How Important is Efficiency in Web Marketing?
Posted in Uncategorized on November 13th, 2009 by fubarriovery.
It would have made a poignant message to end this post after the first word, but, as the saying goes, “why say in one word, what 500 will say just as well?” 
Something that is a common theme for web-marketers, especially when working with smaller, less experienced clients is the concept of “efficiency”.
A new business, or perhaps a small business that grew up without utilizing the web for gathering leads or closing sales, is often nevertheless aware of the traffic they receive to their website, and often acutely aware of a competitor outranking them for a keyword phrase they consider important in google, yahoo, bing, or other search engine.
At this point, most enterprising entrepreneurs will either tackle some rudimentary search engine optimization (seo) or pay per click (ppc) work, or assign someone in the organization to “get them some more traffic”.
Typically, after a steep learning curve involving some link-building, on site seo, or adventures in analytics and adwords, the business owner is very aware of the cost of the project but has yet to see any directly quantifiable gains from the effort expended.
This is often a result of several ‘issues’
1.) an inefficient website
2.) no definitive goals
3.) no systematized tracking in place
An Inefficient Website
By efficiency, I mean the effectiveness at which the website generates your desired result.
If we were to think of the website like a ‘black box’ machine, how good is it at taking the raw input (traffic for instance) and turning it into the desired output? Examples of the desired output may be lead generation, sales, foot traffic (in a physical store), etc.
The back-ass-wards way of approaching the online marketing problem is to assume that ‘more traffic’ is the answer. But if you are feeding more and more leads into a system or ’sales funnel’ that has holes in it, your money and effort is usually better spent on fine tuning your conversions (or efficiency) first.
So how efficient is your website? Without a system for monitoring progress you’ll never know — which leads us to our second point:
Lack of a system for systematized tracking of traffic & conversions
Entrepreneurs are busy. However simple this one thing seems for those of us who live or die based on traffic, cost of conversions, lifetime value of customer, it can seem amazing. But, there are plenty of small business websites out there that either don’t have tracking installed, don’t follow it, or don’t know how to analyze the results in a way that benefits their bottom line.
No Definitive Goals
This one *should* be a no-brainer, I guess. But, I frequently see examples of this with business sites. They are an electronic representation of a brochure. There is no call to action (whatever that may be), and even if they are using the site to (theoretically) generate foot traffic, there is no reason for the user to shut off the computer and come into the store. And, of course, no real good way to track that traffic that came into the physical store after seeing their website
One of the comical things about this post, to me, is the fact that corporateraiter.com exhibits all of these ‘don’t do’s’. However, this is because I’m not in business yet. Right now, my site is merely a way for me to share information with friends who need a nudge in the right direction with their own web properties. Rest assured, when I start pushing prospects to my site, I will have mechanisms in place to capture those leads, and systems in place to monitor my site’s effciency at doing so.
Please keep this post in mind if you are looking for a way to boost your own bottom line! Tuning up your website’s ability to convert with almost always pay better than paying for more traffic.
Metrics are of course the key to understanding how your site is performing. Interesting note about efficiency though. I think it is important to remember that even if a visitor is on our page, we still have to compete for his/her attention. Therefore, we have to be brief, to the point and on message to hang on to enough of the reader’s attention to communicate the message.
Thanks!
I will allow recyclers to know what content is in any consumer or industrial electronics product.
My primary metric for my website is of course sales. But I try to use as many other metrics as possible from google analytics, statcounter, and others to get a feel for the effectiveness of my website in converting visits into purchases.
I think it is not enough to track traffic and conversion rate of your sites just by putting on google analytics or other stats tracker tools.
I prefer making a short report on a daily basis : What I’ve done and What I’ve achieved at the end of the day.
Wow…nice info
I didn’t know about that until now
Thanks for sharing
Tracking is one way to know if our visitor converts into buyers, this is a no-brainer, if your running a business website you should track your visitors and there are a lot of free tracking tools out there, mostly all of us uses google analytics.
The “call to action” is something I frequently notice as missing. An easy to follow contact instruction with as few clicks as possible can help turn readers into customers.
Tracking and analytics help you manage the message and tactics, but if there is no communication of the requested action, all could be for nothing!
Thanks!
MAS
Aside from google analytics, I also use WP plugins trackers and also track sites with Alexa. This is a great post especially newbies trying to drive traffic to their blog/site.
Without web marketing a website or any online business is like a bottle in which you are putting money but not getting any thing.
Very well said, I agree you could have ended that post after the first word, but thanks for expanding on the idea. I think that efficiency is extremely important when marketing online. You must be able to turn around data and reach your customers in the quickest and most efficient way possible. People that are searching online are looking for instant gratification and feedback and if you expect to succeed online you must be able to meet there needs in this instance.
Agreed on this!
I myself remember those days, when i was new to webmaster stuffs…
and i had all the negative qualities of an inexperienced webmaster without any definitive goals. Resulting in straight failure to get any profit from the site. But things have changed now, after learning some SEO techniques and niche finding etc.
For any site i guess the most important thing is “DEFINITIVE GOAL” and then “SEO”.. then we can go for other website promotion things.
I know many webmasters who solely depends on “SOMEONE” to get traffic to their sites.. and we can guess what they end up with..
Thanks, you have covered quite Detailed topic in a small space, Impressive.”
Really agree with you!Without effectiveness on any website we will never be able to bring targeted traffics.This sentence is so true”the effectiveness at which the website generates our desired result”.Your post is really inspiring one and your writing skill is amazing.Thanks a lot for sharing useful article with us.
This sentence who have written is really true “most enterprising entrepreneurs will either tackle some rudimentary search engine optimization (seo) or pay per click (ppc) work, or assign someone in the organization to “get them some more traffic”.First we have to try to bring more traffic in any website for its good effectiveness.I am also giving more priority to SEO for developing my websites.Thanks for sharing your real point of view.
Thank u ,,
And Good Luck ..
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I am totally new in the field of marketing.Today i got opportunity to learn something for my better future.I like your writing skill which is simply great.Your thoughts are also good.I am great fan of your blog that i not going to miss your any article.Thanks for sharing.
Impressive outline and great information about the importance of web marketing. Web marketing is essential to boost your sales and to attain it, you must have thorough analysis on your targeted keywords. The web is getting more competitive at this generation, so utilize all resources that you have.
I think a lot of people just put a site out there and hope for the best.
To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.
Thanks for this it looks good and the information providing is amazing and has helped me alot.
I agree web marketing is a very important aspect to get the visitors to your site and how to have it done within a given costing is even more important. I like your information very much and I have taken pointers from the same.
Thanks.
Thanks for the info. I have been trying so hard to find a better marketing method. And I think without a good marketing method, a website will not survive too long.
While we’re discussing things related to Corporate Raiter » Blog Archive » How Important is Efficiency in Web Marketing?, Statistics can be measured quickly and efficiently in internet marketing campaigns. Almost any part of an internet marketing campaign has the ability to be traced, tested, and measured. Advertisers have many different options available to them. They can use pay per impression, pay per play, pay per click, or pay per action. This lets marketers decide which offers or advertisements are most effective and have the greatest appeal to their target audience.
i still frequently use Google despite the appearance and popularity of the Bing search engine:`.
i would have to say that Google is slightly better than Bing search engine,”:
well, you can never get wrong wether you use Bing or Google, they are both very good search engines:
thanks for sharing information for thanks for sharing information for web marketing i really impressed and want some more stuffs again for this post.
Of course I wouldn’t like to use them randomly on the same blog which may sound like pure advertising strategy and harm your credibility…
Everything you stated made lots of good sense. But, think about this, let’s say you added in somewhat content? What i’m saying is, I shouldn’t explain to you ways to run your website, but what if you added something to maybe get peoples attention? As being a video or perhaps a image or two to acquire people interested in what you have to mention. In my opinion, it might help make your website come to life somewhat.
This article points out very specific aspect of web marketing. I agree with all three measures listed in this article because they are the logical steps that you should take when adressing web marketing.