Innovative Approach

There has been a severe buzz in the internet marketing field regarding web analytics. This is subject which is usually considered as a new concept but it has its roots since the origin of web. Today it is one of the essential and viable thing which is a must for online business.

The old definition of web analytics hover all around logs where the web server creates the log files which when parsed through several software like webalizer or AW stats gives the background information of what’s happening on our website especially traffic, visitors, pageviews etc. Infact website is just your shop for which you will always want to know how many people came today, how many buy products etc. Basically the topic was buried deep and no importance was given to the same. Only few webmasters bothered to check the log files and provide their client about the traffic stats and this was also when demanded by the customer.

Webtrends came up as a market leader in web analytics and it is one of the oldest web analytics vendor but due to its high cost only few vendors were able to afford it. Then something happened which is a remarkable event in the world of web analytics. Google acquired Urchin one of the web analytics tool, this was a commercial tool but google make it free and allowed webmasters to install the same on their domain for FREE. The word free can made any person mad so was the webmasters and they headed like anything to get this innovative tool installed on their domains, this is the story which happened in 2005 something.

It is google analytics which even compelled the non-web savvy people to explore the web analytics world. Google analytics is a tool which is highly user-friendly, simple and authentic, though it is not meant for big portals which has millions of pageviews etc. but still it can help the small and medium scale business to improve themselves.

Now the web analytics is a billion dollar industry with Omniture, Indextools, corematrics, Webtrends leading the market. Almost all big players have these tools installed and also a new position in the internet marketing world has emerged which is “Web Analytics”. Explore more about the latest job for this at : http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/jobs/search.asp

Web analytics though is not concerned of bringing sales on the site but it is possible to track and provide suitable consultancy for the sales. Web analytics give a clear picture of what is happening on our website regarding traffic, visitors, keywords, conversions, ROI, bounce rates, pageviews etc. so a web analytic executive could mine up as per timeline and provide a pictorial representation of the site status.

Though web analytics is a must tool for all web enterprenuers but for big portals its essential as they sell advertising based on their pageviews and CTR’s so for a portal its must to engage the visitors as high bounce rates on their pages will decline their sales as no visitors will view or click the ad. Web analytics data helps us in knowing all this and a web analytic can work with internet marketing to improve in retaining the visitors. This could be any landing page optimization of A/B or MVT testing etc.

The topic has started just now but with the passage of time it will lead the internet marketing football. As all campaigns of SEO, PPC, Banner Ads, Emailing, Social Media marketing is useless if we are not able to track, monitor and enhance them.

Everywhere there is a mania for either creating or enhancing the online sales. Online sales has a somehow a deep impact on internet entrepreneurs and they are excited about that.

Its indeed true to say that everybody has to come online now or in near future, if we look at the internet stats we will find that even the developing nations are jumping up. The growth has been dramatic for Africa and Middle East which were far from the internet world. Check : http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

In the past when web was on anvil, it was nothing but a mere destination where we could upload about our business in the same manner as we get our brochure or business card printed.

No one thought about the monetize factor of web. None think that it could act like a virtual market as brick and mortar store where people will come, review and buy a product or the services.

I would say that web has improved a lot since its inception and still it is in its infancy and needs loads of innovative revamps.

Anway let’s move onto the topic of this post.

ONLINE SALES

I have a web presence and…………..??…..and…….my sales through my site is…$ something or is that NIL.

So creating or enhancing sales online is now the motive of any businessmen and intelligent marketers are working hard to achieve this goal. I would say that having a site or getting it SEO’ed etc. can bring you sales overnight is a false. It has been observed that several entrepreneurs run hundred and thousands of dollars of adwords campaign themselves with zero or 0.1% conversions.

Hence the online sales is nothing but conversions.

For a physical shop we will say –

•    How many customers visit our shop
•    How many of them were relevant customers or they were just researchers.
•    How many customers were really engage with our sales boys / girls.
•    How many did a purchase
•    Ultimately what is the revenue figure.

In the same environment online marketers mine their analytics tool for these questions and they do get the desired replies from the tool itself.

The tool can only do interpretations of factual values but it cannot tell you exactly what’s happening on the site and why the sales is not too much even in peak seasons.

There are several items which contribute to high online sales and they are :

•    Website Marketing should be done in such a manner that we are receiving only those visitors who are likely to buy our product. If you are selling some DVD’s for hypertension patient, you must advertise yourself over heart related forums, community, blogs, portals etc. rather than on travel site.
•    The site should be designed in such a manner or the layout that visitors can locate their required product within seconds. It happens on most of the site where visitor never get the product which he/she is desiring although it resides on some part of the site.
•    User friendliness is the key element which leads to conversion, really if the site cannot present itself to the end consumer they will hate it rather than to buy something. Proper navigation with advanced search options should be enabled.
•    Coping with the ongoing competition is must, so if you are selling an X product at price $10 and that product is branded and is being sold by other online enterprenuers then you need to check the delivery rates. There might be some one who is selling that product for $6 (but he is charging more on shipping), here you could do some sort of competitive intelligence to lead the game.
•    Last and not the least is the “Trust” and proper CRM. People buy things from Amazon or Walmart blindly because of their trusts as there will be a delivery after a purchase with no falsehoods. Several dishonest online entrepreneurs have created a sort of misunderstandings amongst the online users about trust, they have breached their customers and shut down their businesses after big frauds. I would say that if you are opening an online biz start building trust and when you trust is branded just check its impact on your online sales.
•    The other point to be think of is that your website is just like your office so you must visit that daily, experience it, monitor it, enhance it and think what you can do more for your end consumers. Please note that unlike physical shops where you are interacting with your consumer is easy but on website you cannot talk with every customer (though the online chat / toll free support can do that) so make your site a self acting machine.

At the end creating or marketing a business is not that tough, the most tougher part is to make it successful.

I request to all online entrepreneurs to think like a consumer and work around to improve their online biz. I fully assure you it will enhance your “Sales”.

There are lots of things happening in the internet world but the item which has posted a huge impact are the API’s (Application Programming Interface).

All social media sites including google offers the API via which we can integrate their application on our own device or platform.

So in the world of apps two giant players have come up with their own solutions – Facebook and iPhone.

Both these giants are working hard to make their API’s strong and flexible and highly user friendly so that the programmer could manipulate the same easily and distribute for the end user.

In general API’s are nothing special but a simple application programming interface where you can play with code. It’s a very old topic and can be explored more at Wikipedia at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface

So every company – Sun, Microsoft, Unix have API’s of their own. But with the advent of web and especially social media the definitions and almost changed. The APIs are becoming a marketing tool rather than a programming venue.

Just to note – Google maps, Google earth or Google connect are all powered by their API’s which a programmer can synchronise and syndicate his / her website.

Just name a few web based API’s

•    code.google.com
•    developer.yahoo.com
•    apiwiki.twitter.com
•    developer.myspace.com
•    developers.facebook.com
•    developer.apple.com/iphone/

So all of  them are worthy to explore and use for marketing your business.

For instances :

If you are running health portal and want to locate the clinics with reference to particular city, street name etc. you can work for google maps api and the user could find the same on your site very easiy rather than exploring here and there.

If you are running any syndicate in the form of a portal you could use facebook or twitter API for marketing your product / services for the real time.

If you want to go on mobile, you could have a iphone apps. Developed in the form of event calendar, widget etc. thereby making your product / services to be used like anything.

I would like to discuss the potential of Facebook API’s which is behind the true success of this giant platform.

With 250 million of users Facebook is a renewed platform for interactive  applications. We have millions of applications running across the network which are shared amongst the members virally.

Whether its dating, gaming, health, travel, real estate, IT, Jobs etc. several entrepreneur have invested fair money in getting their application on Facebook. The real beauty of application lies in its naturality where members distribute any application virally. For eg. If there is any interesting game and you played / enjoyed it you will definitely refer the same in your network. (Spammer Beware – It will be futile if you circulate useless or crap application across the network, which is a indeed a wrong way of doing social media marketing)

So its time for you and your business to go viral.

Few ideas which you can work around :
•    Research about your consumers in the Facebook
•    See what your competitors are doing
•    Plan a API strategy
•    Get it developed with experience programmers especially of web 2.0 origin.
•    Get it tested thoroughly.
•    Launch and market the API across your own network by creating groups, pages etc.

The last word :

If your product is damn good you will have several thousands visitors in just a month or two and if its damn great it could be in millions.

It’s a well known fact that keywords play key role in SEO, as this is the only factor or we can say key performance indicator which leads to success of any SEO campaign.

In SEO its just the game of keywords and nothing else, I am not discussing about the content, site structure, landing pages of backlinks, just keywords.

There are lot of keyword tools available online both free and paid, just to count we have :

•    adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
•    google.com/sktool/
•    freekeywords.wordtracker.com
•    digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion
•    adlab.microsoft.com/Vnext/Cross-Language-Keyword/
•    keyworddiscovery.com/keyword-selection-tool.html

and lots more…..

As we know that google dominates the search industry with 75-80% market stake, so we could consider google keywords selection tool but still it give a very random idea about keywords. It is a real fact that only live adwords campaign can give you some precise idea about the search count but its not possible for everyone there to run the adwords campaign, also we have to run the campaign at extreme budgets to get the entire search count.

So is there any process we can synchronize our selection more precisely, I say not exactly but we could find a way to get the idea atleast.

Google launched google trends long back and then the google insights for search which is off course a good tool to check the prominence of a keyword across several parameters.

I am running a adwords campaign for my website and I found the adwords data in sink with Google insight data.

Here is an example :

We have three keywords

SEO India
SEO Company India
SEO Services India

SEO India shows the maximum search count and the same I found with adwords. Though it’s a broad match but still it matches too much with google insights data.

Check the graph below :

It clearly indicates that the keyword “seo India” , “seo company India”, “seo services India” shows different search count variability.

As per the statistical information :

Seo India leads the competition followed by seo services India and seo company India.

So if we follow the google insights for our SEO strategy and keywords selection it will help us in getting more trafficked keywords rather than obtaining from several online tools.

Ultimately I would say the google insights as viable tool for keywords selection as a primary key performance indicator.

As I am primarily in SEO services so this post dedicated to the SEO scope in Indian Geography. I will try to explain what is happening here and what can be done to leverage the SEO industry.

India – population of more than 1 billion, making it a hub of juvenile employees and employers but still a developed nation. We have worlds richest person here with millions of investors but still Indian people are struggling for water, electricity, education and other basic requirements. Still the traditional marketing and brokers are making money and innovation is yet to occur. (No further discussion on its root cause whatsoever as the post will elongate too thousands of words).

Basically I would like to discuss the internet marketing capabilities Indian and usage of web. Lets be bit optimistic that we are 4th worlds largest interenet base though its mere 5% of population but now we have tons of portals rolling around targeting – B2B market place, Matrimonials, Dating, Jobs, Classifieds, Travel as well as Finance. But this is not the only solution still a large part of society is devoid of web advantage and are not able to leverage their business via this medium.

The target story of this post is about Search Engine as it’s a hotspot to find anything, anytime and a fast manner. In my previous posts I mentioned the importance of SEO -  but in India the industry is yet to began.

For your information I would say that India has maximum SEO companies but 80% of them cater their services to the outside world as they are in offshore / outsourcing business. Several hundreds and thousands of companies are rolling their seo services in North  America, Europe, Australia and Asia Pacific (primarily the developed states). But I am extremely sorry to say that we donot have any potential hold in India the reason behind :

•    Businessmen are not aware of internet potential as a marketing medium
•    Businessmen are not aware of SEO though they know how to do E-mailing.
•    They think that Indian customers go to net just for fun and never to trade.
•    Internet cannot be a tool to market business as its anonymous and no one controls it.
•    Customer are usually illiterate and they are damn illiterate if you want them to go over net.

Hence nothing can be done about it and why we invest in search engine marketing as we have physical marketing channels open throughout. So the picture depicts the pathetic situation.

Deep breath……………………………………………….Donot worry

It will not be outsourcing my friend which is responsible for internet marketing companies to survive.

Now let me put to the positive part of “Scope of SEO Services in India”. The market is triggering I must say internally, the only way it can be on zenith is :

•    First of all educate the entrepreneurs about the SEO importance and what SEO can do in India.
•    Explain with live explain will definitely help the company to spread the word.
•    Offer all sorts of SEO plans including the budget one. Please remember the best too to proper sales is “Cheap and Best Services”.
•    Be honest and sincere to your client and project and achieve results in fast and effective manner.
•    Try to get the ROI for the client. It should not be so that you are charging US$ 400 per month with 1 leads through SEO.
•    The most important thing, I should have mention on no. 1…First study the business and check the scope on the internet for that before initiating any SEO campaign.

The SEO in India is here to stay and it will nurture as its in USA or UK, the only thing we must go ahead is to educate people about seo and especially seo in india.

The real world examples can be drawn from several online enterprenues which were started at minor level and now harvesting gold.

Guys!!! Time to push the country and the business to atleast come online as we could be out of line in the world’s internet economy map.

We love mass media whether its newspaper, magazines, television, radio or internet. But we do hate advertising which indeed is the key factor which is driving these businesses as it’s the only way through which this media make up the monies.

There is no doubt in saying that mass media is an essential part of the society and we cannot survive without them. But its spontaneous advertising which makes us feel angry sometimes pale etc.

Just to mention some instances,

Newspaper :
Looking at metropolitan page for trade fair news which happened yesterday but its so cluttered with ads that its consuming a lot of time for finding the stuff you are looking………….Finally you quit or else spend more time to get the exact information.

Magazines :
Reviewing the health section in the magazine and the content is syndicated with ad saying “Looking for a battery”……………..seems unprofessional but it will make you feel uncomfortable with the magazine.

Television :
Watching my favourite movie on HBO, actor holding the gun………………..Movies haults and popup ad of a washing machines comes, you are pissed off and switches to another channel until the movie returns.

Radio :
Calmly you are listing to a pure melody of Bryan Adams……in between a rough voice came in “Hurray you can win a trip to Caribbean, Call 8880 now.

Internet :
Internet comprises of web and ultimately we have websites which though yields a lot of information but are so cluttered with flashy banners, ads, pop ups that we do exit due to non friendliness nature.

There is a word “SPAM” of which we are aware of, in general it means unwanted advertising or unwanted pitch for a sale.

But these verticals – TV, newspaper, radio or internet are managed by people who are though great but still they are unable to find better ways to monetize them.

Really there is no way of making monies out of it without making the user unhappy.

Its not like that. Just to put a brief on search engine industry and their methodologies.

Search targets only those advertisers who are looking for a particular thing at a time. So if you are looking for “sun glasses”, you will see the results along with good ads related to “sun glasses”

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sun+glasses&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B5GGGL_enIN316IN316&ie=UTF-8

Search has put a huge impact in the world of targeted advertising and that is the only reason Google has become a multi billion dollar industry in few years. None of the advertising channels are able to cope with search even they are operating since 1800s. (Newspaper and Radio for instances)

So search has changed the scenario of advertising and it’s an innovative approach (Guys the keywords based advertising was is not a google property they borrowed the same from overture).

Lets discuss that how we can make all channels fully consumer oriented and keeping advertising in mind as we can never ignore this as it’s the only thing which is driving the business.

I would like to say that since old time we have classified sections on the newspaper segmenting – Jobs, Matrimonials, Automobiles we can do the same for other stuff.

If you are running a radio channel and there is  an interview with Dr. XYX, highly expertise in Diabetes. We can invite the sponsors who are offering insulin, glucometers and other diabetes related stuff rather than running the ad of a “Laptop or Blackberry.

Same can be implied to magazines, TV shows etc. The word “TARGET” has to be kept in mind and we can see the results like anything.

Now social media platforms provide ads which can be tailored in a very effective manner.

Eg.

My company is selling health insurance in California for the people who are from 28  to 45 years of age with 10% rebate to female.

A campaign keeping these attributes in mind can be formulated and we can track and benchmark our success.

So friends time to switch from traditional to targeted advertising if we want sales oriented and consumer friendly advertising model.

This has been a very debated topic as how offline campaigns helps the online business and vice versa. Lets move onto to the physical world and consider our brick and mortar store. We do promote our business via several marketing channels.

Lets put a case study for this.

I have a mobile store in India and I am looking to increase the sales. I am running my campaigns on newspaper classifieds, display banners on streets and publishing my store over the metro stations. I will definitely have sudden jump in sales. No doubt in that.

Still I donot have any webpresence and is not doing any marketing. I get my website designed for my mobile store and start the marketing of the same. Though the site is very simple just few important models of cell phones still I am looking if some buzz can be created by the site. So in all offline campaigns including newspaper, magazines, road banners I start publishing my URL alongwith my products and promotional offers. In my country there is hardly any market for ecommerce where people will buy a mobile phone online but as per researches from several internet companies and boards its been found that people research, review online and buy offline.

Hence the conclusion is that a person who has seen my URL could land on my websites for more information and after review of the product visit my shop tomorrow to exactly buy his desired mobile phone.

Another way I did some internet marketing for my website and it is pretty visible in search engines. I am also running a group on cell phones industry in India over Facebook. I am also running a banner ads campaign on leading Indian portals about my services, offers etc.

Visitors are coming on my site for reviewing, researching and if the offer suits then they visit my offline shop and do a purchase. So offline is leveraing online and similarly online is helping my offline shop.
So this is one of the simplest way via which we can synchronise both online and offline world easily.

Big corporates publishes their URLs over T-shirts, Coffee mugs, Pen etc. just to brand their websites so a visitor must tend in anyway to open their website.

Similarly if you are running an online business it will create awareness about your products, services amongst the online community thereby becoming an effective channel for our shop.

A large number of retail stores in USA have a giant online presence and they do have physical stores too. For Eg. Walmart which runs both in online as well as offline worlds.

The need to derive benefit from online-offline synchronization is yet to be adopted by the entrepreneurs as its very rare.

Marketing says “Be everywhere whether its sky, land or sea”, capture the untapped venues if not. This is the only way to build a very strong business across the globe.

Few tips to leverage your website from offline world :

•    Publish URLs in your business cards, letter heads and other stationery objects.
•    If you are running any TV, magazine or newspaper commercial do circulate your URL and it should be big enough to be visible (I have always seen www.domain.com of font size which is never viewable by strong eyesight guys)
•    Print the URL in all sorts of novelty , promotional items and distribute it free as per your marketing budget.
•    Try to publish URL in places which have your target audience, for eg. If you are running an online pet food shop then publishing the URL in nearby regions of pet hospital, sanctuaries, shop etc. will be a big plus.s
•    But always keep business ethics in your mind and it should never look that you are circulating your URL like anything similar to mass mailing spam.

If manipulated properly and done intelligently offline too can generate a lot of decent visitors for your website besides the online presence could drive the offline customers to your shop.

So time to study your product and service…………………….then launch

Key performance indicators is terms which is now very common but not yet understood. There are lot of definitions and how to apply this in your business by various intellectuals but it needs to be followed from the ground level.

Lets back to the definition of KPI as per Wikipedia which says “measurement or a metrics use to define the organization’s success and goals”. So a KPI can be anything in business, suppose if you are running a retail chain then your marketing guys are your KPI’s who are bringing in more affiliates which is ultimately helping in growing your business across shores.

A very simple case study, we all know Mac Donalds (a fast food restaurant with chain across the globle), so what is the KPI for its success

-Its their marketing and sales force
-Its their food
-Its their low cost
-Its their customer support

Guess?

Now my friends it none of the above, I agree that they have good and cost effective food but they are none of their KPIs, the KPI here is the “Brand” which people acknoldges blindly and wherever they are in America, Europe or Asia they rush just seeing the Mac Donald’s signage.

So branding is one of the key performance indicator here besides other stuff though they are also a part of KPI but doesnot hold lots of importance as we will definitely consume the burger at Mac Donalds even if its not good (Guys its always good though as my personal experience)

So novices might now be having some idea about KPI as I am moving to the aim of my post which is dedicated to KPI for web marketing.

Internet marketing here there and everywhere, every web entrepreneurs wants their websites to generate sales but in real life they even donot care what sorts of theme is running on their website. There are evidences that a handicraft supplier is displaying just photograph and not the factual description of the product so how can he/she desire sales.

So we need to define our KPI’s as a proactive steps in internet marketing of our websites.

Web constitutes of Webpages which is again a blend of content, images or some videos etc. So if we are marketing our website we need to consider each and everything about our webpages but this is not whole story, I am explaining the KPI for web but not pushing into marketing. So here is the final picture

Whenever I am launching a campaign suppose SEO I will say :

• Content
• Website structure
• Keywords
• Backlinks

Are my KPI’s and again if we dig more I will say my website landing pages are KPI’s.

In a nutshell we can define all these factors whether its related to SEO or conversions as KPI’s but we will come to know after experimenting what are our exact KPI.

In SEO I am targeting 100 keywords and I am ranked with 30 of them in top 10 but only 7 of them yields me visitors and rest do nothing and again from these 7 I have 2 keywords from which I got the lead. Hence I can say that these 2 keywords are my KPIs and I need to invest more in these (may be retaining or ranking more higher positions) and stop investing in other keywords which are doing almost nothing. So I got my KPI automatically during my campaign though I defined my KPI’s for all 100 keywords, such a big different.

Once again I dig into my site overlay (from Google Analytics) and found that maximum conversions have taken place from a page www.xyz.com/file3.html i.e. the user has triggered the call to action from this page, for example they landing to my contact form from this particular page. Hence again this webpage (file3.html becomes my KPI) and I try to enhance it more and work over some more business intelligence the root cause of this KPI.

So KPI are always there even if you donot define them in your initial stages they will come automatically. I have seen my clients running adwords for thousands of dollars with ZERO conversions, they have bided higher but the quality score is low. Reason “Poor Ad copy”, so here it’s the Adcopy. I simple created one more ad variations with dynamic keywords and we were able to get clicks and the quality score was triggered.

Now we have a web analytics world which is considered as an integral part of Internet Marketing. Big portals employ a separate web analytic who can define, evaluate and monitor their KPIs just by mining the backlog data via tools like GA, Omniture, Indextools. Traditional SEO could do a lot of ranking and traffic but they could rarely mine in web analytics and put a picture as what’s happening on their sites.

So if you are running any websites just mine up your analytic tool today and find what are the pages, keywords, search engines, referrals etc. giving you the maximum benefits in terms of sales and then you could benchmark your KPI’s within those and work further to enhance your business just by removing the items which are performing poor. In the marketing world its all about find the bad one replace with other if the other goes well then its good otherwise continue the process. But as all experimenting cannot be done throughout the business cycle so we must define our short and long terms goals and then launch the campaigns accordingly.

KPI – Key Performance Indicators will be governing the web sooner or later, its here to see which business intelligence tool will come up to win the market as currently there are only handful of them with limitations.

SEO is simple, its really simple when we are reviewing a basic tutorial for SEO. All sites explain them very easily like research keywords, update meta, change file names, create XML sitemaps and static sitemaps etc.

My friends this is true when we are working on a site which is comprises of 4-10 pages or is static. You could go ahead with the webmaster and implement the SEO process which we say onpage optimization technically with much ease. What do you say for the dynamic websites whose numbers are growing at an exponential growth rate. Even the entrepreneurs whose sites are static are migrating to a dynamic one.

There are few reasons why the dynamic site is a demand of today :

• It can be modified by the end users i.e. the client even if he/she is unaware of HTML or any backend coding.
• User could create pages by himself once again the right for the user is retained.
• User can launch and schedule the promotional offer himself.
• Even the user could change the design / skin as per his/her requirement.

So dynamic sites are now in great demand and now CMS, Ecommerce software are helping the entrepreneurs to take control of their entire online machinery.

But if we look at the primary channel of internet marketing which is SEO, dynamic websites are considered as monster because of their non seo friendliness.

If we look at SEO it comprises of several modules and implementaions which are as follows :

• Everypage should have unique