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 18th, 2009 by Steven Leung

Integrated marketing activities, by definition, require coordination across a company’s lines of business.  But sometimes the metrics data needed to coordinate and optimize these campaigns is managed by another department.

The most common example is web analytics, which is often managed by IT in mid-sized companies.  IT departments typically have a number of priorities that range from thankless basics like ensuring running email and network security to coordinating and executing the technical requirements of product and marketing initiatives.

Most companies track web metrics, but if yours doesn’t, you don’t necessarily need to purchase an expensive analytics package then have your IT department install it.  There are many hosted web analytics systems available, like Google Analytics, which are available for free — and have more reports than most marketers and executives have the time or patience to read.

Installation is simple and may not require IT.  It just needs several lines of JavaScript to be added to each page on your site, and this is usually very easy if your site is backed by a content publishing system.  And with these hosted web analytics systems, you don’t need special software or IT intervention to generate reports.

If your IT department manages your site, they might be picky about which system you use.  Should the system require software installation, it means they have to dedicate the resources to learning and maintaining it (i.e. they have to bless it).

With a hosted system, you might encounter resistance because the data is stored by a third-party or because it requires minor modification to the website.  But these generally aren’t showstoppers because of how important it is to measure the success of web initiatives.

It’s so important that in many organizations, web analytics reports are a subject unto themselves.  Creating these reports becomes its own job, with increasingly complex graphs and figures being presented.  It’s very easy to get bogged down in analysis paralysis either sorting through all the different reports, or spending time trying to choose between analytics packages that have one type of report over another.

The reality is that for most mid-sized companies not doing retail on the web, there’s not enough traffic or variation to provide all the data needed for an expensive analytics package to bring you measurable results.  What’s more important is knowing you need the right metrics, like conversion ratios and return on investment (ROI).

Web analytics will capture the information you need about your web visitors, but your site needs to be structured correctly and substantial enough to put the information in a relevant context.

In our next blog post, we’ll talk about how to create more successful websites by avoiding some common pitfalls and encouraging visitors towards the path you’d like them to take.

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.

January 29th, 2009 by Steven Leung

If you read just the headlines, you might get confused into accidentally breaking the law on your corporate website.  The Superme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal on the lower court ruling that the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA) is unconstitutional.

According to the PBS article by attorney and law professor Jeffrey Neuberger, COPA was created because Congress feared “the prospect of children obtaining access to obscene and indecent material on the Internet”.  This 1998 law was a follow up to the Communication Decency Act of 1996 which had been previously ruled unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, his article is titled U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Kills Online Age Verification Law.  Frequently, the authors don’t write their article titles — editors do.  So there is no blame being assigned here.  But the fact is that a casual reader could easily confuse COPA with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which does require age verification and was also enacted in 1998.

A 2007 FTC press release goes on to note that “there is potential for age falsification on general audience websites, as well as liability under COPPA, should these sites obtain actual knowledge that they are collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children online.”

The FTC also publishes a COPPA FAQ which has information about specific scenarios corporate website and social media operators should be aware of.

December 23rd, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article

• Balancing response rate and lead qualification
• Designing web forms for a win-win
• How California Law can affect you, even when you aren’t based in California

Previously, I wrote about how people go through four levels in their business relationships with your company and how moving from one level to the next requires an investment of trust on their part.

This investment of trust is especially true when asking visitors to your website for their contact information (which is the second level: converting visitors to prospects).  By being customer-friendly in collecting and using your visitors’ information, you will encourage more people to trust your company with that information.

There are high-profile examples not to follow.  Silicon Valley intellectual property attorney Allen Lee writes about how Sony was found to have violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).  As recently as two weeks ago, Sony learned — through seven-figure civil penalties — that there are legal limitations to how you can collect and use personal information.

The importance of staying within both the moral and legal boundaries of what you can do with customer information is clear, and you can find detailed information at the Online Privacy Alliance and the Consumer Privacy Guide.

From an integrated marketing perspective, collecting customer information is the first step in building relationships with your prospects.  As such, your website must:

1. Clearly communicate how the information is used
2. Explain the benefits of providing that information
3. Make supplying that information as easy as possible

These three factors help you establish credibility and increase number of visitors who will give you their information.  Here are customer-friendly techniques you can use and traps to avoid.

» Read the rest of this article »

December 7th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• How Internet Marketing Is More Effective Than Traditional Advertising
• Tracking How an Actual Visitor Became a Lead
• Building a Stronger Reputation By Combining Internet and Traditional Marketing

Done correctly, Internet marketing is one of the most cost-effective mechanisms that businesses can use to generate leads.

The reason for Internet marketing is simple and ironic: permanence.   When a business launches a mail campaign, your pieces get delivered and you hope that you found enough people who are interested to make that mailing worth your while.

But most, if not all, of the mailings get thrown away.  People may not have even looked at them — and those that did may or may not remember your business. That’s why the author of The Fundamentals of Business to Business Sales and Marketing, John Coe, recommends mailing three times in a two to four week period in order to maximize effectiveness.  But after the mailers are sent, you have nothing of lasting consequence in your hands.  An online presence grows as you invest in it.
» Read the rest of this article »

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 »