Build Trails for Customers that Don’t Dead End
You see it all the time: web marketing that fails to satisfy customer wants and needs in the buying process from first exposure to conversion. The problem is that it’s […]
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Things Your PPC Manager Shouldn’t Say
When it comes to online marketing, I see and hear about way too many companies that don’t take the paid traffic channel seriously enough. They either don’t do it (huge […]
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Building Confidence (and Profit) with Website Testing
Not testing your website is like telling your investors, shareholders, employees or other stakeholders that you already make enough profit and you’d really not like to make any more in […]
Make Enough Profit? Warning: Don’t Test Your Website!
Most companies don’t test their sites. Their main justification for this tends to be that they don’t have the budget to take it on. But, this is clearly a misunderstanding […]
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Save Time Figuring Out Site Performance Changes: Take Notes
You always hear good web analysts stressing that you can’t stop your journey of finding insights for business improvement at the “what.” For example, a “what” would be “conversion rate […]
Metrics That Lie to You: Average Position (Part 2)
We’re taking a look at how the “average position” metric lies to you (or more accurately, is misunderstood by you). In part one, we studied the reasons behind this and […]
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Metrics That Lie to You: Average Position (Part 1)
I wouldn’t call the “average position” metric pointless, but it’s definitely lying to you. Most people approach this metric with a natural misunderstanding. It’s natural to think “this is the average position that my organic listing or paid ad shows up at in a search for this keyword.” Sorry, but no. How could a tool just flat out lie to you? Well, the tool isn’t lying to you. It’s your understanding of what that metric is communicating that is lying to you. In a recent article titled “The big lie of AdWords average position,” light is shed upon this subject. But, this goes beyond AdWords to organic search and many other applications in life as well.
Under-rated Web Marketing Metric – Client/Agency Communication
For many businesses, a major benefit of outsourcing their web marketing strategy to a company like ours is the fact that they get the knowledge and skill of a whole web marketing team for what most of the time amounts to the cost of one (maybe two) employees. Depending on the nature of the business, that can be hard to beat. But, along with it comes a challenge – communication. We fought with this hard for a while sitting in meetings and brainstorming realistic ways in which to communicate better with clients while balancing the hours we spend doing this with formulating and implementing strategies to get results.
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Going Beyond Yourself to Optimize Online Messaging
I recently answered a question on LinkedIn with an ultra-cool strategy that we’ve recently implemented for our client’s PPC ads that you may be able to benefit from. Here’s the question and my answer.
Your Analytics Tool May Be Lying to You
Let’s say your site contains iphone app reviews. Your goal for the 4th quarter of 2011 was to increase your website traffic and conversions by 8% compared to the third quarter. The results? +10%. Time to do the happy dance? Not so fast my friend! This is a common point of failure of many site owners. They analyze their data in the silo of their web analytics tool. This can cause you to misjudge what is truly going on because you are lacking the context of your industry ecosystem.
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Understanding the Real Story of Your Business on the Web
In the early days of the web, all interaction with a business online happened in one place – on their website. Businesses would create content, put it on their site, and followers would come to the site and consume the new content. Measuring success was rather easy at this point. You simply tagged your site and one analytics tool would collect all of your data for analysis. Of course, we know this has all changed.
Ways You Might Not Listen to Your Site’s Customers
As every good website owner knows, collecting data and seeing what happens leaves out an all-important piece of the puzzle. To truly take action on the data you’ve now collected, you need to know why it is the way it is…If you really want to know how to make your site experience better, you can’t just look at your data. You’ve got to get the voice of your customer.
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So You Think Your Changes Will Help Your Customer? Prove It!
Two posts ago, I talked about the importance of laying a web analytics foundation for your company by measuring, valuing and analyzing the critical few visitor behaviors on your site that have an impact on your bottom line. In my last post, I talked about the step after that. That is to acquire the reasons the data you’ve collected is the way it is (the why?). Once you’ve listened to why your customers couldn’t complete whatever tasks they were trying to accomplish on your site, you should have a bunch of ideas on how to fix it.
Get Higher-Ups to See the Value of Your Online Efforts
It doesn’t need to be said that the higher-ups mostly care about getting more of what they want to happen to actually happen. If you can show that it is happening and that giving you more money will make it happen more, then you’ll most likely get more money to make it happen more. Getting the budget you need can seem like rocket science, but it’s really not. If may not be easy, but it is simple.
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Quantifying Your Website’s True Impact on Your Business
People that own companies or those in companies that make decisions on how to use a web marketing budget are shown, whether it’s their fault or not, too much website data that doesn’t directly relate to an impact on the bottom line. What’s wrong with this? Only looking at visits and pageviews gives an incomplete story of how a site is truly performing for its customers and the company. So when it’s time to decide how to invest, there’s nothing concrete that gives confidence in where to put money. To combat this problem, there needs to be a fundamental mindset shift to focusing on outcomes.