I was speaking with a new client recently about the challenges they face in driving qualified visitors to their website.  When we reviewed their target keywords, they didn’t have a single webpage indexed within the top 50 listings on Google or Yahoo/Bing.  As with many companies in today’s economy, they were forced to make some tough decisions on where to allocate financial resources when developing their marketing plan and choosing a web developer.  Eighteen months later, they still have no presence in the search engines organically and sales are not ramping up as they had hoped. 

Their situation reminds me of a classic quote from the movie Armageddon, when Steve Buscemi (who plays the character Rockhound), says “You know we’re sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”  While I hesitate to equate a website with a rocket ship carrying a nuclear weapon, I am sure there are business owners who feel they are managing a company with 270,000 moving parts.  For e-commerce companies, where their website is the main source of revenue, cutting corners or choosing the cheaper option is a blueprint for failure.  I always felt the popular cliché, “you get what you pay for” should be amended to “you get what you pay for…and later you pay more to get it right”.

Putting your most important asset into the hands of the lowest bidder is not a sound strategy, and the final result rarely ends with you actually saving money.  The amount of time and money needed to fix a poorly designed website can easily cost more than if you chose the highest bidder from the beginning.  I’m not advocating choosing the most expensive option as a way to guarantee results.  In addition, I understand all companies have to make sound financial decisions in order to run their business.  Proper due diligence is the best course of action before choosing to partner with any company regardless of the service or product they offer.  However, remember the 270,000 “moving parts” of your business and the importance of your website’s success before blindly choosing a cheap alternative for the sake of saving a few dollars.

Remember back when everybody shared the same homepage experience, be it on AOL, Yahoo, etc?  There wasn’t any personalization to the information, there was just a one-size-fits-all approach. As this was in the early days of the internet, there was hardly an understanding of what the future would hold for internet users, but it’s evident today that people have embraced the concept of having their online experiences tailored to them.

The first meaningful step in this direction occurred with the launch of iGoogle in April of 2007. iGoogle provided a framework upon which users could select modules to be included on a personalized homepage. More so than MSN or Yahoo, Google encouraged people to develop content that could be fed into the iGoogle platform, in contrast to a more restrictive philosophy adopted by Yahoo and MSN who maintained greater control over the content available.

Now we have Twitter. I’ll save for another post my thoughts on how businesses should best utilize Twitter to engage with their audiences. The point here, however is that Twitter enables people to exponentially personalize their experience online by “following” streams of tweets from individuals they are interested in hearing from and by tracking tweets on topics of interest (with saved searches, #hashtags, lists, etc.), be they pleasure, hobby or work related.

Regardless of whether you ever expect to participate in social media through tweeting, you should take advantage of the opportunity to listen to what’s going on through Twitter in a highly personalized manner. 

Our friends at Google have recently launched a new sorting algorithm within Google Analytics. Now, when you sort a computed metric - like goal conversion rate, bounce rate or percentage of new visits – you can weight that sort by the number of data points.  This ranks the most interesting and actionable items higher in your sort.

Previously, if you wanted to see which keyword had the highest bounce rate, it would rank keywords with 100% bounce rates the highest, even if the keyword only had one visit. This did not lend much to analyze.

Now, however, with Weighted Sort you can see which keywords with substantial visits are giving you high bounce rates.

Weighted Sort clears up the clutter of large amounts of data and helps you make more effective decisions when dissecting campaigns. It can help you focus on what keywords or pages need to be improved to increase your campaign performance.