WebProWorld Marketing Forum |
The
Blog Marketing Explosion
There are literally thousands of blogs by eBusiness insiders. This has changed
the landscape of guerrilla marketing. At first it was seen as just something cool
to do ... but blogs are now being used to build personal and corporate credibility
that will eventually attract customers (they hope!)...
How
many monthly hits are considered good?
I have recently taken over as webmaster for a few sites they average 15,000-20,000
hits a month each. Is this a decent amount? There is currently no advertisments
on the site PPC or otherwise. Would this amount of hits generate any money or
is it a little low to care about?
Microsoft Schooled By eBayers?
Ah, the holidays. There's nothing like that pesky giving and charitable spirit
being kept in check by greed, violence, and opportunism. Have the Xbox 360 muggings,
price gouging, and all around hysteria taught Microsoft a valuable lesson in pricing?
Maybe, but as bids on eBay reach $5,000 for the new $400 console, Microsoft has
taught everyone a lesson about timing.
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| Recent
Articles |
Nick
Wilson Sells Threadwatch
Nick Wilson has sold
Threadwatch to Aaron Wall of SEO
Book. Nick states that he wants to focus entirely on Performancing.com,
a group blog site he owns with Patrick Gavin. Also on the team as stated in the
About section of the site is Chris Garrett, their techy guy, and Andy Hagans,
their monetization expert. Nick was someone who didn't shy away from controversy
with Threadwatch...
Blogging
About Innovation
If you have a spare $1,895 sitting around, you might want to consider spending
November 30 and December 1 in New York at Fortune magazine's Innovation
Forum. The speaker lineup is impressive, with the likes of Intuit's Scott
Cook, Starbucks' Kenneth Lombard, McKinsey's John Hagel, EA's Bing Gordon, and
Spaceship. One developer Burt Rutan, among a host of others. Fortune has taken
an interesting approach...
Measuring
And Tracking RSS
Measuring and tracking RSS while a fairly simple concept, is really anything but.
Unlike websites, RSS have the added caveat of potential syndication, making accurate
tracking a challenge to anyone but the extremely tech savvy. It is not unrealistic
for marketers to want to know how many subscribers they have, which items in their
feeds attract the most interest, or how many click-throughs are generated as a
result of an RSS feed...
I
Hate The Term "User Generated Content"
Heh, I was reading Mary Hodder's post
about the correct term to call people who generate content and thinking back to
why I hate the term "user generated content."...It's because whenever I hear that
term I always translate it to "slave generated content." Here's why: there's a
lot of companies who are expecting you to help out their business models...
Nielsen
Reports RSS Users Visit News Sites More
Over on the CyberJournalist site they are reporting
on a new report from Nielsen/NetRatings that says that RSS users are significantly
more engaged ... in online news than non-users, visiting an average of 10.6 news
sites compared with 3.4 news sites for non-users and also visit three to four
times more frequently.
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12.01.05
Measuring And Improving The Performance Of A Website
 By
Fernando Maciá
Traditional business managers and economic strategists have always had at their
disposal a variety of methods for measuring and evaluating the degree of success
of business objectives.
For example, an increase in productivity, cost reduction initiatives, meeting
certain sales goals, or the impact of an advertising campaign are all objectives
that can be methodically measured and directly linked to a quantifiable level
of success within a specific timeframe. Then, as businesses successfully accomplish
their short-term goals, they are able to establish and pursue mid or longer term
initiatives.
When those same business managers and strategists that are used to operating in
traditional environments, and therefore are very familiar with managing and classifying
clients, calculating penetration ratios, measuring profitability and forecasting
sales, are now faced with the new paradigm of a virtual business, they seem to
forget that most of what they already know and do, including the use of common
sense, is equally applicable to an online economy. However, in many cases, it
is very difficult to see how a company's website aligns with its general business
strategy and in extreme cases, a website's only purpose is to provide the company
with a presence on the Internet.
This reality is even more paradoxical if one looks at the fact that the Internet,
due to its technological foundation and highly interactive nature, provides the
ideal ground for quickly testing new ideas, inexpensively measuring their results,
and effortlessly obtaining direct customer feedback to guide future changes or
improvements. Let's therefore take a look at some factors that will allow us to
measure the performance of a website in terms of its ROI, and also at some strategies
that our traditional business managers will have to establish to guarantee that
the same level of success that they are accustomed to is also achieved in a virtual
online economy.
1. A website must be fully aligned with the
corporate strategic objectives
The objectives for a website must closely follow the general strategy for the
company, as established by their executive management. Therefore, when the term
website is used, it should not be interpreted as a piece of the company's Information
Technology (IT) or computer systems. Instead, the term website should trigger
and be identified with concepts such as Marketing, Sales, Human Resources, Customer
Service, Product Support, etc. In other words, if IT is the department responsible
for your company's website you should have plenty of reasons to worry.
2. A website must establish tactical objectives
After the general strategic planning has been completed for the website, each
department must then establish the objectives for their own area of responsibility
as an integral part of the overall plan.
For example, a department responsible for customer support could help alleviate
the load of their customer-calling center by adding to their website a section
that contains frequently asked questions (FAQs), or by simply implementing an
e-mail based help page where customers' questions could be answered during non-peak
periods. As a matter of fact, many people would rather fill out an e-mail form
with their question than waiting on hold for 25 minutes listening to the same
melody or sales message.
In the above example, the objective is clear: to reduce the workload of our customer-calling
center and improve customer satisfaction. We should be able to measure the performance
of this objective by tracking the ratio between the number of calls experienced
by the call center and the number of customer inquiries registered by the website.
As another example, the department responsible for buying pre-owned properties
in a real estate agency would like to concentrate their efforts in purchasing
those properties with the highest customer demand. The objective of that department,
in this case, would be to optimize and adapt the agency's property portfolio to
include those profiles with higher customer appeal. This objective could be measured
by calculating the percentage of successful inquiries experienced by the website's
property locator.
3. Identifying the Key Performance Indicators
Once each department has established their own tactical objectives, a web-based
methodology must be implemented to measure the degree of improvement experienced.
Although it might be interesting to know the overall web traffic statistics of
a website (items such as unique visitors, pages visited, referrers, etc.) it is
pretty obvious that special attention must be given to those visits that directly
contribute to the success of the established objectives (buying, asking for an
estimate, soliciting information, setting up an appointment, etc.)
This concept is very easy to explain by analyzing the behavior of visitors inside
an online store. From all the visitors that access the homepage of an online store,
only a portion will use the site's product locator. Out of that group, only a
few will add products to their cart, and from those, only a percentage will eventually
complete the online payment process. The relationship between the total number
of visitors that accessed our site and those that successfully completed a purchase
can provide our website's client conversion ratio. It goes without saying that
the higher this ratio the better the performance of the website will be. This
ratio is therefore an excellent Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for an online
store.
But even if a website is not an online store, other KPIs, just as easily identifiable
and measurable, can still be defined to evaluate the site's objectives. For the
customer-calling center objective
mentioned above, the percentage of visitors that access the customer help page
after having visited the FAQs could be considered a KPI. In other words, the fewer
inquiries the help center page registers the better the FAQ page is probably performing
and the less work the customer-calling center is therefore receiving. In the case
of the real estate agency objective, a good KPI could be defined as the percentage
of successful visits registered by the website's property locator. Other effective
KPIs for that website could be defined by measuring the number of visitors that
access property specification sheets, or by calculating the percentage of visitors
that eventually set up an appointment to tour a property, for instance.
4. Measuring a website's performance
The identification of Key Performance Indicators allows us to implement two fundamental
processes that will improve a website's performance:
- A "translation" of the website's traffic statistical data into concepts and
values that can be easily recognized by the individuals in charge of a department
or area;
- A "transformation" of that data into knowledge that will allow a department
head to make decisions and take actions.
Read
the rest of the article.
About the Author:
©
Fernando Maciá, 2005. General Manager
of Human Level Communications, a consulting
firm specializing in web development and optimization, search engine positioning,
and digital marketing, with sites in Alicante, Spain and Dallas, Texas. Mr.
Macia is also a professor of Digital Marketing at the Fundesem
Business School. |
