SEO Analytics – Tracking Conversions from Organic Search Engine Traffic

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Most websites nowadays have a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics installed in order to track visitor usage. The majority of these analytics tools provide invaluable data to show webmasters how users reached their website, which pages they spend time looking at, which pages they don’t, how much time they spend on the site, etc. Smart webmasters use this data to constantly improve the bad things on their site to make the user experience that much better for visitors, and as a result, more and more visitors will come to the website. However, since these analytics tools often provide so much data, it is very easy to become overwhelmed and essentially fall victim to “analysis paralysis” since you don’t know exactly what to focus on.

Well here are some analytics metrics which should not be the most important to focus on:

1. Bounce Rate - A lot of online marketers hone in on the “bounce rate” of a particular landing page or keyword. While it is helpful to identify really poorly performing landing pages, for example, if a landing page has a 100% bounce rate for 1,000 unique visitors, then it is likely that page is not generating conversions. If you investigate that page, you might find out that the page is not loading correctly due to a PHP or JavaScript error and thus the user has no option but to abandon the page. However, if all you focus on is the bounce rate, then you lose sight of the big picture. Just because a page has a low bounce rate does not mean it is performing well. For example, you might find that a particular page has a low bounce rate of 30% but that could be because the user did not find what they were looking for and they are looking for the information on some other page on your site.

2. Conversion Rate - while conversions need to be the primary focus of any website, the term “conversion” and “conversion rate” are extremely vague. Put simply, a conversion can be whatever you want it to be. It could be a click of a button or a submission of a 10 page form. So it’s not fair to compare a 30% conversion rate on one site which counts button clicks as conversions versus a 3% conversion rate on a mortgage application submission and then assume the first site is performing 10x as well.

3. Time Spent on Site - Much like bounce rate, just because a user spends a lot of time on your site does not mean your site is performing well. It could mean that a user is looking around for directions to your store, but it’s taking him 10 minutes to find it because your navigation is so poor.

These metrics certainly have their uses, but they should be considered secondary metrics to help you in achieving real online marketing success, which should increasing the number of conversions while decreasing the cost-per-conversion each month.

Sales Tracking Spreadsheet – Excel Template for Tracking Leads

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Most of the websites we have developed over the years for our clients use contact forms to generate leads from the websites. And 99% of those contact forms simply sent an email to a specific email address and that was the end of the tracking pipeline. Some of my more savvy clients used a lead tracking spreadsheet to manage their leads, but even using a spreadsheet is quite a cumbersome and outdated process.

Instead of using an Excel lead tracking spreadsheet for tracking online leads, I am working on a lead tracking and lead management database system for small businesses to easily manage their website inquiries without the need for blowing their budgets on a complicated CRM system or even more advanced tools like a marketing automation system. Most companies that do not already have a CRM most likely are not at the stage of needing a CRM just yet. Obviously, a full-featured CRM makes sense for large or fast-growing companies, but for the most part, a lot of small businesses just want a way to ensure their website contact forms are always working and a place to store these leads. That’s it.

A lead tracking spreadsheet is one way to track leads, but as I said above, spreadsheets most of the time are only accessible on a local computer for one specific user. So the system I am working on will consist of an online database that can be accessible from anywhere by anyone at anytime.

UPDATE - This new lead tracking and management system is called Convertable, and it is ready for Beta users. It is completely free and very easy to use. Please visit Convertable.com to sign up!

Big Data Analytics – What is Big Data Analytics and Why You Should Care

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If you haven’t heard the term “big data” yet, you will very, very soon. Big Data and big data analytics is the latest rage in the enterprise software sector and is poised to grow exponentially over the next 5-10 years as more and more data is being transferred online via cloud-based software platforms and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and more and more data is being captured. It is estimated that over 70% of all of the data on the Internet will be created within the next three years, a mindblowing figure.

What is Big Data?

Big Data is exactly what you probably think it is – so much data is going to be transferred and analyzed that it is going to essentially impossible to make sense of all of it using traditional data warehousing, storage and analysis methods. Databases such as MySQL are great for storing a finite amount of data but when you are capturing several trillions of bytes, you will need something much larger, more powerful and robust like Hadoop.

What is Big Data analytics?

Big Data analytics is also exactly what you probably think it is – it is the ability to analyze massive amounts of data at the top level in order to discover trends and statistics which can also apply at the micro level in order to make critical business decisions. We are still in the infancy of web analytics and business intelligence software so the next 5-10 years are going to be a very exciting time for big data and analytics vendors.

Inbound Marketing Intelligence – How to Track Conversions & Manage Leads from Your Website

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Most websites for businesses either do one or both of the following – 1.) Sell products or services directly through their website (eCommerce) or 2.) Provide information about the services they offer along with a contact form to generate leads from interested prospects. As a web developer for 100s of small businesses over the past eight years, we normally deal with businesses who primarily want to generate leads through their websites. Previously, we would use some open source PHP contact form script that sends an email to the client upon submission and plug that in on their contact page and call it a day. However, as time went on, more and more of our clients were looking for ways to better manage their leads they receive through their website and also wanted to know more about where exactly these leads were generated from.

We initially set up a system to track website leads in Google Analytics, which worked quite well to a degree in that we were finally able to attribute the exact source of each inquiry to each specific lead, but this method still did not address the issue of managing leads. The leads were all just being sent to the clients’ email accounts, and once they started seeing an increase in these leads, they became impossible to manage and keep track of. We were seeing the same problems with our own contact forms.

This is why we have developed a new lead tracking & lead management system as a final solution to generating leads, storing them in a central database where multiple users can access and update them throughout the sales funnel, and of course keep track of where each of these leads came from in order to measure the performance of individual advertising campaigns. We are able to track organic search engine data, pay-per-click campaigns on Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter, social media campaigns such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. as well as other various online advertising campaigns such as banner ads and email marketing newsletters.

If you would like to be one of the privileged few who get to try out our new lead tracking software before we launch it to the public, please head over to Convertable and sign up as a Beta user.

Also, for other inbound marketing and business intelligence news and reviews, check out our new site at Inbound Marketing Intelligence!

Measuring Success of Online Marketing Campaigns

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Measuring Success of Online Marketing Campaigns

Part 1. Google AdWords

It is very easy to get overwhelmed by all of the data that is available in Google AdWords and Google Analytics, and oftentimes it is hard to determine which metrics are the most important to focus on. Below is a list of metrics which we recommend focusing on, in order of importance:

1. Cost-per-Conversion - This is the actual cost you are paying per sale or lead generated by Google AdWords. At the end of the day, this should be the most important number to focus on improving each month since it is essentially the benchmark for determining the actual ROI of your PPC campaigns. The Cost-per-Conversion metric can be used to measure the performance of Campaigns, Ad Groups, Networks, Ads and Keywords in your account. (There are also innumerable advanced ways to segment even further, such as by time of the day or type of device, but I would not recommend digging down to that level until you think you have optimized the five main items listed above first.)

2. Revenue Generated - For ecommerce websites, this is the amount of revenue from online sales generated by the Google AdWords campaigns. For lead generation campaigns, it is very hard to quantify the value of each particular lead since you will need to keep track of the status of the lead through every step of the sales process. However, it is still ideal to set up an estimated value-per-lead just so you can attach some kind of monetary value for each lead generated by the PPC campaigns.

3. Conversion Rate - This is an important metric to keep track of, but it can be a red herring in that it does not exactly mean anything if used by itself. For example, it would be easy to look at an AdWords campaign that has a 50% conversion rate and call it an amazing success, but if you dug into the data and found that the Cost-per-Conversion was five times too high to produce a positive ROI then you would see that the campaign is in fact a huge failure. We definitely still recommend using the Conversion Rate as an important metric to analyze in order to make changes necessary to improve the performance of the campaign, but only if used in tandem with the two metrics listed above.

4. Conversions - This is simply the number of conversions generated. Ideally, this number will continue to increase as you work on improving the performance of the AdWords campaign, but there are likely a number of external factors that must be considered (for example, a mortgage company will always get more leads when mortgage rates are low regardless of how well the PPC campaigns are optimized).

5. Click-Through-Rate - Much like the Conversion Rate, the Click-Through-Rate is an important metric to be aware of but not necessarily the most critical factor to focus on. Typically, if a specific Ad or Keyword has a very low CTR (anything less than 2.00%), then that likely means it is not relevant to the user and you should make changes accordingly to increase the CTR, such as creating a new ad or bidding on more targeted keywords.

6. Quality Score - Google AdWords assigns a “Quality Score” number from 1-10 for each keyword every time your ad is displayed. The Quality Score is an estimate for how relevant and useful your ads, keywords and landing page are to your users. This is important because having a high Quality Score means Google consider your ads, keywords and landing page as being more relevant to their users and thus Google will reward you by displaying your ad in a better position and at a lower Cost-per-Click than other advertisers who have lower Quality Score ratings. The Quality Score is something to keep in mind but again, the most important thing to focus on should be the Cost-per-Conversion. You can read more about how Google calculates the Quality Score by going to http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2454010.

Using the tips listed above to evaluate the success of your Google AdWords pay-per-click campaigns will help ensure that you are not paralyzed by the vast amount of data available to you, most of which is not helpful in reaching your actual business goals.

Integrated ROI – Calculating Return on Investment of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

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Welcome to the all new IntegratedROI.com. We will be providing tools and tips for how to calculate the true return on investment of your online marketing initiatives. One of the hardest things to determine the value of is online leads generated through contact forms on your website. Luckily for you, we have developed an online system to track form leads from the time they are submitted all the way through until the sale is closed. This is oftentimes called “closed-loop marketing” but most CRMs and marketing automation systems are way too complicated and complex for the average small business owner. Our goal is to provide a simple, easy-to-use system that allows you to create a web form with no HTML knowledge and automatically track and update your leads all the way through the sales funnel without any of the unnecessary bells and whistles that other companies have.

Stay tuned for more news soon!