As we’ve been discussing, sometimes businesses get caught up in the need to increase traffic to their website.  This “traffic” often equates to the number of visitors to a website or the number of total pageviews.  But, as Traffikd discusses, there often is an opportunity to increase the time on the site and the number of pageviews per visitor.  This obviously will increase the number of total pageviews, but it also means that visitors are spending more time on your site - which gives you more time to sell to them.

For bloggers and social media marketers, the desire to increase numbers of unique visitors to a site often overshadows an effort to increase the average number of pageviews per visitor… In reality, the blogger and the designer do have some influence on visitors in terms of encouraging extended visits, and even a small increase in average pageviews per visitor can result in significant gains in overall pageviews. - Traffikd - Increasing Pageviews Per Visitor

Before beginning to strategize, you need to create goals for your business.  In order to create goals you need a solid grasp of your current situation on the Internet (your current web presence). To get an idea of your current internet situation take a look at:

Website - Ideally your website is the hub of your Internet presence with customer-centric design and content.

• Analytics - How well is your website performing?  Basic statistics such as page views, visits and uniques are useful.  But more importantly, how many leads and conversions are you getting?  Where is your traffic coming from?  How useable is your website?  Are people getting frustrated?
• Usability - Can visitors find what they are looking for on your website?  Is it easy to use?  What could be improved?
• Content - Great content provides your customers with the information they need to succeed.  Creating content should be a continual process.  What content do your customers want to see?  What expertise can you provide?
• Design - Your website needs to be easy to use (usability), but also should be eye-catching and professional.  Are the fonts need to be easy to read and does the layout should draw visitors into your message?

Community & Brand Reputation- Your customers are talking about you both online and offline.  Find where your customers are and join the conversation to get key insights into improving your business.

• Blog - If you have a blog, what feedback have your readers given you? What are other bloggers saying?  Who has linked to your blog and what have they said?
• Forum / Discussion Boards - If you don’t have discussion boards on your website, find places where your customers frequent.  Listen to concerns and join the conversation with suggestions for improvement.
• Social Networks - Your customers are probably on social networks already (if they aren’t they probably will be soon).  Find social networks where your customers frequent and see what they are saying.  Join the social networks to give them an opportunity to connect.
• Reviews - Have there been any reviews of your products and services?  What can be improved?

Search Engines - Many potential customers will find your website through search engines so it is important to understand how search engines currently crawl and index your site.

• Keywords - What keywords do the search engines see on your site?  Where does your site rank for various keywords?  It can be helpful to pick the top 100 to monitor at first.  There are a number of free tools available to help (Google Webmaster tools, Rank Checker for Firefox, SEO Quake for Firefox and Internet Explorer).
• Indexed Pages - How many pages on your website (and blog) do the search engines include in their indices?  (SEO Quake and Website Grader can help).
• Incoming Links - How many other sites are linking to your website?  What are they linking to?  What are they saying? (SEO Quake and Website Grader).
• Outgoing Links - What other websites are you linking to? (Google Webmaster tools, SEO Quake).
• Cache - What pages are the search engines displaying in their results?  What do they have saved that may be old content?  (Google Webmaster Tools).

Marketing - What is your company trying to say to customers and potential customers?  What are the current marketing messages your company is using?  What is the status of any advertising or sales campaigns?  What is the return on investment (ROI) of any campaigns?

• Advertising - It is important to understand how any advertising is impacting your bottom line and helping to reach your goals.  Besides budgets, clicks, and impressions, it is important to measure leads, conversions, or sales - what return you are getting on your investment (ROI).
• Competitors - Who are your competitors?  What are their web presences?  What marketing and advertising are they doing?  What are their strengths and weaknesses?  What opportunities and threats exist?

There is quite a bit of information to gather, but once you have it you’ll be able to get a good overview of what your current Internet presence is.  You should be able to find opportunities to improve and be able to formulate some business goals. As you can see, Internet business strategy merges into traditional business strategy by using the Internet to collect information and feedback and to further business goals.  Next we’ll talk about vision and goals.

(photo by argenberg @ Flickr CC)

Related Posts:

• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Introduction
• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Methodologies
• Vision & Goals for your Internet Business Strategy
• What are the Requirements for your Internet Business Strategy to Succeed?
• Creating an Internet Business Strategy - Implementation

Technorati Tags: internet business strategy, internet strategy, internet strategic planning, internet strategic plan, internet strategy consulting, internet business consulting

Presented by Nancy Bhagat, VP Sales & Marketing Group, Director Integrated Marketing, Intel

Cost of media is low per person, but is unfocused.

There is a 300% growth rate in timeshifting TV.  But TV is not media, it’s a delivery.  Video will continue to exist, just in different places through different delivery strategies.  Behavior has changed in how people interact with ads.  56% say skipping ads is important part of timeshifting.

Technology is no longer about who is tech saavy and who is not anymore.  It is about the desire to purchase.  80% turn to Internet for information to make a purchase decision. Our targets are online.

People are looking for a person like them, but they don’t need to see or know them directly.  This is defined much differently than previously.

Great brands are no longer the brands that tell the best stories, but are the brands that have the best stories told about them. (needs source)

Power of online marketing:

• Impact
• Agility
• Targeting
• Scale

Leadership requires flexibility and focus. Online vehicles offer speed and flexibility to test multiple content types in one place and to determine what content is best.

Success metrics are shifting away from traditional impressions and CPC. The ability to evaluate success is critical.  Content is increasingly delivered through social media which is difficult to measure.  We now need to measure what matters - user engagement, behavior, movements & trends.  Data that is not actionable is meaningless.

We need to know what place people are in the buy cycle/qualification.  Data without valid business context is meaningless. We need to understand what activities are valued.  And if things don’t go well in those activities, we need to know what and why.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, analytics, end to end marketing, internet strategy summit forum

Presented by Mike Moran, Distinguished IBM Engineer

Yes, an engineer talking to you about marketing.

You need to watch what your customers are doing so you know what to do next.  While there are a lot of things out there that you can’t measure - there are about 20% that you can measure that lead to a sale.

You have a website out there which probably eventually leads to a sale.  What things do you do that lead to that sale?  What things does the customer do that leads to that sale?

Measure ROI in terms of (Gain - cost)/cost. For transactional ROI look at how many transactions you have.  What was the ROI for everything you had to do to make that transaction happen.  For relational ROI, how much did it cost you to acquire this new customer.

Take a look a direct marketers. They understand what works and doesn’t.  How?  They create multiple versions of every marketing piece and analyze the results.  They test the responses to multiple designs and adjust everything based on those results.

Apply this to your website. Define numeric objectives.  Try different approaches.  Get real feedback and constantly look at performance to see what’s working.

For example, you want to increase sales.  For your website there may be two ways to accomplish this - get more people to come or to persuade more of the people that do come to buy.  Measure based on the increase in traffic or the increase in conversions.

Sometimes it’s not clear what metric to use, so just choose one and stick with it.  You’re looking for a trend so just consistently measure the same thing.

Conclusion - Respond to your customers. Change things until you see something start to work.  Do it quickly.  Instead of trying to figure out what to do, just do something.  Let the market tell you what works and what doesn’t.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, anaytics, internet strategy summit forum

The New York Times is speculating [no longer speculation] that an announcement from Google at the Advertising Research Foundation meeting this week will unveil a new product called AdPlanner.  Details are understandably sketchy, though the NYT quotes an anonymous source on the product as saying it will help Ad Agencies to find demographics that match an ads target audience.

Valleywag, though, makes the logical connection by envisioning a tool that could eliminate the need for Ad Agencies all together.  If Google is successful and all the data that an Ad Agency needs is available through this tool, it could easily be rebranded for the direct market.   This is certainly within SOA for Google; they use technology to eliminate redundancy and establish direct, dependent markets.  Some of these efforts like AdSense, AdWords and GMail are clear winners.  Others, like Google’s little know newspaper and radio ad placement drive, are mired in the mud.

My personal opinion is that Google will succeed in creating a very useful tool that will in no way replace the unique talents and skills of Ad Placement Agencies.  This is going to raise the bar for Ad Agencies expectations on reporting and information within content networks which can only be a plus for the Ad Agency’s clients; business owners buying up online ad space.

Web Analytics World discusses some web analytics tools (free) to take a look at, including Woopra, Crazy Egg, Enquisite, 4Q, and ClickTale - 5 Great (Free) Web Analytics Tools You May Not Know About Yet.

No subject is more controversial to a group of web professionals than Web Statistics. The advertising industry is still a little sore with us after we promised early on that Web Stats would give them all that invaluable information they could never get from TV, Radio or Print. This was not a lie, per se, as some sectors are able to mine tremendous amounts of quality information from their web traffic, session login, and cookie data. For most of us, however, the reality has fallen far short of the promise. Continue Reading »

Once you understand the different types of online ads and the advantages and disadvantages of rich media ads, it is important to know how to measure the effectiveness of these ads (especially since you’re probably paying a premium for their creation).

Just like display ads, these metrics are important:

• Impressions: How many times is the ad served to a person (or as near as can be estimated). Impressions to search engine crawlers and bots should be filtered out (most ad servers do this automatically).
• Clicks: How many times someone clicked on the ad (and was taken to your website - remember to target the landing page). This should also filter out search engine crawlers and bots.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions multiplied by 100 for a percentage. This number will typically be pretty small. CTR of 3% is very good for rich media ads, but will quickly decrease the longer the ad is left on a website. Many CTR will be under 1%. This is an indicator of how effective the ads is or how many times the ad was seen each time before it was clicked on.

Unique to rich media ads, this metric is also important:

• Interaction time: Or an average of how long people interacted with the ad (clicked on it, moused over the ad, played the video, etc.). How long this time is will depend on what interaction the ad has in it. If it is just a mouse-over that displays more text the interaction time will be much less than an ad which contains a game (usually).

Since rich media ads are usually more expensive to produce and place on a website, measuring their effectiveness is extremely important to reaching the goals and return on investment (ROI) you have for the ad. Most ad servers will have the first three metrics. The third is becoming more available, but usually requires additional programming into the ad for proper tracking.

Technorati Tags: advertising, ads, rich media ads, online advertising

Using personal analytics to create a better user experience will help you gain insight into your business and your customers (thus increasing revenue). Ankur Shah (from Techlightenment) used the example of the village bakery in the 1970s - the baker knew what you liked and could make recommendations on what to try based on knowing what you chose for years in the past.

On the web we’ve traditionally asked users for information via long registration forms (which are boring for the user), but there is a lot of information available without having to ask. Amazon.com recommends books and products based upon on what you’ve chosen in the past and what others have chosen is similar to the village bakery. These types of recommendations are part of the implicit web and are valuable for both the user (who sees more things that may be of interest) and to the website (who can sell more books).

Think about every interaction on your website as data about your users which should be treated as content. When your users click on a link, when they signup for an enewsletter, and when they come in from a a search engine, they are giving you valuable information that you can use to enhance their experience. One of the most basic enhancements would be to acknowledge users who come in from search engines with the keywords they came in with and give them relevant links from all over your site.

Obviously there are some fairly large privacy issues with using personal data, but if you are upfront with what you are doing and are providing a valuable service, people will be willing to share their information in exchange (just make sure you are providing valuable, relevant services in return).

Technorati Tags: web2expo, analytics, personal analytics

Just finished my first Workshop at the web2.0 Expo

This will be a quick and dirty post between sessions (and while eating a sandwich)

Web 2.0 Best Practices, authored by Niall Kennedy

Niall’s talk focused on taking the audience though the stages of web development history in order to lay down a path for the future. No matter where your web site is today, the take home from Niall is that you have homework to do. If you have a site that doesn’t have RSS distributing your content out in feeds, you need to start here. If you already have that part in place, your next hurdle is adopting microformats

Microformats is the landing pad for preparing your website for the new semantic movement, likely to be the 3.0 of web 3.0 Microformats lets you tell search engines what your content is meant to be. hCard, hCal, and hReference are all reference implementations of microformats. Using them will improve your search engine results, this is now really now debated much.

Once your site is using Microformats, it is time to extend that content out to large platforms like Google, Facebook, MySpace and others. Widgets allow you to put your content up on sites like Facebook to use their traffic to extend your content’s reach. This is usually done through proxies; your content is updated on their site only as often as your site wants. This limits your traffic burden.

Niall did a very good job with this workshop. It was compelling to see how the decisions of the past can make educated guesses on where we are going in the future. If he’s right, this really isn’t the time to sit on your latest site redesign. If you get out infront of this microformat movement and widget revolution, you can beat your competition to the punch to getting those valuable eyeballs that drive sales in an online world

Technorati Tags: web2expo, microformats, B2B