Marketing Technology Blog

It seems that many of the companies I’ve worked with have been possessed when viewing pages per visit and reducing bounce rates. Since it’s such a well-known metric, I see many companies put goals into place for their online directors to improve them. I don’t advise it and I rarely care that my bounce rate is over eighty percent.

Perhaps the funniest reaction to this I’ve seen is people breaking up their pages or blog posts so that people have to click a link to continue to the next page to complete reading the article. This is also common with sites that are paid by advertising…. more pageviews can equal more revenue and more ads to place.

Sure enough, the pages per visits increase and bounce rates decrease – never mind that conversions drop too, though, because readers are irritated they can’t get to the content they were looking for.

If you want to sincerely increase pages per visit and reduce bounce rates, I’d recommend the following:

• Make your page easy to read! Write pithy, highly-compelling content that utilizes headings, subheadings, bulleted lists, numbered lists, and bolded terms effectively. This will allow people to digest your post easier and decide whether or not they want to dive in further. Landing on a giant page of text is a surefire way to make people bounce.
• Provide your visitors with alternatives! Accompany your content with related content. By supplying related posts, pages, or call to actions along with your content, you are supplying some additional options for your reader rather than having them bounce altogether. For WordPress, I utilize the WordPress Related Posts plugin. It’s very accurate.

Personally, I believe that bounce rates and pages per visit are a ridiculous metric for businesses to gauge their online marketing success on. Unless you can provide some kind of correlation between conversions with pageviews, why would you care if people find your site and bounce? Maybe they weren’t the right visitor? Perhaps your site wound up on a high search result for an irrelevant keyword. Are you going to penalize your marketing team for that?

As a business, your web site or blog should be driving new leads, helping to retain current customers, or helping to create authority for you in your industry (which drives new leads and helps retain customers). Conversions should be your metric! Not Pages per Visit or Bounce Rates. I’m happy if my customers land on my site, find the contact form, and bounce!

PS: If you’re a web publication and your money comes from advertising revenue, then you may want to worry about bounce rates and pages per visit because it does correlate directly to your site’s revenue. I’m strictly speaking about companies and their sites, though.

I’ll always remember my high school economics teacher, Mr. Dilk. Aside from his hilarious self-censorship when it was obvious he wanted to curse (“Well … BUGS!”) his repetitive use of cliches actually managed to drive certain bits of wisdom into my hormone-addled brain. Among his favorites:

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Now, this is before the invention of those awful motivational posters with pictures of whale tails and people climbing mountains you see in every corporate office. The dispensation of sage advice was the territory of your parents, teachers, and PBS. Despite the hackneyed nature of such counsel, this one stuck with me.

Now in my professional life, planning takes up a significant portion of my time, and for good reason. When putting together a content and social media strategy, the single most important task is to establish which platforms and services are most useful for your needs and plan your approach accordingly.

Not only does taking a willy-nilly approach dilute your brand personality, it’s also financially wasteful. Without an accurate accounting of what’s been done where–and the time spent doing it–your online efforts are a complete waste of time and money.

Any digital shop worth their salt will pitch you their planning process. If they don’t, ask them about it. If they hem and haw or outright don’t have one, run away. You will find your online marketing budget shrinking and have nothing much to show for it besides canceled checks.

To that end, if your company is in a position to go it alone in the digital space, I highly recommend you look at CMO’s Guide to the Social Landscape. It’s basically a social media cheat sheet to the benefits and shortcomings of the top platforms and services. The analysis was performed by 97th Floor, and it’s a great one-sheet resource guide.

There are numerous social network services out there; no single one is the right one, just as trying to utilize all of them isn’t effective. There is no one answer, no single social media content approach that works for every client. By engaging in thoughtful, constructive planning, you make the best use of your time and money.

Each day, The Marketing Technology Blog sends out an email via MailChimp that automatically converts the blog’s feed to nicely formatted HTML email. There’s only a couple hundred folks that take advantage of it – a fraction of the readership of this blog on a daily basis. That’s okay… it’s a niche and feeds those who want it. I don’t try to artificially grow the list, it’s got great retention and does the trick for those who want my blog in their inbox.

Email is a push marketing channel. I’m a huge advocate of permission-based email marketing but I believe the majority of companies utilize email ineffectively.

• Email marketers don’t measure their email list retention, they only pay attention to how many are on the list at any one time. Your list acquisition may be outpacing your retention. If you’re getting a lot of unsubscribes, you need to fix something sooner rather than later.
• Email marketers believe that incredibly low open and conversion rates are good when they’re above industry averages. Folks, a 4% click-through rate off of an email is a 96% failure rate and not something to celebrate.
• Email marketers often have a calendar that requires them to publish, regardless of whether or not the content is crap or not. I get emails in my inbox every week and I seriously wonder how the company possibly thought there was something intriguing enough to send it.
• Email marketers believe in email math: If 10 people purchased from my list of 1,000 on my weekly email, I can double sales with 2 emails per week. It’s like printing money. No… it’s not. More lackluster emails may initially provide an increase in sales, but ultimately you’re going to lose valuable subscribers.

Although the cost of email marketing is plummeting, it still costs companies a lot of time and some money to send email. I haven’t tried to push my email or dress it up because I’m not sure it will do well with readers. Perhaps if I can have dedicated content in the email down the road – but I’m not going to send out crappy emails for the sake of trying to get a few more eyeballs.

The best thing you can do for a company who sends a crappy email is to unsubscribe. Don’t wait for the email to get better – send them a message today. Clean up your inbox.

Related articles by Zemanta

• HTML email campaigns – is sending them a waste of your time? (inklingmarkets.com)
• How to get the attention of inactive subscribers (b2bemailmarketing.com)

This is the second time I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Steven Woods from Eloqua, author of Digital Body Language. At Webtrends Engage conference, Steven did a fantastic job of describing a typical scenario of a purchase made online… and how our data may be failing us.

I can’t stress how important it is to recognize the changes in marketing and sales that are needed to handle the changes that are happening in the buying process. One of the reasons social media has become so important is that we know that decision-making is now happening within and around our network. It’s a disruptive shift that companies must adapt to.

Social media isn’t always a finite measurement… I believe it’s one that can be measured enough to provide a positive return on investment, though. That’s the responsibility of marketing and social media consultants. That return is becoming much greater than what we can accurately measure!

I recognize, even with my clients, that its far more complex… but we start with the very basics and move forward. I don’t typically finish the social media and integration projects I work on – it’s a moving target and we must continue to refine and enhance as demand requires. Get a solid foundation out that incorporates best practices and that can be accurately measured. Then measure, test, and adjust your execution to maximize results.