Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [255]
If you do not have your conversion rate built in Google Analytics yet, then please consult Monday’s content in Chapter 21, which covers the aspects of building your conversion rate. This is the critical piece of analysis, because all activity needs to be associated with the outcome in order to make the best decisions about marketing your business and your website.
Segment by Source
Review Chapter 16’s Friday topic, which is about evaluating the marketing value of your links. The link analysis performed in this section was the result of attempting to find the best-performing link source for visitors to a website. This was done by creating segments of all the incoming visitors based on source—search engine, website link, blog link, banner ad link, and social-media links. By measuring all the channels through which this website received traffic and the specific outcomes based on the goal, important information was found that provided a confident direction for the online marketing budget over the next year. This analysis allowed the company to find specific tactics to follow and emphasis for link building that would develop the kind of visitors it wanted for the website.
This is a method of developing a clear understanding of the value of a visitor by the source. Most analytics programs will allow you to see how many visitors you receive from various sources, such as from search, external links, ad clicks, and so on. However, by segmenting each source in order to measure the conversion outcomes by source and then comparing each source according to the same measurements, you will find the best-performing segments (the ones that get you the greatest percentage of conversions or leads), not just those who sent a lot of visitors.
Finding the differences within the different visitor sources will enable you to find those high-profit acquisition channels and develop them even more. This analysis will also enable you find low-performing sources and develop an understanding of why they may be underperforming by comparison. This may also optimize your online spending, because you begin investing in sources that are bringing profitable visitors and cutting back in those that aren’t.
Segment by Action
Segmenting by actions can be as simple as tracking the navigation behavior beyond the home page. By tracking those visitors who navigate directly to the home page, segmenting the different paths from the page, and measuring against goals or revenue, you can begin to develop an understanding of the content that is requested more, and ideally it is the profitable content as well. Action-based conversions, such as video views and navigation tendencies, point to the behavior of people within a segment and can provide insight as to how people respond when they interact with elements within the website. Understanding the actions and how they affect conversions will provide direction for continued development of interactions within the website.
Actions can be any goal that is measured in the analytics. Any segment has to be evaluated by a goal or by revenue in order to help you make a final decision as to the value of that segment. One business found that visitors who viewed embedded videos on the website tended to convert 20 percent more than visitors who did not view any of the videos. When finding data like that, it’s not hard to make determinations about how to improve the visitor experience and increase conversions.
As social media becomes more pervasive in the development and marketing of websites, analytics will be able to track more of the interaction between the visitor, social media, and visitor behavior. Integrating