What Are Your Website Marketing Goals? What Should They Be?
I talk to a lot of people who don’t have a clear idea of where they want to go with their website. Pretty much everyone just says, “More hits.”
More hits? More hits froms search engines? More hits from students doing a paper on your product or service? More hits from your target market? More hits from your target market who sticks around for more than a single page?
Ah yes–that’s sounds good: more hits from your target market, motivating them to convert (to buyers, to someone who makes contact with you, to someone who registers for your service, etc).
But how do you get there? I recommend the following progression:
1) Stop thinking about hits. Start thinking about unique user sessions. “Hits” covers everything from loading a page to loading a CSS file to go with that page. A single visit to a single page can generate donzens of hits. Hits are difficult to convert. Unique user sessions, on the other hand, are easy: one per customer, no matter how many pages they hit.
2) Work to increase the number of unique user sessions. Getter better PPC advertising, add more off line advertising, beg bloggers to mention you, etc. Whatever it takes, no matter what, you need to get more people to your site.
3) Evaluate what those users do. Do they hit one page and leave? PANIC. Well–OK, don’t PANIC, but don’t just sit there. You paid for these visitors and then they’re leaving after seeing only one page. What is an acceptable drop/bounce/single page rate? All depends on you. The nature of the web-beast is that you’re going to have a lot of these Looky Lou’s. It doesn’t matter–work to have fewer.
4) Evaluate what those users like. What pages do people visit? I guarantee you you’ll be surprised at the popularity of at least one of your minor pages. When you have a page that people like, expand it. Give the people what they want.
5) Evaluate where those users come from. When you first start, you’ll probably have a lot of people who come in from the PPC ads. That can get expensive, so your goal needs to be to get people to your site without spending a lot on advertising. In other words, you have to grow the number of return and referred visitors.
So: Concentrate on sessions, not hits. Increase the number of unique user sessions. Increase the average number of pages per unique user session and reduce the number of dropped or single page sessions. Increase the number of user sessions that are not the result of PPC advertising.
Some tools. I like (and have blogged about) Google Analytics. I use that combined with our own in house tool. (Analytics gives me great high level information. Our tools gives me unlimited detail. I need both.)
Some methods. So many–tune in tomorrow for some more detail.