Thursday, September 6, 2007
There are a lot of misconceptions regarding website traffic. Tracking visitors is often done with many different yardsticks, which vary tremendously from person to person and site to site, not to mention from marketing effort to marketing effort. However, these differences can often be quite misleading, especially for the would-be advertiser and aspiring Internet marketer. And today there is far more involved in the process than that to which most would tend to give credence. So how does one make sense of it all?
The web is evolving at breakneck speeds along with the way we measure it. First, it is not enough to know how many hits, clickthroughs, or unique visitors a site receives. For instance, banner ads that draw a lot of clicks are no longer considered important -- at least not as important as those from which these clicks are translatable into sales. What's important is the quality of those clicks -- or the number of qualified "interactive visitors" a site receives.
A case in point is an interesting article published in a recent issue of Business 2.0. Titled "Web Metrics," Steven Vonder Haar provides some fascinating insights into the erroneous perceptions of Internet traffic. He points out that the most common one is the fact that hits were and still are considered as the measurement of choice. However, with the Internet population exploding along with the dramatic increase of online business competition, added to the fact that netizens are now drowning in an impetuous sea of promotional messages, traffic measurement has significantly evolved.
According to Vonder Haar, "Some banners that draw downright horrible click numbers can actually wind up with more sales than vague online ad messages that get users to click but not buy." Rosa Aguilar, a news anchor at C|Net Radio, concurs. As she explained in a recent piece on "Banner Blindness," "While statistics have shown that click-rates overall are decreasing, clickthroughs are however becoming higher in quality."
In essence, visitors are no longer measured by quantity but by their quality. Although traffic has been long touted to be the key to Internet marketing success, today that's no longer true. What's more important is the conversion rate. In other words, today's Internet marketer must focus more on the percentage of curious browsers that turn into serious, long-term buyers.
Consequently, basing one's website traffic upon mere hits is really a "hit and miss" approach -- and definitely no longer enough. According to Vonder Haar, "Once users click, you want to know where they go." And that's what needs to be measured. Less than five years ago for instance, hits, pageviews, and clickthroughs were the popular measure of website activity. But today the tracking process has shifted to include audience activity and behavior.
In other words, webmasters are slowly realizing the importance of isolating the more important interested prospect who is looking at developing a relationship from the typical surfer. And subsequently, they are realizing the necessity in tracking their visitors' level of interest, loyalty, and activity. Simply put, all pageviews and clickthroughs are not created equal.
For example, if one website is geared toward financial investments and has 1,000 visitors, that number can be made up of teenagers looking for the latest gimmick versus prospective investors requesting stock quotes for a $10,000 trade. Thus, the goal is not to simply advertise but "to reach those would-be investors," illustrates Vonder Haar in his eye-opening article.
It is no longer important to advertise anywhere and everywhere but to advertise in specific places where targeted, prospective, long-term customers are -- that's the key. The successful Internet marketer's bottom-line is to get the biggest bang for every marketing dollar -- let alone every effort -- invested. If you're only counting the number of hits your site receives as well as the number of eyeballs in front of which your site or ad appears, and not the quality of the people behind them, you're wasting both money and energy.
Niche marketing is the latest buzzword -- and with reason. People are now drowning in information. And their resources, including this rare commodity called "time," have been cut extremely short. Therefore, finding a site that caters to specific needs or to a specific group is vastly more efficient than having to search the entire Internet. And consequently, focusing, targeting, qualifying, converting website visitors into customers and developing relationships are now essential to the traffic measurement process.
Here's a mini-lexicon of website traffic terms, including a quick look at the evolution and new methods of website metrics:
1) Hits
Hits are pieces of data (or files) requested from a web host's server. However, this primitive measurement includes not only the web page but also every other file that makes it possible (such as graphics, plug-ins, scripts, text files, style sheets, and so on). In other words, a single web page can easily translate into multiple hits. When one says that one has received over 1,000 hits, that could very well mean that the site received only 100 actual visitors.
2) Pageviews
Similar to hits, pageviews are files requested from the server but are limited to the web pages themselves (i.e., HTM or HTML files, or Hyper Text Markup Language files). While a little more concrete than hits, pageviews do not give specific information about surfers or their behavior -- as, for example, the length of time that they remained on a specific page.
3) Clickthroughs
Clickthroughs are the number of clicks (or responses) to an online advertisement -- often the measurement of choice for online advertisers. Again, while it's definitely a better measurement than the previous two, clicks do not provide in and of themselves enough information regarding the quality, the subsequent activity, as well as the level of interest of the people responding.
4) Unique Visitors
Unique visitors are tracked not according to the files they have requested but by their unique IP (or "Internet Protocol") addresses, which are much like online fingerprints (e.g., 24.112.98.21). However, not only does this process fail to include specific data about the visitors but it can also be very misleading. For example, many Internet service providers use DHCP (or "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol") -- like AOL, WebTV, and cable modem providers. DHCP uses a different IP address for every file requested, thus making one visitor look like many. In other words, a single IP address may not necessarily reflect a single and truly "unique" visitor.
5) Reach
A site is said to have a certain reach, which is the percentage of visitors randomly surveyed that have visited a specific page in a given month. Similar to the TV's Neilsen ratings, this measurement is very broad and nonspecific. It is purely a estimate and not a measurement. If 50% of randomly sampled netizens have visited a specific page for example, the site is then said to have a 50% reach. It is much like a poll where the numbers are extrapolated and speculative. This vague measurement, however, is often used as a tool for selling advertising space, particularly with the larger portal sites.
6) Interactive Visitors -- The New Breed
This is the type of website traffic in which surfers are measured multifariously to determine their quality and not just their quantity, which at the same time helps to measure the quality of one's marketing efforts. Elements such as length of stay, conversation rates, registrations, subscribers, repeat visits, referrals made, and so on are now part of the tracking process.
Interactive visitors give better clues to their demographic data as well as a site's return on investment. Items tracked include visitor loyalty, site behavior, and online registrations (such as with ezines and contests). While defining specific tactics on how to increase the number of interactive site visitors is far too complex, there are however two important key areas.
First, niche marketing is definitely at the top rung. As Ludwig Van Der Rohe once said, "Less is more." The more competitive the Internet becomes, the narrower your focus should be. And the more specialized your online business becomes, the more visitors let alone the more pre-qualified, loyal, long-term prospective customers your site will receive.
Second, you must enter into a relationship with your visitors. If you plan to increase your sales, you must provide your visitors a way to subscribe themselves to your mailing list -- be it an online community, an announcement list, a discussion board, a contest, or the commonest method, an ezine (newsletter). In essence, you have to start thinking in terms of being interactive with your visitors instead of merely being a silent billboard in cyberspace.
Website Planning Can be a Sticky Situation
"Failure to plan means planning to fail." -- Brian Tracy
There is no question that ecommerce is growing rapidly. From totally web-based to "clicks-and-mortar" companies (i.e., offline businesses with an online presence), everybody seems to be jumping onto the Internet bandwagon. The upcoming holiday season is purported if not feared to be one of the most busiest of all time. Online sales are exploding.
The reason for this incredible slope upwards is the fact that more and more people are going online. It was only recently that the number of online users was believed to grow to over 250 million by the year 2005. But according to recent NUA Surveys, the Internet demographic people, the latest numbers published in September of 1999 indicate that we're not too far off the mark already -- incredibly, with an 'net population now toppling the 200 million mark.
But are we ready? Maybe. But one thing is for sure -- many sites are definitely not prepared. Browsing the web one can easily notice that numerous sites have failed to follow some of the most basic principles of website design. Such storefronts may have great content, professional looks and good entertainment value. But if they are not making any sales...
Sergio Zyman, the former Marketing VP of Coca-Cola and author of the recent bestseller, "The End Of Marketing As We Know It," states that marketing's goal is simple -- so simple in fact that it is so easily ignored. Online, we see that problem all too often. As Zyman points out, the goal in marketing "is to sell more stuff to more people more often for more money."
Web marketing is not any different. The goal is also to get more people to visit a website (and to visit more often) and to get them to buy (and to buy more often). Undoubtedly, that is the number one key to success online. Agreeably, it is not as easy as some think -- and the Internet as well as my private site are testaments to that fact since they are replete with struggling marketers trying to get their wares off their virtual shelves.
So how does one get more visitors to buy more stuff more often?
Marketing is not just built on advertising and sales. Like Zyman points out, it's a symphony of carefully planned and implemented disciplines, strategies and tactics. While planning one's online marketing activities is a different and often more complex issue, simple website strategic planning is probably the most neglected of all web marketing strategies -- not too many webmasters consider website strategic planning as a marketing process in itself.
Strategically planning a website is not a simple issue either. To write about it within the confines of an article is virtually impossible. But to get you started, here are a some tips to guide you in creating an objective-centered website.
Web Storyboarding
Storyboarding is a planning technique used by many filmmakers. The object is to divide the movie into chunks. Producers place multiple sketched sheets on a large wall or corkboard. And each sheet depicts a specific scene in the movie -- including the characters that appear at that point in the film, what they do and say, and that particular scene's visuals and sounds. By looking at the entire storyboard, they can easily decide what exactly a user (or viewer, in this case) should see, know and feel with each scene.
In web storyboarding, designers can create a site chart (often called a "site map"), where each sheet represents a specific web page. But instead of using sheets, they design small boxes, which can be accomplished with most word processing or graphic design programs. Each box describes a specific web page and contains a summary of its content, layout, graphics and objectives -- thus giving each page a specific function within the whole site. Then arrows are drawn between boxes in order to trace specific user trajectories.
The end result looks similar to a flow chart where each box flows into another (or into many others). And arrows are in fact links between pages -- some arrows can be filled, dotted or dashed (the choice of which can represent different outcomes, such as primary trajectories, secondary ones, etc). One can strategically plan, with each box in the chart, what the user is supposed to see, understand and do, as well as where he or she should go next.
But some people prefer the larger, more visual approach used by cartoonists with their corkboards. Therefore, they take a series of "post-it" notes (those small, yellow pieces of sticky notes), write a brief summary of the page's content and purpose on each one, and place them on a wall. Once notes are created for every web page, the webmaster can then rearrange them, change them around, add some more and remove unneeded ones altogether.
Sticky notes can also be used to determine trajectories and user functions (by drawing arrows on additional notes that are placed between consecutive "web pages"). Alternatively, some like to stick their notes on a large bristol or dry erase board and, with a nonpermanent marker, draw the arrows between each note. The possibilities here are numerous and the technique can be adapted to fit one's style. In fact, let's look at some examples.
Going Up Or Down?
Generally, there are two ways to accomplish storyboarding -- and the choice relies solely upon a person's individual preference. One is called the "top-down" approach. A box or note is placed at the very top -- usually representing the index, splash or home page -- and others are subsequently placed below it for the rest of the site. In the end, the storyboard looks something like a pyramid; the deeper a user goes into a site the more content and choices one will be given (within the larger bottom layers of the pyramid, in other words).
The second technique is called the "build-up" approach -- the reverse of the top-down one. If the web designer already has several ideas for content and user outcomes, then he can start with the bottom. Multiple boxes are placed on the storyboard -- each one defining a specific idea or purpose (e.g., an order page, its subsequent confirmation page, an "about us" page, an ezine description page, a product showcase page, a special promotions page, a security and privacy policy page, an order form, and so on).
Boxes are then placed above them and act as pages from which some of the others stem -- some can also be placed below them to which others lead. Consequently, other layers in the storyboard either precede or support specific choices users make. Of course, some parts, layers or "legs" of the storyboard can end up being longer than others, such as those areas that lead to even deeper pages within the site offering more content or choices. But in the end, they all lead to the final page, which in reality is the first or entry page.
But site maps, arrows and user trajectories aside, the one thing to keep in mind in the whole process is the larger objective around which the entire site must focus. Before commencing any site, the designer must clearly determine the core objective of the site itself -- having it clearly defined from the beginning is vital. Afterwards, the key questions one should ask (and ask often), with each and every box (or sticky note) in the storyboard, are:
"What do I want my visitors to know here?"
"What do I want my visitors to do at this point?"
"What do I want my visitors to feel right now?"
And, "Where do I want my visitors to go next?"
Also, one should look at it from an all possible angles and perspectives. If a visitor ever landed on any given page within the site, will that person know where she is? Will that person know (and can easily choose) what she is supposed to do? And more importantly, will that person know where to go from there? Answers to all of the above will help not only in planning but also in developing content, writing web copy and improving site navigability.
Aside from having an objective in mind and working around it as specifically as possible, designers should also plan for contingencies. That is, they must look at all the possible trajectories and outcomes within the site. If a visitor decides to click into a different part of the site, it must be clear as to what they are supposed to learn and do, and where to go next.
Ultimately, webmasters should plan, plan, plan -- because, as it is often stated, a web business' greatest and most feared competitor is not another online company trying to wrestle for the lion's share of the market, but the potential yet confused shopper who cries out:
… "What am I supposed to do?"
Sticky Sites Rule The Internet
Read through the hundreds of forums and bulletin boards on the internet and you will find dozens of threads centering on the lack of web site traffic. All the other remaining threads bemoan the difficulty of getting visitors to return long enough to buy something. Then there are the threads about the complexity of getting listed and ranked well in important search engines.
All of these dilemmas have the same cure - CONTENT. Content that is pertinent to the subject of a website and updated regularly makes a site "sticky." Sticky sites drive and keep occupied all the visitors you could possibly handle. Search engines drink from the fountain of fresh and interesting content provided by savvy webmasters who enjoy increased rankings and sales.
You too can enjoy these benefits with just a little effort and a small budget if you create or find content appropriate to your topic. Add some or all of the following types of content to your site and your traffic will increase and visitors will return often.
Articles - There is no doubt that free reprint articles are the best way to populate websites. You can maximize the benefits of articles by writing them yourself or by offering a small fee to writers for customized versions of their popular articles.
Quotes - An interesting set of quotes on topic will help motivate and inspire visitors. Add and delete quotes regularly to keep your site fresh. Find quotes at http://www.annabelle.net/ and http://www.brainyquote.com/.
Puzzles - People love games and puzzles. Appeal to the child that exists inside all of your visitors and they will reward you with their time and attention. One place to get a new monthly puzzle is http://tinyurl.com/6spgk. Consider investing a small sum to have a custom crossword puzzle developed for your site.
Forums - Follow in the footsteps of successful websites by adding free forums to your site. Check out forum software at http://www.yabbforum.com/ and www.phpbb.com Ask loyal visitors to serve as moderators for specific topic threads.
Feedback/Guestbook - Allow visitors to ask questions or comment on an issue raised by your site or your blog. Make this information public (so long as it is in good taste) and searchable by visitors.
Reviews - Unbiased reviews are universally popular. Add reviews of books, software, hardware, scripts, movies, television shows, schools or spas to your site and visitors will return again and again.
Case Studies/Success Stories - Everyone loves a success story. Interview your best customers and add their stories to your website to bolster your credibility and satisfy your content needs. Be careful to make the success story interesting and motivational rather than commercial.
Jokes - A sense of humor is often lacking on the internet. Imagine how impressed you would be by an attorney who has such a good sense of humor that he keeps all the best attorney jokes on his website. Follow in the footsteps of that attorney and visitors will look forward to visiting your site.
Newsfeeds - Does your site cover a topic that frequently generates breaking news? Add current news to your site via feeds available at such websites as http://www.news4sites.com/services/index.php?t=sites and enjoy a higher rate of return visits from your readers.
Resource Directories - Instead of the usual reciprocal link campaign consider adding a resource directory to your site that actually points your visitors to valuable sites that complement your own. List only the sites you choose and do not incur search engine wrath by insisting upon reciprocal links. All links in the directory should open to a new browser window.
Newsletter & Archives - You don't have to recreate the wheel and attempt to create a huge list for your newsletter. Offer regular updates by e-mail or blog to current and potential clients and include links to pertinent articles or resources. Keep archives publicly accessible and search engines will visit often.
Blogs - Why should you jump on the current trend of blogging? Search engines adore blogs and visit them often because they tend to be updated frequently. You can use a blog to replace your e-mail newsletter and to feature your product or service reviews and other bits of pertinent information that do not merit a special e-mail to your customers.
Job Listings - Consider adding fresh job listings to your site that fit your topic. For instance, you could feature telecommuting jobs if your site topic is "work at home." Make sure you have the permission of the employer prior to posting their openings on your site.
Testimonials - Request testimonials form current and past clients and sprinkle them throughout your website. Remove outdated testimonials and add fresh ones on a regular basis. Give your clients live links (opening in a new browser window) to their website within the testimonial.
Please remember that you need permission to use content created by someone else and at all times follow the rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. You can read the full text of this law at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR:.
The internet was conceived as a method of sharing information with people around the world. If we all return to these roots by filling our websites with topic appropriate content then we will be rewarded by search engines. Forums complaining about the lack of website traffic will disappear and be replaced by recommendations of interesting websites to visit.
(c) 2005, Davis Virtual Assistance. All rights in all media reserved.
Bonnie Jo Davis is a Virtual Assistant and veteran article marketer. For your free e-book "Writing For Publicity" visit http://www.ArticleSubmissionSites.com today!
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