1. Have identified goals as to what is to be accomplished

This one should be obvious, but the years of people hearing “You just have to have a website” have taken their toll.  Many websites do not have any more purpose than to merely state the same message that can be found in their other marketing literature.  This is a horrible approach.  You have so much more power in what you can do through the web that to do nothing more than state who you are and what you do is like a salesman walking up to a prospect and saying, “Hi, my name is Rick and I’m a salesman.” and then walk away.  Defining what you want your website to accomplish in the form of goals is what should control every aspect of how the website is constructed and those goals require something to be done. What are they?

To help identify the goals for your website, simply answer questions like these:

• What do I want the website to do?  Why?
• What do I want visitors to be able to do on my website?  Why?
• What do I want my customers to be able to do on my website? Why?
• What do I want media outlets to be able to on my website?  Why?
• What do I want my partners to be able to do on my website? Why?

Right now, I want to talk about 3 pieces of gold that will help you know what is bringing in the traffic, where and who your greatest supporters are, and what your visitors think about your website overall.

These 3 pieces of gold actually come from 3 sets of metrics, which are:

1. The overall site usage statistics
2. The list and data for your most visited pages
3. The list and data for your traffic sources

Site Usage Statistics

The site usage statistics is actually a grouping of multiple data points that when combined, give you a clear understanding of what website visitors think about your website.  When analyzed, you can quickly determine what visitors think about your website (could be a combination of performance, aesthetics, or content,) how long you have captured the attention of your visitors, and if your traffic building programs are working.

This grouping consists of the following:

1. Visitors/Unique Visitors (otherwise known as hits and visits)
   The visitors/hits data point tells you the number of times your website was viewed during a specific time period and includes multiple visits from the same individual. The unique visitors/visits data point tells you how many actual people came to your website.What’s the gold?
   Watch the ratio of unique visitors to visitors (or number of visits to hits depending on the terms used.)  If you see that the number of visitors/hits keeps growing proportionally to the number of unique visitors/visits then you know that something on your website is causing a lot of individuals to keep coming back to your website over and over again.  This is awesome because each visit is another opportunity to convert the visitor to a customer.  So if these two numbers are very close to being equal, then apparently there is not much of value or nothing that is causing visitors to return to your website after their initial visit.  So they came… they left… and they never returned during that time period.
2. Pages per visit
   This data point shows you on average how many pages a visitor looks at before leaving your website.  To understand the importance and value of this data, you need to know how many active pages are currently in operation on your website. With this, you will know how powerful your content is.What’s the gold?
   If this number is low, then your visitors are not looking at much of your content before they are deciding to leave. This means they’re either not finding what they are looking for, they did find the information they were looking for but it didn’t cause them to engage you, or maybe they were just glancing around your website.  You want this number to be proportionally high to the full number of pages on your site. If it is, it would tell you that your content has enough appeal and value that your visitors click through quite a bit of it before they leave.  So out of a 10 page web site, you would love for them to read 6 or more pages.  If this isn’t happening… it’s time to review your content!
3. Bounce rate
   This data point shows you the number of times people came to your website and left from the same page they arrived on.  This essentially means that they did not look any further than the page they landed on. This can easily be a metric that is looked at negatively since for the majority of websites, it is a high percentage.  For us, it tells us if our inbound marketing strategy is working!What’s the gold?
   If this number is extremely high when compaired to the number of visitors (the percentage is 80% or higher,) you know immediately something is wrong with the website and you need to make some emergency changes. People are telling you that either they can’t figure out how to access the rest of your pages, whatever they’re reading is not what they’re looking for, or something is completely turning them off about your website (potentially offensive material.)

   If this number is slightly high, then it may mean that visitors are not finding what they are looking for on the page they arrived on.  This could mean that your inbound marketing strategy has some flaws in it.  For example, the links that show up in the search engine results or on your online marketing ads are pointing to a page that is not converting visitors. So does it have the right content? If you are paying to send traffic here… you’re wasting money!  Cut off the spending and fix the page first!

   If this number is low (say below 40%) then it means that on average, your visitors are at least looking around your website a bit before leaving. This is a pretty good metric and is about the average.

What’s the overall gold?
The combined gold of the site usage statistics is that you can immediately determine the overall performance of your website, knowing how many visitors come, how long they stay, and what they think about your website overall. Consider this a quick snapshot of the overall health and growth of your website.

Your Most Visited Pages

The statistics that make up the most visited pages listings focus on the content of your website and can include data points such as how many of your site visitors viewed that page, how long they stayed on that page, what page did they come from and what page did they go to next.

What’s the gold?
This list shows you what content on your website attracts the most eyes to it.  So if you see certain pages attract the most visitors, you would want to build on that content to include more like it or change other pages to mimic its layout, its wording, and its structure to help increase the page views of all your pages.  This may also identify the content that is the most important to your visitors, so you would want to be sure to make this content even easier to find, access, and read.

Your Traffic Sources

This statistic helps determine the reach of your website. It helps you understand where the majority of your visitors are coming from. It is typically broken down into three categories: direct traffic, referring sites, and search engines.  Direct traffic means that they entered your web address directly into their web browser address bar, referring sites are all sites that have a link to your website somewhere on their pages, and search engines obviously lists traffic that came from the different search engines.

What’s the gold?
This statistic tells you who knows about your website, how they are getting there, and where you need to improve in order to get more traffic.  If the bulk of your traffic is coming from search engines, then you are potentially missing out on additional traffic that could come from other websites that link to you.  It also means that your offline activities (marketing, advertising, networking, etc.) is not causing anyone to come directly to your website.  Ideally, you would like all three to be equal, but it’s not likely.  Most traffic comes from search engines, but there is great benefit in having other websites link to you (as they could be a source of your greatest fans) and having a large amount of direct traffic is a clear indication that your offline marketing activities are doing well at bringing traffic to your website.  So work on these two sources just as much as you would want to have the #1 spot on Google!

Where do you find gold?

What about you? Where do you find gold nuggets of information in your web statistics?  Share with us below in the comments!

With the rise of social media (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) came the beginnings of the demise of traditional media (magazines, newspapers, TV, radio.) More advertisers are moving their marketing budgets from offline activities to online activities. A report by eMarketer projects that the online ad spending will continue to grow at a rate of ~1% from where it is today in 2009, at 9.9%, to 15.2% by 2013.

That begs the question of what affect this has on the media outlets that have always survived by garnering a large portion of a corporate marketing budget?

The Bleeding of Traditional Media

I call this the “bleeding” of traditional media. It was something that they actually saw coming, but seem to never guess would affect them and their $1,000,000 one page print ads. Traditional media marketing was always about hitting numbers. The number of impressions, the number of viewers, consistency, and frequency. Hit as many people as you can with your message and that will translate into a certain percentage of consumers converting to customers.

The problem is we’ve been marketed and sold to death! We’ve actually learned to AVOID ads. We walk, read, listen and look right past them! There are all sorts of reports and studies talking about “ad avoidance” from the likes of AdWeek, Huffington Post, and even the World Advertising Research Center! You people with Tivo, you know what I mean! Fast-forwarding past the ads! Shame on you!

But hello! This is the financial foundation of traditional media! So what are they to do?

Learn to Adapt or Die

Just like TV did not kill radio and video recorders did not replace TV shows, traditional marketing will not be replaced by the likes of social media marketing… unless they do not learn to adapt. It’s time for traditional media to move into the next phase of their existence. What that is we do not currently know, but what I do believe is that there is still a use of traditional media. They just need to figure out how to combine the concepts we love about social media: connecting and forming communities, relationships built on mutual trust, openness and honesty consistently communicated, and always looking for feedback that is applied not just requested.

These mediums are still great tools for connecting and disseminating information to large audiences of people. They just need to learn how to become a part of our communities of influence rather than trying to be the global dictator of them. So it’s learn to adapt or death is just around the corner.

What are your thoughts?

So what do you think? Do you think traditional media is dead? Dying?

How do you think they could adapt to form a sustainable medium?

“Clients are saying they want accountability for every dollar they spend, and they want cause and effect. Clients will continue to rally behind ideas that build business, and we as an industry have to accept that things will never revert back to the pre-recession mind-set that wasn’t totally focused on accountability.”

Wow! Now that’s a wake-up call if I ever heard one! Time for us to wake up to the fact that the world in which we once operated and conducted business has made some permanent changes! Interestingly, professional marketers and agencies are not the only ones who need a change in our thinking. Business owners and organizations also need to wake-up to the fact that if they want accountability from their marketing, they themselves now have to become accountable to the decisions they make and the support they provide!

In other words, the time of playful ad spending on low result producing activities is over. In comes the sternness and structure of performance-based spending.

What is Performance-based Spending?

The idea behind performance-based spending (or performance-based marketing) is that for every activity you engage in, you are tracking multiple metrics used to determine the overall effectiveness of the implementation.  In other words, for every medium, technique, and message you engage in, there should be built-in metrics that are fed by captured data that will be analyzed to determine the cause and effect of the activity.  Without the metrics, you’re just scattering money into the wind.

Those metrics, when analyzed against the established goals, will give you the activity’s performance.  From that, you can determine if the activity simply needs to be tweaked to increase the already positive results, OR you have clear indication that the activity is not producing results and therefore should be stopped. The focus is on the cause and effect… the return on the investment… the performance of the implementation.

Performance-based Spending Leads to Accountability

For our marketing strategies to truly be valuable, we HAVE to implement, track, analyze, and report results. The results do not simply include subscriber or viewership numbers, total impressions, the click-through rates, or the amount of traffic driven to our web sites, but the actions and transactions made by individuals directly with our organizations.  This processes of “implement, track, analyze, report” brings accountability into the structure of how we develop and implement our marketing strategies.

Wikipedia talks about accountability as “responsibility, answerability, enforcement, liability with the expectation of account-giving.”

Put into my own terms, here’s what I believe marketers AND businesses should be accountable for regarding how we market to our audiences:

1. Responsibility
   You are responsible for the research, planning, development, and decisions you make to engage in certain marketing activities. No pointing fingers. No “he said/she said.”  You all agreed and you all made the decision. Getting past this point helps you take quicker action to prevent any continued losses.
2. Answerability
   Both the marketer and the business are answerable to each other and themselves as to why an activity did or did not produce the desired result. If it did, hey… it’s time for a celebration.  If it didn’t, try to identify the potential reasons a failed result was produced.  This could bring to light major issues that need to be immediately dealt with!  Could be something operational with the business, or it could be a major deficiency on the part of the marketer! Figure it out by communicating with one another!
3. Enforcement
   A central step in the development of your marketing strategy should be a “Strategic Marketing Action Plan.”  This document is not just an outline of the specific activities you are engaging in, but is also a guide with planned action steps that should be followed should an activity or even a whole strategy fail.  This gives you quick, decisive actions that will be taken to begin the process of rectifying the situation.  Don’t focus on the failure, start enforcing planned actions to prevent future failures.
4. Liability
   Our decisions, our actions and our reactions are things that may prevent us from reaching success in our marketing.  They become a liability; something that restrains us from probing deeper and pushing farther with our strategies. We have to accept that these liabilities exist, but work to ensure they do not hinder us from always moving forward.  You can be accountable for past decisions, actions, and reactions… just don’t live in the past.

Plugging accountability into your marketing is step in the right direction to put a cap on wasteful ad spending.  And in tough times such as these, we need to be sure that every dollar we spend marketing ourselves is in some way producing a measurable result.  Show the result, save the dollars!

Questions for Thought

Do you have accountability as part of the structure of your marketing?

What are your thoughts or experiences with engaging in marketing activities that did not capture valuable metrics to prove its effectiveness?

Are there any horror stories of a time you spent large sums of ad dollars on a complete bomb?

During tough economic times as these it’s important to know where all of your marketing dollars are being spent.  For many companies, this becomes a time when they pull back on their marketing budgets for no other need than to simply cut costs. For others, this is a time when they increase their expenditures in an area of their business that they realize can actually increase their revenue as it has the ability to gain new customers and market share.  For either of these situations, it’s important to take a look at where your marketing dollars are being spent, the effectiveness of the strategies employed, and a firm understanding of what you will need to do to improve your strategy’s overall performance for the future.

Here’s a quick 5 step way to mapping out your marketing:

1. Create a Simple Process Map
   View this from a very high level.  If I were to ask you, “How can I buy your product or service,” how would you answer?  What are the steps you would take me through?  Though many would view this is your sales process, think “simplicity.”  If you have more than five steps in your process, try to group some together to shorten the process. Customers usually do not have patience.  Their buying decision can easily sway if it takes too long to satisfy their instant gratification that comes with the purchase.  If you have too many steps, you have too many ways for them to change their mind.
2. Take a Look at What You’re Doing
   Every piece of marketing and sales collateral that you have should be currently used to support one or more of the steps in the process you listed.  If you find an item that you feel is not doing this or is even poorly supporting a step, stop producing it! You need excellence in your marketing when times are tough! Spending the marketing dollars that are still getting you SOME prospects, but just barely simply won’t cut it in the long run!By the way… CA-CHING… money saved! You’re welcome!
3. Group Your Current Marketing Pieces into Activities
   Successful strategies are about spreading your marketing activities over multiple mediums, channels, and tools to reach the broadest representation of your targeted audience(s). Take each of your marketing pieces and group them into activities such as print advertising, radio, TV, search engine marketing, online advertising, social media, etc.Count up the number of pieces in each activity.  This is a quick way to determine how much you’re focusing on each area.  Are you evenly spread in your activities?  Or are there some imbalances? Imbalances could be a sign of wasteful activity and therefore wasted marketing dollars.
4. Check Your Success Rates for Each Activity
   Success in any marketing strategy is dependent on data that is captured and measured against your established goals.  In this case, we’re going to focus on how each activity performs against your sales goals. So, hopefully, you’ve been capturing data behind each activity you’ve engaged in.  If not, we need to talk! Without data there is a high likelihood that you are overspending in multiple areas that may be producing little or even no results.Write on a separate sheet of paper for each activity the following metrics:

    

   - Total amount of dollars (E) committed to this activity – including support/administrative
   – Total amount of transactions (T) attributed to this activity – translated sales transactions
   – Total amount of revenue (R) from transactions attributed to this activity
   – Total net profit (P) attributed to this activity

   Calculate the Following Success Rates

   Goal Achievement by Activity: R/E x 100

   Profit Margin from Activity: P-E=M, M/P x 100

   Average Revenue per Transaction per Activity: R/T

   Average Profit per Transaction per Activity: P/T

5. Determine the Adjustments in Your Activities
   Now this step requires some insight about how to move and adjust your marketing activities, but let me break this down into some simple thoughts that can help you make your decisions about how you spend your marketing dollars.Look at the “Goal Achievement by Activity” rate.  If you have some activities that are falling in the single digits, it means one of two things: 1) You just started this activity or possibly not investing much into it, OR 2) You are potentially overspending marketing dollars in an area that is not translating into transactions.

    

   If the answer is #1, you may choose to continue investing in this area, but I would encourage you to measure this again in 30 day increments to determine if it has any effect.

   If the answer is #2, then maybe you should stop investing in this activity or rethink how you are leveraging this strategy to attain your goals.  By doing so, you can move the allotted marketing dollars for this activity into another area where it can produce higher results.

   Next, look at the “Profit Margin” metric.  If this is high (say even over 10%) then this should tell you that this activity is able to not only produce results in terms of acquiring whatever it was designed for (awareness, traffic, sales, etc.), but it also has the potential to produce the best results in terms of translating into higher value transactions.

   Now, I say “has” because of this.  If this activity generates the least amount of transactions (and by quite a bit) then even though the metric sounds good, it is really not producing long-term gains.  Think of a situation where you have one transaction that had a 90% profit margin or two hundred transactions that had a 50% profit margin. In this case, consider how the activity could be adjusted to generate more high-value transactions.

   Finally, look at the “Average Profit per Transaction” metric.  The activities where this metric is high shows you potentially how and where you are acquiring your best customers – meaning those that may have spent the most with your organization!  What you may want to do here is to look at how you can increase your use of this activity to hopefully increase the number of transactions.

   Now, an important note, oftentimes this activity would be the same as that found from the “Profit Margin” metric.  Remember, we need a good balance in the number of transactions to the amount of profit gained in each transactions.  I only mentioned looking where this metric is “high” not the “highest.”  Therefore, you actually want to find somewhere close to the middle in terms of profit and number of transactions.

That’s it!  Five steps later and you will have a much clearer understanding of not only where you marketing dollars have been spent, but the effectiveness of what you have spent those dollars on!  During these tough economic times, you DO have the chance to increase your market share as well as the number of sales and revenue made from each transaction.  The important thing to start with is this clear understanding of where you are currently.  Once you have this, it is much easier to see how you need to formulate your next marketing strategy to increase your overall performance and make your marketing dollars work for you!

Map your marketing dollars and you can map your future!