Every message has an intended audience and advertising only works when the ones who see the ad are the one who were intended to. Most advertising is very irrelevant and that’s why people hate it, because it has nothing to do with them. Nobody complains about seeing relevant ads because they are helpful and add value, like Cindy Gallop says “Everyone hates advertising in general, but we love advertising in particular.”
That’s why getting your message to just the right person at just the right time is worth a lot of money – hence Google making billions on allowing advertisers to show their ads to just those people who are looking for it. But Google ads only work when someone knows to search for what you sell in the first place. There are a lot of other advertising mediums that don’t promote relevancy as much. Most innovation in online marketing is in trying to make ads more relevant. Two metrics that can be used to measure relevancy are conversion rate and click through rate.

Conversion rate measures the relevancy between a landing page and the ad promoting it. There is a certain level of expectation that someone has before when they click on an ad, and if that expectation isn’t met, or isn’t relevant, they leave and conversion rate goes down.

Click through rate measures the relevancy between an ad and its placement. Ads that are shown but don’t get clicked get low click through rates and signal irrelevancy.

Low conversion rate and low click through rate should be signs that you’re doing it wrong  - the right person is not seeing the right message. I think the majority of the effort spent on optimizing marketing should be focused on increasing relevance.

When a potential client wants to see an SEO site audit I think there are two main things they are looking for: 1. your level of competency 2. free analysis

So I designed this SEO site audit to try to fill those two needs. Give them what they are looking for but not too much to where you audit your way out of a job. The first section of my site audit is all the on page stuff. I like the colored score in the right column which gives the appearance of urgency to certain aspects of the site and also creates a natural list of priorities for capturing the low hanging fruit first. I use the Google keyword tool to pull a list of relevant keywords. I then use the google site: operator and keyword search (as in site:example.com “keyword”) to see how many times a site uses a keyword.

Happy New Year! Its time to look back on what happened in 2011:

Best Purchase: Eagle Creek Belt – The buckle is plastic which allows me to go through security without taking off my belt.
Best Books: Start With Why – A revelation on the importance of purpose.  Anything You Want – Brings fresh air to business and entrepreneurialism books  Practical Wisdom – A concept so true it made me mad.
Best Graphic Novel: Locke & Key – Awesome art and page-turning suspense.
Best Movies: Time Crimes – Time travel twists that made my head spin for days afterward. The Fighter – I love boxing movies. Following – Why did it take me so long to see this great Christoper Nolan movie?
Best Doc: Inside Job - Also so true it made me mad.
Best Albums: Mariachi El Bronx – II, Swingin’ Utters – Here Under Protest, Dead To Me – Moscow Penny Ante
Best Band Discovery: Smoking Popes
Best Concert: Off With Their Heads / Dead To Me @ Marquis Theater Denver
Biggest Bummer: Ball hitting my glove and then going over the fence for a grand slam in softball game
Biggest Time Suck: Watching all six seasons of Dexter
Best New Skill: Making delicious salsa
Best Hike: Angels Landing, Zion National Park
Hardest Hike: Longs Peak, Colorado
Coldest Moment: Swimming in mountain lake water at Tough Mudder race in Beaver Creek
Most Traumatic: Two year old daughter knocking out her front tooth on the book shelf
Most Stressful: Trying to keep water level down with sewer water backing up in the basement. Most Stressful Runner Up: Getting flat tire on the way to the airport
Most Exciting: Launching Minimalist Tees
Best Moment: Second daughter being born

Books Read: 19
Snowboarding : 6 times
Blog Posts: 34
Movies Watched: 111

In 2012 I plan on also tracking the amount of times I go out to eat and what I buy (not just where I buy like the bank does).

The essence of web analytics is to boil down business objectives into unique actions on a web site. Its not about amount of visits, time on site, or most visited pages. When you match a desired outcome from a web site to a business goal and then devise a strategy around getting that desired outcome to happen more, by analyzing the data around that desired outcome, you’re doing web analytics.

Get enough of these and you can separate them into small objectives and large objectives where smaller ones lead to bigger ones, like it takes 10 sign-ups for every 1 sale. Then you build your marketing strategy off of these business objectives: “we need an increase of sign-ups if we are going to reach our sales goal so how can we optimize the content on the site by looking at bounce rate?” etc.

On a side note: Can the same methodology be used on optimizing your life? What is your personal life purpose and how can you boil it down into unique outcomes that you can track to measure your progress?

Usually the product is built first and then the idea of creating content starts with a blog, Facebook page and everything else in an effort to find customers. It turns into a struggle trying to make a content creation and curation strategy. Why not come up with the content first and then build the product?

I’m a fan of the book Lean Startup which promotes the idea of creating a Minimum Viable Product as a strategy for fast and quantitative market testing of a product.

From Wikipedia:

“A Minimum Viable Product has just those features that allow the product to be deployed, and no more. The product is typically deployed to a subset of possible customers, such as early adopters that are thought to be more forgiving, more likely to give feedback, and able to grasp a product vision from an early prototype or marketing information. It is a strategy targeted at avoiding building products that customers do not want, that seeks to maximize the information learned about the customer per dollar spent. “The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

Whats more minimum than content? Content allows for the least amount of effort to test a product idea. Especially if the product is a consequence of a cause or purpose that the audience is rallying around. Once you have an audience built, and have continually collected their feedback, then you already have your customers.

Not everyone who visits your site should be remarketed to – or at lest some users make more sense than others – and the optimal remarketing strategy should be to only market to those with the most potential to come back and convert as a result of you paying to advertise to them.

Its easy to juice the numbers so that they look better by only targeting, and taking credit for, visitors that are highly motivated and by not targeting visitors that are very unmotivated. Visitors that are highly motivated, like visitors that have multiple items in their cart are probably going to come back and buy without any nudging from display ads. Not targeting the unmotivated, like anyone who bounces from the site will increase ROI because those people are probably are not very interested anyway.
In between is the sweet spot: remarketing to those who are interested enough to engage on the site but just not quite enough so that its obvious that they are planning on coming back and purchasing.

Google adwords does allow for this customization to a point. You can create custom combinations that exclude people who bounce and exclude people who have added items to their cart. Unfortunately you can’t get so granular as to exclude based on the number of pages they visited. But when talking to any other vendors you should be wary of these strategies that try to inflate how well the campaign looks like its doing.