Ways to learn what those click-throughs really mean

Clients often ask, “How will I know when this marketing ‘stuff’ is working?” They know it should work, but they don’t know how – kind of like when P.T. Barnum, of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, said he knew that 50 percent of his advertising was effective; he just didn’t know which 50 percent!
There is a science to the art of marketing, no doubt about it – and more so with digital marketing than ever. In the old days, you didn’t really know whether your television advertising worked – you waited until the end of the year and crossed your fingers that sales rose higher than the significant media expenditures.
Now, digital marketing is deeply informative about success factors. Every metric – from the number of click-throughs you got on your recent emailing to how many of your posts were populated in newstreams to how many products were put into your shopping cart – can be studied, interpreted, correlated and finally seen as the success story it is (or isn’t).
If you think of your website as the core, the very center of what you are doing online, then looking at the metrics of your website alone – say, on a monthly basis – will tell you a lot. It can be the proof of the pudding you’re after.
You’ll learn about your website’s Key Performance Indicators by using a free metrics tool such as Google Analytics. Once that strip of code is inserted in your website, from that point forward you can learn how many people visited your site, which pages they looked at, what content they enjoyed for longer than a couple of seconds, where they came from geographically, whether they accessed your site on their mobile device or their desktop, and what the average bounce rate for your site had been during the month.

What’s a bounce rate?
The bounce rate is an indication of the frequency of people visiting your site and then leaving without looking at another page. It is a fair approximation of the engagement value of your site. The lower the bounce rate, the more vital your website.
From your analytics, you’ll also learn how many of your visitors were returning versus how many were altogether new to your site. Very important: where the visitors started their journey to you.
People access a website one of three ways: directly (they knew your URL), via a query on a search engine or from another website and click on your link.
It’s good to have a fairly even spread between these three methods of site access. If it is Google dominated, that reflects well on your Search Engine Optimization, but are you putting too many eggs in that basket and risking a loss of ranking at some point, maybe even during a crucial selling season? Spread your risk around.

Referring sites.
The more places your URL is listed on the Internet, the more visits to your website you are likely to drive. Directory listings are one source of URL referrals. So are press releases that get picked up by various trade or consumer online publications. Your chamber of commerce listing is another referring site, potentially. So too is your alumni magazine listing. Don’t forget social media and blogs that mention your site as a source of information.
Getting people to your website has one purpose: to turn those visitors into leads. So once they’ve arrived at your home page or a page in the interior of the site, what are you going to do with them? Look at it this way: What if there were a salesperson at that entrance door – in the flesh? What would she do with a new visitor who had been quite specific about what he needed (say, by using a keyword in his search)?
Your salesperson would create a quick dialogue. You can too. Maybe have a live-chat person interact with the prospect right then and there, or be pointed with a call-to-action blurb on every landing page – maybe like this:
“Do you need keyword research that’s thorough and insightful? Give us your email – that’s all we ask for – and we’ll get back to you with our best package custom created for you.”

Watch analytics like a hawk!
Your website is your 24-hour-a-day salesperson. It’s where all your digital communications land. Study the numbers as you would a salesperson’s daily activity report. Make her earn her salary and commission.
There are also analytics for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. Practically everywhere on line, platforms are providing data and insights about your recent participation and vitality.
In Google Analytics, you also can set up what are called “goals” and see what percentage of visitors take actions you determine in advance are valuable to your organization. That can be filling out an inquiry form, signing up for a newsletter or actually buying something. You can go right to goals for a quick view into the success of your website and what got people there in the first place.
What’s working and what’s not? Find the answer via all sorts of analytics and then do more of what’s working – and less of what’s not.

Laurie Macomber, owner of Fort Collins-based Blue Skies Marketing, can be reached at 970-689-3000.

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