Internet Marketing Strategy and Implementation

Parsing the opportunity in site redesign

It's site redesign time for several of my content clients, and a great time to place our bets as to where to put test site improvements and program improvements.
When we redesign, we are not merely trying to make our pages prettier, we are testing to find what can be made more productive by changes to program, format, or focus.
Now's the time -- use the spring months, when usage patterns for most content sites are fairly regular, to push out some tests. How much content can your readers handle in heavy-interest time periods, like the run-up to or follow-up from a convention or conference? Can you better ride the wave of of product or service introductions? Or are there stories that spring from industry personalities or product/campaign mis-steps as people position themselves and their new products.

Elements to test: Program, Format, Focus

By program I mean the contact schedule, from broadcast to user-specific communications by way of RSS and e-mail. Chances are there are additional e-mail programs that will find a loyal readership. Our client Advertising Age has just inaugurated a new newsletter to support the strong content in their CMO Strategy section.

Focus is subject line and headline work. What is the best language to sell the story to your Internet-based audience? What do you want to be on the Google, Yahoo or MS news feed from your story? Which approaches get more blogger and social network juice?

Format is how everything else is laid out for the visitor in emails and landing pages, resulting on more time-on-page, more additional page views, and more refer-a-friend clicks. As usability guru Jakob Nielsen reiterated in January, usability redesigns are still averaging an 83% improvement in key volume indicators. The low-hanging fruit may be gone, but there is still much fruit to be gathered. We recommend setting aside 10% of your re-design budget for analysis to target redesign to the highest ROI site elements.

What are you planning on changing this spring? How are you planning on measuring the results of those changes?

Labels: content, metrics, publishing, web analytics

The Arc of a Story

It's been interesting today watching how a big story develops on line. One of my clients has had a story viral enough to be interesting to watch as it developed hour by hour: Former Dentsu Creative Sues Over Trips to Brothel, Bathhouse, Sharapova Shoot, and and The Dirty Details of the Dentsu Suit.

This gets me to the analytics issue: Individual page reporting on HBX Analytics screens is limited to day-level. Fortunately, the custom Report Builder allows me to report hourly, and the reports are delivered in Excel format. This gives us the ability to visualize how the story is building an audience. With this information, the editorial staff is better able to apply resources to follow-up articles and to position emails.

The capabilities of analytics enable publishers to listen to their audiences and implement a rapid response to stories that break big. The trick is to keep an eye out for these stories, and to ask how we can better communicate with our audience when a story doesn't pick up the audience we think it deserves.

Labels: online publishing, web analytics

More Convergence

We have been seeing (and participating in) a convergence of Internet Marketing disciplines. Ken and I started out seven years ago focusing on Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization. We focused on Processes and Behavioral Segmentation. Now we see Email, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Web Analytics all as part a spectrum of Internet marketing tools.

Over the the past year we have been helping more of our clients with Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. As SEO became more sophisticated and link farming and meta tagging didn't provide the edge, our team's skills in Web Analytics were needed.

Now, SEO expert Mark Jackson writes on Clickz that as Google's search engine becomes even more sophisticated and gives greater value to fresh content, Web Analytics is becoming more important to evaluating results of SEO efforts. Since Ranking changes daily, it's hard to provide good ranking reports. Jackson's solution: putting more focus on analytics than search engine rankings.

I wonder if search engine optimization firms should discontinue the practice of providing ranking reports for clients (at least for now with Google). No ranking reports would be hard for clients to swallow. A better solution? Web analytics.

Labels: internet marketing, seo, web analytics

Getting Finance and Marketing to Common Ground and Common Cause

In her Monday 1to1 weekly newsletter, Martha Rogers recommends rapprochement between the CFO and the CMO.

I'd extend that to marketing directors and their financial analyst counterparts. Learn a common language that takes from both of your tool kits, and work together to build stronger selling and service "machinery".

I'd like to expand on this over the next few days, but here are a few suggested starting stances.

Finance "guy" (whether you be a woman or a man):

1. Be willing to learn something new that you can use from a marketer.
   
2. Accept some squishily imperfect metrics that imperfectly indicate that some spending is mis-spent.
3. Start sketching a simplified model of the "marketing production process", particularly where funds are spent: awareness-building, interest-building, relationship building with channels and ultimate customers, sales promotion, and resale promotion.
   

Marketing "guy" (whether you be a woman or a man):

1. Be willing to learn something new that you can use from a finance person.
   
2. Be willing to be shown imperfect evidence that you've been wrong in some of your assumptions, even in deeply-held ones.
3. Start thinking about where you would spend funds and direct your team's thinking if you find out you are over-spending and over-thinking somewhere else.

Comments? Elaboration?

Labels: direct marketing, marketing analysis, web analytics

The Mystery of the Missing Links: Why are web site Visits Down 30%?

Inbound links are the key to Search Engine Optimization. For publishers, a well-cited web site is a source of high page rank and more traffic from search engines. SEO experts often stress the importance of being linked by “high value” web sites for giving your web site a boost. But the search engines also know that thousands of diverse web sites are also less likely to be wrong.

A large on-line publisher recently contacted us with the following inquiry: “our web traffic dropped after our redesign six months ago, and traffic is still down.” Where their web traffic had been trending positive, we now saw that web traffic, measured in visits to the web site, had dropped 30%.

Comparing web traffic reports before and after the redesign didn’t reveal anything significantly different about the use patterns. The redesign was successful at improving navigation and pages per visit were up. But where were the missing visits? One big answer: Search Engine referrals, especially Google referrals, were down 50%.

Looking for clues, we turned to web usage reports. The web analytics tool this publisher used reports based on volume. And for the first five or more pages of the reports, there was little difference in activity. But when we downloaded the top several thousand web pages (they have a lot of articles), we saw that the number of visits to the lesser used pages dropped dramatically. The old version of the site had a longer tail of pages with few requests per month.

When they redesigned the site, this publisher set up redirects for many of their pages. Unfortunately they made two SEO errors: 1) they missed a lot of URL variations that had given users multiple ways to access the same material and 2) they used 302 redirect codes (temporary redirect) instead of 301 redirect codes (permanent redirect).

These two SEO mistakes lead to their losing page rank credit for thousands of links to their site. First, they lost “credit” for the links. Then they lost page rank credit for the redirected pages. Finally, the effect of their moving content from linked URLs was to “break” the linking web sites (from the perspective of the users and web masters of those sites). This lead to a loss of goodwill, and formerly modest linking sources no longer showed up at all in the long tail of the list of “top referring sites”. And these modest referrers had a big impact on this large publisher.

This left the publisher with three significant tasks: 1) create better programs to handle missing links (even at this point, six months down the road), 2) eliminate navigation "breadcrumbs" from the URLs so that each article text has a single endpoint URL, and 3) create a quiet “referrer relations” program to rebuild credibility among linking referrers.

If you are planning a web site redesign, or you are implementing a new Content Management System, remember this motto: “Make New Links, but Keep the Old.”

Labels: linking strategies, seo, web analytics

Should I Spend more on Google Ad Words?

After reading the Comscore article talking about how Yahoo’s new update has improved click-through rates, an acquaintance wrote the following:

I do only use Google Adwords. My budget of $10 per day always gets reached. According to a recent come-on from Google, I could up my budget to $50 per day at my current bids and the current search traffic. I am not sure I want to up my PPC though. How can I tell if it is good to increase my budget? Can you see in the analytics how many sales I have for the amount I am spending?

Here was my response:

In response to your comment, you may want to get a handle on the "conversion rate" from your ad campaign. If your $10 per day ($300/month) pays back, it would make sense to spend another $10/day (and possibly more). If it doesn't, you shouldn't be spending the $300 in the first place, or we would work on improving conversion rates. When the incremental $10 payback diminishes, we would start picking up leads and sales using Yahoo and other Search Marketing opportunities.

His reply -- "I didn't know you could do that kind of thing."

Labels: conversion rate improvement, SEM, web analytics