We heard recently that our beloved Short Pump Towne center received complaints from the ACLU about a technology they activated that tracks customer movement by monitoring their cell phone signals.  It is reported the mall owners are now holding off on this technology due to these concerns.  ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Kent Willis stated “new technologies give businesses more ability to trace customers’ movements and buying habits, nothing prevents them from sharing that information with the government.”

 On the contrary, it seems that some consumers are warming to the idea of connecting with geo-location information including deals and special offers.  While many mobile users have taken advantage of their device’s ability to connect location with useful information, such as maps, directions or recommendations, comparatively few (12% or so) are catching on to the check-in trend.  But things are changing as smart-phone owners are becoming more interested in other types of location-based services—especially deals.   According to a study by HipCricket, interest in time- or location-based mobile offers had increased from 40% of smart-phone owners in 2008 to 54% this year.

 It will be interesting to see how all this comes together.  For marketers, location based marketing and promotion offer attractive opportunities.  For consumers, what’s better than knowing you can take advantage of a special offer while you are in the vicinity?  Nevertheless, the privacy concerns are legit and it will be interesting to see how the “coming together of the minds” will occur.  Hopefully (and probably) in the end, the consumer will win.

1. Can your website be easily found by the people for whom you want your website to be found?  You might have an awesome website, but if it has poor visibility, then what’s the point.  Also, a peek into your web analytics data will tell you quickly if you are being found by people who already know your brand and/or by people who aren’t already aware you exist.  The answer here would most certainly drive online and off-line website visibility strategies.
2. If the people you want to find your website can easily find it (an affirmative answer to #1), then does the website have the information they are seeking to get them to convert – however you want them to convert?  Does the content on your site connect to their problems, their pain-points, their opportunities – or is it just a bunch of blah-blah-blah?  The answer here will drive navigation paths, content and presentation.
3. If people are finding you (#1) and you are delivering the content they are seeking (#2), then are you asking them to take the next step – ie. call-to-action?  Remember, many people using the internet don’t have long attention spans so we need to tell them what to do.  Do you want them to buy something, set an appointment, download a whitepaper?  If so, make it obvious how they can take the next step. 

Use these 3 questions to get a conversation going about online marketing strategies.  Good, honest answers to these questions will make the new website generate a return.

Being the behemoth it is, Google has the existing connectivity to bring a large audience into Google+ and position the platform as a true player in social networking, likely their initial intent – and there’s nothing wrong with that!  Check out this video on YouTube.  It provides a good intro about Google +. 

Video about Google Plus

Google + is simply another online social media platform that enables people (and soon businesses) to create different networks (they are called “Circles”) of people you know and want to “socialize” with. 

One of the many great things about Google + is that you can create many Circles.  You can create a Circle for just your family, or just for work, or just for friends, etc., etc., etc.  You can also reach out and “follow” people just like Twitter, Facebook.  You can put some people you know into multiple Circles.  It’s awesome – you’ve got to get in there and check it out.  Just go to https://plus.google.com/#, sign into Google and begin creating some Circles. 

Is Google + for businesses who want to brand themselves and gain visibility on this platform?  Well, not quite yet but soon to come.  It is expected that Google will soon open the network to businesses and they expect demand to be huge.  In the short term, if an individual wants to create a Circle comprised solely of their co-workers, this can be done and used as a collaboration tool within the firm. 

Google seems to be taking a cautious approach to maintain the credibility of the platform, and I like that.  I even read recently that Google is challenging the integrity of some of the profiles being created.  Someone by the name of Rowan Thunder was banned from the platform because the name sounded like it could be questionable, and Google has since allowed Rowan in because he is a real, legit person.  Facebook seems to have become the “wild west” and it is refreshing to be able to start anew with creating online communications networks with others you know.

What’s ahead for Google +?  A lot!!!  There’s a good deal of talk about games coming to the platform, and this will be a direct hit to Facebook.  Also, the platform is rapidly expanding globally, although the US is by far has the biggest user population.  There is talk about photo sharing and event planning features coming to the platform.  It seems that Google is coming after the social media scene aggressively and it will be interesting to see how it and Facebook play out.  Competition will only make the platforms better for everyone involved.         

One last item not talked about too much yet but will certainly have an impact.  Since Google has virtually double the market share of any other search engine, having all this information about you and your friends will most certainly effect your search results.  I’m certain there will be a great deal of interesting information coming out about this in the future.

Search engine marketing

What is happening to cause this trend and what does it mean to marketers?  First, let’s agree that in the world of online marketing, search engine marketing is an awesome direct response vehicle, and that’s a place many marketers should look first.  Now, that being said, we also know penetration of high speed internet service and the proliferation of wireless networks are causing our eyeballs to go online more than ever before.  In fact, the young adult population is getting more content online than from any other source out there including traditional TV.  That simply means as the years go by, more and more content will be accessed and consumed online than from newspapers, TV, radio and the other traditional media sources.  Consequently, where the eyeballs go so do marketing dollars. 

The prediction that Display will out-spend Search simply tells me that marketers will focus more of their branding efforts online than via the more traditional media sources.  Online Display marketing is the equivalent to branding…branding through banner ad and rich media impressions, online video views, etc.  Search engine marketing will remain a very critical tool in the marketer’s toolbox but Display will become mature and an equally critical tool in that online marketing toolbox. 

Plus, now with the ability to do Display marketing on a cost-per-click basis in addition to the traditional cost-per-impression basis, it just means this medium will grow steadily and quickly.  As Google continues to put emphasis behind YouTube marketing, video development will become another critical element in the evolution of online marketing.

In summary, marketers investing a great deal of their dollars offline need to keep looking harder at online display marketing for their branding efforts.  As our population becomes more internet savvy, and with the proliferation of tablets and smart-phones, branding efforts will go online like never before.

The economics of these sites are daunting for most businesses.  First, you have to provide at least of 50% discount off retail, and then you have to give about half of the revenue to the deal site.  So, if you sell something for $100 normally, you must offer it to at no more than $50 and then give about $25 for each item sold – resulting in the business receiving about 25% of normal retail price.  If you sell 500 items from the deal site, you’ve just sold $50,000 worth of your products/services for about $12,000.  Your margins have to be pretty good to make this work, and most of the cases these services are being sold at a loss.  So, how can a business make it work?  Usually the only way is to upsell the customer to a more profitable product/service that provides real value to the customer.

Here are some ideas about how to make it work.  First, go into it with your eyes wide open knowing the economic impact of what you are doing – selling your product/service for 25 cents on the dollar.  Next, figure out the easiest way to create more revenue from the customer interaction that truly adds value for your customer.  If you are a restaurant, you probably want to offer something like $50 of food for $25, and then sell appetizers, desserts and drinks to re-capture lost margin dollars.  Plus, give the customer such an awesome experience that he/she wants to come back and perhaps even a coupon for their next visit.  If you are a painter for instance, you may want to offer 50% off painting one room and when you arrange the job with the customer offer a small discount on painting another room.  Use this upsell opportunity to re-capture some of the lost margin on the original deal.  And always, always, always – make the customer experience so great that you create a raving fan and repeat business at regular price.

Selling 25 cents on the dollar results in a lot of lost margin dollars but if you are creative about how you position the deal and turn the customer into a raving fan, you can make those daily deal sites work for your business.

It is my hope in this blog post that I can begin to help shine some light on where we should focus when evaluating how good a website actually is and where we should stop paying so much attention. Beyond that, I hope to correct some common misnomers when it comes to web analytics data. Let’s dive in…

Hits: ‘Hits’ are one of the most widely used (misused) terms when it comes to web metrics. In most instances, hits are used as a way to measure a site’s popularity. Not only is it unwise to measure a site success based solely off total volume, but the term hits is not analogous to a visit*. Most web analytics tools don’t even report hits as a metric. You’re best off removing this term from your vocabulary.

*a “hit” occurs when a file is requested from a server – this includes web pages, images, self hosted video, etc

Total visits:
Everyone wants to know how many people are coming to their website. But at the end of the day, how much does this really tell you when it comes to generating meaningful value to your business. I could have 100 visitors come to my site one day and 10,000 visitors come to my site the next day. But if those 10,000 visitors are not part of my target market, how meaningful are they? It’s a delicate balance between quantity and quality, and we can’t get so obsessed with increasing the quantity of visitors while overlooking the quality of the visitor and the quality of their experience on our website. Getting more traffic to your website is easy. But getting more meaningful, targeted traffic to your website that accomplishes your websites goals is something completely different. Make sure you’re shooting for the latter and then find ways to increase THAT volume.

Average time on site:
It’s easy to make a big deal out of this metric, however it does fall under the umbrella of metrics we see over emphasized. It’s interesting information, but it tends to be used in aggregate. In other words “my average time on site is X minutes and Y seconds, so I’m happy (or sad).” While measuring average time on site for all traffic is a mostly hopeless endeavor, you can quickly make use of this metric by segmenting it by different traffic sources. For example, how does average time on your website differ by visitors who come from a search engine or social media or through an affiliate program? If your search engine traffic spends 80% less time on site, start looking at other metrics (bounce, goal completion, etc) that support this source of traffic as being less effective.

Another simple way to make use of this metric is to establish meaning or an outcome associated with more time on site. For example, in the video on your home page the sales pitch occurs at the 1 min. and 5 second mark. Your twitter traffic time on page doesn’t exceed 40 seconds. You now know your message is failing to reach that segment of visitors.

Pages per visit:
Pages per visit is like average time on site in that we think the higher it is the more engaged our visitors are. But like time on site, we need to dig a little bit deeper to understand the meaning behind this metric and what it means in terms of activity. For example, most websites have pages of all different purposes. Some pages encourage the visitors to take certain actions – which have a meaningful impact on your business. While some pages are a lot less interesting and probably do very little in terms of selling the visitor on your brand, service or product. Knowing how many visitors look at the key pages on your site is more telling than the average number of total pages any given visitor views when they come to your site.

Total page views:
Unless you’re selling advertisement space and the key driver of ad revenue is impressions, don’t get too obsessed over the total number of pages on your site. Like the metrics listed above, it falls far short of translating directly into value.

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Now that I’ve given you some tips on metrics that aren’t quite as lovable as you first believed, I’d like to share a few that should capture our collective attention…

Goal value by traffic source:
Every website should have more than one objective. It’s usually easy to identify the primary objective (make a purchase, submit an RFQ, etc), but the secondary objectives of your site carry meaning (and value!) as well. More on establishing website goals in this blog post. When we can identify the different interactions we want a site visitor to take and we can associate an economic value with that action, we can tell which campaigns (social media, SEO, PPC) are generating the most value.

Loyalty:
If you run a nonprofit and the goal of your website is to get membership sign-ups, how do you measure success? Number of visitors that sign up as a member? Take it a step further. You may get 2000 sign-ups in the month, but how many are coming back to your site? What good is there in just signing up if they’re not taking any action beyond that? So we look at the number of people who are signed up and then look for how many of those members continue to come back to the site and take part in our message/campaign/program/whatever.

If you’re an e-commerce site trying to get up off the ground, are you most interested in the one-time shoppers or the visitors that become customers and brand advocates for life? Of course, you want the latter. And one of the best ways to know if you’re building loyalty is to see how many of these visitors continue to come back after they’ve made their first purchase.

Campaign ROI:
This one seems obvious, I know. But when you’re investing in traffic building campaigns such as pay per click, we are very capable of being able to import our click charge data and place it right alongside the revenue generated by those visitors. At a glance, we are able to see which keywords in our campaign generate a positive return on investment and which ones do not. There is no clearer roadmap for where to focus your efforts in a campaign than this metric.

Bounce rate:
While bounce rate is not an end all, be all metric, it is perhaps one of the standalone top-level metrics we can use to determine if something is working or not. Bounce rate of 80%? Either you’re attracting the wrong audience or you’re showing them the wrong stuff on your site. Bounce rate of 25%? Your visitors like what they see (at least, initially). The one exception to this is if a visitor can accomplish everything you want them to on the first page. For example, if you write a blog, a visitor will land on your site, read a post, then leave the site. Bounce? Technically. Failure? No way. While this would technically count as a bounce because they only viewed one page, they accomplished the goal of your blog – the consumption of your content!

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It is important to note that most web analytics metrics are meaningless when they’re not put in the context of another variable. One of the greatest sins of web analysis is only looking at the dashboard and trying to draw a meaningful conclusion; that is, looking at your data in aggregate, one metric at a time. This is why I encourage you to get your eyes away from total visits and average time on site for all visitors and instead, measure outcomes separated by traffic segment. This gets us away from looking at our site traffic as one giant blob of people and instead separates them into nicely organized groups; separated by a characteristic and/or their ability to accomplish an action. This is where the real magic begins to happen and where we start finding actionable data and insight.

An associate professor of psychology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., who studies well-being, says these findings make perfect sense to him.  He goes on to say…“Think about it as a gateway to getting what you want from life — job interviews, first dates, making those initial impressions, persuading and influencing other people,” he says. “Attractiveness gives that slight edge. They’re getting the benefit of the doubt at first sight, and unattractive people aren’t.”

So what does this concept mean for website design?  There are similarities.  When someone comes to your website he/she gets that first impression.  Is that first impression a good one or one where the visitor asks “what the h— is this place?”  There are two important considerations when it comes to web design.  First, if your product has an emotional element to it then you better make sure your website graphic presentation exudes the emotion you seek.  For example, if you are a spa then your website better communicate relaxation, introspection and beauty primarily directed at women.  On the other hand, if you are a sports bar, then your graphics better communicate fun, activity, sports and the like.  You know what I mean?  The second consideration is more basic – simply what I call the “credibility hurdle”.  That is, when someone comes to your website do you look like a credible, quality operation? 

If you are in a “non-emotional” business, then your graphic presentation primarily needs to meet/exceed the “credibility hurdle” to make sure people coming to your site are impressed by you, you look competitive and present yourself as a quality operation.  Many firms in the commercial construction business fit into this arena.  They are selling capability and not necessarily an emotional experience.  On the other hand, if you are trying to communicate a special message that sets you apart and resonates with your target customer, then you better step it up a notch or two or three and make sure that emotion you want to communicate through your website hits the mark.

In summary, beauty on a website is almost always more than skin-deep.  It is just important to know who your customer is and what turns them on.

There is little question that SMB’s value word-of-mouth as the most effective way to acquire new customers.  Social media certainly can result in greater brand and top-of-mind-awareness and it is pretty cost effective if the personnel involved are highly skilled and productive at it. Interestingly, search engine optimization was considered fourth on the list.  After that, advertising in the more traditional sense is taking a lesser and lesser position on the list of what is important to new customer acquisition.  

On the contrary, a different survey sponsored by MerchantCircle found that local small businesses were more likely to say search engine optimization was a more effective channel than social media, at 40.2% vs. 36.7%.  Because some social media platforms like Facebook have become part of the very fabric of our society, people know how to use them and the learning curve is relatively easy.  On the other hand, the costs, technical challenges and mystique of search engine optimization may be discouraging factors to more SMB’s using this marketing approach.

I wonder if a survey was conducted with SMB’s who are doing both social media marketing and search engine optimization, whether these business owners would say social media or search engine optimization was better at actually generating leads.  Our experience clearly indicates at this point in time that search engine optimization is far more effective at actual lead generation.  After all, what better situation can you have then a qualified customer going to Google, typing in a search phrase to find a product or service provider and virtually asking who out there has what I am looking for?  I mean, think about it. 

Now, this is not to say social media marketing should be ignored in favor of search engine optimization.  Considering the social media trends we are seeing, both are critically important and should be considered for serious investment.  The nuances of your target market, their shopping and buying patterns and the strength of your competition are all factors to be considered to determine how much of each is right for you.

 …due to platforms like Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and the like, airplane seats are hard to sell on any basis other than price. Thanks to Groupon, merchants may face a similar, but perhaps even more damaging, fate. Prices are likely to erode as consumers come to expect deals. They will wait for sales to buy, and merchants will find themselves competing ever more fiercely. Meanwhile, merchants’ brand power will be eroded as consumers look to Groupon (as they do to Orbitz), rather than to the merchants themselves, for the best deals.  The logic is simple: Merchants are encouraged to use the deals to attract new customers, who in theory will return at full price. But, in what seems to be an increasing number of cases, customers come for the deals and then leave for deals offered by other merchants through Groupon. So the number of “new” customers attracted by cheap prices increases, and the number of loyal customers decreases as shoppers prefer to become “new” again for whomever offers the best deal.

 While this phenomenon might play out for those merchants who provide an average or  less-the-stellar customer experience, I don’t totally agree with this argument.  If your company provides a customer experience that creates raving fans, then your promotional activity on Groupon or Living Social will most certainly lead to profitable, long term customers.  If you can deliver a customer transaction that is so positive that your customer tells others about you, you will experience an increase in revenue.  What you do with that revenue is up to you – I’m talking about profits here.

 If you are a merchant, ask yourself the following questions:

1. How likely will a customer recommend us to others after his/her experience with us?
2. How can I make my customer experience easier and more enjoyable?
3. How does my customer experience compare to my competitors and what can I do to have a competitive advantage?

 Answers to these questions might reveal opportunities to enhance your customer experience and lead to more repeat customers, higher revenues and raving fans.

The clip was an instant hit among the online community. It’s easy to understand why. And while the Today Show hosts may look ignorant by today’s standards, they spoke for the greater population. Most people didn’t get or understand the internet in 1994.

Should the top morning news program in the country been aware that the internet existed and had the foresight to its potential impact? Maybe. To their credit, one of the hosts and at least one of the crew knew. But it isn’t a surprise that even reputable, authoritative newscasts struggled to understand what the internet was back then. So when this video leaked, people weren’t as much laughing at NBC as they were laughing with NBC. It was a very representative and nostalgic blast from the past.

What NBC did:

NBC claimed copyright on the video, had it pulled down and fired the employee responsible for leaking the video online. NBC had full right to do both, as the video was property of NBC and the employee was likely breaking some rule by accessing and/or leaking the footage.

While they haven’t come right out and said it, their actions implied that they felt this video was hurtful to their reputation. So instead of embracing the exposure that comes with a viral video, they tried to sweep it under a rug. This, and not anything that happened in 1994, was the true irony.

NBC likely felt embarrassed by the clip from 1994 and thought if the clip would go away the problem would go away. What they failed to understand was the video was very representative of the times – not of their stupidity. The irony is in their attempt to remove the video, which – as some have said – shows more ignorance than they were originally trying to cover up. On the internet, nothing disappears. Try all you can, but it’s almost impossible to get something removed completely. In this case, while the original video was removed, other copies were captured and re-posted (five remain on YouTube as of this posting).

So despite NBC’s efforts, we’re left with other copies of the same video and dozens of blogger responses on how NBC mishandled the situation. This would be considered a worse position than NBC began with.

I don’t doubt for a second that there are intelligent people making their PR decisions, but the net result of this entire saga suggests a better approach could have been taken. Managing online reputation isn’t as much about trying to remove honest critique as it is embracing what’s being said and seizing the opportunity when you have the spotlight. In only a couple weeks, the video has accumulated hundreds of thousands of views. Peanuts compared to their daily TV viewership, but more visibility than the network is likely accustomed to via the social network and media space.

If you find yourself in a position of needing to do some reputation management, take a moment to fully evaluate the message that is circulating and the ways you could respond. Your initial response may be to try and cover up what is out there, but doing so can be impossible. Instead, learn, react and, for lack of a better phrase, see how you can play along. People may be more interested in your response than what started it in the first place.