Last week, I wrote about how startups should gather all the analytics they can.  This week, I want to give you a couple of free marketing tools you can download to help you tell your story in the next board meeting.  Hey, we’re a startup too and this is helping us, so I figured why not share it.

Free Marketing Tool #1

The first tool is what I call the One Page Marketing Breakdown.  It’s essentially a “waterline” that shows the board what marketing and advertising is working really well, and what not working so well.  You got it – above the waterline = good; below the waterline….well, it might be drowning so keep a close eye on it, or do whatever you can to optimize the hell out of it.  Yes, there are other facets of marketing I am not considering here, but this is the stuff you’re likely paying for, and I did compare it with free stuff.  For my company, I set out to test several target websites where I thought the people who are most likely to use our product would be hanging out. (click the image below for a larger view)

Free Downloads

Download the file below so you can edit it to your liking with your numbers, and use it in your next board meeting.

Get the Keynote for Mac here
Get the PowerPoint for PC here

Now where did I get this information?  I went into Google Analytics and ran a report on Top Traffic Sources, and segmented it by conversion rate (you have to have goals set up).  That easily gives me the conversion rates per advertising channel, and I compared them to all to what organic (free) visitors convert at.  The thinking here is that it’s probably worth paying for (and keeping) an ad channel if it is converting better than your free traffic – hence the waterline.

Next, I calculated my cost per report ran.  I took the monthly pro-rated cost of the ad (like if it was $100/mo, then it’s around $3.33 per day), multiplied that by the number of days the ad ran in the month, and divided that by the number of conversions – so you get cost/conversion.  These are real numbers for Pear Analytics, and our conversion priority are folks who enter their website and run a free website analysis.  For other startups, this may be folks who create an account, request a beta invite, or accounts that convert from free to paid.  I would caution you to keep it simple, as in our case the conversion comes from the last referral and is fairly immediate.  Once you start getting into original referral source, things get really tricky, really fast.

As you can see, for the most part, our conversions can cost around $1 or less, with a couple of sources going up to the $3-4 mark, and Influads getting up to almost $14 (there wasn’t enough data on this since it was only running a couple of days, hence the shitty CPL).

Free Marketing Tool #2

The next free marketing tool is what I call The Simple Conversion Funnel you saw in last weeks post on analytics.  This is such an important aspect of your business, and sadly, I see few utilizing it.  The funnel is simple, and you can get most of it from your Google Analytics account.  We get the information from a combination of Google Analytics, and information we store in our database (we cookie visitors and do session tracking too).

This is just an example of the various stages in your funnel, but you’re going to want one of these for each activity.  You can see step-to-step conversion rates, the overall conversion rate, as well as the CPL (cost per lead), and CPA (cost per acquisition).  Don’t worry, your marketing guy should know what this stuff means.

Free Downloads

Download the Keynote version for Mac here
Download the PowerPoint version for PC here

Now go off an be marketing and analytics ninjas in your next board meeting.  These are sure to impress!  Now, stay tuned for next week’s post where I show you how I changed my Google AdWords campaign and got a 400% improvement on the conversion rate.

Free Marketing Tools for Startups is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

You’re a startup and it’s you (the CEO), your CTO and your marketing guy in the monthly board meeting, and your investors ask “so what did you learn from the marketing activities last month?”  Don’t say something like “we’re not real sure”, or “traffic went up, but we don’t know from where” – or anything like that.  In fact, make sure you don’t fall into the old adage “I know half of my marketing is working – I just don’t know which half.”

We’re a startup too, and we know you want to be a “traffic whore.”  That’s fine – we are too – hell, we’ll link bait anything to get 2o more visits.  But as much as you want to be a traffic whore, you need to be an analytics whore too.

In fact, we like analytics so much, it’s in our name – and we have the tools to boot. (yes, that’s a photo of my iPhone…so many analytics tools I had to create a whole folder for it).  So we’re going to show you a few tools and techniques to get you to that next board meeting so you can put on a rockstar performance!

Tools

Google Analytics (Analytics Pro) - this should go without saying, but everyone should have Google Analytics running in their site.  It’s free for chrissake.

Clicky - I run Clicky because I love the Spy feature where you can see who is on your site right now and what they are clicking on.  Yeah, it’ll freak people out.

Chartbeat – this isn’t a traditional page analysis tool. This is about what’s going on right now.  It shows you people who are currently on your site, the pages they are looking at, and the average page load time.  This is cool for when you finally hit TechCrunch or Hacker News and you want to see the traffic spike real-time.  Chartbeat is different from Clicky’s Spy feature because Chartbeat keeps track of active and inactive tabs that have your page open, so you can now see who’s actively reading (or not). On Clicky Spy, once they leave the tab (even if it’s still open), the live visitor count decreases.

Floorboard – this is our home-grown reporting engine.  We also do a lot of cookie and session tracking, so I can track the behavior of account holders (like how often they log in, what they do when they log in), or the time it takes from the minute they hit the site, until they sign up for an account.  Sometimes the data out of the database is more reliable than javascript trackers.  Build one for yourself – if you need some help, let us know.  There was also that great video from Mike McDerment over at Freshbooks on “Flight Systems”.

Pear Analytics - this is our SEO tool made for the iPhone.  (Sorry, you can’t get it anymore off of iTunes because we’re going to make a waaaay better one soon.)  Until then, you can use this free seo analysis tool.

KISS Insights (not shown) - you’re going to need a page level survey to ask people what they think about your tool or service.  KISS gets a really high response rate, so you’ll get data very quickly that you can use in your next board meeting.

CrazyEgg – this is a heatmap tool that will show you the “hotspots” on your webpage.  Are people clicking where you want them to?  The results may surprise you. (And yes, I am pimping Hiten Shah a bit here with all of his tools, but hey – they guy is doing something right.)

Userfly – this is super cheap usability testing.  They record the mouse movements of random visitors to your site.  Are they doing what you want them to do?  Did they see that forward to a friend button?  Still a little clunky on ajax and javascript stuff, but totally worth the ten bucks or whatever it is.

Update 8/24/10 - thanks to Dan Martell for tweeting this post out – I totally forgot to add Flowtown to this list of must-have tools.  Flowtown basically pulls a social profile on any email you have.  So if you have a freemium product that asks for an email to signup, they will cross-reference the emails and find out who’s on any social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), along with some basic demographics, AND who the influencers are.  Now for you advanced users, try overlaying this data with the user behavior data in your database.  Now you’re cooking

Techniques

Okay, now you have a shitload of tools – what do you do with them all?

1.  Set up goals - both Clicky and Google Analytics have the ability to set up goals – or conversion places – or places where people do the things you want them to.  This could be fill out a form, subscribe, or sign up.  For Pear, it’s those who come and run a free report with our product.  Now you can tell which traffic sources are converting the most.

2.  Take the time to add the proper tracking codes to your marketing activities - Google Analytics has a way to read special URL parameters so the data goes into the right place into the reports.  If you’re running a banner ad on Mashable, don’t tell them to link to just www.yoursite.com.  Append the URL like this:

www.yoursite.com/?utm_source=mashable&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=125x125a&utm_campaign=startups

Now you know which banners work the best, which campaign, which source, etc.  You can even play with banner copy and calls-to-action now.  Cool, right?  If you need help building that URL, go here to the Google URL builder tool.

3.  Build funnels for all of your activities – what you want to know is where people drop off during the process you take them through to sign up, pay you, or whatever it is you want from them.  If you are using the DaveMcClure AARRR concept (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) – with the exception of Referral, that’s your funnel.  Make pretty little graphs for your board meeting too, like the ones below, for every marketing activity.  If it’s hard to get some of the data, that because it is sometimes.  Don’t whimp out.  If you want, you can also try KISS Metrics to do a pretty schnazzy funnel analysis.

4.  Segment, segment, segment – Google Analytics made the advanced segmentation module just for you.  Want to know out of all of your new visitors, how many went to page X AND page Y?  Create a segment.  Or maybe you want to know how many visitors stayed at least 2 minutes, AND visited at least 2 pages (one of Dave’s acquisition examples).  See how we segmented our top performing organic keywords using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics together.

5.  Test, test, test – you want to be split testing your copy, landing pages and anything that gets a user to try your tool, or ultimately pay for it.  You might have to test different pricing structures, or even test certain features with cohorts of users.  You want to develop your code in a way where it is “test friendly” too….Rails has a plugin called “A/Bingo” made by the guy who invented the Bingo Card Creator.  There may be others out there, but in case there aren’t, you can try Google Website Optimizer or Unbounce.

6.  Know your CPL, and if you have a paywall, know your CPA – your cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA) is a great way to measure what marketing activities are working and which are not.  Without doing this exercise, you may be tempted to stay with the cheaper form of marketing, even though it performs the worst.  Now what should your CPA be?  That’s up to you and your board to decide, and probably will be based loosely on what you know about the Lifetime Value of your typical customer or subscriber.  Your CPL, however, should never really exceed about 15% of the CPA limit.  That means if your CPA limit is $10 (you’re willing to spend $10 to acquire a paying customer), then you should see what marketing activities are giving you leads at $1.50 or less.

Wow!  Now you can go back to the boardroom with some real insights and data to make decisions!  And that’s what your investors want – they want to know what you learned from your experiments in trying to find a repeatable, scalable business model.  We’re by no means the experts here, but if we can help you, please reach out to me – ryan at pearanalytics dot com.  Oh, also be sure to read Steve Blank and Eric Ries.

Startups: Get All The Analytics You Can is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

A couple of my good friends over at MailFinch, an on-demand direct mail service, and Upstack, a site where you can hire designers to do whatever you need, have both been using ReTargeter.com to drive visitors back to their site.  The way it works is a visitor comes to your site, and ReTargeter puts a cookie on the visitor.  Once the visitor leaves, and goes to another website, there’s a good chance they will see a banner ad from you.  And I’m talking about sites like Huffington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal and many more.  It’s all driven to get people to come back, hence the name “ReTargeter,” and so only those people who came to your site and got the cookie will see the ads.

From what Paul and Wes tell me, it’s been pretty successful.  Being an analytics guy, I ask “well how do you know that ReTargeter is sending any traffic back to you?”.  Their response: not real sure, but it feels like it’s working.  People are continuously commenting that they see their banner ads all over the place, and that “they must be spending a fortune on advertising.”  Even ReTargeter mentions this benefit in one of their case studies published on the site.

So the question remains, how do I track these ads better?

Well, the answer is pretty easy.  If you are using Google Analytics, they allow you to append the URL with a string of various parameters to identify a particular ad campaign, banner type, and more.  It’s a great way to see which variation of what ad seems to be working the best, and I don’t have to depend on ReTargeter data if I don’t want to.

So instead of linking every banner to http://www.pearanalytics.com,

I link each banner differently, such as http://www.pearanalytics.com/?utm_source=Retargeter&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=728x90a&utm_campaign=comebacks
To build a URL just like this, use the Google URL builder here.

Where you can see in the URL parameter the source of the ad (ReTargeter), media type (banner), content, or banner size (728×90 version a) and the campaign is “comebacks”.  All of this is recognizable by Google Analytics, and you can now segment your visitors by any one, or several of these parameters.  For instance, you might be interested in which 728×90 banner is performing best (assuming you have a conversion goal set up), so you can determine which copy or messaging is resonating the best.

The problem with just specifying a generic URL, or even a special landing page, won’t give you the data you need to truly segment your visitors and determine their source.  The source may come from many places and may not be readily noticeable in your Referral Source, so tagging the URL with these parameters will give you the insight you need to determine if the campaign is working for you (or not).

Optimization Idea #2: Try banners that talk to the visitor as if they already know you.

As I sifted through the many banner ad examples on ReTargeter.com, I noticed something interesting: no one was creating ad copy that spoke to the visitor as if they already knew who you were.  If I went to website A, then later was surfing on Yahoo News, and saw a banner from website A saying “hey, come back here!” – I think it would make me look twice, versus a regular ‘ol banner with “hi, we do this, and this, and click here to get a discount” type of banner.

So we’re going to try a couple things, and using our nifty URL tracking code for Google Analytics above, test to see if direct copy works better than indirect copy.

Which one do you think will work best?

How To Get The Most Out of ReTargeter.com is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Hubspot successfully analyzed over 1 million websites, 1 million Twitter accounts, raised another $16 million, and yet they only have 1750 customers.

Did anyone else notice this?

I’ve always been impressed with Hubspot, and I have much admiration for Dharmesh Shah and the other founders.  I’ve read just about all of their stuff on inbound marketing, permission marketing, conversion tracking and other juicy stuff.  But I was shocked to read the news about their $16 million in additional funding with less than 1750 total customers.  Boy, with all of the inbound marketing webinars and conversion improvement whitepapers, it seems as though Hubspot may need to eat more of their own dog food.  Don’t get me wrong – their customer growth rate looks like the “hockey stick” we would all love to have, and a 350% growth rate in revenue is not too shabby – but I expected more than 1,700 customers.  And it looks like it takes 2-3 months to acquire 250 new customers, some of which will churn I would imagine.

After the first two rounds of funding, they’ve essentially spent $10,000 to acquire each new customer, but as you will see further below, their average annual sale is only about $6,000. As good as their product might be, I’m sure they are not counting on customers sticking around for 20 months so they can break even, so they will need to sign up more customers faster than ever to decrease their cost per acquisition and get this thing profitable – and fast.  This is the risk by taking on so much funding – how much runway do I need to get our cost per acquisition down and our lifetime value up?  They spent the first $17 mil on engineering the product, perfecting it, building brand awareness, positioning themselves as experts with endless whitepapers, webinars, videos and more, and understanding the model to where they could go and raise more money.  Surely they know for every dollar they put into inbound marketing efforts, how much revenue and profit they will get on the backend.

Now, since this is their third round of funding, their gong to have to sell for about 10X their current value so the first two VC’s get their money out of the deal, at least so I am told.  Wow!  An “SEO Company” for $335 million?  I suppose they could always go public.  Remember when Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) did that last year?  I’m sure being in a niche space where comparisons are hard to come by makes it difficult for analysts to evaluate the company, and even harder for investors to invest in.

So if a customer today is costing them around $10,000, but they are only getting $6,000 per year per customer on average, how long will this model last?  Let’s take a look at their pricing model that is directly from their website:

If you segment customers across this type of pricing model, or a “freemium” pricing model, you will find that most of them  are in the low to mid tiers, with a handful at the top tier.  You spend most of your time trying to figure out how to upsell and convert your lower-tiered customers up into your higher profit top tiers.  Let’s assume Hubspot has a 60-20-20 split here from low to high.  So of their roughly 1,750 customers, that would put 1,050 at the low tier, 350 at the mid tier, and another 350 at the top tier.  If you do the math, that’s a little over $10.5 million in annual revenue, or $6,000 per customer per year, on average.

Hubspot claims an annual revenue growth rate of 350%, which to get to the $300 million mark is going to take about 2-3 years, assuming the growth is constant and they can get to about 50-60,000 customers.  So as you can see, the 250 new customers every 2-3 months isn’t going to cut it – they will likely need to get to around 750-1,000 new customers every month.

The guys at Hubspot are surely savvy enough and have enough brain power (and resources now) to pull this off, but it seems it will be a helluva feat.  Is Hubspot the next SalesForce?  Will they have to go public?  It seems like Hubspot is in the right position for extreme growth – a refined product, brand recognition, a seasoned team, cash in the bank – how could they go wrong?

Best of luck to ya, Hubspot.

Update 10/26/09: I just found this great blog post by Ben Yoskovitz: Raising Startup Capital is an Achievement, But Not the Most Important One.  He explains that Dharmesh is more of a “bootstrap guy” versus a venture capital guy, where he states “Closing a funding round is not value creation.  It’s the opportunity to create value.” – I happen to agree with Dharmesh on that 110%.  After you get your funding – whatever round or stage it is in – that’s when the real work begins.

Hubspot: High Stakes or High Profit? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Before spending thousands on a tradeshow, know the metrics needed to calculate your tradehsow ROI; and get a few tips on how to maximize your success.

We just returned from the Search Marketing Expo in New York City last week where we launched our new SiteJuice™ product. We brought a big team of 9 people to help manage the expected crowd of 2,000-3,000 people.

To calculate your tradeshow ROI, you first need to define your goals, and that has to coincide with what your spending and what you are currently paying to acquire a new customer.  That means if you are currently spending $100 to acquire a new customer, and you plan to spend $20,000 on the tradeshow, you need to get 200 new customers out of the show, which is 2,000 leads at a 10% conversion rate.  If that sounds too high, you need to spend less.

OK, so now that you have a rough outline of some goals based on expenses, what is your strategy?  Our strategy was people. The more people we had, the more people we could talk to about our product and sell its benefits.  We maintained folks in the booth, and other consistently roamed around not only talking to people and driving them to our booth, but also scoping out the competition.  This seemed better than blowing a few thousand bucks on some lame bag stuffers that everyone throws away, or an over-priced sponsorship for lanyards or Wi-Fi access.  Brand awareness is fine, but it doesn’t sell your product, particularly if nobody knows who you are.

So here are a few tips that I hope you will find valuable the next time you search out the next tradeshow:

Tip #1 – Make it uber-simple to sign up for your product. We created special landing page for folks to sign up for our product that had only 4 fields.  Also, we did not require an email verification, and once they entered their info, they were logged straight into their account and we showed them how to set it up.  Normal sign up processes won’t work for a tradeshow.  Even with this simple process and 3 laptops ready for signups, we still had lines forming.

Tip #2 – Simplify your giveaway prize. This was tough for us in the sense that we had all kinds of cool ideas from scavenger hunts, to awarding people for participation and more.  The key is to make it as simple as possible.  We gave away a MacBook Pro as the grand prize, and 5 SEO Makeovers as other prizes.  In retrospect, we would have been fine with just the MacBook Pro giveaway.  Even though the makeover was easy to get in (all you had to do was follow us on Twitter), it was difficult to talk about too many things.  You really have 1-2 minutes to talk with folks and you want to spend those precious minutes trying to sell them on why they should use your product instead of all the various prizes you’re giving away.

Tip #3 – Refine your selling points and messaging based on the audience. We spent a lot of time researching who the audience was and we broke it out into “pros”(people who were experts in search marketing) and “joes” (not experts), and we developed messaging and talking points based on whether they were an ad agency, SEO consultant, or someone just getting into the industry.  We made 11×17 laminated sheets that broke down the benefits depending who they were, and we had a 100% conversion rate for everyone we walked through the “cheat sheet”.  Most importantly, our team met internally several times before the show to discuss what to say, what not to say, and more.  I think this helped immensely in getting over 200 signups in 14 hours of floor time.

Tip #4 – You don’t need a $4,000 booth set up. We made a 10′ x 8′ vinyl backdrop with very large text (only 3 bullets) and a white box where we could run a projector against.  The best thing was that this fit in a suitcase so we didn’t have to pay shipping at all.  The backdrop was about $400, and we purchased 3 yoga balls for $21 each and $60 of Jelly Belly’s for folks to grab.  I even went to Best Buy before the first day of the show and purchased 3 HP Mini’s, and then returned them with no re-stocking fee after the show was over.  We had a $240 floor piece that we couldn’t dismantle and take back, so we gave it to someone at the convention center to avoid fees.

Tip #5 – Huddle. Our team (as large as it was) huddled before the show and after the show each day.  We shared interesting things that we heard from people, we talked about process improvements, and we talked about numbers and if we were on target with our goals.  On day two, we made some significant changes that I believe helped grow our sign up rate by over 30%.  People wanted to see screenshots, so we swapped out the 60 second video with 7 static screenshots that rotated every 15 seconds on the projector.  This way you could actually have a conversation with someone and show them the screens as they rotated by.

All of these tips should help you increase your tradeshow ROI by reducing costs and maximizing conversion rates on your end goals.  Let me know how you made out!

Tradeshow ROI – 5 Tips You Need for a Successful Tradeshow is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Have you ever been to a website that takes forever to load?  What do you do?

We’ve taken some past research and developed a way to determine how many visitors you could potentially be losing based on how long your website takes to load from 0-30 seconds.  This was not easy – only a couple of studies have actually been done, and not only are they “aging”, but they have also been controversial and only up to around the first 4 seconds of load time data.  Obviously, there are many factors involved in determining how long you are willing to wait for a page to load, but with tabbed browsing, faster connections speeds, and more, maybe this is why a real study has not been done since 2006.

Here are some key takeaway points from the research we were able to come up with:

- Zona research said in 1999 that you could lose up to 33% of your visitors if you page took more than 8 seconds to load.
- Akamai said in 2006 that you could lose up to 33% of your visitors if your page took more than 4 seconds to load on a broadband connection.
- Tests done at Amazon in 2007 revealed that for every 100ms increase in load time, sales would decrease 1%.
- Tests done at Google in 2006 revealed that going from 10 to 30 results per page increased load time by a mere 0.5 seconds, but resulted in a 20% drop in traffic.

Wow.  A half of a second?  Is that even enough time to take a breath? Yet, when browsing, most people will lose patience and leave your website before they even have time to breathe.   How this relates to e-commerce sites is pretty important. If your website is selling a fairly generic item, your site had better load pretty damn fast or you just lost your sale to some other guy. At Christmas, when every parent is looking for this seasons must have toy, better hope your website loads in under 2 seconds. When a husband forgets his anniversary and is quickly looking for a flower delivery place while the boss isn’t looking, your pictures better not be too big and take forever to load.

So how long does your webpage take to load? Check out Pingdom.com/Tools, and then come back here and approximate your potential visitor loss:

If you prefer to “geek out” and read our entire white paper, you can download it here.  (I will warn you that it does mention words like “mathematical model”, “radioactive first oder decay” and “non-linear regression”.)

How Webpage Load Time Is Related to Visitor Loss is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

The following is a blog post by Nan Palmero, Chief Inspriation Officer at Sales By 5, a San Antonio firm that helps companies achieve dramatic increases in sales.

Last December, seeking to enhance sales, Gary Vaynerchuk offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.

Are you using social media to get your story out there? You don’t have to pay for attention anymore.

Guest blog: Twitter Blows Out Direct Mail is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

I’ve been wondering lately about Twitter.  I wonder when I send a tweet to my 800 followers, who is actually paying attention not only reading my tweet, but clicking on the link I provide.  In reality, it seems to me that we only have a small window of opportunity to be “noticed” or else the tweet just gets buried in the time line.

My guess was that any tweet has a “shelf life” of roughly 2 hours, and assuming about 5% of your followers are considered to be “active followers” (meaning they usually respond to things you post or at least consistently read them), I could expect about 20 click-throughs to the link I provided in my tweet.

The Test

I sent a post at 1:38p CST (right in the middle of the day, when hopefully most are actively using Twitter) entitled “Test: How I Evaluated the Effectiveness of Print Ads: http://bit.ly/19GkSz”; a blog I posted on this site on April 21st.  I used bit.ly to track the results, thanks to my friend @bolora.  I was using BudURL and was getting frustrated with it, so Bo said to try bit.ly and by inserting “/info” right after the .ly, I would get a full report on clicks, etc.

The Results

Right after the tweet posted, it was re-tweeted by friends @erikdarm (678 followers) at 1:53p, and then 2 of his followers re-tweeted the post; @blellowj (2,047 followers) at 1:54p and @stephenlynch (712 followers) at 1:57.  It is now 3:19p and there have been no further re-tweets, so the pass-along value may have reached its limit within the Twitter time line.

Total reach = 4,235 potential Tweeple to read and click on my tweet (my 798 followers, plus the followers of the re-tweets).

If you go to the bit.ly link, you will see a screen like the one below:

So the “Now” screen looks like this and refreshes every few seconds, so the time line keeps moving to the right.  (It would be cool if you could go back and see the clicks at the beginning – there was more activity around 2:00p with one time about 6 clicks came in simultaneously).

I think it’s safe to say the post has now exhausted it’s useful life, with the last click at 2:41p CST (it is now 3:29p and no click activity since then).

This shows the activity for the “full day”, with a total of 34 clicks at the 2:00p mark, and 15 at the 3:00p mark for a total of 49 clicks to the link in the tweet (i.e. 49 potential new visitors to our blog/website).

Conclusion

We would have to do several tests to prove this out, and I’m sure would vary if you were Robert Scoble or Guy Kawasaki, but in general (for the rest of us), from this small experiment we conclude that a “useful” tweet has the following characteristics:

-a shelf life of about 1 hr 15 min, and then it “dies”
-1 to 2% click-through rate on links

Which means that this is not a whole lot different than direct mail for example, without out the cost of course.  What do you think?  Is Twitter really a good way to communicate and share useful knowledge, or is it simply getting lost in the mix?

Test: Is Anyone on Twitter Paying Attention? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

As I was flying back from the east coast on Southwest Airlines, as usual I pick up the latest copy of Spirit magazine to see what’s interesting as we wait until I can open my computer and do something else.  It occurred to me as I was perusing that there were very few ads that had either a direct response mechanism, or at least some kind of tracking mechanism to validate the performance of the ad.

The Test

So I decided I would do a study: count every single ad and see which had a) direct response mechanisms; b) tracking mechanisms; or c) nothing at all.  Even when I stopped in Nashville, I went and purchased the latest copy of Entrepreneur magazine and did the same study so I could compare the results.

So, let’s first define the three basic types of ads:

Direct Response – this type of ad has a mechanism to entice the prospect to learn more about the product or service, or to purchase.  Examples would be a tear-sheet to mail in for a free something, a link to a website with a promo code, a cut-out to bring in for a discount, a link to a form to download something, etc.

Tracking Mechanism – this type of ad does not have a promo or direct response mechanism, but has a special 800 number or URL so they can effectively track the responses from the ad.  The URL mechanisms are fairly easy to spot, but the 800 numbers are not.

Branding – this type of ad has no direct response mechanism and no noticeable tracking mechanism.  They simply are there to generate brand awareness to the company/product/service.

Now, knowing these basic parameters, there are some caveats:

1. Brand awareness ads have their place in the world.  Because I get excited about measurement, I would love to see all ads of all types have a direct response or tracking mechanism, but it is not always feasible.  As long as the company knows exactly how much they are spending on “brand awareness” and has at least tested turning them on and off to see the relative impact, I’m OK with them.

2.  While some ads may not have a direct response or tracking mechanism, they could have had a place on their web sign up form with a “how did you hear about us” field.  I think these are generally ineffective since you never know if the person was guessing or simply picking anything just to get through the form faster.  If you are running ads in multiple publications simultaneously it is nearly impossible to track the performance of them, so you might consider running ads one at a time to see what the relative increase in performance is compared to when you run nothing.

The Results

The results of the test may or may not surprise you, but the use of direct response or tracking mechanisms in print advertising is largely missing.  Many of the hotels and casinos were guilty of most of the branding ads in Spirit magazine, while in Entrepreneur magazine, it was the franchises.  Collectively, less than 25% of the 125 total ads had either a direct response or tracking mechanism.

The Awards

Based on all of the 125 ads, here’s what we’ve come up with:

Best Direct Response Mechanisms

Gotomypc.com has an excellent campaign where they are giving 30-day free trials if you enter a special promo code.  Their ad in Sprit magazine had the code “spirit” and in Entrepreneur they had the code “entrepreneur”.  I have also seen them using this on their tv spots as well.

Airport Parking has a pretty good ad that offers 1 day free, and then asks for an email for the 2 days free offer.  The sales associate scans the barcode which indicates which offer and which publication it came from.  It could be a little clearer that you do actually need to cut this out and bring it in to the retail center.

Kaplan University has a great example of a tear-sheet that you mail in to get a free book.  If you don’t want to mail this in, you can call the 800 number (which I am sure is specific to the campaign) or go to the unique URL.  I like this one a lot because in the form it also has a referral mechanism where it asks if they can contact a friend on your behalf.

Least Likely to Succeed

IBM – First, this ad is way too busy, and it’s rare for people to actually read an ad these days.  I didn’t think the readers of Entrepreneur were the IT-type, but I could be wrong.  Then, if you want more information on this “offer” you go down to this small box where it has a long URL, or an 800 number where you are required to remember (or write) down some long string of characters.  Not too convenient, and I would suspect they could have a conversion problem on their hands.  Why not just “ENT409″ for Entrepreneur Magazine, the April 2009 edition?  Nope.  6N8AH14A was better.

Comcast had an interesting ad that hooked me with the fact that I might be “stuck in an old phone contract that doesn’t fit” (which I’m sure many of us are), and then drew my eyes to the red strip where I thought I would find some direct response mechanism.  Nope.  Gotta go way back up to the top right corner to get a website and phone number.  This could have been so much better…

Most Confusing

The Parking Spot folks, similar to the Airport Parking guys up top, had a similar offer to save 20% at any of their “spots”.  Problem was I did not know or understand that I am supposed to cut this out and bring it in to the retail office.  Way down in the bottom right corner there is a “For cashier use only” which indicated to me that it was a coupon – other than that, I didn’t catch on.

Biggest Waste of Money

Now this ad was weird.  First, I guess I don’t understand the butterfly concept, but more ironically, I had to “search” for this search company’s contact info.  And I actually thought the name of the company was “Search Marketing” – that would be a blunder if people went to Google looking for “search marketing” and came up with their competitors.  My point is that the number and website (calls to action) are buried in the text that no one reads anyway.

Test: Measuring the Performance of Print Advertising is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

I’m real big on measurement. And I mean BIG. Without data, you can’t measure, and if you can’t measure, you have no real insights to your business as to what marketing is working for you, and what’s not.

Whether you are spending a small fortune on marketing and advertising, or nothing at all, I’m going to show you 5 cost-effective ways to get more insights from your prospects and your customers to help grow your sales.

1. Web Traffic
If you are not looking at the traffic that visits your website, you should start today (that’s an order!). We can debate if you should use a server-based solution such as AWStats, or a javascript-based solution, such as Google Analytics, but that’s another blog post. I am going to recommend 2 products to you that are both javascript-based, and let you decide.

Google Analytics – this is a FREE but very powerful tool. You can literally install Google Analytics in less than five minutes, and start collecting data. You can segment your visitors, say comparing paid traffic to organic traffic, or traffic from one city to another. Their advanced segmentation and motion chart features are fantastic, but take a bit of wizardry to completely understand how they work.

Clicky – this is a paid tool, but does have a FREE limited version. Clicky offers real-time data, iPhone accessibility, and a “spy” tool where you can see what visitors are doing on your website in real-time. But primarily, Clicky is very easy to use.

I like to make the analogy that Google Analytics is like buying a bike in a box that you have to take home and assemble, where Clicky is already assembled and ready to ride.

Now, if you don’t have enough traffic coming to your site to measure, well, that’s another problem, and you’re going to need to run this FREE Website Analyzer to determine why you can’t be found on search engines.

2. Task Completion Rate
So now you have some analytics on your site. What are you looking for in all of those wonderful looking Google Analytics, or Clicky dashboards? You’re probably getting excited with “average time on site”, or “average this”, or “average that”. Beware of averages – they lie! While the dashboards are nice, they tell you little about what the visitor did, and if they were able to accomplish what they came for. So while we do have “conversion rates”, I would like to stress the importance of “task completion rates”, or the ability for a visitor to actually complete the task they set out to do. This can easily uncover some usability issues with your site.

I highly recommend using a FREE site-level survey called the 4Q. Four simple questions that measures how they liked the website from 1-10, the purpose of their visit, if they were able to complete their task or not, and an open ended comment.

3. Customer Leads and Sales
How do you currently track your lead pipeline? Do you know what your close ratio is? I just saw customer service guru Jack Daley speak, and he spouted some interesting data. If you contact a lead 2 times, you have a 5% probability of making a sale. If you contact a lead 12 times or more, you have an 80% probability of making a sale. The real eye-opener is that the majority of sales folks were contacting leads much less than 12 times, and in fact, the percentage that do is single digit.

Secondly, you need to be able to track every lead, the source of the lead, and if they converted to a sale. If you knew this, then you can start to compare quality of leads, such as do your paid search leads close faster than word-of-mouth leads? Or, do leads from direct mail result in a higher gross sale than newspaper ads?

The good news is that there are some tools to help you along. What you need is a simple CRM (Client Relationship Management) System. If you want to use a web application, try Zoho for FREE, or as little as $12 per month. Then there is Sugar CRM, the open source platform that you can download and configure on your own server. The app is FREE, but you will likely need to pay for a Sugar developer to get the tool working the way you want – unless their out-of-the-box solution fits your needs. Lastly, you could always try Salesforce.com, which has some great features like being able to link to your Google AdWords campaigns. The tool is relatively affordable when you start off, but if you are keeping tons of data, then it can get expensive.

4. Email Campaigns
I sure hope you are not trying to email hundreds of people a promo through your Outlook, Entourage or Mozilla email client. If you are, STOP! I have some better tools for you to try:

Constant Contact – you may have heard of these guys, since they have probably been around the longest. Surprisingly, they are not ahead of the curve when it comes to features compared to some other competitors. Their big thing is that they have an affiliate program. Big whoop. You need sales, not puny commissions of some email marketing tool. CC will charge you by the size of your list, and not by how many emails you send out.

Mail Chimp – these guys have tons of great information on how to properly set up and send an email to your prospects with all kinds of white papers and instructions. They even provide opt-in forms for your website that are completely customizable. Sending your first email is a bit of a hassle since they want to know exactly where you got your emails from, so expect about a 3-day wait to send your first email since they have to approve it.

Campaign Monitor – these guys have some neat features such as checking your email against over 20 mail clients so you can see what it will look like before you send it out. It will even convert a web-page to and HTML email if you want, and will even integrate into your Google Analytics account. They are also strict on the first email sent out. If you get more than a 0.02% complaint rate, they will disable your account. Pricing with them is a bit different. It’s $5 per email, plus $0.01 per recipient.

5. Net Promoter Score
This is undoubtedly the most important question you can ask your customer: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” The score is from 0 to 10, where 9′s and 10′s are your “promoters”, 7′s and 8′s are your “passives”, and the rest are your “detractors”. You can read the book “The Ultimate Question” by Fred Reichheld for more information on how to apply this.

So there you have it – 5 ways to start measuring some things that will improve your marketing performance, and that won’t break the bank.

5 Ways a Small Business Can Improve Marketing Performance Through Measurement is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.