Know What You Know

The Direct Marketing Association released their "Web Analytics Report" this week.  The survey of marketers overwhelmingly rated web metrics as the most important key to campaign evaluation, scoring 5.8 out of a possible 7.0.

Duh!  At the very least, and for most SMBs, having minimal website metrics is a crucial aspect of evaluating website performance.  You should know how many unique visitors your site gets and how many pages they look at, at the very least.  If you use landing or squeeze pages as a destination for any on or off-line marketing, knowing how many visitors landed there help measure a campaign’s effectiveness.  Then knowing your conversion rate, or how many people bought something, registered, donated, etc, you can make some decisions about improving performance.

Monitoring certain metrics ratios is important for tweaking campaigns, assessing marketing initiatives and budgets or determining when something has run it’s course.  For instance, if you want to double the results of a campaign, it might be as easy as doubling the efforts and budget of a certain marketing initiative.  To operate more profitably, you’d want to assess which campaigns have a higher cost-per-customer-acquisition and eliminate or cut back on it.

None of this can be done without web metrics.

We once had a customer who brokered golf course real estate.  He talked
about having placed ads in a popular golf magazine.  I told him that I
could probably tell him when the ads ran based on traffic reports for
his website.  He was surprised when I told him that it appeared that
the ads ran about the 15th of the month in September, October and
November.  He had purchased ads in September and October and the
magazine had run a smaller make-good ad in November for a minor mistake
in the initial ad.  Not surprisingly, the number of visits for the
first 2 ads was bigger than for the third smaller ad, but to measure
the overall visits to his website over and above his "normal" traffic
gave him an idea of how well his marketing dollars were being spent.
Later, he placed similar ads in a different magazine and measured his
results with the first publication.  The lower cost ads resulted in higher traffic, which resulted in lower a cost-per-prospect.  That’s the sort of benefit you get from a very simple analysis of web metrics.

We’ll take a look at some of the kinds of information you can get from website metrics in an upcoming post.

Two Words for You

An online article says most people (31.9%) searching for information in search engines use two words in their query.  An Amsterdam-based analytics study shows that 3 words are used in searches 27% of the time.  One and four word searches each account for about 15% of search engine queries.

It has only been in the last year or so that searchers began using more than one term.  The use of multiple terms indicates that users are learning how to narrow their searches.  Online marketers can use this information when developing keyword and phrases lists.

Be The Master of Your Domain

This information is presented on a Need To Know basis.

That means you.  This is important.

One of the first things you need to accomplish when developing a website is make sure you own and control the site’s domain name.  Domain names are registered online and very often the person who registers the domain name is listed as the owner and is the one who ultimately controls the name.  Domain name owners control where the website can be hosted and where the associated email is set up. (Make sure you have access to add or delete email addresses too!)  Hosting and email settings are set up and modified where the site is registered and you want to make sure that you have access to the domain and its settings and that it can’t be taken away from you by a web designer or ISP.

Do not allow your web designer or website hosting company to own the domain.  If you get into a dispute or the company fails, you’ll be hard pressed to gain access to your domain.  ALWAYS make sure that you are the Registered Owner.

There are usually several contacts associated with a domain.  Site owners should be aware of at least 2 of them: Administrative Contact and Billing Contact.  Administrative contacts have the power to change overall account settings.  Make sure you  are listed along with your correct email address.   Billing Contacts receive the domain renewal notices.  This is important so as not to have your domain registration lapse.

We also recommend that at least one of the contact emails for the domain NOT be connected to the domain.  If for some reason you need to acknowledge a transfer and the site or email is down, you’ll have a difficult time doing so.  So use a personal email (or other domain) address as one of the contact emails.  We’ve seen cases where a site goes down because the  the web host or ISP has gone out of business, making it virtually impossible to manage the domain.  Sometimes you can obtain control  offline if you are the Registrant.  But, it can be time-consuming to send and/or fax the appropriate letters and documents to transfer a domain, so having a couple of ways to access your account online is important.

Want to register or transfer a domain as safely and easily as possible?  Click here.

Speaking of service interruptions, our next Need To Know will address maintaining access to your website’s files.