Most web site owners would like visitors to spend more time on their website looking at their products/services or content, but getting people to stick around your website is not always the easiest thing to do. Website owners much like their brick and mortar counterparts simply don t understand why no one is buying their products, visiting their stores or why they don t receive business referrals from their website. There is something that I call the 5 W s of website visitors, if you don’t know your W’s it is going to be very hard to even attempt to understand your customer, so here they are: Who they are (Demographic information), Where they came from (referring site/search engine), What search term they used (keyword(s)), Where they went on your site (Visited pages) and What time did they spend on your site (Bounce Rate/Visit Duration). show notes for web analytics, a measure of success part two Listener Feedback s A Few Reasons Your SEO Campain May Be Sinking or Sunk Online Resources back to top listener feedback t the case I would uninstall the program, reboot and reinstall it, hopefully that will clear it up. The second question was why FlashPaper2 wasn t viewable to some users running IE7? It seems that after updating IE6 to IE7, you may find that .swf no longer display in the browser; this seems to be a VERY common occurrence that everyone says is fixed with the latest version of IE7 and Flash Player 9. However, I just recently upgraded a family member s machine to IE7 and I had the same issue. I was able to resolve the issue by logging in as an administrator and uninstalling the Flash Player, rebooting the machine logging in once again with full administrative rights then reinstalling the application. I hope that helps and feel free to drop me an email if you re still having issues and I will put my thinking cap back on. Question 2: Is Age a Hindrance to Marketing Your Services? Nicky a current high school student with a few years of web development under his belt called in from Colorado with the following: As a self taught web developer with my first website built in the 6th grade, I sometimes see my age and lack of traditional training as a hindrance to marketing my services to their full potential, how can I price my services without undercutting myself due to my age and experience. My second question is, I will be a junior this coming year and I am thinking about college, should I focus my studies on business or graphic design. Marketing your services as a freelance developer or firm is a very slippery slope that a lot of designers and developers struggle with every day. I am a firm believer that a great portfolio speaks for itself. If the work is quality work with quality design, build on that. I think the average customer won t be very concerned with your age if they feel confident you can not only get the job done but you will exceed their expectations. However, age can be a stigma to a lot of people as they equate it with experience. I would put extra effort into showing off your past web conquests and creating sales proposals and documents that are top notch. Show your prospective clients that you are just as pro as us old folk are. If you are meeting a client be prepared for the age issue to come up. Don t run from it; embrace it to show your clients how talented you are. I think you might be surprised how much it impresses them. To answer your second question, if you are truly interested in furthering your education in this field a solid background in both graphic design and business doesn t hurt. In fact I recommend it; anything you can learn to push toward your goals is a boon. I have a solid background in web design and development, but I didn t have any formal business training before I launched EOC with Dan in 2003. Suddenly I found myself awash in a world of little things like taxes, paperwork and federal forms that only a federal court judge would understand or even care to read. I really regretted passing on those business courses in college, not because I couldn t figure it out, but because I had to spend time catching up on topics that I could have learned when I had more time to do it. Mostly I regretted it because it took time away from doing what I love, running the business and building websites. Formal training isn t always necessary, but damn if it s not helpful. back to top why you need analytics If you want to know more about your site and your site visitors you need to know your W s, and using an analytics package to do so is the first step. With every client we work with we encourage an analytics package, with our SEO or web marketing clients it is required to use an analytics package. The information you collect using analytics is vital to know your visitors, and gage the effectiveness of your design, landing pages, search engine visibility and much more. You can have a distinct advantage over your brick mortar side of your business by knowing much more about your customers. You may have noticed when out shopping that some retailers ask you your phone number or zip code at checkout, this is their version of customer tracking. back to top the five W s Who they area: Looking at your demographic information you can view your visitors by cities, regions, states, and even countries. Use this information to understand your visitor, identify which regions or areas you should buy advertising in to gain more exposure, identify weak spots in your marketing reach and help you refine online PPC programs or other online advertising. Where they came from Your referring source is one of the best analytic information you can get your hands on. The referring source will tell you the referring website or domain that lead the visitor to your website and/or the search engine that served your listing to that visitor. If you are performing any online advertising you will to want to track your ad sources. Use this information to find out weather your ad dollars are a waste or the best money you ever spent. You can learn who is linking to you by looking at your referring sources, see if that content rich page you created is drawing any interest, or that article you posted in a Blog or forum is generating any visits. What search term they used: Find out if you are loved by Google, Yahoo, and others and weather you have a high relevancy for your targeted keywords by looking at your referring search engine and keywords used to bring visitors to your site. If you or your SEO have done your keyword research, and optimized your site correctly you will see in time that you will be begin showing up in search engines, and depending on how important your site is and how relevant your content is to your chosen keyword(s) you will generally show higher or lower than your competition. Keyword search terms can also work the other way, to point out services or products you should be selling, for example, let s say you make pudding in 3 flavors, vanilla, chocolate, and butterscotch but every time you look at your analytics you see that 25% of your visitors are actually looking for pistachio pudding. Since they don t find it, they leave. This may be presenting a great opportunity to give them some pistachio pudding and increase sales, after all proof is in the pudding: P. (Sorry, couldn’t help it) Where they went on your site: Your analytics should show your navigation or visited pages. Gage your most popular products or topics with your visitors, or identify dead pages or pages of little interest. But wait, sometimes just because a page seems dead it may not be your visitors telling you that the page is of no interest. It may be entirely your own fault; poor navigation, bad linking structures or just bad design could be at fault, maybe the page has errors or broken links. Analyze these poorly performing pages, fix any errors, and make some changes then look at the new data after time to see if your changes were effective. Do A/B testing, make 2 versions of a page and over time evaluate the results. You can do this type of testing with images, banners, links etc to see which promote greater click through, or sales. What time did they spend on your site: Your site Bounce Rate and visitor duration can be another tool that is useful in measuring effective website planning. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who viewed only one page, think of them as the channel flippers of the internet. It is a pretty good indication that they came they saw and didn t like it. Looking at the average time your visitors spent on your site for the most part this is good information that can help you determine if your page is sticky, but it is recommended that you look at the big picture and cross referencing is recommended at times especially when dealing with eCommerce sites. Again, time on your site may mean that your site is not sticky or visitors don t stick around. This can be a combination of a few things. Poor keyword research and usage: You might be capturing visitors that are looking for a term that means something else in another industry either by on site text, keywords or titles and descriptions or in online ads like Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, or other PPC or advertising programs. back to top a few reasons your seo campain may be sinking or has sunk Poor design, boring or just plain dull: Advertising mediums need to capture your attention, a website is advertising medium as well as informational. Neglecting the design and concentrating on the content is not effective and neither is the converse. With good design and effective ad copy you can entice people to read on, navigate through etc. getting people to take a look and capturing someone interest is a good first step to a purchase or sales inquiry. Slow loading pages: Slow pages can tank you site as well. In the land of quick and easy, fast food and express checkout people will not wait 15 seconds for your page to load unless you are their only hope for the content. Excessive page load times because of improper site design architecture or overuse of technologies, or poor hosting can cost you visitors. A lot of people have branded Flash as the demon of SEO, this is not so, use of technologies can actually keep visitors on your site, just plan to use them within reason, Flash is one of the best ad mediums for a site and can add a flair of interest, just keep page load in the back of your mind when working with any technology. Bad landing pages: You have the option to designate which page visitors land on when running an ad campaign or setting up your site for search engines. Many people are making big mistakes when it comes to the landing pages used for PPC advertising. I have seen some advertisers send people to a contact page to fill out a form. In my opinion this is death, you would be better off sending them to your home page. The last thing I am going to do is fill out a form to a company that I know nothing about. Some advertisers are targeting their product in their ad; let s say Pistachio pudding, but when people click on the ad they go to the main store page and are forced to perform yet another step. Don t make your visitors search for the pudding, you may be loosing customers forever, I know I get annoyed. Analytics is just one part of a great marketing strategy for your website. Many analytics packages offer many great features, this is just a sampling of all that is available to you, and ultimately choosing an analytics package depends on your specific needs. But I will equate not using a good analytics package (in combination with keyword research) to early submarine warfare or even guess work. If you would like to learn more about analytics or how your website, business or organization could benefit from its use contact us and we will be glad to go over solutions or questions that you may have. Also see our other Podcast on web analytics: Web Analytics a measure of Success” for additional information and technical explanations of web analytics. back to top Online Resources Learn About SEO on Engines of Creation.com Web Analytics by Wikipedia back to top
