Displaying posts tagged "marketing" (Clear Search) Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
So what can be done to make a blog popular? Don't worry, I'm not talking about this blog. As you know, I'm working a lot on Clarifying Health at work. It gets more traffic than this blog since it's actually a part of a real website and the traffic is growing. But it's time to grow faster. I realize that patience is a virtue with stuff like this, but that doesn't mean I should just sit back and watch. With that in mind, I'm going to go over a few things I'm trying to stir up interest. Hit me up in the comments if you have any other good ideas.
The key here is coming up with posts that people want to read. Without that, nothing else matters.
Anyway, time to practice that last step. Any ideas on what else I should try?
Posted by Tyler King
Monday, July 20th, 2009
Today I continued my month-long marketing binge by trying to optimize certain metrics on our corporate site at work. Specifically, I'm testing out different ways to get visitors of our site to contact us for more information. We actually get a reasonably high number of people that go to our "Contact Us" page, but a surprisingly low percentage of those people actually fill out the form. This is very troubling. These are users that looked around our site and decided to click a big shiny button that says "Contact Us" and then they stop in their tracks and leave the site.
So what's the problem? Is our form too complicated? Maybe they'd rather call us. Privacy could be a concern. There's really no way to tell what the problem is right now. In comes Google Website Optimizer.
Google's tool lets people like me perform easy A/B testing. What's A/B testing? It basically means that when a visitor goes to a certain page of your site, they see one of two or more different variations on that same web page. By tracking how the visitors of the different variations act, you can make pretty educated guesses about what drives user behavior.
So in this case, I made two different versions of the "Contact Us" page and Google is automatically sending half of our users to one page and half to the other. Whichever page gets more people to complete the form is obviously a better format. You can do more than just two pages per "experiment" but it's important not to dilute your users across too many options because that will make the results less reliable. That's why I'm starting with two choices and I'll evolve based on what I learn.
This is something that I should have done a while ago but I didn't have the analytics set up until recently so I had no idea where the real problem was. Now that I'm getting comfortable with analytics I can start acting on the data I'm gathering. I'll be sure to post more on what steps I'm taking.
Posted by Tyler King
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
I've spent the past year and a half working on making our websites and applications more functional and full-featured at work. Our software has matured a lot and we finally have enough flexibility and freedom to start worrying more about marketing and analytics. I saw this article from GrokDotCom which goes over tracking some less obvious visitor behavior.
The second item the article talks about suggests that websites should track "conversion points for visitors who are early in the buying process". This is something I need to work on. Right now we take the following approach when measuring the success of our marketing:
This seemed like a pretty thourough approach, but the article made me realize that there's a lot of information that we aren't paying attention to. For example, it would be worth knowing how many of these people care enough to view more than just one page. It would be interesting to see if most visitors are leaving the site on a certain page (so that page would need to be re-designed).
As the author points out, there are several stages of the buying process and we should track them all. This could partially be accomplished by using our existing information in smarter ways, but there's more to it. Maybe we could put a link on our homepage saying "Are you thinking about changing your health benefits? Click here to learn about some of your options". If 75% of our visitors clicked that, we would know that a large number of visitors are in an early stage of the sales process.
I'll play around with different ideas over the next few months. I'll post again about my analytics experiences.
Links: Can your Website Handle the Complexity of your Sale? [grokdotcom] Posted by Tyler King
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