May 19th, 2009 by Steven Leung

There are many metrics that businesses use to measure the success of their websites.  As we discussed in our last post, almost all standard web analytics deployments will have more than enough reports to keep any busy marketer, business owner, or executive from their day jobs.

But if the purpose of your website is to generate more business, then your most important metric is your conversion ratio.  The first step to getting your conversion ratio is to define your goal: what are you trying to get your visitors to do?

The visitors who succeed in doing so are called conversions.  And your conversion ratio is the percentage of your visitors who convert.  The reason why I used the word “succeed” above is because you might have visitors who wanted — and, in fact, tried their best — to convert, but didn’t or couldn’t.

There are the websites that literally dare you to buy something by requiring you to fill out a sign-up form before putting an item in your shopping cart.  There are the websites where the contact form is temporarily broken and there isn’t a phone number as backup.  I’ve even seen business websites without contact information.

Most sites have a more subtle issue: they don’t clearly communicate a mutually beneficial offer to their visitors.  This offer is the call-to-action, and it encourages visitors to convert.  Your call-to-action should be easy to measure and appropriate for a person surfing the web.  If your website isn’t generating as much business as you’d hoped, you may want to understand common reasons why some calls-to-action don’t work.

The easiest way to understand how your visitors see your call-to-action today is to work backwards.  Start from what you consider success, whether it’s filling out a contact form, making a purchase, entering a promotional code, etc.  Then map how a visitor might be instructed to get there and trace how a visitor might have seen those instructions.  Many site owners find it’s not as easy to convert as they’d envisioned.

Conversions don’t have to happen on the web.  Many times, you want to get a phone call.  The main issue with getting calls is that they aren’t as easily tracked as web conversions.  After all, most people put their main business phone number on their site.  How can you tell where your caller got your number?

As part of any good integrated marketing campaign, it’s a best practice to have a separate phone number for whatever initiatives you run.  The best part is that you can bypass the phone company altogether and get a forwarding phone number for a nominal cost.

It’s easy to see how the Internet has become more ingrained into business.  Over the next few articles, we’ll discuss integrated marketing techniques that combine the immediacy and measureability of the Internet with social and traditional media.  Our next blog post talks about how to create websites that already have communication mechanisms with Google and other websites built-in.

May 15th, 2009 by Steven Leung

Now that we’ve talked about the importance of using the right metrics, we can move on to what metrics you should use for measuring the success of your online marketing campaigns.

There are literally hundreds of statistics that you can gather and analyze.  But not all of them are a wise use of your resources.  We’ll look at the most popular metrics and show how they’ve evolved over the years to be a concise measurement of the success of your web presence.

Hits. In the 90’s, the most prominent measurement was hits but that was widely and quickly discredited because one person loading one web page will almost always generate more than one hit.  That one person visiting one web page create a hit for that page plus every image loaded on that page.

Page Views. When laypeople say hit in this day and age, they mean a page view.  Page views are a double-edged statistic.  One the one hand, more page views can mean a reader is interested in your site.  On the other, it could mean they’re lost and can’t find what they’re looking for.

It also begs the question, would you rather have a reader look at a hundred pages on your site and leave, or look at one page and become a customer?  For business sites, the answer is always the same.

Time on Site. The same goes for the time a person spends on your site.  Would you rather have a user spend 10 minutes on your site and leave, or 1 minute on your site and contact you?

Unique Visitors. Almost everyone says they want more visitors to their site, though, and estimating unique visitors is today’s most popular measurement of a site’s popularity and success.  And marketers can easily use this metric to measure the popularity of their campaigns.

This metric is useful to a point, but it doesn’t say anything about how well your web presence is bringing your company leads or customers.  After all, most unique visitors aren’t actionable: your sales force can’t contact them since you don’t know who they are.  Most, but not all of them.

Conversion Ratio. You actually do know who some of your unique visitors are.  They converted from being random unique visitors into your leads and customers.  These are people where your website worked, and knowing how many visitors it took to get one lead is the single most important metric for your web presence.

This is called the conversion ratio, and to get more business, you can either increase the number of visitors to your site, or you can increase percentage of people who convert.  The two require different techniques: one for increasing your traffic and another for optimizing your landing pages.

Return on Investment (ROI). The conversion ratio has a direct impact on when you see ROI for the campaign.  At the beginning of the online marketing campaign, you measure ROI by the amount of business you would need to generate in order to pay for the campaign.  Done correctly, a web presence never stops generating new leads or business.

The conversion rate comes into play when accelerating that ROI.  When you know your conversion rate, you can estimate how long it will take to achieve a full return and increase the resources you put into it to accelerate that return.

You can build a referral cycle using referral bonuses and email marketing, which will ramp up your growth as your customer base continues to grow.  As you get more customers, you build a greater referral base that can market for you.

These metrics are important because you can only improve what you can measure.  Getting these statistics isn’t always as easy as it seems because of both technological and human factors.  In our next blog post, we’ll show you ways to get these metrics and some of the traps to look out for.

May 14th, 2009 by Steven Leung

In creating integrated marketing campaigns, or any company initiative, it’s essential to choose the right metrics so that how you’re measuring your success coincides with reality.  Here’s an example of how a company chose a metric that was both a cause and a symptom of a very large problem to come.

Over a decade ago, I had the opportunity to talk with the world’s largest technology company at the time about their hard drive business.  One of the managers there talked about how they were a metrics-driven organization and how they measured productivity.  He went on to talk about how every one of their programmers was rated based on the amount of code they produced.

That code controls how and how well the hard drive works, and it’s stored in memory that’s purchased and built into the drive.  The more memory you need to buy, the more expensive your COGS.

Code is like writing.  You can write either “six words to convey an idea” or “a long missive that meanders around the point you’re trying to make until you’ve finally communicated the gist of what you’re trying to say”.

The second phrase is four times more expensive than the first, but gets you a higher rating.  Basically, their way of measuring how successful their programmers were caused their manufacturing costs to rise in the same way.

What happened to them?  In 2002, the company sold the division, suffering 1,500 layoffs and a $2 billion charge in the process, including those “related to productivity initiatives”.

So what are the right metrics to use for measuring the success of your integrated marketing campaigns?  That’s the subject of our next blog post.

October 5th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• Understanding the goals behind your web presence
• What makes a web presence successful
• Investing vs. advertising, and doing both at the same time

When I talk with people about their Internet presences — not just their websites but the development of their reputation on the Internet — I almost never talk about the underlying technology first.

To me, it’s more important to understand their underlying goals and what people want to accomplish by establishing a presence online. Their goals usually fall into one of three categories, which help shape the framework of the project and how much potential is has for their businesses.
» Read the rest of this article »