RSS
Fri 29 Dec 2006
3 New Years Resolutions for Web Marketers
Posted by Josh Katinger
With everyone setting corporate and personal goals for the coming new year, we figured we would perhaps help out with three key things we would recommend you get on top of (if you aren’t already) in 2007 to help move your business forward:
- Start tracking something. Anything. Analytics is free now; everyone should be using it to some degree or another. Think about what the measure of success for your website is or should be. Is it the number of page views? Unique visitors? Online sales? Do you know how you did in any of those areas last month? In the last three months? This month last year? If not you should make use of the free, and/or not-so-free but excellent tools that are out there in the coming year. You have no idea where you are going, or how long it’s going to take to get there, if you have no idea where you are starting from.
- Discover and keep track of how well you rank (or don’t rank) in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) for the keywords that your customers are using to find your product/service/information, etc. Do you come up at all? Do you want to come up higher? Aside from doing spot check searches, the analytics mentioned above can help tremendously with this. A majority of web users start their surfing sessions on search engines. Whether you use search engine optimization to rank well in the natural search results, or use pay-per-click marketing to buy your way to the top, or some combination of the two (which is what we usually recommend) - there is no better marketing mechanism than putting you offering in front of the people who are seeking it when they are seeking it! Sounds so simple - but it’s really quite revolutionary - refer to Google’s stock price for proof.
- Implement and/or optimize “pull” content and technologies instead of only focusing on “pushing” visitors to your site and hoping they do what you want them to. Start blogging on a regular basis, and make sure it includes an RSS feed and a Google Sitemap. Start a regular email newsletter. Include genuine helpful content in these publications with no strings attached. These tools can help create or put a fresh spin on your brand and create an audience and readership where there was none previously. Imagine an ecommerce site that sold only three products that the customers didn’t need but once a year - at best. If that site included a blog or newsletter that kept the customer in touch and interested in the brand and the company between those long purchase cycles - what are the chances that they would buy again in 1 year’s time? Much better we have found! Like Godin says: “Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers“
Those are some of our basic thoughts - admittedly high level. We’d love to hear some of the goals and plans that some of you out there have for 2007. Use the comments field below. And as always, contact us if you want to discuss your needs or if we can help you out in any way.
Happy New Year!
Josh I am very interested to hear more about the free web analytics you mention, can you go into greater detail? I have several sites that I am working on that I want to start tracking but the clients don’t want to pay any extra but it is important for me to understand the trends of the visititors in order to scale the site. Thanks -M
Thanks for the comment Mark. The leader of the pack right now would be Google Analytics. It is a VERY good tag-based analytics product - especially for the price (free)! GA provides all of your basic stats in a very nice, clean interface that you can easily share with your clients - all they need to do is get a Google Account. Beyond the basics GA lets you set up goal tracking (i.e. if the goal of the site is leads via a submission form, you can track submissions to that form specifically as a goal and then measure the effectiveness of any campaigns you are doing on driving those leads/goals). Commerce can also be tracked in GA, even with a third party shopping cart. I recently implemented this for a client and it has been working unbelievably well.
This is not to say that there aren’t other free alternatives, but as far as a free JavaScript tag-based solution you can’t beat GA. I like tag-based analytics for ease of implementation and reliability of both the implementation and the data itself.
However if modifying the site pages with JS tags is not an option, or you have older log files you want to analyze then ClickTracks (which also sells an excellent JS tag-based solution) has a free version of their log file analysis software available for download.
If you want to get even more basic than that there are always the old stand-bys AWStats, Webalizer, or the very basic Analog.
Let me know if you have any other questions or would like any help, especially implementing GA - I know its sick of me, but I actually find it fun!