Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Turkeys are thawing, pies are baking, people are traveling and it is a time to be thankful. Thankful for health, family, friends and everything else in your world. So how about a little time to reflect on your internet marketing strategy and how well you are doing! Grab a cup of cider and let’s talk about some changes in your marketing that you should be proud of!

7 Changes in Your Internet Marketing That You Should Be Thankful For

1. Increased site traffic – This is s big one! Compare your website visits from last year to this year. Are they up? Then you should be thankful! That means more people are searching for you, coming to your site from social media, reacting to traditional marketing campaigns and, all-in-all, experiencing your company and wanting to learn more.
2. Blog subscribers – If you have a blog, how many more subscribers have you got over the last year? I think many of us will see that more people are subscribing to our blog. Check your RSS counts and the number of people who signed up to have your blog sent to their email. If you have more subscribers this year than last that means people like what you have to say and they are finding it valuable.
3. Social Media Presence – Take a few minutes to appreciate any positive changes you see in your social media presence. Are your pages getting more subscribers? Are people interacting with your content more on social networks? Are you getting more inbound traffic to your site from social media sites? Social media is where your next customers and your current customers already are. You should be proud that you are engaging with them and that you can see results from the time and effort you are putting in.
4. Lower bounce rate – Your bounce rate tells you the number of people that came to your site and left right away. If your bounce rate is lowering it is a good indicator that you are being found for the right search terms, you are providing the information people are looking for and that people find your website engaging. Those are all good things to be striving for with your website content.
5. Mobile traffic – We have been talking a lot about mobile and that is because more and more people are accessing the web on-the-go from their smartphones. Hopefully by now you have addressed how your site looks in mobile browsers and fixed any snafus you came across. Now that your site is tuned up for mobile visitors, you should notice more engagement from your mobile site visitors!
6. Increased pages per visit – Take stock of the stickiness of your site. Once people come to your site, see if they are sticking around to get more information. See if a person who lands on your products pages ends up reading a few blog posts or poking around in your About Us section.
7. Goal completions – Creating goals for your site makes analyzing trends on your website easy to get in a moments notice. Set up goals for clear paths and conversions you hope you are getting from your site visitors. Adding a value to those conversions also helps you value to those web visits. More goal completions mean your site is performing the way you had hoped and you should be especially thankful for that!

So this holiday when we are thankful for all we have we should spend a little time being thankful for what we have accomplished with our hard work. By regularly maintaining your website you will see that the conversions, inbound traffic and stickiness of your site continues to grow.

Are there any other internet marketing efforts you are extra proud of this Thanksgiving? Did you close more business from LinkedIn? Did you start a blog? Have you picked away at an editorial calendar that helped you organize your content? Tell us we would love to hear what has worked for you this year!

A couple of months ago we posted about authorship markup and what it means to B2Bs. When you are searching online for something, a particular author can be attributed to their published content. The title of the content shows up, along with the link, date, and meta description just like the other search results but what makes it stand out is the inclusion of the author’s name and photo.

A person is more likely to end up clicking on a search result that has an image, especially if they recognize the person. Not only will this attract more people to click on the results it will also give that author more authority compared to the other results on that page.

New and Improved Look!

Authorship just got better.

We had given instructions in the previous post about how to go about implementing authorship markup with your content. But Google just made this so much easier for us to link ourselves to the content that we publish around the web.

The idea behind simplifying this process is that, in many cases, our email address is associated with the content that gets published. What Google did was allow you to verify your email address in your Google+ profile so that any content you write that is also associated with that email address gets attributed back to you as the author. Genius! (And so much easier/quicker than before!)

Check out this blog posted by Google that explains step-by-step how to set up authorship using just your email. In addition to simplifying the process they also explained that they have improved the look of your authorship. Now, the authorship includes your Circle Count, an option to “Add to Circles,” and Comments.

These updates will eventually change the way we search. We will be more likely to interact with content published by someone we recognize or that a friend has recommended. The additional author information makes us feel that the content is more reputable than the others which makes us value and trust that content over other content that isn’t attributed to the author.

Yesterday I spoke to the Mid-Maine Chamber about Social Media for Business and I am putting the finishing touches on my Measuring Social Media presentation for Social Media FTW. Needless to say, I have been thinking a lot about measuring social media, web marketing and even SEO.

Before working at Hall, I worked for a large radio station group. Before the radio station, I worked for a small magazine. In those years of experience I don’t remember clients or advertisers asking for the ROI of their ad. It was just something they did. In the case of radio, they usually were happiest when someone came into their store and said ‘I heard your ad on the radio’.

So why the demand now on ROI for online marketing? I have a few ideas but I will stick to the point – Online marketing is more measurable than any other kind of marketing.

I am a numbers girl. I like them. I could drown in them and with online marketing you have more numbers than you know what to do with.

With web advertising, you can see exactly how many people clicked on your link, went to your landing page or converted on your site.

With SEO, you can see how many people searched for you, whether your ranking for key search terms rises or drops, how much of your website traffic comes from search engines, how many people are linking to your website and so much more.

Social media, the belle of the ball, is being falsely accused of being unmeasurable. There are lots of key data points you can measure in social media.

• Traffic to your site data
• Fan/Follower data
• How often people interact with your content
• How well some content performs over others

So where is all the worry coming from? These days we need to justify our cost and spend with actual results and not just hope. Find the data points that you feel are important to show success and start measuring!

Photo credit:

This week we had a great webinar with a record number of attendees. I was surprised… I thought the day after a holiday would surely be slow but we had a great turnout for our Using Analytics to Measure Website Engagement webinar (slides are at the end of this post).

One of the questions we got during the webinar, I actually got at a meeting last week too so I thought I would explain it here.

As you know Google Analytics is a popular, powerful, free tool to see how your website is performing. If you want to drill down to how a single page is performing and gather information on it follow these simple steps after you are logged into your Google Analytics account:

1. Specify the date range you wish to analyze.
   
2. Go to Content in the left hand navigation and find the page you are looking for in either Top Content or Content by Title.
3. Select the page you are interested in by clicking on the link in Google Analytics
   
4. You should now find yourself on the analytics for just that single page.
   From here you can look deeper into:
   • Navigation Summary
   • Entrance Path
   • Entrance Sources and
   • Entrance Keywords

   

With all that information you should be able to make some easy assessments of how this page is doing compared to other pages, how people got there, what they did after and if this content is what they were looking for.

Another question we got was about determining what your Bounce Rate is and what web visits count as a ‘bounce’. Jenike actually wrote a post about that recently so I thought I would re-share that link her as well: What does your bounce rate tell you?

Hope those two tips help! Let us know if you have any other Analytics questions!