At first glance, most people think “that’s simple! It’s how many visitors i get”. Well is it? Let me pen out a few questions for you, and I’ll ask you again…
* What is your Average Income per visitor
* What is your Average Cost Per Visitor
* Do you know your Visitor Sources, and their Value
* Do you know the cost breakup (Income Vs Cost) of the source country of your visitors?
Now, I’ll ask you again, “Which Web stats are really important”?
I have been asking that question over and over for the last couple of days, trying to come up with as many answers as possible. I’ll be truthful why I have been asking these questions (and no, this isn’t a sales pitch, I promise!). I am currently writing my own web analytics software (closed beta!), and well I am trying to work out what statics people really NEED as opposed to want. I am a firm Believer in giving a person what they need, even though it’s most an uphill battle. Now that I’ve come clean on the source of these questions, I’ll continue on.

The main problem with the question is that it’s different for everybody, if you are a marketer, you want to know how much Cash you are paying to get a visitor to your site, and attempt to optimise it. But as a sales man, you want to know how much Income you are generating on average per visitor. Looking at these two angles separately you’ll automatically think more visitors more money, well that is true, the reverse is also true – the more money the more visitors, it’s the balancing act that people try and do. But if you Combine the both of them, and start looking at the micro stats, More questions start popping up that maybe people never consider – but are maybe more important than the usual ones. Which Visitor Group is generating us the best ROI (Return on Investment)? An example to make sure we are on the same level. Ok you are paying .50c a visitor from adwords, and you are converting 10% of your visitors into sales. So you are paying $5 a sale (for visitor generation). Now if your average sale is $10, then you are making $5 gross profit on the sale, depending on your product/item that might be a lose or a profit, but for this example we’ll ignore that. So your ROI for the above example would be 200% (ie $10 return on $5 spent).

Now, If you could look at your visitor costs & sales per country, you might be able to shift that in which ever direction you wanted. Just say that your Average cost of a visitor from England was $1, your marketer might have a fit and turn off that traffic, But if the Average Sale per visitor was $40, your ROI would be going up (about 400% - $40 sale / $10 visitor – still working off a 10% conversion). Now if your conversion rate for English visitors was 12% or 13% you’d be throwing a party, now the important bit – what if your visitors from sale Mexico, only cost 10c a visitor, but the average sale was only $2, and there was a 1% sales rate (ok a lot of math – 10c a visitor * 1% conversion = 10$ sale, cost - $2 a sale, that’s a loss of $8 a sale.)

We focused on SEM above (paying for traffic) but this also converts into SEO as well, you need to pay for your SEOefforts, either with your own time, or paying staff for their time. While you’re not bidding for keywords, you’re working on improving your Organic rankings for the SEO keywords. The sale principles still apply, how much work are you putting into building your keywords, what keywords are getting the most traffic – and the best conversion rates (now that is two questions to be clear – quite often with totally different answers), If you’re getting 1000 visitors for a keyword with a 1% conversion rate, is that better then getting 100 visitors with a 10% conversion rate? Well the answer to that is – you probably spend a lot more time on getting the 1000 visitors / month keyword then the 100 visitors / month keyword. SEO is perhaps more important than SEM in the long run, as it’s almost free money – but you need to target your keywords just as much, if not more to ensure you get your optimum long term benefits. If you do it well, your cost per visitor with SEO can be considered less then SEM.

Now let me ask you again? What web stats are important to you? Please leave me a comment with an answer if you have gained anything from this article, Not just for my research, but also for other marketers and webmasters out there that could benefit from them as well, and as always – feel free to ask questions or leave a comment!

- Justin

Bookmarks

People always say working smarter is the key to success, But how do you work smarter online? you can work harder, that’s always a choice, but how do you cut down your work and ramp up output? been online is fundamentally working smarter by default isn’t? computers speed things up, help you automate alot of tasks, and general get things done faster, so how to you work smarter then everyone else to get ahead when the tools you use offline are not only default online, but required?

It’s quite a difficult question to answer don’t you think?

How do you get a head start when everybody else has the same tools and access to all the same software.

This is what has been going though my head for the last couple of months. Browsing around blogs, websites, everybody promises you they have a system that works, but of course, you have to buy the course first, or the ebook, then sign up to all the sites they tell you do, because if you don’t, your not following the system and will fail. It seems everybody is out there promissing the earth and delivering the same ebook (and/or goods) just with different wording.

I have come to a conclusion that really counter productive, but so far is starting to work, which is  well,  wierd.

What is the conclusion you ask? Online, working hard is working smarter .. see i told you it was wierd, let me explain (hopefully in english =))

Ok, everybody has access to the same tools, the same software, programs courses ebooks, and their all cheap(ish).

Now everybody that follows the “systems” (free or paid) or follows the general consensus think they are working smarter (which really is default, your only working smarty when you working above the curve right?).

Now one thing people tend to do when they believe they are working smarter, is start to work less, now this is where the working harder is smarter thinking kicks in, if bob is only spending 2 hours a week on his website working “smarter”, he’s not really doing much to get traffic to his website, maybe a smart headline here and there, but not much.

Now if your willing to spend an hour a DAY on your website (or websites) your going to start to get momentum, and we all know what happens when the ball starts rolling right? but building a website is like pushing the ball uphill, along as your standing behind it and keep pushing your going to keep going up the hill, and you might lose ground here and there, but your making ground overall. However bob, he’s standing still at the bottom, pushing the ball, waiting for it come back to him, he pushes a little harder every now and then (like a catchy headline etc) but he’s still standing still.

Nobody gets anywhere by standing still, and hoping someone else will do the work for them. it’s only when your there pushing your ball uphill and taking steps with it that you’ll move in the right direction.

So how do you put that into motion, do what everybody is saying to do, get involved in the social networking, write articles and participate in forums, engage other webmasters and bloggers, but don’t do it once a month, try and do it every day. In the end, alot of websites are built up by their sense of community, and only doing a hour or less a week on your website isn’t working smarter is it? all your doing to ignoring your potenatal members of your website and your standing in the community you want to join.

Hopefully all of that was in english for you. It’s been a jumbled week for me trying to work out a few things, and well, i think i got that one sorted, what do you think?

Bookmarks

Well it’s coming to that time again, the Quarterly Google update. Look on any self respecting webmasters forums, and you’ll see countless threads and posts about it, has your site been updated, when is it happening, and the perpetual it’ll be tomorrow thread – “I know it’ll happen”. But have you ever asked yourself, what really happens when they “update”. All the webmasters go bonkers over their PR ratings, did I go up, oh no I lost 2 PR! everyone does it, even if they claim they don’t. PR is an online currency to the internet, not in dollars, but in visitors. Some webmasters use its value to sell links on their sites, others use it as a badge of honor, but all in all, everyone wants it, because the higher it is, the better your site is compared to the rest.

In the end, nobody really knows what happens when the quarterly Google update comes around; everybody knows that the PR value of the entire internet gets updated, but what does that mean? Google update their indexes continuously, so they don’t need to do it for themselves do they? Hence we get to the idea; it’s a scam to get people talking about Google, about their search engine, and mainly to get the webmasters to focus their efforts on it.

Google have been very smarty with the Pagerank feature of their search engine, they have “exposed” a part of their system, that gives people the idea they can try and beat the system, who cares about msn yahoo or ask! ? nobody really knows how their systems work, so really don’t try, but in reality, all the search engines work the same way – off links and scoring websites, it’s just that Google have exposed the score of a page in the Pagerank value, and that gets people running around in circles trying to improve it.

As I stated above, Google update their index all the time, so they could also update their Pagerank real time as well, but they don’t. What if, just if, Google done the quarterly update for a more fundament reason, one some simple, so basic, people just don’t think of it. What if… google do the quarterly updates because they can’t trust their own real time updates?

Let me explain why I think this before you start shaking your fist and other various angry stuff! Now, in the real world, when you are working on a project with other people, everyone can work individually on their own, and it all works well, but when you bring all the project parts together, they just don’t fit together 100%. This is how a search engine would work; you can go and index pages every second of and update that page, and adjust the score for that page and keyword. But you wouldn’t be doing other things like running a full analysis if the website is a spam site, changed a lot, etc.

Now to work that out, you would require to process the site itself as a whole, then all the sites that links to it as a whole, how they link to it, and possibly a lot more thing us as webmasters wouldn’t understand, now to that do that for one site would be very intensive indeed, to do that even once a day would bring them to their knees. So back to the basic idea, that Google has to re-evaluate its entire index every so often to ensure that their index isn’t as out of line with what they want, and they hide this from the public and webmasters by hiding it behind a “PR Update”. Get everybody running around in circles talking about their PR scores while they fix the fundaments of their search engine…

But in the end, it’s all speculation, as always, what would a bunch of webmasters know anyway?

Bookmarks

Hi all, when i logged into day, i noticed that wordpress 2.5.1 was out, after having a looking, it appears that there is a serious flaw in wordpress 2.5.0 and you need to upgrade to 2.5.1 asap. The hole isn’t publicly know at the moment, but they are saying it is only a matter of time. you can find out more information at the following urls:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.5.1

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/04/wordpress-251/

Bookmarks

When you’re in online business, just getting traffic isn’t enough to turn a profit, you need to make sure you know what your conversion rate for your visitors is, and you might get 400 visitors, but if you only get one sale is it worth it? Know how much your paying per visitor and what your conversion rate is, and also your average sale amount Is what you need to know if you’re going to go out of business or not. Ok let’s say you pay $1 per visitor to your site, and your average sale is $15 (profit before advertising), now you would need to turn every 15th visitor into a paying customer to break even, that doesn’t sound like much, but when you can be getting a conversion rate of 1% or lower, paying $100 to make a $15 sale doesn’t look so good.

There are 2 formula’s you really need to know if you’re going to be paying for traffic,
Maximum advertising cost: Conversion rate * amount per sale = max cost per visitor
I.e.: 5% * $20 = 50c, if you had a conversion rate of 5$ and made $20 per sale – you wouldn’t want to pay more than 50c a visitor
Minimum conversion rate: ( average amount per sale  / advertising budget) *100 = minimum conversion rate.
Ie:  =  ($20 / $100) * 100 = 20%, or you need one in every 5 visitors to buy your product.
This is starting to seem daunting isn’t it? Well you should also look at maximizing your SEO value of your website as well; this will help you get free targeted visitors to your website as well. A good way is to write a couple of articles, put some links in them, and put them on a couple of larger article directory sites, this will help build backlinks for you, and more importantly, will start bringing in traffic, the more you do, the more traffic you’ll get in the long run. Another way is to swap links with other website, if this isn’t an option for you, you might want to consider buying some links from websites instead, if they are websites with related content, you might find that they are cheaper than buying PPC ads though mainstream networks. The main point here, is no matter what option you choose to try and increase your traffic, you need to make sure that you are targeting your method at your content, otherwise the all the effort and costs in doing such will be lost which isn’t a good thing at all.
One this to make note of, is stay away from blackhat methods of building up your site visitors, like hidden links and keywords in your pages, if you do this, the search engines will remove you entirely and you’ll be totally lost in the search engines and will only have a choice of paid advertising methods.

Search engines main goal is to give their visitors what they want – content based on what the visitor searched for , and you want to sell the visitors the products what they were searching for.  In the end it’s all about targeting the traffic for what you are selling, and not trying to catch fish with your hands.

Bookmarks

Backlinks are a link from another website to your website; The search engines love them because it is a way to finding new content to index. Backlinks are one of the most important aspects you need to consider when you’re trying to build a higher ranking in the search engines. The search engines can perhaps find and index your site without backlinks, but without backing backlinks the search engines will never suggest your site to any of their visitors. Every backlink to your site is like a vote for your website (well page on your website) from another website.

When your building backlinks, it’s important to make sure you don’t get too of them at the same time, It’s best to try and build them over time, it’ll appear to be more natural to the search engines that way, and won’t raise suspicion or get your site flaged. Search engines will find backlinks to your site over time as well, as they visit new websites and and revisit older ones. The search engines  take note of where they find the backlinks, and what the pages are about, and how important they consider the page is. The search engines use all this information to build their search indexes and display results to visitors.
To some sites, Backlinks are used as a way to get visitors to paid for listings on their sites, this is mainly restricted to paid directories, there are dozens out there, but also you must consider that directories paid or free, are really just a well structured link farm, and aren’t the best source of backlinks for your websites. The best way of building backlinks is trying to get other sites to link back to your site on a page that is relevant to your content, as an example, if your website was about cars, and the page you wanted to improve your search lists for was about ute’s, you’d try to get backlinks on pages that covered ute’s first, then cars, and try to avoid to other, because they wouldn’t be on the same general subject, and would be practically worthless. Another way to think about it is, if you are at work, and 2 people say you’re doing a good job, is not as good as 20 people saying you are a doing a good job, which person would you go to first?
When building backlinks there are several things you should try to avoid, the first one is un related content, if your site is about baby toys, you don’t want backlinks from car sites, webmaster sites etc, as they wouldn’t be considered relevant and pretty much discounted by the search engines. Another one is avoid services that offer packages like “get your site submitted to 700,000 search engines”, in the end they will be harmful to your site and not beneficial to it.

Bookmarks

A lot of people will talk about keyword targeting, but aren’t 100% sure what it’s all about. Some people have a general idea about it, but don’t go about it the right way. You want top listing on the search engines, and you need to target keywords, so you get a #1 listing. If you sell green crystal watches, most people will target “Green crystal watches”, which this is highly targeted, if the search term is only getting 10 searches a month, you might only get 1-2 visitors from it, which means you’re not going to any noticeable about of sales or conversions from it.

The best thing to do, is to get a keyword search tool, there is a nice one called “good keywords” which is free, also you can use google adwords research tool, or msn adcenter research tool, I find these better as they are up to date and are great at making suggestions. What you want to do is try and find a set of keywords that are related to your products, but get a good amount of monthly searches, once you have come up with a list, you want to start targeting the phases you have (a phase is a keyword that is two words or more). It is usually best if you use multiple sources for your keyword research, as you can get a broader picture, which will be more beneficial in the long run, as you’ll then be targeting the general market, and not just the visitors to one search engine. The more targeted your keyword is the better, but also you want the keywords to have a high amount of search made for it every month, striking a balance if often an art in itself, but with a little practice you can get it to a level that you are able to work with (ie amount of work in relation to how many visitors you get from it).
Writing articles is a great way to target keywords you are trying to rank for, writing articles about your keywords, and publishing them on your site, and then building backlinks is one of the most efficient ways to raise your rankings to the first page. Another way is to buy links on websites with a similar content / products and getting them to link directly to your product / content pages for that keywords with the keyword in the link text. Another way to get links with Articles is to publish them to article directories with your keywords in the bio box linking back to your website.

Keyword marketing is more important than most people realize, as if you chose the wrong keywords, and work on building them, they could be dead weight as they get no searches, the opposite is also true, if you choose an extremely highly completive keyword (just say watches) then you’ll need to do an excessive amount of work to get to the front page, which might not be viable for your company in regards to much you’ll need to spend to get the rankings.

Bookmarks

Google Pagerank is an important item for most webmasters and bloggers. There is a lot of concern over Pagerank for webmasters and bloggers all over the world. Pagerank is an item invented by Google to determine how good a site rates for certain keywords. The Pagerank algorithm is extreme complex in nature, but the simple version is – The more links to your website Google finds, the more value Google will give your website (or Pagerank). Google Pagerank is something webmasters take as an absolute factor in their website value, and use it as a way to price advertising and services from their sites. In the end, the more Pagerank your site has, the more a webmaster can charge for links on his page, this has cause a reaction from Google in penalizing website that are known to sell links to your website for pr juice (the term pr juice is used by people who are referring to “links with the soul purpose of getting better page rank).

PR for your pages is based on several items; these include not only the amount of inbound links to the page, but also how relevant the link is to your subject, and how important the page linking to your page is. The better the quality you can get on all of the 3 above items, the higher your page will rank for those terms. Some sites have a Pagerank of 10 out of 10, like google.com msn.com and yahoo.com, however msn.com and yahoo.com always wave in-between PR 9 and 10 for some reason (perhaps Google trying to devalue their competition!).
A lot of webmasters place to much importance on getting links from high ranking websites only, this is not good as Google checks to see if your links are natural, and if you only have links from one type of site, or only high PR sites, Google will devalue them greatly as it’ll think you are trying to gain ranking though paid links (which as we said – is a bad thing in Google’s eyes). When you are building your links, you should try and get links from relevant sites, but also when you get your inbound links they should link to several pages in your site, not just the front page. Also getting links from all level of pr sites is the best, getting a lot of low level pr links only is ok, but getting a lot high pr links only is not. In the end, when you’re getting links they need to look like they have come in naturally or Google will flag them.

Adding a massive amount of pages to your website in a short period of time can hurt your ranks in Google’s eyes a lot. There is a thing webmasters call the “sandbox”, this is where your site goes if Google things your site is spam, or doing something highly suspect. What happens is that no matter how well your pr is on your site, you won’t rank for any of the terms, usually you are pushed back 100 or 1000 places in the search results. Also if you are adding a lot of pages at the same time, your amount of inbound links are the same, but the value of them are spread over more pages, devaluing your pages power in the Google search listing as a whole.

Bookmarks

What is seo?
Search engines have one goal, to give the searchers relevant content for their searches, and you want to be listed in the results when the search engine gives it to the searchers, that is the main goal of seo, to get you into the top ten for certain search terms, which are related to your website. But the reality is, it isn’t a walk in the park to get a listing in the top 10, let alone first.
The Search engines don’t pick what sites they’ll show in the top 10 at random, they use highly crafted algorithms that take in a lot of information, then after they have processed your site with them, decide where to rank your site compared to others for the search term it is working on. You can be ranked for several search terms for one page, but you will have a different ranking position for each one.

Some of the external factors that the search engines check are inbound links, how relevant the links are to your content (not only the content on the page the link is on, but also the text used for the link itself), and the content of the page it’s linking to. The main onsite (items on your page) that the search engines check are the content of your page (or lack of it), the Meta tags and description, and the heading of your page. The more links you have to your page, that are related to the content, the higher you’ll be listed in the search engine results, so obviously, a strong part of SEO is obtaining the links to your site with the correct tags in the links, and also making sure they are on pages that are relevant to your content.
While this may seem like a basic concept, a lot of people fail at it miserably. They either get links from the wrong type of websites, or get the wrong tags in the links, or just go out and get thousands of links in a single day and get their site flagged as spam. The best way to go about getting links is trying to be a steady amount of links over a long period of time. Like if you could build 5 links a day to your website, for a year, which would be 1500 inbound targeted links (assuming you got the links on the right type of sites – and with the right tags).
In the end, to make sure you get the right type of visitors to your website, and get high in the listing, is to make sure you have good content that is targeted to the right search terms. Once you have gotten that, go out and build links, and you will rise in the search engines quickly to number one!
Remember that Rome wasn’t build in a day, and neither is a popular website, just keep going and going, and you will rise in the rankings, the strong you make your website, the harder it is for people to knock you off the top ranking.

I am always interested in what people have to say, if you think you can add to this, or have a different opinion please let us know =)

Bookmarks