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How effective is web marketing?

Hits can mean visitors, which can produce enquiries, which can produce business.

Web marketing reality is that hits do not on their own mean very much. Hits can indicate there are human visitors who can produce enquiries, and these enquiries can then produce business. Assuming your company website is intended to promote your offerings rather than other peoples, then it is the eventual business that you are interested in rather than just the vanity of a high hit rate.

There are three levels of conversion that you will be interested in achieving, first conversion of some of the millions of Internet surfers out there into visitors to your particular website. Secondly you will be interested in the conversion of some of these visitors into enquirers, thirdly and finally there is the conversion of these enquirers into business.

You will have to apply some original thinking and hard work to each of these three conversion stages if you are to achieve your real objective which is the generation of business from your website so I am going to discuss them separately in some detail, this month starting with conversion of surfers into visitors to your website.

1. Conversion of some of the millions of Internet surfers out there into visitors to your particular website

There are a number of routes by which to get people to visit your website in the first place, not all of them are expensive and none require more than a little original thought and application though there are expensive options available if you feel wealthy.

1.1 Mention your website URL on/in all communications from your organisation.

This means:

business cards
letterheads
invoices, purchase orders and order acknowledgements
brochures
instruction sheets
response cards
answer machine messages
adverts
press releases
all product packaging and any included materials

Basically any communicative item that reaches the normal circle of contact individuals and organisations around and involved with your company.

These people should be the first to know and perhaps the first to benefit from your use of the new medium which allows communication inward and outward via your company website.

1.2 Exclusive and unique content on your website attracting your contact group to visit.

This contact group may require information on fixing installation problems or installation options, which may be too complex to include in the product packaging if there are many variants available. Such information can be provided in limitless variations on your website.

They may like to purchase an extended guarantee and you could offer them that option via the website. They might like to report a problem or tell you how much they like your products, again the website and resulting email or enquiry form could be invaluable.

Critically you could try to enlist your customers into a feedback scheme regarding your products through the website. Organisations have often tried suggestion schemes using their own employees with mixed results but having your own Internet site allows you to try a suggestion scheme which includes some aspects of brainstorming with a much wider and perhaps more valuable audience, namely your customers.

You could try to combine media and start a campaign in one media completing it on your website.

Obviously such things will depend on your expectations of the level of Internet access available to your targets but as mentioned in this month (August 2001) edition, UK homes with Internet access increased to 10 million in 2001 compared to 6 million last year and around the globe business users increasingly turn to on-line information sources instead of out of date printed directories.

There will increasingly be opportunities to persuade people to visit your on-line shop front. (see a previous article on this, "Have you determined what your website is for and what that means for its design?"). Many pundits have already used the phrase "content is king" and there is in my estimation no substitute. If you can get first mover advantage and make your site the on-line resource for your business area, technology, offering, you will gain a significant lead over the basic brochure ware sites which typify most organisations on-line presences.

1.3 Email or traditional, regular, informative marketing communication activity.

There are many instances where a regular informative requested email newsletter can be very effective in maintaining top of mind awareness and tempting people to visit your website for more information.

I recommend being very careful using lists where individuals have not asked to receive your specific email newsletter as you do not want to offend or anger possible punters and more importantly you want to talk to people who want to talk to you.

Imagine you are a supermarket selling a wide range of ingredients, which people cook at home. How about a monthly newsletter with recipes from leading chefs. You mention them initially in the newsletter and give a link to the full article and mouth watering pictures or animations on your website.

Note: I do not recommend you send HTML email newsletters, it is possible to embed virus type code in an HTML email and so some punters are understandably concerned plus if the punter is off-line their newsreader will not be able to download the images to form the HTML page properly, it will look awful and likely prompt them to make an Internet connection just so they can read your email displayed in all its undoubted glory. Send simple text emails and most importantly do not display the email addresses of all the people in your mailing list. You can use a program to generate the emails so they do not include all email addresses or you can use the blind copy function of your email client and send groups of emails at a time. Each recipient needs to know that you are being responsible with their personal email address, likewise that means you do not under any circumstances sell their email address on to others. If you are in the UK you should comply with the requirements of the data protection act.

1.4 Viral marketing activity.

While this may not be appropriate for some businesses it does not take much imagination to find that quite a large group of businesses can benefit.

My definition of viral marketing includes "Word of mouth is perhaps the original viral marketing and perhaps also still the best".

Viral marketing is basically all about generating positive word of mouth communication and it means simply this: "if you produce something which has value to people they will tell others about it for you". So it is in fact not that different from the suggestion I made for supermarkets to generate a resource of tasty recipes on their website. If that resource is truly valuable then people will instinctively tell others about it which will drive visitors to your website.

Typical viral marketing includes fun items like flash games with some branded content and you can certainly get a lot of fun from such things and drive visitors at the same time. You could for example if it were appropriate supply a branded flash game virally yet provide updates and or a high score table on your website, does it fit with what you are doing in your business? Is it consistent and in harmony with your other communications, it needs to be.

1.5 Search engine and directory registrations and listings of your pages.

Some significant search engines and directories notably Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Goto, now charge for review for inclusion of business websites into their index.

This is a good thing for businesses because, it is not enough of a cost to dissuade serious businesses but will reduce the amount of noise which could otherwise get in the way of your ranking.

Designing your website to be found by various keywords is a vital aspect in it's construction and there are plenty of articles on the Internet on this topic already, many on the search engine's own sites.

Keyword density, "meta tags" and page titles need to be understood and implemented by your site creators on all pages. Importantly, the concept of keyword density implies that large pages cannot by their definition have both high keyword density and an easy to read format.

You will want your website to be on the first few pages for searches for many keywords and phrases because you cannot always be sure how Internet users will search for your type of item.

You need to be sure that you have sufficient content spread across sufficient pages to achieve this and critically the design of the website must allow humans and search engines to fully navigate and read the contents. It is not rocket science but your website designers must be convincing when they explain to you how the site should be, for good performance in the search engines. Beware of flash pages, non HTML pages including adobe acrobat, image maps and dynamically created pages with complex url strings or which are to be created in response to query strings entered manually by users with no static alternative way to find the contents.

1.6 Linking to and from other Internet sites, which will drive visitors to your site.

Links are valuable for a number of reasons. Firstly links to your website from others can drive visitors to your website and if inward links are on the right websites, with relevant and high traffic then you are likely to get a good quantity of relevant visitors.

Links from your website (outward links) can add value to your website for your visitors. Your website about your company which manufactures widgets could include links to the standards bodies which specify widget tolerances, the metallurgy institute where the full properties of the "unobtanium" metal you use are listed, websites or sections of your own where the application of your widgets is shown, links to all your authorised outlets for spare widgets worldwide, carriers websites so customers can track their shipments, the global widget producers association of which you are a member, on-line engineering resources on which your company is listed and where your visitors can find other items they are seeking. The list can go on but you are likely to want to show that your organisation is an expert in every thing to do with the production supply and application of widgets. This will go a long way to convincing your on-line visitors that they have found their source for their annual widget needs.

The third reason for the importance of inward and outward linking is that many Internet search engines currently look at something called "link popularity" and use a formula to calculate a value which is used in their calculation of your ranking for a keyword. Trying to trick this formula is a waste of energy, the formula used by Google, the search engine behind the webpage search supporting Yahoo, takes into account keywords on the pages that link into your website. Again as you are trying to get ranked for many keywords and phrases you will not be able to trick the engines in this area or if you are foolish enough to try, you will certainly be diverting your resources from making your website the most valuable resource for people when they do eventually arrive from one or other of these invitations you are creating looking for an authoritative organisation about widgets.

The safest place to ask people to point inward links is to your main index page, your domain name, as this is most likely always to be present and not to provide a dead link, but in some cases it will benefit inward linking sites to send visitors to a sub section of your website so you could provide an index page for each section which you will always maintain. Examples include "widgets/construction_of/index.html or widgets/glossary/index.html. Having links come into relevant sub sections of your website will be likely to increase the similarity between the keywords in those pages on your site and those of the referring page which as mentioned will improve your ranking.

You should ideally create a custom 404 page for your website to catch any visitors using a dead link into your website, this could be a site map of some kind to permit the visitor to get to the section they were seeking as easily as possible. Monitor arrivals to this page in your logs and if any are coming from inward links on other websites contact the webmasters to get their addressing updated.

1.7 A final note on converting Surfers to Visitors, be aware that a hit is not a visitor.

Assuming you are monitoring hits to your website with a stats package or log file or both, hits will include any requested object from your website, this means images, objects, HTML pages, pdf pages, css files etc and will include the indexing activity of the search engines themselves.

If you have access to the raw logs, and are able to analyse them yourself, you will be able to identify when a search engine has indexed your site because the first file it will ask for will normally be a "robots.txt" file from your root directory. (they will normally ask for this even if you have not provided one as it might include your coded instructions for them).

You could if you so wished identify the IP addresses from which the robots came and monitor these specifically to see how regularly your site is indexed and if you resubmit, how long it takes for the engine to send it's robot to index your new contents.

Another aspect of search engine indexing is speed, you would not expect humans to remain only fractions of a second on each page or send repeated requests for different pages within seconds or less of each other, these are not human visitors to your website rather they are the robots (sometimes called spiders) from the search engines whipping through your site to compile their indexes.

Human visitors are likely to remain on each page for at least 10-40 seconds depending on the contents, what you will be more interested in is whether they stay or leave, whether they find the contents interesting and valuable enough to browse around and perhaps place an enquiry or if they on arriving realise this is not the website they expected, not what they were looking for and leave immediately.

On this note your promotion must be consistent with your offering, there is no point attracting visitors for whom your offering will be irrelevant, all you would achieve by this is a higher monthly data transfer than needed which may cost you more money or slow your site's response for your real visitors.

If you like this article, bookmark www.sticky-marketing.net and come back next month for the next piece on converting visitors into enquirers.

Author Mark Abraham (mark@sticky-marketing.net) 8th August 2001