The meeting starts in an hour. You were up late last night. Had to make sure you’ve got all the numbers to support your proposal.

You feel armed and ready. But a little nervous too.

What if your manager (or your client or the creative director or the executive committee) disagrees with your data? What if the disagreement takes the form of “I know what all the facts and figures say, but it just doesn’t feel right?”

You think to yourself: Doesn’t feel right? But I have all the facts right here! They can’t be disputed. How can anyone say “Doesn’t feel right?”

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. We’ve all been in this situation before.

For those of us whose stock and trade is analytics, it’s even more likely. We suffer from a great temptation to persuade by leading with the numbers, by focusing on the facts.

Surely no rational person would disagree with the facts?

But they do.

What goes wrong?

The Golden Circle

Simon Sinek wants to help us with this question.

You may have seen Mr. Sinek’s TED Talk. It’s one of the most watched of the TED videos. Or read his book, Start with Why.

Sinek uses a simple but powerful model to explain what happens when we talk about facts and figures too early in the discussion.

Here’s what he says:

It’s the world’s simplest idea. I call it the Golden Circle. Why. How. What. This little circle explains why some leaders and some organizations are able to inspire where others aren’t.

Every single person on the planet knows what they do. Some know how they do it – whether you call it your differentiating value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. By why I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of the bed in the morning and why should anyone care?

As a result, the way we think, the way we act, the way we communicate, is from the outside in. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations, regardless of their size, regardless of their industry, all think, act and communicate from the inside out.

That explains why we feel the impulse to communicate from the outside in. We want to start with “what,” to lead with the facts, because the easiest and the clearest path begins with what.

But Sinek says we cannot do business or negotiate an agreement or settle on a proposal with someone until we share common beliefs, until we agree on “why” we should work together. No one will find our facts and figures persuasive until we share these beliefs.

Rooted in biology

Sinek goes on to suggest that this aspect of our nature is rooted in biology.

Here’s the best part. None of what I am telling you is my opinion. It’s all grounded in the tenets of biology, not psychology, biology.

If you look at a cross-section of the human brain looking from the top down, what you see is the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the Golden Circle.

Our newest brain, our homo-sapien brain, our neo-cortex, corresponds with the “what” level. The neo-cortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language.

The middle two sections make up our limbic brains. And our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings like trust and loyalty. It’s also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language.

In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn’t drive behavior.

When we communicate from the inside out, we’re talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior and we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from.

You know, sometimes you can give someone all the facts and figures and they’ll say “I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn’t feel right.” Why would we use that verb, it doesn’t “feel right?” Because the part of the brain that controls decision-making doesn’t control language.

The next time you are tempted to lead with numbers, pause for a moment.

Instead of starting with the logic of your data, start with “why we are doing this.” Then explain the how and what of getting there.

Until your audience (the executive, the committee, the client) is convinced that you share similar beliefs, no amount of data or facts will convince them.

Feelings of trust and loyalty drive decisions, not data

Remember, the limbic brain doesn’t think in terms of language. It makes decisions based on feelings, especially the feelings of trust and loyalty.

But how do you know if the other person believes what you believe?

Because you will have done your homework to understand what is important to that person, what motivates them. Preferably you will have agreed on objectives in prior conversations.

And how do you know if the other person will accept your evidence?

Because you will express your evidence in terms of your common beliefs, of how the project will help achieve the objectives important to this person. And how not doing it will hurt this person’s interest. You will be focused on support for common beliefs instead of debating the merits of your data.

You may be convinced that your organization should become more metrics-based and scientific. That your company is best served if it moves toward becoming “data-driven.”

But you and your audience have to agree on shared beliefs first. Shared beliefs will help avoid arguments about the source and accuracy of the data. The data will play an important, but supporting, role. It will point you in the right direction to accomplish your common objectives.

Therefore, instead of leading with what, lead with why. Why this project meets our objectives. Why it is consistent with our beliefs. Why this campaign will help us move forward. Why it matters.

Search. Referrals. Direct.

Google Analytics categorizes visitors arriving at your site primarily into these three buckets.

Search: Visitors find you in the search engines, either in the organic listing or your PPC ad.

Referrals: Visitors are referred to your site from another website that links to you – an article for example, or a blog post.

Direct: Visitors who already know about you. They go directly to your site by typing your URL into their browser or opening one of their bookmarks.

What makes Direct visitors special?

Direct visitors arrive at your site under their own propulsion. They already know about you. Direct visitors are your existing customers. They are familiar with your brand.

No one had to refer them. They didn’t have to search for you. You didn’t have to beg.

Therefore, learn to love your Direct visitors. Segment them to find what they look for and what content they consume. Study their questions and what you can do to solve their problems.

And admire the conversion metrics for these visitors. It’s likely that conversion rates for clean Direct traffic are higher than for your other visitors.

Questions lurk in the Direct bucket

There’s just one problem in this happy story. Notice I said “clean Direct traffic.” The data for direct traffic in most sites isn’t clean. In fact, it’s probably dirty, dirty, dirty.

Why is this? Because if Google doesn’t know how a visitor arrived at your site, it categorizes the visit in the Direct Traffic bucket.

As Alban Guillemot at SEO Sydney Blog explains:

“Google Analytics classifies traffic as Direct when a user session has been started without a referrer being passed by the user browser.”

Who are these visitors that Google can’t identify properly? Avinash Kaushik describes the primary culprits in a detailed post on Direct traffic:

1. Missing web analytics tag from landing pages
Likely to be the most common reason that traffic gets categorized incorrectly. You thought you had inserted the Google Analytics tag on all your pages, but you missed some of them. When a visitor lands on this page and then clicks on a link to go deeper in your site, even if your campaign parameters are tagged correctly, the traffic source will be recorded as Direct. All for the lack of an Analytics tag on the landing page.

2. Online campaigns that are not tagged (email, search, social media, etc.)
Kaushik says untagged campaigns are probably the second most source of improperly categorized visitors. What are these campaigns?

They include untagged emails that send visitors from client-side email applications (like Outlook), mobile ads and mobile application links (e.g. Twitter and Facebook apps), and clicks from PDF and Microsoft Office documents.

3. Mistakes in your tagged campaign parameters
You finish the tedious work to write your campaign parameters and little do you know, you’ve made some mistakes. Easy to make. And the result? Your analytics will ignore the parameter and throw the traffic into the Direct category.

Other sources that get lumped into Direct traffic can include visits from email signatures, shortened URLS in social media like Facebook and Twitter, and from a firewall-secured environment that strips the referrer.

Is pollution in Direct really a problem?

These errors create two major headaches.

1. Your Direct traffic numbers are tainted with traffic from other sources. You’ve allowed Google Analytics to pollute the category of people you love the most, the visitors you want to understand deeply. It pulls down your conversion rates and disguises your other metrics, rendering them useless for understanding the needs of your most important visitors.

2. Your campaigns appear to be doing poorly. Instead of visitors from your campaigns getting tagged and neatly categorized where they belong, they are all getting tossed willy-nilly into Direct. When you report on these campaigns to your management you are forced to understate the results and answer awkward questions about your data quality.

How can you clean your Direct data?

The closer you look, the more Direct looks like a catchall category and not so much like a category to capture visits and learn about the needs of your customers. You don’t have to let this happen. Focus on the most important sources of incorrect categorization: correct tagging of your pages and your campaigns.

Once you’ve cleaned your Direct sources of traffic, then you can dig in and learn more about this important source of traffic – where they are in their buying cycle, what problems they are trying to solve, what content they consume most, and how their behavior differs from your other sources of traffic.

Ever gotten stumped with your web analytics before you got started?

You encounter dozens of metrics, even more possible ways to view them, thousands of different configurations for reports.

It’s no wonder many marketers and entrepreneurs throw up their hands in exasperation. Though determined to use their web presence to produce more traffic, leads, and revenue, they give up and return to making decisions based on instinct and experience.

A seasoned power shopper would recognize this problem right away.

If you walk into the grocery store with the vague idea that you’re going to “cook something,” you’re unlikely to walk out with what you need to make dinner. You make a more productive trip to the store if you first decide what you want for dinner, plan a menu, review the ingredients, and make a shopping list. Then when you arrive at the store you can go straight to the items you need and purchase them.

Instead of the store overwhelming you with too many choices and no clear aim, you can overwhelm the store with a goal and a list.

Prepare to analyze your website metrics the same way a power shopper prepares for a trip to the store.

Avinash Kaushik, in an article for the Yahoo Web Analytics blog, explains exactly how to prepare. Kaushik counsels to ask some existential questions about the business before diving into the data.

He describes fives steps to prepare for your analysis journey.

1. Settle on your business objectives

Why does your website exist? What business objectives will improve if your website does its job? More revenue? Lower costs? More control over the forecast?

Objectives place your website firmly in the context of your business. They align your activities and outcomes with those of your executives and investors.

For most B2B marketers, the business objectives for their website are to attract more buyers, to nurture them, and to transition them into sales leads or customers.

2. Specify your Goals

When you define specific goals, you align your website outcomes with your business objectives. Goals define actions you want your visitors to take.

Since B2B buyers pass through multiple buying stages, you may have multiple goals for your website. They could include downloads of articles, signups for email newsletters, or attendance to a webinar.

3. Select the key metrics

Once you’ve defined your goals, you can select the best metrics to measure your progress. Metrics are more specific than operational goals. They must be something your web analytics tool can measure.

You have a lot of metrics to choose from in your analytics tools! Select your primary ones carefully. Of all your metrics, these are your Key Performance Indicators.

KPIs are unique to each business. To use our lead generation example, a KPI might be the number of people who reach the “thank you” page for email newsletter signups.

Of all the metrics in your analytics tools, now you know which to focus on. You’ve got your “shopping list.” You can prioritize the time you spend to make these metrics measurable and visible. You can construct various tests and optimize for them.

4. Set your targets

How do you know if you are succeeding or failing? Choose targets for your metrics, specific values that indicate success or failure.

To choose your targets, look at the past history of this KPI in your web analytics tools. With your finance team you also look at your forecast or financial obligations for the coming period (month, quarter, year).

People are tuned to be persuaded by specific numbers. If you say sales increased, the point won’t stick with people. But if you say “our optimization efforts caused downloads to increase by 17% with a subsequent 4% increase in sales,” people will remember.

Choose these targets carefully! They should be aggressive enough to be significant toward achieving your business goals and objectives. Yet they should also be doable. These are the numbers you will be watching every day and reporting to your management and other groups in your organization.

Now you know what good or bad looks like. You know what constitutes success and what constitutes failure. You have a numerical yardstick against which to measure your test and optimization activities.

5. Single out your important segments

Segments are groups of people with common characteristics that visit your website. Divide your visitors into segments by how they got to your website (source), what they did on your website (behavior), and the outcome of their visit (the goals that were met).

Since the people in your segments have common characteristics, their metrics can reveal something about their intent. Knowing that 40% of the people who visit your site use your Total Cost of Ownership calculator is less useful than when you segment your visitors and find out that 80% of visitors who come via organic search use the calculator but only 20% who come from social media sites use it.

Further, focus on the segments that advance your business. They will produce more traffic, leads and revenue than other segments.

When you focus on specific segments, you will get clearer results from any testing and optimization. You’ll get more specific insights into your segments about what they want more of and what they want less of.

In summary, retail stores manipulate shoppers into buying what they want you to buy. Power shoppers study their environment and then form a strategy to accomplish their own goals. With a strategic measurement plan, you can stop being overwhelmed by your analytics data and start owning it for your own purposes.

Many people have wanted real time abilities in Google Analytics. Now they have it.

Last week Google Analytics announced it would add real time capture and analytics information to its application.

Jason Cutroni, Stephanie Chang at distilled, and Dorcas Alexander at LunaMetrics immediately wrote informative articles with their initial impressions.

Some organizations will make heavy use of their real-time data. Publishers can watch content that gets attention and move those pages to a more prominent location. Retailers will use Real Time to understand the immediate impact of new campaigns.

A modest role in B2B Marketing

For B2B companies real time analytics has fewer applications. In fact, it could be an annoying distraction if used the wrong way.

But for some specific situations, real time information will significantly improve your ability to measure activity and intent. Here are a few:

1. You release an email or paid search campaign and you want to make sure that your tagging was implemented correctly. You can get immediate confirmation and make changes accordingly. No need to wait until the next day to see your results.
2. You conduct a physical event and you want to understand how people interact with your website as the event unfolds.
3. You make an announcement, you send out a tweet, and you can watch the immediate impact.

What’s included in GA Real Time?

GA Real Time covers these dimensions:

• Geographic Locations
• Traffic Sources
• Content

And these metrics:

• Visitors
• Percent of new visitors and returning visitors
• Pageviews
• Traffic sources (referrals, direct, search, and campaigns)
• Active pages

Limitations of GA Real Time

Google Analytics Real Time is an exciting addition to GA’s feature set. However, it is limited. After all, it’s expensive to process website activity in real-time.

First, GA Real Time only includes information on what happens on your site up to 30 minutes prior.

And second, Real Time reports are not filtered. Even if you have a profile filter applied the data is not filtered.

The folks at Clicky (who sell a real time analytics application) were quick to point out the limitations in Google Analytics Real Time:

Hmm… did anyone actually read the announcement that Google made today? This isn’t “real time Google Analytics”, this is a single report in GA that is real time. The rest of GA remains the same. This is more akin to Chartbeat, to be used as a real time compliment to a standard analytics package, rather than a full standalone real time service like Clicky is. But I guarantee you Chartbeat will be just fine, as will everyone else. We’ve all had, and continue to have, plenty of advantages over GA other than real time data.

Of course, Google has only initiated its entry into the real time arena with this release. If previous patterns of development and release are any indication of what Google plans for Real Time, they’ve only just begun.

It’s become a running joke in Brad Feld’s circle that he “hates marketing.” But does he really?

Feld published a letter this week from Chris Moody, COO of Grip. Moody’s letter captures what he believes Feld’s philosophy of marketing to be. It’s based on a belief that “startups have the power to change the world.”

Feld and others at venture firm Foundry Group don’t say “look at us; look at all the successful investments we’ve made.” They run conferences, write books and articles, and talk to everyone about their belief in the power of startups. In doing so they advance everyone’s thinking on the subject.

I like Moody and Feld’s description of marketing because it reframes marketing’s purpose in terms of leadership instead of products and transactions.

If I were going to create the Brad Feld sound bite for Marketing it would go something like this “Don’t do marketing. Focus on becoming a thought leader in your space. Talk everyday with your customers, prospective customers, partners, and the world about why you do what you do and why you think it is important. The reality is you can only talk about what you do one or two times before people think ‘got it’ and stop listening. But, if you talk about what you believe and point to countless examples that exemplify your beliefs , you can build real engagement with people who care/believe the same things.”

“Marketing through thought leadership” also maps well to Aristotle’s three ways to persuasively appeal to others: argument by character, argument by logic, and argument by emotion.

Argument by character (ethos) includes the aspects of virtue, practical wisdom and disinterest. When Feld demonstrates his belief that “startups have the power to change the world” he shows that he shares the same values (virtues) with the startups he works with.

His conferences, books, and conversations prove to them that he has experience (practical wisdom) in his domain. And when he shares his knowledge and experience so freely, his audience can see his disinterest, that he is not just in it for his own gain, that he genuinely wants to help them move forward on their journey. When he appeals to his character, Feld’s audience perceives him as a trustworthy leader and will let him influence them with his ideas.

Argument by logic (logos) always starts with where the audience is, with commonplace beliefs they already hold. Feld’s audience of entrepreneurs believes that “startups matter.” They find him persuasive because he starts his conversations from this position and then uses various logical arguments to bring his audience to the specific choice or decision he is recommending.

Argument by emotion (pathos) changes the mood of the audience to make it more receptive to your logic and more willing to make an emotional commitment to your goal. Though emotions like anger and humor are persuasive, they are short-lived. The most powerful emotion is to create a sense of group identity and belief. Entrepreneurs lead challenging lives as they put their ideas to the test in the marketplace. The activities at Foundry make them feel part of a larger group that is doing important work. When Feld creates this feeling among entrepreneurs they become more receptive to his ideas; they respond to him as a role model.

All visitors to your web site leave at some point, whether they visit one page or one hundred. The last page they visit is their Exit Page, an event your analytics application records.

You might think that your analysis of the Top Exit Pages for your site would reveal some important information. But it turns out that the Top Exit Pages report is not that helpful.

Top Exit Pages does not tell you intent

Here’s why. Buyers visit your site for a variety of reasons. They leave when they are satisfied or when they can’t find what they are looking for.

When visitors leave your site from a particular page, you can’t know from the clickstream why they leave because you can’t know their intent. Maybe they found exactly what they wanted, maybe they didn’t.

If you don’t know the intent of your visitors, you can’t infer much just because you know the last page they visited.

A real world example

Imagine you had a store in the middle of a mall and the store had five entrances. People could enter or exit any of the five doors.

If your “exit rate” for one door was higher than the others, would you be concerned? Not necessarily.

Maybe that door is next to the food court and most people are hungry when they leave your store, so they use the food court exit. Or maybe the “high exit rate” door is next to the checkout stand and so people who buy something simply leave through the closest door.

The problem is that if you only know the number of exits or the exit rate, you don’t know the intent. Which visitors got what they wanted and exited satisfied? Which ones had become frustrated or disappointed and left unhappy? You don’t know.

One exception: Pay attention when visitors leave your site in the middle of a structured experience like a checkout sequence to make a purchase. If the sequence is four pages and you have a high Exit Rate on anything but the fourth page, look into the cause.

How can you discover the intent behind pages with high exit rates? Since clickstream analysis can’t help you, try surveys or usability tests.

Bounce Rate is your friend

Bounce rate is a different story. The Bounce Rate is your friend.

Bounces from your website occur when a visitor lands on a page on your site, stays for a very short period, and leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. Visitors who bounce from your site did not find what they wanted or expected.

Let’s continue with the analogy of your store at the mall. What if many people walked in one of the doors, briefly looked inside, and then left but did not browse or buy anything? Would you be concerned? Of course you would. Something about that entrance casues people to leave. You would send someone over immediately to see what was wrong.

Just like the door at the mall, high bounce rates on a page tell you something is wrong and that you need to investigate immediately.

Use Bounce Rate in these five situations

Avinash Kaushik suggests five situations where the bounce rate will reveal something about buyer behavior and buyer intent. They are the Bounce Rate of your:

• Overall website – Bounce rate for your website gives you a sense of whether visitors from all sources engage with your site. Watch this trend over time for changes that need your attention.
• Traffic sources – Which sources of traffic engage with your site and which ones leave immediately upon arrival? Look at the sources with high bounce rates to understand the mismatch between what they expected and what they received.
• Search keyword – Look at which keywords from search engines send visitors with high bounce rates or low bounce rates. Use more keywords on the topics that send high-quality visitors and fewer of the keyword topics that send low quality visitors.
• Pay-Per-Click campaigns – Since you pay for every one of these visits to your site, it makes sense to examine their bounce rates. If people click on one of your ads and then immediately leave your site, what is wrong? Mismatch between the ad copy and the topic of your page? Trouble with the landing page? Better check it out.
• Top trafficked pages – Lots of people visit these pages. How long do they stay? At least long enough to visit other pages? If not, then investigate why they leave a popular page so quickly.

One exception to the bounce rate: blogs. Many people come to a blog post from a feed reader which sends them directly to the post. They read the post and leave your site. It’s recorded as a “bounce,” but in fact the visitors got what they wanted and left your site satisfied. Therefore, blog pages often have higher bounce rates and that’s ok.

They are paid to make their number, to convert prospects into customers, to focus on this quarter’s results.

When companies give their salespeople unqualified leads it drains productivity and saps morale:

• Salespeople must spend time to manually qualify a large number of leads, a job for which they are poorly suited.
• It steals their time away from the task they are paid to do: convert qualified leads into customers.
• Some of the leads they discard have long term potential and should continue to be nurtured instead of tossed in the trash.

Salespeople and Gem Cutters

Salespeople are like gem cutters in the diamond business.

How is that you ask? Because they are both specialists.

Gem cutters specialize in the cutting and polishing that transform rough stones into polished gems.

Salespeople convert buyers into customers.

The Diamond’s Journey

Before a rough diamond makes it to the gem cutter, it makes a long trip from the center of the earth to the cutter’s bench.

Prospectors explore remote locations all over the world. They look for geologic pipes formed during volcanic activities. Diamonds and other minerals flow through these pipes to the surface.

Mining companies establish production in newly discovered diamond fields to extract the minerals.

Sorting operations then send the ore through a sequence of blasting, crushing and processing steps to release the diamonds.

To produce one carat of rough diamond requires 250 tons of ore! And only one fourth of these rough diamonds are high enough quality to be cut into gems.

Turn Rough Diamonds into Jewels

At last the rough diamonds are ready for the gem cutters who meticulously cut and polish them into stones to use in jewelry.

Each group has a specialty in the sequence that produces polished diamond gems. It would be unprecedented and ludicrous to send gem cutters out in search of diamond deposits in remote locations. Or to ask them to organize mining operations that could excavate tons of ore from the ground and then sort it to find the small amount of rough diamonds.

Likewise, it makes sense to only give salespeople qualified leads, rough diamonds that can be cut and polished into a jewel of a customer.

The Attributes of a Well-Qualified Lead

What are the attributes of a qualified lead, of a prospect that is prepared and ready to meet with a sales representative?

Dan McDade in The Truth About Leads proposes a list of ten attributes:

1. SIC or NAICS code
2. Firmographics (company revenue and profitability, number of employees, number of locations)
3. Decision makers and influencers identified
4. Environment documented
5. Decision-makers engaged
6. Business pain(s) uncovered/validated
7. Decision-making process and time frame documented
8. Budget allocated or process for budgeting documented
9. Competitive landscape documented
10. Sense of urgency or compelling event exists

You or I might quibble with some of the specifics on Dan’s list. It might be slightly different for your customers, or from customer to customer.

But that’s not the point.

The point is to give the sales person a rough diamond – not an exploration map, not a mining site, not 250 tons of ore to sort through.

With a thorough picture of the prospect’s business drivers, its buying process, and plans for the future, the salesperson becomes a knowledgeable advisor who creates value for buyers and helps them to become customers.

You know the bounce rate on your website. And average time on site. And on and on for many other metrics.

Are your numbers low or high? What can you compare them to? How can you know what a ‘good’ number is?

You could compare your metrics to those of your competitors to answer this question. Or to other industries that are similar to yours.

You could look at historical patterns – this time last year, last month, last week.

You could look to the future and measure against your plan, your forecast, your budget.

You could try all these. But they would be a waste of time.

This is a case where ignorance is bliss.

Why, you ask?

People use benchmarking, historical trends, and forecasting when they don’t have good, recent data for decision-making. When all they can do is approximate.

This is not you.

Your website analytics provide insight and power from recent measurements. You can make a change and see the results right away. You can arrange a split-test and measure which split delivers the best outcome.

The only comparison you need to make is to the results of your tests.

As Ian Lurie says in his (excellent) book Fat-Free Analytics:

There is no ‘good’ bounce rate, time on site, or anything else. There are no absolute values for all web sites. If you want a ‘good’ bounce rate, find a way to reduce your current bounce rate. Now it’s ‘good’, compared to the old bounce rate.

Keep the blinders on, stay focused on your metrics, and work to make them ‘good’.

Every business wants to know what is happening on their website.

But you can’t just stroll onto your website like a restaurant owner who leaves the kitchen to visit the dining room.

Or a shopkeeper who visits the store floor.

It’s invisible, this activity on your website. You need a way to record the activity and assemble it in a form that you can use.

That’s exactly what Analytics packages do. And the most popular package is Google Analytics.

Good news, bad news

The good news is: Google Analytics does just about everything.

For professional web analytics folks that’s terrific. They revel in the ability to look at their data up, down, sideways, inside out and outside in.

The bad news is: Beginners often find themselves overwhelmed. Which numbers are important? Where do I begin?

In this article I’m going to help you get started with Google Analytics.

(By the way, I got some help for this post from Ian Lurie. He recorded a short video on getting started with Google Analytics. It’s definitely worth watching. [Note: Ian updated this video in January, 2012. The link goes to the new version.])

What do you want to know?

Think for a moment about that store owner I mentioned earlier. What would this shopkeeper monitor daily?

The number of people who visit the store? Of course.

How long they stay and what they do? Absolutely.

Who referred them? Without question.

It’s the same for analytics on your website. Start by learning who is visiting the site, how long they stay, and how they got to the site.

How many people visited your site?

1. Visits. How many visitors came to your site in the past month?

2. Absolute unique visitors. You could have 2,000 visitors in a month, but was it 2,000 unique people who visited once? Or is it some smaller number of unique visitors, some of whom visited the site repeatedly? You want to know this because it gives you a sense of how many people came to your site more than once.

How long did they stay?

3. Average page views. The number of pages that each person looked at while visiting the site.

4. Average time on site. How long they stayed.

5. Bounce rate. How many of your visitors looked at only one page and left? Or simply stayed for a short period of time?

Where did they come from?

Google divides the traffic sources into Search Engines, Direct Traffic, and Referring Sites.

6. Referring sites. Look at referring sites to see what sites people are on where they see a link to your site and pay a visit.

7. Referring keywords. What keywords did they use in the search engine to find you?
This can tell you a lot about what people are searching for and what terms they use to find it.

Seven metrics to get you started

There you have it. Seven metrics on Google Analytics to get you started. Number of visitors. How long they stay. Where they come from.

Try these out for yourself. Check out Ian’s video [Updated in January, 2012]. And let me know what questions you have about Google Analytics. If you have a question, probably lots of other people do too. I can write it up and we’ll share it with everyone.

Like a moth to the light, when technology buyers have a problem they turn to the search engines first.

They may have just started to investigate a problem. Or buyers could be at the final stages of vendor selection.

At all stages of the buyer’s journey they rely on search engines to find sources of information.

It’s no surprise then that technology companies invest significant resources into their website, to make it a quality source. They want to attract and retain the interest of their buyers, to demonstrate that they can answer buyer questions and help solve their problems.

But do their pages rank in the search engines so buyers can find them?

When technology companies ask the question: “What is the search engine rank for each of the primary pages on my site for its keyword phrase?” they are often horrified at the answer.

All that effort and yet their pages don’t rank well for their keywords!

Structure your core website for visitors and search engines

Can your buyers find your company’s website? Do your pages rank highly for terms your buyers use in their searches?

In the last article I explained how to divide your site into a Core Website and a Blog to improve both search engine rankings and visitor conversions.

Now we’ll look at how to create pages for your Core Website that rank and convert, pages that do well in the search engines and that meet the needs of your buyers.

It’s not as hard as you might think.

1. Draft a core set of pages

Start with a framework for the core site. Use a simple hierarchy of categories for the framework.

Make each page in the core website on a different topic related to your domain, your offer, and your company.

Draft the copy for each page. Write a page that is tightly on-topic and at least 300 words long.

2. Find a competitive keyword for each page

Once you have a draft for a page, you’ll likely see that it has a natural topic. But that topic phrase may not be the best keyword.

If the topic phrase is too competitive, then find another one that lots of people search for, but that is less competitive.

If it’s too obscure, find a term that is more competitive. You can use Google’s keyword research tool to find these phrases.

3. Optimize the page for that keyword.

Once you’ve decided on a keyword for the page, edit to optimize the page for that keyword phrase. The page will still be about your original topic. It will still please your visitors. Now it will also satisfy the search engine because the engine will know what your page is about.

Make these changes on your page:

• Title tag – Use your keyword phrase in the title tag, preferably at the beginning of the title.
• Meta description – Since the meta description is used by the search engine to display the “snippet” on the search engine results page (SERP), use your keyword in the meta description.
• Body content – Use your keyword in your content – in the header, sub-header, in the “alt” text for images, and in the body text.
• Outbound links – Use your keyword phrase in the anchor text to link out to other websites.

How many times should your keyword phrase appear on the page? Enough times so it is clear to the reader and to the search engine that it is the dominant phrase. But not so many that it reads awkwardly. “Stuffing” your page with keywords will make a bad impression on the reader and the search engine.

4. Publish the page

Assess where your pages rank for their keywords. You can do this manually. Or, if you want a tool that tracks keyword rankings automatically, subscribe to the PRO version at SEOmoz.

5. Attract inbound links to raise each page’s rank

Brian Clark suggest these ways to attract links to your pages.

1. Guest writing – Write a guest post on a relevant blog in your industry. You can link back to your home page in your bio, or even better, to a piece of cornerstone content on your site like a white paper or an e-book.
2. Social networking – Participate in the prominent social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google +. Keep the focus on what you can do to “establish and grow relationships with influencers.” More people will see your content and link to pages on your site when you develop an authentic network.
3. Linking out – You will initiate a dialogue with companies and writers in your niche when you find opportunities to link to their sites.

With your Blog you have free rein to write on a wide range of topics. And with your Core Website you can develop quality content on a tightly focused set of topics. The pages on your Core Website have the potential to rank and convert well.

• It’s a site where pages are well-defined; each one is about something in particular.
• Each page is strong – it ranks well in the search engines, visitors stay to read it, and it converts well.
• The Core Site will get stronger and stronger as you continue to add landing pages for new rich content: white papers, cheat sheets, checklists, infographics, videos, and webinars.