Part I D MA TE RI AL Getting Started TE In This Part CO PY RI GH Chapter 1: What’s Your Game Plan for Success?
CHAPTER 1 What’s Your Game Plan for Success? In high school I was in a program called the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC). Our senior Army instructor was a retired U.S. Army colonel (a “full-bird” colonel, as he would emphasize). He was a tough, no-nonsense leader who preached the values of teamwork against the backdrop of our own motto: “Leadership. Citizenship. Challenge. Responsibility.” One of the colonel’s pet peeves in life was a poorly designed lesson plan.
Part I n Getting Started you’re thinking about or are in the middle of your first foray into doing business on the World Wide Web. You’re going to get a good sense of how you should be thinking as an owner or marketer of a website, or even as someone who performs technical updates to a website.
Chapter 1 n What’s Your Game Plan for Success? So let’s say that your website passes that first mental checkpoint for the typical visitor. Now, your website also has to do something apart from just being visually attractive. It has to be enticing. It has to be engaging. It has to be persuasive. If you’re trying to sell a product online, you’d better be really engaging; otherwise visitors to your site will not want to continue with you after the initial impression.
Part I n Getting Started What Does Your Website Do? Currently, most sites on the Web don’t do much of anything, except provide the visitor with content (a lot of websites don’t even do that). However, with the influx of more and more technologically advanced websites, visitors are beginning to expect any website they visit to do more and more for them. What was acceptable in 1999 or 2004 is now passé, and what was yesterday’s news is today’s history.
Chapter 1 n What’s Your Game Plan for Success? Figure 1-2: eHarmony’s homepage If you’re not doing it, there are a dozen other websites out there that will do it instead. You really can’t afford not to provide some kind of benefit to your site’s traffic that no other site can match. If you can do that and market it better than anyone, all of a sudden your bright orange background and cheesy horizontal banner ad don’t seem that annoying. And what’s more, your asking price doesn’t seem as high.
Part I n Getting Started for a decade and your tagline says you’re the best, that doesn’t mean you have a right to the traffic and transactions that the kid with a six-month-old site is “stealing” from you. The Web doesn’t care how long you’ve been doing it — it cares only about how well you’re doing it. How you plan your marketing strategy as you move forward can’t be about ego or a sense of entitlement.
Chapter 1 n What’s Your Game Plan for Success? to measure success. If your site had 30,000 hits a month, you were winning. If your hit counter below the “Sign My Guestbook” link and above the animated “E-mail” icon was large, you were in charge. Boy, have we come a long, long way from those times.
Part I n Getting Started Time on Site is usually reported as an average, and it’s the average amount of time, in minutes, that all visitors spend on your site. So it goes one step beyond a metric like Visits, because Average Time on Site takes all the time that all the visitors spent on your site, and reports back a ratio to you. It’s an improvement upon Visits and Page Views, and for some websites it can be of a higher importance, but it’s nowhere near where we want to be. It’s a start, at best.
Chapter 1 n What’s Your Game Plan for Success? Similar challenges for measuring success arise when you look at a report like the New vs. Returning Visitor report. Here, Google Analytics (or whatever webanalytics program you’re using) can determine the percentage of visitors who have visited your site only once, and the percentage who have visited twice or more.
Part I n Getting Started You see, it doesn’t matter how long visitors spend on our sites or how many visitors there are, or how many pages they viewed.
Chapter 1 n What’s Your Game Plan for Success? Key Performance Indicators (KPI) OK, if you’re doing this already, then you are at a higher level of measurement knowledge than most people. Congratulations to you! Key Performance Indicators are the solutions to the mini-equations that you’ve built to measure how your website is performing. They are not metrics, like Average Time on Site or Bounce Rate, and they are not counts of things, like Transactions or Goal Conversions.
Part I n Getting Started Fast, Faster, Fastest! Let’s say that I’ve just launched my brand-new AdWords campaign, targeted to the state of Florida and running during business hours only, Monday through Friday, with a cost per lead of $25. It’s chock-full of different ad groups, keywords, and negatives.
Chapter 1 n What’s Your Game Plan for Success? on to your Google AdWords account, you can see that your local Products campaign received a total of 1,092 clicks for the month of July. That’s not an estimate or a guess — that’s 1,092 clicks on the dot. Google is even able to remove invalid clicks (from spammers and competitors who are bad sports) before you see them, and of course you’re not charged for said invalid clicks.
