Continuing on from yesterday’s answers to last Friday ‘web marketing statistics question time’, here are my answers for the remaining questions.

There are some powerful tips in both the answers AND the questions themselves - I hope you’re able to use this information with great effect.

Shuaib (who had obviously just been listening to Paul Gorman talk about writing powerful headlines in Copywriting Gangster!) asked “How to Permanently be on the Driving Seat of your Business & Website & Monitor The Speed, Volume & Quality of Traffic Entering, Purchasing From & Leaving your Site on One Hi-tech Real-time Interactive Dashboard That Then Allows You to Continually Tweak your Marketing Strategy to Super-charge your Business By up to 73.9%!”

That’s a meaty question Shuaib!

And the answer is IN the question.

To be on the driving seat of any business you have to be continually monitoring performance and results.

I think the old saying “work ON your business not IN it” applies here. Spending any money on web site design, development and promotion without monitoring results is a dangerous situation.

Web sites should be an investment, not an expense.

The trick is to ask what your site should be doing for your business (for example generating sales leads) then find ways of constantly tracking not only how many sale-leads it generates but how profitable those sales leads are — and that’s where most stats packages fall short and why I use a manually collated master dashboard that integrates data from ALL sources.

I go into it this a lot more in Stats Faceslap, but this is the secret any business can use to start dramatically improving sales.

Tom Brownsword asked “For somebody like me (who knows that he should be doing this but is simply overwhelmed with other stuff), what’s the easiest, least expensive way (both in terms of time and money) to get the stats you need?”

I get outsource workers to quickly and inexpensively collate my stats from the various sources each week. That saves me time so I can spend more on working ON my business rather than in it.

There are some other tools more related to search engines that are worth checking out, but with just Google Analytics and AWeber used side by side you can get an incredible depth of data.

He also asked “And as a somewhat obvious follow-up, how do you properly analyze them to get the information you need to make changes?”

Well the incredible depth of data is actually a problem… “TMI” (too much information!).

For years I’d not really use my stats properly because of information overload syndrome — now that I get a dashboard compiled by other people on my desk each week, with all my web sites at a glance — I’m finding I’m actually using stats to improve things — not merely for fascination.

Lucy from Xero.com said “One thing I really want to understand easily from my web stats is a quality versus quantity question.

Obviously its nice to say we have 1000s of visitors but I’d like to know as much as possible about the ones who end up as customers as they are the most important.”

This was one of my favourite questions, because it’s so salient for me based on recent personal experience.

The number of people who visit my blog shot up by quite a few thousand in April, as a result of focused testing on new traffic sourses. And it was all a waste of time — it was unprofitable traffic.

So I plugged those new traffic sources and let my traffic flow reduce — but I’m more profitable.

There are a lot of ways to determine traffic quality.

In my opinion one of the easiest ways is to define ‘goal conversion funnels’ — let Google tell you which source of traffic is most likely to convert and then leverage those sources and drop lesser converting traffic sources… unless it’s free.

However, what many web marketers say is ‘free’ traffic (like organic search engine traffic) is actually very expensive traffic, if they count in the hundreds or thousands of man hours spent on on and off-page optimisations.

Great questions from everyone thank you.

And hopefully I didn’t slip in too much jargon in the above answers? Stats Faceslap does a much better job of explaining all the above in plain English.

At the moment it looks like I’ll be launching it on my blog here on Thursday - I’ll confirm tomorrow.

-Ed.

Here’s the first batch of answers to last Friday’s ‘web marketing statistics question time’. (Some of the questions needed long replies so I’ve split them over today and tomorrow.)

There are some powerful tips in both the answers AND the questions themselves - I hope you’re able to use this information with great effect.

Karin H. made more of a comment than a question — but it contains a great tip about how to combine more than one statistic.

The most important/useful stats tell her “which search result page on any search engine my visitor found the page he/she landed on”.

And that’s a powerful technique to optimise any site.

Let your statistics package (hopefully you have one and are tracking web stats) tell you which specific pages visitors land on the most — and which keywords they used on the search engine to find your page.

Then optimise your pages around those keywords.

In other words, give visitors what they were looking for and you’ll get far greater levels of sales and response.

Great tip thanks Karin.

Juliette Player asked a question about the “Average time on site… what is viewed as an ‘improvement’ to this fig?”

She made the observation that “if the visitor is having to dig around in the site for what they require then they will spend longer on the site; however, with improvements in navigation etc. they might find what they need more quickly and therefore spend less time on the site.

So in some ways isn’t a reduction of this figure an improvement?”

Great question, and you’ve hit the nail on the head!

Big business marketers who focus on building brand use the time on site to measure less tangible metrics like ‘brand exposure’.

However, for e-commerce and smaller businesses who need more tangible response, time on site is only important when tweaking it (either way) improves response in the form of actual sales or enquiries (sales lead generation).

The key is all about getting visitors to take action.

If a tweak to a site (like making phone numbers more prominent) means more sales are taken offline, then site performance will improve, but the overall time on site reduces.

So yes you’re absolutely spot on.

And there are two things from this — don’t isolate statistics (which is why I get all my most critical stats compiled into a dashboard each week so I can easily correlate them side by side) and secondly, realise that what a statistic means to one business may have a totally different meaning to another business.

Example: Time on site on this blog is relatively low because most visitors are regular readers who are keeping up with what I write.

So they visit, read the latest article, and then go.

An e-commerce site on the other hand hopefully has a higher time on site as people browse around — but it all comes back to what you said above about improved navigation. If they are coming to the site from the search engines for a specific product and are able to find it quickly, and make a quick payment or telephone enquiry then you have a good site even if the time on site is relatively low.

Cindy King asked a number of great questions about web statistics with the main one being “Please help me choose how to set statistic tracking up.”

For most business sites I recommend Google Analytics. And because they provide detailed instructions on how to add it to any site, I think they’ve saved me the job of explaining it here.

Actually, for Wordpress blogs it’s even easier — just install a plugin and let that do the work for you.

Sign up for a Google Analytics account first, then run a Google search for ‘google analytics wordpress plugins’ or similar and there are loads of time-saving plugins you can download for free to help you add it to your blog.

Burton Kent asked “How to effectively track leads through your sales funnel?”.

Now looking at Burton’s blog I see he is quite technical, which explains his question which is quite advanced.

He specifically asked “If I have an adwords ad, which leads to a signup to my email newsletter, which leads to a sale of my book, I’d like to track all of them through each step.

There are lots of different ways of doing this.

The challenge as you’ve no doubt realised is that a signup to your newsletter can happen today, and the same person buying your book could happen weeks or months later, after they’ve cleared their cookies. So Google Analytics may not see it’s the same person.

What you can do is track on two separate levels, and then ‘join’ the data for analysis later.

So for example — and assuming your keywords are divided into specific categories as much as possible — get your Adwords to send a URL code to your squeeze page.

A line of PHP script parses the code from the URL and adds it as a hidden form field.

When someone signs up to your newsletter, the code can be stored as a custom field in AWeber (or whatever database you use.)

Finally, as people on your list buy the book, you’ll be able to cross reference with the newsletter data and determine which AdGroup they came in on.

And then you’re in a really powerful position to optimise your campaigns based on profitability, not just initial conversion.

Burton also asked a second question which I’ll mention here because it contained a critical element to making the most of web statistics to help a business grow.

He asked “How can I use statistics to come up with specific elements to test, optimize and otherwise improve? (Stats in themselves are worthless unless you use them somehow.)”

Coming up with specific test elements is the key to putting all this together.

There are SO many stats that it’s all too easy to not do anything with it.

In the last session of my Stats Faceslap programme I explain how to identify which stats are most important based on the type of business you operate (online or otherwise). I’ll be announcing the launch of that programme any day now, but in advance I’ll give few pointers.

FIrst of all, forget trying to use ALL the possible stats. Work out which stats are the most critical to your business, the strip those out for analysis each week and for comparison with previous weeks so you can see trending.

Google Analytics can provide a tonne of information, but on it’s own it will miss other critical data related to email marketing, RSS, search engine keyword rankings and back-link counts (all explained in Stats Faceslap).

So the key is to pull all the most critical stats together for side bvy side comparison and forget the rest.

Also create a test plan — a schedule of what you want to improve and HOW you intend doing that. Then weekly stats give you the feedback to see how you’re doing.

And Burton’s comment that “Stats in themselves are worthless unless you use them somehow” is so true.

For years I’d ‘occasionally’ log into my stats package and view them with interest, but not really implement any changes as a result. It was a total waste of my time.

These days I have a system to collect stats from the various sources, that eliminates all the stuff I don’t want to see — and I have a plan to actually use those stats to improve sales and profitability.

Answers for the remaining questions will be posted tomorrow.

-Ed.

Thank you to everyone who took part in my question time. If I can have the weekend to answer the questions, that way I can do them the justice they deserve.

In the meantime I’ll announce the winner of my question time — the following person is going to get a FREE copy of Stats Faceslap when it releases next week…

Actually, they were all such great questions about stats, I couldn’t choose a winner!

So I used the Random List Generator at http://www.random.org/lists/ to tell me who won. So from the following list of people who asked questions…

* Karin H. www.TheKissBusiness.co.uk
* Juliette Player www.MoreThanMowers.co.uk
* Lucy from www.Xero.com
* Tom Brownsword www.TomBrownsword.com
* Burton Kent www.AcupunctureClinicMarketing.com
* Cindy King www.Cindyking.biz
* and Shuaib (no web address supplied)

…the randomised winner was Lucy from www.Xero.com. Congratulations, you’re going to get a ‘Stats Faceslap’ when it’s released next week!

Thank you to everyone who sent a question, I really appreciate it. I’ll post my answers on Monday.

Have a great weekend,
Ed.

In my recorded phone conversation with UK copywriting master Paul Gorman last week it became publicly known that I’m not a very good copywriter.

Luckily I never claimed to be — and that’s why copywriting is a tiny chapter in my strategy book, where I talk about headlines but also strongly encourage the reader to get well versed in copywriting, or outsource it like I do.

And even though I outsource my copywriting, I still want to try and get better at it, so this morning I visited one of my favourite copywriting blogs and saw ‘Million Dollar Marketing Secrets’ being offered for just $7 …

I haven’t used Ryan’s copywriting services (I know I will someday, maybe soon), but I’ve been following his blog a long time, and I’ve seen his sales letters. They’re excellent.

So I recommend his book (which includes other big name copywriters) before I’ve even read it.

If you want a copy — you need to be real quick — go and grab a brand new copy of his book for just $7 (that’s about £3.50 - bargain!) before the special offer ends.

I just ordered myself a copy because although I outsource copywriting, I still want to know as much as I possibly can. (And if you heard me get a verbal kicking from Paul Gorman you know why as well!)

Grab the book while you can — I think the special offer ends sometime today (soon).

-Ed.

P.S. Ryan, just to be clear, when it’s my birthday I won’t be posting photos of me in my pjs!

P.P.S. If you want more copywriting blogs check out the list of recommended sites on the right side of this page — including Stephen Dean (Steve’s got some great copywriting products I obviously need to pay more attention to!), Carol Bentley (great book), Ryan’s blog which I just mentioned above, and Paul Gorman’s Leave them in the Dust. All great resources.

P.P.P.S. Question time is closing at 12pm today when I announce the winner and answer everyone’s questions about using web statistics to increase site traffic, optimise conversions and increase sales.

In the final part of Stats Faceslap (almost ready for launch) I explain how to create and use a Stats Dashboard, which reveals a birds’ eye view of ALL sales and enquiries, received not only over the web, but also by phone, fax or post (but as a direct result of an initial web site visit).

Many web site owners fail to include those in their calculations when determining web site performance, and in some companies that data can reveal enormous hidden opportunities to sell more.

With that said, the phone, fax and mail don’t feature in my sales — I’m 100% online these days — but even so, as a result of reviewing my entire web portfolio (all web sites) on a single simplified dashboard I’ve seen…

* One web page on one of my sites performing at such an outrageously high level it’s simply ‘begging’ for more more traffic to work at it’s fullest potential. I also know (thanks to stats) that I can safely pay a lot of money to attract traffic directly onto that page (use paid advertising for example) simply because the lifetime value has proven itself over time.

* I’ve seen strong evidence that two of my digital products (sold through separate sites) have been totally defrauded. Hundreds of people have gained access to the download files - through a back-door I hadn’t taken care of. (Have now!)

* And I know which sources of traffic (which third party referring web sites) send me the highest quality leads. I can use that information to get extreme leverage over the coming months (and much to the benefit of those third party site owners also. Win win).

Google Analytics — one of the best free services gives a vast amount of insight into what’s happening on your site, but it doesn’t tell you everything. And sometimes you have to dig to find the gold.

I’ve found the best way of ensuring I regularly review my stats is to have it precompiled for me — by other people (in my case I use outsource workers). That way the time I spend on my stats is all high quality productive time — not unproductively ‘digging and sifting’ through the mountains of data.

A weekly ’statisical slap in the face’ is one of the best ways of ensuring online sales and marketing constantly improves.

Stats Question Time.

I really don’t know if the subject of web statistics is one you have any questions about, but I’m interested to find out.

Do you have any questions about how to collect and interpret web statistics, and how to use that data to increase sales?

What would you most like to know about the people who visit your site — and why they do — or do NOT — take action while on your site.

Do you know which tools and services to use?

Do you want to know how many offline sales by phone, post and fax are the result of an initial visit to your web site?

If you have any questions about web statistics please leave a comment to this post and I’ll answer each one on Friday.

The best question (at my discretion) gets a free copy of the Stats Faceslap DVD when it launches.

-Ed.