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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Marketing Success for 2008: Measurement is the Key

Welcome to the first Work Media blog post of 2008. We hope everybody had a terrific New Years!

We've been finishing up the Work Media 2008 marketing plan and it got me thinking about something very important when it comes to marketing, and that is measurement. Even though we're an Internet marketing firm, we will be using a number of different strategies for promoting ourselves in our local market, several of which are off-line. It would be foolish to exclude certain marketing venues just because they are not the techniques we specialize in providing.

But the question is: how do you know what combination of marketing strategies to use? There are many - search engine marketing (which we, obviously, heavily recommend), direct marketing, print advertising, TV, radio, etc. The first clue as to what methods to use is by finding out what methods are used by your most successful competitors, or similar types of businesses that are successful in your home market.

One problem is that the strategies used by your competitors may not be the same that work for your business. So ultimately what you have to do is try different things and track results as tightly as you can. You need to try and associate leads with the marketing techniques that generated those leads. A couple of ways of doing this is to use a special URL or phone number with different advertising campaigns. For instance, if you run a TV ad campaign, you might direct viewers to a URL like "www.mysite.com/TV". Then when you check your stats, you can see how many visitors you had to the "TV" URL, which will give you a good idea how effective the campaign was.

This strategy is not perfect. In the above example, someone could type your URL without the "TV", in which case you would not be able to make the connection. But this strategy is at least a starting point. A more accurate, but more complicated, way to measure ad campaign performance is to set up a unique phone number for different ads. Then you can tell which ads are working by how many calls come in for different phone numbers. There are a number of different companies that can help you set these phone numbers up and provide call tracking.

So when you are working out your marketing plan (you do have a marketing plan, don't you?), please keep in mind how you are going to measure performance. Finding the right marketing mix can mean the difference between success and failure for your marketing and your business.

For help implementing a successful marketing plan for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: advertising, analytics, business advice, business planning, internet marketing, marketing, marketing plan, performance measurement, tracking, web site marketing

Friday, September 21, 2007

Generating Marketing Data with Heat Map Analysis

Heat map analysis is coming of age as a tool in the Internet marketer's toolkit. Heat map analysis creates a visual display of mouse movement or click activity over a web page. The idea is that where the mouse moves to, human eyes are following. Where the mouse sits on the screen, "heat" is displayed. The hotter (more red) the area of the screen, the more that part of the screen is looked at. Or the more clicks an area of the screen gets, the hotter it is.

Why would you need to know this? Because where people are looking and clicking on your web page, that's where you need to place your most important marketing message or your device to capture the visitor's email address. If you know what plot of real estate people are drawn to, you know where to focus your marketing.

At one time, heat map analysis was voodoo magic (as are many things associated with online marketing) beyond the use of everyday marketers, and it was very expensive. But now there are several options for generating free or low cost heat analyses for your own web site. Here are a couple of options:

www.crazyegg.com. This service, which is based on clicks, is free for users tracking less than 5,000 page views per month, and who are tracking four pages or less. Beyond that, they have pay plans that range from $9 to $99 per month.

www.clickdensity.com. This click tracking service is also free for analysis of less than 5,000 clicks per month, although it is limited to a single page. One interesting feature of some of their paid plans is the ability to do web page split-testing.

www.fusestats.com. This is a more complete analytics package that includes heat maps. Their free service is limited to 15,000 monthly page views and 15 heat maps per month, and it is based on clicks. This package can be used for paid search conversion tracking as well.

www.opencube.com. This company sells a product called Mouse Trends, which is JavaScript code that runs on your site. It allows for true mouse movement-based heat map creation, as opposed to just clicks. The cost is $149.

Spend an hour or so examining where people are looking and where people are clicking on your site. The information may be quite surprising, and could trigger some ideas on how to better present the information on your web site. The more you know, the better job you can do of crafting your marketing presentation.

If you need some help generating data for your web site to help you make better decisions, contact Work Media today at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: analytics, click map, heat map, internet marketing, seo

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Internet Marketing: Keep Your Eye on Your Bounce Rates

The bounce rate of a web page is the percentage of visitors to that page who leave your site from that page without visiting any other page on your site. This is a very important piece of information.

Most analytics software should report on the bounce rates for the pages of a site. In Google Analytics, for example, there is a report called "Entrance Bounce Rates" that is located in the "Navigational Analysis" section. It shows the number of entrances, number of bounces, and bounce rate for every page on a site that acted as an entrance point.

To start with, if the bounce rate of your home page is high, then you're in trouble. You need for people to use your front page as a starting point to explore your site. The exception is if you have a one-page site, such as a salesletter-style site. If you have a one-page site intended to accomplish some purpose such as getting newsletter signups, then a better metric to examine is the conversion rate.

The bounce rate can also help you determine the effectiveness of landing pages. For example, if you are running a pay-per-click campaign and split-testing two different landing pages, the bounce rate of each page will give you a good idea of each pages' "stickiness" (although, as always, the conversion rate is the number one measure).

Use the bounce rate of pages on your site as a gauge of how effective those pages are. Do everything you can to compel the reader of your web copy to perform some action - to visit some particular page on your site to make a purchase or fill out a form. If your bounce rate is high, then readers do not feel sufficiently comfortable or interested enough to spend more time with you. That has to be fixed. Try different things, using the bounce rate as your guide. If the bounce rate starts going down, then you're headed in the right direction.

For help tweaking your site to improve your web page bounce rates, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: analytics, bounce rates, Google Analytics, internet marketing, web site marketing