This article is heard toward small to medium sized businesses in moderately competitive markets. However, the fundamentals of evaluating online marketing efforts are largely the same for any business. It is important to recognize that an effective internet marketing plan must take the competitive landscape into account. The following questions should help get you thinking about what you need to know as your online marketing efforts evolve.
The first two questions are perhaps the most important. Marketing sophistication and the level of effort devoted to effective Internet marketing will level the playing field in spite of virtually everything else.
I’ll begin with what I call the primary metrics. These are the data shown on the first page when you log into Google Analytics. Here’s what they are and what mean.
All of this information is historical in nature, and only provides totals and averages. It is helpful for identifying trends, but to understand what’s happening on your website, you need to dig deeper.
From the beginning you need to know the information you rely on is valid. The vast majority of websites I work with for the first time take everything fed to Google Analytics as legitimate. The truth is it’s probably not even close. Here are a few things that screw up your data.
Spambots: These are computer programs, often called robots, spiders, crawlers or some other name. Not all robots are bad, but spambots scour the web looking for any online form to fill out with bogus information. Their goal is to create links to crappy websites by them into the comments section of your blog or other publicly visible content.
They do this in a nefarious attempt build the number of inbound links (backlinks) to some website. Entire companies, mostly in Eastern Europe and China, are devoted to selling backlinks this way. It’s obnoxious and doesn’t work, but comment spam is everywhere.
Tip: You should always moderate blog comments before allowing them to be published on your website. At the very least moderate those that include links.
What sucks is each attempt is reflected as as a visit. Usually, visits from spambots will have a bounce rate of 100% and a session duration of 00:00. They badly skew your data, and will often overwhelm legitimate traffic. As an example, a typical website with 1000 legitimate visits might have a bounce rate of 35%.
Add 500 visits from scumbag spambots and your traffic will be reflected as 1500 sessions with a bounce rate of 56.6%. Without the phony data from the spambots, the top level data looks pretty good. But, if you believe the numbers that include the spambot data, you’re likely to try to correct a problem that doesn’t exist.
Referral Spam: These are jerks who bombard your website from a URL they want you to visit. The idea is that if you see a sharp spike in traffic, you’ll want to investigate the source. Once you know where the traffic is coming from, it is very natural to want to check it out.
What’s actually happening is your are being tricked into visiting websites you wouldn’t know about otherwise. Beyond that, these referral spammers screw up your data much like the spambots do. Your traffic will be artificially high, and your bounce rate, time on site and pages per visit will all be wrong.
I’ll touch on filtering Google Analytics in a minute, so here’s a short list of URLs I filter out always.
There are more, but these eight routinely account for 60% to 70% of website visits. Many times I’ve seen referral spam account for virtually all of a website’s traffic.
My clients often think they have high bounce rates and low session durations, but plenty of traffic. So, they pull their hair out tweaking pages and moving content, but it makes no difference. Here’s a real-world example of what’s happening:
Unfiltered Website Traffic Data:
Sessions: 1127
Avg. Session Duration: 00:00:06
Bounce Rate: 88.14%
Filtered Website Traffic Data:
Sessions: 188
Avg. Session Duration: 00:01:54
Bounce Rate: 39.38%
In this example, the client came to me to solve a bounce rate / session duration problem, when in fact, he suffered from weak traffic volume. It was the exact opposite of what he believed. It’s maddening and disheartening, but once we were able to deal with real numbers, we could work on the right things.
Hacking Attempts: Depending on the type of attack, hacking attempts will also skew your data. It should be obvious by now that bogus visits tend to push sessions up and session durations down.
Brute force attacks sometimes result in legitimate traffic not even getting through. What’s happening is the hacker has a network of corrupted computers trying to guess passwords or take advantage of a known exploit.
In some cases, they’ll just hammer your website with thousands of visits a second so no legitimate traffic can get through. I won’t bother with the details right now, but recognize that hacking attempts screw up your data.
It should be obvious, but you can’t ignore hacking attempts. Data and traffic issues aside, given time, a hacker will get through. That never ends well, so if you suspect you are being attacked, call or email us and we’ll help you deal with it.
Internal Traffic: A website that is being actively worked on will skew your number in the opposite direction. Web designers and content curators often spend hours on pages and hop through the website testing user interface changes.
Early on, that may be your only traffic. It might warm your heart to think people are visiting every page on your website an hour and a half at a time, but it’s not really real. Again, filtering is the answer. In this case, you would filter the IP addresses of anyone that actively works on your website.
Also, if your website is WordPress, you can use a plugin to disable Google Analytics tracking code for certain types of users when they’re logged in. If they aren’t logged in, it’ll still mess with your data though, so it is best to filter by IP.
Job Searches: Obviously, legitimate visitors to your careers page are desirable. I mention them here because job searchers are most likely not buying anything. It really depends on your business and the nature of the visit.
It may be that the website visitor arrived as a genuine potential customer. Then, decided to explore career opportunities. In this case, the visit certainly has conversion potential. In our agency, that’s unlikely, so unless we want to assess our recruiting efforts, we filter those visits into another view.
Next, I'll provide details about keyword tracking and tools you can use to evaluate whether or not you are executing an effective Internet marketing strategy. Drop me an email, and I'll be sure to let you know when "Effective Internet Marketing: Part II" is published.
Last month I conducted an email survey asking one simple question: Given the choice, which of the following is more important for your business website? There were only two possible answers: Your website's design, or search engine rankings. Here are the results:
Although the survey was unscientific, the results show that website owners clearly understand the importance of search engine rankings. With few exceptions, I believe search engine rankings are the most urgent factor contributing to business website success. Simply put, if people can't find you, it really doesn't matter how great your website looks. That's not to say website design isn't important. It's vital. However, it is easy to get wrapped up in design and put everything else on hold. Here, we design around search. By that, I mean literally putting ranking factors above design elements and publishing content around specific search terms. We predict visitor volume based on specific keyword rankings and known search volumes. Our goals for design are to provide an elegant, polished, branded experience for users that is lightening fast on any device. That happens to be Google's goal too, so favor is being given to sites that meet these criteria. In many ways, I think it's time to rethink design. In the old days, the goal was to keep the total weight of a webpage under 100K. Even better, under 65K. As broadband became widespread, that kind of went out the window, although I personally never bought into the idea that a page could be as big as you want. With something like 2/3 of Internet searches being conducted on mobile devices, that 100K limit makes a lot of sense. So, while web design is critical, it is important to keep things in perspective. Rankings and user experience are what drive sales. Design complexity is fun, but frequently stands in the way of other critical goals.
I’m tired of dating analogies in Internet marketing. But, when we’re talking about call to action mistakes (CTA mistakes) it is hard to find a better one, so let me get it out of the way. Outside of Vegas, meeting and getting married all at once is a pretty rare thing. Business relationships need to progress too.
With that in mind, I’ve put together a list of 5 call to action mistakes even professional Internet marketers make. In truth, marketers make a lot more than 5 CTA mistakes. The important thing is knowing how your customers progress through the buyer’s journey.
In general, expensive or complex purchases involve a lot of reinforcement. Impulse items, not so much. This list will help you create the perfect call to action.
I often tell clients, “nobody cares about you, or you company.” It’s a harsh statement, so I soften it a bit, but it’s true. Unless you’re Fabio, nobody is going to swoon over your “Click Here” button.
Imagine you’re a guy, and you’re in a bar with 250,000 other guys, and 3 girls, and your goal is to marry one of them. Get the picture? Those are tough odds even for Fabio. For you to reach your goal, the following has to happen.
The whole strategy is wrong. In reality, one of those 250,000 other dudes is probably going to kick your ass before you get anywhere near the girls. That’s the Internet.
Given the amount of work and planning it takes to get noticed online… Let me put it this way. Say you do get one of the girls to talk to you. It’s your big chance. All you need is a way to contact her later. So…
You hand her a page long form to fill out. It asks for her address, phone number, likes and dislikes, email address, where she works, and requires that she write in long form her favorite things about you.
When your position is weak, you can’t make demands. Keep your forms short and only require the information you absolutely need. Often, just an email address is enough to open the door to a second contact.
In business, we set goals all the time. Popular favorites include sales goals, revenue goals, cost reductions, walk-ins—it could be anything that’s important to a particular business. Most business owners are pretty good at keeping track of the big stuff, i.e. money in, money out.
Probably the most measurable part of any business is what happens online. Google Analytics, at the very least, will tell you all about where your visitors come from, what pages they visit, how much time they spend on them, what device they’re using to view your website and thousands of other details.
Virtually everything about your website is knowable, so it’s a pretty short leap to say, “Our conversion rate is 1%, so let’s get that up to 3%.” There are many ways to increase website conversions, but it starts with two things:
Yet, the vast majority of business owners pay almost no attention to what happens online. My next article is going to be about what online metrics are most important to business owners. Drop me an email (joe@ocgcreative.com) and I’ll send you a link when I publish it.
There’s a common misconception that you need to place calls to action all over your website. It isn’t true. While you absolutely should make it clear how to contact you from anywhere on the site, CTAs are intrusive and expect too much from the visitor.
Look, if the big red “click here” button didn’t work at the top of the page, it won’t work placed 30 more times down the page.
If your landing page strategy requires more than one CTA on a webpage, that’s fine as long as your page was well planned. In general, if your call to action is supported with factual, believable, relevant content that is bathed in sincerity, you’ll convert at least some visitors.
Ultimately, CTA placement should be tested. Until it is proven that one CTA location outperforms another, place a simple form near your most compelling content—usually near the top of the page. Leave it there and count conversions for the first thousand or so visits before testing another location.
It’s a very unscientific test, but it will help you get your brain into a testing and measuring mode. It also starts to lay a foundation for developing good habits as you begin to develop more reliable experiments.
If you read #2, and thought to yourself, “how would I know?” there are two essential tracking tools; Google Analytics and your CRM. Let’s look at Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is by far the most popular web analytics tool available. It’s free for all but the largest (by that I mean HUGE) companies, and is simple to set up and use. Chances are you’re using Google Analytics already if you have a website.
You may not know there are conversion tracking tools built in. Essentially, these work by identifying a checkout page or “thank you” page as your “conversion goal.” Every time that page is served, it counts as a conversion. You can track many different conversion points in Google Analytics.
Most of the time, your should use a different page for each conversion path. That way, you’ll better distinguish which results in what. There are many, many sources on the web that provide step-by-step instructions on how to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go into it here.
The second essential conversion tracking tool is your CRM. What, you don’t have or use a CRM? Client relationship management (or is it customer retention management?) should be the center of your universe. By linking all of your online conversions to your CRM, you’ll be able to recall critical details through every stage in the buyer’s journey.
Your business depends on attracting and keeping business. Yet, business owners everywhere store critical client history in their email inboxes. Don’t be one of them!
CRM is so important that it is included in all of our Internet marketing plans. Unfortunately, very few companies use CRM as effectively as they could, but that’s a topic for another day.
Business owners are often mislead into thinking website visitors behave differently than people. As it turns out, most website visitors ARE people. People use the Internet for lots of reasons, but topping the list is to learn things and solve problems.
At the beginning of this article, I said coldly that nobody cares about you or your website. Actually, they don’t trust you either. It should be your burning imperative to build trust. You do that by providing information people believe and can use.
Too often, the call to action is the focal point. Marketing jackasses tell clients, “you need CTAs. It’s all CTAs these days.” WRONG! Your goal should be to make yourself essential by being the trusted source of information.
Prove what you know. Prove that you deliver. If it takes a thousand words, write them. If you suck at writing, have someone write for you.
The key point is if you want people to take an interest in your business, they have to take an interest in you. For that, you have to be interesting and make the extra effort your competitors won’t.
This is hardly an exhaustive list. In truth, the most common CTA mistake is not taking a serious interest in your own conversions. Too often, web related duties are assigned to a nephew or the girl who answers the phone.
As a business owner, the opportunity cost of not having experts manage your online marketing is immense. It’s intangible, though, so you don’t feel it the same as if you are writing checks.
You wouldn’t dream of having a teenage daughter handle your accounting, yet it happens all the time in marketing. Just because Sally Sue likes Facebook doesn’t make her an Internet marketing expert.
Internet marketing (which includes calls to action) is a complex, statistical exercise. Most “marketing” agencies have no clue about how to run a statistically valid test on a CTA. Guessing doesn’t really cut it.
On the other hand, it can be fun, especially when you start getting results. The bottom line is you should embrace the call to action component of your website like you would any important business function. You’ll be surprised how much business your website can generate when you apply effort in the right areas.
CTAs are overall beneficial for a business and are typically associated with landing pages that are intended for your website visitors to perform a specific action. Learn more about the importance of landing pages here.
Blogging on a consistent basis for your business can help boost your overall marketing and SEO efforts. Not to mention—it can be fun! However, if you’re new to blogging, the process can seem daunting. Where do I start? What do you I write about? These are all questions that might run through your mind at the thought of blogging for your company. Aside from being great for SEO, I always look at blogging as a way to take information that's unique to your business and share it with the world. For example, Danielle Litoff, a Doctor of Physical Therapy and Health Coach over at Battle Born Health, blogs monthly about physical therapy and various health related topics. Without the power of blogging, people wouldn’t have access to her years of experience and expertise on a large-scale. Think of it this way, you are the expert in your field, and now you’re able to share valuable information to educate and inform others. If you’re new to blogging, don’t worry—you can start small and build from there. Here’s some tips to help you get you started:
One of the things that business owners get caught up on most is the question, “What am I going to write about?” You'd be surprised by how much information you can share on your blog. That’s why it's a great idea to grab your team and brainstorm topics together. Make a long list, and don't leave anything out. That way, you’ll always have fresh ideas to choose from. If you need inspiration, you can browse other blogs in your industry to see what they’re writing about.
Blogger Tip: If you’re a beginner blogger, I recommend blogging once a week. If that intimidates you, start with a monthly or bi-monthly post and build momentum from there. The key is to pick a consistent schedule and stick to it!
Now that you have your topics picked, it’s time to set a deadline for writing, editing and posting blogs. In the world of writing, it’s absolutely imperative to stay organized and set reasonable deadlines that you can communicate clearly with your team. I promise you that 90% of the battle with writing is staying organized! If your team knows what day their writing is due, it makes the process much less stressful for everyone.
Organization Tip: Keep a digital calendar that can be shared across your team. Writing your personal deadlines on paper also helps keep them sharp in your memory.
List of interesting and engaging topics? Check. Deadlines set? Check. Now, it’s on to making an editorial calendar. Depending on your preference, you can manage your calendar online using a number of tools. Some tools that I like include: Google Calendar and Trello. Or, you can keep it old-school with paper. The most important thing is to keep it up to date and share it with your team. Setting up a google alert on your calendar can help remind you when to start writing posts, so you won’t miss a deadline. Now… it’s off to get some coffee so you can start writing! Happy Blogging!
Ah, that thorny space between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we all try to stick to a diet of salad for the next four weeks while we wait for our bank accounts to refill in time to get the last few gifts we forgot about on Black Friday. On tap this week: Best selling books of 2015, SnapChat for business, wrangling your 2016 email marketing plans into a calendar, a look into OpenTable’s dual-design process, and hot business trends. Hottest selling business books of 2015 NEW YORK TIMES
Evergreen business heavy-hitters Malcom Gladwell (Outliers, Tipping Point) and Tony Robbins (Money: Master the Game) are joined by mid-career authors Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Freakonomics, Think Like a Freak), relative newcomer Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit), and others on this list of the best-selling business books of 2015. What the heck is SnapChat, and how do I use it for business? SMALL BUSINESS TRENDS Just a few short years ago, SnapChat was making headlines as a controversial tool for frisky teenagers and adults who wanted a way to send private content to friends without the risks of exploitation—the content disappears as soon as it’s viewed—that come with other social media outlets. Today, businesses from BuzzFeed to Mashable to Comedy Central are using SnapChat to reach a younger audience, with content that lends itself to SnapChat’s ephemeral quality. Build a killer email marketing calendar for 2016 EMAIL EXPERIENCE COUNCIL Newsletters, promotions, launches, events. New customers, current customers, former customers, possible customers. If you’re a businesses with multi-layered email campaigns, things can get overwhelming when you’re planning for the coming year. The Email Experience Council lays it out for you in this handy guide. Too complicated? Let us build a comprehensive email marketing campaign calendar for you. See how restaurant reservations maestro OpenTable designs its mobile experience for both sides of their marketing coin INVISION We love a good behind-the-scenes look at how today’s most innovative companies are handling their web and app design, digital marketing, brand strategy, content creation, and other components of a successful product. Here, OpenTable opens the doors to its design department to give us a look at how they solve the problem of who to design for when two different market segments use the same app. Srirachi2Go Makes Hot Debut AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION Possibly the only instance of a tiny, empty bottle going viral you’ll ever see. Sriracha2Go pleases hardcore chili sauce fans by providing a portable vehicle for their addiction, and the Internet goes wild.
If you’re doing business in 2015, the term marketing automation has likely made its way into your vernacular—or at least your inbox. But unless you have a comprehensive marketing department, or a service provider who specializes in it, you’re probably not making full use of it as a time-and money-saving tool. If you’re like a lot of small businesses, you may even be fuzzy on exactly what it is. This brief primer is for you. Marketing automation is an umbrella term that refers to the process (and its technologies) of turning prospects into customers in a way that's data-driven and standardized. Marketing campaigns are automated, and usually channeled through email, social media, blogs, and websites. That automation allows your marketing staff to spend fewer resources on moving prospects through the sales channel, while speeding up that process. Data gathered during this process is useful both in the journey to a particular conversion, and for future marketing and even product planning. Automation typically has three components that work together: Intelligence/Analytics At this phase, prospect activities—for instance, who clicked what link in an email, or used a particular search term—are tracked and analyzed, allowing campaigns to be more highly-targeted to a prospect’s interests based on their behavior. Prospect-Campaign Automation Here, prospects are categorized based on the analysis of their interests gathered in the first phase, and then presented with marketing messages and campaigns that target that particular interest. This is where you’ll see marketing components like shopping cart reminders, and those uncanny Facebook ads that seemed to know what you were thinking earlier in the day. Workflow Automation Marketing campaigns activities can be creative and exciting, but they can also be tedious and labor-intensive. Workflow automation allows marketing staff to automate repetitive processes, like campaign budgeting, file approvals, brand asset management, campaign scheduling, and other internal activities. The field of marketing automation isn’t new, but for many years it was used primarily by larger organizations with the budgets, staff, and expertise to purchase and use those tools. In recent years, it has been gaining traction among even small businesses and entrepreneurs, thanks to more accessible and affordable technologies, and an increasing number of digital marketing agencies offering it as a one-stop service.
It’s the first week of December, which means we’re all decking our halls with the hundreds of marketing emails we’ve received in the last week from retailers trying to pull in Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and now even Giving Tuesday dollars. After that annual deluge, it’s tempting to swear off email marketing for the rest of the year. But this is also a time when consumers are particularly open to and appreciative of non-selling messages, which means you have a chance to do some feel-good branding work to set the stage for 2016. Here are four merry ways to make sure your holiday greeting is the one your subscribers remember: Personalize the subject line Using your subscriber’s name in the subject line can increase open rates by as much as 41%. This may seem too easy, but personalization is still the leader when it comes to getting subscriber attention long enough to get that coveted click. When it comes to email marketing, regardless of it being the holiday season, it is important to make your opening line shine. Pay special attention to your opening line, not just because we have ever-shortening attention spans, but because most email programs display the first line of your email in the inbox view. Do it right—with clear, evocative language that hints at what’s inside—and your subscriber will be more likely to open it. Use a custom, branded graphic or illustration This is your chance to show your subscribers that you’re more than just a shopping cart, or bullet list of services. Put your graphics team to work on a custom e-card design for your subscribers that captures the essence of your brand. Take it further and spin your brand into a traditional holiday scene: Use your logo as the star on the Christmas tree, use your brand colors in place of the typical red and green, or place your hottest products under the tree. Keep it original, genuine, and focused on the customer Done well, even a simple, text-only message that comes from the heart of your business can plant the seeds that grow into future sales. Let your audience know they’re important to you, and that you’re reflecting on the prior year with gratitude. Above all, thank your subscribers for being subscribers, your customers for their business, and if you can, give them a sneak peek at some things you’ve got planned for the new year. Happy Branding!
