Web analytics tools are only as good as the questions you ask of them. Knowing how to use Google Analytics or Omniture – how to pull certain metrics and create reports, doesn’t do you any good until you have a reason to do so.

There are two kinds of questions: reactionary questions and investigative questions. Reactionary questions come from looking at trends and reacting to the results to find out why those trends happened.

Here are some reactionary questions:

• Why did revenue dip week over week?
• Why is cost per acquisition going up?
• Why is site traffic increasing?
• Why is bounce rate increasing?
• Why is traffic decreasing from X traffic source?

Investigative questions are a result of discovering trends before they cause a reaction. These questions are the little discoveries that yield big results and the best questions are the ones that have a desired outcome tied into them.

Here are some investigative questions:

• Where do my most valuable customers come from, and how do I get more of them?
• Which keywords should I be focusing on in paid search and seo to decrease cost and increase relevant traffic?
• What content is most persuasive at driving desired outcomes so that I can make more of it?
• Which marketing channel is performing the best/worst according to sales and leads?
• Is the content on my site causing people to return frequently and how can I make it more “sticky”?
• How many page views does it take for someone to convert, is that the right amount or are we making it too hard for them to find what they are looking for?
• In what stage of the shopping cart are people abandoning so that we can fix the leaks and increase conversion rate?
• Which sources of traffic are driving the most new visitors so that we can continually add new prospects to the top of the funnel?
• How do we get users to add more items to their cart so we can increase average order value?
• What things are visitors searching for the most in site search? Are there opportunities to create content that doesn’t yet exist or make existing content easier to find?
• How do smart phone visitors differ from tablet users and desktop users? Could we make a better user experience for those different users that would lead to higher conversion rates?
• How long does the average paying customer spend on the site? Should we try to get everyone to spend the same amount of time or is it too long?
• What effect would increasing rankings on organic search have on revenue and leads?
• Which sources of traffic are assisting in conversions even if they aren’t the last source before the visitor converts?

This seems overly simplistic but too often people employ SEO tactics to rank for keywords that aren’t very related to their business. So the first step is to define why your website exists in fifteen words or less. Complete this statement: “When its all said and done the only purpose of my website is to _______”.

“No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others… or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist.” – Calvin Coolidge

Then the next step is to figure our what queries your customers would use to look for your business purpose. Put yourself in their shoes. These queries will be really similar to your purpose. They will also go from broad queries – people who aren’t quite sure what they are looking for,  to exact ones – where they have figured out exactly what they are looking for,  and that’s when you need to find the happy medium between relevance and popularity for your keywords.

“The golden rule for every business man is this: “Put yourself in your customer’s place.” – Orison Swett Marden

You don’t. All the research in the world will not tell you if its good or not. As soon as a good idea is given to the public to see it can quickly become a bad idea. The Apple 1984 commercial aired in 1984 during the super bowl and subsequently won many awards and became a signature representation of Apple Computers. At the next super bowl, Apple launched it’s next commercial, “Lemmings,” which turned out to be a huge failure that no one remembers. I’m sure everyone though it was a great idea just like they thought 1984 would be, but it took the implementation of the idea to find out. (It’s funny to see how there is no attribution to who made the commercial on the Lemmings Wikipedia page yet on the 1984 Wikipedia page, it only takes as long as the second sentence to find out who contributed to its creation.)

Great ideas and bad ideas are only great or bad in retrospect. Ideas when they are first conceived are neither, it takes implementation to decide.  So, the only way to know if your marketing idea is a good one is for people to see it. Yet the majority of advertising is subjected to hours of research, focus groups and reviews before anyone see it. That’s because there is a huge amount of uncertainty and money on the line.

The book The Lean Startup explains how startup business should treat uncertainty which I think can also be applied to dealing with the uncertainty of marketing: by advocating the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and using customer feedback to evolve ideas much faster than via more traditional product development practices. I think the internet makes this a possibility for today’s advertisers. Create a prototype ad and measure its effectiveness on the web to specific targets before launching it more broadly.

Optimal on-page keyword optimization means taking advantage of every posible place a chosen keyword can be used. Below is a diagram showing how this can be done to improve relevancy to search engines.

Remarketing is typically a strategy where recent site abadoners are targeted during a short window of time while the purchase is still top of mind. Since AdWords allows you to maintain a cookie for 540 days, its worth considering the idea of targeting past site visitors beyond the 10 to 14 day window.
Traditional display ads on average have dismal click through rates – somewhere in the .09% range. Instead of doing media buys for display advertising based on the demographic information that sites give, why not take advantage of all those people who have visited your site over the last 540 days? These people are at least one step closer to being familiar with your brand than someone who has never seen your site before and is being broadly targeted with gender, house hold income or other demographic indicators which may or may not be totally accurate.
Take a look at the opportunity in the drawings below:

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).