In the process of building your company’s online brand, you’re going to have to deal with a veritable ton of information. We have discussed how the practice of Web Analytics can quantify all manner of data such as number of users, the location of visitors, and changes over time, all intended to allow you to analyze your brand’s performance. However all the information in the world isn’t going to do your online marketing efforts a bit of good if you aren’t able to measure it against carefully chosen benchmarks of performance. In short, you need to identify your metrics.
What is a Metric?
Boiled down, a metric is some unit of measurement intended for you to compare current information to previous information, and to evaluate the difference in light of your goals. An example of a metric is the Conversion Rate, which is typically defined as the number of visitors who took a desired action divided by the total number of visitors in a given time period.
Metrics vs. Goals
It is important to understand the metric is not the goal itself, but rather the way to measure that goal. For example, visitor traffic numbers in a given month (quantity + time) is a metric. It is a unit of data that can be compared to other units. Trying to increase user traffic is a goal that can be evaluated for success by the use of metrics (i.e., if user traffic decreases from one month to the next, the goal has failed).
Setting Your Metrics
The keys to every metric are universal: quantity and time. Visitor rates per month, unique visitors per quarter, bandwidth use before and after an advertising campaign, each of these is based on a quantifiable measurement within a predetermined timeframe. The key is to have a piece of hard information that can be compared between two points.
In the online branding arena, there are numerous metrics you can choose to help evaluate your brand’s performance.
Usage statistics – Hard numbers that can be compared by date, user statistics are essential and vital. This category includes numbers of unique visitors, time spent viewing each page, how frequently certain videos are downloaded, and the like.
User Commentary – While this may seem a more qualitative category, there are actually several ways that user comments can be judged in mathematical terms as metrics. Evaluators can measure comment proportionality (percentage of positive, neutral, and negative commentary per product, for example). Including a rating system enhances this effort, as it allows comments to be summarized, reducing the time spent on reading and interpreting the text itself, if necessary.
Social Media Influence – Social Media venues are the newest and most efficient source of word of mouth press. Being linked through a popular blog or Facebook page can spike a brand’s visitor statistics overnight. In this case metrics can include the number of link-backs spread around various Social Media sites, or the popularity of a site’s own SM pages in various communities.
Timing is Everything
The Web is a place where time becomes downright bizarre. Companies start overnight and fold just as quickly, so the perception is that any changes have to be immediate and drastic. The problem is that this can be utterly counterproductive to good metric analysis. Metrics take time to properly analyze, and indeed are useless without the consideration of timing.
Consider a webpage that gets a total of twenty-one unique visitors. This doesn’t actually say anything in and of itself. Now, compare a page that gets twenty-one unique visitors per week, and one that gets twenty-one unique visitors per minute. Suddenly a comparison can be made. This is it the essence of metrics, comparison over time.
You must establish realistic time goals for your brand, so you can logically evaluate the impact of various decisions and procedures. To do otherwise is simply robbing yourself of any way to use the vital data you’re gathering properly.
Some sample time benchmarks include the obvious daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and quarterly periods. These should be examined in a before-versus-after context. For example there is Burger King’s quirky Ugoff campaign, which ran for a single summer in 2004. The metric in question would be the number of Burger King salads purchased before, during, and after the campaign.
A Parting Thought
It is important to remind yourself that a metric is not the goal. Just as importantly, remember that the metric is not the brand itself. Metrics are measurements. The brand is something that can be evaluated in the light of the metrics you choose, but the brand is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a thing distinct unto itself, the image of your organization that is presented as a combination of the actual quality of a product and peoples’ perceptions thereof.
Consider very carefully what exactly your brand is, and what you want the brand to be. Compare the two honestly and carefully, and you will find that the metrics you need to evaluate the success of your brand are actually quite easy to discern.
Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand management specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat. We are social media consultants. Make your site more findable and your brand more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at http://www.iBrandCasting.com/
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Online Brand Building By the Numbers
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Online Brand Building By the Numbers
As part of my search engine optimization service, I evaluate client’s web design and web contents. I do this right after I finish checking their market demands. When they do not have a website, I create one for them. For me this is much easier than redesigning an incorrectly designed website.
Why A Website That Converts Traffic is a Good Website:
The first benefit is you will get more calls and inquiries. When your website builds a bond with your prospects, they are definitely going to contact you to inquire further. There is a reason why they are on your website, to seek your service or product. This means more prospects which could mean increased sales!
The second benefit is that you get to capture their contact information, even if they are only on the finding information stage. Through continued contact, you can be their selected vendor when they are ready.
What Happens When Your Website Converts Traffic Into Prospects?
I’ve had clients who expressed interest in what the internet ccould do for their business. when I explained the many opportunities that could open up for them when they went online, they were astounded. And now, they are testimonials to how powerful the internet can be, if done properly.
One client receives up to 40 new inquiries per month. Now, they do not have to worry about getting new clients as their phone and emails are ringing off the phone.
My business partner has expanded her music school twice in 6 months and has to hire 2 staff to handle the calls. In addition, they have increased the prices of the music lessons as they want to attract premium clients who pay well for her excellent services. She enjoys predictable demand and can plan expansion accordingly.
When your website moves from an online brochure to lead generating tool, you can free up more time to grow your business, service your clients well and even select well-paying and kind clients to work with.
So How To Increase Website Conversion?
Tip 1) Segment your target audience.
Determine who your target audiences are and build a page for them with layouts and contents that would make them feel special. Many companies create their website from their services and products, however seriously, no one is really interested in what you sell. They are interested in how you can help them. By personalizing their page, you can speak to them and build a connection in order to get them to contact you.
Tip 2) Reduce the choices
People do not like to make choices. When given too many choices, they do not make a choice. In addition, it is ideal to assume that people who land on your website are easily confused. In fact, the truth is that your website layout might feel idiot-proof because the ideas spring from your head, however people completely new to your business might not feel the same.
Solution: De-clutter the website. Think through of a process of how you want your prospects to navigate through your website. Home ‘> Find Their Profile ‘> Contact You. And create the flow as simple as possible and reduce the options.
Tip 3) Provide an irresistible call for action
Anyone that lands on your website is important. And it is your goal to capture them! Critical, necessary and you must do everything to get them to contact or leave their contact details for you.
Tell them the next step. Ask them to sign up for a free report. Ask them to give you a call. Add you on facebook. Read your blog. You must tell them what you want them to do next. Always communicate with your contacts. Then you can build a database of prospective clients who are only a call away from buying your products.
You will learn insider secrets and free resources designed to help you make MORE money than ever before! If you are looking to make 2010 the year of success, register for your FREE tips at http://www.Makeit-right.com . Pamelina Siow is an expert on generating leads through the internet. To keep in contact, read Pamelina Siow blog.
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
by Stoney deGeyter
In the world of marketing and campaign measurement, the web has been a goldmine. Almost every conceivable metric can be measured online. But of all the things you can track, measure, weigh and analyze, the only metric that truly matters is conversions. Click through rates, page views, time spent on site, number of pages read, entrance and exit points, abandonment; all of these metrics are fantastic, but if you’re not using them to improve your conversion rates, then why bother?
Most people look at their website as a whole but in reality it is a collection of many parts. These parts (web pages) are essentially individual steps on a path that should lead your visitors to a specific goal: the conversion. If your site as a whole, and web pages individually, are working properly, you should see an increase in conversion rates and sales. If anything is broken along the way your visitors are led the wrong way at the wrong time and you open the door to having them leave before they’ve reached the conversion goal.
Each entry point of your site (wherever the visitor lands first, not just the home page) needs to be treated as the starting point that will lead your visitors step by step toward the conversion goal. In order to guide your visitors from this starting point to the end point, you need to make sure each step along the way is aligned with the next; in sync and unbroken.
The seven steps to strong conversions
Step 1: Build the path to the conversion point
Just like good book needs to have a beginning, middle and an end, your site should be no different. All the steps, from start to finish, need to work together to bring the visitor toward the ultimate goal. However, with a website the start isn’t always the home page. In fact, a website is more like a choose-your-own-adventure book than a traditional novel. The visitor starts at different points; wherever the search engine dropped. This could be the home page, product page, testimonial page, informational page, an article, or anywhere else.
This makes building the path to the conversion a bit more challenging, but it can be done. Each page must be able to act independently from the previous, having a beginning and a middle while guiding the visitor to the end. Essentially, every web page of your site needs to be able to be the very first step in the process, provide a link to or act as the middle step, and lead the visitor to the last step, which is the conversion.
Step 2: Create alternate paths to the conversion point
Not every visitor has the same wants, needs or desires as the next. If you plan only a single path to the conversion point, you will ultimately lead much of your audience down a path that isn’t meant for them.
Twenty visitors can land on the same page and take 20 different paths to the conversion. Some want to read about your company, others want to see your testimonials, while another group wants guarantee or warranty information. Yet still others want to read more about your products or services before learning more about you and then getting some testimonials for confirmation. And of course there are always those who are ready to buy now with very little persuasion having to be done..
A path to the conversion should be created to provide each of your users precisely what they need in order to take the next step. Every visitor has different needs, desires, and temperaments from the next. Their needs vary at any given time in the process. Keep your visitor’s options open but also be aware that too many options can create confusion or inhibit your visitors from choosing any path at all. Don’t try to be all things to all people, but instead try to narrow the options down to the most common and significant so you can be sure to meet the vast majority of your visitor’s needs.
Step 3: Inspect your conversion paths
Once you have created your paths you then need to inspect them. Put yourself in the mind of your visitors and follow through as many paths as possible. This is where you’ll find out if any steps are missing or broken, or if there are too many steps in the process.
Take notes of obstacles that may disengage the visitor or may be an impediment to them reaching the conversion goal. Look for missing information, errors on the pages, broken links and calls to action. You want to make sure that the visitor finds no hindrances to getting to the destination and are able to find all the information they need to make a confident purchase decision.
Step 4: Fix broken steps along the paths
This is pretty self-explanatory. Once you’ve uncovered any problems with your conversion paths, fix them. Patch holes, fill cracks or otherwise improve the performance of each step along the way. Use your analytics to identify problem areas and test different versions to see which performs better.
Step 5: Add or remove steps to create the most efficient path
Again, using your analytics, determine if there are places where steps need to be added or removed in order to make the conversion process more efficient. Your goal is to make the site as streamlined as possible. Add no more steps than are needed and no fewer than what it takes to get the job done.
Remember, each set of visitors is different. Some paths may be long, others short but you need to have the options there for each segment of your audience.
Step 6: Create and test new paths
Once you have tested, fixed and retested your original paths and everything is functioning as it should, it’s time to start building and testing new paths. Consider your users carefully here. The first pass at creating paths should have been designed to hit the majority of your target audience. Now it’s time to accommodate the rest. While the broader target is easier to hit, the smaller target is no less important. Build paths specifically for these users as they can be the source of many additional sales, and often result in higher conversion rates.
Step 7: Test new stepping stones
By this time your conversion process should be going strong and you have pretty solid conversion rates. Well, if it ain’t broke… fix it anyway. Never stop looking for new opportunities to improve your conversion process. Test, test, and test some more. Sometimes adding new steps in the process can help improve conversions with certain audiences. Just be careful to keep an eye out for any negative effects as well. The goal here is improvement, not to add clutter.
Building a cohesive path from your visitor’s landing point to the conversion goal isn’t easy. What makes it even more difficult is that you never know what any individual’s preference or needs will be. But by taking the time to know and understand your audience you can find ways to build and improve upon the conversion paths that will satisfy the majority of your visitors.
Follow these seven steps and there is no doubt that you’ll find ways to improve your conversions rates. It may be incremental or you may find huge gains all at once, but every gain is a good gain.
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7 Steps to Improving Conversion Rates
by Mike Moran
Image via Wikipedia
Good Internet marketers pay close attention to conversion rates, checking their Web analytics system to see how many folks came to the site and how many actually bought something. Some interesting research from Sun Microsystems shad some new light on the limits to how easily we can calculate certain types of conversions.
For some kinds of businesses, conversion rate calculations are easy. Think about Amazon–people come to their site every day and many complete their purchases in the same visit. For Amazon, all they need to do is to divide the number of purchases by the number of visits and they get their true conversion rate.
Most businesses don’t have it so easy. If you customers visit your site several times before they convert, you don’t want to figure your conversion rate based on visits, but rather on unique visitors. If you are selling computers, such as Sun does, three visits to the site over three days by the same person doesn’t tell you that you had three chances at a sale–you had one.
So, the mechanism that you use to identify each of those three visits as being from the same visitor is extremely important. If, for some reason, the mechanism fails, you might interpret two or all three of those visits as being from different people, throwing off your conversion rate calculation.
For most sites, the mechanism used to identify returning visitors is tracking cookies, and this is where the new research from Sun becomes interesting. Every time cookies are deleted, the tracking mechanism is upset–some visitors are counted multiple times because the analytics system can’t match their cookies from a previous visit. Sun’s research showed that almost 30% of cookies are deleted within a week, but that some cookies are retained even months later. The article suggests that businesses with long buying cycles might need to adjust their calculated conversion rates using this information.
To some, this news might be alarming, but it needn’t be. After all, the real reason that you track conversion rates is to understand the effectiveness of what you are doing. As long as user behavior remains consistent–they delete cookies at about the same rates and on the schedule as they used to–or it changes very slowly over time (a safe assumption), whether your numbers are precisely accurate or not isn’t important.
What you care about is the trend–the difference between last month’s conversion rate and this month’s, for example. If both numbers are inaccurate because of cookie deletion (and they are), it’s OK, because you can still compare last month to this month to make the decisions you need to make.
Sun’s research is important, yes, but it will be more important if that research is conducted every six months to see how behavior is changing, rather than to be used to frantically adjust your conversion rates to make them seem better. Your real conversion rate isn’t important as long as you pay attention to what actions made that number go up and down each period.
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What’s Your True Conversion Rate?
It’s sad, but true. Most internet entrepreneurs are struggling with poor response, and have no idea how to go about increasing the effectiveness of their marketing beyond increasing the size of their advertising budget. This foolishness never ends.
The truth is, most internet marketers don’t have a problem getting traffic. They have problems converting browsers into buyers, and more often than not, the problem lies with their web copy.
It’s brutal, but bad copy is bad copy, long and short.
It costs nothing to tweak your web copy, and yet you can get measurable, marked improvements in response!
Here are 4 little known ways which cost nothing to implement to, radically improve your internet profits.
Response Booster #1: Add DRAMA!
Fact #1: It’s hard to get anybody’s attention
Fact #2: It’s hard to keep their attention
Read this:
“Bill was shocked. He had never seen so much blood in his life… it was almost nauseating. It wasn’t his fault. He buried his face in his hands and wept… she was such a lovely child….”
I bet you really want to know what happened next, don’t you?
Well, I don’t know what happened next either cause I just made that up. But I think this proves how powerful a device drama can be.
The key is to keep your reader hooked!
If your reader doesn’t read your copy, your copy has no chance of selling anything!
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the famous mystery writer Dashiell Hammet, who gave other budding writers this advice:
“When in doubt, have someone come crashing through the door with a gun.”
Response Booster #2: Give Them The Facts
Do you know what’s the #1 trend online?
Skepticism.
There are way too many scandals in the political, economic, educational, religious and financial arena.
People just don’t know who to trust anymore, do you?
On the web, almost every mother’s son is THE GURU.
Who do you trust?
Does your sales letter answer the questions: Who are you, why should I pay attention to you and why should I buy from you?
You have to back up what you say with the cold, hard unadulterated FACTS.
Response Booster #3: Empathize
Here’s a direct quote from Robert Collier from his legendary out of print book, “The Robert Collier Letter book”:
“The reader of this letter wants certain things. The desire for them, is consciously or unconsciously, the dominant idea in his mind all the time. You want him to do a certain definite thing for you. How can you tie this up to the thing he wants, in such a way that the doing of it will bring him a step nearer to his goal?”
You must get out of your own ego and get into theirs!
When you truly know your prospect inside out, you’ll be able to display empathy in your sales copy, and be able to push their emotional buttons, and hit them in the “sweet spot” to make them say, “I really want to buy this.”
Response Booster #4: Dress Up
It’s really important that you know why your website looks the way it does.
While many will argue that it’s not always true… people DO judge a book by its cover, and for that matter, your website from how it looks.
You can radically increase the chance of your prospect doing business with you, by conveying credibility through your font and color section. It’s easy to tell an amateurish website from a professional.
If you don’t convey credibility, you’ll lose the sale as people are wary about credit card fraud, and there’s no way they will gamble with fate and give their credit card number to a website that looks like crap.
Ask yourself, “Do the graphics enhance readership and credibility, or are they there simply for the sake for being there?
This is the vest best “litmus test” for using graphics in your web copy.
There’s one more thing that stands between your web copy and the results you should be getting from it.
YOU.
Go for it!
Dan “The Man” Lok
A former college dropout, Dan The Man Lok transformed himself from a grocery bagger in a local supermarket to an internet multi-millionaire. Dan came to North America with little knowledge of the English language and few contacts. Dan just created a 4-part video explaining exactly how he makes millions online, watch them here >> http://www.websiteconversionexpert.com/
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
%%4 Amazingly Simple Ways To Double or Triple Your Internet Sales!%%
4 Amazingly Simple Ways To Double or Triple Your Internet Sales!
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4 Amazingly Simple Ways To Double or Triple Your Internet Sales!