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You Had Me at 2.0
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DISCOVER
THE MANY "ATTRACTION" SECRETS of the Marketing Elite that
generate flash floods of traffic to your web site,
explode your sales of products and services - and
elevate YOU to "Rock Star" status as The Authority
in your industry! 
Acquiring new visitors is equally valuable as the activity that results in conversion
26th
Summary: I don’t care if you’re a small business, mid size or beyond…no one is exempt from analytics
- I want you to embrace tracking and analytics or you’ll be leaving big money on the table.
A Quick Glance of one customer touching your brand.. across 4 channels can be deceiving: look at your marketing in individual sessions. The results are dim.
• Paid search didn’t convert
• RSS didn’t convert
• Email didn’t convert
• Blog didn’t convert
• Direct load converted.
The basics of Web 2.0 marketing include RSS, email, and paid search for a financial services client.
1. A visitor, Bryan, comes to the site via a paid search advertisement. Bryan browses through several pages, registers for RSS and an email newsletter, and then leaves.
2. Bryan regularly reads your RSS feed, and returns based on some new “how-to” information on refinancing. He reads the article, browses your mortgage loan pages, and leaves.
3. You then send Bryan an email promoting the current low mortgage rates. Bryan returns to your site, reads more about the current rates, starts an application, and leaves.
4. Bryan reads a blog entry about refinancing on a financial site: “The time is now and rates have never been lower.” He sees your ad on the page, clicks through to view your current rates, starts the application a second time and leaves.
5. Bryan then direct loads your site and completes an application for a mortgage loan.
Summary: Session Data: Conversion rate 20%. A full 80% of your sessions did not result in conversion, and there is no apparent value. The conclusion you would draw is to eliminate investment.
However, if you look at this scenario from a visitor-based perspective:
• Paid search, RSS, email, a blog ad and direct load all contributed to a single conversion, so you had a conversion rate of 100%.
• 100% of your visitors converted to customers.
If you only look at session-based data, you will undervalue all your marketing activities, or assign inappropriately high value to the last activity that results in conversion. Marketing happens over time, and marketing activities that acquire new visitors, or move the visitor along in the sales cycle, are equally valuable as the activity that results in conversion.
Bryan’s activities were vital components in driving Bryan to complete an application. Without your paid keyword, Bryan may never have found your site. Without your RSS feed, he might never have understood the value of refinancing. Without the email, you would not have prompted him to look at rates. And if you had not advertised on the blog, Bryan may not have come back to your site.
By tracking the right metrics, you will understand the value of Web 2.0 content and interactions to your business—not just in a single session, but over the lifetime of your relationship with an individual.
Action step: Start attaining a complete picture of an individual’s online visitor behavior.
And, don’t judge a movie by it’s book. The movie is all the touch points your measuring across the sales cycle a visitor can experience….the book is a symbol of any resistance you have today to embracing customer-centric data.
If you’re crawling with analytics, WALK. If you’re walking, RUN more measurement and provide your visitors with a truly personal experience that optimizes their business goals.
Does this article leave you thinking…which analytic tool would be best for me to start using? What’s working for you now?
Google Analytics hasn’t been as forthcoming as they used to be.
Are your customers converting? Are you watching them from two or more channels?
Jerry Hart
Popularity: 26% [?]
Video blogging with Hart: Signup: Audio Blogging with Hart:
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Comments
so how do you set up the metrics that tell you how to track what activities your INDIVIDUAL visitors are engaged with?
Some suggestions would be helpful.
Gavin Allinson
Gavin:
There are many ways to improve the ways we assess highly de-coupled activities. In our own advertorial platform we have a proprietary piece of technology that instruments all off-domain links with click tracking. It’s seamless - when some writes content and references a product or service, or newsletter signup - these actions are all measured and reports are provided to help paint a clearer picture.
Google Analytics also provides a similar solution although it requires a little more effort to integrate and utilize.
Unfortunately we all think about the content, the pages, the promotional process - but we always seem to forget to think carefully about (and plan) success in terms of what it means to properly measure the actions for accurate ROI purposes. It’s best to ponder the objectives before planning your analytics and measuring tactics.
We’ve had one client cancel their MyST Blogsite service last year because they couldn’t assimilate cost-benefit evidence that they should maintain the service. They weren’t gone for more than a few months when they realized the impact - sales dropped and existing customers complained that the reason they bought their service in the first place was the helpful blog content they provided every month.
As Jerry points out, acquiring new visitors is equally important to the activity that caused conversion in the first place. Advertorial blogsites work the same way - while the vast majority of visitors to an advertorial site are new (because of search referrals), the ones that convert are probably using the same content to be more successful with your product or service. This is yet another reason why it’s important to have multiple blogs - support, sales, marketing, new products, training - these are all meta-categories that should be separated in a true corporate blogsite.
bf
thanks for your reply Bill.
you obviously know your stuff and your comment made me realise that there is a whole other level to shoot for in analytic tracking thanks for taking the lid off my jar
Gavin
hi
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good luck
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