Even if your website does not have e-commerce functionality, it still must have 'salability' - the ability to create the desired response from its visitors. If your company has developed a solid web strategy, you already know whether the desired transaction (or conversion) is online sales, potential customer inquiries or getting visitors to become registered users. With these objectives predetermined, it becomes easier to identify where a website is successful and what areas need improvement.
Search Engine Optimization
First and foremost, user tracking and analysis should be built into your online marketing program in order to identify these areas. It is foolish to invest significant resources in a website only to walk away from it without evaluating its performance on an ongoing basis.
A 'hands off' approach can only hurt your company's chances of future growth, whereas continual monitoring and user feedback can identify new opportunities.
Online Sales - What's the Problem? You've built the store and are still waiting for the orders to start flooding in. The first question to ask is whether or not the right customers are finding your site. Have you optimized your site for the search engines by using keyword-rich copy? Have you listed your site with the key directories: Yahoo, LookSmart, and the Open Directory Project? If not, then you need to start here.
SEO Packages
Writing for the web is difficult - not only must your copy include your key search terms, but it must also convince the user to buy products from your site. If the first pages visitors see do not immediately make clear the benefits of buying from your site, then they are likely to leave before ever finding your order page. Here's where your website's traffic statistics come into play - how many visitors get to your order page compared to the homepage? If the number is considerably lower, then visitors have determined you don't have what they want or the copy did not convince them to buy.
Now let's look at the buying process:
* Can visitors buy in 5 clicks or less?
* How many visitors get to the order page and buy?
* How can you streamline the buying process?
* What incentives can you offer buyers?
* Are your prices competitive?
The standard e-commerce conversion rate of visitors to buyers is reported at 3-5%, yet judging your site's performance by those numbers can be especially difficult if you are in a niche or highly competitive market. Understanding user behavior on your site and analyzing feedback from customers can drive successful changes to your site functionality. Case studies show simple modifications to order forms and sales copy results in significantly improved conversion rates - as much as 25%. If yours is a dynamic website, making products within the database available to search engines allows those users looking for a product by name or model number to find it on your website.
Registered Users
Whether you're an e-commerce site or not, an effective way of attracting repeat visitors is by creating a free or paid membership program. In the case of an e-commerce enterprise, asking users to register for a free membership provides a pre-qualified email list of potential buyers to which email newsletters showcasing new site features or special offers can be sent. By creating your own targeted opt-in email list, you have an engaged audience who has already established a level of trust in your products or services and will return higher response rates than a non-targeted list.
Paid memberships are most effective with services publishing a high-quality newsletter that offers in-depth information for a highly interested audience. Can you offer your current customer base any value-added services via email? Is there an opportunity to create a subscription-based, password-protected area of additional content covering industry specific information and topics? Either of these options would require significant employee resources to maintain a regular update schedule and produce quality content that meets subscribers' expectations. However, you may be able to efficiently develop the content needed by way of other materials that are produced in normal workflow. If your business is seeking an added revenue stream, you might consider setting up one of these programs to attract both new and repeat users to your website.
Customer Inquiries
Most traditional businesses simply use their website as online collateral describing services offered, encouraging users to contact the company for details. In this case, a successful site will draw qualified users based on the content within the page, which should be optimized with key industry search terms. Placement in appropriate industry directories and portals will further increase chances of being found by interested users. Ideally, the website will drive potential customers to call you for more information, yet will educate users enough to minimize time spent on sales calls. Again, tracking mechanisms should be in place to allow your business to effectively calculate ROI for costs spent on building and marketing your website. Each sales call should collect information about how the user found the site and what they were looking for, even if they did not find the desired product or service. Mining this type of data will not only provide new ideas to make the website perform better, but also identify new opportunities for business growth overall.
Increasing Salability
If you can identify areas in the above scenarios where your company is not achieving maximum performance, it's time to revisit your online marketing strategy. Start by reviewing the competitive marketplace and look for potential growth areas. Review your content:
- does it need updating? Does it reflect company goals and reach the desired audience? Do you know if the right people finding your website and how are they reacting to it? Solutions to these types of issues range from simple changes to complete website overhauls; however, long-term success comes from continually analyzing and improving overall performance.
Tracking and Analysis Make Your Website Work Harder
Six Ways to Measure Performance and Create Success
Your server logs are a gold mine if you know what to look for and how to analyze the appropriate data relationships. Combined with some basic financial information, the data can produce some valuable insights. Why, without even looking at your actual site, somebody else could tell you a lot about how successful you are just by playing with these numbers.
E-commerce is a numbers game. The trick is to focus on the right numbers so that you can make accurate decisions about how to improve your site and, ultimately, your Customer Conversion Ratio. On our Web site we offer a free download of an Excel spreadsheet that instantly calculates the key metric you need to track as you work to increase your conversion rate. My experience has been that few companies are collecting the right data or are so overwhelmed with data that they don't know what to do with it.
Time to see how well your site is actually doing. These six simple calculations will give a snapshot of where you are, and if you continue to do these calculations over time, you'll be able to track the effectiveness of your improvement efforts.
1. Customer Conversion Ratio (CCR) Divide your number of orders by your unique visitors to arrive at your CCR. The CCR (also called sales closing ratio and sales closing rate) is the bottom line metric out there. It's a measure of how many of your visitors actually complete the action you desire.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost Divide your marketing expenses by the total number of orders you receive from unique new buyers over a given time period. Your cost of acquiring a customer is critical to improving your profitability and also your cash flow. With regard to the marketing expenses component of the calculation, some companies include a monthly amortization of the cost of the website as well as the monthly cost of maintaining the site, while other companies only consider promotional expenses. Use the approach that works best for you.
3. Sales Per Visitor Divide gross sales by the total number of unique visitors. This is similar to CCR, except that instead of showing you the percentage of visitors you "close" into becoming buyers, the Sales Per Visitor shows you the actual average amount purchased per visitor (not per order).
4. Cost Per Visitor Simply divide your marketing expenses (or your marketing expenses plus your Web expenses) by the number of unique visitors. Cost per visitor measures the effectiveness of your marketing and your conversion processes. The objective is to minimize cost per visitor and increase sales per visitor.
5. No Sale Rate: Home (or Landing) Page Divide the number of one-page visits to the home (or landing) page by the number of visitors entering the site through the home page. This metric is crucial; if you have time to track only one thing, track this one. If you have other high volume entry pages, they should be tracked instead of, or in addition to, the home page. For any site you can imagine, if visitors are not making it past the home page or other high volume entry page, something is wrong. If the marketing is on target, the problem centers on usability -- visitors simply cannot find what they want to find, or the design (including the way offers are presented, the speed of page load, the copy in text links) is simply not working. This metric is especially effective for hunting down copy problems on a specific page. Unquestionably, falling percentage is good here.
6. No Sale Rate: All Pages Divide the number of one-page visits to the entire site over a period of time by the total number of visitors over the same period of time. While focusing on top entry pages is more important in the short term, because that is where the traffic is happening, this more global metric is likely to point to global design flaws in navigation or page layout. When you make global design changes, pay attention to this one -- you want it to be forever falling.
These metrics, in the aggregate, may not be giving you the numbers you're looking for. You may need to get more specific to get the actionable information you need. This is important to understand because there are no "average" visitors. There are specific visitors from specific places, and, to maximize each visitor's value, he should be given specific treatment. To reach the required level of granularity, you should subdivide your macrometrics into their component micrometrics. By monitoring and optimizing these "conversion" metrics, you can begin to improve your results. This isn't that hard; certainly, it's not rocket science. With a little education, anyone can calculate basic Web metrics and understand and use these numbers to maximize results. Are you just gathering data, or are you gleaning valuable information that impacts your bottom line?
The BuyerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patterns
One of the session that I plan to attend at SES San Jose is "The ByerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patters" on Wednesday, August 12, 2009, at 4:00 p.m.
And I can't tell you how many search engine marketers -- including me -- have taken his eye tracking research and presented it to their clients over the years. Although I always give Enquiro credit for the findings, if Gord were getting residuals, he'd be rich.
At SES San Jose 2009, the speakers at Gord's session are:
-- Mark McMaster, Senior Planner of B2B and Technology Markets, Google
-- Ben Hanna, VP Marketing, Business.com
-- Chris Golec, Founder and CEO, Demandbase
-- Jon Miller, VP Marketing, Marketo
-- Dr. Matthias Blume, Chief Analytics Officer, Covario
All of them have just concluded a major B2B research initiative, which was conducted by Enquiro with input from Google, Business.com, Covario, Marketo and DemandBase. The so-called BuyerSphere Project showed that most marketers aren't effectively leveraging online assets to their best potential. Are you shocked, shocked by these findings?
Among other things, the notion of a strictly followed, traditional buying funnel is simply not accurate in many instances, risk dictates buying behavior, search is incredibly important as an integrator across online and offline channels and face-to-face persuasion is still necessary in many high risk, complex purchases. The BuyerSphere Project looks at how online strategies became artificially separated from traditional best practices, how they can be more effectively integrated and the part search plays as a major influencer. That's worth knowing, don't you think?
Now, this panel at SES San Jose will review the research from over 100 face-to-face interviews, hundreds of eye tracking sessions and over 3,000 survey responses in total. The project represents a major step forward in understanding B2B buyer patterns and the part online marketing can play in influencing them.
So, I couldn't wait get a "sneak preview" because, well, I'm a competitive kind of guy. And if Enquiro's research is worth borrowing, I mean, worth understanding, then it's worth finding out about ahead of time.
So, I was delighted when Byron Gordon of SEO-PR interviewed Gord Hotchkiss earlier this week and uploaded the video to SESConferenceExpo's Channel on YouTube. Gord discussed Enquiro's three phase research project that incorporated interviews with more than 100 BtoB buyers before the survey was even put together. The goal was to discover how purchasing decisions get made within a company.
Gord says it was previously thought that BtoB purchasing is based on rational decision making but this is not always the case. He says influences maybe online or offline but they all play a part in determining how purchasing decisions are made.
Gord also discusses the advance of a generational shift in behavior, described as the "digital natives" and the "digital immigrants." Online usage differs between the two segments. Hey, you might as well watch the video interview below to hear for yourself what he has to say.
And if you want even more details, the head over to the Enquiro site and click on New Research on B2B Buying: The BuyerSphere. You will find White Papers, webinars, and other information.
Why am I plugging this now when you could just attend the The BuyerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patterns at SES San Jose 2009? Let's just say that I -- like many, many other search engine marketers -- owe Gord big time for all the research we've borrowed from Enquiro to persuade a B2B client to rethink his or her assumptions.
Hey, a plug and a link is the least that I can do to "repay" Gord for his groundbreaking research on B2B buying and B2B marketing. And it's a lot more affordable than paying residuals.
The long term plans for Google world domination
Long term strategy or random innovation?
Google is proud of its 20 percent rule. Its employees may spend 20 percent of their time on their own personal projects, as long as these projects are — in some way or other — relevant to Google’s present or future activities.
Google can only win through this deal, as their employees work more than 100 percent anyway. Many innovations thought up in these 20 percents are subsequently put to the test in Google Labs, and some become permanent members of the Google family.
This may lead people to think that Google is a company focusing on bottom-up innovation, with a strong belief in serendipity: Give the employees enough time and freedom and they will come up with something useful, eventually.
This narrative fits well with Brin and Page’s university background. Google’s Pagerank algorithm was, after all, born out of curiosity driven university research.
This story has become a smoke screen covering the real strategy of Google, which is a patient, and very long-term plan for continuous Google domination of the Web. This is a plan that will (if it works) ensure that Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing will continue to lag behind, even in ten to twenty years time.
Long term planning
No, we don’t have access to Google’s secret archives. The company’s ability to think long term is out there for all to see.
Here’s an example:
In 2001 Pandia presented a Google innovation called Google Catalogs.
It didn’t make much of an impression at the time. Google was scanning and indexing American mail order catalogs, letting you search their content using a Google search engine.
It didn’t make much sense to us at the time. We speculated that they might be thinking of future ad revenue.
This was not the case. Google Catalogs never became a popular search tool and was probably never intended to become one (it was closed down in January).
Indexing all printed material in the world
The real reason for doing this was to develop a technology that made it possible to scan a lot of printed publications and turn their content into searchable text.
Google was as early as in 2001 planning to turn Google from a web search company, to a content search company. Google wanted to become nothing less than the primary destination for searching all kinds of content, including all text that has ever been printed.
This may sound like madness, we know, but thanks to the Google Catalog experiment, Google has been able to develop a technology that makes it possible to scan a large number of books in a very short time.
In 2004 we reported that the company was planning to scan books owned by the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and the New York Public Library. Since then the number of libraries have increased dramatically, and Google has made complex deals with publishers regarding copyright.
Although Google Books will not (yet) give you the full content of books that are not in the public domain, Google will give you extracts, and you may use Google Books to identify the books you want to buy in print or as a file.
Indexing printed material makes a huge difference
Most people are not aware of the importance of this move. So far, most of the debate on Google Books has been dominated by authors worried about their intellectual property rights.
Having nearly all printed material available at your finger tips will, however, completely change the way — for instance — academics search for books and papers.
As soon as Google finds a good way of including printed material that is relevant for the regular Joe in regular web search, that will also change the world for the rest of us. Google is already adding magazines to Google Books.
Preparing for a world of digital print
Soon the difference between printed and digitalized content will become blurred. Most books are produced as digital XML files today, and when the ebook/ereader revolution takes hold, we will probably read our newspapers and magazines using digital tablets.
At that point Google doesn’t have to scan new material, only index it. Thanks to Google Books it will be the only company that has all the legal agreements with publishers in place. Google had the right vision and was able to think ahead.
It is important to keep this in mind, when we discuss the importance of Microsoft’s Bing initiative. Bing proves that Microsoft has — in many ways — caught up with Google as regards online search.
However, as far as we know, Microsoft does not have a plan for the next phase. In 2008 Microsoft closed down its own book scanning project!
Search content of any language
Here’s another example: Google is spending a lot of money on developing new and better automatic translation algorithms.
Yahoo! has also got a translation service called Babelfish (you may know it as AltaVista’s Babelfish), but Yahoo! does not own the technology used in Babelfish (it is developed by Systran). Google definitely owns Google Translate, and — as for the scanning project — it is part of a larger, long-term strategy.
Google plans to go far beyond Babelfish’s ability to translate paragraphs of text or the web pages you feed into its search field. Google plans to use Translate to include translated content into regular web search results.
This means that if you sit in China and do searches in Mandarin, Google may include English language content that has been automatically translated into Chinese. This is not going to make the dictators of the world happy.
Combined with Google Books, this service will break down the language barriers between the English, French, Spanish and Chinese language spheres of science and technology.
Google Translate has some way to go
At the moment the Google Translate technology is not good enough for this purpose. One Google representative told us that the service is improving, getting it right some 70 percent of the time. This makes it usable for rough translations, but not for the kind of service we are talking about here.
Still, given the resources Google set aside for this project, they are probably going to get there in a few years time.
This is actually an area where Microsoft should be able to compete. They have their own translation technology which is used by Bing.com.
Google Chrome OS
The lesson learnt from these examples is that Google has long term strategies, often based on what more timid souls would call megalomaniacs’ dreams of madness.
The fact is, however, that Google may actually reach is objective of indexing all content in all languages — in time.
The Google Chrome OS is part of such a long term strategy.
Microsoft threatening Google’s position
A few years ago there was an intense debate regarding Microsoft’s virtual monopoly as regards operating systems. Microsoft succeeded in crushing the Netscape browser, making its own Internet Explorer browser the most popular browser on the Web.
This combination of operating system and browser was a huge threat to Google, as Microsoft could use the default search boxes in these tools to direct searchers to its own search engine. Google needed a strategy that could help it face this threat.
As it turned out, Microsoft managed to lose its advantage.
It was completely unable to develop a branding strategy for its search engine (until this year, that is), meaning that it lost many of the searchers it could have gained via Windows and the Explorer.
Nor did it manage to develop a search engine technology that was better than Google’s, thus luring in the tech savvy searchers.
Then the company made the major mistake of not updating the Explorer browser, leaving room for Firefox. Google made deals with Firefox, Opera and Apple (Safari) making Google the default search engine of these browsers.
A more conservative company might have left it at that. Google seems to have won the search engine war against Microsoft.
The king of your content
However, there is another side to the Google/Microsoft battle, one that goes beyond search.
Google is not satisfied with being the king of published content, it wants to become the king of your content as well.
In other words: It will not only index the content of web sites, blogs, books and magazines; it also wants index the content of your emails, letters, memos and spreadsheets.
This is, of course, Microsoft’s turf. Microsoft has another virtual monopoly: the world of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
From Gmail to Google Docs
Google started out with developing the free Google Mail service. Then it gradually expanded on this service adding an RSS reader, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation package and — soon — a complete content management service called Google Wave.
The main difference between Microsoft Office and Google Docs is that Google Docs stores data online (in the cloud), while Microsoft Office stores your files on your computer.
Well, there is another difference: Microsoft Office is much better and has many more features than Google Docs. This has, of course, led many to argue that Google Docs can never become a real threat to Microsoft Office.
This is where they are wrong.
Again, remember that Google operates with long term plans — very long term. It is patiently waiting for the moment where Internet connection speeds get fast enough and the price of online storage gets cheap enough to let people stay online all the time.
Some of us are already there. The rest of the world will be there within a short period of time.
All Google has to do is to continue to improve Google Docs, and make sure that users can make use of the Microsoft file formats. Then it shouldn’t be too difficult to lure these users over to the bright side (or the dark side, dependent on your point of view). And Google Docs is free while Microsoft Office is not.
The reason Google developed the Chrome browser was not to kill Firefox or the other alternatives to Microsoft Explorer. The reason was that they wanted to make a browser technology that could be used of running programs or software on servers in “the cloud”.
In this way Google can encourage the development of browser technologies that are safe and stable and that will work on any operating system, being that Windows, Linux or MacOS.
The point is to make Windows superfluous. If you are doing everything inside the browser, you do not need the expensive and bloated Windows software. You can use Google Docs in Chrome.
Then Google will get all the eyeballs it need to deliver ads, and what’s more: it will manage to do what Microsoft failed to do: use the OS to lead users to the search engine.
Chrome is the Windows killer
The Chrome OS for netbooks is a natural continuation of this strategy. Netbooks are cheap laptops you can use to access the web. They do not have the capacity to run big, bloated, software. You do what you have to do online.
Given that none of the free Linux packages out there deliver the same user friendly experience in an operating system that Firefox has provided in the world of browsers, it makes sense for Google to make an open source OS that is free, easy to use and that leads users to Google services.
If others make use of this technology to develop better alternatives, that’s good too. These variations of the Google Chrome OS will also be perfect for using Google Docs.
It will take time for Chrome to weaken Windows
Both companies and users have too much invested in Windows and Microsoft Office to make it die any time soon. Windows will be around for ten years or so as well.
But Google has proven that it has the money and the time needed to be patient. If Microsoft continues to hold on to the old software-in-a-box paradigm, Google will probably win. If Microsoft moves Office into the clouds, who knows what will happen.
Google World Domination
If the idea of Microsoft world domination worried you, it is probably time to spend some sleepless nights worrying about Google.
Google Image Search Now Features License Filter
Google has just launched a new feature of Image Search which is aimed at helping users find images that are free to use based on their usage licenses, such as Creative Commons, GNU free documentation and other intellectual property agreement. This feature includes searching for images that are free to use, edit and share. Somehow, this gives artists producing these images and making them available on the web a hand in determining how their images can be used by anyone, if in case they will allow so. Artists can specify these conditions through the Creative Commons licenses which they tag to their images prior to making them available online.
The feature can be enabled through the advanced image search page. Users can select the type of license attached to images that they want to search for.
According to the Official Google Blog, while this maybe a safer way of finding reusable images, users must still be cautious when using them. It is still the user’s responsibility to verify whether the licensing information is still valid or applicable to the images to avoid copyright infringement later on.