Marketing Intelligence™
Holiday Season is upon us! First comes Halloween, then Thanksgiving (for you Americans), and then Hanukkah and Christmas, followed by New Year’s Eve. So when it comes to your website, do you acknowledge these special occasions? Do you celebrate with your audience through the medium of your site and services or products?
Over the last week, I have been discussing which metrics are critical for analysis, depending upon the type of website. The last two posts covered: Critical Metrics for Lead Generation Sites and Critical Metrics for e-Commerce Sites. Both posts covered analytics you need to be paying attention to if you run an e-commerce or lead generation site, respectively, as well as common metrics for all types of websites.
The analytics you should devote your time to depends on what type of website you have. Here’s a quick classification of a few analytics:
Side Note: Relative importance of site metrics based on site type. Critical goals should be measured and improved. Trend indicators can tell you if your site is headed in the right direction. Good means that it's something to keep your eyes on but it's not a primary indicator. Don't waste your time with Not Important indicators.
The final main type of website is ad-driven, which is a different kind of animal than e-commerce or lead generation. Join me after the jump an intensive breakdown of critical metrics for ad-driven websites as well as some secondary metrics worth tracking.
As everyone (hopefully) knows, Prince William and Kate Middleton wed on Friday, April 29, 2011. Aside from the live broadcast breaking the world record for live internet streaming (YouTube reportedly had over 400 million viewers!), what does one of modern history’s most historic occasions have to do with anything web-related? Well, quite a lot!
There is a common misconception that marketers ALWAYS know the exact answer for how to make your website or business successful. A good marketing team can implement or recommend strategies to improve your marketing campaign based on solid experience and research. However, there is no silver bullet, no clear answer for what works and what doesn’t work, and if anyone tells you otherwise, I suggest you proceed with caution.
Last week I dove into a topic very critical for nearly every website – metrics – in a post entitled: Increasing the Conversion Rate: Critical Metrics for e-Commerce Sites. The post covered analytics you need to be paying attention to if you run an e-commerce site, as well as common metrics for all types of websites.
The analytics you should devote your time to depends on what type of website you have. Here’s a quick classification of a few analytics:
Side Note: Relative importance of site metrics based on site type. Critical goals should be measured and improved. Trend indicators can tell you if your site is headed in the right direction. Good means that it's something to keep your eyes on but it's not a primary indicator. Don't waste your time with Not Important indicators.
Beyond these, there are certain internal numbers you may want to track, especially for a lead-generation site. For example, you may keep a log of web-leads after they go to the sales department. Wouldn't it be great to know if leads from a certain keyword or web site turn into deals more often than other types of leads? Integrating your web site with a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) suite can show you these types of things. Examples of CRM include SalesForce.com, SugarCRM, and my personal favorite, ZohoCRM, which is free for the first few users.
Join me after the jump for critical metrics common to all sites, as well as an intensive breakdown of critical metrics for lead generation websites.
The mantra of a great web site team should be 'measure everything'. Understanding what and why you're tracking certain things will help you make sound design improvements to your web site. Not all data is useful, though. The analytics you should be paying attention to will vary by the type of web site that you run. Here's a quick classification of a few analytics:
Side Note: Relative importance of site metrics based on site type. Critical goals should be measured and improved. Trend indicators can tell you if your site is headed in the right direction. Good means that it's something to keep your eyes on but it's not a primary indicator. Don't waste your time with Not Important indicators.
Beyond these, there are certain internal numbers you may want to track, especially for a lead-generation site (which I will cover in a later post). For example, you may keep a log of web-leads after they go to the sales department. Wouldn't it be great to know if leads from a certain keyword or web site turn into deals more often than other types of leads? Integrating your web site with a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) suite can show you these types of things. Examples of CRM include SalesForce.com, SugarCRM, and my personal favorite, ZohoCRM, which is free for the first few users.
Join me after the jump for critical metrics common to all sites, as well as an intensive breakdown of critical e-commerce website metrics.
Once you have decided what type of conversion-oriented web site you are, you will know exactly what you want visitors to do. Now it’s time to define a clear path you want them to take to accomplish these things. The fantastic usability book, Don’t Make Me Think, espouses the idea that it’s not how many clicks someone has to go through; it’s how easy it is to make the click decision. If clicking is easy and provides value then there is a great chance the user will click closer and closer to becoming a customer.
The key to understanding what your customers are thinking is to understand what path they will take through your site. Based upon the conversion type of your web site, here are three different paths to conversions.. after the jump.
One of the most fundamental, yet overlooked, areas of SEO is conversions. Many folks dwell on the virtues of ranking at the top of Google but they ultimately miss the primary goal of a business web site – to get visitors to do what you want them to do. Conversion rates are not just for e-commerce sites; all web sites have conversion goals that can be measured, managed, and increased.
Conversions mean different things to different web sites. There are three main types of web sites, with three different main types of conversion goals. Let’s take a look at all three and then discuss how to you can decide which type your site should be.
One of the best marketing tools any company can use is a website with informative, compelling copy. Yet many websites lose focus on the customers’ needs and “WeWe” all over themselves. This term refers to copy that focuses inwardly on company advantages and practices (i.e. “We are the industry leader in our market”, or “We have a 95% customer satisfaction rate”).
Instead copy should convey how your business meets a customer’s needs. When reading your company website, ask yourself this simple question:
Are you talking mostly about your customer or yourself?
In order to help solve this problem, Future Now Inc. has created a “WeWe Monitor.” This is a free analysis tool that counts certain words on your site that are key indicators of whether your focus is on the customer or not.
Click here to run the customer focus calculator on your company website.
