Archive for Marketing Basics
Using Goals in Google Analytics to Track Conversions
Posted by: | CommentsA simple and free way to track a conversion on your website is to use Google Analytics’ Goals feature.
Scenario:
Imagine that you have just rented an email list from a list broker to promote your latest product. Not only are you interested in knowing how many product sales you make from this email list to your custom landing page, but are also interested in knowing how many people sign up for your e-newsletter after landing on that page. Of course you want to know this so that you can better understand the ROI of this campaign. You could use Google Analytics’ Goals to learn how many landing page visitors also signed-up for your newsletter.
Goals:
A simple non-technical explanation is that Goals count the number of unique pageviews of a specific url that you predetermined during the Goals setup process. When a visitor reaches that predetermined page, Google Analytics increases the numerical count by one for that particular goal. A goal is incremented only once per single visit, so if a visitor during a single visit reaches that predetermined page more than once, the goal count is only incremented one time so as to not inflate your goal count.
During the Goal setup process, you can also specify the urls of pages prior to your Goal page. What this does is enable you to track visitors who go through a specific first page (by selecting the required step checkbox during setup) before they go through a certain set of predefined pages to reach your goal page, commonly known as a Funnel.
An oversimplified but useful explanation of how to use a goal would be if you wanted to learn how many visitors that went through a specific page (let’s call this page.html) went on to sign-up for your email newsletter on a different page. If after they signed up for your newsletter they were redirected to a thank-you-for-registering page or confirmation page, you would set your Goal page as that thank you page (for this example, this page only being reached by filling out the registration form), and your required step first url as page.html that we referred to above. By configuring a Goal like this, you could see how many unique visitors that go through page.html continue on and sign-up for your newsletter.
Now there is a little more to the planning, set-up and preparation than mentioned above in order to help filter out some of the noise to get closer to the true data, but overall set-up of Google Analytics Goals is really a snap. Currently, Google Analytics only allows you to have 4 goals per profile set-up at one time which means you have to plan accordingly.
Tips to Analyzing Poor SEO eCommerce Conversions
Posted by: | CommentsScenario:
Like clockwork as you do every Monday morning at 10am (after you third cup of coffee and a morning snack) you log into your analytics account to view how much organic traffic is being driven in to your eCommerce website. You’re extremely excited when you see that the number of visits from organic search is growing steadily from last week’s numbers, and the week before, and even the week before that. Your hard work optimizing your pages for the SERPs is starting to see results and your boss is going to be thrilled.
But wait, although organic traffic is climbing up, up, and away, week over week, you cross-reference your sales data again and notice that you aren’t getting any more orders with all this new organic traffic that you have been receiving. How can this be? What could be going on?
Investigation Scenario Tip #1: What keywords are they arriving on?
It’s really important to make sure that you are driving the right search engine traffic to your website. Extract from your analytics account what keywords are driving this newly acquired search engine traffic that you are receiving. To oversimplify, if you’re selling toothpaste and your recent boost of traffic is from searches on arts and crafts paste, you’re driving more traffic, but it’s not the right traffic.
Investigation Scenario Tip #2: What pages are they landing on?
If you notice that many of the keywords that are sending organic traffic in to your site are in fact relevant to what you are selling, then you must dig deeper into your analytics and see what pages visitors are landing on when they are searching on those keywords or phrases. Let’s use the toothpaste example again; you sell toothpaste and your visitors are searching on Google with the end goal of purchasing toothpaste. You notice that they are landing on the page about how toothpaste is manufactured. A closer look and you notice that the bounce rate is high and reviewing your page there is no obvious way to know that you actually are selling toothpaste on that page.
In this situation you are getting the visitors that you want to sell to (those searching for a product that you do indeed sell), and they are searching for keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business – but you are not giving the visitor what they are looking for or a clear way to get to what they are looking for when they land on your page.
In Closing
If either of these two scenarios is happening to you then you will need to work on the optimization of your pages from both an SEO perspective of getting the right traffic, and getting the right traffic to the right pages and from a conversion perspective of keeping them in the continuity of continuing on for what they came in to potential purchase with the least amount of effort and friction.
Email Marketers: Be Careful What Your Email From Line Says
Posted by: | CommentsToday I received an email from the Web Marketing Association that made me chuckle when it arrived in my inbox and I read what the From Line stated. Slightly immature on my part, but at the same time a good reminder to always review all aspects of your emails. Although this is their proper name and it did get my attention (and as a matter of fact I forwarded the screenshot for others to look at too), Outlook only displayed a portion of the from line for me.
Click on image below to see full size:
I should note that this was in Microsoft Outlook.
Rethinking your Continue Shopping Button to Increase eCommerce Performance
Posted by: | CommentsThe continue shopping button on your eCommerce website is an incredibly important feature and its use is many times over looked or under appreciated. Linked from properly it can contribute to increased sales or at a minimum reduce online friction for your customers, or on the other end of the spectrum it can drive your visitors away to your competitor’s website. How so? Imagine this real life scenario:
You are at your favorite brick and mortar store, you navigate the aisles looking for the first item on your list to purchase, you see it in all its glory on the shelf, you smile and reach out to pick it up and place it in your shopping cart-ah that was easy. But now you’re ready to find the next item on your list so you decide to continue shopping…but wait, POOF, suddenly you immediately placed at the entrance of the store again. You now have to navigate through the entire store again to find your next item. You find it, this time you’re not smiling, you place it in your cart, and you’re ready to get your next item. Again, POOF, you’re back at the entrance of the store.
How long would you be willing to go through this scenario – would you quit after the first time you were sent back to the entrance of the store? Would you rethink visiting the store next time you have to go? Would you purchase the item that you have already have in your shopping cart but no way even attempt to get the other items you need?
This scenario happens over and over again when you link your continue shopping button to your home page. The user adds the first item to their shopping cart, they are presented with a continue shopping button, they decide to look around more, but where you link this button to can decide how their experience will fair.
Link from the continue shopping button properly and truthfully the user may never consciously even notice (however, their actions will display that they subconsciously do), but link from it incorrectly and you could hurt the chance for an increased order size, lose the order totally, or even possibly lose the customer.
So where can you link to from it? You can link back to the page they were on when they chose the item they added to the cart. You could give them a few choices of where they want to go such as the page they were previously on (the product page); the category listings page, and here even the home page. Some sites even use an AJAX pop-up letting the customer know that the item is in their shopping cart – in this scenario the customer doesn’t even have to leave the product page they are on. Using this presentation style you could still even present the customer with multiple options to choose where they want to go next.
Now you know why where you link to from your continue shopping button can mean so much to your eCommerce websites performance and to your wallet.
Blogging Optimization Best Practices?
Posted by: | CommentsMost likely you have a blog or have thought about creating a blog for your business. There is minimal financial cost involved in starting a blog if you don’t have access to a lot of capital, but the time and thought investment can be equally as “expensive” as other marketing objectives if not more so. Either way, you might learn a thing or two from the top audience acquiring and retaining blogs in the blogosphere if you are trying to create a profitable business blog.
Technorati, the leading blog search engine, recently completed their 2008 State of the Blogosphere report which has been released annually since 2004 reporting on their analysis on the trends of blogging.
The 2008 report consists of the who, the what, and the how of blogging; blogging for profit; and the brands entering the blogosphere.
In The How of Blogging section of their 2008 State of the Blogosphere they nicely break down what the top bloggers are doing compared to their blogging counterparts based on Technorati indexing data.
Audience Building Strategies – listing, commenting, linking, and tagging.
“Top audience-building strategies include: listing their blog on Technorati and Google, commenting or linking to other blogs, and tagging blog posts so that they are more easily searchable. Active bloggers have learned a variety of techniques for attracting visitors to their blog, conducting an average of five different activities to attract visitors. 28% do at least seven activities.
Posting -The top blogs post daily and post multiple times per day.
“Technorati Top 100 bloggers are twice as likely to post ten or more time daily compared to the next 500, and 14 times as likely than the next 5000. Looking again at Technorati’s tracking data shows how often the Top 100 bloggers post each day compared to the next 500 and the next 5000. The Technorati Top 100 are prolific, with 43% posting ten times per day or more often. Only 8% post once a day or less frequently, compared to 13% of the next 500 bloggers, and 22% of the next 5000 bloggers.”
Linking Strategy – The top blogs consistently link from their website to other blogs.
“Bloggers are also adept at linking to and from other sites – they have a median of 29 links from their blog to other web sites (with a mean of 3400), and a median of 30 links from other web sites to their blog (with a mean of 4800).”
Reader Loyalty – The top blogs actively pursue ways to create reader loyalty.
“To build loyalty with readers, bloggers create events for their readership. In order to retain visitors to their blogs, sophisticated bloggers are creating readership events.”
In Conclusion – Should you adopt ALL of these blogging strategies?
Although these may sound like good ideas or no-brainers, are these strategies the right choice for your blog? Technorati has an obviously large user base, but at the same time they are also a “technically advanced” audience. The average consumer, be it B2B or B2C doesn’t visit their site or possibly even know who they are.
Does your audience need 5 posts per day, or will it annoy them enough that they delete you from their RSS feed or stop reading your blog. Is your blog’s goal to convert visitors to purchase your products, think of you as a thought leader, or to increase page views so that you can sell more ads or increase your advertising rates? These are three totally different strategies that require strategic planning that comes from different angles. As with anything in internet marketing optimization, no one strategy is right for every website or blog so you will definitely need to test to uncover what works best for your readers and your blogs goals with the least amount of compromise.
For the business bloggers out there reading this, check out LinkedIn’s corporate blog editor Mario Sundar’s post on 7 Habits of Highly Effective Business Bloggers that are takeaways and a slideshow from a presentation he did with Lionel Menchaca from Dell, Nicki Dugan from Yahoo!, Carolyn Abram from Facebook and Thomas Hoehn from Kodak. This will help get your mind on the right track.
