We started by looking at this client’s traffic sources and separating them into early, middle and late stage buyers.  None of this client’s traffic is truly “late stage” because very little traffic actually uses their brand or specific course names in their search to get to their site.

Their traffic is mostly in the early, middle and middle/late stage buckets.  Their middle/late stage visitors come to their site from search terms such as “starting a bookkeeping business” and “how to start a bookkeeping business.”  The homepage is the top landing page these types of visitors land on.

We start our continuous improvement process by making recommendations to convert more of their late stage traffic.  This is where the fun begins because we get to think and act like these types of visitors in order to understand what their motivations and needs are.  With this, we assess whether the site does a good job of moving the visitors through the information towards giving them the answers to their questions and persuading them to take macro-conversion action.

If you were searching “how to start a bookkeeping business,” what content would speak to this need if you landed on the homepage? Their original homepage offered no call to action in the active window to speak directly to this visitor.  They had some strong headlines and a small link, “start here,” that blended in to the headline bar.

This is the recommendation (click screenshot to enlarge) we gave them through our software.

After some interaction with this client, they came up with two variations of buttons to test against the original (click screenshots to enlarge). The conversion point of this very simple test was to move more visitors to the next page in the scent trail–in other words, to move them forward in their buying process.

It was found that both variations with buttons performed better than the original.  The version that calls out “Start your own accounting business now” had less success than the “Learn how to start your accounting business.”  This is because the majority of traffic coming to this page is not yet ready to just get started, they first want to “learn how” before they start their business.

What can you take from this example? Start by determining who your late stage traffic is. Look at their keywords: what are they searching for and what are they looking to accomplish when they arrive at your site?  Are you featuring a strong call to action (mapped to a buying stage) that will help this visitor move forward in their buying process? Treat each click independently and help your visitor move through one revolving door to the next.

Have you tested anything similar recently? We would love to hear about your experiences.

Our recommendations aren’t pulled out of a list of best practices.  Our analysis and recommendations follow a process, linking everything back to a piece of data.  This is why data from your analytics is so important in optimization.  If you can’t draw a direct line between why you’re changing something on your site, and a piece of data, make sure you recognize this as a risky move, and track it very carefully.  Learning how to properly track information in an analytic program like Google Analytics, and crunching numbers to isolate potential problems are both blogged about often.  Searching for these types of articles (hint: His last name is Kaushik) will help more experienced DIYers find some of the more sophisticated tips that they’re looking for.  It won’t be as easy as “make your button stand out” or “make sure your security assurances are click-able,” but it’s useful information that’s out there to be consumed.

What I mean is that once you get beyond the basics, optimization is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution, just like there is no average conversion rate that you should measure yourself against.  So, when you look at examples of problems and solutions that are more complicated, the direction you get from those endeavors is much more likely to be about how to approach a particular kind of problem than it is to be a specific “change X to Y” kind of learning.  Why is that?  Well, let’s revisit my lead-in statement: I can’t give you recommendations that’ll revolutionize your conversion rate without looking at your data. The operative words in that statement are “you” and “your.”

Contrary to popular belief, optimization is not over after you’ve eliminated basic problems that every site needs to account for (e.g. load time, font size and legibility, visible calls to action, security assurances, etc).  But, beyond that point is where the real fun begins, and where the deeper opportunities lie.  That’s when conversion optimization transitions from sheer mimicry into a complex dance where the particulars of a situation drive how you apply overarching principles and practices.  We can talk to you about what those principles and practices are; show you some examples of those principles and practices being applied.  But you can’t just do what we do and expect it to work for you, because you’re already beyond the point where you’re just like everybody else.

That’s right: you ARE special. You’ve been waiting for someone to say it, and now it’s finally out there.  Now we can commence with our love affair.  In fact, it’s because your business is unique that optimization sometimes can be so difficult: what worked for Sally’s website might not work for yours, because you are not Sally. That doesn’t mean that you can’t learn something from Sally’s struggles.  You can learn the techniques that Sally used to resolve them.  You can read about how Sally struggled, and the progress she made all by herself.  And you can also investigate the experts that Sally used to help her learn how to look at her site and data to break through the barriers that held her back.

If you want to use Sally’s deeper learning to try to shed light on your own optimization efforts, you have to use your instinct.  You have to ask yourself, “Am I just like Sally?” or, “Am I similar enough to Sally?”, and, “How might I be different from Sally and what does that mean for how I attack this problem?”

Instinct can be a very powerful thing for those who have some confidence in optimization, but make sure you have a back-up plan as well.  A great security measure for instinct is testing.  Testing can save you from making a wrong move when trying to optimize your site. However, it’s also one of the easiest things to mess up if you don’t know how to do it properly.  Thankfully, there is a ton of information out there on how to run tests!  Creating a scientifically valid test is the key to creating a ’successful’ test.  (Successful in this case = results that can be trusted, not necessarily results that generate you money.)  Numerous blog posts give pointers about testing calculators that determine how long a test must to run to achieve significance, creating tests that will give you the clarity you seek, and testing when you have lower traffic.

So, to you experienced DIY optimizers: don’t lose faith when you read yet another article on best practices; just understand that the “beyond-the-basics” direction you’re looking for is hard to come by because it has to be tailored to you.  It doesn’t mean you can’t try those kinds of things on your own.  You certainly can.  But please recognize that if you find yourself wishing this blog post went into more detail about someone “just like” you, with a problem “just like” yours, then that’s probably a signal that you need some expert guidance. There is no shame in admitting that.  And believe me: you’re worth it!

These are some of the questions you should be asking yourself:

1. What am I trying to achieve this year online? E.g. higher sales/leads and/or more traffic?

2. What is my total online marketing budget to allocate to these efforts?

3. What ROI will I be satisfied with?

4. What is the marketing mix I should invest in to get the ROI I expect?

What am I trying to achieve this year online?

If you’re an eCommerce website, you probably want to increase your sales. If you’ve got high targeted traffic, but a low conversion rate, you’re probably wanting to invest in marketing that will turn your existing highly targeted traffic into more sales.  If your traffic is high but not very targeted (visitors who are coming to your site, but aren’t necessarily interested in what you’re offering), you may want to invest in driving more targeted traffic. The best way to know what you’re trying to achieve online this year is to acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses and formulating goals to improve your results.

What is my total online marketing budget to allocate to these efforts?

The bad news about “Marketing” is that it has a dark cloud hanging over its head from many years of tainted history. Marketing was something that was “done” by most companies in one way or another traditionally, but it was the department that was not always held accountable for its actions because tracking was near impossible in traditional marketing terms.  Online Marketers are still having to overcome this shadow of the past, and we need the decision makers to hear our message loud and clear: Every online marketing effort you invest in can, and should, be tracked. You should know every dollar you are spending, and in turn, every extra dollar you are making from each and every individual marketing effort you are investing in. This is why it’s so important to track and test everything you do online. If you aren’t sure how or what to track, your first step should be to setup Google Analytics or another analytics program.

What ROI will I be satisfied with?

There is no one-size-fits-all conversion rate unfortunately, but you should have a good understanding of how much opportunity you have yet to realize.  For some clients, a $1000/month for 6 months has resulted in 30% increases in conversion rate, while other clients who come in with a different set of circumstances may invest the same amount of dollars but only realize a 5% increase in their conversion rate.  Determine what the minimum increase in traffic and/or sales/leads needs to be for you to be satisfied (based on how much you’re investing) and state this as your goal when reaching out to whomever you outsource to.  You should start with a realistic expectation.  This will not only help you assess your performance effectively, it will also give your outsourced partners an expectation to meet or exceed.

What marketing mix will lead to the highest ROI?

This answer will change for each set of circumstances.  Again, you need to know what you’re doing well and where you need to improve.  If you have a hard time assessing this, reach out to a trusted source that has the expertise to assess this effectively.  When we work with our clients to turn traffic into more sales and leads using website optimization tactics, we usually uncover other weaknesses and opportunities that effect other areas of our clients’ marketing mixes.  We sometimes find that a client has a tremendous opportunity to focus on Search Engine Optimization efforts to generate more targeted organic traffic.  In other cases, we may find that a client is spending dollars on paid search advertising that are not converting effectively because they aren’t focusing on highly targeted keywords in their campaigns and are therefore losing money on these campaigns.  We help them refocus their investment on more targeted keywords.  We also come across cases where some clients are not leveraging their email databases effectively, and we bring this to the client’s attention as another opportunity they could be leveraging. These are just a few of the many opportunities we uncover from analyzing our clients’ marketing programs.

Make no mistake, if you do nothing, your competition will take business that could have been yours.  But if you analyze your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, and put an action plan in place, you will have a tremendous advantage over your competition.

Monday, I got a call from my colleague, Marijayne Bushey, who told me about a great question she got via our Comments box.  The question read:

..I am looking for someone to help me understand why I am seeing only 0.02% conversion rate–is it a product, traffic, or usability issue, and what I can do to improve it? Please let me know if you provide service like this…

This is a great question because it recognizes that there may be multiple reasons for why a conversion rate is so low.  Remember, your website and marketing campaigns are a complex web of technology, products/services, information, colors, placement, copy, imagery, branding, etc all rolled into one big experience for your visitors, so chances are it’s a combination of these three factors (and others) that account for the reasons why visitors do or do not take a desired action. Thus, the real question is what factors contribute to the low conversion rate more than others, and deserve priority when it comes to fixing problems… and yes, we do offer a subscription service aimed directly at answering these questions, and making recommendations to help you drive increases in your bottom line.

Is it Product?  Maybe.  If you’re in an over-saturated marketplace and you don’t have anything that you offer that competitors don’t offer (a Unique Value Proposition, or UVP), then it might be the product itself. If this is the problem there’s little you can do to fix it short of offering the best (i.e. lowest) price or having an EXTREMELY loyal visitor following.

Is it Traffic?  Possibly.  For this one, there’s an easy way to investigate; and there’s often a quick-and-dirty triage for the problem too.  First, go into your analytics report.  For the sake of simplicity, I’ll use Google Analytics as the example.  (If you don’t have an analytics program, go immediately to Google Analytics, get an account, and tag your site!)  Go into Google Analytics and click, “view report’ then select “traffic sources.”  You’ll see an overview of your traffic. Select the largest  piece of your traffic pie, for instance “Search Engine.”  Now, it’s time to do some digging!  Look at your top three sources. Chances are, they make up a considerable amount of your overall traffic.  Click into each and look at your keywords, bounce rates etc.  As a rule of thumb, if there’s a larger than 80% bounce rate, you’re not driving qualified traffic to your site and you need to spend time on your traffic to make sure that you’re driving the appropriate traffic. Don’t forget to check scent on these pages, too!

Is it usability?  At FutureNow, we take this question one step further, and ask not only whether your site is usable, but if it is persuasive.  This is often the biggest reason behind low conversion rates, but also the most difficult to tease apart because there are so many possible ways that visitors can interact with your site, and such a large breadth of areas to consider.

The bottom line here is that the number of factors that together contribute to your conversation rate, and the interplay between them, make it silly to try to provide an answer to the qustion on a one-off basis.  It must be teased apart over time, within the context of a continuous optimization program where you can test and observe results over time as a means of gleaning the information you need to make informed conclusions.  Our extensive experience in the field, and exclusive optimization tool are two very good reasons why you should talk to us, and consider hiring us.  We can help you narrow down where the real conversion-inhibiting issues exist, and help you prioritize your efforts in fixing those areas, so you can address the ones that will give you the largest return first!

This isn’t to say that content targeting is the worst thing to ever happen to paid advertising online, rather, a cautionary tale to those who use it as a primary means of driving traffic to their site.

Content targeting can actually be quite helpful if used properly and optimized, especially if you’re in the early stages of building your business and you’re not ready to jump into the more complicated paid search campaigns. If you’re looking to build brand awareness, for example, the “reach” of the Content Network is staggering. The moral of this story is that you don’t have to just let unqualified traffic bounce in and out of your site costing you money while you sit by idly. You have the ability to say, “No thanks, I don’t want traffic coming from this site anymore.” Still unsure what sites to say this to? As a starting point, exclude any sites from the campaign where the bounce rate is above 80%.

More Tips for optimizing ad spend on the Content Network

1. If you’re spending lots of money for no conversions, opt out of the Content Network until you’ve done some research and have a strategy in place.

2. Audit your reports to weed out the sites that don’t meet performance KPIs for bounce rate, conversion rate, or Cost Per Conversion.  You can select sites or topics to exclude from your campaign.

3. Separate your Search and Content Network efforts into 2 campaigns.  Adjust budgets accordingly, as you may not want to spend as much on Content Network until the campaign is optimized.

4. Use a separate batch of keywords in your Content Network campaign.  Hint: they may be words you’d never dream of bidding on for Search ads.

[Editor's Note: FutureNow is NOT an SEM agency, nor do we claim to be the industry experts on PPC advertising.  We are, however, good at optimizing online marketing and conversions, and PPC definitely gets a lot of our attention these days.]

One thing to note is that many, perhaps even most, of our clients are not new to online optimization efforts in search or conversion, and have either already hired another company in the past or tried some best-practice implementation DIY style. Unfortunately, many of them claim they’ve been “burned” in the past, and we hate to hear that.

Time and time again when I ask, “What are you currently using to track your analytics?” the response I hear is, “Google Analytics, but I’m not really sure if it’s set up right or what I’m supposed to be looking at.”

Everyone assumes (based on what the industry tells us) that having Analytics is important. Everyone knows that the more data you have, the more information that can be extracted from it. However, what good is a bunch of numbers if you don’t know what it’s tracking or what this data means? It’s no surprise that many have a difficult time understanding their visitors and don’t know how to optimize their site. They’re driving without a map. They aren’t connecting the data to the people!

So, if you find yourself saying, “I’ve got Google Analytics, but I’m not sure what it’s telling me” here’s what to do:

1. Take the time to make sure that it’s properly installed and tracking. If you’re using Google Analytics, try the free SiteScan tool from EpikOne.  If you need professional troubleshooting, contact an Authorized Consultant.

2. Make sure that it is tracking the metrics that influence your conversion. Setup a goal to track the conversion funnel so that you will be able to look at the performance of your shopping cart or lead generation form.

3. Ask yourself a few basic questions and look for the answers to these questions in your Analytics such as: Where are most of my visitors coming from and what landing pages are they being sent to from these sources? What’s the bounce rate on my top landing pages? What keywords are they using to get to these pages from search? The answers to these questions will help you understand what is happening at the front end of the visitor’s experience on your site and where some of your highest impact opportunities for improvement may reside.

If you’re not currently using your Analytics data to influence your optimization efforts, you’re ignoring a wealth of insights into who your visitors are and what they are experiencing when they get to your site. At FutureNow, our analysts weed through data continuously to gain increasingly deeper insights into what is happening on sites and WHY it’s happening. We help clients continuously optimize their web site performance by understanding the way visitors are looking to buy, and helping map the sales process to the customer’s buying process.

In this post, I’ll wrap up by covering some of the benefits you can get if you learn to observe and leverage DBL, as well as some of the author’s ideas about the future of sales and marketing as marketers start to adopt the DBL approaches.

Benefits of DBL

If you understand DBL, and can leverage the data points it provides, you’ll be in a much better position to effectively nurture early and middle stage leads.  This is crucial since the majority of leads in your database are probably in these two stages.  We at FutureNow spend lot of time working with clients to optimize their sites for early and middle stage buyers, so this was great to read.  We also encourage B2B marketers to design marketing efforts intended to “graduate” their prospects from one stage of their buying process to the next.

In addition to more effective lead nurturing, DBL allows for much more accurate lead scoring, which is of huge value to an organization.  Most B2B sales and marketing teams seem to only have 2 lead scores: “hot” and “disqualified.”  The lead is either worth calling on the phone, or they’re thrown away.  This obviously can lead to frustration on both sides of the Sales/Marketing fence.  By tracking and monitoring DBL, you have a lot more data to use in scoring leads so Sales knows which ones are “hot,” and which ones simply aren’t ready to buy and can be nurtured.

Woods uses example lead categories of:
1.    Inquiries – usually some contact information captured online
2.    Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) – Marketing has vetted as qualified for Sales
3.    Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) – Sales agrees to follow up with the leads
4.    Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) – Sales agrees the leads are qualified to be sold to
5.    and Deals – closed business

The above categories can set an organization up for a very disciplined, data-driven approach to their prospect pipeline.

DBL is also a tool that helps teams get away from the usually-broken “lead source” model. Woods eloquently argues against the traditional model on page 185:

…the prospective buyer is not suddenly “driven” to make a purchase because of a well-crafted marketing campaign or elegantly worded collateral documents.  Rather, a purchase is the culmination of a well-choreographed series of messaging, campaigns, and collateral that–over time–collectively guide the prospective buyer through education and discovery processes that are driven by their own internal interests and business goals.

Best of all, DBL allows for a new, improved way of measuring marketing performance. We all know that measuring marketing effectiveness at driving revenue (as opposed to just leads) is challenging, even with all the fancy data we have at our fingertips these days.  This, I think, contributes to the fact that CMOs have some of the shortest tenures in all of the corporate world.

DBL can be used to understand, track, and prove “the conversion of prospects from one phase of their buying process to the next.”  If a nurture marketer’s goal is simply to find prospects and convert them over time through a succession of buying stages, it becomes much easier to plan campaigns, segment the data, and make wise marketing investments.

Looking Towards the Future

Given that I’m an analyst, one of my favorite parts of the book was Chapter 10 where the author starts to talk about a new breed of “Analytical Marketer:”

Marketers are beginning to capture, store, and process unprecedented volumes of data and will need people with management capabilities and skills to model, prototype, and design processes.

Woods goes on to argue that organizations must change to meet the demands of DBL: executives must understand why DBL is a worthy investment, skill sets have to evolve or be brought in, data cleansing must be a priority for IT and analysts, and marketing organizations have to become more process-driven instead of relying heavily on “creativity for creativity’s sake.”

In the end, though, the author ties it all back to that core concept of realigning to the buyer’s buying process–using DBL to understand their needs, and providing the marketing that will help them move themselves through the buying stages at their own pace.  And, being there top-of-mind when they decide they’re ready to raise their hands and ask to be sold to.

Finally, those of you in Early Stage who perhaps aren’t persuaded to buy the book could visit the Digital Body Language blog to learn more.  I’m sure Steven would be happy to nurture you for as long as you need

Are you simply looking at whether a marketing effort is converting and bringing in sales? Are you ignoring the step-by-step process visitors are going through from the marketing effort, to final conversion point, and making some assumptions for why one marketing effort might be converting more effectively than another?

Don’t just look at conversion rates, bounce rates, and click through rates this holiday season. Become an investigative reporter and find some meaning behind WHY something is happening, instead of just acknowledging ‘WHAT’ is happening.

Let me help you with the first few steps. Start by looking at your top landing pages and highlight your top 3 landing pages. For each of these top landing pages, find out the traffic sources that are driving traffic to each page. If search is driving traffic, then dig deeper and find out what the top 5 – 10 traffic driving keywords are for these top landing pages.

Now, you need to make some assumptions about the motivations and needs of the visitors who are coming to these top landing pages from these sources. The keywords visitors are typing when searching can tell us a lot about what they are looking for. The banner ad or other marketing efforts might be using specific language that can tell us a lot about what the visitor was hoping to find when she clicked.

Once you have come up with some ideas about the motivations and needs your visitors have when they come from the marketing effort to your landing pages, you need to follow through and determine if you’re effectively speaking to these needs and motivations on these top landing pages when the visitor gets there.

Are you featuring some of the keywords they were searching for, or that you used in the marketing effort to persuade her to click, in headlines on the landing page? Are you effectively providing the visitor various ways to navigate and move forward based on their motivations and needs? Are you providing a look and feel that is consistent with the marketing efforts or what the visitor is searching for?

At FutureNow, we help our clients increase their conversion rates and optimize their web sites by analyzing each site based on how existing visitors are coming to the site and what the visitors are looking to accomplish when they get there. One of the highest impact areas of your site are the top landing pages. You can get the best “bang for your buck” by providing more effective ’scent of information’ from your marketing efforts to your landing pages. You’ll not only experience lower bounce rates, but you’ll also reduce the likelihood that the visitor will drop out at the next click, because you’ll be leading her down the path she wanted, and expected, to follow.

The #9 prediction was that there would be “more Flash, not less” on websites in 2010.  The authors posit that Flash on websites will experience a resurgence online in 2010 due to increased adoption of broadband, improved track-ability, and new options for making flash sites more search engine friendly.  They also predict that flash will deliver the “rich, brand-extending experiences” that consumers are craving.

While I’ll keep an open mind for Flash in 2010, I still have many doubts built up from whenever Flash came out through 2009:

1. While more track-able, Flash still doesn’t offer the depth of analytics (or at least not easily) that other formats offer
2. While more search engine friendly, Flash still doesn’t offer the rich, index-able content that search engines still reward
3. Flash is still a “specialty” skill set, which makes site maintenance and optimization more tricky
4. There still seem to be usability/accessibility issues with most of the flash sites and micro-sites I see.  In most cases, people aren’t interested in learning a brand new interface on every site
5. I’m not convinced that consumers are looking for “rich, brand-extending experiences” that are best-served by Flash.  People are still task-oriented, and want to “get in and get out,” especially when it comes to researching purchases or making purchases
6. Flash sites seem to be the sites that display “creativity for creativity’s sake,” and don’t focus on the prospects’ needs, motivations, and goals.
7. Except for some niche applications, flash animation doesn’t accomplish much that AJAX and other similar approaches can’t do (without requiring a downloaded browser plugin)
8. While broadband may be continuing to grow, there are still PLENTY of customers (especially in rural areas) that don’t have lightning-speed connections.  Do you really want to exclude them in any way?

Are there exceptions to the above?  Of course, but exceptions won’t make something a trend in 2010.

Another thing to keep in mind about Flash is that there are really two schools of use:  One is using Flash animation, and the other is using the Flash format to deliver true video experiences.  In my opinion, using Flash to deliver video experiences is the more valuable of the two approaches, so maybe that’s where the resurgence in 2010 will come from?

Another question in my mind is whether Adobe’s recent acquisition of Omniture will have any effect on the track-ability of the Flash technology.  My bet is “yes,” but I’m not sure how soon changes will come.

So, Grok readers, what are your feelings about Flash in 2010? Do you plan on using it more?  Less?  The same?

At FutureNow, we work with clients in a variety of industries and business models: e-commerce, lead generation and catalog. Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some clients who are driving traffic from their web sites to physical store locations. These clients share some basic challenges, so I’ve decided to cover things you should be focusing on if you’re an online business trying to drive traffic to a physical location.

First, decide what action you want your visitors to take. We know that you want your visitors to come off your web site and visit your physical location, but what actions do you want them to take ON your web site that demonstrate their interest in coming to your physical location? These are what we call micro conversion points.  “Micro” because they are stepping stones on the way to some sort of purchase, which we call a macro conversion.

Here are some examples of actions a site might want the visitor to take to show their interest in moving forward. The following points should be tracked as micro conversion points, and you should optimize to increase these individual conversion rates.

• A “locations” page where you feature your address and map with directions. If visitors get to this page, they are interested in where you are located, which shows strong motivation and intent.
• Some sites feature a “Find the nearest location” tool.
• Booking an appointment for a service or holding/reserving a product.
• Contact us page, phone calls and emails are demonstrating that visitors are looking for answers to questions.

Tracking these micro conversion points is important, but it’s also important to follow through and track whether visitors who take these micro conversion actions are resulting in physical store purchases. Many companies track one or the other, but they seem to have a hard time tracking micro conversion rates on their web sites or they have a hard time connecting actions on a web site to actual sales in the physical store.

Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself in order to get the right tracking in place to start seeing how your online efforts are resulting in ‘brick and mortar’ sales.

Tracking whether a store purchaser was originally a web site visitor:

Are you tracking all in-store purchases, asking each purchaser whether they went to your web site before they came to your physical store? This will help you find out general stats on how many visited your web site prior to purchasing.

Are you collecting email addresses and sending out surveys to in-store purchasers to find out how they came to your store?

• For those who identify that they came to your web site before coming to your physical store, are you asking them if they already knew about your store and were just coming to your site to find the address/location or to call the store?
• Are you asking them whether they were actually searching for something online, and found your web site as a solution to a problem (and didn’t yet know about your store) and they only found out that you had a physical store from your web site?

Tracking phone calls from listed phone numbers on your web site:

Is the phone number listed on your web site unique from other marketing efforts so that you can track it separately?

Is the phone number you list on various pages unique from the other pages on your site? In other words, if you feature a phone number on the about us page, is it a different number than the one on your contact us page? This would help you identify what pages visitors are making a decision to call from, and will also help you identify what types of things they are asking after visiting specific pages on your site.

Are you collecting enough information from the caller on the phone, so that you can match this up if the visitor turns into a sale in the physical store location?

Purely “clicks and mortar” E-commerce sites see the importance of optimization before the Holiday Season because it directly impacts their sales online. “Bricks and mortar” companies that use their web site to drive traffic to their physical store don’t see the direct impact as strongly, but this could be because they aren’t tracking  the impact effectively. If you’re in this situation, use some of the tips above to begin tracking and optimizing. You still have time to optimize for the holiday season and beyond!

One of my clients from over a year ago, was successfully implementing our recommendations. He was seeing increases in his conversion rate, measuring success in “clicks”, or more orders being completed online. After speaking with one of his customer service reps one day, I was informed that her call volume had increased substantially since working with us. She was also able to convert a high percentage of these callers into sales because they were better informed. Unfortunately, because they weren’t tracking these calls as conversions, we were unable to prove to the owners that call volume and conversion rates from phone calls were a measure of the success of our project.

It’s just as important to track phone calls, not just clicks, as conversions for your web site.

For some high ticket items, or for some industries that are more cutting edge, visitors may be more likely to want to speak with a representative in order to get questions answered, gain confidence and place an order via phone. There will always be the visitors who simply don’t feel comfortable placing an order online and want to speak with a live person in order to place their order. These conversions should not be ignored. The improvements you make to your site will directly affect call volume and the conversion rate of these calls.

Now, you can track your call analytics alongside your web analytics. Not only can you view the number of phone calls but you can also set the phone call URL as a goal in Google Analytics, so that you can see the value of these calls. Now you can calculate offline conversions, which have resulted from online marketing efforts.

By using unique phone numbers for your different marketing communications channels, you can track which traffic source generated the call, allowing the company to improve their overall marketing campaigns. When a visitor is referred from one of the traffic sources, a unique phone number will appear on your web site, allowing you to track conversion rates for phone calls. This will help you determine which keywords, sites, or PPC campaigns generate the most phone calls, and in turn, which ones result in successful conversions via phone.

Check out this screencast to see how ifbyphone has integrated their solution with Google Analytics.

Screencast – http://public.ifbyphone.com/demo/google-analytics-integration-screencast

Are you tracking your calls and your clicks properly?

What seems more difficult is deciding where and what to optimize. All of us have our plates full already. Adding optimization to the heap seems uncomfortable, even painful.

It doesn’t have to be.

It may not be easy, but very little that is worthwhile ever is.

When no clear starting line exists, most marketers will optimize in an ad hoc manner with no clear plan. Often companies will:

• Start with their newest campaign
• Start with their pet campaign
• Optimize their least favorite campaigns
• Optimize the easiest campaigns
• Optimize everything they can just a little, but never develop a method to get maximum results
• Start with the boss’ favorite campaign, least favorite campaign, and so forth

None of these are bad places to start. A little bit of optimization even in a less optimal place is better than no optimization. Still, if you’re looking for a more effective means to get rolling toward results sooner rather than later, here are a few tips.

Preface: Understand Your True Conversion Rate

While your average conversion rate is the total number of unique visitors divided by the number of unique visitors that take a conversion action, your true conversion rate is the number of people who take the action you want them to take divided by the total number of potential people who could have taken that action. Your true conversion rate takes into account how qualified the visitor is and gives you a better indication of how well your site is performing.

Look at Your Marketing Efforts

How are you bringing these people who take action to your Web site? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser’s address bar? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Or your products? Do others come from organic search? Paid search? E-mails? Affiliates? Do these people come from different Web sites: Google? Bing? Yahoo? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Define Your Prospects

You are likely targeting different audiences based on personas or demographics. You might have different efforts for each segment, maybe several efforts per segment. Each segment that was brought in by an individual marketing effort has different, sometimes intersecting, occasionally opposing scenarios (persuasion paths) based on needs, motivation, knowledge, purchase preferences, or some combination thereof.

For example, you sell Web conferencing and buy the keyword “online web conferencing.” You’ve identified three prospect segments: small office/home office, education, and marketing/sales. They all share a keyword and a landing page that gives them the content each segment needs. You might also buy more targeted keywords that send them to more segment-specific content, but they all share the same sign-up process.

Each one of these is an effort that may need to be optimized. A don’t forget your banner ads and offline media efforts, either.

Create Goals and Micro-Funnels

You cannot succeed online unless you plan for it. Specifically, you need to plan conversion goals for each effort. What actions do they want to take based on where they are in the purchase cycle? How are you going to measure them?

Again, if you sold Web conferencing, your early-buying stage goals may be to have visitors sign up for a trial or download a case study. Late-stage buyers would have paid sign up as a goal. Often, optimization means starting by adding efforts for early or middle stage. There are clearly too many businesses that expect to convert you all the way on the first visit. This may be unreasonable, depending on the audience segment and the complexity of the sale.

Each segment brought in by an individual marketing effort that navigates through their scenarios (persuasion paths) is a micro-funnel that needs to be optimized. Prioritize them!

The 80/20 Rule

The Pareto Principle is a good place to start thinking about prioritizing your optimization. It is highly likely that if you have 1,000 different efforts, about 20 percent are pulling their weight. Those 200 efforts need persistent and vigilant optimization.

Here are a few more places to start:

• Optimize your top-performing efforts, figuring out how to make them better.
• Optimize your most expensive but low-converting keywords (each one or several related terms in a group in individual marketing efforts).
• Sort out your top 200 campaigns and optimize those that are within a few percentage points of performing like a top-200 effort, then move on to your next 200.
• If you have very few efforts that perform respectably (over 10 percent true conversion rate), you may need to look at the potential market and create persuasion paths by paying attention to your market segments’ needs or your prospects’ needs at different buying stages.
• Optimize your top 20 exit pages.
• Optimize the bottom of your registration or checkout funnel and work your way up the funnel.

Your conversion rate is nothing more than the sum of the thousands of efforts and paths that prospects take through your site. Beware of averages. There is no such thing as an average person. That is why your average conversion rate is a rough indicator but virtually worthless as a way to focus your conversion optimization.

You have lots of segments that come to your Web site. They differ by demographics, psychographics, behavior, or marketing effort.

Are you optimizing by effort or by average? Tell me which and I’ll tell you what kind of success you’re having.

Instead, we’d like to present our brief “Best Of” List so you can get some quick highlights from our (somewhat biased) perspective:

Here we go…

• Best Presentation: “How to Turn Your Web Analytics into a Money Making Machine.” Bryan Eisenberg, Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, and moderated by Mike Grehan. I thought this presentation was great because it brought together a few of the industry’s uber-minds, and the subject matter was absolutely crucial: What’s the point of investing in search if you aren’t making money? How can you figure out how to make money off of search marketing if you aren’t properly leveraging data to drive decisions, experiments, and investments?  Great job, Bryan, Avinash, and Jim! The presentations were wonderful, but it was the Q&A that gave the session a life of its own.
• Best Booth: A 2-way tie between iProspect’s “gold mine” and Facebook’s sexy white couches and shag carpeting.
• Best Giveaway: OrangeSoda gave away a sweet orange cruiser bike. We even gave the winner some unsolicited advice on how to get it back home via car!
• Best Schwag/Tchotchkes: NO ONE.  We thought the schwag was pretty weak in general.  If you saw some great schwag that we missed, add it to the comments. One notable mention was PeoplePond’s fill in the blanks t-shirt (check out Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg getting their t-shirts).
• Best Booth Outfits: SuperPages.com’s gold capes cracked us up and helped them market their new “superguarantee” concept.
• Best Announcement: Sandra Cheng’s announcement of the YouTube mega-test using Google Website Optimizer: 1,024 variations in a multivariate test on YouTube’s homepage! Not sure if they’ll be blogging about it, but stay tuned.
• Best Marketing Mantra: Another 2-way tie between People must be at the center of your search strategy–not keywords. by Charlene Li and Turn opinions into hypotheses. by Avinash Kaushik.  Both great phrases to market by; we couldn’t agree more

And to those folks we met at SES, it was nice meeting you, and keep in touch!

There was no question that the pages on this site performed exceptionally well. Bounces were under 20 percent and the exit rates were very low. I also knew this company had been testing using Google Website Optimizer.

Clearly, this company was dedicated to continual improvement and working hard to improve its conversion rate. The analytics shouted proof that someone was minding the store.

So why was its overall conversion rate painfully low?

I dug deeper into the analytics, going back and forth between the numbers and the site. Then I knew exactly what was wrong. I was curious if my staff would be able to see exactly what I saw.

As much as I’d like to brag about my staff for being brilliant (they indeed are), I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, they’re trained to look where others don’t. Without hesitation, they saw exactly what I saw.

All Is Well…on the Surface

The marketing was good and relevant, the site was well designed, the landing pages and product pages were sticky, and traffic seemed to move through the site with ease. Even the checkout process was good. Instead, the site suffered from a severe persuasion scenario problem.

The site attracted interested prospects and gave them enough big call-to-action buttons and shiny products to browse, but made it difficult, even impossible, for prospects to gain any resolve to buy the right product for them. This is a site with a slow drip. Prospects are falling off one by one in hundreds of different places. It’s proof that landing page optimization isn’t enough.

Moving Beyond Best Practices, Usability, and Testing

Joel Spolsky best summed up this site’s dilemma in “User Interface Design for Programmers“:

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a night club it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with plenty of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

The site is nice, well lit, well run, but not selling. So how do you begin fixing the problem? First, you have to understand it a bit.

We created a simple, one-dimensional persona who was early in her buying process. She knew she needed a certain product but didn’t know where to start. The site sells sporting recreational goods with the average price point in the hundreds of dollars. This isn’t an impulse-buy type of site.

We clicked through the site as this persona and, no matter where we started, we ended up hitting a virtual brick wall, confused and frustrated. The site seems to have good prices but little guidance on what products are best for the beginner. The site even offers packages to make it easier for the customer.

Yet it didn’t help the persona answer the question: which is the right package for me? Even when we were a persona further along in the buying process, we still had a heck of time sorting and finding the right products for our need.

Simple persuasion issues not addressed on product pages and category landing pages are the Lilliputians sucking the lifeblood out of the site’s conversion rate. Proof again that too many sites spend way too much time and money on best practices and page performance to the detriment of site performance.

The Good News

This site will get a makeover that will undoubtedly stop many of the drips. Some solutions are as simple as adding a little copy to category pages, creating several pages specifically addressing the needs of different buyers, and leveraging some great content already on the site.

The site can serve as a lesson to those of you who have come up short on your optimization expectations. It can remind you to optimize not just for better page performance but also for the actual visitor using those pages.

Here are a few steps you can take if you’re suffering from a slow-drip persuasion scenario problem:

1. Start with a simple persona, putting her in a typical buying process for your product or service.
2. Click through the site as that persona, doing your best to pretend that you don’t know where the content she needs is. Is it easy for her to find? Did she get distracted by something else? Does the content do what you intended it to do: does it move users forward through the site and give them greater resolve that they have found or will find the right product for them?
3. Run a usability test. Sometimes it’s hard to see your site with fresh eyes; you may need to bring in some help.
4. Remember that site engagement metrics, like bounce and exit rates, click-throughs, and time spent on site, are important key performance indicators. If your site’s engagement metrics look healthy and your conversion rate remains low or unchanged, you must now focus on selling and persuading the customer, not designing the right button or searching for a better hero image on a landing page or even finding better qualified traffic. You will likely need to create some content that will help visitors find the product they need and want. That’s a persuasion issue, not a usability or best practices issue.

Are you spinning your wheels, looking at your site analytics and running out of things to optimize or test? If you’re willing to share your situation with my ClickZ readers, tell me your story. My staff and I will select one or two sites to look under the hood of and share findings in a future column.

Sarah from Seattle tweeted Bryan the other week, asking for some advice on how to use web analytics, and specifically “goals,” to help her with a nonprofit website supporting the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.  We thought it would be good topic to explore a bit, so we’ll start with the basics.

Even the most “nonprofit” website still has goals, and let’s face it, they’re still “business” goals. Keeping that in mind, I’m going to try to label some different types of business goals you could track in web analytics, and how to measure success.

1. Memberships & Donations – We won’t spend much time on this one because it’s pretty obvious.  Most nonprofits’ main business goal is to solicit memberships or donations.  And tracking them using web analytics is no different than ‘for profit’ sites.  The only caveat is that (unfortunately) human nature seems to dictate a longer consideration cycle for donations than, say, buying a fancy new smartphone.  Knowing this, it’s wise to track the content and micro-conversions that might lead to a donation (micro-conversions).  Think about downloading brochures and visiting particular pages about the mission statement, leadership, whether donations are tax-deductible, etc.
2. Logistics – For physical spaces like galleries, museums, and parks, there are goals related to logistics that indicate a strong likelihood of a visit.  These should be tracked as goals, and optimized on an ongoing basis.  Some examples here are downloading a map, visiting a page that lists directions and hours of operation, or even interacting with content related to “events.”  For maps, it would be great to track that a visitor had mapped from their location to the nonprofit’s location, as that indicates strong intent to actually visit.  For events, some sort of “add to calendar” micro-conversion would indicate strong intent.  Another great goal to track regarding events is getting prospects to sign up for time-sensitive “reminders” via email or SMS.
3. Opting In to Content Pushes – That’s an odd phrase, but my way of saying that nonprofits should be tracking goals where prospects allow you into their lives a bit.  Anytime a prospect opts to become more than an anonymous site lurker you achieve a portion of your business goal!  The Burke Museum has lots of great options already, so it would just be a matter of tracking goals related to: subscribing to their blog, signing up for their email newsletter, taking action to follow them on Twitter, and taking action to friend them on Facebook.  If you can’t track with 100% certainty that a conversion has occurred, track the action taken (e.g. clicking a Facebook icon) that shows strong intent.

Note that most web analytics programs won’t necessarily allow you to track all of these things as goals “out of the box,” but with some technical knowledge (especially JavaScript), perseverance, and creativity, they’re all quite achievable.

Calling all NPOs! What else are you tracking (or wishing you could track) as goals in your web analytics?

The Words ‘Marketing Automation’ are Like Music To Our Ears

According to one definition:

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient, and makes some new processes possible.

In plain English, marketing automation uses data (like your web analytics) to do some of your marketing tasks for you. Herein lies the problem I keep running into: Your decisions and those of your marketing automation platform are only as sound as your data.

I’ve seen marketing automation software that helps your email marketing, your ppc bid management, segmentation and personalization, and others. As Jeff Sexton recently pointed out, if you have the wrong analytics it could cost you 30% of your sales. Can you afford that today?

A few weeks ago we were helping a client optimize her website and we wanted access to her historical data. All she had was the analytics from her marketing automation vendor. Now the fact that you could only access these analytics using Internet Explorer (we are mostly on Macs) was one failure, but the main failure was that it looks like the analytics was an after-thought by the vendor. Anyone can throw up some reports on a screen — but the issue is, do they tell you anything meaningful? There was virtually nothing to make you smarter as a marketer. Today’s smart marketers understand the value of data-driven decisions. Unfortunately, this vendor’s reports provided in an abstract way what happened but did not provide the vital statistics to diagnosis and prescribe any sort of optimization to the company’s efforts.

Marketing Automation Must Make You Smarter Not Lazier

I was talking to friend who is a superstar B2B marketer. He was telling me about this new enterprise PPC bid management software he was evaluating. He deals with thousands and thousands of terms so automating the bidding would be a huge help. He told me about the slick interface and the bidding rules, etc. Then I asked him the question that made him stop like a deer in the headlights.

“Have you checked out the data reporting behind the algorithm? What actionable insights does your ppc automation vendor provide you?”

Of course, vendors will shout “proprietary formula” and we marketers fall for this marketing B.S. We don’t need the complex details behind it but we do need to get a sense of what and how they look at data, keyword attribution, etc. What metrics do they value most? If you fall for the “black box” how do you and the system continue to learn? How do remove it if you are unhappy with the vendor? How do you create your internal best practices unless you have a clear picture into what is happening?

Without good data at the core, you may just end up with a mechanical turk. You need data to share in your organization and data that tells you details of what you’re doing and how to improve it. Also, beware of bad software that takes what you need done and tries to completely automate it. Just because it is automated won’t guarantee it is optimal for the way a good marketer works.

Don’t Forget Your Job Is to Make More Money, Not to Make Your Job Easier

The point of marketing automation is to free you up to do more of what you are really good at by letting the glorified calculator do what it is really good at. Good marketing automation lets you use your insights about your customers in ways you couldn’t before; bad software takes those decisions away and prays that the computer will do it for you. Keep in mind we have created a computer that has barely beaten a great human chess player, despite its intricate and complex algorithm –  and we’re still far off from a computer to beat the best human poker players. Do you really believe that some algorithm is going to be better than you at creative marketing insights?

Without solid data, scientific method and reporting, how does your marketing automation software show you it is making money? Whether or not you are using marketing automation, you still need access to great metrics. In the case of marketing personalization, how do you know if the efforts are working if there aren’t control groups to measure against? How do you control for other external factors?

The Marketing Automation Future, Now

Don’t get me wrong — I am an advocate for marketing automation. But only if there is a core focus on the insight derived from data, not the automation, first. Analytics must be at the foundation and not an afterthought. You can identify first generation automation tools by their focus in on automation first and reports second. Today’s next-generation state-of-the-art tools have to have great metrics and analysis at their core and are focused on helping you optimize your business; that is, making you more money and proving their value to you.

Please feel free to tell me more about your marketing automation love fest or worries.

P.S. Full disclosure: like my good friend and analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik, I work for and sit on several advisory boards of companies that use data as their foundation for marketing optimization and automation.

First, the pleasantries:

• “Companies are focusing on analytics which help them improve their customer acquisition and customer retention. The recession has helped to bring into sharper focus the importance of understanding return on investment and how individual elements of digital marketing impact the bigger picture.”
• “There is a prioritization of information requirements which relate directly to business efficiency. The biggest focus is information relating to the cost of acquiring a customer or lead which is regarded as a ‘high priority’ by 59% of responding organizations.”

Overall, the interest in Web analytics and using it to improve continues to creep upward. The report also clearly shows that as the interest grows, so does confusion:

• “There has been a slight improvement since last year but only one in five companies (22%) have an internal strategy that ties data collection and analysis to business objectives. More than half (60%) of responding organizations said they are ‘working on this’, while 18% say that they don’t have such a strategy.”
• “There are still only a quarter of company respondents (27%) who say that their Web analytics ‘definitely’ provide actionable insights, with a further 55% saying that this is only sometimes the case.”

Another trend is that more companies are using Google Analytics: 23 percent use it exclusively, compared to 14 percent last year. For Internet marketing consultant Andy Beal, this is why the following is also a key finding in the report:

There has been a marked shift from spending on technology to spending on internal staff, with companies now spending more on human resources than on software and licenses. The proportion of spending on internal staff has increased from 36% to 42% of total Web analytics spend while spending on technology has decreased from 45% to 38%.

Obviously some companies are hiring analysts rather than paying for analytics or some other technology. A welcome bit for those trying to make a career as Web analysts.

Still, I wonder how these analysts are faring. We all know the challenge in finding qualified candidates. When asked if companies were getting a return on investment from their analytics, a whopping 65 percent of respondents didn’t know or said they weren’t getting a return.

Andrew Hood, managing director at Web analytics consultancy Lynchpin (which cosponsored the report), said: “While the technology gets more and more sophisticated (and arguably more accessible from a cost perspective), the challenges in interpreting and actioning the data only get bigger…Resources [are] still a massive issue, and while companies are looking to increase spend on people, there looks to be an underlying skills shortage operating against this.”

It seems like good Web analysts are like yellow lobsters: they’re very rare.

What’s a Company to Do?

Before you do anything else, define your business goals. What do you need visitors to do to make your company more profitable? How will you measure success? You must tie your business goals with online efforts, or this is all for nothing. When you invest in improvement, you must at least know where the goal posts are.

Next, don’t let budget be a barrier to improving your Web site. What you don’t have in the budget you can pay for with a little more time and effort. Take the time to learn.

I’ve said it before and I say it enough: commit to a culture of continuous improvement, not a culture of set it and forget it. If you only focus on improving a few landing pages here and there, testing a few variations here and there, tweaking creative here and there, you’ll never reach your highest potential number of conversions.

Don’t worry, your customers won’t go unsatisfied. Sooner or later your competitors will figure out how to satisfy your visitors’ needs. Hopefully that will motivate you to get your goals on target by investing in continuous improvement.

What is your company doing with your analytics these days? How do you turn your analytics into actions that improve on your goals? Let me know below.

So the natural thing to do is trim non-performing words and phrases in order to increase the efficiency of your PPC spend.  And that’s exactly what one client did, except rather than increasing his efficiency, he dropped his sales by 30%.

Why?

Because, depending on what you sell, lots of people buy on their second, third, or umpteenth visit to your site, rather than the first visit.  Those visitors are building confidence in you as they move through their buying process.  But most systems don’t (or can’t) track user behavior over multiple visits.   So when those early and middle buying-stage keywords shown up as non-converters, they get cut.

The shame is that not everyone is able to track the following sales drop off, which may not occur for days, weeks, or months, back to the act of cutting those keywords.

Trading away Dennis Rodman as a Non-performing Player?

Would you trade Dennis Rodman for non-performance?  Of course not, right?  Rodman’s defensive stats alone tell the tale.  At his prime, Dennis was pulling down a truly astonishing 18.7 rebounds per game.  For reference, the previous year’s league leader in rebounds (David Robinson) averaged 13 per game.

But if the only stats you looked at involved scoring, you’d get a different picture. Comparing Rodman’s 8-9 points per game against other star players’ 20 or more points per game, you’d likely have been misled into trading Rodman, only to find yourself wondering why you started losing games and everyone else’s scoring stats went up against your team.

Think of your assisting keywords terms as the Dennis Rodman’s of your PPC campaign, except you’ll get all the assists and none of the off-court shenanigan’s.

There’s plenty of other ways myopic analysis can leading you astray

A recent eConsultancy post discusses how Google’s default window for tracking cookies can distort traffic data.  Left in its default cookie window setting, Google Analytics (GA) will classify visitors as “search”-driven traffic for six months following a single search based click through to your site – regardless of how they got to your site previous to that search or how they might arrive at your site following that search. Here’s an example of how this might skew your results:

Let’s say you’re driving traffic to your site via radio ads and that a listener, after hearing your ad, types your url directly into his browser.  Later, he comes back but this time, he types your business name into Google and clicks through on a displayed search result.  Following that, he visits your site three more times via bookmark or directly typing your URL into his site. That’s a total of 5 visits.

Question: How many of those visits would GA classify as search-driven?

Answer: 4 out of 5.

GA would count the first search-based visit and then all of the remaining 3 visits, despite the fact that the following three visits didn’t use search and may have taken place several months after the initial search.  Multiply that by all your visitors/visits, and you can see how your understanding of what drives traffic to your website might be distorted in favor of search. And under the impression that your traffic was mostly generated by search and not, say, your radio ads, you might be tempted to cut them from your ad spend.   Obviously, the same thing could apply with e-mail campaigns, magazine ads, etc.

Bringing Clarity and Orientation to Web Improvement Efforts

Any experienced Web Analyst or Website Optimizer could extend this list of “gotchas” and “classic mistakes” almost indefinitely.  It’s just not that uncommon for an uncareful analysis of data to lead online marketers either to analysis paralysis or sub-optimal optimization strategies.  Is it any wonder that 70% of businesses collecting wed data fail to act on their analytics data?

Obviously this issue has been central to Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Web careers since the beginning.  It’s why they helped found the Web Analytics Association; why they published The Marketer’s Common Sense Guide to eMetrics, Call to Action and Always Be Testing; why they created Persuasion Architecture; and ultimately why they’ve built the OnTarget program.

The central theme amongst all of these issues is bringing clarity and actionable insight to Web improvement and online marketing efforts.  They are all answers to the business owner who feels confused or disoriented by the data he’s given and want’s a clear direction toward more sales/conversions and improved website performance.

So, if you find yourself struggling to make sense of your online marketing data, or frustrated by non- or counter-productive optimization efforts, ask yourself: are you giving credit where it’s deserved?  Or do you need help achieving greater clarity and actionable insight from your optimization efforts?

Instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your visitor mix as a starting point.

There are 3 types of visitors who can come to your website:

1. Buyers – you know who they are because they converted to a sale or lead.

2. Potential Buyers – these are visitors who are in the market for what you offer, but for any number of possible reasons, don’t buy. They may be at earlier stages in the buying process, doing research to sell it internally, not adequately persuaded, driven away by bad usability, etc. The upshot is, there are countless number of changes/improvements you can test and make to bump these visitors from potential into actual buyers.

3. Disqualified Traffic – these are visitors who wouldn’t buy no matter what (maybe they arrived to your website by accident – they typed shingles and were looking for the medical condition not what you put on roofs, or maybe they don’t have the type of budget your product or service needs, etc.).

On a typical website, 3% of visitors are Buyers and the other 97% is distributed among the Potential Buyers and Disqualified traffic. You should be asking yourself these 2 key questions:

1. Of your non-buyers what percent are potential buyers? And how can you increase those?

2. What marketing efforts are bringing ample amounts of traffic, but with poor quality traffic – i.e., what’s driving a disproportionate amount of disqualified traffic?

Your web analyst should be able to tell you the answers to these questions.

The opportunity to increase sales is in:

• understanding that 97% of non-buying traffic better,
• bringing in less Disqualified traffic and more Potential Buyers, and
• More effectively turning those Potential Buyers into Buyers.

For example, if you look at the top converting retail websites, one of the key reasons they have such high conversion rates (way above 3%) is their intense focus on bringing back repeat customers. Note: You should subscribe to each of their newsletters to see some of what they are doing!

What you should do next:

1. Find your expert (if you have them) and coordinate their efforts to get it done.
2. Educate your team and then coordinate their efforts to get it done.
3. This is what we do, if you would like you can talk to us.

Cost Per Visitor (CPV) – How many advertising, marketing, SEO, etc. dollars do you need to spend to bring in each Website visitor you’re getting.   Don’t look at conversion just yet – it’s your website’s job to convert the visitors; marketing’s job is to get them there in the first place.  So Cost Per Visitor is the best starting point for measuring your return on marketing spend.

Also, feel free to break this down by channel: SEO, e-mail marketing, PPC, conventional media, etc.  Some channels are easier to track than others, but give all of them your best shot.  Now plot your CPV performance from the beginning of the year till now and see how you’re doing.

Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) – Top line revenue is usually easier to calculate and track, so we go with RPV, but if you’ve got the metrics to figure out bottom line Profit Per Visitor, all the better.  So basically you’re looking for how much money you are bringing in per Website visitor, and you’re looking to see how this metric is changing from the beginning of the year until now.

CPV should be decreasing and RPV should be increasing

What to do if these metrics aren’t moving in the right direction:

1. Take a look at your marketing spend. What’s working?  What’s not working?  Look at differing channels, keywords, time of day, etc.  Get accountability from the tactics you are using to drive traffic.
2. Focus on improving your conversion rate.  Your Website’s conversion rate can act as a lever to both CPV and RPV.  By examine keywords and marketing campaigns in terms of scent and scent trails, you can improve the performance of your campaigns and drive down CPV.  By improving micro-conversions throughout the buying process, you can increase macro-conversions, average order value, repeat customers, etc – thereby improving RPV.  For tools on how to do this, take a look through our archives, read Always Be Testing (or any of our other books), or give us a call.

Feel free to let us know how you’re doing, or to post any questions you have on these metrics and improvement tactics.  We’d love to hear from you.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]

Are they only using metrics to make them feel better about their efforts or are they using the data to find ways to continuously improve their efforts? And with the widely available tools today, why aren’t the other 21% of businesses even capturing this web analytics data?

Is it because as John Lovett, Senior Research Analyst at Forrester claims in his post Forecasting Change for Web Analytics, that it because of unfulfilled promises by the analytics vendors, that their isn’t enough talent available to analyze the data, or is it because the tools available were too limiting?

Why do you think marketer’s collect data and don’t or can’t act on it?

P.S.  During editing, Jeff Sexton reminded me of one of his favorite jokes: “What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a hi-tech salesman?  The used car salesman knows he’s lying.”  No offense to my vendor friends

1) Where are they entering?

Most analytics packages (including Google Analytics) make it easy to view your top landing pages.  If you haven’t checked this before you might be surprised at the number of visitors who aren’t entering your site through the home page.  That can be crucial information.

Maybe your PPC landing pages don’t provide all the information visitors need and you’re not giving visitors clear links back to your main site.  Maybe your UVP is only clearly explained on the home page, so that someone landing on your services (or a product category) page wouldn’t get that info.

But more than all of that, you’re trying to get an understanding of how visitors move through your site and why they take the actions they do, so you’ll need to know visitor entry points.

2) How are they entering?

Your analytics package should let you analyze traffic, breaking visitors down by source: organic search traffic, paid ads, direct traffic, etc.  And for organic and paid search, you should be able to see what keywords brought the majority of your visitors to your website.  From this information, you should be able to get a sense of the following:

• What are their expectations? Given your visitors’ traffic source and keywords, what are they looking for?  What would they most expect to find when they land on your website?  What scent are they following?

• What are their likely goals? The same key word search could easily be used by people with differing goals.  Chances are you might be ignoring all but one of them.  For instance, I could be searching on “Pensacola Day Spas” because I wanted to buy a gift certificate for my wife.   Whereas my wife might search the same term to see if they take last-minute or walk-in appointments.  Or maybe she’s searching  to see if they have a specific treatment?  The point is, it helps to mentally force yourself to brainstorm as many real-world behind the search terms as possible.

• What do they already know? Someone searching on your name or on the name of a specific service or product line obviously knows more than a visitor entering from a general search term.  Use your keyword knowledge to get a sense of visitors’ differing stages of the buying process?   Are they just starting out and searching for general info?  Do they already know exactly what they want?  Or are they somewhere in between?

• How well is your landing page matching up with visitor expectations and goals? Would visitors find their keywords on their entrance pages?  Would they know that they are in the right place, based on a 7-second scan of the page?  Do your entry pages have high bounce rates?  What is the average time spent on the page?

3) Next-page navigation – where are they going when they first hit your Website?

Now that you know where visitors are entering your site and you have a sense of their motivation upon arriving at your site, take a look at where they navigate to upon their arrival.  What are the most popular next pages? Look at this information while looking at the actual landing page.

• Are the most popular “next pages” the same ones you would have guessed?

• Are they pages linked to by prominent calls to action or embedded links placed within the active window? Or are they pages only accessible through your top or side navigation?

• What questions would those pages answer for the visitor?  Why do you think the visitor is moving to those pages? Is that action congruent with what you’ve seen of visitor motivation from their keywords/scent?

After you see what those most popular next pages are, click through to them within your analytics package and see where visitors are going from that next page.  If the majority of entering traffic (for a given page) is clicking through to a couple of different pages, you’ll often find that visitors navigate to the remaining popular pages following their first click.  You should start to see patterns forming – key, or most navigated to, pages will stand out.

Watch out for situations where your most persuasive content is NOT one of those most navigated pages; you can’t persuade visitors with content they never see.  Also, watch out for situations where one of your most navigated pages are also exit points, in those cases the visitor either lost confidence or didn’t find what they were looking for.

4) Where (and Why) are they leaving?

First, let’s talk about the difference between bounce rate and exit rate. A bounce is sort of like it sounds, someone came in on a given page and left on that same page without going anywhere else on the site.  Unless visitors are also converting on that same page, bouncing is bad.  It means visitors are rejecting you – either because you are attracting the wrong visitors, or because your landing pages are not re-assuring them that they are in the right place to find what they came looking for.

An exit rate simply tells you how many of the people who came to that page also left your site from that page, including both people entering the site on that page AND people navigating to that page from somewhere else on your website.

• Planned and unplanned exits. Some exits are good.  You expect people to leave your site after buying something/filling in a lead form.  Customers who log-into a registered user domain from your home page will likely show up in your analytics as a bounce.  Etc.  But you obviously don’t want customers to leave before reaching their goal or your goal.  Often you’ll find visitors exiting from pages containing your conversion beacons – product pages containing the “add to cart” button, service pages containing your lead form, etc.  Or you’ll see cart/form abandonment, where visitors start to convert and then back out.

• Take a look at “time on page” for the conversion beacons. Abandoning a page after a few seconds isn’t the same as dropping it after a few minutes.  A few seconds means it was the wrong product or service for them.  Someone leaving your page after a few minutes engaged with your content and never got the answers to their questions and/or simply didn’t have the confidence to buy.  Take a look at the page itself, what information are you not giving them?  Are you using great photos, persuasive copy, points of action assurances, risk reversals, etc. in order to instill buyer confidence?  What about shipping information?  Most of the exits on both this page and the cart page are caused by inadequate information and content on these conversion beacon pages.

• Page prior and broken scent? If you find a high exit rate page, look at the most popular entry paths to that page.  Look for mismatches between expectations in moving from the prior page to the exit page.  What were visitors hoping to find on that exit page and what did they actually find?  Was the hyperlink misleading or was the content simply anemic?  Try to figure out the Piss-Off Factor.

5) Form a hypothesis and test

Completing steps 1-4 should have shown you several mismatches between what you and/or your visitor expected and wanted to happen vs. what actually happened.  You should also be able to come up with some pretty good theories for why these mismatches are happening and what might fix them.  Even better, you should have a strong idea about what success would look like if your tested theory proves true.  In other words, you know what metrics are indicating a problem, so you know what metrics you should see change.  Congratulations, you’ve now made your analytics actionable.

Here are some further tips to help keep you going down the right path:

• Don’t test randomly - always test with a hypothesis regarding visitor motivation/behavior.  You’re after insight as much as lift – a “negative” test that gives you a better idea of what motivates your visitor is     actually better for your long-term success than a positive test that provides little or no new insight.

• The difference between micro-conversion vs. macro-conversion. Testing a page variable that reduces bounce rate and/or moves more people to a key persuasive page may or may not immediately impact your conversion rate, as you may be moving people down a funnel that’s leaking somewhere else.  Or maybe you’re engaging early stage buyers that won’t convert for another month or so.

• Know when to test for micro-conversions, such as moving from one page to the next; when to test for macro-conversions, as in how much bottom-line impact this change made; and when to set-up a secondary, earlier-stage conversion, such as signing for the newsletter or downloading a white paper vs. buying or filling out a lead form.

Bonus step – answer their questions, manage their anxiety, stoke their imagination.

When looking at a page in terms of visitor behavior and motivation, always ask yourself how well that page is answering visitor questions, how well it is re-assuring them emotionally that they are in the right place and on the right track to accomplish their goal, and finally how well it is appealing to their real desires.

P.S.  A quick note on how to integrate “best practices” into your optimization efforts.  Rather than blindly testing best practices, allow your knowledge of them to help you form theories about why visitors are or are not taking a certain action.  For instance, it’s a best practice to place your calls to action within the active window.  If your main call to action is in a side-bar and almost no visitors are taking that action, you might test moving your CTA into the active window.  For some fabulous books on best practices and testing, take a look at Call to Action and Always Be Testing.

P.P.S. If you enjoyed this post please consider Tweeting it please.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]

In fact, whenever I work with B2B and complex sales clients it’s a sure bet their website won’t:

1) Adequately address the multiple decision-makers and influencers involved in securing the lead

If a sales manager needs to justify a training expense to his CEO and CFO, wouldn’t it help to provide your inside champion with messaging and tools to help him make his (read “your”) case?

It’s usually good to have sections of your website and messaging designed specifically for those secondary decision-makers and influencers that need to sign-off on the decision of your inside champion.  As an analogy to the consumer world, would you really want to construct a website that sells engagement rings without providing content and messaging for the prospective fiancee?

2) Have planned (and tracked) conversion points for visitors who are early in the buying process

To keep with the consumer analogy, let’s say you’re considering having a pool put into your back yard.  Assuming that one of your local pool suppliers/installers had a website with valuable early and middle stage content, how many times might you visit their website before actually contacting them and becoming a lead?

• You might come to them early on when doing preliminary research regarding what type of pool you wanted, what size, shape, depth, etc you should look at, what kind of associated expenses and purchases are involved, etc.  Reading this stuff might take 3-5 or even 15 different visits.  How would you know if any of these visits are successful?  How could you measure or get a handle on your Website’s influence on such a buyer?I’d normally suggest having a goal for these types of visitors.  Maybe it’s downloading a pool planning or pools for dummies report/PDF.  Maybe it’s playing with an interactive pool builder or pool cost calculator.  Whatever it is, having a trackable (and helpful) event for these early stage buyers helps to track your Website’s success in attracting and engaging

• Moving to the middle stage of the buying process, you might touch the site again when you are closer to buying and constructing a short list of potential contractors/installers.  This time you might drill down into why you should do business with them and not someone else, reading up on their installation timelines, the skill of their install crew, etc.You may or may not feel like filling out a lead form at this point.  But a valuable and well-merchandised free download titled something like, “10 Questions to Ask Any Pool Contractor,” might look far more attractive to you – especially if you only had to provide a name and e-mail (rather than the lead forms more detailed info requests) to get it.

• And then at the late stage of your buying process you might look at the site a third time to fill out the form or get the phone number to actually buy the pool. What a waste if the pool website only had the lead form as a conversion point, without ever providing (let alone tracking) any of the early and middle stage downloads and conversion events.  Questions would go unanswered, and prospective buyers would go unengaged / go somewhere else.

Needless to say, the exact same patterns of behavior occur for B2B sites as well.  And yet most B2B sites don’t have defined content and conversion points for their early and middle stage visitors.  Your prospective leads are going to go somewhere to get their questions answered, shouldn’t it be on your website not your competitors?

3)  Have metrics/analytics capable of tracking visitor behavior over multiple visits.

While early and middle stage conversion points help a Web analyst/website optimizer get a better handle on a sites overall success in engaging early and middle stage buyers, it still leaves them guessing at the big picture, simply because they can’t track a lead generation or sale all the way back to that prospect’s first visit to the Website.  This can be crucial for gauging the real success of a PPC campaign.  Key words that might look unprofitable (because they target earlier stage buyers) might be spectacularly profitable – but only after the 8th (or 20th) visit to the site.  Unfortunately, if you can’t track visitor behavior over multiple visits, it’s difficult to get a handle on real – vs. false- measures of keyword performance.

While I love, love, love Google Analytics / Google Ad Words, this is exactly one of these tools shortcomings.  And it’s one reason that we insist that our OnTarget clients install our software in addition to GA/GWO: OnTarget can bracket visitor behavior through keyword entry and track individual visit behavior over multiple visits.  It’s a wish-list come true for us Future Now Persuasion Architects and can be a positive boon for our On Target clients.

So there you have it: start matching your B2B and complex sale website to the real complexity of your sale.  I’ll be writing follow-up posts with exercises and steps on how to do this, but in the meantime, would it be too forward of me to suggest you sign up for On Target?

The problem is larger than that. In another email marketing study in 2007 by Silverpop, it was found that many people’s email marketing sucked, and that there was poor messaging follow through on the website from the email campaign. This often happens in a large organization because the team responsible for email marketing lives in a silo separate from the website team. When the organization is not in silos or when you have a smaller team though it still happens. They have not figured out how to integrate web analytics and website optimization with their email marketing; a critical piece of the marketing equation.

According to the eROI Q1 2009 Study: Trends & Use of Email Analytics:

The savvy email marketer knows that developing a truly targeted email campaign goes beyond simply segmenting by demographic and focuses on behavioral segmentation, which enables delivery of the most relevant, targeted messages to your recipients. How does one track behavior? Easy, just follow the data.

An individual who visits your site from an email campaign, but doesn’t make a purchase, can be targeted with an offer different than that sent to a person who eventually abandons their shopping cart, or another person who makes a purchase. Intelligent email marketing requires different tactics for follow up and re-engagement based on previous actions, but if you are not capturing any of these analytics all of this might sound like magic.

The 80% that measured their email marketing efforts were asked to rank the metrics they tracked by importance and ranked open rate, followed by click rate and open to click ratio as the most important measures.

Though they receive the most attention, these metrics ultimately give you the least amount of insight into the true success of your campaign. Open rate, as mentioned earlier, is not a reliable metric. Click rate is better, but unless you can tie those clicks to dollars, campaign ROI can still be a little tough to prove.

Tragically, about one-eighth of all email marketers are not tracking conversions. Of those, the majority don’t track conversions because of time or budget considerations, but, shockingly, about one-quarter aren’t tracking conversions simply because they do not know how.

Are you leveraging intelligent dynamic emails? Emails that are triggered based on the analytics and actions of your website visitors and customers? Let us know if you need help.

Earlier last month some hot air came from Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg, who wants to prevent the Internet advertising economy from becoming “performance based.” This week provided another more disheartening statistic. Helen Leggatt, of BizReport, writes:

With the number of channels a marketer has to manage and monitor increasing, you’d think technology would be employed to make their job easier. Not so. It seems marketers are foregoing analytics to measure their online marketing campaigns…When asked about their use of measurement applications, less than half (47%) of the 1,545 American and British marketing professionals polled by Alterian said they currently use analytics to measure their online campaigns.

Sure, the shear number of those ignoring analytics in today’s marketplace is alarming, but it’s not all that surprising.

At first blush, one could conclude that site owners suffer from either arrogance or ignorance. Marketers either believe they don’t need analytics because they are smart enough to trust their gut (arrogance), or they don’t know what to do with them (ignorance). The Web analytics community has been split on this issue. Eric T. Peterson, Web analytics consultant, argues Web analytics is hard, while Google’s analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik argues Web analytics isn’t hard. This still doesn’t sufficiently explain why more than 50 percent of marketing professionals fail to integrate analytics into their marketing efforts. (No doubt, getting value out of Web analytics is complex, something I’ll address in a future column.)

Mitch Joel, author of “Six Pixels of Separation,” offers some valuable insight:

It’s hard to measure the success and efficacy of your Digital Marketing initiatives if we’re feeling like our own home base could use a little renovating and extreme makeover. The problem is that many people built their online presence with a one-time budget. While they may have factored in ongoing budget for Web hosting and occasional updates, this strategy has left them paralyzed.

The bigger problem I’ve encountered in company after company is that most have failed to make Web site optimization a part of ongoing business operations. And who can blame them? For many, analytics have failed to live up to the promise that analytics vendors have been selling. Many companies have “been there, done that,” honestly attempting to use analytics to improve and have seen very little result in comparison to their effort.

As I commented on Mitch’s blog:

I blame it on our ADD mentality. Campaigns are exciting and change frequently, providing us with our next, new, shiny object fascination. Most people’s websites are static and lack the ongoing imagination and efforts required to reap the benefits of continuous improvements.Most campaigns would perform better if people only realized how many times a visitor engages with your campaign and then abandons only to search or reach for your “home base” later. This recession will weed out many of those who don’t pay attention to this.

If only they had stuck with their effort to make Web analytics work.

Still, commitment alone could put you on a hamster wheel. How does one know when to stop a particular test, stop improving a particular element, or drop a complete design in favor of something new? You must also commit to learning. Learn about your visitors, why they do what they do, and how you can better give them what they need and want.

The companies that benefit most from analytics have a culture of optimization. Whether it is explicit effort or part of a company’s DNA, each of these has some sort of process or system for analyzing the data, generating recommendations, and most important executing improvements, learning, and starting the process all over again. This improves the ROI (define) of efforts and ends up paying for itself and much, much more.

Optimization using analytics causes an interesting dichotomy. It is a rather simple concept, and there are many valuable and impactful “simple” lessons to be learned. But it is also complex; you can go very deep in analysis. To get the most out of your analytics — or just your optimization efforts — develop a cost-effective, smart system for improving continuously.

Not Using Analytics?

You are running out of excuses. Let’s deal with some of the smaller ones.

• If arrogance is your problem, do nothing. Your competitors will soon overtake you.
• If ignorance is your problem, learn. A good start is to get good at using a free product, eventually you can pay for more.
• If budget is a problem, it doesn’t have to be. You can do all kinds of things for much less money than you would imagine. Some of them are even free.
• If resources are the problem, that’s OK. Just move forward at a slower pace. Optimize what you can as often as you can with the resources you have now. Soon you’ll catch up and surpass the arrogant company mentioned above.

Optimizing the Organization

Want to have a culture with a constant eye toward getting smarter and better? Here are a few things that your organization can do:

• Adopt an attitude that every action measured in analytics has an actual human being behind it. Don’t allow your optimization team or analyst treat your visitors like stats. Try starting by looking at them as personas.
• Don’t get overly addicted to shiny new tools and technologies, or even to marketing platforms. New isn’t always better. Here are a few wise words from the lovable venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki:
  Follow through on an issue until it is done or irrelevant. Many organizations set goals and even measure progress toward them. However, after a short time, some goals are no longer on the radar because people start focusing on the coolest and most interesting stuff. For example, fixing bugs in the current version of a software application is not as interesting as designing a new, breakthrough product — but your current customers think it is. Legend has it that Pat Riley, the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, measured stats of his players and posted each player’s progress on his locker.
• Commit to a culture of execution. “Execution is not an event — a onetime push toward achieving goals. Rather, it is a way of life,” says Kawasaki.

One of the most important things about improving is making it a way of life, so that it happens over and over.

What’s keeping you from using analytics to optimize your marketing?