Chances are, if you’ve got a website, then you have some kind of analytics installed. If not, you should. How are you going to tell where your traffic is coming from and how much of it you are getting?
You’ve also likely heard by now that Google Analytics is free. Indeed it is. Totally. And you can use it to gather all sorts of useful information about your site visitors. But is it enough? Can you survive on Google Analytics alone?
I think for new websites Google Analytics is enough. You really want to see how your site grows over time. But as your website grows and you take on more search traffic from a variety of sources, you probably want to use an alternate analytics services to compare your metrics.
I’m not saying you should replace Google Analytics. You can keep it installed. There’s nothing wrong with it as a service. But there’s no perfect metrics package.
The point really is that you want to corroborate your data, especially the actionable data. By comparing the numbers you get from two or more analytics sources, you ensure that you are getting accurate data. It’s actually more actionable when you can get reports and actionable data from more than one source. Wild fluctuations between the two can be analyzed and judged according to reality and your expectations.
Google Analytics is good, but I wouldn’t rely on it completely forever. Your SEO is more important than that.
It used to be that all you had to think about when building your landing pages was how to optimize your titles and headlines, images through alt tags, keyword usage, and a having strong call to action. Is that all you have to think about today or is there more to it now?
I think that landing page optimization has changed and primarily it has changed because users are more savvy now than they used to be.
For sure, Internet users overall care more about design and layout today than they used to. At one time an ugly landing page could still make money, but because most niches now are embattled in some pretty stiff competition, if your web pages don’t meet a certain design standard, then your competition is going to win. Users will bounce from an ugly site to a more attractive site and make a purchase there even if your product is better.
For that reason, web design is much more important today. You want your site to be optimized well and have a strong call to action, but you want it to be beautiful too.
Aside from that, you also want to pay much more attention to metrics. What are you measuring, and are you sure you’re measuring the right things?
For starters, you should know how much of your traffic is converting. You should also measure your social signals, e-mail opt-ins, and anything else that could potentially lead to a conversion. You have to know what web design elements are working for you and eliminate any that aren’t. This often requires A/B testing or multivariate testing in some form.
By testing your landing pages for better optimization and conversion you signal to the world, and your in-house team, that you are serious about building your brand. It all starts with effective web design.
What is the most popular social media website for business-to-business marketing? If you guessed Twitter, then you’d be right. But which social media site actually delivers more leads? According to Mediabistro, that would be LinkedIn.
Big surprise?
The sad part is most small businesses aren’t using any kind of social media measurement tool, so how would they know where the majority of their leads are coming from? Twitter might be more popular, and easier to use. But it isn’t more lucrative. The ROI is actually coming from the social media site that specializes in B2B networking.
But LinkedIn doesn’t just beat Twitter for lead generation. It beats ALL social media websites. Even blogging.
While most small businesses are using social media and have a strategy for it, most of them also don’t use any kind of social media metrics. That brings to mind an age-old question: If you aren’t measuring it, how can you change it?
Businesses who do business with other businesses need to figure out how to measure their social media marketing campaigns. And it helps if you use the social networks that your target audience is using. If you are targeting consumers, that might be Facebook or Twitter. If you are targeting other businesses, it is more than likely LinkedIn.
One thing is for sure – we live in a social media age. But don’t just do it because your competition is doing it. Doing it because it is right for your business.
Phone call tracking is one of the useful metrics for companies who want, and need, a phone number on their website. You’ve spent a lot of money on that website. Wouldn’t you like to know if it’s working for you?
With phone call tracking, you can track your incoming phone calls no matter where they come from. You’ll never miss another phone call. You can block the calls you don’t want to get. And you can calculate your ROI, record your phone calls, and track local as well as international calls. All at no additional cost to you.
Never wonder how effective your Internet marketing campaign was ever again. Whether you want to implement a PPC campaign, a social media campaign, or a video marketing campaign, you can track your incoming phone calls.
Inbound call tracking allows you to measure the results of your Internet marketing campaigns and determine if they are successful or not. If your marketing efforts succeed, then you can re-run them another time. Or learn from your mistakes.
Try inbound phone call tracking today. Use an 800 number and measure your total ROI so that your online marketing efforts can be more effective.
It’s funny, but if you go to many marketing conferences or read marketing blogs, then you’ll soon find out there is no real consensus among online marketers about what makes for a good social media metric. Some marketers talk about “return on influence” while others talk about “reach.” And others don’t have a clue. But what’s really important?
Should you measure how many Likes you have? What about Retweets? Is it important to keep an eye on the number of shares or followers you’ve acquired?
While it might be nice to see that you have ten thousand followers, it doesn’t really make much sense to pat yourself on the back if none of those followers translate into sales. The only real metric you should be concerned about is what affects your bottom line. Are your social media efforts leading to an increase in business?
Contrary to what some social media marketers teach, you can measure your effectiveness. But you’ll never figure it out by counting your followers and fans or your retweets. Instead, set concrete goals for your social media marketing and measure your results according to those goals.
For instance, set up a landing page just for your social media marketing efforts and measure how much traffic you drive to that landing page through social media, then see how many conversions you get.
Social media measurement doesn’t have to be hard. It just has to be done.
True reach is a social media metric that many social media marketers use to determine how effective they are being at reaching their audience. There are various ways to determine true reach, but one way that I have seen used by online marketers is to measure your most loyal followers and the level of influence and interaction they have among their followers.
For instance, if you have 500 followers on Twitter and you interact with 10 of those on a regular basis and those 10 followers each have an average of 10 followers, your true reach is 100 (10 X 10).
Let’s expand the numbers a bit: You have 1,000 followers on Twitter and another 2,000 on Facebook. Let’s toss in another 2,000 connections on LinkedIn for a total of 5,000. If you have a network of 20 people across all three social networks who are influenced by your content and those 20 people have an aggregate of 250 followers and fans among them, then your true reach is 270.
So how do you know if your true reach is high or low? You can only measure it against your potential reach (your total number of followers plus their total number). With 5,000 social connections who among them have a total of 250 connections, your potential reach is 5,250.
Your true reach should be somewhere in the range of 25%-50% of your own total follower count. But I wouldn’t get wrapped around the numbers. Keep an eye on them and understand that the true reach metric is simply one of many social media measurements to watch.
Do you understand your website’s traffic metrics? Most websites have particular days of the week, and even hours of the day, when they are at their busiest. A quick look at your website’s stats will tell you which days of the week (and which hours of the day) are most popular. The question is, can you modify your marketing to either take advantage of traffic peaks, or better yet, to drive traffic during the quieter times?
Offline businesses have been doing it for centuries. Making special offers available early in the week when customer traffic is low. Some businesses have even been accused of raising prices during peak periods – gas for our cars is a good example. What about your website – can you do the same?
Many businesses care only about right now. You need to understand your target market first. If you are selling products that are aimed at moms, then you will see a distinct peak at certain times of the day, depending of course on your product. Tweeting a super special at other times of the day may increase your traffic marginally, but if moms just aren’t available then, that special offer will be lost. More importantly, you may upset some customers since they weren’t physically able to take up your offer.
Knowing your traffic highs and lows and knowing your target market’s online habits are important metrics that you may be able to use to better target your marketing. If you use pay-per-click advertising, then you can ensure your ads are only running when your customers are online.
When it comes to blog traffic, publishing blogs shortly before your traffic peak ensures your readers are receiving the very latest. Publish after your traffic peak and regular readers are seeing your content 20-24 hours after publication – that is not ideal if you are looking to start conversations. On topical matters, you could be seen to be publishing stale news.
Understand your traffic metrics and use them to help boost your internet marketing programs.
Metrics are one of the most important aspects to doing business online. If you don’t measure your results then you can’t analyze them or change them. That’s why it is important to measure what you are doing and how it is helping (or hurting) you. This is true in social media as well as search.
One of the things that you want to measure in your social media strategy is your authority ranking. How do you stack up against your competition and how does the social marketplace perceive your brand?
Social media metrics is not about how many followers you can attract. It’s really about how influential you are and how influential your connections are. Here’s what I mean:
Most celebrities who start a Twitter account amass a large number of followers and many of them do it quickly. That doesn’t do much for their social media authority since most of their followers are Twitter users with low authority. That is, those users don’t follow to many other users nor do they have many followers themselves. Likewise, they don’t do much retweeting or posting of updates, which lowers their social authority.
In business, you want to attract followers who are engaging an audience themselves. You don’t want a large number of followers who are just there to listen. You want followers who are engaged. Why? Because they are more likely to retweet your updates and engage in conversation with you as well as about you with their followers.
When you start engaging in social media, pay attention to the authority of your followers. They will lead to increasing your own authority.
Competitive intelligence is one thing. Comparative intelligence is quite another and if you want to really understand what your competition is up to then you need to have a basis for the comparison. There should be a benchmark.
A benchmark is a basis for comparing data. Your benchmark can be anything that makes logical sense, but it is generally one of two things:
- An internal metric or milestone of which you are proud off or that you would like to test
- An industry norm
Which ever benchmark you choose is up to you, but both of them require that you have a set of metrics in place to test your progress. While you are testing your own progress, you should also be testing your competition. How do they measure up against your benchmark? How do they measure up against you? How do you measure up against the benchmark?
These questions can only be answered with a quantifiable metric tool. Competitive intelligence is your best comparative measure.
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2010. Have you established any search engine optimization goals for this year?
It might seem like an academic exercise to establish goals for SEO, but it’s really not. If you want your search engine optimization efforts to be successful then you’ve got to have a plan and you’ve got to work your plan. That requires setting some goals.
The first step to successful goal setting is to analyze where you are now. What got you here? Have you been tracking your progress?
Some of the important SEO metrics to keep an eye on include:
- Search engine saturation
- Number of inbound links
- Keyword rankings
- Page rankings per keyword
- PageRank
- Traffic count (visitors, unique visitors, etc.)
- Bounce rate
These are not the only metrics that are important, of course, but it’s a good start. Figure out where you stand right now then chart a course for where you want to be by year’s end. Goalsetting is not a difficult task, but it is an essential one – even for search engine optimization.
