Promoting Campaigns Based on Site Visits

Currently, Marketing for Mavens offers 3 types of promotions; tags, visits, and individual. I'd like to take a moment to explain the visit promotions.

Visit promotions are designed to show different content based on the number of visits a person makes to your web site. For instance, the first time someone visits your site you may want a home page promotion that explains what your company does. Then for all subsequent visits, you can change the promotion to go into more detail about your products, events, and services.

Visit promotions aren't distributed to your visitors based on their needs the way tag promotions are but they can be very valuable in certain circumstances. Just remember, a new visit is determined by the time in-between page views which is 30 minutes. When you test your visit promotions, you will need to wait 30 minutes between page checks for a new visit to be recorded.

Web Analytics is Dead!

Web Analytics is the one thing that all web marketers do and it continues to be the least understood. Every corporate site uses some form of Web Analytics software. Whether it's Google Analytics, WebTrends, WebSideStory, or some other package, companies spend thousands of dollars a year on these applications. The problem is that these packages record too much information with too little time to respond. When we do respond, it's to make small changes designed to appeal to the masses that have already been to your site and that if we've even interpretted the data correctly.

If we've learned anything in the ClueTrain era it's that mass anything no longer works. Just look at mass advertising, mass email, and mass mailings. These marketing techniques require that you hit as many people as you can because you're only going to reach about 3% to 5% of them. Well what about the other 95%. Shouldn't we at least try to appeal to them? Well we can.

To appeal to the other 95% on the web, we need to be able to customize and target our content directly to them. We need to learn about our visitors as they use our sites and we need to respond to their needs in real-time, not weeks and months later when we have time to analyze our reports. We don't have the time. Many people will only visit our sites once to decide if they want to do business with us. These lost opportunities will never come back.

We're now well into the Web 2.0 era but our web analytics software has done little to catch up. It's now time to look for ways to communicate as close to a 1 on 1 basis as possible. I've been formulating these ideas for some time now and have begun integrating them in the Marketing for Mavens web application. It focuses on communicating with each of your visitors and I welcome you to try the free beta and let us know what you think.

Developing a Better Home Page

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Over the last few days, I've put a good deal of time into reconfiguring the home page. The previous design was very text heavy and the feedback I received revealed that it didn't clearly explain the services provided by Marketing for Mavens.

It's funny how you can be a web marketer for 10 years and still find yourself reverting to poor design practices. In this case, I'm far too close to the content then I'd prefer to be. I know how valuable Marketing for Mavens can be to a web marketer but when you've been so focused on developing the product for the last 6 months, what you consider to be a clear and concise explanation, turns out to be confusing to people who are learning about your services for the first time.

I still feel like the content needs to be revised further especially on the pages beyond the home page. I'll be updating it over the next several days and will continue to listen to the feedback we've been receiving and update the site accordingly.

Treat Your Web Visitors with Respect. Stop Herding Cattle.

We've moved. Please visit www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

One of the features of Marketing for Mavens is the ability to see how each visitor comes to your site and where they go. The real value is that it forces you to see your visitors as individuals instead of a crowd of people.

When you look at your typical web report, you see how all of your visitors interact with your site. You know that a majority of people visit your home page and that a certain percentage go to your product pages but you miss out on the details like how did this person get here, what were they looking for, and did they find it. The other problem is that any changes you make to your site based on these reports is designed to appeal to the masses. Web reports force us to treat our visitors as cattle that we can herd around. We try to find the path of least resistance that we can push them towards and then track the results through funnel analysis knowing that a certain number will drop out but if we can convert 10% to leads we'll be very happy.

This leads us to the niche that Marketing for Mavens fills. There's a very good reason to use all those web reports and you should continue to do so but you should also be looking at your individual visitors as well. Marketing for Mavens will assist you in treating each visitor, or as we like to call them citizen, with respect and open up a new way of communication that will transform how you interact with your potential customers. With this approach, you will understand what your citizens needs are and assist them in fulfilling these needs turning your citizens into customers more quickly and more efficiently then pushing them through a path that you already know loses 90% of your potential leads.

New Feature: Track Referrer and Search Words

A new feature has been added which allows you to see if your visitors found your site through Google or Yahoo and what keywords they used. This information is now listed in the citizen profile. For now, the code only looks for Google and Yahoo user but it will be expanded in the future to include other search engines and paid advertising campaigns.

Where is the integration between content management and web analytics applications?

We've moved. Please visit us at www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

One of the problems which Marketing for Mavens tries to solve is that most sites use some kind of content management system and a separate web analytics application and neither of them talk to one another.

Every day your content management system pushes out the same content to the same people and it doesn't know whether that person has visited your site in the past or what they were looking for. Instead, web marketers are left looking at reports on a monthly basis and then trying to configure the site content accordingly. This response is far too slow and you're reacting to the masses and not individual visitors.

Marketing for Mavens helps to solve this problem by tagging you're visitors based on the web pages they view. It then knows each visitors interests and can push the appropriate promotions and content to them in real time based on these interests. Now your site can be personalized to your visitors without them having to register for your site. This is important as you can now target your content and messages to only the visitors interested in seeing it. If you are interested in seeing how Marketing for Mavens can help you to manage your web content and promotions and deliver them to targeted visitors, please check our our short demo video and join or beta program.

Added Time Zone Preferences

Today, a new time zone option was added to the dashboard. In the past, all of the statistics were returned in UTC time. Now each user can select their time zone and have the statistics display in their local time.