Identifying robots more effectively - even indirectly enlisting their help - will distill your results, and solidify your site's relevancy.

In a recent post, I spent some time exposing what we’ve since been calling the “bot quandary,” which, put simply, is the tendency for a sites’ analytics to become skewed – sometimes significantly – because indexing visits from bots and spiders are counted by search engines. In this post, I will spend some time on a few things that can be done to help reduce that skew in order to clarify your site’s actual relevancy.

Take aim and select your target, then execute

As I pointed out in my prior post, these spider visits affect site analytics, often significantly. In order to get a more accurate picture of your site’s true relevancy, it’s necessary to remove them from the count. But – and this is important – you don’t want to block the bots completely, or you’ll stop being indexed altogether. Of course, this can be a much worse fate than some fairly skewed numbers. (more…)

Separating the bot from the customer will refine your site's analytics - sometimes more than you'd think.

Two words you hear constantly in content discussions are relevance and traffic – testament that these concepts, maybe more than any others, drive the life of your site. Usually, but not always, the two form a symbiotic relationship: relevance definitely drives traffic – in many different ways – and usually our focus is on how to harness that power for good.

For this post, though, I want to focus on another, less obvious – and much less intuitive – relationship between content and traffic: the concept behind the relevance of traffic.

It’s not something web professionals have examined readily – or very heavily – as search has grown, but the concept is gaining steam around analytics and SEO discussions lately. (more…)

It’s no secret that one of the cornerstones of Web Experience Management (WEM) is the common eNewsletter, and your subscribers are each a piece of marketing gold – directly attached to traffic, engagement and, yes, conversions. While it wouldn’t be wrong to call each email address a lead, it would be discounting their potential. More accurately described, your subscriber list is a screened and vetted collection of opt-in, targeted, hungry leads, complete with a stated interest in exactly what your website has to offer.

Money can’t buy love

It seems obvious that one of the most important things you can do to increase your site’s web engagement would be to grow your e-mail list, organically rather than by purchase of addresses. One way to accomplish that is through goal oriented, multi-channel campaigns and by applying constant optimization to your website landing pages and form pages. (more…)

In today’s web-covered world, everything is richer, faster, more colorful, and more relevant to each user. The old bait & hook, mass-blast marketing isn’t enough anymore, and can genuinely annoy its intended target – your potential customers. Marketers need to focus their messaging efforts now, more than ever, across multiple channels to effectively manage successful web engagement, and they need to take advantage of tools that can help them do just that. Today’s Web Engagement Marketing (WEM) strategies require an implementation that is derived from specific goals or objectives, and campaigns need to be able to be easily and quickly altered in individual channels for continuous optimization.

Goal Driven Marketing involves setting specific goals for an overall campaign and deploying a WEM strategy that exploits various channels to achieve those goals and that can be measured against benchmarks that make sense to your company. Effective Goal Driven Marketing leverages accurate, relevant web analytics to enable real-time adjustment to each channel in order to reach and exceed these goals.

You do this now. Need to fill more seats for your next company seminar? You set a campaign goal for increasing the number of registrants then associate that goal to a series of channel actions: email campaigns, banner ads, paid search, social media efforts, etc. As the campaign progresses, you keep a close eye on analytics from each channel, figure out what is and isn’t working, then make necessary adjustments to optimize for maximum effect. (more…)

Oh Behave…

When visitors enter a website they do so to accomplish a goal. That goal could be to purchase, to learn, to download or to be entertained. However, even the best laid out website can have interesting results on how visitors navigate to accomplish that goal. What’s more, visitors may even search out content you never thought was important. How to find all of this ‘interesting’ data comes from conducting a User Intent Analysis.

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We landed on the Moon

July 20^th, 1969 Neil Armstrong,  Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins expected to land on the moon and that’s exactly what they did (not getting into conspiracy theories today). But what would have happened if Apollo 11 ended up on Mars instead? Neil would have pulled out his 7-iron and realized he was hitting out of a dry sand trap; may need to club up! The point is, your visitors also have expectations of where they’ll be landing, and if they bring their golf clubs, they expect to golf! This is why Landing Page Optimization is so important. You can ensure that the visitor’s experience is relevant and optimized based on ‘their’ feedback, not just ‘your’ gut instincts.

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