Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [196]
Analyze the Data
Knowing which links provide visitors, which provide sales and leads, and which don’t provide any value are all critical to helping you develop a marketing strategy.
Everything can be tracked, valued, and developed into a strategy. Analytics are able to track the value of each link to your website and show a significant difference in the sales and lead generation value of linking websites. It will also provide a clear strategy in developing a plan to approach similar sites that are able to provide a good source of sales.
Consider the Source
Simply by breaking out the visitors from the incoming links, a pattern will emerge. Figure 16-8 shows an example of a content site (we’ll call it site X) with two primary conversion points: registering for a webinar and subscribing to the mailing list. These two goals were tracked together in the overall conversion rate. When comparing the conversion rates with stats such as time on site and pages viewed, there is enough comparative data to begin to assessing the value of the visitor from each source. The pattern looks the same on almost every website that is analyzed in this method.
Figure 16-8: A comparison chart of visitor engagement and conversion by source, using a simple spreadsheet
What emerges when defining a goal such as “Where do my most engaged and valuable visitors come from?” is that the most vibrant source of visitors is from an article in an online news source (a contextual link). The visitors who came from this article converted at the highest rate, stayed longer, and read more pages than any other type of visitor. In the case of the link from the online news source, the article was written exclusively about site X’s business and some of the issues it had experienced. The article contained a few direct links to pages on the website within the context of the article. As mentioned earlier, when another site links to your website, it is like a word-of-mouth referral. When a link is placed on an online news source to another website that is part of the story, the reader is able to follow the link and continue their desire to know more about a specific subject. Readers of the online news source were coming from a highly engaged state of reading a trusted source of news, and when presented with a link to the subject of a news story, they clicked the link.
The credibility of the news source and the context of the link were all presented with continuity. The subject matter was all related, and the news source passed credibility through the link to the website. As a result, the readers wanted to find out more about site X, the business, and recent developments in the business before they ever clicked the link to go to site X.
The next highest engagement sets were visitors who came from an advertisement and from blog links. The website link was network advertisement on other websites that advertised a webinar. The results of the ad showed a fairly good response rate. Most importantly, when compared to the ad buy and the results, it was a profitable ad buy—one that could now be justified in the future because of measured performance.
The blog links consisted of other bloggers writing about this website and recommending their readers to go to this site and find more in-depth information. Links from bloggers created the same type of engagement. Visitors from blogs were highly engaged, because of the same reasons. When looking at the links on the blog sites, the links were from articles writing specifically about that business or a similar subject matter and contained links within the article to the website. As a result, the readers knew where they were going when they clicked the links and already had familiarity with the business because of the blog article.
The next engagement set was made up of the four primary search terms for this website. All of the search visitors seemed to behave in the