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Jordan Glogau has been involved with marketing and sales on the Internet since 1995. He has worked for a number of computer and Internet company like DEC, Sharp and IDT and presently at Haiku-Marketing.com. Jordan is involved in Search Engine and Internet Marketing for ecommerce, healthcare, real estate, financing, consumer products and reputation management . He can be contacted at jglogau atphr400.com .

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Five Things People Miss From Web Analytics

Written on
May 30th 2007
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by Jordan Glogau  |
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gawkerjobs1.jpgThe Sales Cycle: How long did it take to make a sale

Understanding your site’s sales-cycle is an essential piece of information. Useful for both strategic and tactical decision-making, the length of the sales-cycle will heavily influence your direction in terms of site design (how much content do you need), placement of conversion drives (where and how quickly do you drive to conversion), personalization solutions (do you need real-time customization, next session personalization or even offline targeting), and marketing messaging. You may know your sales cycle in the offline world — but online users are likely coming to you at very different stages. Using web analytics, you can identify how many visitors arrive at your site ready-to-buy. How many show up seriously shopping. And how many first arrive in a purely informational mode. Taking this information and matching it to time/visits to conversion can help make almost every web site marketing and design decision better informed. Sales Cycle information is usually available in two different places. First, many packages provide information about the average time to conversion for a campaign. By creating site-wide campaigns as well as source-specific campaigns, you can find out how many days between first visit and conversion typically elapse. You can get even finer grained information by building visitor segments based on VISIT number. By counting how many conversions occur in 1st Visit segments you discover your Ready to Buy visitors. By seeing how conversions are distributed by subsequent Visit Number, you can track the “Sweet-spot” for your sites conversion. Some industries and services have been radically transformed by the web. For example, residential real estate buyers now “hunt” through the web, get pre-qualified for their financing and “bounce” when they see the house of their dreams. Tracking multiple visits could be a critical edge to understand buyer demographics. Channel InteractionMarketers know that a single message is almost always lost. Consumers become prospects when your message reaches a certain threshold of awareness. And this usually involves more than one message and often involves more than one channel. Despite this well known fact, most web measurement is geared toward a channel-at-a-time approach. Marketers report on PPC campaigns and SEO campaigns and Online Banner campaigns and never bother to look at how they overlap. Chances are, the overlap is real and significant — both within and across channels. PPC visitors often click multiple times within a single session on different terms. They often use a mix of PPC and Organic listings to your site. And they may well change their usage of Search Engine listings over time. Tracking the channel interaction between your marketing program can help you better understand how programs both support and cannibalize each other — and give you a much picture of individual channel effectiveness. To track channel interaction, build visitor segments based on particular source types. For instance, if you build a VISITOR segment based on having a PPC Referral and then track all visit sources, you have an excellent picture of how your PPC campaign overlaps with every other sourcing mechanism. If you have a large marketing group don’t be surprised that cross tracking may run into political trouble. Don’t let individual budgets get in the way of this analysis.

After the Sale

So much web analysis concentrates on what comes before the sale that what comes after is virtually ignored. As with any business, your existing customers are your most valuable resource. Tracking what happens with visitors right after a sale or lead (especially a lead!) can be huge in helping shape CRM, personalization and marketing efforts. It can also help you with customer support — a function that the web site can perform admirably and much less expensively than traditional call-centers. Many sites see significant repeat visit behavior post sales/lead but do nothing in terms of personalization or site optimization to accommodate this fact. For a large ticket item this information should be used to prevent buyers remorse and to make sure that follow-up service is done, a great idea of a luxury car dealership.

Failure to Route

Web Sites are like Federal Budgets — they never shrink they only grow more or less rapidly. So many organizations find themselves with sites that are large and multi-functioned. When your site fits this profile, measuring routing behavior is critical. The pages that are designed to move visitors from one area of the site to the next are Routers — and they include most top-level navigation pages and your Internal Search tool. Web measurement can help you isolate and study just the performance of these pages in terms of moving visitors into the site. And this simple analysis can often reveal significant problems in one or more areas of your site. Many pages on large ecommerce sites are like this, brand and category pages. Often it’s these type of page that the search engines pickup for important queries, not the home or product pages. Make sure to follow these pages individually and as a cluster to your shopping cart forms, if your package allows this.

Evaluating Quality of Traffic

We all want traffic. But web measurement can help you understand one great truth — unlike people, not all traffic is created equal! Sites and Marketers who ignore this principle and choose to optimize their marketing programs by Click or Entry will almost inevitably waste large chunks of their budget. Web Measurement can help you understand the different traffic quality by Source, Keyword, Campaign, Creative, etc. — and it can do this even for sites that don’t have specific conversion events. There is no single worse strategy in online marketing (and especially Pay-Per-Click) than optimizing for Clicks. If this sounds like you, then using web measurement to evaluate and optimize your traffic can be the best return on analytics you’ll ever see. Again politics can enter into conversion tracking, who is the responsible party. For something that is not that much work this seems to get lost at the last minute. You analytics vendor can only give you the basic tool for campaign tracking. The organization must come up with the standards for tracking codes and get them implemented with your technical group(s).



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Reader Comments.

very informative
thank you

Posted by Mariud Dragutoiu | 7:16 pm on May 30, 2007.

Well written

I believe retailers and eCommerce sites will be starting to look at using traditional terrestrial shop KPIs and mirroring this online.

Regards

Marcos Richardson
Director
www.webtraffiq.com

Posted by Marcos Richardson | 7:25 am on May 31, 2007.

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