Total Internet Presence: Measurability

Posted on July 14, 2010 by David Culbertson

Sorry for the long delay since my last blog post, I’ve been very busy with family activities, vacations, and working on projects with my good friends at Paul Werth Associates including the writing the following blog post which is cross-posted on the Paul Werth Blog.

How do you get noticed online?

In three words, it’s about your Total Internet Presence (TIP), a concept that I created in partnership with Bryan Huber. Vice-president of Interactive Services at Paul Werth. This post kicks off a series on the seven elements of Total Internet Presence, a process we apply to make your digital brand more exciting, visible, transparent, accessible and competitive.

Today’s post is about the element of measurability — the yardstick for your online presence. There are some very sophisticated tools for measuring your “worth” on the Web, and most often we refer these as Web analytics.

What are Web analytics?

The Web Analytics Association defines Web analytics as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.”

That sounds very academic, doesn’t it? Bottom line, Web analytics provide answers to a couple of fundamental questions:

  •  How did visitors find my website?
  • What do visitors do once they reach my website?

Why measure?

There’s an old saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Taking that a bit further, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Some of favorite specific benefits of using Web analytics are:

  • Determine if your investment in website visit drivers such as advertising, SEO and social media is paying off. For example, is the company Facebook page really driving visits to the website?
  • Provides historical benchmarking. For example, are visits increasing or decreasing?

What to measure?

All of the data in the world are useless if you haven’t established some specific metrics (i.e., measurements of success). Do you know if you’re winning or losing?

Some of the most common website metrics – and the data used to determine if they’re being met – are:

Increase site traffic:

  • Total visits
  • Unique visitors

Improve site visibility:

  • Traffic sources (i.e., search engines and other websites sending visitors to your site)
  • Search engine rankings

Improve Site Engagement:

  • Average visits per unique visitor
  • Average page views per visit
  • Site bounce rate
  • Return visitors

Increase Conversions:

  • White paper downloads
  • Contact forms submitted

How do you measure up?

Drop me a note if you want to look into assessing your company or organization’s measurability. We can discuss the analytics that will best meet your unique needs.

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BP fumbles social media and SEO

Posted on June 2, 2010 by David Culbertson

As the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico enters its 44th day, thousands of people from around the world have supposedly submitted ideas to BP, but they don’t seem to be listening – or at least not responding. As BP prepares to spend millions on traditional advertising and PR, the concepts of listening and responding to social media are eluding BP.

To make matters worse, Googling “oil spill ideas” returns nearly 100% negative results that contain zero organic results from an official BP website. BP is running a paid search ad, but it takes you a standard PR page with way too much information and no mechanisms for consumers and non-BP experts to post an idea.

Here are a couple of ideas for BP:

  • Emulate Dell’s IdeaStorm with a twist – provide a website for consumers and experts to easily post their ideas then let BP experts review and rate them. Make it transparent and archive for when (not if) there’s another huge oil spill.
  • Invest in some SEO!
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Another study proves the value of high search engine rankings

Posted on June 2, 2010 by David Culbertson

Chitika Research recently completed a study that reaffirms the key finding from a similar study from a few years ago – high search engine rankings matter. Key insights:

  • The #1 ranked slot for a keyword gets almost as many clicks as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.
  • The #10 slot (the very bottom of page 1) gets 143% more clicks than #11 (the top slot of page 2)

SEO should be a standard practice of all Web design firms now (honestly, good web design firms have been doing SEO for years). If your web design firm isn’t experienced in SEO and hasn’t made it one of their primary focuses when building websites, it’s time to consider a new firm.

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Is Bing’s search share up or down? Depends who you ask

Posted on May 19, 2010 by David Culbertson

So, is Bing’s market share increasing or decreasing?

According to Nielsen, Bing’s market share increased in April at the expense of Google. Hitwise, on the other hand, is reporting that Bing’s market share (and Yahoo’s also) declined. I’ve got the advantage of a third set of data – the web analytics for more than 50 client websites. That data shows strongly that, if anything, Bing is taking market share from Yahoo but not Google. I’m gonna trust that data set.

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Auto manufacturer’s recall websites invisible in Google

Posted on April 13, 2010 by David Culbertson

With all of the attention on Toyota lately, I wondered – how well do the top car manufacturer’s official recall websites rank for brand related recall searches? Here are the results for the top brands in the U.S. that I found on April 12:

Most of the brands completely lack a search presence. Outside of Toyota and Lexus (ranking well for obvious reasons), Ford has the best presence by far. A few brands (Cadillac, GMC, Nissan, Pontiac, Volvo) have less-than-ideal pages ranked for such an important topic.

So, what web pages are ranking well? Car websites / blogs such as Edmunds and Motor Trend, Enthusiast / owner forums, and lawyer blogs come up most frequently; places where most of the content is brand-negative regarding the recalls. If customer service truly is the new PR, the car brands are missing a golden opportunity to communicate openly with vehicle owners when they search for critical recall information about their vehicle.

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Small business websites hacked for Traci Lynn Johnson search engine spam

Posted on April 9, 2010 by David Culbertson

Traci Lynn Johnson is the alleged girlfriend that former NFLer Tiki Barber left his pregnant wife for. That’s as much as I’ll say about it. What’s interesting to me is how search engine spammers have already hacked many small business websites (hundreds or even thousands) and loaded malware on them. Take a close look at this snapshot of a Google search done five minutes ago:

There are 13 links on this page – nine of them are spam. Luckily, Google does make an effort to protect you:

The lesson here? Small business needs secure websites, just like big business or things like this will happen.

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The Columbus hamburger war: SEO or a billboard?

Posted on April 8, 2010 by David Culbertson

Columbus is a town that loves hamburgers and the competition is heating up for your hamburger dollar. As this photo proves, Columbus’ own Graffiti Burger is aggressively targeting Five Guys:

Judging from the packed front parking lot in front of Five Guys on west Fifth Avenue in Grandview, I’m not sure the billboard is making a difference; it’s high up in the air, only cars driving west see it, and Five Guys has plenty of “best burger” signs in the front window that people see when they’re parked and entering the restaurant. That’s not the ideal moment to try to persuade time-crunched hungry people to try Graffiti Burger instead.

The time to connect with consumers is when they are searching for a place to have a hamburger. On Google, there are more than 9,000 searches per month for “Columbus Burger” and related terms. As of today, no Columbus-based Hamburger restaurant is on page one of Google. Thurman’s website is highest ranked at #13. Where does Graffiti Burger rank?

While Graffitti Burger spends big money on that billboard, they are essentially invisible in Google since 95% of non-branded organic search clicks come from page one. As a business owner, where would you want people to learn first about your business and its award winning local product or service – when they’re doing a search on Google? Or when they’re standing outside of your competitor’s door?

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5 Steps to effective business participation in social networking

Posted on March 19, 2010 by David Culbertson

Here are my thoughts on how businesses can earn the right to participate in social networking sites used by their customers such as Facebook and Twitter.

1. SHOW UP – Be among your customers.

2. SHUT UP – It’s hard to listen when you’re talking.

3. LISTEN UP – Gather stories of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Listen to what’s being said about your competitors. Knowledge comes before wisdom.

4. PUT UP – Do something good. Remember, customer service is the new PR. And there’s an additional meaning – be willing to politely “put up with” the pushback/contrariness/negativity, etc. that you will get from some customers, and even non-customers. Those are usually opportunities for improvement.

5. SPEAK UP – When the time is right, but do it infrequently and with a purpose – helpful tips, discounts, and other useful information. Simply speaking highly of yourself is just noise that your customers will ignore and eventually might turn off altogether.

Wash, rinse, and repeat!

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