12
2009
May

Life after the first click

graveyard sm
Recently much of my day is consumed not so much with Adwords but with what happens next. Clients are interested in results and we are part of that pipeline so it is perfectly understandable that we would be part of the team trying to solve this challenge. This process shifts my attention from the data in Adwords to Analytics. Analytics is easy to use but there is a fundamental shift from what to why and that is not easy. Visitors arrive at your web site and if you are average, 98% of them leave without taking the action you wanted and we are left with the question of why?
The first concept that we have to struggle with is that marketing data is more clue than fact. Data tells us that the visitor left but does not tell us why they left or if we met their expectations. Different data can paint conflicting messages and the perfect example of this is pages read and time on site. In most case increasing pages read and time on site are positive indicators but what if they go in different directions? Getting mixed signals from your data is common and in reality it is the balance and direction of the data you have to understand.

Businesses have expectations for their traffic and often those expectations are not realistic. We all want results and we want them now but the reality is that the market is going to give us what we earn not what we want. So once we get a visitor to the site how do we earn the goal for the traffic? The simple answer is we earn the result by providing a web experience that takes the visitor from hello to thank you. In between those two is a conversation with the prospect and many web sites fail in managing that conversation.

Just like any conversation, the web experience has to build on the prior interactions and meet the needs of the visitor. Deviate from the interests of the prospect and they will leave. This builds from what you know and this is where many web sites are challenged because visitors arrive from different keywords and with different interests in your business. The classic mistake in this process is the searcher that looks for Italian Shoes, who clicks on an ad for Italian Shoes, only to land on the home page of a department store 9 clicks away from the Italian Shoes. In most cases every time you give people a choice you will lose 50% of your traffic so it will take 256 visitors to get one person to the Italian Shoes page. This is a huge mistake and it happens every day. Even if you get a 90% success rate on those 9 clicks you still only get 38 people out of the 100 you paid for to that page and you still have to convert them. The other side of this problem is that creating a landing page for every keyword group could become very expensive and the return on this investment could be minimized.

The next challenge is that not all visitors react to your message in the same way. It is very easy to have multiple sales attributes that move different people in different ways. The classic example of this is the balance of cost and quality and this varies by many different factors. If your product is sold based on the highest quality then offering a sales price can actually hurt you. How many sales do you think they have on a Ferrari or Bentley? On the other hand if your product is sold on price and all you do is push the quality of the product you also have a classic audience to message mismatch.

There is no perfect answer to any of this and the challenge is to find the right balance for your business.