Understanding Your Website’s Role in an Online Media Combination

In our last blog post, we reviewed the first 3 Steps in determining an online combination that will create marketing synergy for your business. Those steps included:

Creating a list of specific marketing objectives for your business.
Identifying the audience(s) you are trying to reach and developing audience profiles.
Segmenting these audiences into separate homogeneous groups you can target, using images and language they will relate to.

In this post, let’s look at your website and some of the ways its performance can be measured. I like to think of a website as your “long-form” infomercial – designed to persuade people and get them to act. To be effective in this role, an effective website needs to get visiting prospects to say:

I’m in the right place (visitor self-identification using images and language that relate to their interests or needs)
They appear to understand my needs
They tell me how they work with clients like me (the process and/or methods they apply in working to resolve a client’s needs)
They offer proof that that their services/products work by providing concrete examples
They provide a reason to act

(Note: If you are selling products you can substitute product performance measures for processes and methods in item # 3 above.)

Assuming your website has been designed with these elements in mind, you will want to find out how well it is working and what can be done to improve or fine tune performance (i.e. measure results, make any needed adjustments, measure again, and so on). Some obvious results might include the number and quality of leads received, subscription or information requests, sales or conversions. For less obvious measures of performance, you will need to get visitor feedback (if possible) and use web analytics to uncover problems or roadblocks in the site that may not be readily evident.

An example of using web analytics to uncover problems follows. When visitors arrive at your site, you can visualize their behavior on that page by examining what, and how often, they are clicking on (click patterns). This will indicate which links are capturing their attention and interest on that page. If they click on a link, it suggests that they are going someplace that addresses those interests or needs. We can get a good measure of how well the page they arrive at performs by looking at the exit rate (% of visitors leaving the site after viewing that page). Or, if they enter the site by landing on a page after doing a search on Google related to a specific need, we can measure the bounce rate (% of visitors leaving the site after viewing that page). A high exit or bounce rate may indicate a problem with the page, and suggest a need to make some adjustments in the layout and/or copy. If you are selling products, you will also be able to measure the ability of that page to contribute to sales using a $ index. Once you have a clear sense of what’s going on, you can make and test adjustments designed to improve performance for each step in the process. The diagram below is an example of a Google Analytics page showing bounce and exit rates along with other content analysis measurements.