Traditional Marketers Shocked - Actual Data Exists
by Ross R. Lasley
Lately I've been speaking to a number of really excellent sales and marketing people - most of them are pretty stumped by web data. I hope I am not reaching out and offending folks in the industry but I'd like to make a sweeping conclusion if I may - these people have been trained to make a best guess. It simply isn't possible to know how many people looked at an ad they placed in Newsweek, how much time those people spent staring out, how many of them cut it out and put it on the fridge - all they know is how many people actually bought the product. Most of the time they don't know if it was the ad in Newsweek that had any impact, it could have been the one in USA Today - all they know is that sales are up or down.
Don't get me wrong, stumbling around in the dark like this is hard work - there are strategies, focus groups, all sorts of ways to get better with the ads and the results. No matter what they do, traditional media just can't be measured like the Internet.
Last month 3,506 people went to kisscomputing.com. I have info on what day they came, what hour they came, what pages they visited, what search engine they used to find our site, what words they typed in to that search engine, what pages on our site they visited, what pages they left the site from, what country they live in, what kind of computer they have, what web browser they are using, what screen resolution the monitor is set to, if they came back and when - the list goes on and on. (note: if your site is hosted with KISS you have all this data too)
When confronted with this much detailed information on what is working and what isn't, traditional marketers hit a brick wall - they really have no idea what to do next. This level of feedback usually ends up being considered a problem - leading to no action based on web site statistics - the worst case scenario. It is often difficult to boil the information down in to the few things most business owners want to know:
- How Many People Came
- Where Did they Come From
- What Did they Do When they Got to my Site
If you ignore all of the other intricacies of web site stats and just focus on these few pieces of info it becomes much easier to make conclusions. More people came to KISS last month than the month before - good. People came from a wide array of sources but the effort we put in to particular search engines was worth it - excellent. People love our packages but still seem kind of confused on how to order a custom website (the vast majority of what we do) - not so good. We had a decent conversion % (number of people who showed up divided by number of people who buy = conversion), and made some solid sales from those leads - kind of the whole point.
So I don't need to increase my web marketing efforts this instant, as I am not looking to make lots more sales in March than we did in February. We'll probably stick with the search engine strategy for this month - the results are there and the action seems solid. Some content improvements are always in the works but they've become more important as people don't seem to be getting to the custom design end of things. I'm happy with the conversion rate and if visitation holds at the same levels sales in March will be excellent.
Now we are making sense to traditional marketers again - this sort of 'conclusion blurb' is just the kind of thing they are used to. It generally comes as the result of expensive focus group studies, lots of industry knowledge, and whatever sort of special techniques they have that make them good at what they do.
When it comes to web site stats keep your eye on the ball - focus on the simple things that can lead to direct action.
Help Making Conclusions
Vacation News
It was a great pleasure for Ross & Amy to recently take some time off and head down to the west coast of Florida. We both caught fish. As you might imagine - some debate has emerged as to who caught the better fish or who was better at catching fish. We have decided to turn to you, and give you the evidence to judge for yourself.
 
Amy is displayed with a very tasty trout and Ross is shown with a delicious snook.
The guy with the business end of both fish is Captain Van Hubbard - our most excellent guide.
Captain Van's Website
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Wednesday, April 9th - 10:00 AM -
""Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Search Engines"
This is one of our most eye-opening seminars. The hour long, in depth seminar will answer a number of questions you might have regarding not only the cents (sense) of using search engines to expand your business, but how to do it.
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