Tagged with 'analytics'

Duo uses a persona-based approach to website designs - which should help answer questions like, “Are potential clients or current clients the most common website visitor and your target for content?” Personas help designers and programmers visualize real people reading and acting on the content they find on a website. But after the design is done and the website is implemented, you have to know what your visitors are doing, how long they’re spending doing that, and whether your website is efficiently “converting” the behavior you want to see - buying a product, signing up for a class, or connecting with other like-minded individuals. So you constantly monitor your website to answer the questions related to your personas’ behaviors.

Visitorville is a visual website metrics tool that lets you go beyond just the numbers - “hits” don’t provide enough inforomation for you to know how your site is being used. But using a helicopter to circle your Very Important People around your website virtually, now that is above and beyond your usual website metrics tool.

Which pages are the most visited? Which personas visit those specific pages most often and how long does it take them to accomplish their goals? You can visualize people coming and going in buses, with traffic in buses and people that look like the Sims (in the 2D view) and they also offer a 3D view that looks like Second Life. The screen shots are really amazing and you can wow your friends and clients alike by showing them around your website in a way they’ve likely never envisioned it before.

I get a little bit creeped out sometimes by MyBlogLog displaying my profile picture while I’m viewing a blog. Every time I read a certain blog and it shows “user from Austin, TX” on a map or list of some sort, I wonder if anyone knows it’s me and if that matters.

Yet, despite my own trepidation and refusal to use such widgets on my site, I know bloggers who find it great fun and a motivator to keep writing. Using Feedjit as an embedded widget on your blog or website may help other website visitors as they browse, who knows?

What are your thoughts? Is it useful and motivating or simply too much information to have these visual methods for watching your web traffic?

Should you put a link to LinkedIn on a biography page of a law firm website? That was the question posed recently on the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) listserv by Gail Lamarche Director of Marketing at Henderson, Franklin, Starnes & Holt.

I opined that, for professional services firms such as this law firm, the attorney biography page is the best thing we have as a “money page” on the website. Therefore, driving visitors away from the money page was, strategically, a bad idea. Moreover, it seemed if there were really content on LinkedIn that was valuable to the site visitor, then that information should be on the bio page. And if it wasn’t there, the bio page was somehow deficient.

Smug I was in the righteousness of my response. But I got an earful of dissent from LMA listserv contributors. The arguments are worthy of consideration:

Jayne Navarre, LawGravity, presented these points persuasively:

• Branding – The LinkeIn link is like a hip badge of Web 2.0 awareness
• Connections – LinkedIn provides a transparent view to an attorney’s connections, arguably a value to any prospective client
• Authoritative - Access to the LinkedIn Questions & Answers provides additional proof of the attorney’s authority

Heather Milligan, Director of Marketing at Barger Wolen emphasized that LinkedIn:

• Human - helps make the attorney “dynamic, human, liked”( in case we have any residual concerns about their humanity) and helps the attorney pass the “known, liked & trusted” test of prospective clients.
• Dimensional - And in rebuttal to my “bio is deficient” comment, Heather notes that to maintain a certain appearance consistent with other bios and the overall website, “the firm bio is controlled for content, style, etc….(while) LinkedIn is the perfect place where an attorney can bring together their outside interests and professional careers, making them more human and likeable.
• Connections - Perhaps the most valuable feature, LinkedIn is fundamentally a connecting tool that might serendipitously reveal a third party connection to the site visitor which presents all kinds of opportunity for real introduction.

It’s not a slam dunk either way. The answer to Gail’s original question seems to be, “It depends.” The circumstances dictate the strategy. I’ll give it a nod of possibility and something worth trying.  Yes, I know, “first I was against it, now I’m for it.” Thanks to the enlightenment of my marketing peers.

But I’ll have this last (never!) word.  Think doubly hard about sending your site visitor from the most valuable conversion page of  your site to an information wasteland. Don’t do it unless the LinkedIn profile to which you are sending visitors:

• provides a rich set of business connections
• demonstrates some effort to contribute authoritatively to the online Q&A discourse
• otherwise expands on the website attorney bio page
• (if possible) provides a path back

And whatever you do, measure the results. Professionals keep score.

Now you can link away to my LinkedIn profile.

That’s revenue Google gets by focusing on the effectiveness of its advertising engine. “The Human Hands Behind the Google Money Machine” in today’s New York Times, shows the importance of analytics and how it is used by Google to drive revenue. The story reviews the genesis of the Googles AdWords program, five years ago when GoTo.com was acquired by Yahoo. GoTo was the first to pioneer advertising, but Google made a critical advance improving the system by actually looking at the click-throughs, not just what people were willing to bid for ads, that pushed Google ahead to stay. On the web it’s all based on metrics and analytics. At Duo we keep harping about analytics and how clients should benefit from studying what really go goes on with their sites – but few take advantage of that recommendation. The advantage there is there for those that do – and they are going to reap the rewards.