Pillar 1 | Online Strategy

Online Strategy
Data Driven Insights

New Opportunities and Insightful Ideas
Growing your business online requires progressive marketing skills, technical savvy and most importantly a blend of strategic insight and diligent analysis that are nimble enough to meet shifting consumer and business demands. Whether you are selling online, finding prospects, or providing information it is imperative to define a strategic approach and then measure website interactions and marketing activities to gauge the effectiveness of the efforts. By establishing an initial baseline and then tracking the progress of each strategic initiative you can continuously evaluate the key metrics that will determine brand awareness, visitor engagement or conversion successes.

Ensuring positive online experiences for your website audience is achieved by following these fundamental strategic guidelines.

Define the Core Business Goals
Whether keyword, demographic or site targeted search engine advertising campaigns, EpikOne's objective is to decrease cost-per-acquisition and increase return on ad spend. We will ensure we understand who a qualified visitor is in your eyes, identify the online acquisition channels meeting this demographic and develop and manage campaigns the analytics confirms are successful.

Understand Your Online Audience
Whether keyword, demographic or site targeted search engine advertising campaigns, EpikOne's objective is to decrease cost-per-acquisition and increase return on ad spend. We will ensure we understand who a qualified visitor is in your eyes, identify the online acquisition channels meeting this demographic and develop and manage campaigns the analytics confirms are successful.

Gain Awareness with Analytics
Search engine optimization is based on three main principals; relevant content, quality inbound links and sound website architecture. EpikOne assists our clients in applying these principals to their web properties. Our process begins with understanding what your visitors are searching for and what content you're currently providing them. We couple this information with keywords identified to drive conversions and implement a resulting SEO strategy we can be confident will improve your rankings.

Balance Design and Function
There is a wealth of customer data that is too often ignored. It is free and it if you listen you can hear your customers telling you exactly what they are looking for. We optimize internal site search with Google's platforms and then use the data to drive website optimization and both paid and organic search campaigns. Just listen.

Initiate New Ideas
Monitoring the performance and associated search terms of organic, paid and internal site search enables ongoing search optimization to meet visitor needs and increase conversions. Search analytics provides extensive reporting on search terms, click-paths, zero-results and usability patterns. EpikOne delivers search analytics reports and key performance indicators along with continual improvement consultation.

Why Do Marketers Ignore the Bounce Rate Metric?

Such a simple metric — Bounce Rate. However, even with industry evangelists like Avinash working to shift our focus to this website metric by naming Bounce Rate "The sexiest metric ever...", marketers are still ignoring this simple metric. Visitors bouncing off of your site at first sight should be a startling reality of your "first impression". Imagine operating a bricks and mortar store and 75% of potential customers left the store within 10 seconds — basically they walk in, take a quick look and walk right back out. In the "real world" we would take immediate attention to fix this major issue. In the "online world" we have a quantifiable metric updated every few minutes and people simply ignore this metric.

I believe Google Analytics should send you SMS or RSS alerts if your bounce rate increases more than 10% at any given time. Because if it does increase by 10%, you are losing potentially qualified customers because of that fancy design element you put up!

If you are ahead of the crowd and passionately focused on this one simple metric, Bounce Rate, then lets look at what you can do to make it better. First you need to establish What is a Good Bounce Rate? The new benchmarking service from Google Analytics will provide you good insight into what is the "norm" amongst similar sites in your industry. If not, I believe a 20% bounce rate is fantastic, 40% average and acceptable and above 50% should be improved up...oh and if you have above 80% you better get your act together and stop losing 8 out of 10 potential conversions before they have a chance to hear your message.

So once you've established what your bounce rate is and if it is good or not, start thinking about your segments. I'm not talking about demographics or anything like that (not a big fan of demo), I'm talking first-time and repeat visitor segments, which indicate attitudes. A first time visitor needs to understand if they want to take the time to explore your website and if it will lead value in their time (time is money). A return visitor however most likely understands what to expect but now they may need to find something new. It is likely that both their intentions are the same — came to find information, make a purchase, get contact information, etc. — but their attitudes are different.

Ideally when you segment this metric you'll find your bounce rate for return visitors is lower and for new visitors it is higher. Once you've established your bounce rates you have to consider if you want to invest in improving (lowering) your bounce rate for a particular segment and what impact it will have.

This is one of many posts to come on how to Optimizer Your Bounce Rates...stay tuned.