Sadly, I find that many companies are still reporting the “Caveman Analytics” of; Unique Visitors, Avg. Time on Site and Page Views. I call this Caveman because we were generating these reports back in the middle 90’s. If these reports are still being generated, you can save some time and money by simply stopping those reports! They do not lead to reporting success, goals or achievements.
Here are 3 questions to ask that will transform your online marketing strategy:
1. What did visitors want?
This questions speaks to the channel, the search term or the referral source. You can find the intent of the visitor by the method they used to find your website and the words they used. Even evaluating the sites and links they came from can help you find the intent. This is the first step in developing a practice of segmentation – creating user groups based on a common factor and evaluating their success based on that factor.
2. What did they see?
Now that you have intent, look to see what they saw. It is possible to have a great keyword ranking, but the wrong page holding that ranking. Evaluate the page that the visitor saw based on the intent expressed in the search query, link or source. As the saying goes, “you can”t make a second first impression.” Be sure that you are delivering the best page to the visitor for what they want.
3. What did they do?
This is the easy part. Hopefully, you are tracking the goals that you want people to accomplish on your website. Registrations, downloads, sales, lead forms, ad clicks – anything that leads to revenue or a successful visit needs to be tracked and assigned a value. Only then can you measure the effectiveness of each channel and each source of visitor.
Once you know the source, and the value of that source, you will then be able to truly understand the return on your investment and the best revenue-producing channels in your array. By measuring value, you can better manage your marketing investment and make better decisions, just with a few simple questions.