But did you know that traffic generation and website optimization aren’t mutually exclusive? There are tactics that will help you accomplish both goals at the same time, and one FutureNow Partner recently spoke to me about a tactic that’s working well.

Our Partner is a software development firm that specializes in web-based applications and good old web development and design. They are currently gaining leads and sales by being very active with their marketing mix: radio, billboards, PPC, SEO, etc. They identified that there is a clear separation between their leads based on the lead’s motivations and, more importantly, their budgets. Some leads are looking for a small and simple web site with a custom design, with an approximate $500 budget. Other leads are looking for very complex web sites with a lot of tools and capabilities with a much higher budget in the $5000+ range.

The marketing team recognizes the difficulty in trying to effectively speak to these very different segments on a single site. Even using landing pages, there is the possibility that one type of visitor may be turned off by content they read that was written for another type.  (FutureNow has a whole methodology for writing copy and mapping out buying paths for different types of visitors on a single site, but this takes a focused expertise and experience.) On top of trying to speak to all types on their main web site, this company creates completely different buying experiences on separate micro-sites for each segment. This drives more targeted and qualified traffic to these micro-sites. The micro-sites speak more directly to the segment and therefore move them through their buying process more effectively, without possible distractions from content that doesn’t speak to their motivations and needs.

They generate the smaller budget leads via radio ads. These radio listeners are driven to a micro-site in order to follow through on the messaging from the radio ad.

They also generate leads who are primarily interested in finding a web design/development firm in Utah via PPC ads with keywords such as “cheap web sites utah.” They send these visitors to a different micro-site and speak to their interests of a local company that can meet their web design needs.

As you can see, they send these very different prospects down customized buying persuasion paths based on the buyer’s motivation and need. By doing this, they are driving more targeted traffic to sites that have been more effectively optimized for a particular segment.

You can segment your traffic by the different products or services that they are searching for.  Or, you can segment your traffic by the different problems they are experiencing, or solutions they are looking for.  Are you driving all traffic to specific landing pages, or simply a single homepage on a single web site? Are you optimizing your site based on different motivations? These are good questions to ask yourself in order to get started optimizing your primary web site.

On top of optimizing your primary website, you should consider the micro-site tactic in order to drive more targeted traffic to your company and quickly turn this traffic into leads or sales. This tactic is applicable to multiple online business models; whether you’re e-commerce, lead generation, or a brochure site.

Note: Micro-sites are entities that can become part of your overall marketing strategy and shouldn’t be created and then forgotten about. Along with your other marketing efforts, micro-sites need to be continuously optimized and improved.

Are you ready for the challenge?

We began to dig deeper. We learned that the client, an online software service, was pushing current customers through a key selling page we were optimizing. Because these customers had already converted and were simply on their way to sign in, it was causing noise in the data, canceling out any movement we might have seen otherwise.

I instructed one analyst, a competitive type who takes great pride in delivering results for our clients, to segment his way out of sadness. The analyst was able to shortly report some very positive results underneath the noise.

He segmented out current customers and was able to analyze optimization results using cleaner data. Simple. And overlooked, more often than you’d think.

Of course, segments can be used to filter out visitor noise, but they can also be used to keep a close eye on specific campaigns and events and to hunt for opportunities. Let’s look at a few ways you can use segments to get a better idea of why visitors do what they do on your site.

First, for the sake of simplification, I’ll refer to segmenting in the free Google Analytics tool, but know that segmentation is available in almost any major analytics offerings. While viewing visitors by segments isn’t new or novel, it’s becoming easier to do.

What Are Segments?

Google Analytics calls them advanced segments. Here is its official definition:

Advanced Segmentation is a tool you can use to slice and dice your Analytics data with great precision. Advanced segments allow you to choose what types of visits you want to be considered when generating the data for a report.

If you find that you have a large amount of data but you’re having a hard time filtering the information into a report, you can easily create your own segments or use our default segments and apply them to any report instead of creating different filters for each profile. Use advanced segments to further understand, anticipate and react to your customers by identifying key trends and common behaviors.

Ideas for Happy Segmenting

Let’s start with a few ideas courtesy of ROI Revolution. Here’s one specifically for e-commerce sites:

If you have any sort of membership programs, tracking returning transactions and customer retention is a great way to increase revenue. Using the New vs. Returning report is a very basic way of examining these trends, but it’s based on the Google Analytics cookie. People surf from multiple browsers and multiple computers, but if you have a membership program or the ability to track customer accounts, chances are you will know whether someone is a return customer…

You can create an advanced segment to zoom in on only those with the “return” tag.

Now monitor your retention efforts. You’re testing out a new coupon program? Did it boost your return customer transactions? Did it boost overall revenue? Now you can find out.

And another:

The Top Landing Pages report is great if you’re only interested in bounce metrics, but what if you want to see how much money a landing page generated? One way of getting at this data is by creating an advanced segment for each landing page.

Once you apply these segments to your reports, you can see all traffic that originated at a specific landing page. In addition to revenue, try analyzing time on site, internal site searches, and clickpath data. You can use the information that you collect here to supplement your Google Website Optimizer reports with additional metrics. If one landing page generates more orders but the other generates more revenue, which is the true victor?

In our practice, we look at several segments by default. The new vs. returning visitor segmentation is always helpful. This segmentation allows us to see how well a site is doing with first-time unique visitors compared to returning visitors. It gives us insight into the length of the buying cycle and can help us determine if a site has credibility problems.

We also do a lot of persona-based segmenting and segmenting by buying stage. But that is another, much longer column.

You can also set up segments to track how visitors might be behaving based on traffic source, such as why one traffic source, such as affiliate traffic, is outperforming your own PPC (define) campaigns. The possibilities are endless and fun, and can be very profitable.

For lead-gen sites, segments can be set up to cross-analyze conversion rate among content pieces that people visit. You can then drill-down and learn why Whitepaper B converts at a higher rate than Case Study A.

Maybe you just produced a few new product demos and videos to sell your goods and you’d like to know if they’re working. In Google Analytics, you can easily set up event segments and isolate the traffic that has actually watched your new video events. Are those visitors indeed converting higher than those who don’t see a video?

Get some more ideas directly from Google and Omniture.

Last Words and Caution

One caution: Segments can be used to torture data into saying whatever you want. Resist the urge to segment and segment and then segment again until you see the positive result you’re looking for. Simply use it as a way to either zoom in on a specific visitor behavior compared to a control of some kind or as a way to filter out unqualified, or noisy, traffic.

If you’re a little bit of an analytics junkie but have hesitated to jump into segments, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Jump into segments, the water is warm. You don’t need to be an analytics ninja to set up a few helpful segments. Remember, metrics based on averages produce average results.

Have any interesting lessons from your segments? Tell us all about it.

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

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.

If these customers aren’t tagged somehow and you don’t have in depth analytics in place, you probably aren’t effectively separating their behavior from the behavior of new visitors to your site. This makes it difficult for you to point out stumbling blocks on your site because your existing customers and new visitors may be landing on the same pages and navigating to the same pages on your site even though their tasks may be very different. You should suspect that their behavior would be dramatically different, but you have no way of separating them.

In order to gain valuable insight from looking at your analytics and trying to help new visitors buy more effectively, you need to be able to assess their behavior without the existing customers providing additional noise to the data.

If this rings true for you,  what are you currently doing to be able to make effective assumptions from analytics?

• Early means that the visitor has a problem, and is looking for a solution.  They may not know who you are, or that your product/service solves their problem.
• Middle means that they have an intention to buy a product or service that solves their problem, but not necessarily from you.
• Late means that they’re persuaded to buy from you, and intend to close the deal.

Sometimes, websites seem to be doing everything right, but the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) just aren’t as high as everyone expects.   Their sites are functional, accessible, usable, and intuitive.  Their look and feel is credible, and their content is high quality.  So why do their visitors not behave as we expect? Why do well-planned and well-executed scenarios (e.g. PPC ad, to landing page, to lead generating form, to thank you page) not always convert?

You guessed it: Buying Stage Schizophrenia.

Buying Stage Schizophrenia is when our selling process doesn’t jive with the visitor’s buying process.  It’s when our conversion funnel is designed for a buying stage that the visitor isn’t in.  Take a look at your site’s conversion funnel…it’s most likely designed for Late Stage buyers, right?  Take a look at one of your PPC campaigns…are you showing Early Stage keywords a Middle Stage ad that sends the visitor down a Late Stage funnel?  Poor visitor

The key point is to be aware that multiple buying stages are traversing your designed scenarios.  It’s fine if your funnel is fine-tuned to Late Stage buyers, but do you have easy navigation paths to let an Early or Middle stage visitor branch out and get more information?  It’s fine if your PPC landing pages are perfect for a Middle Stage searcher, but can an impatient Late Stage searcher “Buy Now”?

How do I identify buying stages to improve my scenarios?

A few ways, using basic analytics tools and skills, are:

• Look at your keyword lists (in-site search, organic keywords, and paid keywords) and start segmenting by buying stage.  Guessing is OK.
• Look at click paths and navigation (which pages would be attractive/informative to the various stages?)
• Look for those who bail out of conversion funnels (it could be that they’re not ready to buy)
• Look at entrance sources (organic vs. PPC vs. referrals vs. direct visits)

Coincidentally (read: not coincidental at all ), we just launched a subscription service that can help with this very issue, you can start improving your conversion rate for as low as $1,000 a month.

I call it persona-lization.

Thankfully, today’s technologies have come a long way from those that would recommend “customers who bought my book ‘Call to Action‘ should also buy clean underwear.”

Moving Beyond Demographics

For over a decade, I’ve been railing about demographics’ limited value. Just because your visitors fall into a certain demo doesn’t mean the same things motivate them. Demographics don’t reveal motivation.

Customers have individual needs and different reasons to buy. They’re at different stages of the buying process. Their motivations, largely driven by their unique personalities, are diverse. To maximize ROI (define), a personalization campaign must address and effectively bucket (or segment), then persuade a visitor based on this data as well. This go well beyond demographics.

One place where demographics can be used effectively with personalization technologies: shipping rates. There is an extreme difference in shipping costs for East Coast and West Coast customers; you can make each demographic a different shipping offer.

Hunting the Bargain Hunter

David Brussin, CEO of Monetate.com, describes a campaign involving client ModCloth, an online retailer:

• • 1,590% lift in conversion rate vs. control
  • 2,050% lift in new customer acquisition vs. control
  • 2,314% more revenue vs. control

ModCloth.com’s marketing team came up with the idea of incorporating a game into the sale, by giving customers the opportunity to “win” a discount on their purchase by finding a hidden creative somewhere in the sale catalog. Since this was a holiday promotion, they hit on the idea of using Rudolph as the hidden creative.

The idea was to display a creative on a product page somewhere in the catalog, and once that creative has been seen by a customer affect a discount on their shopping cart at checkout for the rest of that visit.

The results were compelling; customers who searched for Rudolph were committed to the purchase:

This personalization is especially exciting because it effectively targeted and engaged a very distinct persona preference type — the bargain hunter. This campaign went beyond just offering a bargain; it delighted this persona type by actually giving them a virtual hunt. Once this persona type actually hunted for a discount, it was unlikely they were going to abandon it. Many of them completed a transaction and likely told every one of their friends (another common bargain-hunter behavior).

Building a Meaningful Relationship

In these rough economic times, we’re all tempted to bend over backwards for bargain hunters (who isn’t looking for a bargain, right?), but you shouldn’t do it at the expense of the other buyer types.

One is the relational buyer, the relationship-focused decision maker. This persona type wants to build a relationship with those she purchases goods and services from. She wants to know who she’s buying from.

Jim Cain, senior analyst at Sitebrand, which develops personalization software for Web sites, tells the story of how the company reached out to relationship-focused customers:

The Sitebrand team crafted a call to action simply saying “First Time Here? Click here to see our welcome page” and ran it in a banner that would be shown on the first page view of the visit, regardless of landing page.

The welcome page itself, also built and optimized by Sitebrand, allowed their client, the CoffeeForLess.com team, the ability to write the equivalent of an “about us” page with copy designed specifically for this segment. There were no discounts or promotions included in this dialog, only the most relevant information for this unique visitor type and calls to action to help them start their shopping experience.

In the four months this dialog has been live, the impact to conversion has been significant. In the month of January alone, this effort resulted in a 304% segment specific conversion lift, accounting for over 50,000 in incremental sales.

Taking the Offline Online

Let’s face it, a significant portion of our visitors simply don’t like computers or spending time online. These people aren’t luddites; they just live life away from their computers in the offline world. We call these shopping types the spontaneous buyers. This includes buyers with little patience on your site, visitors who won’t spend time searching and looking or who won’t wrestle with complex online tools and builders. So how do you deal with this type of persona? Improve the online experience not with bells and whistles but with actual help purchasing.

Online fragrance commerce site Scentiments was great at personalization offline, but it had to take it up a notch online. From Howard Wyner, CEO of Scentiments.com:

While Scentiments has always emphasized a personalized approach in the stores — it even has an online and phone-based “Fragrance Guru” to answer specific questions from individual shoppers — we had not developed an in-house recommendation capability before then because we did not have the internal staff time or expertise to do so.

Scentiments.com contracted with MyBuys.com to generate personalized product recommendations on its Website and to manage its email list to send personalized email alerts.

We learned quickly to have more fulfillment staff on the job Wednesday afternoons and Thursdays, because the personalized email alerts go out on Wednesday. We always see a spike in sales on those days. The results are outstanding, Scentiments.com’s email open rate was 29%, click-through rate was 7.8%, and conversion rate was 16%. That level of personalization fosters loyalty and boosts sales.

While this isn’t a specific campaign, it is a concerted effort to emulate the offline shopping experience online. Your site should be good at doing what the best of your sales team does offline. After all, the best offline salesperson personalizes their pitch.

Getting Started With Personalization

While the vendors mentioned above are trusted colleagues and friends that I’d recommend, not everyone can afford these types of technologies and solutions. So if you are small or lack budget, or if you want to prove the personalization concept, there are free tools that will help you do just that.

If you want better insight into motivations and your site’s current ability to meet visitor expectations, free survey tool 4Q can give you some preliminary data to start segmenting customers based on behavior. BTBuckets is also a free tool for doing personalization by behavioral segments and targeting. Of course, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) will allow you to test your personalization efforts at no cost, and BTBuckets has even worked on an integration for using GWO.

Before this, however, you might want to create a few personas and create specific campaigns designed to speak to their most base motivations. Then create experiences that will exceed their expectations.

Tell us your personalization stories through the comments section below.

Over the past several columns, I’ve examined conversion rate basics. This week, we continue our study of the basics with an updated look at RFM.

Recency represents the number of days since the customer last completed the action you’re profiling. Frequency represents the number of times the customer has completed this action since the first time she completed it. Monetary value represents the total value (usually total sales) the customer created by completing these actions.

The classic RFM model produces scores that rank customers relative to each other for the likelihood that they will repeat the action being profiled. Any action can be profiled: visits, purchases, logins, and so on. High likelihood to repeat an action, providing this action has economic value to the company, means high future value. Low likelihood to repeat means low future value. RFM is that simple.

RFM is a commonsense way of sorting marketing and optimization decisions based on what your visitors actually do and what they spend.

What Can RFM Do for You?

Let me defer that answer to a friend, optimization junkie, and fan of RFM. According to Frank Malsbenden, VP/GM of Vision Retailing, parent company of Shoeline.com:

The use of RFM metrics can drastically improve the effectiveness of e-mail marketing. It’s no secret that your best chance at repeat business is within 30 days of the customer’s last purchase. It’s not hard to grasp that frequency of purchases are a key metric in understanding the “health” of your customer database. And if you think about what you expect for service levels at retail establishments you spend heavily with, it’s easy to put yourself in the shoes of customers who spend big bucks with you. This is RFM, and catalog empires were built on the premise that recency, frequency, and monetary metrics should be the driving force in customer retention strategies…

But sometimes in e-commerce, we outthink ourselves, get too cute by half, or just get too plain confused by all the data that flies our way on a daily basis. Instead of keeping it simple, we get too “sophisticated.” What we should be doing is mastering techniques like RFM that have been proven over time. The possibilities with RFM and e-mail are endless. At Shoeline.com, we’ve started off with the basics. We developed e-mail templates for customer’s who purchased 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days ago. The content for each template is dynamically driven based on the RFM score of the recipient as well as references to previous purchases. We’ve developed the process so that these e-mails are sent automatically every day. All we have to do is change the content for the templates on a seasonal basis to ensure thematic relevance. The results speak for themselves. In 2008 the difference in open-conversion rate (orders/opens) was 31 percent higher for RFM-driven e-mails versus our traditionally segmented e-mails. The difference in straight conversion rate (orders/recipients) is so stark I’m afraid to go public, for fear of losing credibility. These results have prompted us to increase the percentage of RFM-based e-mails in 2009, and you can be assured that someday soon, 100 percent of our e-mails will be RFM-based.

Obviously the value of RFM goes beyond e-mail and can be used to increase SEM efficiency, ad targeting, and even merchandising. Still the simplest and most profitable use of RFM scoring is to identify and resell your best customers over and over.

Getting Started With RFM

Start by reading my previous columns on the subject: “Betting the Farm on RFM, Part 1” and Betting the Farm on RFM, Part 2.

Once you grasp RFM fundamentals, you’ll be inspired. Once you sort by these criteria, you’ll quickly find new and exciting ways to use them, such as:

• Is that PPC (define) campaign really bringing in high RFM customers or just low RFM customers? Any campaigns you would kill?
• What do high-scoring customers buy more of? Are there any patterns? Can you make them an offer to sell them again?
• What other behaviors are high RFM visitors engaging in on your site? Are average number of pages higher or lower? Is time on site higher? And so on.
• Create new KPIs (define) designed to optimize higher RFM visitors retention.
• Does RFM data give you any insight on merchandising and inventory?

My one tip when using RFM: don’t waste too many resources turning low RFMs into higher ones. It’s much more efficient to keep higher RFMs engaged.

If you need a quick immersion in RFM, again I highly suggest “Drilling Down: Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet” by good friend Jim Novo.

Have you learned anything interesting from employing RFM techniques? Let’s us know in the comments section what you’ve found.

When I fall off the wagon, every so often, I’ll go ahead and pick a keyphrase and start clicking through PPC ads and their landing pages and take screenshots of the whole entire experience. You can’t imagine how often the experience from keyword to ad to landing page is broken. I want to call them and yell at them to subscribe to OnTarget. I don’t do it. Instead a few weeks or months will pass and the same advertisers drop those ads.  I can just hear their internal discussions as they analyze their metrics and rationally conclude that keyphrase X doesn’t convert for us.

(Maybe we should start the Internet Marketing Darwin Award for PPC ads.)

Keywords Don’t Fail to Convert… we fail to convert visitors for that keyword.

Do you believe the keyphrase you chose is relevant to your business? If it is, then your responsibility is to show every visitor how that keyphrase is relevant to their needs. Every visitor that comes to your site is not completely unique. They have various mostly foreseeable motivations persuading them to buy and various foreseeable objections that would keep them from buying. Ask yourself:

• What is their intent in usingthose keywords?
• What need or desire are they trying to fulfill?
• What is their goal?
• How do we align our goals to meet theirs?

PPC ads are just like tapping someone on the shoulder. PPC ads are only meant to grab attention not convert. If you want to convert your visitor you need to work on the rest of the experience (the conversation) beyond the click.

Do you make any money when a visitor just clicks your ad? No.

So instead of thinking of PPC as pay per click start thinking of it as pay per conversation.

Devote some resources to optimizing your conversations.

How to Get Started Optimizing your Keyword Marketing

1. The first thing you need to do is bucket your keyphrases. Start with the first 100 or so top phrases that drive traffic to your website. For each one of those classify the terms by phase in the buying process. Does the keyphrase apply in the early, middle or late stage of the buying process?

If the term is driving traffic to your site but not really relevant to your business put it in a disqualified bucket for now. For FutureNow one of those terms is “convertion rate.” It may be a harmless typo but time has shown that if they can’t spell conversion they aren’t likely customers.

An example: Someone is planning to buy a new television set. Early in their buying process they might use phrases like LCD tvs, best LCD tv, or LCD tv reviews. As they progress to the middle stage you might see keyphrases like compare Sharp and Sony LCDs, LCD tv 1080 dpi and then move on to specific models in the late stages like Sony KDL-52XBR6.

2. Define and realign your goals with your visitors. Would you expect every person you went out on a date with to marry you at the end of the first date? So why do we expect every keyword to convert visitors to our ultimate goal, the sale or the lead? Our job is to get them there, but based upon their buying preferences, they may not be able to be moved any faster than they are prepared to.

Start planning micro-goals along the way to your macro-goal (sale or lead). Someone earlier in their buying process might not be ready to commit on their first visit. Plan smaller milestones or micro-goals that may lead that person to convert at a later point in their process.

Why don’t many more early or middle stage landing pages have some easy way to capture a visitor’s email address with some kind of offer? 

If your web pages were sales people, how many of them would you fire or at least get trained?

Don’t pay for a keyphrase or a date if your only expectation is a  full commitment at the end.  You need to romance them and show them all your best moves. (Warning – this is conversion advice and it works but I’m no dating expert, just ask my wife.)

Some examples: Maybe you can offer them a buyer’s guide download, a coupon for their first time purchase, an offer to see a webinar about how to choose the product/service they are considering or a price alert notification if this item goes on sale.

Every keyphrase should have a goal that is in alignment with the visitor’s stage in their buying process.

3. Measure your success and build confidence. Respect and support your customer’s journey along their buying process by pulling them along instead of trying to push them to commit too fast. That is the friction that is caused by your sales process colliding with, instead of aligning with, their buying process. This is what creates cognitive dissonance. What you need to build is confidence. Your visitors need confidence that you are there to support their buying process and confidence in your ability to address all their needs and wants in order to convert visitors at all stages.

Start tracking and evaluating your keyphrases and landing pages by how well they support moving visitors through the buying process.  Analyze these micro-goals and continuously optimize the experience to move further and further along so that you keep them on target. Every step closer to the macro-goal is a success, every visit that just bounces is a failure.

Take these 3 steps now and you’ll enjoy a more confident and lucrative 2009.

P.S. This post was inspired by my presentation at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago. Read about it on the AimClearBlog.

I was also lucky enough to get a signed copy of my friend Andrew Goodman’s updated book Winning Results with Google AdWords, Second Edition.The first was was great and I am looking forward to reading this one over the weekend.

2. Customer Focus Calculator – will analyze the words on your page and determine if your copy is more about yourself or your customer. This tool will measure if you are we-we-ing all over yourself.

3. BT Buckets – Engage your users with a free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.

4. 4Q from IPerceptions – developed with web analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik. When evaluating how you website is doing obviously it helps to get your customers’ opinions. This free tool helps you answer four important questions:

* How satisfied are my visitors?
* What are my visitors at my website to do?
* Are they completing what they set out to do?
* If not, why not?
* If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?

5. What’s the Buzz? – a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword. To do that, it does five things:

* It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days
* It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword
* It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword
* It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search)
* It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

6. Bad Neighborhood Link Checker – scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.

7. Backlink Social Celebrity SEO Tool – discover who bookmarked a webpage and who linked to that webpage. The bookmarks are searched for in the various social bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, Raw Sugar, and others. The backlinks are found using Google and Yahoo!.

8. Webbed-O-Meter 2.0 – can help track how effective you are at inspiring consumer generated content online, call it buzz marketing, social media marketing or viral marketing.

9. Website Grader – provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

10. Spider Simulator – help you find out for yourself how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your visibility.

11. Spider Test – Shows the source code of a page, all outbound links, and common words and phrases.

12. Google Analytics – web analytics with new “enterprise features” and a ton of plugins and hacks.

13. Google Website Optimizer – Free A/B and Multivariate Testing

14. Yahoo! Analytics – still in beta, but incredibly powerful. It is currently available with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store plans.

15. Microsoft adCenter Analytics – by invitation only, but you can apply at the link provided.

16. Piwik – This is an open source web analytics solution.

17. Linkscape – allows access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains.

18. BacklinkAnalysis – Get a look at what keywords websites are linking to you with.

19. Trifecta – Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.

20. Firebug – this plugin for Firefox provides a number of development tools. For the purposes of analysis, Firebug will allow you to monitor and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within your browser.

21. YSlow for Firebug – YSlow will analyze your page to make suggestions for how you can speed up the page. YSlow is integrated with Firebug.

22. Google Webmaster Tools – see which phrases your ranking well for, what pages are causing problems for Google when crawling your site, which pages are getting the most links, rss subscribers, etc.

23. Morgue File – offers free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

24. OpenAds – for sites that want to serve and track advertising.

25. Sitescore – analyzes the quality of incoming and outgoing links, keyword density, page titles, plagiarism, popularity rank, the usage of popups and the effectiveness of site’s structure. Sitescore also grades the printability, readability, spiderability and usability of the page as well as spelling and W3C compliance. This is no longer available for free, sorry.

26. mon.itor.us – use this to monitor uptime, website performance and other hosting abnormalities.

27. Orangoo Spell Check – spell check your website.

28. The Scrutinizer – offers 283 tools to test your website in one place.

29. Product Indexation Check – use this handy tool to check how many of your category or product pages are included in the major search engines.

30. Kamplye – allows your visitors to give feedback on your site, via a little button that sits at the edge of each webpage.

31. Google’s Free Custom Search Engine – create your own custom search engine, indexing your website or add additonal websites as well.

32. Feng-GUI – generates heatmaps for your website (upload a screenshot) by simulating human vision during the first five seconds of viewing your website.

33. Scrutinizer browser – a web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system. Using this simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design.

What are some of your favorite free tools to make websites better?

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

• Dutiful George Washington for Sensing-Judging / Methodicals
• Philosophical Thomas Jefferson for iNtuitive-Thinking / Competitives
• Rambunctious Teddy Roosevelt for Sensing-Perceiving / Spontaneous
• Idealistic Abraham Lincoln for iNtuitive-Feeling / Humanistics

Unfortunately, the cover story (though excellent) treated temperament from a Nine Characteristics perspective rather than a Four Temperaments perspective in a way similar to this Slate article or some recent blog posts regarding presidential personality type.

Yet at least the Time cover/article got me looking for and reading those posts, because the authors guessed slightly different temperaments from each other, and I found the differences illuminating.

But before discussing the blog authors’ picks, my personal predictions were SP/Spontaneous for fiery, action-oriented McCain, NF/Humanistic for idealistic and emotionally intelligent Obama, and NT+Judging/Competitive for sharp-minded and power-hungry Hillary Clinton.

So here’s how the experts typing matched up with mine:

• Everyone agreed that McCain has a spontaneous temperament.
• Emily Yoffe felt that Hillary was an SJ, but it turns out that Hillary has actually taken an MBTI test and has tested as an NTJ, which matched up with most blog post guesses.
• Some experts believe that Obama was an NT, while others felt he was more likely an NF

And here’s what you can take away from the misperceptions and disagreements surrounding presidential candidate typing:

1. Myers-Briggs Preferences (and Temperaments) are just that: preferences.

People are adaptable and can develop or use weaker sides of their personalities – and may even prefer to use them in a given situation.  Introverts, for instance, all have an auxiliary personality that they use for social situations or work.  Johnny Carson was a legendary introvert, but hardly came off as one during The Late Show.

So too could an NT politician learn to speak empathically about deep emotional issues and learn to champion inclusive policies.  Or conversely, NF’s are more than capable of adopting an NT mindset when the need for tough-minded leadership decisions arises.  Hence the NT/NF disagreement over an emotionally savvy, but also emotionally flat “no drama” Obama.

And it’s also why Future Now analyzes buying behavior in terms of “buying modes,” rather than assuming that buying mode will line up with temperament preference.  No one buys accounting software spontaneously, and even the most hard-headed and practical of us have been known to make spontaneous purchases on vacation.

2.  Knowing how temperament preferences overlap – and where they differ – is important

Why would one person see an SJ/Methodical when another sees an NT/Competitive?  Well because both temperaments have a strong preference for logical decision-making.  And an NT with a strong Judging preference, like Hillary’s INTJ personality type, can come off as an organizer – reliable and sufficiently detail-oriented to fool you into thinking they have a methodical temperament*

So what does this mean for your Website/copy?

Rather than pushing copy or messaging styles onto visitors, it’s best to cover all the temperaments persuasive needs according to the “fast up top and slow down bottom” layout method.  That way you can let visitors self-select the copy and links that most appeals to them without worrying about improperly typing them. You can get a sense of how these temperaments interact with a page by reading Howard’s analysis of Jakob Nielson’s eyetracking study.

Conclusion: Put Copy for Fast Decision Makers Up Top and Slow Decision Makers Down Bottom

So the default copy organization for most pages will include copy, links, and calls to action intended for competitive and spontaneous temperaments (your fast decision makers who are less likely to scroll and spend the time to examine the entire page) up top, and copy more suited for methodical and humanistic temperaments (slower decision makers who will examine the entire page) below that.

For instance, if you have an NT/competitive who follows a link intended for Methodicals, the page he lands on will still have some bottom-line or big picture copy at the top of the page and a call to action appropriate for his temperament.  And if that particular competitive keeps reading, well, he may just be in a more Methodical Buying Mode.  No big deal – as long as your pages are set up properly.

And that’s what I took away from the recent spate of articles and blog posts on Temperament and MBTI.

P.S. If this stuff interests you, I highly recommend that you check out this free audio book.

* For the record, what probably should have pushed Yoffe away from typing Hillary as an SJ, is that she is very much an ideologue.  Her political stances were sharply radical when she adopted them and required something of a philosophical bent to arrive at.  She didn’t enter politics by being an outstanding administrator; she entered politics because of a commitment to her political theories and ideas.  Plus, her career as a lawyer indicated an NT preference over SJ.

Most of the time, first time visitors are the largest underperforming segment of your traffic, representing on average 60 to 80 percent of all visitors, with a conversion rate significantly lower than site average. Judging by typical traffic generation spends, they’re also the most expensive type of visitor on your site. So making your site the first time visitor friend versus foe needs to be a top priority. To learn some key steps to better converting first time visitors, join special guest Bryan Eisenberg, from FutureNow and Sitebrand’s Carolyn Gardner on Thursday, October 30 2pm EST, as they share ideas around the importance and impact of:

1. Using data to build an understanding and framework for first-time visitors, aka personas.
2. Building the messaging required to grow the engagement and the sales of first-time visitor segments / personas.
3. Mapping the real estate on your site toward your messaging.
4. Launching your cycle, watching results, and planning for re-optimization.

Register for this special 29 minute webinar today.

*Custom reports* enable customers to create their own reports with the metrics they want to compare organized in the way they want to see it. You no longer have to look at the standard reports and using drag and drop you choose the data you want to analyze on your report. Avinash likes to calls these “micro-ecosystems.” The entire company can get one report with just the custom metrics the key groups in your organizations care about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGgl137×3Yw

*Advanced segmentation* enables customers to isolate and analyze unlimited subsets of their traffic. They can select from predefined custom segments such as “Paid Traffic” and “Visits with Conversions,” or create their own segments with a flexible, easy-to-use drag and drop segment builder. As you can see in the screenshot below you can see the “values” of your segments on the fly. Never look at data in aggregate again. The key to success in online marketing and web analytics has always been segmentation. Avinash hopes this is the death to standard reports. This will allow you to also do deep dives into the history, without changing tags, no touching code and no popups and just work through this one page feature.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*The application programming interface (API)*, currently in private beta, enables developers to access all of their Google Analytics data and export it for any type of use. Possible uses include integrating information into other data sources, building custom visualizations or interfaces, and conducting offline analysis.

*The updated interface* that was released yesterday for everyone, includes several new features in the administrative interface and a cleaner reporting screen that highlights tools for changing the way reports display data. A new navigation, administrators’ ability to rename accounts and profiles, and account and profile locater functionality are designed to help increase customers’ efficiency and ease of account management.

*Motion Charts* provide advanced but easy-to-use multi-dimensional analysis. Customers can select their own metrics to compare and then view how those metrics interact over time. By animating data, Motion Charts make discovering insights much easier and more obvious than when viewing data in traditional graphs and columns.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*Integration with Google AdSense gives new and existing AdSense publishers access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance by both page and referring site. Armed with this new data about user activity, they can now make more informed decisions on how to improve user experience on their sites and optimize their AdSense units to increase revenue potential.

The aim of this new feature set is to offer customers the flexibility to choose how their data is presented to them and the extensibility to integrate Google Analytics data with their other data sources. These capabilities will help further unlock the potential of both large and smaller website owners to improve visitor interaction with their websites and improve the value of their marketing investments.

More details on the entire new feature set including screen shots and videos demonstrating the new features will be available on the Google Analytics blog: http://analytics.blogspot.com.

If you would like early access to the feature set, please contact us. As Google Analytics Authorized Consultants we can offer a handful of clients to start with these new features and place them on the early release list.