The Marketing Wire

So you’ve got you’re new website set up but it’s not getting many hits, what do you do? A quick search online and you’ll find a plethora of websites that will offer you website submission, SEO tips and tricks and both paid and link exchange programs.

So an hour and a hundred pounds later you’ve submitted your site to dozens of search engines you’ve never heard of, downloaded an ebook that that promises the Earth in exchange for your email address and decided that meta tags and PageRank rule the Internet.

Don’t panic!

At this point I’d recommend taking a relaxing deep breath.  Don’t try to rush things – you’re probably working hard enough already, just focussing your efforts in the wrong place.  Now that just sounds smug, but there’s a point here.  The first step is to take a good hard look at your website and work out what really matters and that’s where great tools like Google Analytics come in.  Watch this video for a very Google-specific but thought provoking introduction to a nunber of  “metrics” that can help you better understand your website and how visitors use it.

In other words, hits aren’t everything and knowledge is power.  This doesn’t have to be in a scary bad way, it simply means that you can target your website better to suit your audience.

Website hits

Going back a few years hits were still a regular measure of the success of a website.  Hits are still important, but the term is often used as a generic term of discussion, like “Does the site get many hits?”.  There’s nothing wrong with this kind of talk, but it’s not going to stand as a website metric when negotiating link exhanges or selling banner ads.  More to the point it’s not going to be of much use to you, the site manager.

Hits:- Total traffic to your website.

• Each visitor to your website could account for a hit for evey page / item they view.
• A search engine bot could account for a large proportion of your hits, without any real persons visiting!
• Some webstat packages look at http requests ie. each time an item is requested eg. a gif, a stylesheet, a video!

Tools and services exist that can help you to filter out search engine traffic and ensure that only selected files eg. html, podcast downloads etc counted in statistics.

Website Visitors

This is a nice measurement that separates the hits down into individual users that have visited your website. In other words, a visitor is one user that has entered your website, regardless of how many pages they might have visited.  The visitor is usually recounted each time they visit ie. disconnect from your server by closing their browser or going somewhere else then return.

Website visitor:

• A user visiting your website
• Can often be filtered to exclude search engine bots etc.

Unique visitor:

• The amount of completely different users that have visited your website during a given period.
• Usually determined by IP address. ie a user visits the site from 2 IP addresses (work / home) = 2 visits.

Pages per visit

If each visitor only looks at one page, then the hits could be similar to the visitors. This can be typical of blogs, which hook visitors from search engines such as Google or Yahoo but don’t offer much nore information on the topic. Reference tools such as Whois.net, Dictionary.com or Whatismyip.com have the same sort of “one hit wonder” traffic.

Pages per visit:

• This is the amount of pages a visitor browses whilst on your site, usually a mean average.
• A low pages per visit means that visitors don’t stick around to find out more.

Of course, you could be feeling very proud because your new site has 10 pages per visit. If you think this through for a minute and dig a little deeper into the stats then you may well find that the high pages per visit is down to your own tinkering or that of your web designer or Search Engine Marketing consultant!

In many cases, the aim would be to grab the interest of a visitor with engaging content so that they stay on your site and find out more about what you have to offer. If visitors land on your website you have a matter of seconds to grab their attention and stimulate further interest. This first impression must convine the visitor that their needs will be met; these needs vary depending on the purpose of your website but could include providing a solution to a problem, establishing trust (look and feel, certification, SSL encryption), and simply making it clear exactly what you / your website is about.

Once visitors are on your website, offer tempting links and graphics to encourage a user helpful user journey throughout the site. Good written content helps all sites retain visitors, good product search and filtering tools are essential for online shops and cleverly places “find out more” links all help improve and enhance this journey.

Bounce rate

Websites that don’t engage the visitor have a high bounce rate. For sites such as online shops, or portal sites this is a really useful measure of a website’s success. If visitors simply “bounce” off your landing page without exploring further then you really need to look at whether you are attracting the right visitors, if your site is confusing or unatractive or worse still simply offering the wrong content and products. On the other hand, if your website is a reference site, a blog or a sinlge page “business card” then a high bounce rate is really not a problem at all.

Bounce rate:

• The percentage of visitors that leave after only viewing one page (usally the homepage).

Time on site

The time a visitor spends on your website can be very useful for larger sites such as portals that intend to provide social networking and membership services. Websites that provide lots of content that is targeted to their users in an accesible manner can score highly, for example professional communities such as www.safetyusersgroup.com, multimedia rich sites such as Youtube or Drum and Bass Arena engage users for long periods of time once they have logged on by providing large amounts of relevant or easilly filtetred content.

Other sites like social networking giants Facebook and MySpace keep users involved by providing a reliable and platform for users to share their photos and communicate easily.

Your site might stimulate users by providing unique content, eye catching product graphics weavin insupporting information such as blogs, news or video that hold attention.

There are, of course many other metrics that you can use to evaluate your website’s effectiveness. What I have tried to communicate here is that all search engine marketing should be driven towards achieving your own goals – and different websites have quite different goals. They are a useful ally and must be used in context with a fair pinch of common sense.

For some less opinionated background reading take a look at some use webstat definitions.

Top tools include the free Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics. Many Internet Service Providers also provide basic free tools.  If you have your own server try AWStats or Webalizer and if you fancy a little web development take a look at the open source Piwik project (although there’s really no reason not to use a free service that someone like Google has already set up and hosted free for you!)

Affiliate marketing. Love it of hate it it’s here to stay and it will continue to evolve no matter what the search engines, Antivirus tools and popup blockers do.

Ooops, rewind! What’s affiliate marketing?

OK, for the PROs and B2B marcomms persons (how pc) who justifiably haven’t a clue what it means I’m talking about online marketing techniques with the primary aim direct return on investment generate sales or leads. Such instant gratification is something that many a marcomms team can only dream of, so how’s it done?

Consumer goods retailers such as PC World, Amazon.co.uk, eBay and lingerie retailer Figleaves.com rely on their affiliate marketers to drive traffic to their sites and stimulate sales. Entrepeneurial marketers can literally create marketing campaigns for the retailers by publishing special (hyper)links on their websites and email newsletters which track the origin of the traffic and pay a commission of 2-15% to the referrer in the event of a successful sale.

The marketer or “affiliate” of the retailer will sometimes deal directly with the retailer (Amazon), but will more often operate on behalf of the retailer through a 3rd party affiliate service such as Tradedoubler, Affiliate Window or Webgains.

Which leads me to the beginning. A good place to start. Many large sites, particularly in the IT / Technology sector rely on banners and product features to generate income. These sites and the Affiliate services are frequently challenged by tools that stop advertisements (ad blockers), stop popups (Popup blockers, browser toolbars) and Antivirus / Internet security software that stop advertisements from being displayed or even the referrals from changing the web page viewed to that of the retailer. Ironically, Antivirus and Popup blockers themselves rely heavily on affiliate marketing.

And that’s the big boys. What you might call the real publishers. There are smaller sites, such as my appalling Cheap Laptops website or Bra Selector (following the Valentines Day inspired Figleaves theme) that are set up purely as marketing platforms. These smaller entrepreneurial sites can be penalised by search engines such as Google because they are seen as offering little of interest to the knowledge-seeking surfer.

This isn’t all bad – we have all searched for products and information an ended up on a “phony” affiliate site. One industry in particular floods the Internet with errrm… affilaite content… yes you guessed it. Just try searching for various species of bird and you’re in the porn-zone. Not a pleasant experience at all. All salute. Google ho!

But what about the humble Internet entrepreneur earning a crust off the pumpernickebrot of online technology sales? Why should they be treated unfairly? Well, some sites are poor. They re-use retailer’s content leading to a sea of rather sad and uninspiring sites in a knee-jerk effort to make a quick buck. These sites are unlikely to stick around for the duration, so there’s no real issue here – except for perhaps an issue of scale. One goes, the next pops up. The best sites have a clear purpose (again unlike mine… gimme a chance!), a brand and a driving force behind their development.

Modern search engines look for unique, varied content. What? Like blogs? Well yes – blogs can make highly effective affiliate marketing tools. Marketers who really know their chips from their Apples can make a living by publishing informative – if quirky and opinionated- posts and creating a bot of a buzz. It’s a one-man (“mun”) publishing extravaganza.

Other sites such as moneysupermarket.com or Pricerunner have evolved from basic price comparison sites. At the most basic level, these sites offer a price comparison between several retailers – not just between brands like in a Supermarket – putting the consumer in control. Great. Nice…

Jazz it up and you have a surfer’s best friend. Surely something they would like to find on Google. To those in the know, affiliate sites elicit the basic human instinct : why should they get a cut? Well, why not? Those affiliate marketers have probably worked alot harder for that referral than Google does for its paid ad clicks from their free product search and comparison service Froogle / Google product search. Fair enough I say.

Where was I? Ah, yes. Google is fine – it’s just a rant. Hope it was an interesting intro to the ins-and-outs of affiliate marketing. Search engines often punish the affiliates so we don’t have to, when they do it’s up to the marketer to find a way round it – and so the cycle continues. The best sites have a clear purpose, brand and all that – they’re smart – and they help consumers find what they want whether it’s information or a product. Support your local shops favorite sites, share them with your friends and join the web 2.0 revolution (more on that later).

Hello wonderful world and welcome to my new blog. I’m a marketeer (no musket) and I’m passionate yet cynical and neurotic in my pursuit of new media, PR and branding skills and technology for the coming decades.

Who’s me?

That seems a fair question although I have a rather odd outlook on life so you can just take a look at my blog from time to time [by the way I'm hoping that others will join in a contribute - it's not necessarily a one man band] and you can decide if it floats intellectual or practical boat amongst the surf ‘n’ turf of the “Innernet” [sic.]

I’m Robin Wolstenholme and I work in technology and engineering PR, cross industry SEO and corporate podcasting.

Portfolio?

My work includes writing, managing and media relations for guys such as small satellite manufacturer SSTL- which includes running their wonderful Space Blog. I also do PR in other countries, in particular Italy and Germany for companies such as Invensys. Sadly, no I don’t speak Italian!

There’s alot of people interested in podcasting these days, and justifiably so. I’m a proponent- a good podcast will engage and draw in the listener, communicating on a one to one level and it’s available anywhere (at least anywhere with broadband and PCs …this isn’t a sales pitch!). Check out Scottish Life’s award winning Pensions Radio for a surpirisingly interesting discussion of the often grey subject of pensions.

SEO and all that – well I don’t feel the need to list anything here, rest assured interesting projects and the real life experiences of your faithful blogger will intertwined throughout said blog.

What’s coming up?

Anything goes. Warning – this blog may drift into technology or philosophy (meaning of life and all that) from time to time but then it’s a blog so there’s no real rules. I don’t hold any plans but I hope it will turn out interesting for the wider blogosphere.

Tschus [still figuring out special chars... good stuffthis WP]