If you are reading this, that means you might be facing some issue or struggling at online marketing. Not to worry, Bitgog is there to guide you.
Let us first start with the absolute fundamentals. If you have a website, what do you want your website to do for you ?
If we are clear about what we want, at the start itself, it becomes easier to implement the right strategies.
You should have at least one or more of the below mentioned objectives:
- Get more leads for your business
- Convert those Leads into paying customers/clients
- Increase the number of online sales
- Retain customers for a long duration
- Bring back your past lost customers who are currently not buying from you
- Build top of the mind recall in your customer’s minds
- Upsell and cross sell multiple products/services to existing customers/clients
To do the above, there is one important area that we need to focus on. That is, measuring the success of your online marketing efforts. Because if you are able to measure and analyze the results of your online marketing efforts, you can tweak the strategy and improve it easily instead of shooting in the dark. By measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns, your website can start producing the results that you want it to produce.
Although we are talking about getting successful in the area of online marketing. Knowing about success secrets and implementing them can help you in all areas of your life. You might want to check out this post we wrote about secrets of success that can change your life.
Are you struggling at online marketing? Do this:
Measure conversions on your website – Absolutely FREE
To measure conversions, let us understand what are conversions. To do that, Let us first understand how the journey of a customer unfolds when she visits a website.
- Understanding the Customer Purchase life-cycle/ funnel
- Understanding Business Goals / Objectives
- Macro Goals
- Micro Goals
- Conversions
- Macro Conversions
- Micro Conversions
- How to measure conversions for FREE
Before we start understanding the above, let us look at what happens in the offline or physical world, companies use various mediums for marketing, such as:
- T.V commercials
- Radio ads
- Banners and Hoardings
- Print Advertising
- Newspaper
- Pamphlets
- Magazines
The cost of advertising in these can vary from a few dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending upon the company that does the advertising.
What is one major problem faced by advertisers in the offline/physical world ?
It is difficult to measure the effectiveness.
It is a big pain area for advertisers, since the amount spent is huge and there is no easy way to measure the effectiveness.
When we are spending any money for our business, all of us want the maximum ROI (Return on Investment) to be there. The companies that want to measure the effective return on investment for their marketing efforts are moving towards the digital advertising medium, since they can measure the effectiveness of the campaigns and thus, maximize the return on Investment.
In the online world, it is comparatively easier to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Understand Customer Purchase Life-cycle/funnel
I am explaining the concept in brief summary here, you can check out this article where I have explained Customer purchase life cycle in detail.
It mainly consists of five stages.
Awareness Stage:
In this stage, a person becomes aware about her need to purchase a product or service.
Consideration Stage:
This is the stage where in a prospect starts searching on internet for the product or service she is looking for.
Preference Stage:
The prospect reaches this stage after searching for different options and finalizing on two or three different alternatives. In this stage, the prospect will evaluate the different alternatives from preference stage to finally choosing the one that suit them the most as per their requirements and expectations.
Purchase Stage:
This is the stage where customer finally decides to make the purchase decision
Loyalty and Advocacy:
If the customer is happy after the purchase, then she can become a loyal customer for the brand and can even advocate about using the brand’s products or services to her friends and family members. However, if a customer becomes dissatisfied after purchase, the customer might not return to the brand ever and might even bad-mouth to others about the bad product/service.
If we look at the journey of a buyer from prospect to customer, we realize that all the actions that a user takes does not necessarily result in a sale, but each interaction whether small enough, is important in influencing her decision to make a purchase.
For example, the prospect might have:
- seen his friends liking your company’s facebook fanpage
- watched a few videos about your company on youtube
- subscribed to a free ebook from your website
- interacted with the person on online chat on your website before finally purchasing something
The reality is customer will interact many times before finally getting converted.
For Example:
If we look at a soccer match, One player does the goal, but other players assist him in doing the goal. So, it does not mean that the goal was done only because of the effort of that player who does the goal, but it is actually the combined effort of all players involved.
Similarly, a prospect might have different interactions before getting converted into a customer. All those interactions are important in the process of conversion.
Therefore, it is important to track the effort of multiple activities so that you can measure effectively and so that you can take informed decisions.
Understanding Business Goals / Objectives
Business Goals/Objectives are actions you want users to take on your website.
Before going further on the topic, I just want to tell you that it is important to be aware of horrible mistakes people make with their websites so that you can avoid those.
The simplest way to measure business objectives is to define what is it that we want. For example, if you want to generate leads for your business, then, this can be your business objective. Some of the examples of business goals can be increasing:
- Online sales
- Subscribers
- Youtube video views etc.
Let us understand how different businesses may have different objectives. And for each business objective, there can be an outcome that can be measured through Goals.
Let us understand this with the help of below image:
Lets say there is a business that sells products online, their business objective will be to get maximum number of eCommerce transactions done on their eCommerce Website:
How can it be measured:
There can be number of ways:
- Number of users who add an item to cart
- Number of users who purchase the item
By measuring this, they get to see a funnel wherein for example, if 1000 users added something on to the cart and only 800 made a purchase, the company will be able to find out that there might be some problem with the checkout process due to which 20% people are not finalizing the purchase, and hence once they are able to find out the issue, they can find a solution to fix it.
For a Lead Generation Website, the business objective can be number of people who submit their contact information by submitting the inquiry form.
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Business Goals can be divided into two parts:
- Macro Goals
- Micro Goals
What are Macro Goals?
The important goals that a business wants the users to take, that can directly result in a sale.
For example, clicking add to cart button. A user would click an add to cart button when she would have made the decision to purchase something from the website.
Not all websites can have the option of online sales, For example: there are many companies that offer customized solutions, so the customer might want to speak to them on phone before making the purchase decision. In such a scenario, a macro goal can be ‘user submitting the inquiry form’.
What are Micro Goals?
Micro goals can be considered as small interactions or engagements that a user does with an online business, before purchasing. Some of the examples of these can be filling subscriber form, clicking download button to download a free resource given by the business owner, playing a video on the website.
What is a conversion?
Each time a user completes one of the business goals, it is called a “conversion.” It is helpful to know about some of the terms that are associated with conversion:
Conversion rate: The percentage of website visitors that get converted out of the total number of visitors.
Conversion rate optimization: It is the process of improving the conversion rate.
A/B Testing: The process of showing different versions of the same page in order to improve the effectiveness of a campaign. This is one of the methods that is implemented by marketers in order to optimize conversion rate.
Conversion can be further sub-divided into two types:
- Macro Conversion
- Micro Conversion
What is Macro Conversion?
If a user takes an action which was a macro goal for the business, it is called a macro conversion
Example –
For an eCommerce store – adding an item to cart and making a purchase.
For a business website – Filling up an inquiry form or giving contact details on online chat.
What is Micro Conversion?
If a user takes an action on the website which results in a micro goal fulfillment, that is called a micro conversion.
Examples, If a potential customer does any of the following on your website:
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Viewing a product video
- Rating a product
- Downloading a specifications sheet for one of your machines.
- Signing up for your weekly newsletter
- Joining your social media community
Many times, it happens that a prospect leaves a website before getting converted. Do you know why your customers leave your website? Read this now to find out!
The good news is that as a business owner, you can track the user’s behavior on our website, that too – absolutely FREE of cost! Google has created an extremely amazing tool to do this, It is called Google analytics.
It must be installed on every website, in fact, not installing Google Analytics on a website is one of the common mistakes business owners make with their websites.
How to measure conversions for FREE ?
Do this by setting up Goals in Google Analytics
If you are struggling with your online marketing campaign, this can end now. In Google analytics, there is a concept called, Goal Setting. The beauty of this feature is that once you set up Goals in Google Analytics, It automatically keeps on measuring the conversions of visitors based on goals. After setting goals, all you need to do is login into your analytics dashboard and see how many of your visitors are getting converted and for which particular goals!
For Setting up Goals, you can simply login to your Google Analytics account. Click on Conversions in the left hand side menu. And then click on Set up a new Goal.
If you are new to this, then you can choose from pre-filled configuration templates. However, in case you don’t prefer the pre-filled template options, you can set up a custom goal based on your business objectives.
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yes i am struggling with online marketing. hope ur tips help me