2003 Web Site Marketing
The Year To Turn Traffic Into Sales

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

The holidays are over and it's time to look at a fresh new year for your business. Perhaps 2003 has inspired me over-generalize, but I am sensing a new era in web site marketing. OK, "Era" is a strong word because the trend I'm outlining is already an important and prevalent part of the industry. But I am noticing that this trend is finally being recognized as necessity by website owners. The trend is the careful practice of web log analysis and the use of that data to improve site usability.

Back in the days of yore (97-98), websites were designed and savvy businesses went to designers demanding marketing solutions to draw in traffic - AKA: "Pretty site. Now how do I get people to see it?" Now those savvy businesses are posing a new question, this time to their marketers: "Nice Traffic. Now how do I get decent leads and sales?"

Two years ago, web marketers could get away with saying: "We can lead a horse to water, but we can't make him drink your badly branded product from your non-user-friendly website." But in this day and age, decent web marketers have to offer clients more accountability than that - they have to offer clients the tools and services to help them read their web logs and understand what traffic patterns tell them about their website, products, and marketing efforts.

Traffic will be plentiful and qualified if:
1) The marketer does their job properly (such as proper key phrase research [FYI: that goes beyond using the Overture traffic count and bid tool], non spam SEO, etc.)
2) The client is willing to spend the web site marketing money needed to appear on their industry's online radar screen.

And, if these steps are followed and the traffic is qualified and plentiful, then bad lead/sales conversions are unacceptable. But the next step is not cursing the web marketer and throwing in the towel on Internet revenue. Far from it. It's simply time to get down to serious work.

Generating traffic is the first part of a three-part equation. The second part is properly setting up the logs for analysis, properly analyzing those logs, and effectively charting what you analyze. If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. But like all things in this industry, it can be done on many levels from intuitive to intensely detailed. We wouldn't necessarily endorse the "intuitive" method over the most aggressively detailed, but we would endorse doing it on some level, and if a business is not analyzing logs at all, then intuitive analysis is a decent enough place to start.

By "intuitive," we mean looking at the site logs provided by your server and knowing details of your marketing, how many unique visitors come to the site monthly, how many pages those visitors see, common paths through the site, and how leads and sales figures generally relate to traffic stats. For example, knowing that October 2002 was the month you upped the Overture budget, the second best month for traffic that year, the best month for page view per visitor, the month where the most visitors reached the "contact us" page, and the best month for email or phone leads. That's pretty basic and an example of the Minimum that a business should know about their site.

From there the detail level can increase ad nauseam. As an example, the business has installed stat software that allows for the most detailed analysis, is using cookies, and has tagged each unique web site marketing effort with a url source code, special email, and special contact phone. Now they know that October 2002 was the second best month for traffic that year and 12% of new traffic was traced back to upping the Overture budget. But the surprising generator of new traffic, at 78%, was the newly gained #2 spot in Google for their most popular qualified key phrase. The balance 10% of traffic increase was actually repeating traffic from visitors that first came to the site mostly between Aug. and Sept. that year. And as it turned out, this new Google traffic is twice as likely to call and email after reaching the contact page as opposed to the Overture traffic. And, after calling or emailing, is three times as likely to buy product compared to the Overture traffic. If your head is spinning, don't worry. There aren't many companies drilling down to this level. But they should be. And they will in time.

If you want to feel a bit dizzier, consider this - we haven't even looked into step three, which is tweaking the design of the site, the brand presentation, the online product offering, and the web marketing plan based on web log findings. But we imagine you can see how these kinds of stats would make design and web marketing budget/plan decisions much more simple, clear-cut, and effective. In our second example, that client clearly should look into cutting back on Overture and allocating that money to optimizing pages for Google or increasing their investment in the Google Ad Words program.

So, if your sales aren't what you think they should be, and you don't have anyone even glancing at your logs, it's time to wake up and get accountable. And if you don't have the time, then I'm sure your web marketing company would be happy to help you. And if they tell you they generate traffic, not sales, then call us.