Tuesday, January 6, 2009

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.

Friday, January 2, 2009

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.