We wish to welcome the continuation of uccpshalomcenter.com.ph to the Infinity Domain Hosting family.
How to Use Web Analytics to Grow Your Business
The referring website and page
The search engine and keyword used
Their location
Their operating system, browser and monitor resolution
Their network
Duration of visit (time on site)
Pages per visit (number of pages viewed)
Bounce rate (percentage of users who viewed only one page before leaving)
Conversion rate (percentage of users who completed a preset task)
If you own a business, chances are you do. But don't pat yourself on the back too quickly.
By now it's widely-accepted that if you have a business card you should probably have a website. It doesn't matter what your company is selling - a website, however modest, has become a standard.
The real question is: what is your website doing for your business? As a web marketer I often put this question to the business owners I meet. Not because I'm trying to lead into my sales pitch, but because I'm intrigued to hear the answer.
Most people get a certain "deer in the headlights" look in their eyes when I ask this question. To be fair, it's not a question we're used to hearing. But that's not all that's going on here.
Traditional advertising mediums - print, TV, radio, etc - are notoriously difficult to track. Sure, you'll know how often the phone is ringing or how many people come in with a coupon clipped from the Sunday paper, but what you don't know is how many people saw/heard your ad and whether they were interested, oblivious or, worse, annoyed.
Business owners are used to this. We all know we need to advertise - it's a necessary cost of doing business - so we buy that half-page ad in the Yellow Pages or the local newspaper, we sponsor an event or a little league team, we have a radio commercial written (maybe even with a jingle) and we hope for the best.
This has been a given in marketing since the beginning. But the web, and analytics, changed the game.
So how should you be using your web analytics to grow your audience, and your business, online? Track Everything
With web analytics on your site you can track:
Where your traffic is coming from by
Your website visitors by
Visitor behavior and actions by
If you're planning on doing any kind of web marketing, be it through search engines, email or advertising on other websites, information on your past and current traffic is crucial. Not to mention you'll want analytics in place so you can properly track the new traffic your promotions will, hopefully, bring in.
Tie Your Traffic Sources to Your Users' Actions
When looking at your analytics data the behavior and action metrics mean little by themselves. If the bounce rate of your site overall is 75%, what does that tell you? Well, this is a pretty high bounce rate - you should at least be shooting to have a bounce rate lower than 50%. But does this tell you exactly what is wrong?
Likewise, if you have secured advertising or a listing on another website, the number of visits coming in from that site only gives you part of the picture.
Tying your bounce rate to a specific traffic source, on the other hand, can tell you a lot. If a given traffic source is generating a bounce rate of 85% or more, for example, this indicates that users are not being satisfied. There are a few possibilities as to why: The users may not be well-qualified - or the site where you are listed or advertising might not have the best audience for your content/offer. The listing/ad may promise something that the entry page does not live up to (or, at least, the promise is difficult to locate once the user arrives at your site). Your site is simply not usable, is unattractive or unprofessional, causing users to leave immediately (and most don't come back) Your users are not connecting with your content/offer. There are other possibilities, but you'll want to find the most likely answer here - and try to fix it. Then, using the same metrics (traffic source + bounce rate), you can see whether things improve moving forward.
Using metrics like these you can also get a sense of which advertisements are bringing you a return on your investment and which aren't. With goal tracking in Google Analytics, for example, a conversion rate is added to just about every traffic metric, including referring websites. If you're finding that a website is sending you plenty of traffic but none of it is converting, re-examine the referring website's audience, how your site is being presented and the user's experience when they click through.
The Point
Your website is more than a brochure. It's an interactive tool for your users. The only true way to find out how they're using it (or not using it) is to get web analytics set up properly on your website (including setting goal points to track conversions).
And the best way to improve your website in the aim of building your business is to use the information your web analytics give you.
The age of blind advertising - of throwing money at the problem and hoping for the best - is dead.
If you aren't tracking everything, taking time on a regular basis to understand what the data reveals about your users and adjusting your efforts based on this information, you're missing an opportunity to optimize your advertising and get a better return on your budget.
In this economy, is that something you can afford?
By Mike Tekula (c) 2009
We wish to welcome the continuation of kantarworldpanel.com.ph to the Infinity Domain Hosting family!
In Marketing, Perception Is Everything
In Marketing, Perception Is Everything
Influence...Not so much
The mind is a deeply complex organ, at times influenced by small, seemingly trivial things, and at others closed off to any external stimuli. Think of it as an onion, with belief at the center and perception at the outermost layer. Subtle stimuli can alter perception not just more easily than they can belief, but alsocan alter perception in nearly imperceptible ways, as air overtime hardens and dries the top layer, not affecting the layer beneath.
Case in point: Associations with brand logos. No core belief is needed to deal with company logos and associations made with them, thus those associations are more easily influenced. A recent study showed people subliminally exposed to Apple's logo were more creative with their tasks than people exposed to IBM's.
Likewise, as posted on the Today show's website, it's easy to send subtle cues to other people physically in order to get them to associate certain positive traits in their mind. For example: having a picture of a dog on your desk to convey loyalty or wearing a black suit to convey authority. This is what is also referred to as "the power of suggestion."
In short, perception is easily manipulated because people are less likely to guard their perceptions than their beliefs. Changing someone's faith, on the other hand, would be a much more difficult task, as belief is protected at the center of the onion.
Understanding this relationship is important when considering the implications of other studies and how those implications apply to marketing efforts. More than one piece of research has found, for example, that people are more likely to be influenced by friends and families than they are an A-list blogger. Part of that rests with the belief that someone is trustworthy versus the perception that someone is trustworthy. Some, though, take that information and jump to the conclusion that blogger endorsements and celebrity endorsements are over-credited for effectiveness.
The underlying assumption is that it all comes down to how much trust people put into a recommendation. People these days are much less likely to put trust in a celebrity they know is paid to say something. That distrust could extend to bloggers as well, either for that reason, or lack of certainty of the person's identity (especially in light of recent hoaxes), or a myriad other reasons not to trust a stranger.
So, a consumer in the market for an automobile is more likely to trust a friend or relative, especially one with long-term brand experience than a blogger in another state. Yeah, well, when you put it that way, it's not such a surprise, is it?
Veteran communications specialist Shel Holtz doesn't think it should be shocking, either, and criticizes competing viewpoints that trust is the most important metric in marketing:
"Whatever happened to the importance of building awareness?" asks Holtz at his blog. "While the influential bloggers-the so-called 'A-listers'-may not have influence, they do have eyeballs. They are A-listers, after all, because people read them. I may have greater trust in my friend in the next cube, but where did he hear about it? And if he heard about it from a trusted friend or family member, they read about it from a source that gets broad distrtibution [sic]. The information has to start somewhere."
- Jason Lee Miller
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Find us on
