Tommy Puglia - Bayshore Solutions Account Associate
By: Tommy Puglia – Bayshore Solutions Emarketing Team
How do you define success?
That is one of my favorite questions to ask people – because ultimately it is all about growth. Actually, please find me someone who would say “success is staying complacent and situated with where I’m at now”. It is a question that Bayshore Solutions ask our clients and ourselves constantly, and finding ways to achieve those goals.
A websites PURPOSE should not be any different. If someone asked you right now “how do you define success for your website”, you should be able to answer them without hesitation the goals for your website. But how do you measure those goals? It is imperative that whatever goals you set up for your website, you can track, measure, and report the right data.
Let’s say your goal is to increase leads for your company – what data will correlate with those goals? When creating your goals and what you want to accomplish, make sure that your website AND your company have a specific way of measuring them.
Okay, now you have collected a month’s worth of data, and you hear this:
“Hey, we had 8,000 people click on our ‘Learn More’ page! Sounds like a good thing!
If your website’s goal is to increase the number of leads and forms submitted, does that number mean anything to you? Did that affect the number of people filling out a form? How many of those clicks were from new visitors, and what was their next step on your website? As Emarketers, every number has a story, and our goal is to relate those stories to how they affected your goals. So instead of reporting “8,000 clicks to your “Learn More”, page, here is what it really meant for your website:
“We had 8,000 clicks to our ‘Learn More’ page, and 80% of those clicks were from New Visitors. People who clicked on that page were 73% more likely to fill out a form or email a representative than those who did not visit that page. We recommend having the “Learn More” added to your main navigation, as well as at the end of every page’s content.”
It is simply not enough to report data. At Bayshore Solutions, we are constantly looking FORWARD to find what why something worked, and why something didn’t – and what we can improve to achieve the goals. Are you involved in Paid Search campaigns? It is easy to say take any given campaign and say “We had 10,000 impressions and 3,000 clicks!” – But does that mean a success? What if that campaign had a majority of their impressions from 6:00am – 9:00am, and no clicks and conversions at that time? What if 1:00pm – 4:00pm gave you the most leads?
There is no settling in Digital Marketing. It is an on-going relationship with numbers and tweaking, and trust me: There is always something to optimize. The data is out there, but how you use it can be the difference between growth and mediocrity. Define your goals, establish how you aim to achieve them, set how you are going to measure them, and learn from your numbers.
So, how do you define success?
Tommy Puglia is an Account Associate at Bayshore Solutions—a Tampa Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.