CoachStrategies

The Power of Numbers

I’ve been reading Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth Revisited and have picked up many good ideas. There is a particular quote I wanted to share with you:

Because without the numbers you can’t possibly know where you are, let alone where you’re going. With the numbers, your business will take on a totally new meaning. It will come alive with possibilities.

I’ve written before about how important measurement is when it comes to your website. It is absolutely crucial which is why I’ll continue to write about it.

I still find that the majority of people don’t have the slightest idea how their web site is performing. No idea of incoming traffic, no idea of returning traffic, no idea of how many sites link to their site and only a faint idea of how many actual leads or sales the site is producing.

If you don’t have numbers, how do you know that you’re investing wisely in your web strategy? How do you know if site updates are helping or hurting you?

You can sign up for Google Analytics for free. If you don’t like Google, you can sign up at http://www.statcounter.com/ for free. Both work in a similar fashion and both are quick and easy to use. You’ll never regret the 10 minutes it will take you to register and start tracking your sites.

Instant Insight: Why Your Online Strategy Isn’t Working

Image credit: masochismtango.

I use a simple model to help me troubleshoot problems in online strategy. Generally I use this model to help people understand why their site is not performing and give them suggestions of what to do about it. Although I most often use this to troubleshoot strategies promoting a client’s site, you could substitute the concept of site with a blog or some kind of profile on a social media site. The principles are the same.

Keep in mind that this is just a model—not a definitive reference of How Things Work. The point is to use this model as a tool to identify problems so you can develop a strategy to get better results.

At a high level it has three components:

Traffic > Offer > Conversion

Let’s look at each in more detail:

• Traffic. The number of people coming to your site. Measured in number of visitors coming from:
  • New traffic.
  • Return traffic.
• Offer. Everything you have to offer visitors. Consists of:
  • Content and resources.
  • Your services/products.
  • How well you present your services/products.
  • How easy it is for visitors to take action (includes site design and navigation).
• Conversion. The number of people that come to your site and actually take a desired action. Usually measured as a ratio of the number of people that took a desired action to the number of visitors (traffic).

Here is the key: this model is only useful if you have numbers. If you don’t have numbers, everything you are doing is guesswork and not much better than outright gambling. Don’t have numbers? Get them. Numbers are crucial. You can’t work without them. If you are dumping time/money into your website and don’t have any numbers you are potentially throwing your time/money away.

Let’s walk through this model on a practical level with an example.

Say I have a site and the site is indexed on the search engines which means I have a couple links coming in from there. I also have some links coming in from blogs and forums. These links all send me traffic or visitors. These visitors check out the content of my site. Some bookmark the site because they like what they see or they search again later and come back.

These visitors constitute my return traffic.

I want visitors to subscribe to my blog, read my posts and eventually buy my services. When people take those actions of subscribing or contacting me, it’s called a conversion. Let’s say I got 1000 total visits to the site last week: 900 new visitors and 100 returning visitors. Out of 1000 visits, 5 people contacted me. My conversion rate (CR) is .5%. Got it?

Now that we know the terms and see how the concepts fit together, let’s take a look at the ideal situation and the worst situation.

Ideal situation: Strong new traffic, strong return traffic, strong conversion.

If this is what you are getting, you’ve done a great job. Specifically:

• The strong overall traffic means that your efforts to promote your site are working well.
• The strong return traffic means that your content is interesting and valuable and people are coming back.
• The strong conversion means that your offer is good. The market for your products/services is good, your site’s content is a good draw for visitors that make up your market, the way you present your products/services appeals to visitors and you’ve made it easy enough for visitors to take action.

Worst situation: No traffic, no conversion.

At this point, it’s almost impossible to tell if your offer is good. You can only get conversions once you have initial traffic flow. Something is not right, most likely:

• Efforts to promote site are misplaced or not working well.
• Site’s content is not interesting and valuable to people.

At this point, you have to work on building good content and promoting your site.

Let’s look at some middle of the road situations:

• Strong new traffic, weak return traffic. Look at your offer. Is your content interesting and helpful? Is there a market for what you offer? Have you presented your offer in a way that would appeal to people in your market and made it easy for them to take action?
• Strong new traffic, strong return traffic, weak conversions. Your efforts to promote the site are good. The strong return traffic indicates that your content is valuable to visitors so they are coming back. Something with your products/services or the way you are presenting them just isn’t clicking however. Maybe you’ve made it too hard for people to take action, or the benefits of your products/services are not presented in a compelling enough manner.
• Weak new traffic, strong return traffic, strong conversion. You’re probably doing find and just need to put more effort into promoting the site.
• Weak new traffic, weak return traffic, strong conversion. Your offer must be pretty solid to convert. Work on promoting your site to boost traffic. If your return traffic lags, look at improving your content.

When you don’t have strong overall traffic it can be tough to know what is going on precisely. In general, if you aren’t getting strong traffic you need to focus on giving people a reason to go to your site and then promoting your site. Once you have a good flow of traffic coming in, it is easier to troubleshoot other problems with your strategy.

Start gathering numbers. Use the stats your web host provides or implement something like Google Analytics. Get a baseline by measuring performance over the course of a week or two. If you don’t have traffic, start by working to build traffic. Once you have traffic, use the model I’ve given you to understand how your site is performing. Once you know that, you can craft a strategy make the site more successful.

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