BusinessBruce.comSep
2
Marketing has a wide plethora of mediums in today’s area, but if you are a web-based company, you will probably be focusing on website visits as a major source of incoming leads.
Two key metrics for any company that makes a majority of its revenue from a webpage are:
1. Unique Homepage Visits
This will result from three main areas: Pay-Per-Click, SEO, and Affiliate Sites. Obviously, you want this to be a high number, and also very importantly, a number with strong growth.
a. Pay-Per-Click aka PPC
Vital statistics are Click Through Rate, Conversion Rate, Cost per Converison.
b. Search Engine Optimization aka SEO
Vital statistics are # of 1st page rankings, # of #1 keywords, # top 5 keywords, # inbound links, Google PageRank.
c. Affiliate Sites
# of Affiliates per Month (growth rate), $ generated from affiliates.
2.Visitor : Conversion ratio.
This is currently the golden chalice of web-based business. Back in the day (Web 1.0) , one could just drive traffic to a site to have it valuable. These days, getting traffic is easy - it is converting them that requires some analysis and thought.
The difficult thing with conversion ratio, is that it is a much more analog statistic, due to the element of human psychology and cognitive science. With the homepage visits statistic, it is quite digital - the more sites you have driving traffic to yours, the more your number goes up. With conversion ratio, it will largely depend on continual testing for your demographic. So far, I have found the following statistics to contribute to the ratio:
a. Pages per Visit.
The more pages your visitors see, the more they’re likely to find something they want and provide a conversion for you. The trick here is getting them to look at the greatest number of pages possible. Critical elements to make sure are finely honed are the site navigation system and the search system.
b. Average time spent on Site.
The more time a visitor spends on your site, the more likely something has captured and engaged them. Critical elements to make sure are finely honed are the page layout, content, and marketing material. In this Web 2.0 age, the clean design and site interactivity all contribute in this area.
If every visitor that comes to your site spends a lot of time on each page and is reading through several pages, it’s safe to say you’ve engaged their attention. The more of somebody’s attention you can capture, the easier it will be to close them, whch brings me to another key Visitor:Conversion contributor.
c. Cart Abandonment Rate / Page Bounce Rate
This is when you’re in the process of closing the visitor lead. Critical elements are similar to Average Time Spent on Site, except in this stage you’re in less of an informative mode vs a reassuring mode. Just like when you’re going to buy a new TV - you first look at a TV and think about what you want, then as you’re about to make your purchase, you want it to be as easy, and reassuring as possible that you’ve made the right decision. If this number is high despite an engaged visitor (indicated buy high pages per visit and average time spent on site), something is scaring off the visitor.
High Visits + High Conversion Ratio = Lots of Money Creation! Of course, marketing may generate the money, sales may capture it, but it is up to operations to keep it, which is the topic of another discussion.
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Good write up. Application of social bookmarking and Social Media Optimization or “SMO” marketing work very well to drive traffic to a website.