Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Photo credit: Artbandito

Every year Santa makes a list and checks it twice. What is he doing when he checks it multiple times? I think he’s digging deeper into his memory to decide which list each boy and girl will eventually end up on.

Just like when Santa makes “the list” as the first step in assessing the behavior of the children; we look at web analytics to assess the visitors of our website.

It’s easy to see high level data about your website like how many people have visited your site in the past month or what the site’s bounce rate is – but what about their behavior? Google Analytics makes it easier for you to understand the types of people visiting your website using Behavior Reports (Figure 1.1 below).

What can you see in Behavior Reports? What insights can you learn from these reports?

New vs. Returning – This report shows a ratio between the new traffic as compared to the returning traffic to the website in a given time period.

• If you have a high percentage of new traffic that means you’re doing a good job of making your site visible online.
• If it’s low then you’ll want to review things like your SEO, social network profiles, content strategy, and even directory listings to include your URL. You might even want to create a PPC campaign to obtain new traffic.
• If you have a high percentage of returning traffic that means that the content on your site is helpful and people are continuing to return for more. Maybe you have a login section for current customers or a training section that gets a lot of return visitors. If this is the case, make it easy for your returning traffic to find the content they are seeking quickly.
• If your site isn’t getting a lot of return traffic you might was to assess things like your blog or FAQ section. Is there information important enough for people to return back?

Frequency vs. Recency – This report helps indicate how interested people are with the information provided on your website.

• One view displays Counts of Visits (frequency) and the other displays Days Since Last Visits (recency).
• Counts of Visits shows the number of times users have viewed the site in a given time period, how many pages were viewed as compared to the percentage of the total visits.For example (Figure 1.2 below) you can see that 54 visitors have come to the site 9-14 times in the given time period and viewed 129 pages in that time frame. In most cases you’ll notice that those that only visit the site once account for a majority of the visits in a certain time frame. You may notice the counts of visits decrease after 1 and then spike back up at 3 or 7 which might help you understand the research/buying cycle of your audience better.
• Days Since Last Visit shows similar information but you’re looking at how many days lapsed since the previous visit. Many times, if your site gets a high percentage of new traffic most of the visits are coming from people who account for “0 days since last visit” in this report. However, this report will help you understand how often the people that are using your site are returning back for more information. Do you post your blog on the same day each week and people are returning to the site because of that? This can also give you some feedback about offering a promotion or changing certain sections of your site to keep it fresh for users that are returning.

click to enlarge | Figure 1.1

click to enlarge | Figure 1.2

Engagement

• The engagement report is measured by Visit Duration or you can see Page Depth. These are similar to the data you can see in the Overview Report (Avg. Time on Site and Pages/Visit). With this report you can see how engaged your site users are by understanding how long they are spending on your website and how many pages they are viewing each time they visit.
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  click to enlarge

  The Visit Duration report shows the duration in seconds and the respective visits of each time range. This shows you how engaged with the site the users are in relation to the time they are spending on the site. For example (right), you can see that 187 visits occurred where the users stayed on the site between 181 and 600 seconds (3 – 10 minutes). Pay attention to the amount of time that you see users are the most engaged and viewing the most pages; this could be a goal to aspire to for your site. If you notice that people that stay on the site for 181-600 seconds have the highest pageviews (except for 0-10 segment) then look to this as a goal for the site; to have the avg. time on site be 3 minutes.

• You can understand the engagement of the site visitors in a different way by looking at the Page Depth, or how many pages people are visiting when they come to your site. Chances are the highest number will be 1 page and then the traffic will taper off; make sure the traffic doesn’t merely drop off.

Dig Deeper into the Data

These reports are just the tip of the iceberg. You can always learn more about your site’s user behavior by adding second dimensions to the reports. For example, if you’re reviewing new traffic vs. returning traffic you can select “source” as a second dimension. This will break down and show you, of those who came to your site via “Bing” how many were new and how many were returning in a given period. Also, with each report you can add advanced segments to filter the report in order to obtain more granular data. You can always dig a deeper to understand your site traffic behavior better.

Remember, it’s all relative.

You better not pout and you better not cry! There is no ideal number for everyone to try to reach for each of these reports. The key is to understand your site goals and which milestones you should track to make sure you’ll meet your goals. Plus, when it comes down to it the more you learn about your audience the better you can serve them; just like Santa finds out what all the good children want for Christmas.

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Thanksgiving Day, every year the same two local radio stations drop their format and go straight to 24/7 Christmas music. Some will cry it is too much. Some will say it is overkill. But… when you feel that twinge of holiday spirit creep in your bones, you know what channels you will be turning the dial to.

So here WE are again for another year to do our Advent Blog schedule – to be consistent. People like consistency. They like knowing what they are going to get. Throughout the year people bring up this series to me. They like it. We like doing it so it is a win-win.

Of course there is always room to surprise people but being dependable for what people want is one of the best things you can do for your business and your marketing messages.

Three places where being consistent will help your internet marketing

1. Keep your website consistent with your industry and with websites in general – Many creatives will disagree with me here but this really depends on your business. If you are in the B2B industry, people are coming to your site to research your company and your services, they are coming for information and they are coming to gather data so they can make a buying decision. While they are collecting that information, they don’t want to learn how to use your website. There are things they have become dependent on like easy to use navigation, an About Us page, product pages etc.
2. Keep your messaging and tone consistent – Make sure the content on your website, blog and social media profiles are consistent. Although many blogs and social media profiles often have a more personal tone, don’t let it be the exact opposite of your company site. A person may get to know you through your social media accounts first and you don’t want them to feel like they got duped when they visit your site.
3. Keep the your posting schedule consistent – If you have an email newsletter, blog or social media profiles you should try to keep how often you post to them somewhat regular. There is something dependable about knowing I am getting a newsletter each week or month. A blog or social media site that sits stagnant for months and then posts in bursts is hard to get any traction on. Space your posting out and make yourself accountable to get things out on a regular basis.

And so beings our consistent routine with the 2011 Advent Schedule! Enjoy!

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.

After starting your paid search campaign you’re going to start collecting data. Here’s a simple breakdown of the data you’ll be looking at each day as you monitor and optimize your PPC campaign.

Clicks – This is the number of times someone has seen your ad show up in a search result and have clicked on the ad.

Impressions – How many times the ad has actually shown up for a search; even if a user doesn’t click on it.

CTR – Also known as “click-through rate” this number is the number of clicks divided by impressions. It’s a percentage of the overall clicks that actually get through to the website based on impressions. If your ad is getting a lot of impressions and not that many clicks then you might want to review your ad copy or think about using a different keyword.

Average CPC – CPC stands for “cost-per-click” and this number is basically telling you about how much you are paying each time someone clicks on your ads. Remember that some keywords are more expensive than others, however, there are ways to help reduce how much you pay for clicks by optimizing your ads.

Cost – The total cost you are paying for the campaign (all the clicks’ cost added together).

Average Position – The paid ads show up in Google on the right sidebar, this piece of information tells you what position (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.) it shows up on the page.

Conversion – When you set up your paid search campaigns you can also set up a way to track conversions. This is how many times the users clicks on the ads, gets to your page, and converts.

Cost per Conversion – This is the total cost of the ads divided by the number of conversions. You can think of this number as the amount of money you are paying for whatever the conversion means to your business – most likely a lead.

Conversion Rate – Another mathematical equation – the conversion rate is just the number of conversions divided by the number of clicks.

There, now you know what kind of data you’re dealing with – what should your goals be?

1. First things first, work on getting a good quality score. This will help improve all aspects of your campaign.
2. Improve your conversion rate. There’s no magic number for the “ideal” conversion rate, the key here is to improve on what you currently have.
3. Reduce your CPC. Are you paying too much for keywords? Investigate the costs for each. Can you group them differently to make the campaign more effective?

Want more information about running your paid search campaigns?

• Read more blog posts about PPC
• Check out a webinar about generating sales with PPC
• Optimize your campaign – dayparting and day of the week
• PPC performance tips
• The basics – the anatomy of a PPC campaign