…life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot…hits and pageviews don’t mean anything except that someone came to your site and consumed some content…metrics are a dime a dozen, so how do you know which ones to use? They should have the following four attributes…
- Uncomplex – If you want action, everyone involved in the decision-making must easily comprehend performance.
- Relevant – they must be measuring the success objectives that are unique to you and your website.
- Timely – Even the greatest metric in the world is useless if it takes nine days while your world changes every three days.
- Instantly Useful – you need to be able to find insights as soon as you look at it.
-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0
Your business is different than everyone else’s, so why would you look at the same measurements of success as everyone else? Everyone looks at visitors to their site, but what does that tell you about how your business is doing? If you sell a high-end product and the only people coming to your site are those looking for a cheap solution, it doesn’t matter how far up and to the right that blue line goes for visitors, your business isn’t growing. You want to look at the metrics that will tell you if you are progressing with growth. That’s why the most important step you can take toward success is identifying the metrics that will tell you if what you really want to happen for your business is happening or not.
Clients want results, and who can blame them? However, the results they want should be guided by the goals we set with them from the beginning of a campaign. From my experience with clients, their biggest concern is ranking higher in the search engines for their targeted keywords. Aside from that, they aren’t concerned with how they get there.
If you’ve been to any kind of social media seminar lately, you may have heard that making videos is the next Big Thing in online marketing. Depending on your industry and your business goals, that may or may not be true for you. Of course, if you’re even the tiniest bit familiar with online marketing, you know that making videos does not guarantee that anyone will watch or share them. The competition is brutal. On YouTube alone, people upload more than 48 hours of video every minute and watch over three billion videos every day.
I often find myself wishing I had the same conveniences in real life like I do on the Web. While a lot of the “offline” world has been made possible (and easier) online–such as using social media to stay connected with friends and family–we haven’t really been able to transfer the magic of offline into the real world.
Keyword research is important to online marketing efforts. But even more important than that is the keywords you select for your SEO and PPC efforts. Of course, you cannot select what you have not researched, but finding keywords generally isn’t the problem. There are tons of keyword tools available that will help you do that.
