I listen to what they are saying and then ask the Magic Question What do your statistics tell you? At this point, I either hear: 1. Crickets chirping.
2. I dont have statistics or know how to access them. Why are statistics important and why should you care? Here are a few real-life web stories that will help answer that question. For confidentiality reasons, names and websites are not disclosed. E Commerce A large retail company paid upwards of $10,000 for a website. They have hundreds of products to buy in their online catalog. After many months of having very few sales they found me and said their website wasnt working. Then I asked the Magic Question, What are your statistics telling you? Their response was #2. However, they were able to call their hosting company and get the access codes. After carefully reviewing their stats we discovered 3,000 unique visitors a day were coming to their home page and leaving in less than 10 seconds, not visiting any other page in their site. Traffic was coming to the site, they just weren't taking the desired action. The simple solution was to change the wording and navigation on the home page to encourage visitors to buy. Within 30 days of making these revisions the company began getting hundreds of online orders. Services A consultant selling services was spending several hours each week marketing her website. She was exchanging links and submitting articles. She had very few subscribers to her ezine and was hoping to see better results from her marketing efforts. I listened then asked the Magic Question. I heard response #1 crickets chirping. After some discussion we were able to determine that she did indeed have statistics and I was able to see immediately what was happening. Under the Referring URLs section I saw that 189 visitors came to her site from one article submission. This is excellent! What is happening? Lets go back and take a look at the site. On her home page, the upper right corner did not include an action button nor were there any clickable links to take visitors to other pages in the site. The ezine sign-up box was below the fold meaning a visitor had to scroll to find it. I also recommended she send a thank you note to the site that posted her articles and begin some cross-marketing online. To get more subscribers to her ezine I suggested offering a bonus, package deal or free article. She now understands the value of reviewing her stats in connection with her marketing efforts. Its a good idea to get a website evaluation by a 3rd party before spending hours of time or $$$ on marketing. Clients & Referrals This architect wanted a website mainly for clients to see and also for clients to easily refer others to him. Their first website was designed by someones son in the office. It did not portray their professional, luxury image or have the colors of their logo on the site. A bad website is worse than no website at all. A company without a website these days is like not having a business card. A website establishes credibility and can feature so much more than a printed brochure at a fraction of the cost. Its important for this firm to review their statistics to see Page Views. Which pages are clients going to? Exit pages tell us where they left the site. There is no email address on the site so we made the phone number in a larger font and listed it twice on each page. (You dont have to be computer literate or even use email to have a website presence). There is also an action button to Refer a Friend. This makes it easy for clients to refer someone to the site. This client recently moved and the map, new phone # and address were posted on the website even before the movers got there. An email notice was sent to all current and past clients notifying them of the change. Printing and postal mailing would have taken much longer. This firms website is generating new business and they are ecstatic with the results. If these clients had not viewed their statistics they would just be guessing at how much gas was left in the car. They may have spent money on search engine optimization when all they needed to do was change the website itself. Statistics show results. Whenever you hire any company to do marketing, article submissions or search engine submissions - you'll see the results of those efforts in the statistics. How often should you check your statistics? Some people check them daily. I think once a month is fine. One word of caution, avoid changing your website too frequently based on small numbers. Let your website just BE for awhile about 3 months before making radical changes. Then youll have some substantial numbers and a good timeframe to evaluate what is working and what is not. |
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