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.

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?

Here are a few others that caught my attention:

About Face: My buddy CC Chapman prepared this guide afterthe recent update to Facebook Pages. He thinks many brands and businesses will be left wondering how they can best take advantage of this upgrade and this white paper offers some wonderful advice.

The Techie Guide to Google Website Optimizer: This guide covers just about everything you wanted to know about the technical ins and outs of Website Optimizer.

How to Write a White Paper: This paper’s objective is to guide you in the process of developing effective white papers and persuasive business documents.

What interesting white papers have you read lately?

P.S. if you are marketing your own whitepapers don’t forget to read 12 Techniques to Increase White Paper Leads.

• increase your qualified leads
• create a system to prioritize leads
• reduce the lag time in responding to leads
• target content to your different market segments/personas
• aggressively optimize your lead/demand generation process
• improve the ROI of your search and pay-per-click campaigns
• reap the value of a continuous optimization discipline

Get your copy of “The Leading Edge” now.

Many sites offering “free” white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn’t treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won’t either.

The problem starts by thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information, you need to show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange: valuable information for valuable information.

1. Your White Paper Needs an Interesting Title – Would you rather read a white paper title “Mobile Analytics” or “Why 90% of Your Mobile Visitors Aren’t Being Tracked and What Your Can Do About It?” The same technique, that works for selling books, getting people to read blog posts and even to attend webinars can significantly increase your white paper downloads. But don’t go for such an interesting name that no one knows what the paper is about though. For borderline cases, a strong sub-title can bridge between interesting and descriptive.

2. Every Book White paper Needs a Cover – Instead of just giving the white paper a title alone, merchandise it the way you would a book. No plain vanilla covers, make it engaging. Take a look at some samples white paper cover merchandising from other smart marketers.

Keep in mind, many people prefer to download and print white papers before they read them. Which is more likely to catch someone’s attention on a busy, cluttered desk a white paper with no cover or one with an engaging cover design?

3. Make It Easy to Digest – How often have you downloaded a white paper for it only to be pages after pages of block text. No headlines, sub-headlines or bullet points. No graphics, charts or screenshots. People are busy. It is fine to make a long white paper if the topic deserves it, but make it reader-friendly.

4. Tell Them What They Are Going to Get – Write persuasive copy that not only informs people what they’ll learn from the download but also what they can do with the information. Make sure this copy is crisp, simple to read and formatted for online readers. You may want to offer key takeaways, a table of contents, or even an example chart to show them how valuable the paper is going to be.

5. Give Them Download Details – Let them know how many pages it is, how big the file is, what format the paper is in (PDF, DOC), etc.

6. Give Them an Excerpt – Very few people like reading poorly written, monotonous sounding, corporate gobblygook. By providing an excerpt you can help prove how well written, easy to understand and valuable your white paper is.

7. Prove Other People Like It – Like endorsements on a book cover, “credible testimonials” on the download page of your white paper can help sell the value of the content and improve conversion.

8. Don’t Ask For Too Much Information – Make sure your forms are optimized to ask only what you really need. And please don’t ask people to “submit to you.”

9. Let Them Know What Will Happen With Their Personal Information -  Provide them with point of action assurances around their privacy.

10. Make it Easy For People to Share – Give people an easy mechanism for them to share your white paper via social media, email or pass along.  Do it on the offer/landing page as well as on the thank you page. Visitors are most engaged when they are already downloading the white paper, so a suggestion for them to share it often helps.

11. Have a Follow-up Program -Let’s face it, you created your white paper and offered it for download in order to get leads.  That means the white paper has to generate a response or conversation.  Making your white paper interesting, actionable, and readable will help, but you’ll be far more successful getting responses if you initiate the post-download interactions and follow-up conversations through a well-planned lead nurturing campaign.

12. Offer Contact Information – Some persona actually prefer to contact you immediately upon finding the white paper, so make sure your contact information is on the download page. Others prefer to contact you as they are reading the white paper, make sure your contact information is found there as well. Others just feel a sense of confidence knowing you are providing your full contact information and not trying to remain anonymous while asking for their personal information. In simple terms make it easy for them to find your contact information everywhere.

What other techniques have you tried to increase leads from white paper requests?