1) Need a lot of custom extension work specific to your site AND have a reasonable large budget available? = DRUPAL.

2) Have a tight budget and don’t forsee the need to expand your website any time soon to anything needing a little more advanced extensions functionality = WORDPRESS.

3) Want to being able to produce a functionally advanced small to medium size biz website without costing an arm and a leg that doesn’t require re-invent the wheel specific functionality but are happy to use an extensive pre-existing extension pool = JOOMLA!

Is it really that simple? How capable the CMS is of handling SEO, usability and ease of integration with some other functionalities such as Mobile devices etc. obviously also play in. There is a reason of course that all 3 aforementioned are among the finest CMS options out there and that is that they all do at the very least serve their own niche very well.

David McKillen Web Strategies Inc.

1) Need a lot of custom extension work specific to your site AND have
> money to pay for this? = DRUPAL.
> 
> 2) Don't have a lot of money and don't forsee the need to expand your
> website any time soon to anything needing a little more advanced
> extensions functionality = WORDPRESS.
> 
> 3) Want to being able to produce a functionally advanced small to medium
> size biz website without costing an arm and a leg that doesn't require
> tons of re-invent the wheel specific functionality but are happy to use
> an extensive pre-existing extension pool (as is the case with many
> clients) = JOOMLA!

When doing seminars for marketers and business owners I always recite the famous quote from Wanamaker – “I know half my marketing works – I just don’t know which half.”  That’s so true for many.  Just think about how much more successful you could be and how much more effective your marketing investments would be if you truly set goals and then configured metrics to measure performance.  At the beginning of the year my firm, WebStrategies, decided to market a “product” (it’s a service, of course) that analyzes a client’s overall marketing activitities, identifies how to measure each element (online or offline) and configures web analytics to track those activities.  This approach resonates with many but others still can’t wrap their minds around it.  Perhaps it is not a priority for them.

In any case I continue to be amazed at the richness of data one can get out of Google Analytics.  As I manuevered through Conversion University (CU) I picked up a few more nuggets of gold relative to advanced segmentations, navigation paths and ecommerce behavior.  If only I could get a client to spend just 30 minutes in CU, I doubt I’d ever have to preach the benefits of web analytics again. 

ROI visibility was recently rated as one of the most important issues for marketers today.  Well, much of the answer to this challenge lies in being clear about objectives, creative about metrics/measurements and using the tools at our disposal to measure marketing success.  They are there – we just need to understand their application and be smart about implementation.

Of course, goals are not limited to personal improvement and development. Businesses have goals, teams have goals, families have goals. In every instance, it boils down to setting your sights on an objective and doing something to get you there.

Digital marketing is certainly no exception to this. In an online world where we have the ability to measure oodles and oodles of activity, not only can we set goals, but we can use tools to track when they happen and analyze what can be done to make it happen more often. A goal junkie’s Utopia!

The following is a quick exercise I put together that addresses the four core phases necessary to have an outcome-driven online marketing campaign.

“Why does your site exist?”

Write down at least two solid reasons why you have a website. Try not to stop at the one or two most obvious reasons, either. Drill down – peal back another layer. Do you have secondary goals? Tertiary goals? If you do, write them all down.

With your site’s goals clearly identified and written out, you’ve added a new level of clarity and peace of mind. “Why spend another penny online? Here’s why! We want to do more of this!” (at this moment, be prepared to whip out your yellow sticky note with the goals you’ve written out).

Where does our website fulfill the “why.”

With your sticky note on your desk, open up your website on your computer. Goal by goal, go through and find where in your website these goals are achieved. If you’re an ecommerce site and your goal is to sell more online, you would identify your store and shopping cart. If your site exists to generate leads, look for the Contact Page, the phone number, the online form, the email links, etc. If your site’s goal is to brand yourself or your company, find the areas where your message is clearly articulated – perhaps a blog where you regularly post new content.

“How is it being tracked?”

After figuring out why our site exists and identifying where these goals can be achieved, determine how this will be tracked. An ecommerce site should track purchases and be able to trace them back to the source (e.g. Google PPC, SEO, email marketing). A site that exists to generate leads should track visits to the Contact Page, Contact Form submissions, email link clicks and phone calls. A site that exists exclusively for branding should track visitor loyalty, blog subscriptions and mentions of their brand.

(A common scenario we’ve seen is where this step is neglected altogether. An owner or manager has no problem answering the why but can’t answer how (or even if) it’s tracked. If your personal goal was to lose weight, wouldn’t it seem crazy not to use a scale? Same thing.)

“What are you doing to make it happen more often, more efficiently, more effectively?”

Almost done! (not really). You now know why your site exists, where the goals are achieved on the site and how you track when these goals are achieved. With a clear line of site to success and the tools in place to know when you’re successful, it’s now time to determine what you can do to make it occur more often and with greater ease.

An ecommerce site might consider an SEO strategy for your products and product categories, a PPC campaign targeting specific products and a Twitter campaign engaging anyone talking about the activity related to your business. For lead generation, you may also pursue an SEO campaign and PPC targeting. A social media campaign could be very effective at finding people interested in what you offer. For branding, you would comment on blogs, engage people on Twitter and write regular, awesome content. You would want everyone you encounter to think you are the best at what you do.

With the right measurement tools in place, every one of these strategies can be measured back to onsite activity and ultimately goal fulfillment.

Why this process is cyclical:

There’s a reason I don’t illustrate these four phases as one linear sequence. For starters, it shouldn’t be thought of as having a beginning and end. When you do that, it leaves no room for reacting or reevaluating. As Darwin observed, it wasn’t the strongest, but the most adaptive species that would survive. We regularly need to circle back and reassess why we are doing what we’re doing.

Having our goals in place keeps us in check and holds us accountable. It lets us make mistakes faster and it tells us when to put the peddle to the metal. Whether you’re just beginning to get more serious about your online presence or have been there for years, go through this exercise and see where your company stands. You may come out of it surprised.

That’s the key though – INVESTING TIME. It is easy for very knowledgeable business men and women to find it difficult to monetize something like Facebook or Twitter; to look at a tool like Twitter and think to themselves that it is just another Flash-in-the-pan Web craze. I am not sure that Twitter of Facebook can necessarily send you a check in the mail after the first week of using it – or after the first year for that matter. As Chris quite rightly pointed out at one stage in an IM chat to me – “How can you put a value on caring and being known?” How can someone measure in monetary terms, the great value of having a captive audience? After all, the basis of almost any successful business is the existence of a raving client base.

The ultimate goal with business is to make a profit, but you can’t get there until you build this client base and develop relationships. This is just as possible on the Web as it is in our real world day to day, face to face, human interactions.

It might be true – in 3 years we may look back on Twitter (or Facebook for that matter) and say “ah remember Twitter? Those were fun days”. It’s true, there will also be a day in the future when we look back on Apple’s iPhone and say – “ha! Remember the iPhone … that white, chunky brick we had to carry around with us!?” Apple’s iPhone may be the best inventions of this decade – but inevitably it will become a dated piece of technology.

Just because something is around for a short while, doesn’t mean it has no value and one can’t utilize the “Tool-of-the-day” while it lasts. Social Media (well maybe socializing in general) has been around since the dawn of animals – we are social beasts so even though Twitter will likely some day disappear, the underlying purpose of Twitter, Society and interactions between humans, will last as long as we do.

So – what’s Dave rambling on about anyway?

Well I wanted to just try and give just a small, real world example how how you can do something with Twitter and how there is real value to be found. As you may or may not know I manage an adult rec soccer club in a few different cities across the US. A friend of mine approached me about helping him create another adult rec. soccer group for his city. He had no players, no idea of how or where to start and really the only link he had to soccer having just moved there was me (or should I say the fact that I might be able to help him).

I decided to try and use this as an opportunity to give Twitter a go – give it a real world test. I started following hash tags like, #cityname, #soccer etc. to see what if any activity there was already on the topic in the specific city. I used Google to search for “twitter cityname soccer” to see if I could find any Twitter users that advertised their Twitter username Online. I watched for #FF or Follow Friday posts by other users. I looked for the Twitter username of the local newspaper and other soccer related businesses in the area and started following them.

Having already established the existing Soccer club via other cities I simply added another new city group to the website and used that as my base. I would include the URL for that on a lot of the posts I made. I used Hootsuite to manage my Twitter interactions and used their Stats tracker to learn how many clicks if any I was getting from URLs I would post.

Over time I started asking questions of other Twitter users and started noticing people were following me. My current Twitter follower list is by no means huge but it seems to have fairly hardcore, devoted soccer lovers – a few hundred hardcore followers is infinitely better than 1,000 random businesses following me simply to get me to follow them.

Bit by bit my friend and I continued to work in this fashion over the period of weeks to months. Our Twitter followers grew and we were able to slowly build this new adult soccer rec team. A huge bonus that we didn’t expect to earn was the support of a local beer company as a sponsor for the new team, who have promised to cover expenses – jerseys etc. and supply us with beer . To have found financial backing for our little venture was truly a great find and all basically thanks to Twitter.

So there you have it, the experiment worked! Twitter can be of great use and proved to be a valuable tool for my friend and I in our development of his brand new soccer team.

The only problem in all this is? – my friend is a terrible soccer player. Well Twitter can’t be expected to do EVERYTHING – .. now to find soccer coaches …

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

I was looking around for a nifty way of examining load issues on clients sites. I wanted some way of quickly pin pointing which images/files were causing the issue (or the delay was even being caused by site file sizes in the first place!). I discovered a cool little site called Pingdom that did the job.

Simply enter a URL and even check the save URL box. Pingdom drills down through your file load times and display in KB each different component of the page. It also gives you an outline summary of basic info about the site, how many images, style sheets, plugin, redirects, external objects etc. Simple and neat it does what I needed!

But Pingdom is more than just that, it is also an uptime and performance monitoring system. The system lets you know if you site has gone down, gives you uptime reports, response time reports and connects nicely to Twitter, SMS and Email to alert you if troubles a-brewing.

When you want to purchase a domain name, you do so through a registrar.  You can use search functions on a registrar’s website to see if a domain name is available for purchase.  If it is, and you want to own it for a period of time, you can set up an account at the registrar and make the purchase.  It is important to note that you are not buying permanent rights to the domain name, you are only reserving the right to use it for a period of years.  When purchasing a domain name, it is best to do so for a minimum of 2 years, as this seems to give the domain name more credibility with search engines.  Prior to the term of the domain name purchase expiring, the registrar will notify the registered contact on the account of the need to renew.  This is where I have seen clients get into trouble, when the renewal notices are ignored and the term is allowed to expire.  Most registrars have a grace period, usually 1 or 2 months, where an expired domain name is held for the client.  Once the grace period is over, the domain name becomes available again on the open market and is often quickly purchased.  Buying a domain name back from a 3rd party can be a very costly experience!

A hosting provider is where a website’s files are maintained.  There are one or more servers there that are essentially rugged computers with high-speed hard drives designed to quickly “serve up” a web page when a request comes in from a browser.  Professional hosting companies will have physical and data security systems, redundant power supplies, and other measures designed to provide the greatest possible reliability and uptime to their clients, as well as security against unauthorized access to the files.  Bandwidth is also extremely important in order to keep up with the combined traffic resulting from requests for pages.

There is something called DNS (Domain Name System) that is used to direct traffic for a given domain name to the correct hosting environment.  If all functions associated with a domain name are hosted by the same provider, usually information for two or more Name Servers is entered at the registrar.  Name Servers serve as the “traffic cops” of the Internet.  With the nameserver values pointing to the hosting provider, all related traffic (website and email) is sent there.  Since most hosting providers have multiple shared and dedicated servers on which website files reside for their clients, the host will also have a system to detect traffic from a given domain name and direct it locally to the proper server.

There are times when it is desired to host the website and email with different providers.  In this case, you can leave the nameservers at the registrar pointed locally (to the registrar) and then modify individual entries in the DNS zone file at the registrar.

Keep in mind that changes to nameservers or DNS zone file records need time to propagate through the Internet before they become effective.  This depends on the ISP, but is typically in the range of a few hours.

• project performance relative to budget
• breakdown of project steps (prep, graphic design, site shell development, copywriting, content integration, etc.) by total hours and percent of project
• trends over time
• performance by employee

Here are the basic steps I took:

• From the BaseCamp Time control panel, export all history in 6-month intervals (BaseCamp will allow the export of a maximum of 6-months at once)
• Merge these exported CSV files in Excel, saving as a regular spreadsheet.
• Important: Keep the order of the exported columns as is.  This will enable you to add updates as needed (weekly, monthly, etc.) by simply pasting in new updates at the bottom of the raw data.
• You can now add a few additional columns to the right of the imported data.  One of the most important will be a field to be used as a flag for the type of activity.  For example, you could use “S” for site coding (skinning), “C” for content integration, etc.  Plan out what you want to do in advance with as few or as many flags as needed.
  

  Adding project flags to exported BaseCamp data.

• Create a new sheet in the Excel workbook.  This will contain a Pivot Table to summarize the raw data.  In the one I developed, projects are the column headings and the flag values (Stage) as the row headings, with a summation of hours as the data in the middle.  The following image shows how you can configure the Pivot Table layout to show a summation of hours for each project, segmented by the project activity flags you inserted into the BaseCamp downloaded data.  Excel Pivot Tables are great because they allow a tremendous amount of data to be quickly segmented according to desired criteria.
  
  

  Pivot table layout

  

  One column of resulting pivot table

• Create a third sheet which will be the main summary page.  In the first column of this sheet, paste all of the project names, exactly as copied from the main listing in BaseCamp.  It is very important that these project names exactly match the ones that are in the pivot table.  In the first row, create column headings such as Project, % Budget, Budget, Preliminary (hr), Preliminary (%), Design (hr), Design (%), Total Project (hr), Total Non-project (hr), Grand Total, etc.  You can make as many columns as you want.  You will need to manually fill in some information for each project such as the budgeted hours, etc.  This example shows some sample project data in the summary project sheet.  I’ll show in the next step how to bring over the summarized info from the Pivot Table.
  

  Summary sheet

• Use the Excel HLOOKUP command to extract pertinent information from the pivot table sheet for each project, referencing the appropriate Flag value in the left-most pivot table column.  This image shows an example of a HLOOKUP formula which can seem a bit intimidating at first glance.  The command simply scans across the Pivot Table column headings (Projects) looking for a match.  Once found, the corresponding value in the row number of the pivot table is returned.  Build the formula once, then replicate it to the other cells.  I used a combination of absolute and relative addressing to make it easier for me to carry the formula over to other columns.
  

  Example hlookup formula

• Now you can add calculations in the summary sheet columns such as the ones showing percentages.  Calculate these, referencing the values you brought over from the pivot table sheet.
• Important: Keep all calculations active.  This will allow you to refresh the pivot table when new raw data are added, and the summary sheet and any graphs will update automatically.
• I sorted my summary sheet according to budgeted hours in descending order.
• Create a stacked column graph on a new worksheet with hours as the vertical axis and projects along the horizontal axis.  The components of the columns will be the values corresponding to Preliminary, Design, Skinning, etc. for each project.  In my chart, I changed the graph type for the Budget data series to that of a line graph, with no interconnecting lines.  In doing this, the result was a superimposed horizontal tic mark on project column corresponding to the budgeted number of hours.  There likely will be shown some projects that are under budget and some that are over.  The nice thing is that you now have a means to review at a glance many projects at once.
  

  Example project breakdown by task and budget

• Here is the fun part!  Go back to your Summary sheet and use the autofilter command.  This allows you to customize what is shown in the summary.  For example, you can customize the Budget % column to only show projects where the value is greater than 1.00 (in other words, showing projects that have run over budget).  When you switch back over to your graph sheet, it will automatically recalculate and update, only plotting the projects that are over budget.  You can actually drill down quite extensively into your projects, using the graph sheet to visually show you the results.  Here as an alternative, I am showing only projects under budget.  New graphs can be generated on the fly in only a few seconds.
  

  Graph of projects, filtered to show only those under budget

I update my workbook each week with new data exported from BaseCamp, and use it as an effective tool in project management and production planning.  It allows areas to be identified where improvements in process efficiency are needed as well as providing solid input to Sales for estimating new projects.

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

Have you checked out IMO.IM yet? I have been using Meebo for a while now to combine all my different Instant Messaging applications. Meebo was the first of its kind (that I came across anyway) but still has yet to integrate Skype into it’s list of available tools.

Just today then I happened to be on Skype and noticed a friend of mine had the tagline “I’m on imo.im” and it peaked my curiosity. Basically IMO incorporates all the main IM tools, including Skype, which makes it very useful to me. Not only does it allow you to easily incorporate Skype with your other IM’s in one location but it also maintains the voice capabilities, enabling voice and video chat.

Another cool feature of IMO is the ability to video chat with any of your buddies, regardless of what IM client they use and whether that client has built in video chat capabilities. This is a very useful too for distributed work groups.

IMO can be “popped out” such that it sits as a sidebar on your desktop which is nice as it remains visible while you browse to other websites. Another cool feature of IMO is that it doesn’t require any sign up. At first this was a little confusing to me – seeing a login box but not requiring any sign up (but then I’m pretty simple ). IMO simply allows you to login to any of the list of IM’s you currently use (say Gmail). You can then log into each one in turn and then “link” them all so you can access all from the same spot. IMO encrypts and stores your passwords and you never have to login again – pretty nifty .

The interface might not be a pretty as say meebo.com but it’s clean and simple, and it works!

Nice extra features: You can send broadcast messages to other IMO users in your network, there’s a whiteboard that allows colaboration between IMO users in your network, invisibility and blocking and more.

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

Like social media sites, just having the analytics (or Facebook page, or Twitter account) won’t get you anything. It won’t get you traffic, it won’t build your brand, it won’t explain why your shopping cart has a 99.8% abandonment rate. Yes, the data and potential is there, but without the proper groundwork and planning, you’ll have a very difficult time adding any value to the business.

To have any impact, you first have to identify what you’re trying to impact.

It sounds obvious, but it isn’t always. Most managers/bosses/owners will tell you “Well, I want sales to improve, of course!” While it’s an understandable response, it’s the equivalent of telling a doctor, “Doc, make my life better.”

On the bright side, learning that their sales need improving gives us a starting point. We can view shopping cart funnel data, bounce rates and conversion by traffic source and keywords, etc.. Basic run of the mill web analytics analysis, more or less. Continuing with the medical analogy, after being asked to improve your life, the doctor would give you a physical, interview your friends and family members, then come back with a list of recommendations on how you can make your life better.

This isn’t too hard to pull off, but the problem is the method is not unique to you. A turn key approach is never unique enough to solve and improve your unique problems.

So how do you get past the generic “make my sales better,” response? You ask to dive deeper. If the owner doesn’t have the time to get into the nitty gritty (which is understandable – they’re trying to run a business, after all) ask who’s the next best person to speak with. It could be internal marketers, analysts, consultants, etc.

Now that you’re speaking to more micro-focused individual or team, we need to start identifying more manageable goals to achieve the ultimate goal of “better sales.”

Sales happen because of customers. If we want sales to improve, we need to better understand our customers. “Customers” as one large bucket is still way too large to analyze and draw actionable insight from (at least, in the age of web analytics it is). Find out which kind of customers they want to know more about. A large ecommerce site may want to know how effective its email marketing and affiliate program channels are doing when it comes to sales. BOOM! A couple new Account profiles here, some custom filters there, and now we have two reports for just email marketing visitors and affiliate program visitors.

Sticking with the ecommerce scenario, identify next what product categories are most profitable for the business. If UberWidgets are the most profitable followed by SuperWidgets, use custom segments to break your reports into those who purchase UberWidgets and SuperWidgets as well as those who look at UberWidgets and SuperWidgets but don’t purchase.

Combining these segmentations with the reports showing only email or affiliate traffic, we can see how each referral source performs when it comes to producing the highest ticket sale. Comparing the purchased traffic versus the non-purchased traffic for a single product category, we can easily uncover what’s different about those who buy versus those who don’t. If your product lines and prices range significantly, you can break down price levels using custom segments (more achievable with properly configured ecommerce reporting).

We’re starting to get some great data, but don’t stop here!

Say your business offers incentives or extended options for those in close geographic proximity to the physical store. For example, you’re headquartered and have stores in Richmond, Virginia but ship nationwide. Central Virginia residents can have their purchase picked up in store to save on shipping costs. With this added incentive, it would be worth your time to individually segment Virginia web traffic and see how their behavior differs from those who can only have their purchase shipped.

These exercises can be done over and over with different variations – each time uncovering more of your data’s story. We are no longer asking the doctor to make our life better, but instead asking him to fix the pain we experience in our right shin when we go running. The more specific we are in what we’re trying to improve, the better chance we have of making an impact.