Look how much these people love your website! Thank you web metrics!!

With so many web metrics tools out there, it’s not easy to understand or choose how to measure your web success. If you feel like you need a dictionary to even get started, you’re not alone. Plenty of bloggers and websites out there are saying the same thing.

Successful businesses know their markets and the people who interact with their brand. Learning exactly how people are interacting will better assist you in the marketing of your business.

When considering web metrics, here are 6 key important considerations that should not be overlooked.

1. Know the variety of metrics available to you.

If words like Web Counter, Hits, Browser Platform, Pageviews, Visits, or Operating Systems mean nothing to you, then the time has come for you to learn. Web metrics will help you to understand where your site visitors are coming from, how their search led them to your site and what they are engaging in on your site. There are lots of different ways in which to analyze this information so it is key to know about them all.

2. Choose your key words carefully.

Certain key words in a search will lead high numbers of visitors to your site. But are they the people you want? Most of the time, driving the right people to your site is more important than driving a completely diverse audience to your site.

3.  Get to your Audience to the Point.

Every website has a goal. Make your website easy to navigate. If you are selling a product, then sell the product right away. Don’t make your audience search the page too hard. Usability is key. The trick is to monitor how well your ad copy and website layout work together to make that sale. Web metrics will monitor what’s working and what’s not.

When you know what’s working and what’s not working on your site, you are then prepared to make the right changes to the site. Don’t be afraid to keep making changes until your site is a success.

4. Analyze Audience Behavior

So you are getting the right people to your site. Great. But nothing seems to be happening. It is very important to understand what your audience is doing on your website. If they completely miss the most important part of your website, then not only was their visit unsuccessful, but the odds of them returning to the site go down significantly.

Watch what is happening during their visit. Where do they spend the most time? Where are they not going at all? The answers to these questions are key.

5. If you don’t want to monitor EVERYTHING, make sure you monitor these 7 metrics…

There are a ton of metrics out there and it’s hard to make a website perfect. So make it as perfect as you can and use metrics that cater to what you care about knowing the most. If you want a quick summary of your website success, filter down what you need to know: Bounce Rate, Attention, Conversions, Spend, Errors, Online Search Terms, Bailout Rate.

These metrics will give you the best overall perception of your site.

6. If it aint broke, don’t fix it. But if it is broke, maybe just improve it a little.

So your metrics have told you that no one has clicked through to the most important part of your website. You have already spent lots of time making this particular section of your site perfect. Surely, you thought, this would be the key to boosting business. Well it wasn’t because no one has taken the time to click through to see it.

Now you are left with two options: develop or remove. If you decide this website feature needs to be improved, then brainstorm process begins again. Think about what is missing. Why are people not clicking through? What will it take to encourage click-throughs? Look around on other sites and pay close attention to how it draws you in. Where is your eye drawn to and why? Studying other sites and applying this knowledge to your site will other further enhance your own audiences’ experience on your site.

Or on second thought, maybe you are just thinking that you should delete this non-functioning feature all-together. If what is not working on your site is not worth the effort to fix, then delete it. This won’t necessarily hurt your website because it will only make it easier to navigate. A user-friendly, clean layout is always a good choice. Too much clutter hurts a website’s functionality. Whether the decision is to improve or delete, the important thing here is that a change has been made based on web metrics feedback.

If yes, then call us. If not, then you are just probably finding ways to keep your job and we recommend you to read the 6 tips below and then tell us how they worked for you.

1. Don’t Spend Your Entire Marketing Budget. Costs saving initiatives have been more popular than ever before. If you can manage to not spend your entire marketing budget you will be rewarded. Showing savings is always a good thing these days, and who cares if you hurt your lead generation volume and quality or stall your brand building efforts. What is more important though is to get a tap on your back from your boss for finishing the year strong. Nobody will hunt you down if you don’t continue your efforts to capitalize on the upturn of the economy we will see in 2010, right?
2. Keep Reducing Headcounts. Everyone had been letting people go and most have successfully managed to survive this economic crisis based on these decisions. These types of initiatives are effective and opportune to let go of low performing employees. You can always hire top performers later in the year; although you may not have enough budget. Remember you saved so much money by not spending your entire marketing budget that your boss will probably decide that you could do a great job with a smaller budget in 2010.
3. New Market Segments are Not Worthwhile. Although, trends such as the high broadband Internet penetration, the surge of web 2.0 tools and the social media boom are making it easier and easier to reach out to smaller segments in very cost effective manners, many people would argue that is not enough. Segments based on race, language, gender, age or sexual preferences are not big enough yet to allocate enough resources. No one cares that one of every five young adults today (ages 18 – 34) are Hispanic, which are ONLY about 50 million people. And nobody believes in Forrester estimates that Hispanic disposable income as a group will grow to $1.4 trillion by 2013 from $951 billion in 2008.
4. Search Engine Optimization is Overrated. People justify SEO investment with arguments such as that more than 1 billion people worldwide, ages 15 years and older are Internet users or that more than 74% of the US population uses the Internet. Also that organic search drives 75%+ of all search traffic. What value does all that have? How many people really use the Internet to purchase or influence product purchases? Not many really, the penetration of ecommerce, on product categories such as computer electronics and media (books, music and videos) is ONLY 25%. There are still lots of people that you can reach out to without using the Internet, so why bother reaching out to these demographics, right?
5. Email Marketing is From the Past. Email marketing started in the mid and late 1990’s, which is a long time ago in Internet history. It boomed in the early part of this decade, but as of a couple of years ago many argue it is being replaced by social media marketing and other new media channels. Companies used to BLAST emails because it was easy and cheap, but CAN-SPAM laws, anti-spam software and other tools are allowing people to hide from email marketing messages. Let’s look at some stats again to support this argument. Email open rates are above 30% in many industries and click rates get up to 6% or higher. So if you are a small or medium size business and you have an opted-in list of prospects and customers of let’s say 10,000 emails, you are directly reaching ONLY 3,000 people and building strong relationship via your content or offers with ONLY 600 people… EVERY TIME YOU SEND EMAIL CAMPAIGNS.
6. Social Media is a Fad, Let Your Competitors Go There First. Much has been said about the reach of social media, the engagement capabilities it adds to the mix, that is taking Word-of-Mouth marketing to the next level and that is incredibly more cost effective than other tools. But, it is so new that many marketers feel threatened or not knowledgeable enough to jump into it, so they are waiting for others in the industry to lead the path to figure out how to use it. Let your competitors work with “social media” marketing firms and create some success first before you join. Why take any risks? We still need to survive 2010, right?

We like to share ideas, thoughts, best practices or whatever we feel like writing about in lists of 6. But, you can add to it…so, If you are going to take one risk, make it sharing your thought and believes with others. Feel free to comment, tweet, share or do whatever you want to do with this.

Jose Guerra
Principal

1. Successful marketers will be more like Dale Carnegie by listening first. The 4 steps to social media success are 1] Listen 2] Interact 3] React 4] Sell
2. Consumers are looking to peers for recommendations on products, services, health issues, and more via social media. Only companies that produce products and services of great value will be part of these conversations; mediocrity will quickly be eliminated.
3. Social media’s ability to quickly disseminate information among friends and peers helps eliminate different people performing the same tasks (multiple individual redundancies), whether it’s researching the best vacation spot or smart phone. This is a huge benefit to consumers.
4. The old adage that you can only have two of these ‐‐ cheap, quick, or quality ‐‐ doesn’t hold true within social media. It’s possible to have all three.
5. Successful social media marketers will function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners rather than as traditional advertisers.
6. The transparency and speed of information exchanged within social media mitigates casual schizophrenic behavior. Having a “work” personality and having a “party” personality will soon become extinct. People and companies will need to have one essence and be true to that essence.
7. Companies that produce great products and services rather than companies that simply rely on great messaging will be winners in a Socialnomic™ world. The social graph is the world’s largest and most powerful referral program.
8. Making multiple mistakes within social media is far better than doing nothing at all.
9. If you’re a large brand, you can rest assured that there are conversations, pages, and applications constantly being developed around your brand and by the community at large. The social community is “doing” social media even if your company chooses not to.
10. The overall achievement of individuals and companies will be largely dependent on their social media success.

Among the benefits corner6labs brings to its customers is a focus on helping them craft campaigns that effectively combine online advertising, email marketing, social media, mobile and… read the rest of the press release here.

Traditional marketing just doesn’t work well anymore. More marketing and advertising dollars are being wasted because consumers have gotten good at filtering out what they consider “babble”. We feel for you because you want your brand to make an impact in your sales and marketing efforts. So what are your options? Well, you could save up (or get an investor…seems to be the thing) and hire that “expert” advertising firm to come in and speak marketing nerdery to you, pretending to know your customers more than you do by holding up complicated graphs and charts, or… you could look in the mirror and realize that you and your employees probably know your customer and your market better than anyone else. Back in the day, only deep-pocketed marketing departments could afford to churn out those “cool” marketing campaigns. However, with the advent of social media, the playing field has officially been leveled. These days if it looks too polished… FILTERED, if it’s from an untrusted source… FILTERED…if it’s from an annoying source… FILTERED. The bottom line is that your marketing communication has to change because if they don’t…FILTERED!

The Promise

Here is what we know:

• No one knows your customer or client base like you do
• You can always make an impact with a smaller budget
• Employee engagement drives productivity

Whoa! Where did that employee engagement bit come from? Here is the deal. Most companies have the internal resources to come up with impactful brand-messaging but just don’t acknowldge it. Before starting corner6labs, we worked at a nationally recognized marketing firm for Human Resources software and service providers that was very successful with their internal marketing effors. A part of what makes them so successful, is that they draw heavily on idea contributions from their employees. Now you may be saying, well you guys were marketers…well not really, only a few were “marketing professionals”, most had expertise in other fields unrelated to brand engagement. We quickly realized that employee involvement however diverse, fostered an extreme level of creativity.

As social media came along, we found that a lot of companies were clueless to the platform’s “language”. Companies approached social media with the same attitude they did any other media, and with the inherent nature of the masses to reject corporate bull, they were doomed to fail. Therfore, when we started corner6labs, we embraced the philosophy of brand recognition through employee involvement, using correct social media communication strategies.

We understand the connection between engaged employees and your messaging platform. Your employees are the key to transforming your marketing from a corporate endeavor to a grassroots movement that can’t be stopped. Our goal is to help you work with your employees to outthink and outperform your competitors branding and communication efforts. We want your company to know what Seth Godin knows before he knows it, to beat the Wexley School for Girls at their own game and to be the company that your competitors whisper fearfully (or better still, enviously) about at lunch.

We help our clients generate impactful, innovative and cost effective marketing campaigns by facilitating rich engagement amongst employees and customers. We leverage proven team communication and dynamics methodologies along with leading behavioral assessment tools. We help small and medium size firms engage employees to make a difference on their brand. We help them drive marketing innovation and campaigns that are impactful and emotionally engaging for themselves and their customers.

corner6labs was conceived to pioneer new marketing solutions. Period. We are passionate about innovative marketing, social media, and marketing technologies. However, we are not a traditional marketing firm; we are a marketing communication firm that is not constrained by limiting stereotypes of traditional marketing firms. Most importantly, we get your point across.