WavyBrainy

Many of us need and want to measure the output of our web sites in sales. This is particularly important with long sales cycles and cases where the sale isn’t completed online. By defining intermediate measurements, you can identify trouble points, enhance information offered, or remove steps from the process. Analytics need to be customized for each site, but here are a few tracking ideas we use:

1. Purchase – Yes, the sale!
2. Specific action – The visitor downloads content, engages an interactive application, visits a key page.
3. Registration – Whether this is a lead form or an email signup, this is an important indication of engagement.
4. Call for more information – A prospect calls to make purchase or get more information.
5. Extended visit – Flag visits that exceed the average visit length. Investment of time can indicate serious interest.

Of the many factors that determine the success of an email campaign, the time of day and day of week campaigns are deployed is the most often ignored. New research from Pivotal Veracity may just change your timing. It shows, for example, that the elapsed time from when messages are first sent and first seen has expanded from 23.2 hours in January 2009 to 25.9 hours in August 2009. This is critical if your email campaign is time sensitive.

Target an Episode

Pivotal Veracity also identifies 2 daily episodes especially pertinent to B2B mailings targeting office bound workers. The first period in the morning, from 7:30 to 9 a.m. is the most extended time people use to cope with their email. Later in the day, from 2 to 3 p.m., workers attend to their emails in shorter bursts. While mornings are popular, PV suggests that your customers may view your email as welcome relief later in the day.

The ideal time of deployment is a moving target. As soon as a day or time becomes “popular,” it’s time to move your campaign away from the onslaught of email competing for your customer’s attention.

Keywords are the words or phrases that visitors use to find your site via search. Most web analytics programs track keywords and how many visitors each drive to your site.

Here’s what you can learn. Say that you’re in the candy business and your top keywords are “jaw breakers,” “salt water taffy,” and “Carbolicious Carmel Corn.” Great, you sell those products. But what if 30% of your company’s income derives from selling “candy gift baskets,” and that term ranks at the bottom of your keyword list? This is an example of an opportunity missed, and a website that’s out-of-step with its core business. To get the rest of the picture use Google’s keyword tool to find out the frequency of search on key terms. This will help you determine if your business is jiving with reality. For example, if  “mimeograph” machine is one of your top keywords, but it’s very low in popularity as a search term…uhhh…you may want to consider a new core business. Keywords can speak volumes about the state of your site and business, so dig in soon!

Is your search engine marketing a financial black hole that rarely coughs up a lead. Try a dose of medicine from Dr. SEM.

• Eliminate keywords that generate clicks but not conversions.
• You are tracking conversions, right? If not, have your developer insert it on key pages.
• Make your ad keywords more specific. Try “Italian food Charolotte” instead of “Italian food.”
• Use the keyword or phrase in the ad, so it is highlighted in the search results.
• Find new keywords. Ask customers how they would search for your company. Look at your competitor’s code and reverse-engineer their keyword strategies.
• Use Google’s keyword tool to generate new keyword ideas and generate traffic.
• Check the bounce rate on your landing page. If it’s high, the page isn’t matching the expectations set by the ad. Change the landing page, or recast the ad.
• Use geo-targeting to narrow the area in which your ads show. They’ll get higher positions, and you’ll stop getting carryout orders from Norway.
• Evaluate your cost-per-sale and ROI. Maybe, just maybe, you should spend more.

If you’re a fan of search engine arcana, you’re familiar with the lingo of search algorithms. Terms like backlinks, crosslinks, keyword density, hidden text, meta tags, robot tags that you can toss around at the local bar.

There’s someone else you should meet, though. His name is Fred. He’s one of thousands of human reviewers, many who are volunteers and specialists in their subjects, that catalog sites for search directories like DMOZ.org,Yahoo, Business.com and Zoominfo.com.

The importance of these human reviewed directories cannot be overemphasized. That’s because search engines like Google give Fred and his minions more weight than their own web scouring searchbots.

For all you DIYers, all the sites listed above have good instructions. Make sure you read them, because Fred can be a little cranky at times.

One of our motto’s at Ideopia is “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” Perhaps nothing fits this category better than blogs on corporate web sites. They can be hideous, pumped full of hype and hard sell, or they can be funny, chock full of useful content and make you love a brand even more. In that spirit, we offer a few observations that might help you decide to blog, or not to blog.

Do blog if you want to:
1. Entertain a small group of friends and your mother
2. Communicate and engage customers
3. Demonstrate expertise on key issues
4. Build search rankings for your site on specific business areas
5. Convert prospects and leads on the blog
6. Share information and ideas within your company
7. Make your brand come to life
8. Be open to opinions other than your own
9. Want a book deal

Don’t blog if you:
1. Need to control information flow
2. Value a corporate voice versus personality on your blog
3. Won’t accept negative comments
4. Want to broadcast instead of have a conversation
5. Just want to sell and market your services
6. Don’t have specific goals for your blog
7. Think your blog can outsmart Google
8. If you expect the same audience for your web site as your blog
9. Want a book deal

The remodeling tips below require almost no knowledge of code, but they can have a big impact when you get them right.

1. Proof all copy for typos and grammar.
2. Read your copy. Cut jargon and long-winded phrases.
3. Break long paragraphs of copy into bullet points. Web visitors scan, they don’t read.
4. Run a free online link checker, like Integrity, on your site. Fix broken links.
5. Make sure headings or headlines on each page instantly communicate the page’s content.
6. Check all forms. Make sure all fields work, and results are returned to the correct person. Do the same with email links.
7. If you don’t have a contact form, get one.
8. If your blog doesn’t have an RSS icon or feed, get one. It’s usually a simple setting.
9. Review all pages to make sure they have titles above the browser window. These are essential for search rankings and understandable search results.

Search ads on the web give you a rare opportunity to learn what copy your prospects are responding to in real time. This knowledge is hard won through continual experimentation, trial and error, and occasional thumb sucking. We say share the wealth. For example, we recently learned in our eVitalize web campaign that “Fix up your underperforming web site” beats “Cost effective web marketing strategies” five to one. Understanding how your target perceives your product benefits not only gives you ammo for search, but better ways to communicate through sales and other copy created for the brand. Conversely knowing how an effective salesperson formulates his pitch can inform better keywords and ad copy. The trick is to share and bust through compartmentalized suppliers and internal departments.

Think we’re pandering? Think we’ll sell our souls for a few clicks? Think we made the intern do it? Think you want some? Learn about Ideopia’s eVitalize web marketing.

There are many factors that determine the speed of your website, such as the size of your images, code structure, or techniques used to import movies or (yech) Flash animations. It’s a certainty though that if your site takes more than a second or two to download, your visitors will bolt for the doors and probably head for a competitor. Studies shows that women value clear navigation more than speed, but men want it now! (Did that really require research?) If you’re concerned about download speed, check the bounce rate on your home page. If it’s above 40 or 50%, you either have a technical or content problem. You can also use this free utility, http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/, to run a load time check.