With marketers gathering more and more data, the tsunami of information might tend to be overwhelming. That’s certainly understandable. How to deal with and maximize this flood of information can be challenging.
One solution is to follow what famed Roman emperor Julius Caesar said, “Divide et Impera” or divide and rule. That’s also been more popularly interpreted as “divide and conquer.” Either way, the philosophy is still relevant in today’s digital world.
Divide and Rule
All kinds of metrics abound and marketers first need to recognize the most important ones. There are three that can best be applied in a digital strategy: 1. Reach, 2. Conversion, and 3. Revenue.
Reach
Marketers first need to understand the people who visit their sites. This includes the number of unique visitors, where visitors came from, and what brought them there; e.g., keywords, SEO, etc. What are the top referral sites? If competitors are drawing customers from other sites, might these be sites worth checking out as well?
Also worth investigating are the company’s click-through rates. CTR-influenced high scores could bring the company discounts from search engines like Google Adwords and help lower a company’s pay-per-click costs.
Conversion
Key to maximizing a company’s content is awareness of its bounce rates. SEO companies like GoRocketFuel and Moz say an acceptable bounce rate is about 50%.
For companies with higher bounce rates, this could mean uninteresting content, too many ads, unattractive design and/or an absence of what a visitor was searching for. These are issues that should be investigated where bounce rates are higher than the norm.
On the other hand, lower bounce rates are the mirror opposite of high rates. In addition, they could also signify that the company is appealing and marketing to the right target audience and displaying a distinct application of its website.
An awareness and adoption of better practices can only help to improve average page views, average site times, and conversion rates.
Revenue
The obvious bottom line in any commercial venture is revenue and critical to getting there is having the right tools to measure the company’s return on investment and costs to acquire customers. Every department that’s part of a company’s digital strategy must have a say in determining what software best meets everyone’s needs. There are a lot of programs out there.
In addition to acquiring the appropriate software, other actions should include: 1. Enhancing the check-out procedure; 2. Employing third-party trust signs to improve visitor confidence; 3. Extending more active assistance offers like “live” chat and co-browsing; 4. Helping guide more users through the conversion funnel by utilizing AIDA – attention, interest, desire and action; 5. Removing dated data; 6. Cultivating and publishing more user reviews; and 7. Establishing baselines for user actions, major comments and objections, and metrics for key areas like conversion, bounce rates, and retention.
The last recommendation should also result in regular interdepartmental reviews to tweak or even discard certain action plans based on recognition of an ever-changing environment.
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