Get the Most from Your Website: Measure Everything

I’ve been in internet marketing, especially search marketing, for about 11 years now. Four years ago, I went out on my own, started my own thing. And I tell you, over all this time, I’ve learned that the most important thing anybody can do when using their website to promote their business is to measure everything.

This started as a presentation I gave to WordCamp Atlanta 2019. You can watch the entire presentation on WordCamp TV: Get the Most Out of Your Website: Measure Everything.

This is where the power of internet marketing comes from. We’re not buying a radio spot and hoping someone hears it. It’s really hard to see if something like that helps you. You might say, “I’m gonna buy an ad in this magazine.” That might go great, and you might spend a lot of money and think, “I spent so much money, surely it’s gonna work.” I don’t do that kind of marketing. I like internet marketing because we know if it works or not. The power of internet marketing is our ability to measure everything we do.

There is a problem though, and it might be why you’re here today. There’s so much data- what are you supposed to believe? What are you supposed to do?

• Should you look at your bounce rate?
• Should you look at the pages per visitor?
• What’s the difference between a page view, and a visit, and a session, and a user?

We get analysis paralysis.

It gets worse when we’re paying for advertising. Maybe we’re doing Facebook. We have to ask ourselves: after paying for this traffic is Facebook giving us data that helps us to know it’s effective? Or is Facebook giving as data to make Facebook look really good so we keep spending money with them? We have all these numbers. It sounds great to have 10,000 impressions on our Facebook campaign, but did that help? It feels like it did it, it might have, I surely it did something…

We lose the power in our confusion.

I’m hoping to provide a solution. A solution to analysis paralysis in marketing data. A solution to whether or not you should believe or trust this particular metric.

The solution is: a measurement plan.

Now, I know we’re all busy, and I know that we just kind of want to get down to the nitty gritty. This is where we all live. But as with most things in life, time to make a plan and develop a strategy will end up making everything more efficient. A plan will allow you to have the power that you need to understand what marketing is working, what marketing is wasting money, where you should double down, and where you should cut off.  Because you have a measurement plan you can understand what you should be looking at.

The first step, in creating a marketing plan is understanding your business objectives. This might be harder than it seems.

Forget about your website for a moment? What does your business hope to accomplish? What is your business objective?

Now, the cobbler’s kids got no shoes. As I’m writing this I had ask myself: “What is your business objective, David?” I should put it down. The business objective of Reliable Acorn is: help B2B companies grow through reliable internet marketing advice and services. That’s what my business wants to accomplish.

What’s your business objective?

Let’s look at an example of finding a business objective.

Woman: My business objective on my website is to articulate that, coming to my company, you’re going to have security, and that you are going to have top rate service, because I do nonmedical in-home care in Pennsylvania. So, we have a black eye in the industry of horror stories of caregivers coming in the home and robbing them blind. So, that’s my objective.

David: If we could sum it up in one sentence, well, how would you say it?

Woman: Safe affordable home care.

That is a great business objective. It’s short and clear. Notice how this business danced around the idea for a little before they got there. Sometimes we know our business so well that we have a hard time summarizing it. Other times our business is so complicated, or has many different facets, that it’s hard to summarize. For our purposes (creating a measurement plan) it’s worth making it more concise. With a concise business objective, we can carry-out the next steps in a measurement plan.