Understanding the Real Story of Your Business on the Web ...

Become a Certified Internet Marketing Professional at the Internet Marketing University of Canada

by Mike Fleming

In the early days of the Web, all interaction with a business online
happened in one place ? on their website.? Businesses would create
content, put it on their site, and followers would come to the site and
consume the new content.? Measuring success was rather easy at that
point.? You simply tagged your site and one analytics tool would collect
all of your data for analysis.? Of course, we know this has all
changed.

Now, a business creates content and it gets published and
consumed in multiple places.? This fundamental shift in how the web
experience works brings with it a challenge in measuring success.?
When content is published and consumed offsite, the data is not
collected by your analytics tool.? Therefore, looking at visitors and
page views of your content no longer gives you the real story of your
success or lack thereof.

At this point, the Web analytics industry
is still evolving in regard to the challenge of collecting accurate
data about what happens on the Web.? Piecing together a story requires
multiple sources of data, as no one tool covers all of the needed
bases.? Not only that, but the way that the Web now experiences your
content requires different metrics to really understand how successful
you are.

I?m going to present to you what I?ll call ?metric
categories? that will help you to change your paradigm about what
success is on the Web and, therefore, help you to better analyze it.?
These categories will give you a sense of the types of metrics that you
should be looking through to identify the critical few that will help you grow your online presence.

1. Production ? am I worthy of customers?

If
you aren?t consistently creating killer content that is valuable to
your target audience, you are not worthy of success.? For a blog,
metrics like posts per week and words per post are great for monitoring
your end of the bargain in your online relationships.

2. Conversation ? how are my relationships developing?

Are
you interacting with your audience?? Are you getting comments on your
blog, reviews on your products, replies to your tweets, etc.?? Are the
comments people leave in-depth?? Are you leaving comments and responding
to your audience???? Metrics like comments per post, replies sent per
day and replies received per day can gauge your success in having
conversation with your audience.

3. Attraction ? what content is most successful at gaining attention?

Instead
of just blindly pushing content out into the plethora of spaces that
now exist, how about analyzing what your audience likes and doesn?t like
based on what they decide to consume and how much they interact with
it.? Metrics like CTR of link tweets or % of users that complete a video
can show you how you?re doing at delivering your content to your
audience in a way that interests them.

4. Attention ? is my content creating loyal followers?

Beyond
just attracting an audience, you want to keep their attention.? Is the
content you?re producing valuable enough to keep them coming back for
more?? Metrics like subscribers (Email or RSS), followers, likes, visits
per visitor, visitor loyalty and visitor recency are great for
measuring if people are becoming your fans.

5. Amplification ? what content spreads the most?

One
of the true powers of the Web is, of course, is how easy it is for your
fans to become evangelists and create more fans for you.? Free
marketing is golden!? Therefore, you want to measure and analyze how
well your content is spread by your audience.? Metrics like retweets per
thousand followers, links to your site, and blog authority can tell you
how well your influence is spreading and leading to more fans.

?

6. Conversion ? what content and sources lead to the outcomes I desire?

Of
course, we can?t forget outcomes.? How good is the sweat equity you?re
pouring into all these online relationships at leading customers into
your sales funnel and/or closing sales (whatever is appropriate).?
Metrics like Conversion Rate and AdSense clicks (for blogs) can help you
measure the activity, sources and content that is getting the job done
in this area.

There they are?6 categories of metrics for a Web
2.0 world.? Remember, while all of these are great, you don?t need all
of them all the time.? What you need to do is combine these broad areas
with the information from one of my previous posts about focusing on a few metrics
that are really important for the health of your business right now.?
Then, you?ll be well on your way to using your time wisely on what will
provide impact for your business.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Become a Certified Internet Marketing Professional at the Internet Marketing University of Canada

By admin in In the News, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing on March 25, 2012

Source: http://imuniversity.ca/blog/internet-marketing/understanding-the-real-story-of-your-business-on-the-web/

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