You have your new company web site. You have the mandatory,
unnecessary Macromedia Flash intro page. You may even have
incorporated e-commerce into it. You, my friend, are The Living
Personification of Bleeding Edge Technology.
Your [insert stockholders, management, spouse, or cat, as
necessary] would like to know when [he, she, they, it] can
expect the return on investment. When will it make money? If you
(The Living Personification of Bleeding Edge Technology) built
it, why aren’t they coming? Join the party. Web site owners
around the world want to know why their shiny new web presence
has not drawn a deluge of traffic and delivered huge profits.
Haystacks are easy!
One of the most common reasons you may not be seeing that
expected ROI is that your target market simply cannot find your
site. The estimated number of registered domain names varies
depending on whose statistics you believe, but
www.internetnews.com
estimates over 90 million, of which, about 50% are “.com”.
Compared to this, you would be better off looking for the needle
in the haystack! At least the needle in the haystack would
explain that bleeding edge!
Harder Than Falling Off A Log
The first thing you can do is analyze your web site traffic
logs. This data is created by tracking the invisible data
transmitted with every viewer mouse click (called a “request
your web server automatically records. Most web hosting
companies provide you with some sort of statistic or traffic
reports. Ask your hosting service provider or web administrator
on how you can get the traffic statistics for your site.
Wait! Don’t run off just yet to show your cat printouts of these
beautiful charts and graphs. The first question he is going to
ask is, “What does all this data mean?” closely followed by
“What are you going to do with this information to get more
people to our site to buy widgets?”
Traffic Reports. What are they good for?
Absolutely nothing. Unless you act on the information.
Remember “data” is just raw numbers. “Information” is
conclusions and answers drawn from the data. “Wisdom” is knowing
how to act on that information to the greatest effect. You can
quote me on that.
A good detailed traffic report will include how many unique
visitors, what domain they are coming from to get to you,
average length of visit, the main entry and exit pages, and a
plethora of information about traffic to your site. This
information can tell you what keywords people are searching on
to find your site, what search engines they are using (or not),
what they are most interested in, and how long they spend on
average on any given page. Study this information. Jot down
conclusions and ways to act on those assumptions. You will want
to tweak your site to take advantage of what you learned.
Increasing Your Traffic
Now that we know what your visitors have done in the past, we
need to increase our traffic. One way to increase your web
site’s visitor traffic is by improving your rankings with the
online search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, About.com, Ask.com
and all their brethren. The resulting page presented to you when
you search for something in Google, is a list of web sites
“ranked”, according to Google, for relevance to your keyword
search.
There are two primary ways to improve your ranking with the
search engines: A.) “Organically” which is fine-tuning your web
site for maximum rankings and then submitting it to the search
engines and waiting for results; or B.) Pay-Per-Click - Bidding
on select key words and “Pay-Per-Click throughs” to your site.
If they click on your sponsored listing and go to your site, you
pay whatever your bid is for that particular phrase. This can
‘guarantee’ top placement with the search engines. You chose a
monthly budget and when your budget runs out your sponsored
listing comes down. You will see these sponsored listings along
the top and right side of search engine results pages.
Both systems are quite a bit more complicated than they sound to
implement. Organically growing your site costs less in the long
run and the effects lasts longer, but is much slower to get a
response. The search engines will review your site in 4-6 weeks.
If done correctly, optimizing will improve your rankings, but
does not guarantee top placement. To fine-tune your site, you
need to analyze various factors the search engines look for, key
words, linkages, traffic patterns in your site, quantity and
quality of content, placement of key terms, your current search
engine rankings and competitors, alt tags, meta-tags, etc. Your
site then needs to be systematically submitted the way each
engine prefers. If you don’t fine-tune and submit in the manner
the search engines prefer, they may even penalize you with
reduced rankings.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) requires a bit more analysis and strategy:
all of the above plus... review of your key word strategy,
competitive spending/bids, search counts, conversion rates
(visitors who come to your site and turn into buyers), profit
per conversion and return on investment calculations. All of
this leads to a PPC strategy and budget that will give you an
action plan to control your spending and results. PPC gets
faster results but requires a dedicated monthly budget. This
budget and strategy can then be modified on the fly to optimize
your results.
For instance, let’s say you wanted to appear in the top listings
for “toy airplanes”. You might agree to pay 35 cents per click.
If no one agrees to pay more than this, then you would be in the
number one spot. If someone else later decides to pay 36 cents,
then you slip into the number two position. You could then bid
37 cents, if you wanted to, and move back on top.
Be aware though, that there is a certain point where the
purchase of that ranking may be the wrong move. What if you are
paying 86 cents per click (purchasing the key phrase “toy
airplanes”) and you get 10,000 new visitors. Of that 10,000, 2%
of those visitors ‘convert’, or buy your product. (Barnes and
Nobles and Amazon usually get about 12-14% conversion.) So you
have just made 200 new sales… of $5.00 toy airplanes and made
$1,000 or $900 after your cost of goods sold (COGS). But, it
cost you $8,600 in “click-throughs” to do that. You got 10,000
new visitors and increased your sales, but you are $7,700 in the
hole!
Take that same scenario and change it slightly. Instead,
purchase the key phrase “plastic toy airplanes” for $0.25 and
direct those clicks directly to your Premium Plastic Plane that
you sell for $15.00. You get 10,000 visitors and maybe increase
your conversions to 3% since you are going directly to the
Premium Plastic Plane page. Now you have sold 300 Premium Planes
for a total of $4,500 in sales (with a COGS of $3.00 each or
$900). You made a gross profit, before advertising costs, of
$3,600 and a net profit of $1,100 for the same amount of
traffic.
What changed between a loss of $7,700 and a profit of $1,100?
The amount of visitors was the same. Your conversation rate of
those visitors increased, the price of the product you featured
increased and had a higher margin and cost of the keyword phrase
decreased. Finding the right bidding/marketing mix is critical
to having a successful Pay-Per-Click strategy.
They’re here. Why aren’t they buying?
Now that you have analyzed your web site traffic and
increased it, you should be making more money. Logically, the
more people that come through your online store or office, the
more people that will be exposed to how great your product is
and the more that will buy. …And maybe not.
There can be any number of reasons for this. Your site’s look
and feel may not match your company’s brand or image. The
branding may not appeal to your target market. Your pricing may
be out of line with the online competitors. Maybe the design is
not as professional or polished as your competitors’ sites. Your
business goals and model for the site may not be realistic or
appropriate. Maybe… no one wants to buy your featured brand of
widgets (it could happen, you never know!)
More than likely, once they got to your site, it was difficult
to navigate and find what they were looking for easily.
Prospects should be able to get to any location in your web site
from any other page in your site in less than two clicks. If
they can’t, you are giving them every reason to click on someone
else’s site to find what they want.
Your web site’s goal is provide the visitor what they want
(something you learned from your traffic logs and real world
experience) to the action you want them to take as quickly as
possible. Your web site’s primary goal is to “convert” them from
a viewer to a “sale”. That means getting them to buy your
widgets online or generate a lead by emailing you or to simply
get them to pick up the phone can call you. You will want to
rethink your design, navigation, message and objectives BEFORE
spend time and money building traffic to a site that won’t
produce the results that your cat wants to see.
Now your new web site is not only the Bleeding Edge of
Technology, but is marketed more intelligently, and more
importantly to your [stockholders, management, spouse, or cat],
is making money and returning results.
###
Paul Metheney is CEO of Metheney Consulting, Inc. and a
thirteen-year Internet marketing veteran, with a Masters in
Business and twenty years of advertising, marketing and teaching
experience. He can be reached at paulm@metheney.com.
