on desktop. Overall 60% of our site users are on mobile, 10% on tablets and 30% on desktop, so this is a huge difference. Sky Lake is apparently a hub for some unknown group of mobile device users.
We found somewhat similar numbers for Hialeah and Davie:
hialeah-devices
davie-devices
Davie is close enough that some people there probably do commute into Boca for work, and/or some Boca residents may work there. That would explain why their desktop numbers are a little higher.
Boca Raton is in Palm Beach County and our area code is 561. A lot of people in Boca Raton have cell phone numbers with area codes from Broward County (954 and 754) or Miami-Dade County (305 and 786). They may have lived in those counties in the past, and some may live there but work in Boca. Davie is in Broward and might be a common city used by cell phone companies for phone lines that were set up in Broward. Similarly Hialeah is in Miami-Dade and the same logic would apply.
Sky Lake still seems odd. What might explain it is that Palm Beach County used to be in the 407 area code. The 561 area code was created in 1996. So it’s possible that a significant number of Boca Raton residents somehow retained phones with 407 area codes. That explanation doesn’t feel right because we encounter very few people with 407 area codes. But we don’t have a better explanation for it.
This detail creates a problem for those of us trying to build hyperlocal websites. Part of the business model is to sell local advertisers on how well targeted our website is to the very local audience they want to reach. When we show them analytics data (whether from Google Analytics or other tools) these odd cities weaken our pitch. Hopefully this article will help other hyperlocal webmasters explain the data, and if you are looking to get certified in Google Analytics, you might want to take a google analytics certification practice test first.