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Practical Guide to Website Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Source: Search Engine Journal Authored by: Julie Mason, Kellysearch.com For full article, click here. When it comes to analyzing the performance of your website, there is a seemingly endless (well, at least a few hundred) list of factors to consider. How do you determine which criteria will be the most useful for grading your website? Well, the short answer is, it depends…on the type of website, the time available to devote to analytics and the depth of information you’re looking for. Here we’ll take a look at some of the “key” Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can help you measure the effectiveness of your website with quantifiable and actionable results. A Key Performance Indicator measures a certain aspect of the site. Compare results with your web goals, and you get a sense of a website’s ability to engage visitors. Let’s take general page views as one data point. A raw number of page views just tells you how many times in a given period people looked at pages within your site, which basically doesn’t tell you much at all. More meaningful, however, is how those page views translate to the effectiveness of your site. This is where a KPI can help. For example, if your site provides in-depth content on a specialist subject and generates revenue through a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) advertising model, then your goal is to have a site that engages visitors and encourages them to view a large number of pages and, by doing so, ads. In this case, average page-views per session or visit is the KPI to look at – and the higher the better. On the other hand, if a site’s purpose is to deliver information quickly so visitors can get what they need quickly (e.g. an e-commerce site for office supplies), your goal would be a low number of average page views per visit. Determining which KPIs to use depends on the overall purpose and goals of a website. Potentially overwhelming are the number of KPIs available at your disposal. Here are a few high-impact, low-investment KPIs to always consider: Visitors per Conversion, Lead or Order: Whatever the goal of your site, this measurement tells you if your Web site is working. Example: Only five people out of 100 sign up (convert) for your Webinar. There is a problem with your registration page. Among the issues could be poor layout, confusing copy, or too much personal information needed. Reexamine the KPI, and determine what was hindering your Webinar registration. Cost per Lead: Cost per lead measurement can help you see which investments work. For the Webinar example, let’s say it cost $5,000. You generated two leads. If the boss isn’t paying $2,500 per lead, try finding ways to cut event costs or update content to improve response rates and registration numbers (ie. conversion). Stickiness: Consider the previous example of page views per visit. It measures how deep a viewer gets into the overall web site content. If viewers are highly engaged in the content area, you may want to keep the section the same, or put links to other parts of your site that relate to this content. If visitors aren’t spending as much time in a section as they once did, it’s probably time to update your content. In some cases, if visitors are not going to a page at all, it can signal that there’s a problem with your navigation. Percentage of New Visitors: New visitors means marketing is attracting them. If loyalty’s the goal, then the ideal percentage of returning visitors should make up the majority of your web traffic. These four examples have probably gotten you thinking about the best KPIs for your website. The four here are common and useful, and even if your website requires more or different measurements, the importance of KPIs remain. If they’re a tool that can do what we’d all like to be experts in – performance improvement – being well-versed in the basics will certainly help you and your website achieve your goal. Julie Mason is the General Manager for Kellysearch.com, the comprehensive online buyers’ guide and vertical search engine, with more than two million company listings from over 155 countries world wide. Back To Top Set Your Content Free to Get More Leads Source: iMedia Connection Authored by: Marc Osofsky, Optaros For full article, click here. Nearly every company offering products and services to other businesses (B2B) creates content (whitepapers, podcasts, etc.) and forces anyone who wants it to register by supplying her contact information. This approach is a legacy of the first generation of the internet and is based on decade-old assumptions that no longer hold true for most of our clients. Most companies are "tearing down the fortress" of forced registrations and broadly syndicate their content. Fortress mentality Go to Google. Does your best case study or whitepaper show up in the list of results? If you answer "no" to these questions then your website a fortress to what the prospect wants. This approach is having a negative impact because registrations keep coming in for content, but many registrants are not targeted prospects and supply faulty information just to get past the fortress walls. Because the registrations keep coming in -- bad registrations included -- many companies believe that everything is fine. It is much harder to measure how many potential prospects you are not reaching. Some abandon their effort at the sight of a registration, and web analytics programs can tell you who and how many. Other prospects search results and find other options. You can test this searching your own content yourself. Use these methods to see if you’re new methods are working. Re-examine two key assumptions Assumption No. 1: Prospects first come to the homepage of the company Studies have shown that between 50 and 70 percent of B2B site traffic is driven by search. Prospects first come to a search engine, not your website. Keeping content behind registration will not be accessed by search engines. Assumption No. 2: Prospects will only provide contact information if forced Studies have shown that prospects realize that submitting accurate information will likely result in email spam or telemarketers calling them. So they may simply click away, never to return. Others submit false information just to get to the information they want. Some provide accurate information but then request to be removed from newsletter mail lists and are annoyed by telephone calls. Only a few actually want to be contacted and those would have told you anyway. Prospects will provide accurate information when they want to be contacted to learn more. Tear down the fortress For most of our clients, the following three steps are some of the first actions taken after the analytical assessment: 1. Remove registrations for content or at least provide executive summaries outside of the search engines like industry analyst firms, Forrester and Gartner, have recently done to gain traffic from search. This will dramatically improve organic search results and traffic to your site. 2. Syndicate content to other sites. Do not assume prospects will find you and come to your site. Push content out aggressively to increase overall awareness. 3. Find ways to engage prospects and add value to their search and qualification process. Offer them the option to ask a question from the website that is routed to inside sales for direct IM response. These are some of the steps to fully leverage the next generation internet to dramatically increase the amount and quality of leads. Back To Top 7.5 Rules for Creating a Great Business Blog Source: iMedia Connection Authored by: Michael Mattis, Yahoo! Search Marketing For full article, click here. Done right, creating and maintaining a corporate, executive, employee or product/service blog can offer several benefits to your brand. A blog can: * Give your business the human touch * Get your customers engaged * Offer a window into your brand culture * Offer a complementary information and marketing channel * Allow you to react to critical issues quickly Who writes what? Corporate blogging is usually a team effort. You may want to consider putting in place a flexible editorial process that includes copy editing, PR and legal review. Whatever the case, you'll want to make sure that everyone has clear guidelines. The rules |
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