Serena just pointed out a great article on the first 90 days of launching a Startup by Mike Sweeney of Right Source Marketing. It’s well crafted. In fact, I think his first point about creating an easy-to-navigate website is a great choice to lead the discussion and goes back to my point about Executing on the Basics in Marketing. As a rule of thumb, I think his 10 Steps are as good as anybody’s.
The only point that I find myself partial to disagreeing with is #8 on his list, “Install web analytics. Monitor it. Don’t obsess over it.” I agree…you can get analysis paralysis big time when you open your recently installed analytics for the first time and start exploring all of the interesting trends of your new business. Certainly, if the traffic is low and you don’t have the budget or resources to optimize, there is little value in checking your stats 5 times a day wondering if you got another visitor and whether they came in off a new keyword or one you already knew about. However, particularly if you’re spending a reasonable amount of money on search marketing, I find that digging extensively into your keyword sources and other analytics information can be invaluable in helping guide your decisions and monitoring your opportunity cost.
Keyword Analysis is Very Valuable
Mike might have been referring to businesses that are not getting enough traffic to help guide decisions but I found, when launching SportsCampConnection.com not too long ago, that there was a ton to be learned from the immediate results we achieved in SEO and paid search marketing, and that it could be applied successfully not only to optimizing both channels but in helping guide our sales strategy.
Keywords – Singular or Plural? Analytics Will Tell You
For example, we found that people search for the singular version of our top keyword more than the plural version most of the time. This helped us immediately revise the content we were writing so that it would hit that larger keyword search. It was important to learn this quickly, too, because the more natural way to write about “sports camps” is by using the plural version. Had we continued to do what felt naturally and not paid close attention to the analytics, we’d have generated a ton of content targeted at the 2nd largest keyword in the space.
Analytics Can Prove or Disprove Your Keyword Assumptions
Another example is that we quickly found out a much more significant number of people search for camps by their name – “Miami Heat Basketball Camp” – than we thought. This was contrary to the research-based model that we had assumed upon launch - that people would look for a “Florida Basketball Camp” and then FIND the Miami Heat program. Given that SportsCampConnection has over 3,500 camps listed on their site and a page dedicated to each, this was a solid source of SEO traffic. However, as the company was new and most of the 3,500 camps were not paying clients, this traffic was of little value, other than helping to add another name to the database. But what we also found is, once the person requests information about the camp that got them there, they ALSO request information about another camp the majority of the time. That meant that, as long as we optimize our upsell process on the back end of every unpaid lead, we had a good chance of converting leads for our true clients, all on the backs of this targeted free traffic. We quickly sought to make the most searched camps our clients, but more important, others in the same sport and region.
If You’re Spending Advertising Money, Studying Your Analytics Will Pay You Back
I won’t continue to give away the secret sauce of SportsCampConnection, but I will say this: although I’ve seen plenty of people spend a disproportionate amount of time analyzing small bits of traffic or trends that they can’t optimize, or worse yet, making incorrect decisions on an insignificant amount of data, I think that any business spending reasonable money on marketing should always be looking closely at the stats and figuring out where to go and what to do next. Everything from singular nouns to misspelled city names can change your approach to optimizing and will give you the competitive edge over those who aren’t paying close enough attention. It’s these minute details and crafty optimizations that make a huge impact in the long run and can help new businesses avoid time-wasting efforts early on.
Joey Flores
EVP of Marketing
StartupArmy.com – Bring in the heavy artillery
Connect with Joey Flores on LinkedIn!
Related posts:
- Executing on the Marketing Basics
- Channel Surfing – Picking the Right Waves in Marketing
- What would be the best way to guerrilla market a videography company targeting future brides?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Joey,
Glad you liked my post on Startup Marketing and what to do during the first 90 days.
Your comments in this post on analytics are right on. It always baffles me when I run into seemingly sophisticated companies that have not installed any type of analytics, and if they have installed analytics they do not bother monitoring it. Is there any reason why you would NOT want to know who, what and how is coming to your site?
Anyway, to address your slight disagreement with me above, we’re on the same page. I was referring to two types of companies: those that do not generate enough traffic to warrant a daily/weekly look at analytics and those who spend 2-3 hours of their day looking at analytics but never use it to actually make (or at least shape) a marketing decision. Certainly any company that invests time and money into serious SEO, PPC, email, social media, etc. efforts should be watching analytics as part of their results monitoring.
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