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April 18, 2012 By Sage Lewis 1 Comment

4 Tips for U.S. Airport Facebook Pages

This entry is part 8 of 17 in the series Airport Marketing Series

A couple days ago I talked about the top 1o U.S. Airport Facebook pages based on Likes.

I loved doing that research because it gave me a great view of the airport Facebook landscape.

Here are some tips I collected as I went through this list:

Most of you have claimed your Facebook page. But some of you have not. Please claim your Facebook page now. You don’t want it sitting out there unclaimed. Potentially bad things could happen to it.
Some of you have multiple versions of your Facebook page out there. It wasn’t always clear which one was the best page. When doing a search on Facebook for “Los Angeles International Airport” you see this:

It’s very clear which of those pages is the main page. The others were setup by visitors to the airport. Los Angeles should ideally keep an eye on those and claim them and delete or merge them. It’s a bit of a hassle. But it would make Facebook look a little cleaner.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport is less clear:

8009 people checked in at the Places page. Claiming and merging the “Page” with the “Places” page would make for a better experience for the visitor. The added issue here is that this is the Metro Station that people have checked into. The listing at the bottom is the airport with 662 check-ins. My feeling is that people are probably confused as to what page is what. Claiming these would make for a better user experience.

Understand the new Timeline format for pages. Here’s a good page on Facebook about Timeline for pages. This has automatically happened to your pages. If you haven’t updated yours yet you will definitely want to.
Like it or not you all are on Facebook. I was just in a meeting yesterday where the company didn’t set up a Facebook page because they didn’t know what to put up there. That is no longer an option. Your employees and customers are automatically creating them for you. If you don’t claim your Facebook page you are giving your brand completely away to your audience. It’s not difficult to manage these pages. And you don’t have to be a Facebook guru. Just put up a few pictures and make it look semi-nice. That’s OK. For what it’s worth: We can help you with this as well. Just ask.

Facebook is projected to reach 1 billion users by August. Not being engaged there is not an option any more. People expect you to be there. Just do it!

But for the most part most of you are doing some really great things on Facebook. I’m quite impressed.

If you need ideas of what to do just click through this top 10 list of pages. Pay attention to the ones that are getting the most engagement. Try to figure out why people are commenting, sharing and liking posts. These will give you some pretty good ideas for what you could do to have an awesome Facebook presence. You are in the company of some amazing online marketers.

Filed Under: Featured

April 17, 2012 By Sage Lewis 3 Comments

Top 100 U.S. Airport Foursquare Brand Pages

This entry is part 7 of 17 in the series Airport Marketing Series

Happy Foursquare Day! (yesterday).

I should have gotten this out yesterday. But I wasn’t thinking ahead. Just the same… I wanted to give you to complete list of the top 100 U.S. Airport Foursquare brand pages.

I thought it might be interesting to organize them by total check-ins (as of 4-16-2012).

There aren’t a lot of surprises here. But you might find it interesting to know these numbers.

Airports are some of the most popular places to check-in.

I will say: If you are an airport and have not claimed your foursquare page, please do so!

Also, special props go to these 9 airports:
Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport
Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport
Akron-Canton Regional Airport
Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport
Tulsa International Airport
Jacksonville International Airport
Des Moines International Airport
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport/Wold-Chamberlain Airport
Logan International Airport

They were the only airports to have foursquare check-in deals. I would highly encourage you all to do this. It’s a super way to reward your most loyal customers (and employees). You can click on each of those pages to see what kinds of offers they are offering. They are pretty clever.
Here is the complete list of U.S. airport foursquare pages including total check-ins:

Filed Under: Featured

April 16, 2012 By Sage Lewis 4 Comments

The Top 10 U.S. Airport Facebook Pages

This entry is part 6 of 17 in the series Airport Marketing Series

Can you guess who had the most likes on Facebook for the top 100 airports in the U.S.?

I thought it was surprising.

Here is the top 10 list of U.S. Facebook pages with the most Likes (as of April 12, 2012):

Los Angeles International Airport 61,464 Likes
Cleveland Hopkins Airport 40,516 Likes
Akron-Canton Regional Airport 37,176 Likes
O’Hare International Airport 26,549 Likes
Orlando International Airport 25,099 Likes
Denver International Airport 24,757 Likes
Logan International Airport 22,940 Likes
John F. Kennedy International Airport 22,441 Likes
San Francisco International Airport 21,984 Likes
Metropolitan Oakland International Airport 18,421 Likes

Los Angeles is one you might expect.

But would you have guessed that Cleveland and Akron Ohio would be #2 and #3? In fact, if you put them together they far surpass LA with 77,692 total likes.

That’s impressive. That’s particularly interesting to me because according to this list Akron-Canton is #96 of the 100 airports based on 2010 passengers. Although, I’m not sure how trustworthy the passenger numbers are on that list. According to this CAK post they had 1.5 million passengers in 2010 which would put them around the #70 mark. Yet they are the #3 airport with the most Likes.

But what is important about those numbers is this from that same CAK post:

At the end of December 14, 2011, our passenger count reached 1,654,000 total passengers, exceeding our all-time passenger tally (1,560,031) set in 2010.

One of the things people often ask about social media is: “How can you track it?”

You track it like that.

Is it a coincidence that they continue to have record breaking passenger tallies and also have the third most liked Facebook page of the top 100 airports?

While CAK is a client of ours, we have nothing to do with their social media. We are the search people for them. Their social presence has everything to do with their internal marketing team.

According to this CLE page, Cleveland Hopkins is the 36th busiest airport. That is also impressive to come in as the #2 most Liked Facebook page. My feeling is that they are being pushed by CAK to be better socially. This is a good example of how the community benefits from competition. We have a really great social presence to work with in Northeast Ohio.

ATL came in at #25 with 7989 Likes. They are the airport with the most passengers. I thought that was interesting. I don’t want to jump to conclusions here. But my instinct is that they could potentially have a more interactive presence in Facebook. As of this moment (April 13, 2012) Atlanta has 183 people talking about them. Akron Canton has 1310 people talking about them. It’s possible I just caught them at a slow moment.

I’ve put all Like counts in this main U.S. Airport Web Presences spreadsheet.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk about tips on how you can make your Facebook pages a little better.

Filed Under: Featured

April 13, 2012 By Sage Lewis 4 Comments

Top 100 U.S. Airport Facebook Pages

This entry is part 5 of 17 in the series Airport Marketing Series

This is my list of the top 100 U.S. airport Facebook pages.

I’ve put this together for Airport Marketing Month here at the SageRock blog. But some people might find it useful as a resource as is.

In the next installment I’ll talk about what I found here. There’s some pretty interesting stuff.

If I have gotten any information wrong here please let me know! I’ll gladly update my links.

Also, if you are not on this list and you are close to being one of the top 100 U.S. airports please let me know that too. I’ll gladly add you.

Here’s the list sorted alphabetically:

Adams Field Airport

Akron-Canton Regional Airport

Albany International Airport

Albuquerque International Sunport

Anchorage International Airport

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport

Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport

Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport

Bob Hope Airport

Boise Air Terminal Airport

Bradley International Airport

Buffalo Niagara International

Charleston AFB/International Airport

Charlotte/Douglas International Airport

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport

City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport

Cleveland Hopkins Airport

Dallas Love Field

Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport

Dane County Regional-Truax Field Airport

Denver International Airport

Des Moines International Airport

Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport

El Paso International Airport

Eppley Airfield Airport

Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport

General Mitchell International Airport

George Bush Intercontinental Airport

Gerald R. Ford International Airport

Greater Rochester International Airport

Guam International Airport

Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport

Honolulu International Airport

Indianapolis International Airport

Jacksonville International Airport

James M Cox Dayton International Airport

John F. Kennedy International Airport

John Wayne Airport-Orange County

Kahului Airport

Kansas City International Airport

Kona International Airport

LaGuardia Airport

Lambert-St. Louis International Airport

Lihue Airport

Logan International Airport

Long Beach Airport

Long Island MacArthur Airport

Los Angeles International Airport

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport

Louisville International Airport

Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport

Manchester Boston Regional Airport

McCarran International Airport

McGhee Tyson Airport

Memphis International Airport

Metropolitan Oakland International Airport

Miami International Airport

Midway International Airport

Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport/Wold-Chamberlain Airport

Myrtle Beach International Airport

Nashville International Airport

Newark Liberty International Airport

Norfolk International Airport

O’Hare International Airport

Ontario International Airport

Orlando International Airport

Palm Beach International Airport

Palm Springs International Airport

Pensacola Gulf Coast Regional Airport

Philadelphia International Airport

Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport

Piedmont Triad International Airport

Pittsburgh International Airport

Port Columbus International Airport

Portland International Airport

Portland International Jetport Airport

Raleigh-Durham International Airport

Reno/Tahoe International Airport

Richmond International Airport

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport

Sacramento International Airport

Salt Lake City International Airport

San Antonio International Airport

San Diego International Airport

San Francisco International Airport

San Jose International Airport

Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport

Southwest Florida International Airport

Spokane International Airport

Syracuse Hancock International Airport

Tampa International Airport

Theodore Francis Green State Airport

Tucson International Airport

Tulsa International Airport

Washington Dulles International Airport

Westchester County Airport

Wichita Mid-Continent Airport

Will Rogers World Airport

William P. Hobby Airport

Filed Under: Featured

April 12, 2012 By Sage Lewis 3 Comments

Analyzing the Top U.S. Airports Web Sites

This entry is part 4 of 17 in the series Airport Marketing Series

In the last post I put up a list of the sites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and some other information of the top 100 U.S. Airports in a spreadsheet.

Today I want to spend a little time giving my initial thoughts on what I found.

I’ll just move left to right in the information.

Airport Web sites:

I was very happy to see that every airport had a Web site. That might be something we all take for granted now. But it shouldn’t be. In fact, I thought virtually all the Web sites were very nice.

Pretty

I think my visually favorite Web site was Sacramento International Airport. The lines, colors and emotional connection appealed to me very much. But that’s just a personal opinion. The best design is the one that entices your visitors to do what it is you want them to do. I’m not a big fan of focus groups navel gazing coming up with design ideas. They rarely include designers. And even if they do the CEO usually gets the final say. I don’t think I have ever met a CEO that went to art school.

Opinions of a group of people in a room, or the opinion of me, is irrelevant. Good design is only determined by testing.

That said, I don’t think there was a single site that I didn’t like.

Most of you had your own domain names for your airport. I think that’s fine. But I noticed some of you had your airport attached to a larger site. Hawaii, for example lists their airports like this:

http://hawaii.gov/hnl

http://hawaii.gov/koa

http://hawaii.gov/lih

http://hawaii.gov/ogg

I think that’s fine too! In fact, I actually like it a lot. It is very descriptive of the fact that the airport is part of the Hawaii government. The domain tells a very clear story.

I didn’t find anyone that used a subdomain, like: airport.state.gov

That would be fine too.

But whichever way you have chosen to go just keep doing what you are doing.

Little Rock is going through a tricky transition because they are renaming the airport: Little Rock National Airport is renamed Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport. However, Adams Field continues when referring to the airport’s runways and air traffic as well as the airport’s official designator.

I’m not sure if they are going to keep the domain: http://www.fly-lit.com. Or if there will be a domain name change.

Changing domains should never be taken lightly. That’s simply because over the years people have linked to your current domain (and pages within your domain).

My preference is to keep urls the same. There should always be a very good reason to change them.

That said, it can be done.

If you are moving domains my basic recommendations are these:

Always 301 redirect old domains and main pages to the new domain’s equivalent pages.
Look at your analytics to determine the referring sites that are generating traffic for you. Ask these sites to update their links to the new domain.
Make sure all your paid search and advertisement links are updated when the switch over happens.
Anticipate a drop in traffic. I’ve never seen a domain name change not effect traffic numbers negatively… for a while.

Several of you have what we call in the biz: “canonical issues.” What that means is that you have multiple urls that will resolve to the home page.

You have canonical issues if:

You can type in your domain name with or without “www” and one or the other does not 301 redirect to the other. Only one version should actually exist. Akron Canton Airport does this correctly. If you go to http://akroncantonairport.com/ it automatically redirects to http://www.akroncantonairport.com/
You can go to

yourdomain.com/index.html
yourdomain.com/
One should 301 redirect to the other.

You can have multiple urls that have the same content. But if you do, Google wants you to use the rel=”canonical” tag. It’s not light reading. But there is more information on that here: About rel=”canonical” – Webmaster Tools Help

Some of you have a redirect to a long url when someone types in your domain. I’ll use Albany as an example (you are not alone Albany, you just were “A” in my list of sites). When you go to: http://www.albint.com it automatically redirects to http://www.albint.com/pages/default.aspx

You are redirecting to this perfectly (and you have redirected the non-www version of your site perfectly to the www version). It is a 301 permanent redirect. However, you are potentially going to have problems down the road, from a link perspective, if you decide to change from the .aspx server format. People will not be linking to your root domain: http://www.albint.com but instead will be linking to the longer url: http://www.albint.com/pages/default.aspx

Ideally, I would like to see http://www.albint.com/pages/default.aspx 301 redirected to http://www.albint.com. Then no matter what changes you do down the road, from an architecture standpoint, you will be covered.

I know why this redirect is happening. But I also know that it doesn’t have to happen.

Urls tell a story. They are an address. There is a reason we don’t give longitude and latitude coordinates to people who have never been to our home.

This is an airport address: 38.692686,-121.587941. But I don’t think there is a human on earth that could tell you that it is actually here:

6900 Airport Blvd.Sacramento, CA, 95837 – That address tells a story.

This address is an airline: http://www.nashintl.com/airlines/default.aspx?airline=3

But I suspect not even the designer of the site knows which airline it is. An ideal url would be: http://www.nashintl.com/airlines/american-eagle

Please notice I have not added a file extension like html, php, aspx, etc. By making your urls platform agnostic you can easily move between content management systems and no one will ever know. You’ll never have to change your urls.

That was longer than I anticipated. So I’m going to stop there today.

Next time we will talk about what I found from a social media perspective.

Filed Under: Featured

April 11, 2012 By Sage Lewis 1 Comment

Web Presences For Top 100 U.S. Airports

Jay Labelle liked this post

This entry is part 3 of 17 in the series Airport Marketing Series

I was curious to understand the online status of the major airports in the U.S.

So, because I don’t have a life, I’ve been cataloging the:

Top 100 U.S. Airport Web sites
Top 100 U.S. Airport Facebook pages
Top 100 U.S. Airport Twitter accounts
Top 100 U.S. Airport YouTube accounts
Top 100 U.S. Airport Google Plus accounts
Top 100 U.S. Airport Google Places

Actually, it was a pretty interesting process. It’s given me a lot of things to talk about as we move through Airport Marketing Month here at the SageRock blog.

I have collected a bunch of notes from the process. But we’ll get to all that later.

I thought I’d just publish my results in this post. Then we’ll dig into everything I found as we move along.

Because there is a bunch of data here, I have put the results in a Google Docs Spreadsheet.

You can click here to get the complete data I found for the Web presences of the top 100 U.S. airports.

Here are some things to be aware of:

I searched for a Twitter account and Facebook Page for each airport if there wasn’t one listed on the main site. But I didn’t search for a Google+ page or YouTube account. So, if you have a Google+ page or YouTube account and I missed it just let me know.

If I linked to the wrong anything (site, Twitter, etc) just let me know. I’ll gladly update my listings

I got the top 100 airports from this list. I have organized the airports alphabetically by airport code, not size. I don’t have any size data in my list. But if you are not on the list and you are close to being in the top 100 U.S. airports please let me know. I will gladly list you.

That’s all I’m going to say about the data today. I’ll start going through my findings in the next few days.

If you have any questions or comments just let me know in the comments below.

Filed Under: Featured

April 10, 2012 By Sage Lewis 1 Comment

Why Marketing Your Airport Matters

This entry is part 2 of 17 in the series Airport Marketing Series

This very well might be an obvious question. But there are possibly some aspects to this that you haven’t considered.

First, all businesses need to understand that we are living in a very turbulent time for business. So many of the rules of business have changed:

Mite no longer makes right. The small guy and even the single customer can significantly eat into a large brand’s market-share. Social media and Google are primarily responsible for that change.
Consumers are open to anything and everything. Airbnb is a compelling alternative to standard hotels. And Megabus is a cheap express travel solution. I have a friend who often will travel from upstate New York to southern Ohio by finding a ride on Craigslist. It’s possible you might think these are distasteful solutions. But I assure you, many people would disagree with you. Your competition is no longer just another airport. It is buses, trains and individuals with a space in their car.
You can’t simply buy ad space on a couple TV stations and the major newspaper in your town and be done with it. Your customers are incredibly fragmented. They are on their smartphones and tablets. They are watching TV on Netflix and Hulu. They are spending a huge amount of time on Facebook, Twitter and now Pinterest. They are increasingly everywhere other than the places they used to be.
Consumers are fluid with their preferred channels of entertainment and information gathering. Pinterest is now considered the fastest site to 10 million users. Before that it was Google+. Instagram was just released for Android a few days ago. It reached 1 million users in 12 hours. Consumers “get” this stuff very quickly. You have to get it just as fast. They expect you to be there.

But while that’s all mind-blowing and dizzying, you actually have a larger problem: You have to compete for your own name!

Look at this:

I’ve done 3 random searches here for names of large airports. I’ve then pointed to all the advertisement that are not the airport.

It is perfectly acceptable for these people to be doing this.

Not one of these airports appears to be buying their own name… their most valuable branding asset. But as you can see, others are doing just that.

Above all else, you never want to lose a visitor that typed in your airport name. But I assure you it is happening all the time.

Companies that disregard all these Internet channels are losing money. There is always another company that is willing to be agile and fast to pick up the pieces you chose to disregard.

The good news is: None of this is as difficult as it all seems. We’ll move through all these different channels so you can start to put together your online marketing strategy for your airport.

See you next time!

Filed Under: Featured

April 9, 2012 By Sage Lewis 3 Comments

Airport Marketing Month

This entry is part 1 of 17 in the series Airport Marketing Series

Going on vacation often gives me some epiphanies.

I was just in Naples Florida spending time in that most amazing sun and warmth.

I think somewhere between Naples Beach:

and Tigertail Beach:

I had an idea! I’m going to try focusing on a specific industry for each month.

Most Internet marketing blogs and resource sites talk about marketing in general. But they don’t spend a lot of time helping people in specific industries. The information is very general.

So, I thought I’d give industry-specific content a spin.

Why I’m starting with Airport Marketing Month

The reason is pretty simple actually. I’ve got airports on my mind. Specifically, I’ve got the Akron Canton Airport on my mind. We work with CAK on paid search and search engine optimization. The marketing team at CAK is amazing. I feel unbelievably lucky that we get to work with them. They are smart and fun… a killer combination of ingredients that make for an amazing dish of awesomesauce.

My thought is that if they are so great to work with maybe there’s another airport out there somewhere that would be great to work with. Plus, all the SageRock heads are in the airport mindset.

But if nothing else, you should get a ton of information here as we explore the world on online airport marketing.

Here’s how it will work:

All month long the content here on the SageRock blog will be all about Airport Marketing. I’m envisioning we will discuss things like:

Airport key phrase research.
Airport paid search analysis.
Airport organic search engine optimization analysis.
Airport social media analysis.
How airports can use various analytics tools to measure success.
And stuff like that.

But here’s the thing: because I’m dedicating this month to airports, I’m more than happy to go in any direction you all would like. If you have a topic you would like to discuss just let me know in the comments of any of the posts. Or send me a message in the Contact Us page (in the top navigation). This month is all about you, airports!

I write this blog on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So you will want to check back here on those days. But I’m going to start trying to write more. My goal is to try to write something (even just a little something) 5 days a week.

I also encourage you to sign up for the SageRock Informational Newsletter. I send out notifications of free webinars, classes and that sort of thing in that newsletter. It is a primary way I let people know what new content is coming up.

I also am a big Twitterer. I post information and SageRock news there. You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/sagerock

There will also be a series of all these posts that you can follow. Those should be found at the top of each post in the airport marketing series.

So… we’ll see how this goes. If it goes well I’ll try another industry next month.

And as always, I’m very influenced by what you want. If you have ideas just let me know somewhere, somehow.

I think that’s enough for today. I’ll say this: I’m in the writey mood. I’m probably going to write another post right after this one and publish it tomorrow, Tuesday. You might want to check back tomorrow for the first step in our airport marketing analysis.

Filed Under: Featured

April 6, 2012 By Sage Lewis 1 Comment

SMB Owners: Leave your company

Susanne Bailey Svette, DL Meckes liked this post

I’ve spent the week in Naples Florida with my family.

85 degrees and sunny in April is a foreign concept to my Northern Ohio sensibilities.

My mind is mushy and relaxed. I could really use some more time feeling like this.

But school starts on Monday for my kid. So we have to head back.

I never can see my company and my role in it as I do when I’m away from it all. Going back to work feels like I’m entering battle again. If my strategy isn’t clear in my head before I go back in I lose all that perspective I gained while away.

When I go back in all I do is work the plan. Changing the plan mid-stream is risky. I’m only seeing trees. I can’t see the forest.

As an owner of a small company I often feel guilty about leaving for vacation. But the reality is: It’s crucial to the entire organization’s success.

I recommend leaving regularly. Not only is it good for you as an owner, it’s good for your team. It’s empowering.

Don’t be afraid to leave: it might actually be the best thing for you and your company.

Filed Under: Featured, Small Business

April 5, 2012 By Clayton Curtis 2 Comments

How to Tighten Your Sales Funnel With Form Intelligence

This is a guest post from Clayton Curtis.

I have the distinct pleasure of running several lead-generation websites. If you’ve ever launched or worked on one you know what a pain it can be to make sense of the visitor flow and conversions, especially if you’re continually launching content optimized for long tail search terms. These landing pages can really pile up and it’s important to identify what converts and what doesn’t. It’s impossible to adjust your strategy unless you have a deep understanding of where your leads are coming from. Yes, you can set up goals in Google Analytics but there is an easier and more practical method to asses landing pages: form intelligence.

Forms Are the Heart of the Lead Process

I love forms. Despite exhaustive studies proving their importance it’s still an underrated topic in web marketing. While design teams spend hours tweaking pixels and conducting focus groups the programmer slugs away just to get the forms working right. In reality, the UI designer and programmer are the ones who should work closely with focus groups. If you’re like me though and don’t have an astronomical budget to hire UI designers then a simple solution is FormStack, an online form builder that requires no knowledge of coding. You can set conditional statements, create web hooks for rerouting, and build out as many fields as you want just by using an easy drag and drop interface. An extremely useful feature is the ability to pickup the “referring URL” by using a hidden form field.

The Referring URL Tells All

Upon each form submission, I receive a custom email telling me all of the submitted details along with the original page the customer trickled in from. There are several ways to receive this information:

Email: Instantly when the form is filled out. You get all of the relevant information.
RSS: You can set up an RSS feed that you can receive on your phone, in Google Reader, or a program of your choice.
Google Docs: Setup a spreadsheet that all of the information gets parsed into. This is useful if you like to define specific data sets and/or work extensively with spreadsheets.
CRM Integration: My client has several salespeople who start the process as soon as it gets into SalesForce. In the FormStack admin area, it’s easy to map corresponding fields to the ones you see in SalesForce.

Being able to see how each customer (conversion) got to your main form is incredibly useful for salespeople as well. Along with the other passed along form information, a salesperson can use the referring URL to better understand what the customer was originally looking for. For example: say that you have a website that sells/promotes your tree removal services and you cover a certain geographical area I.E.-Atlanta. You setup several geo-specific landing pages for the areas that you cover: “Tree Removal Service Decatur”, “Tree Removal Service in Marietta” (suburbs of Atlanta) etc. or you offer different kinds of tree removal: “Tree Stump Removal”, “Emergency Tree Removal” etc. If a customer comes in through one of these landing pages a salesperson will be able to identify what they’re looking for and prepare themselves better for the sales call.

Identifying Choke Points

Another important aspect in understanding visitor behavior is finding out what stops people from filling out the lead form. With FormStack you are able to identify “choke points”, areas in the process where people bounce away. Example: One of my clients has a fairly extensive lead form that aims to capture not only basic contact information, but also the visitors health history. One of the *required fields was the applicants height and body weight. After a month of data collection I quickly realized that people were hesitant to give us their weight. The “abandonment rate” at the weight field was a staggering 32%. We were losing nearly a third of all form visitors because people weren’t comfortable with this inquiry. It didn’t take a lot of convincing for my client to give me the go ahead to make the weight field un-required. Upon doing this we saw a dramatic rise in conversions. The form abandonment rate went down by 15%.

Focus On The Engine

You can SEO and promote your site ’till your blue in the face but if your visitors aren’t converting your efforts will be in vain. So many marketers spend a lopsided amount of time trying to increase daily “hits” when they should be focusing on the product (website) itself. Aside from heat mapping software and focus groups, form analytics is a great way to gauge customer interaction and expectations. Understanding your form process if paramount to assessing the overall performance of your site. Using third-party software to collect data not only alleviates bandwidth and performance problems but also helps you get people to click the almighty submit button.

Filed Under: Featured, SEO Tagged With: clayton curtis, form intelligence