Online Brand Building By the Numbers

Guest Post: By Enzo F. Cesario

In the process of building your company’s online brand, you’re going to have to deal with a veritable ton of information. We have discussed how the practice of Web Analytics can quantify all manner of data such as number of users, the location of visitors, and changes over time, all intended to allow you to analyze your brand’s performance. However all the information in the world isn’t going to do your online marketing efforts a bit of good if you aren’t able to measure it against carefully chosen benchmarks of performance. In short, you need to identify your metrics.

What is a Metric?

Boiled down, a metric is some unit of measurement intended for you to compare current information to previous information, and to evaluate the difference in light of your goals. An example of a metric is the Conversion Rate, which is typically defined as the number of visitors who took a desired action divided by the total number of visitors in a given time period.

Metrics vs. Goals

It is important to understand the metric is not the goal itself, but rather the way to measure that goal. For example, visitor traffic numbers in a given month (quantity + time) is a metric. It is a unit of data that can be compared to other units. Trying to increase user traffic is a goal that can be evaluated for success by the use of metrics (i.e., if user traffic decreases from one month to the next, the goal has failed).

Setting Your Metrics

The keys to every metric are universal: quantity and time. Visitor rates per month, unique visitors per quarter, bandwidth use before and after an advertising campaign, each of these is based on a quantifiable measurement within a predetermined timeframe. The key is to have a piece of hard information that can be compared between two points.

In the online branding arena, there are numerous metrics you can choose to help evaluate your brand’s performance.

Usage statistics – Hard numbers that can be compared by date, user statistics are essential and vital. This category includes numbers of unique visitors, time spent viewing each page, how frequently certain videos are downloaded, and the like.

User Commentary – While this may seem a more qualitative category, there are actually several ways that user comments can be judged in mathematical terms as metrics. Evaluators can measure comment proportionality (percentage of positive, neutral, and negative commentary per product, for example). Including a rating system enhances this effort, as it allows comments to be summarized, reducing the time spent on reading and interpreting the text itself, if necessary.

Social Media Influence – Social Media venues are the newest and most efficient source of word of mouth press. Being linked through a popular blog or Facebook page can spike a brand’s visitor statistics overnight. In this case metrics can include the number of link-backs spread around various Social Media sites, or the popularity of a site’s own SM pages in various communities.

Timing is Everything

The Web is a place where time becomes downright bizarre. Companies start overnight and fold just as quickly, so the perception is that any changes have to be immediate and drastic. The problem is that this can be utterly counterproductive to good metric analysis. Metrics take time to properly analyze, and indeed are useless without the consideration of timing.

Consider a webpage that gets a total of twenty-one unique visitors. This doesn’t actually say anything in and of itself. Now, compare a page that gets twenty-one unique visitors per week, and one that gets twenty-one unique visitors per minute. Suddenly a comparison can be made. This is it the essence of metrics, comparison over time.

You must establish realistic time goals for your brand, so you can logically evaluate the impact of various decisions and procedures. To do otherwise is simply robbing yourself of any way to use the vital data you’re gathering properly.

Some sample time benchmarks include the obvious daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and quarterly periods. These should be examined in a before-versus-after context. For example there is Burger King’s quirky Ugoff campaign, which ran for a single summer in 2004. The metric in question would be the number of Burger King salads purchased before, during, and after the campaign.

A Parting Thought

It is important to remind yourself that a metric is not the goal. Just as importantly, remember that the metric is not the brand itself. Metrics are measurements. The brand is something that can be evaluated in the light of the metrics you choose, but the brand is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a thing distinct unto itself, the image of your organization that is presented as a combination of the actual quality of a product and peoples’ perceptions thereof.

Consider very carefully what exactly your brand is, and what you want the brand to be. Compare the two honestly and carefully, and you will find that the metrics you need to evaluate the success of your brand are actually quite easy to discern.

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Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand management specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat. We are social media consultants. Make your site more findable and your brand more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at http://www.iBrandCasting.com/

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MadViral online since 2005, MadViral Enterprises, LLC can help you market your business with Email Advertising, Professional Unique email design services

Online Brand Building By the Numbers

Is Your Website Springing a Leak?

Guest Post: By Philippa Gamse

Imagine that you own a beautifully designed yacht. It looks great on the surface of the water, with superb lines, gleaming decks, a well-appointed galley… but you’re having real trouble getting out of the harbor and you can’t figure out why!

You investigate, and you find that beneath the surface your beautiful boat has a number of slow, silent, leaks. None of them are big enough to sink you on their own, so there’s no obvious immediate crisis – just a constant drain on your efficiency and your speed.

I’ve been reviewing Web traffic reports for over 10 years, and I believe that this analogy applies very well to almost all business websites. Very few sites are so terrible or have something so wrong with them that they’re clearly a disaster. Yet just about every site has some area where it’s quietly losing traffic, losing potential business or the opportunity to create relationships – or failing to attract visitors in the first place.

If you’re not regularly reviewing your traffic analysis, you can’t know for sure if your site is leak proof. In this article, I’ll show you a few of the most common areas where you can look for – and fix – those silent leaks.

1. Leaks in your Brand & Positioning

The excellent folks at MarketingExperiments online research laboratories have shown that clearly articulated and differentiating value propositions have a critical effect on Website conversion rates. (The conversion rate is the measurement of visitors fulfilling your desired outcomes – which might include calling you, buying a product at your site, signing up for your newsletter or blog feed, etc.) Your value proposition should be front and center on your home page. It should answer the classic question: “Why should we do business with you instead of your competition?”

Although this question isn’t a Web strategy issue in itself, it is one that many people struggle to answer. But the lack of a compelling opening message can be a major impediment to your online success.

How to check for this leak: Even if they don’t enter your site at the home page, most visitors who don’t know you will go there as the second page they look at to find out more about you and your business. If visitors are taking a quick look at your home page and then immediately leaving, something is wrong. Your copy is failing to pique their curiosity or to answer their questions: “Can this company meet my needs?” and “Should I explore further?” You have a leak!

2. Leaks in Visitor Engagement

Popular theory says that you have 10 seconds to engage a visitor – i.e. convince them to stay on your site before they click away in search of something more interesting.

While I don’t believe that it’s quite that simple, there are some definite ways to get rid of visitors fast before they’ve had a chance to really check you out. The best of these is probably the infamous splash page – the entry page to your site that your Web designer persuaded you to have because it “does cool stuff”. Hopefully there’s a “Skip Intro” button somewhere on the page! In all my reviews of traffic reports I’ve seen a consistent leak of up to 30% of visitors leaving from this page alone – before they’ve ever seen who you are or what you offer.

How to check for this leak: Easy – look for the splash page in your traffic reports and see how many visitors exit at that point. If it’s more than a small percentage, you have a leak – take the page out today!

The other major area where you should watch for leaks in visitor engagement is in what are called “landing pages”. These are inside pages of your Website which turn out to be the first page that a visitor sees, usually because you have some well-indexed content that they’ve found in a search engine.

Here it’s absolutely critical to understand the visitor’s mindset. Each visitor is at your site looking for something specific, they may well have found you by accident, so they may have no idea who you are – and worse, no interest in you.

The first page that they see on your Website must engage them immediately in accordance with their needs, and it must have enough context to draw them into other areas, and to want to find out more about you. It’s not enough to give great information on this page – they’ll soak that up, and then leave.

How to check for this leak: Hopefully your traffic reports are sophisticated enough to show you which keywords bring visitors to each specific page of your site. This shows you each visitor’s “mindset”.

If visitors are leaving a page very quickly, then it probably isn’t satisfying their informational needs, so you should review the content.

If visitors are reading the page (your traffic reports should show the time spent at each page) and then leaving, you’ve given them what they wanted but failed to draw them into the rest of your site. This can be fixed with more compelling navigation and calls to action.

Either way, you have a leak!

3. Leaks in Directions & Outcomes

I’m constantly amazed by the number of Web pages that give great information and content – and then just end abruptly – perhaps with some navigation tabs if you’re lucky!

Steve Krug in his excellent book “Don’t Make Me Think!” describes how crucial it is to direct visitors to the next step that you want them to take. If you don’t do this, and rely on your visitors to figure this out for themselves, there’s a strong chance that they’ll make a different choice than the one you want – or they’ll leave your site altogether, creating leaks in your potential revenue stream.

Every page of your site needs strong calls to action that stand out visually and click directly to where the visitor can fulfill the outcome that you want (e.g. “buy now!”, “sign up for our newsletter / RSS feed”.) Pages can have more than one call to action, and there’s nothing wrong with repeating them on longer pages so that they’re always within eyeshot.

And by the way, “Back to top” is not a call to action!

How to check for this leak: If your traffic reports show this information, look at the paths that visitors take through your site – where do visitors go next from each page? If many of them are exiting the site and / or they fan out across many pages with no clear pattern or direction, you have a possible leak.

4. Leaks in your Credibility Building

MarketingExperiments research has also shown that powerful, specific, and authoritative testimonials can have a major impact on your site’s conversion rates.

Consider this statement: “Documented results show that just a few hours with [ expert ] can increase lead generation by 125%”. Imagine how much stronger that assertion would be if there were some examples of the “documented results” and some customer quotes to that effect.

However, including a page on your site called “What Customers Say” doesn’t do it – I can safely say that visitors don’t go to those pages. And it’s not just traffic reports that tell me this – whenever I ask a live audience “Would you click this link?” there’s always a resounding “No!”

How to check for this leak: This is a much more subtle leak to detect, but it’s an important one. The question here is whether you are potentially losing business because your site fails adequately to establish your value and credibility.

My recommended approach is to review your site for credibility-building content such as client lists, testimonials and case studies. You need to spread your testimonials through your site, using short one or two line excerpts that are relevant to the content of each page – whether it’s about a product or a service, or the value of subscribing to your newsletter or blog.

Make sure that all of this material is linked to from other pages so that it’s easily found by visitors. If you then experience an increase in calls, or in the quality of your leads, then you might have just fixed a leak!

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Philippa Gamse is a Web strategy expert who spends much of her time fixing leaky Websites and other website problems. Would you like your own “Leaky Boat Website” Review? Visit http://websitesthatwin.com/leaky-boat-report.html for more information.

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• Advertising, Opt-in Leads, Email Marketing service helps small businesses market their products more effectively. We provide everything you need, http://www.madviral.com Phone: 256-778-8350 (9am-5pm CST M-F) MadViral Enterprises, LLC 171 Early Rd. Hartselle, Al. 35640

Is Your Website Springing a Leak?