Blue Tent Marketing

IV. Right Metrics

Many presenters mentioned Google Analytics best practices–establishing goal pages, funnels and measuring conversions. Almost every presenter said stop worrying about eyeballs (total visitors, for instance) and start worrying about conversions. They went so far as to say a drop in total visitors could be a good thing if it happens in conjunction with an increase in conversions. Why? How could this be true? For example, ACME Vacation Lodging–having paid more attention to it’s referral pages than it’s total page visitors levels–finds many of its vacation lodging customers are coming from the Mobissimo and Kayak.com vertical search engines (see V. Changing User Search Patterns below). ACME reduces it’s Google Ad Words paid search for certain non-specific, underperforming terms and allots budget to advertising on these travel portals. Suddenly they’re pulling in more qualified traffic, if less ovearll traffic. As users become more focused and savvy on the web they’ll spend less time messing around and more time performing transactions. If you want to be on the receiving end of these transactions it’s essential to drive potential buyers to your site not confused “bait and switch” victims. If you sell real estate, for example, you want users coming to your site who might be capable of buying real estate in your area–not users looking for local trail information that you happen to provide on local hiking they found through Google. This means targeted banner ads, blogs, links for industry specific sites, and the accuracy of your search terms are crucial. These are the filtering mechanism that turns eyeballs into leads before a user ever hits your home page. Your competitors are still staring agog at their overall visitor fluctuations and wondering what astrological forces are acting on their web users. Get precise. Dig down into your analytics and think like a user. Most important, consult experts and have a search strategy. A search strategy is not, “we spend $1000 a month on Google adwords.” That’s so two years ago!

V. Changing User Search Patterns

User search patterns are changing. Users are using more sophisticated search terminology and even operators such as “+” and “!” operators in their searches. They are more transaction oriented. And they’re more likely to try to guess a url or look for you on an industry-specific site. Don’t get me wrong, the big four search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask are still key. It’s important to compete in these arenas on both the organic and paid search fronts.

And even that’s gotten more complicated. The Internet is vast. A recent study of the major search engines showed that the overlap between top ten results across multiple search engines for the same term was about 9%. That’s a staggering statistic. It means that only about 1 in 10 of the results a users gets in the top ten on Google for a search term will appear in the same group of results on Yahoo or Ask. (GRATUITOUS MARKETING TIP: If you’re doing well on Google organically for your key terms, considering spending your pay-per-click) budget on Yahoo, ASK or MSN.

In addition, the advent of Google Analytics has shown that many users are finding Vertical Search portals on their searches and then using those portals to find a particular vendor. Shoppers might be finding you through shopping.net or shopzilla, travelers through Mobissimo or Kayak, B to B customers through KnowledgeStorm or Business.com–you get the picture. Consider finding out the best Vertical Search Engines for your market and devoting a real budget to advertising there. Spend at least $1,000 or call the specialized search firm and ask for their recommendations. They may drive less traffic overall, but it will be more qualified traffic. And again (see Right Metrics above), measure success based on total number of sales or leads, not overall traffic figures.

One final piece of advice, don’t rob Peter to pay Paul. The Internet is playing an increasing role in business and requires additional budget. Don’t plunder your pay-per-click budgets on the big four to fund your forays into Vertical Search. The more paths available for users to find you the better. I often hear users wondering if they should change their home page because they’re seeing fewer unique visitors. Likely it has nothing to do with their home page and much more to do with the competitiveness of their search strategies and offline marketing efforts. The way you drive users to your site and qualify those users is as important as having the best site in your vertical.�

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.