Category Archives: Web Analytics

What exactly is a bad website & how do you fix it?

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On my way into work this morning, I passed a local computer repair shop and they have one of those messaging signs. This one said “we fix bad websites”.  Obviously that got my attention, but I am always on the lookout for such things as a marketing executive.  It did however get me to thinking, “what exactly is a ‘bad’ website?”

Is a bad website something that looks like it was built in 2001?  Is a bad website something that is so overwhelming with content that you “click off” the moment you get there because you don’t know where to start?  Is a bad website something that drives you no traffic on its own?  Is a bad website something that nobody can find unless they search for your company name?  Is a bad website something that makes you click 4 times before you get to what you want?  Is it when you go to visit examples of their work and they look old or in some cases you can’t FIND the references they give as “testimonials or case studies”?  Just what does a “bad website” mean and look like?

I would have to say all of the above.  You website is your only resource working 24/7/365 for your company.  It is also a lot of times your only chance to make that all important “first impression”.  You have 7 seconds for them to determine if they will “click off”.  You have to make sure you provide enough and the right content on your business site so they feel comfortable in one of three things – buying something (if you sell), filling out your form to talk to someone – or picking up the phone and calling you.  If you don’t give them what they need to do any of those three (refer to your sales process for what information is needed to get them to make a buying decision) – then you have a “bad website”.  PERIOD.

In a day and age where everybody says they can build your website, search optimize it, handle your social media, and drive you traffic – execution of those strategies makes all the difference.  Just because they “know more than you” doesn’t make them an expert in web strategy – talking the talk is much different than walking the walk.  Make sure you check out their site and the references they give you.  If their site does not have the work done that they are proposing to you and/or you find references to work that you don’t like – run.  If you don’t like their website (and just because it’s better than your current one, doesn’t mean you have to like it) keep looking.  When they are willing to tell you how they will do the things that will drive your website’s return-on-investment (ROI) to new levels (which is beyond just traffic) with specific steps and tasks and give you a list of people to call – follow up with references and ask how much VALUE they received – value being ROI, data, sales, leads, qualified traffic and understanding to move their entire business forward – then you have found someone worth talking to when it comes to “fixing bad websites”.

Analyzing your audience’s web habits to improve website performance

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How much actionable information do you have about your web visitors? Can you predict their wants, goals, needs and behavior? Are you using analytic data to improve website performance? Do you utilize any re-targeting, ad networks, Search Engine Marketing (PPC and Display) and social media to be collecting data across multiple external sites and clickstreams? If so, the potential to deliver targeted content and offers based on their previous behavior and referring traffic source is possible.

You can construct detailed matrix that serve up content based on the family of sites they have visited and the predicted traits and interests that visitors to those sites demonstrate. However, if the first known point of contact with your visitors is their arrival at your site, then predicting their targeted area of interest is a much more tricky proposition, unless you study your own analytics and data (Sitecore, Webtrends, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc) to come up with them and improve website performance.

Do you perform any A/B testing of two broader offers or content paths on your enterprise level site visitors and see which performs better (ie they look at more pages or end up as a conversion more often).  That is a good place to start, but more organizations have never consider split testing their own website. Doing this would ensure no audience gets excluded or misdirected–and it requires less historical data to drive the offer but allows you to profile how each “path” behaves.

Coming from purchased media like PPC or Facebook, can also shed light into keywords that have “special” needs to be effective, landing pages that get them to take desired actions and demographic profiles of who is visiting based on reporting. Again, this allows you the create a profile on each type of visitor and adjust the “path” accordingly – which will improve website performance .

You tie all of this data together to make the necessary changes to your website and content, navigation paths to drive more usability, click patterns, desired “conversions” that you have established for your website and/or campaigns.  Interpreting data is extremely important to ongoing web success – find a resource to work with that understands this to help set benchmarks and foundational strategy and it will help educate yourself and give you insights to things you could use across all mediums with your marketing and advertising.

Google Adwords Call Metrics Effectiveness and Billing Changes

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If you haven’t already been using Google’s Adwords Call Metrics feature then you really need to look into it. Sadly, if you don’t already know about it then you have missed some functionality that was initially rolled out as free. This will not be the case very soon. Let’s first take a look at the functionality and the value that it adds, excluding the cost initially.

Call Metrics & Its Benefits

If you’re driving traffic through any form of internet marketing you are always looking for ways to track its effectiveness and justify ROI for your ad $$’s. Often times we are all tracking conversions on sales leads and sales through e-commerce, but what about the person who also gets value from phone sales or drives user interaction through offline communication? This is a great way to justify the offline conversion of your traffic and add value to your clients by letting them know the real effectiveness of a campaign if you are ultimately driving sales leads or calls over the phone.

How To Setup Call Metrics

First, go into your Adwords campaign under the Ad Extensions tab and add a Call Extension to your campaign. The next step is to establish what the phone number you want those calls redirected to. Then check the box to use Call Metrics and you’ll be able to establish whether you would like a toll free number or a local area code number associated with your tracking that will be displayed. This brings up another factor of marketing and the local spin of your business if this applies to you. Users love to see local phone numbers and know that they are talking to someone local, so if you are a local business then I would recommend using a local phone number. Even if you need to start separating out campaigns for different geographic areas to achieve this the extra effort is worth it. Either way now Google will use its Google Voice platform to assign you a phone number and they will handle the forwarding and tracking of that number. Another thing I want to mention with this is there is also another feature I have skipped over. The Call-Only Format is only possible to use if your device is capable of making phone calls. This could be any mobile phone or computer with Skype or a VOIP system. This will disable the functionality to click the headline of the ad and go to the website, and give the user only one option to interact with the ad and that is using the Click To Call functionality. If you’re trying to drive sales through a phone number then who doesn’t love a 100% conversion rate. Also, if you haven’t broken out your PPC campaigns and separated out a mobile strategy then you need to do that as well, but I’m not really covering that whole concept in this blog post.

Call Metrics Changes Very Soon

What will be changing very soon is the way Google bills for this value added service. Soon campaigns will be charged $1 for every time this number is called manually. Now when I say manually basically I mean any time the number is called NOT using the Click To Call functionality. This could be when the user sees the number on an Adwords ad, doesn’t click, but calls the number. You would be charged $1 in that scenario. The worst thing about this is users who may call your business for the first time through a PPC ad and then save the phone number in their contacts list. Users could be using this number in excess and costing your campaign money. This is just one downfall to think about. I still believe the functionality is worth the cost and will be testing to see how many times users will actually be calling the number manually. We can measure this against how many users call the number and do not charge the additional $1, and make our judgments after we see more data.

Reporting On Your Call Details

An extra feature that makes this even more valuable is the way in which we are able to report on this data. If you go into your campaign and look under the Dimensions tab you’ll want to view the Call Details information. This will give you:
  • Start Time Of The Call
  • End Time Of The Call
  • Status – Received or Missed Call
  • Duration In Seconds
  • Caller Area Code
This information is very valuable because it gives you very valuable information regarding the effectiveness of your PPC budget. Also you should be using this data to setup your Day Parting strategy to further target your ads to drive the most ROI.

Top Search Terms and Visited sites for 2010

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Experian does an annual study on the top search terms for each year and the top ten visited URLs for each year. Below you will find a graphic for 2010 versus 2009. Facebook found itself at the top of both lists – showing you the power that brand and property has become. There is a reason why Mark Zuckerberg was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and there was a movie made about the Facebook story. As you will see, FOUR of the top ten search terms were all facebook.

Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches so you social media doubters needs to stop doubting.

New terms that entered into the top 50 search terms for 2010 included – netflix, verizon wireless, espn, chase, pogo, tagged, wells fargo, yellow pages, poptropica, games and hulu.

The combination of Google properties accounted for 9.85 percent of all U.S. site visits. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 8.12 percent. The top 10 Websites accounted for 33 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010, an increase of 12 percent versus 2009.

One of the next questions becomes, will Facebook be able to be knocked off it’s perch from either list? You would think at some point there would be something else that needs to get searched for more than Facebook just because “everyone” will already be a user right? But when does that happen? 2011? 2012? When the next great social media invention comes along? It will be interesting to watch this over the next couple of years.

Some other fun facts and top searched items :
Athlete: Still Tiger Woods – Dallas Cowboys were the team
Destination: Disney World and Disneyland was #2
Movie Title: Star Wars
Company: Bevelwise (just making sure you are paying attention, lol)
Music Artist/Band: Justin Bieber mania was BEAT by Lady Gaga
TV Show: Dancing with the Stars beat Amercian Idol…
Personality: Kim Kardashian has passed Oprah and Rush was third…

We just thought it was very interesting how powerful Facebook as become. Let us know if you think any of these numbers/spots will change for 2011 and why. We’d love to hear your opinion.

Using Your Web Analytics To Make Actual Business Decisions

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I have spoken with a number of people who have websites, and some who even have Analytics. (usually Google Analytics, because it costs $0.00) One of my favorite questions to ask is “what do you most enjoy looking at in your analytics that helps you?” and usually the response to this unfortunately is “how many people are coming to my website.” That’s all and well and good, but lets take a minute to look at the concept of “Segmenting Your Data”.

I doubt that you are looking at an overview dashboard and are actually going to figure out anything you’re ready to make a decision on. So what should we as internet marketers be looking at that will actually help us make decisions.
I often speak with people who are spending a gob of money on various online marketing opportunities, and I want to to see if what they are getting for their hard earned money is actually worth something. Lets take this a step deeper. One example is to look at conversions rates and/or goals (if you’re using Google Analytics) and segment by either the traffic sources and/or the campaigns associated with those traffic sources. If you’re not passing in variables for traffic source, medium, and campaign with your various advertisers(for example, a banner ad) I would recommend starting to do that right now. The variables below apply to Google Analytics, and are very useful when passed into your destination URL’s:
  • utm_source=
  • utm_medium=
  • utm_term=
  • utm_content=
  • utm_campaign=
And this would be an example of using these variables to establish where some traffic actually came from using our website. bevelwise.com/?utm_source=ourblog&utm;_medium=textlink&utm;_campaign=using-your-web-analytics. What this will do for measurement, is assign the following variables when you click as such:
  • source=ourblog
  • medium=textlink
  • campaign=using-your-web-analytics
You could then reference all the clicks that came in through any campaign online/email campaign to goals that you have pre-determined and set up for your website and use them to further drive your marketing objectives and strategies.
Getting back to the concept of segmenting you would always want to be drilling down into your data and breaking out specific variables and sections of that data that mean something to your business. Having someone who is experienced with reading your web analytics is just as important as having a CFO that knows how to read a balance sheet and it can help produce better financial results. I’ve heard someone say before, “oh we know what our website is doing, because we put analytics on our website.” Interpreting those analytics and helping to make actionable decisions for your organization involves much more than knowing the basics of what analytics tells you. Do you know what areas of your website’s content is delivering the best results? Do you know where your advertising $$ are being best spent?
Bevelwise does seo from grand rapids, MI which includes Google Analytics measurement and will put our skills up against anyone out there in the Midwest. Would be happy to help you with your search engine optimization, web strategy, web analytics and all marketing from a measurement perspective. You will get insight to drive all your marketing initiatives if your website done and measured correctly.

5 New Features Google Analytics Offers In The New Beta AdWords Stat Tool

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A couple of us Internet Marketers here at Bevelwise were just talking about this a few weeks ago. I had even provided this as feedback to a Google survey a few months ago that I would like to see, specifically goal tracking day parting on campaigns. I feel like those Windows 7 ads – “I’m an Adwords Certified Professional and day parting of conversions was my idea”. Google has beta released the new stat tool for AdWords data in their Analytics package. This adds a ton of features and ways that we can look at Pay-Per-Click traffic and how it is interacting with websites. If you’ve never checked this section of Google Analytics out before then go under “Traffic Sources -> Adwords” you will see a wide range of new options under that.

I thought I would give a little more insight about about some of the new features I’ve enjoyed checking out this morning and point out my top 5

  • The new Adwords Overview looks at your CTR and Bounce Rate metric side by side and line graphs it for you very nicely by default.
  • You can now see your goals/conversions broken down by day-parting. This is something we’ve not been able to see until now, and lets you see exactly what time of the day is bringing you the best conversion rates.
  • The layout of your Destination URL’s are easier to get to now, and you can see the statistics breakdown for how each destination url on your website is performing. This helps even further when we are looking at conversion rate optimization
  • You can see your “Keyword Positions” performance, which lets you pick a keyword anywhere in your account and see how many times it is clicked when it is served in the first position, second, third, etc.
  • You can see statistics breakdown for each match type you use. This means that you can see the bounce rate if you want for all your broad match types, and compare that to your phrase and exact types to see what is bringing in the most qualified traffic.
As you can see this a big addition to their already great Analytics package. There are so many ways to apply this to further improve Google Adwords advertising, and websites in general when we are looking at conversion rate optimization.

If you don’t already have a company that helps you manage your search engine marketing or website analytics Bevelwise is a SEM firm that is utilizing these strategies and all of the most current techniques to drive our client’s business and have successful web strategy. Staying up to date with these great additions and changes is more than a full time job for us, it’s our passion – which makes us good and what we do.