Web Design: Is Your Website a Friend or Foe of First Time Visitors?

Acquiring first time visitors to your website is one of the riskiest endevours in Internet Marketing.  

• Where should they come from?
• How much are they going to cost?
• Can we convert them to buyers or leads?
• Will they ever come back?

In my experience, businesses are very familiar with these concerns.  And these concerns are legitimate.  But often the concern is misfocused.  Typically, businesses are concerned about the traffic itself.  The appropriate concern should be the website itself and the planning that went into how the website would convert visitors into buyers/leads.

If you want to learn more about addressing this for your website, then please join me on Bryan Eisenberg’s webinar on Thursday, October 30 2pm EST.  

Click here to go to the registration form for the webinar.

Internet Marketing: Shifting Marketing Budgets

 SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) recently conducted a poll and asked:

From which marketing/IT programs are you shifting budget away and moving it to search marketing programs?

Excellent question! Before you peek at their answer, do you have an answer for your business? 

SEMPO – Shifting Marketing Budget

 

 

 

 

Internet Marketing: Search Marketing Grows in Face of Downturn

Much of the news around the economy has been grim lately – everyone can admit this.  Just click here for the gory details.

12-Month DJIA Slide

However, in the midst of all this turmoil one area is thriving – Search Engine Advertising. 

SearchIgnite reported that search marketing spending grew 27% in the 3rd quarter of 2008; up from the same period last year. 

Search Engine Marekting Growth

Can newspapers, Yellow Pages, TV, radio or print come close to making the same claim?  You probably know the answer to this since it is likely that you are currently considering trimming these budgets back yourself. 

So what do you do with this information?  Get prepared and properly balance your marketing budget. 

1. Make sure your website is operating as it needs to be.  How do you know?  Ask two questions: a) What is your website conversion rate? b) Could it be better? 
2. Examine if your competitors (national or local) are making investments in their Online Marketing.
3. Create an online marketing plan that outlines how to: a) reach potentional customers and clients; b) engage customers and clients about your value proposition for them; c) convert visitors into sales or leads; d) retain these relationships for future marketing efforts. 
4. Execute on the easiest battles to win in your online marketing plan - and yes, that may be implementing or improving your search engine marketing.

Internet Marketing: Next Six Month Focus

Online Marketing Blog recently conducted an unscientific survey of 400 bloggers and online marketers and asked: “What 3 internet marketing tactics will you emphasize most in the next 6 months?”

Have you asked yourself that same question?

Here are the results of the poll:

• Search engine optimization (36%, 149 Votes)
• Blogging (33%, 134 Votes)
• Pay per click (26%, 107 Votes)
• Email marketing (22%, 89 Votes)
• Social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) (21%, 86 Votes)
• Blogger relations/blog PR (14%, 56 Votes)
• Microblogging (Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku) (11%, 47 Votes)
• Affiliate marketing (11%, 47 Votes)
• Advertorial (NewsForce, AdFusion) (10%, 40 Votes)
• Video marketing (7%, 29 Votes)

One note in the results is that ‘Corporate Web Site’ also got 7% of the votes. 

Now maybe you just need to get some more traffic for your site – plenty of sites get too little.  But if your website isn’t converting visitors to leads and/or buyers then you are just pouring water into a leaking bucket. 

See the table below to understand the business purpose of working on your website’s coversion rate.

Web Design: How Important Is the Copy on Your Website?

I first saw this video on the blog of my friends at Future Now.

As I was first watching it, I imagined the beggar as typical online business.  He is set up and occasionally some revenue trickles in.

You can even imagine his business metrics (you have metrics for your online business too).  Possibly, 1 in 100 who passed dropped a coin in his can.  And for the sake of ease, let’s say those individual coins were dimes.  So for every 1,000 people who passed by the beggar made $1.00.  Ouch! 

So the new words on his sign made the entire difference!  He went from a conversion rate of 1% to 5% and it looks like he may have also increased his average donation as well.  For the sake of ease, we’ll say that patrons began donating two dimes.  Now for every 1,000 who passed by he made $10.00! 

A few simple words made the whole difference. 

How well is your website working for you?  Could an improvement in your copy start to make the difference?

Internet Marketing: Marketing in an Economic Downturn

Okay, so the economy may be slowing down a bit – at least that is what we are hearing from experts.

But your business has to keep growing. 

The first thing businesses typically cut in a downturn is the marketing budget.  For most businesses, that makes sense. 

But here is the key point: Cut the fat, not the muscle!

So what is the muscle?  Each business has its own muscle in the marketing budget, but an often overlooked option is Pay Per Click and Email Marketing.   

Each of these methods are shockingly efficient and cost effective – you can get started for less than your cable bill. 

Pay Per Click, done properly, does can offer immediate cash returns while collecting new paying customers.

While not as great for gaining new customers, Email Marketing is a superior tool for creating repeat customers. 

To find out more about more about either of these options please contact us.

Internet Traffic Measurement – A Response to Arkansas Business

 

The latest issue of Arkansas Business has an article on the cover below the fold entitled, “Quantifying Internet Traffic Remains Elusive”.  Since I make a living in the Internet Trafficking business, I am glad to see it get some front page news – thanks Nate.  But I would like to elaborate on some of the points in the article.

The main point of the article is that it is difficult to obtain precise traffic estimates for sites that display advertising (see the title). Should it matter to marketers that these specific traffic estimates are difficult to pin down?  In a word – no.

In traditional advertising, those selling the advertising could only point advertisers towards circulation numbers or television viewers and some demographic data to attract advertisers and set their rates.  So naturally, traditional marketers still have this frame of mind when judging the Internet. 

On the Internet, however, the marketers’ focus needs to shift from circulation numbers to measurable ROI.  There are great tools like Google Analytics and Omniture that allow Internet marketers to trace any digital campaign all the way back to a real ROI number.  If I spend $10,000 per month advertising on SFGate.com and I can show an ROI of 40%, should I care if the site gets 2.4 million or 7.6 million monthly visitors? 

The metrics that really matter are not ‘circulation’, ‘viewers’, ‘page views’ or ‘time on site’ but profit and loss.

Nitty Gritty Details

The article speaks to a specific niche of Internet Advertising – buying banner ads directly on another content-driven site.  Think of the Metropolitan Bank banner ads that are displayed regularly across the top of ArkansasBusiness.com.  ArkansasBusiness.com has made a good living out of selling space on their website in the same way they sell ads to statewide businesses in their print edition of Arkansas Business.  

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which is sited in the article, display advertising of this kind accounts for 22% of total Internet advertising revenue.    The article doesn’t speak of the advertising done on search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN, which accounts for 40% total spending.  For search engine marketing, getting the exact number of impressions (times someone was exposed to your ad), clicks-throughs (number of times someone clicked on the ad) and conversions (times someone took the action you wanted them to take for coming to your website) is straight forward and reliable.

Why are Internet traffic measurements elusive? 

Measuring traffic, or visitors, on a website that you don’t own is tricky.  The main reason is because that is the proprietary information of the website’s owners.  As Nate mentions, there are services that can estimate a website’s traffic for you.  comScore, Nielsen/Net Ratings and the Audit Bureau of Circulation are sited directly in the article.  In my opinion the best service for getting data on another website is Hitwise, which was not mentioned.  Before advertisers start citing the wide variance in these traffic estimates, they need to understand how each of those services works so they can make intelligent analytical adjustments to the estimates.  Maybe I will touch on the differences in the services another day.