Tag Archives: data

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Mine Your Search Engine Data

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What are interested parties interested in when they visit your website?  That very critical marketing intelligence is often not quite obvious when we plan and contract to build our website. We know to include a description of the products and/or services we sell.  Those who sell products on their site know to include an e-commerce function.  Those who schedule on-line appointments know to include a booking function and perhaps also a pay online feature.

But what information,  surveys,  videos,  white papers or whatever grab attention and keep visitors on a certain website page and convey details that prospective customers need to make a decision about doing business with you,  helping to convert prospects into customers?  Well,  you have to build the thing before you figure out the nuances of what information and features best serve your prospects and business,  but once you’ve done that Google Analytics can help in a big way and as of September 29,  even more than before.  Let’s take a look at Site Search Analysis (SSA) and two new Google offerings,  Real-Time Analytics and Analytics Premium.

SSA functions as  Search Engine Optimization  (SEO)  for your website,  extracting  and reporting valuable data about  site visitors that will provide clues on how to effectively fine-tune the sales tool that is your website.  This is not inbound lead generation  (nor is it actual SEO).  SSA analyzes data generated by your website’s own search engine.  Analytics Premium and Real-Time Analytics will make the information more timely and comprehensive.

The big advantage of Real-Time Analytics is that it will produce a set of reports that show what’s happening on your website as it happens.  You will receive instant insight into the visit count and much other valuable information about what resonates with visitors directly from the search engine of your website.  Real-Time will also measure the activity of social media linked to your website and it will allow you to monitor the impact of new content and marketing campaigns.  Once you’re registered with Google Analytics,  you must enable the Real-Time feature by clicking “new version.”

The more traffic your website receives and the more search queries occur,  the more extensive and revealing the story.  The data from this internal search process will identify what prospective customers want from your website and your business.  What are they curious about?  What information do they seek?  SSA internal search data lets you know the ways your website does and does not deliver information and answer visitor’s questions.

You will be able to evaluate website content—do you provide enough of the right information,  do you tell the right story in the way that prospective customers can understand?  Or you may have the right content,  but analyzing search data can tell you if visitors to your site somehow become frustrated and wind up exiting the site,  perhaps because the desired information is hard to find because it’s buried somewhere that prospects don’t expect to find it,  meaning you need to re-arrange and re-configure pages.  Maybe your information needs to be presented in a more eye-catching fashion or the text and terms used should be clarified,  expressed in language that your clients use and will better understand?

Analytics Premium is a paid service that reportedly will produce more specific website traffic data than the free service.  Premium will offer more customizable variables and downloadable reports.   There will also be guaranteed service level agreements for data collection,  processing and reporting,  plus  24/7  customer service reps available to assist with installing the program.

In closing,  I offer you a caveat:  SSA provides much intriguing data about how prospective customers respond to your website,  but you have to interpret the meaning of it all and decide what smart thing to do with the information.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

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The Data Driven Payoff

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Because the February-March session sold out,  I have been invited to reprise my three-part workshop  “Become Your Own Boss: Effective Business Plan Writing”  at Boston Center for Adult Education 122 Arlington Street Boston MA on three Mondays,  May 9, 16 & 23 from 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM.  For more information or to register please visit http://bit.ly/becomeyourown59  or call 617.267.4430.

As Freelance consultants,  we know that information is nearly as valuable to us as our skill set.  Information leads us to make smart decisions about all aspects of business: what services to offer,  identifying target client groups,  determining a profitable business model,  understanding how to market our services,  gaining a competitive edge.  That good information is integral to all that we do comes as no surprise,  but until now there was no scientific evidence to support that belief.

New research done by Erik Brynjolfsson,  economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Business,  Heekyung Kim,  graduate student in economics at MIT Sloan School and Lorin Hitt,  economist at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business proves that good information really does put money in your pocket.

The three studied 179 large businesses and found that when decisions enacted were based on reliable data,  companies achieved a 5+ % higher productivity level than businesses that relied more on “experience and intuition” for decision making.  The higher productivity could not be attributed to other factors,  such as the use of more sophisticated technology.

In the study,  data driven decision making was not primarily based on merely collecting data,  but was closely linked to how the data was utilized.  In the April 24, 2011 New York Times,  Mr. Brynolfsson stated that business decisions based on data and analysis “have huge implications for competitiveness and growth”.

Thomas Davenport,  professor of information technology and management at Babson College in Massachusetts supported the conclusions reached regarding data driven business decisions in a book written with Jeanne Harris and Robert Morison, “Analytics at Work: Smarter Results” (2010),  concluding that companies that rely heavily on data analysis are likely to outperform those that do not.

The big question is,  which data do we choose to collect and analyze and how do we best apply it?  Curating data is big business.  “The biggest change facing corporations is the explosion of data”,  said David Grossman,  technology analyst at Stifel Nicolaus in the April 24 NY Times.  “The best business is in helping customers analyze and manage all that data”.

How does a Freelancer decide what to do with data available to us?  I propose that data presented here would guide readers with excellent proficiency in mathematics and possessed of an advanced degree in the subject to become data analysts!  All others might take a look at our P & L statements and examine gross revenue and fixed and variable expenses and analyze how much it costs to generate income and what can be trimmed to make the bottom line better.

Speaking of revenue,  do some research on the services that your target clients are contracting for these days.  Are you retaining clients and signing new ones, too?  How does your 2Q 2011 active client roster compare to 2Q 2010?  Do you need to tweak your business model to maintain your competitive edge,  or might it be wiser to seek a strategic partnership?

To help figure things out,  do a free online search of Google’s Key Word Tool or Wonder Wheel and type in a descriptive phrase of your core service.  How many prospects in your locale are searching for what you sell?  Next,  type in a phrase that describes the service you think might interest clients and see how many local searches it gets.  There you have it,  data driven analysis to guide your business decisions.

Use Google Analytics to track hits to your website and report which pages receive the most attention.  You can correlate that data to the number of follow-up requests you receive and  the conversion of that follow-up to new business.  Make further use of that data to evaluate the efficacy of your website and learn how you can enhance this important marketing tool.  Will adding multimedia to your website be useful?  Or will adding pages to give more information do the trick?  Or maybe you should just simplify the text and clarify and strengthen your message?  Listen to the data and find your answers.

Thanks for reading,

Kim