Website Magazine May 2015

3-Steps to Get More Product Reviews

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CELEBRATING

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THE MAGAZINE FOR WEBSITE SUCCESS MAY 2015

PERFORMANCE MARKETING And the Affiliate Flow INSIDE THIS ISSUE...

Today’s Top 3 SEO Trends How to Compete for Leads Conversion Rate Optimization for Startups PLUS: Top 50 Software Solutions for Web Professionals

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PERFORMANCE MARKETING And the Affiliate Flow

Affiliate marketing is an important part of the digital ecosystem, and in many ways, the Web is a perfect environment for the practice. The art and science of performance marketing, however, is changing. To get rich quick, you need to be part of the affiliate flow and that requires a practical guide and industry insights to lead the way.

THIS MONTH IN WEBSITE MAGAZINE

Explore Website Magazine’s

DEPARTMENTS

Email & the Enterprise

Stat Watch:

Often associated with small business tactics, enterprises leveraging email can make bigger waves thanks to the ocean of data at their disposal.

Enterprise Ready:

Managing Customer Relationships How Shake-Proof is Your CMS?

Small Business Lab: How to Compete for Leads

CRO from Scratch

Quiz Time:

Startups may face countless challenges, but being able to think conversion-first from the start isn’t one of them.

Test Your Software IQ

Top 50: Software Solutions for Web Pros

Mastering Search:

A Look at Action Analytics So much data, so little time. Discover which types of analytics can help improve decision making for the average local business.

Future-Shaping SEO Trends

E-Commerce Express: Get More Product Reviews

Design & Development: User-Experience Analysis

Web Commentary:

MVP Screenshot Tools While taking a video or picture of a computer screen will never be on the highlight reel, these tools can be part of a winning strategy.

Local Listing Management Simplified There is no shortage of local platforms promoting a company’s info, but up until now there has been little insight on how to manage them easily.

Where to Invest Your Time

GET THE DIGITAL SCOOP Check out Website Magazine’s email newsletters covering search, e-commerce, social, design and more at wsm.co/webscoop.

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From the

EDITOR The Magazine for Website Success Reaching the largest audience of Web professionals of any Internet industry publication

The Affiliate Flow When you are really, truly in the affiliate marketing flow, the digital streets of the Web are paved with gold (real and virtual).

Find Website Magazine at these Internet industry tradeshows. eTail Canada* May 11-14 Toronto, ON WebRTC* May 12-14 Miami, FL Conversion Conference* May 13-14 Las Vegas, NV Ad:Tech May 20-21 San Francisco, CA *Sponsored by Website Magazine

The practice of affiliate marketing has come a long way since it first emerged. By the end of 2016, affiliate marketing spend is expected to reach a whopping $4.5 billion annually according to Forrester. Brands that include affiliate marketing into their digital strategy and performance marketers that employ the best practices are those positioned for long-term success. As an advertiser or someone looking to get rich quick, however, it’s not always easy to feel the affiliate flow.

Affiliate/performance marketing is vastly different than in years past – it’s faster, consumers are more demanding (having higher expectations in general) and the models for earning are changing along with the expectations of advertisers (those that pay the digital bills). It’s almost enough to make affiliate marketing seem impossible. Fortunately, it’s not. In fact, it remains incredibly lucrative when you know exactly what you’re doing.

In this month’s Website Magazine, however, readers are exposed to both a high-level overview of trends influencing and impacting the ‘Net today in relation to the practice of affiliate marketing and are provided with some practical tactics that can be used to turn a profit (and quickly).

Affiliate marketing is the primary focus of this edition of Website Magazine, but readers will also find many other useful articles to help accelerate their ‘Net success. The May 2015 issue includes guidance on enterprise email marketing, conversion rate optimization, managing customer relationships, and advice on lead generation, product reviews, user-experience analysis and a whole lot more.

As always, we hope you enjoy this issue of Website Magazine and invite you to join us on the Web, where our editors and CELEBRATING contributors explore the topics that matter most to your digital success.

Best Web Wishes, Peter@WebsiteMagazine.com

10 YEARS

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Now is the Time to Celebrate!

Continuing our year-long celebration of Website Magazine’s 10-year anniversary, join this month’s digital mission! Find the phrase “widespread outreach” (hint: it’s in orange and bold and in the second half of the magazine), open up the digital edition of Website Magazine (wsm.co/digitalwm15), and click that phrase. Participants will then be directed to a special landing page where they can enter to win a $500 prize.

Website Magazine will be sending readers on these special missions through 2015, so keep a digital eye on this space in the months to come!

Abdul Umer a.umer@websitemagazine.com Website Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 5, May 2015, (ISSN# 1942-0633) is published 12 times a year, January through December by Website Services, Inc., 999 E. Touhy Ave., Des Plaines, IL 60018. Periodicals Postage Paid at Des Plaines, IL and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Website Magazine, 999 E. Touhy Ave., Des Plaines, IL 60018.

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Net

BRIEFS EMAIL MARKETERS RESPOND TO RESPONSIVE Email conversion rates saw a significant jump last year – and that’s because more marketers embraced mobile. A new benchmark report from Yesmail reveals that brands’ use of mobilefriendly strategies, such as responsive design, paid off with mobile email conversion rates jumping more than 70 percent year-over-year.

During the same period, consequently, desktop conversion rates dropped by 4 percent.

Book It on Yelp

Yelp has bolstered its platform through new partnerships with Vimbly (which

shows users what to do in their down-

Consumers Demand

Free Returns

Seventy-three percent of consumers “always expect” free returns according to a recent report from Royal Mail. The report reveals that the majority of consumers not only expect free returns, but 56 percent also say they will consider using a different retailer who does offer free returns.

time, like ice skating, cooking classes, etc.), BloomNation (a platform for local

florists to run their businesses online) and several other enterprises - enabling Yelp to make activities from more than 5,000 local vendors instantly bookable. These partnerships will now allow Yelp users to stay on the location-based platform to do anything from rent a paddle board to book legal consultations.

Square Has Your [Charge] Back Sure to be a crowd pleaser, Square is now offering a chargeback protection service, providing merchants with protection against chargebacks (the return of funds to consumers) of $250 or less per month. In the same digital breath, Square is now catering to offline merchants with its Square Marketing suite, allowing them to leverage many of the features that their online competitors take advantage of, including trackable email marketing campaigns.

Search Spending on the Rise Search advertising is alive and well with new data from IgnitionOne revealing spend in this area saw its highest year-over-year growth in three years (26 percent in Q1 2015). According to the report, the dramatic increase in paid search spending is attributed to the growth of mobile and the improving economy.

YEAR

1997

Donny Wilkes-White

Discovered Scrolling.

This same year in WebAward History: Best of Show - Organic, Inc. Top Agency - CKS Partners

BE GREAT

DEADLINE FOR ENTRY:

May 29th 2015

WEBAWARDS 2015

webaward.org

Net

BRIEFS

AdWords Wants Your (Real) Number As one of the most popular ad platforms on the ‘Net, Google AdWords is making an effort to verify the information that businesses place in their ads. Google recently announced that in June 2015 it will require verification of ownership for all call and location extension phone numbers. There are three ways brands can verify the phone numbers on their ads, including displaying the phone number on their website, linking their brand’s Google Webmaster Tools and AdWords accounts or adding their unique AdWords conversion tracking code snippet to the landing page featured in their ad.

.CLUB What?

Brands may have a plethora of new domain extension options, but .com is still the most memorable. According to a recent Interbrand study, consumers are much more likely to remember a .com extension over other extensions (like .club or .xyz). In fact, when it came to remembering the domain extension of a Web address, 94 percent of consumers correctly recalled .com addresses while just 7 percent correctly recalled a new domain extension.

MORE NEWS OF NOTE: Tinder swipes left on spam: wsm.co/2theleft2theleft

#WEBTECHWATCH See what has the ‘Net community all abuzz with Website Magazine’s #WebTechWatch series a weekly roundup, available online, that profiles both emerging and established technologies and some of the most useful solutions for today’s Web workers. If you have a digital product or service you think deserves a mention, tweet @WebsiteMagazine with the hashtag #WebTechWatch.

+ SatisMeter: Collect user feedback from within Web applications. + Prisma: Global color swatches for Photoshop. + Venzee: Turn spreadsheets into real-time, cloud-based data. + Everlist: Collaboration platform for product teams. + Loggly: A simplified log management system for developers. + Roboto: Build and deploy iOS and Android mobile apps. + Dashtab: Optimizes how leads are qualified in Salesforce.

Twitter Shows Media Publishers Some Love: wsm.co/weloveyoutoo Facebook’s BIG F8 Announcements: wsm.co/f8roundup Instagram Adds New Creative Tools: wsm.co/gramfade

+ Dtermin: A keyword suggestion tool for modern marketers.

Stat

WATCH

Managing

70%

Customer

Relationships 80

16%

percent of online adults now own a smartphone, with 75 percent of them saying they’ve gone online via a mobile device in the last month.

While this Q3 2014 data from GlobalWebIndex does not indicate which activities users are taking once on the mobile Web, it is clear (and has been for some time)

Salesforce leads the CRM industry with a 16 percent market share, followed by SAP (13 percent) and Oracle (10 percent).

(Gartner, 2014)

that brands must cater to the mobile user. New predictions from Gartner indicate that’s especially true when it comes to customer service.

According to Gartner, poor mobile customer service (e.g. non-optimized FAQs or forms, non-existent chat options, lack of texting capabilities, etc.) is hampering customer engagement, predicting that by 2017 one third of all customer service interactions will still require the support of a human intermediary. For customers, the inability to self-serve is bothersome. Even as far back as 2013, a survey from Nuance Communication

49%

revealed that 75 percent of respondents said self-service is a convenient way to address customer service issues, yet 58 percent of consumers were unable to resolve their issues on the Web, despite their best efforts.

Companies of all sizes need to figure out how to properly engage customers (or give them the ability to self-serve) on all channels and that likely starts and ends with the right customer relationship management (CRM) system.

“CRMs need to grow from an internal solution into

a two-way customer engagement platform,” said Ran Oelgiesser, CMO of online engagement technology provider vCita. “Providing customers a view of their interactions with the business and encouraging a dia-

Nearly half of CRM users access their CRM system on smartphones (48 percent) and/or tablets (45 percent), with 49 percent accessing it on at least three devices.

(Software Advice, 2014)

A majority of small businesses (70 percent) identify engaging, qualifying and following up with leads as their biggest challenge regarding sales and marketing.

61 percent also indicate that it’s a challenge to prioritize and track activities and follow-ups for their sales teams.

(Zoho, Dec. 2014)

55% Brands may have made more money in 2014 – with 67 percent of survey respondents indicating an increase in revenue last year - yet fewer (55 percent) were able to improve customer engagement/relationships during the same period.

(Regalix, Jan. 2015)

$18

billion The global social CRM market is expected to be $18 billion by 2019 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 52 percent between 2014 and 2019.

(MarketsandMarkets, Jan. 2015)

logue at the customer’s convenience on any device will be the gold standard of great customer service.”

M A Y 2015

|

|9

Enterprise

READY

Everybody Panic!

How Steady Is Your Web Content MANAGEMENT SYSTEM?

By Amberly Dressler, Managing Editor

After securing themselves and their loved ones, people experiencing a minor earthquake tend to take inventory - quickly surveying the area, looking to see if anything fell or broke.

Small earthquakes tend to do little damage – with the exception of possibly unraveling some nerves (mostly those of the family dog or a visiting out-of-state relative) – because most modern buildings in earthquakeprone areas are engineered to withstand a significant amount of shaking. The foundation on which they are built serves those occupying the space well.

There are few industries more prone to shakeups than the Web – from bubbles and busts to ever-changing expectations and trends. Despite the constant shaking, not every piece of software, tool, solution or app available to today’s enterprise is made to withstand such significant repositioning.

Many are built for a specific micro-goal (shorten links, deliver ads, publish blogs, schedule social media), but today’s enterprise-level solutions are increasingly looking to become more “everything to everyone” type offerings.

Content management systems are both the exception and the rule to this trend. Their foundation – the management of content (think publishing, ed10

|

|

MAY 2015

iting, approving) – has served companies well for nearly two decades, but as both they and the industry mature, content management solution providers have taken inventory of the new digital landscape and built out their offerings to withstand industry shaking (or in some cases been the catalyst to that change). They are now the backbone of digital experiences (in Forrester’s words), “a multifaceted toolkit for building, managing, delivering and optimizing digital experiences, the bedrock of your business technology agenda.”

Others may say, however, that what is one man’s (or woman’s) blog is another man’s digital experience platform.

As researched and evaluated in, “The Forrester Wave: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2015,” the top two leaders in the space are currently Adobe and Sitecore. Interviewed here, these companies are on the frontlines of how the criteria for selecting a Web content management (WCM) system is rapidly changing and how they (and others) are adapting to both external and internal pressures to serve everyone from the everyday content writer to the C-suite in a way that encourages analysis and optimization of the Web experience. Let the following serve as evaluation of how shake-proof your Web content management is.

Who Can Test?

Today’s Internet professionals expect to be able to measure the effectiveness of landing pages, calls-toaction, images, etc. (any digital campaign, really). This expectation, according to Mark Floisand, VP of product marketing at Sitecore, stems from the expectation put on marketers to be more accountable. Inherent in this, Floisand continues, is that everything can be tested and optimized, which has traditionally been difficult to do. To ensure that it’s easy for all content writers, marketers, executives and the like to run the most effective content/campaigns/copy, it requires WCM systems to have built-in testing functionality.

Testing is now considered a baseline offering for today’s WCM vendors, but Forrester’s evaluation of the top 10 (Acquia, Adobe, Ektron, EPiServer, HP, IBM, OpenText, Oracle, SDL and Sitecore) proves this offering varies dramatically in scope, with IBM and SDL scoring as low as one, on a scale of zero (weak) to five (strong). This is not to say, however, they aren’t hypercompetitive in other areas (SDL, for example, scored the only five for globalization and localization).

Adobe, which scored the highest for testing, is empowering the everyday user to test elements like which content to show based on known and unknown elements (such as user behavior) not because IT’s role is diminishing (enterprises will always have unique scalability and security requirements), but because, according to Loni Stark, Adobe’s senior director of strategy and product marketing, the amount of personalization, content and channels to publish and promote content is exploding. As such, Stark believes that the technology that lets marketers and business people be able to create, publish and test which content will be most effective.

What Can Be Personalized?

When an Internet professional begins to understand just how much of an enterprise’s content can be tested, he or she also begins to realize how much of it can be optimized or, more specifically, personalized to individual users or groups. Rule-based personalization can be as specific as serving an image to someone with an average order value (AOV) of $90 that offers free shipping if that person spends more than $100 (or higher depending on that person’s past AOV) – Adobe offers this kind of dynamic creative – to something as simple as recognizing returning visitors with “Welcome Back” copy in a landing page’s headline.

There is, however, according to Floisand of Sitecore, some degree of trepidation by marketers when serving personalized experiences. Are the users actually seeing what the marketer intended? There’s an alternative to trying to mimic user activity (sign up

for a new account, abandon a shopping cart, etc.), and that is Sitecore’s visualization tool. It lets users visualize simulations of personalized content based on the parameters they have set - providing reassurance that the personalization makes sense and isn’t conflicting with other messaging.

How Future Proof Is It? As few as 3-4 years ago, responsive Web design was mostly theoretical (and personalization was just in its infancy). Now, according to Stark of Adobe, nearly every Web redesign is responsive. Adobe, like many other WCM vendors, has focused its efforts on features and capabilities to help the average person be able to design and support responsive sites. In 3-4 years from now, what will be the focus of delivering content?

Floisand is putting his money on the Internet of Things, as there will be no shortage of Webconnected devices in which to access brands on/ through. WCM vendors will need to innovate to find new ways to analyze and optimize those content experiences. Those ready, willing and flexible enough to embrace emerging channels are those that will remain competitive and continue to cater to the enterprise user.

Equally, Floisand thinks the industry will see expectations that a Web CMS will do more and more of the automation (in a broad term), so that marketers and business users can spend more time fine-tuning campaigns, rather than grappling with CMSs.

Aftershocks The Web industry will continue to shake – a sign of adapting to changing expectations – but if chosen wisely, an enterprise’s Web content management system can serve as the bedrock of its digital existence and experience. While Adobe and Sitecore are far from the only WCM options worth exploring, they’ve thoroughly been vetted as two of the premier players in the space, making their offerings a standard to which others should be held.

Where to Start: Personalization Discover how to reduce the creative burden of personalization by starting small and building a strong foundation at wsm.co/pzfoundation

Small

BUSINESS LAB Standing Tall Amongst Giants:

HOW TO COMPETE FOR LEADS

By Derek Schou, Associate Editor

In many ways small businesses fight a daily uphill battle against the giants in their industries – perhaps none tougher than lead generation.

To help small businesses raise awareness of their products and services, here are three techniques and tools they can use to better compete against their larger counterparts who are looking to acquire the same qualified prospects.

Inbound Marketing

Big List of Social Media Management Tools From awe.sm to Wildfire see which offerings are best for managing your social from one platform at

wsm.co/2015topsmts 12

|

One of the most important things that small businesses can do in order to increase interest in their company is to ramp up their inbound marketing efforts.

Inbound marketing, for those unfamiliar, refers to marketing activities that attract consumers to a brand and convert them into customers. There are various techniques that brands can use to attract consumers including a social media presence (more on that below) as well as creating relevant and insightful content that can be discovered through search engines. However, before brands begin their inbound campaigns they must have a “customer first” strategy in place.

“Inbound marketing shifts the focus to the customer experience and helps to reinforce the values of a small company that is dedicated to its customers, because inbound is all about helping people,” said Melis Steiner, a marketing and business development consultant.

“Instead of pushing out mass emails to purchased lists or cold calling people, which very few people appreciate these days, inbound offers solutions to leads and customers, gaining their trust, and providing them with the services or products that will benefit them.”

Luckily, small businesses don’t have to go about inbound marketing on their own. Companies like HubSpot, Marketo, Act-On and Pardot are at the ready.

10 YEARS

|

MAY 2015

Social Media With consumers flocking to social networks (Facebook alone has more than 1 billion active monthly users), small businesses must recognize the opportunity social affords when it comes to lead generation.

From Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and Snapchat, there are numerous social networks that small businesses can leverage to communicate with prospects on a daily basis. To manage the many platforms, small business owners should consider leveraging a social media management tool, which not only makes quick work of posting to numerous networks from one platform but also makes tracking the success of campaigns easier (see sidebar).

Personalization and Localization Whether it’s the person behind the counter that remembers their name or the owner who remembers exactly what they purchased the previous week, small businesses provide a level of customer personalization that large businesses often struggle to match.

Small businesses can translate this level of personalization to their online storefront by leveraging various personalization solutions (e.g. RichRelevance, MyBuys, Evergage, etc.), which range from welcoming returning customers back to the site to recommending products or content based off their previous purchases or website activity. Also, to lure consumers back to their site, small businesses can leverage ads that retarget consumers based on their previous website activity (like a purchase or an abandoned shopping cart). For a roundup of conversion-boosting retargeting examples go to wsm.co/4retarget.

Another advantage that small businesses have is their staff’s involvement in the local community. The most successful small businesses are always in tune with what’s going on around them and leverage their knowledge to spur their success. For instance, a small business sporting goods store can cater to local sports tournaments by offering deals to participating players or, similarly, a local bakery could bake special treats for a city holiday or event at the local high school.

While small businesses may not have the money or the manpower that large corporations have, that does not mean they cannot compete in the marketplace. Through increasing their inbound marketing efforts, social media presence, and leveraging personalization and localization tactics small businesses can stand tall amongst giants.

Quiz

TIME

WHAT IS YOUR

SOFTWARE IQ? 1. What does SaaS stand for? a. Social as a Solution b. Sassy animals are Silly c. Solutions are always Standard d. Software as a Service

2. How much money was spent on enterprise software in 2014?

Much like everything else in the realm of technology, software has evolved dramatically over the last decade.

Not only has the way software is delivered changed (thanks to the cloud), but also the number of software programs being used by enterprises today has steadily increased. In fact, data from Netskope reveals that businesses used an average of 613 cloud apps in Q4 2014, up from 579 in the previous quarter.

While this may seem high, it’s important to note that Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive, Evernote, Salesforce, etc., are counted as cloud apps. Nonetheless, this increase in usage makes it no surprise that software is a booming industry. After all, if you can identify an area of opportunity for your business, there is almost always a software solution available to help you capitalize on it.

Regardless of how many software programs your enterprise may use on a daily basis, there is still a good chance that your own current understanding of the industry is a bit outdated. Fortunately, Web workers can keep up with changes in the software vertical by visiting Website Magazine’s Software Everywhere channel regularly at wsm.co/softwarewm.

In the meantime, find out how much you know about the current state of software by testing your knowledge in this month’s Quiz Time.

a. $503 million b. $317 billion c. $782 million d. $39 trillion

3. By 2018, SaaS is forecasted to represent what percentage of the enterprise public cloud computing market? a. 6 percent b. 73 percent c. 59 percent d. 34 percent

4. What percentage of business apps used by organizations was breached by hackers in Q4 2014? a. 15 percent b. 40 percent c. 2 percent d. 81 percent

5. Global SaaS revenues are forecasted to reach how much by 2016?

Get the answers to this month’s Quiz Time by visiting wsm.co/qtmay15 or by scanning the QR code.

a. $503 million b. $106 billion c. $867 million d. $214 trillion

Top

50

Software Solutions for Web Professionals It’s hard to imagine what the day of a ‘Net professional might look like without software (Web-based or that of any other variety, e.g. desktop).

In 2015, there are solutions for everything; from platforms for designing and developing brands’ digital foundations to myriad offerings available for testing, optimizing and analyzing every aspect of the modern customer experience. It’s easy to understand why spending in this important industry segment is accelerating so dramatically.

In its 2014 IT spending forecast, Gartner projected IT spending (which is already in the multibillion dollar range annually) would increase 2.4 percent in 2015 – up from 1.9 percent growth in 2014. Gartner, of course, is not alone in its optimistic projections. Forrester Research projected 5.3 percent growth for 2015 and 5.9 percent for 2016. And the area with the highest likely growth rate? You guessed it, enterprise software – the solutions today’s brands use to conduct business on the Internet and engage their audience across channels.

Software comes in so many forms that it can be exceedingly difficult for stakeholders to develop a master list of essential solutions for their enterprise. In their pursuit of ‘Net success, businesses (whether they are purely digital or have a brickand-mortar component) must first identify what specific segments of the software industry will be most valuable to their team of Web professionals when managing a digital presence. Where do you begin? Focus on the basics.

In this month’s Top 50 from Website Magazine, the focus is on those solutions that, time and again, prove essential to success. Readers will find both established leaders and emerging contenders for their software dollars in six categories including Web content management systems (CMSs), e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, project management and help desk solutions. Let this Top 50 serve as the inspiration as you roll out your next project or replatform in the months and years to come.

Sales/CRM Salesforce.com Zoho.com Nimble.com Workbooks.com NetSuite.com PipelineDeals.com SugarCRM.com Salesnet.com Insightly.com Contactually.com

Content Management Adobe.com Sitecore.com Ektron.com EPiServer.com WordPress.com OpenText.com DNNsoftware.com LightCMS.com Drupal.org Joomla.org

Project Management Wrike.com Trello.com GetHarvest.com Basecamp.com Workfront.com

E-Commerce Magento.com Bigcommerce.com Shopify.com AbilityCommerce.com PrestaShop.com Volusion.com Miva.com 3dCart.com Fortune3.com Avactis.com

Marketing Oracle.com Act-On.com Marketo.com OutMarket.com SalesFusion.com LeadSquared.com Silverpop.com Infusionsoft.com HubSpot.com Customer.io

Help Desk Freshdesk.com Zendesk.com TeamSupport.com HappyFox.com HelpScout.net

Mastering

SEARCH

Search Trends Today

for Influence Tomorrow

By Peter Prestipino, Editor-In-Chief

The Website Magazine community of Internet professionals has seen a great deal of change in relation to the practice of search engine optimization since our launch 10 years ago.

SEO TIMELINE Check out a Website Magazine timeline profiling some of Google’s most important SEOrelated updates from the past 10-plus years at

wsm.co/timelineseo 16

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As you might remember, it was not uncommon in the early days of the Web to be able to rank for highly trafficked, competitive terms with what today would amount to only a modicum of digital effort; an exact-match domain, a few posts or articles stuffed to the virtual brim with relevant keywords combined with a few strategically placed links from a website owner’s colleagues and a website could easily start appearing on the search results (and it would, in most cases, work on every search engine).

That’s not exactly how it all comes together these days. Those responsible for search engine optimization in 2015 must not only understand the core practices of traditional optimization but, increasingly, the experience that is demanded and ultimately consumed by end-users. As a result, the savviest SEOs are shifting their attention from tweaking title tags to optimizing infrastructure and away from pursuing links anywhere they can be obtained to developing strategic promotional partnerships designed to drive audience engagement (and not just rankings) instead.

Unless your enterprise has had its digital blinders on, you likely already know the trends that are impacting how and why a website ranks (or does not rank) and will continue to influence the suc-

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cess of your digital business tomorrow and well into the future. For those that aren’t yet familiar, those trends are mobile-friendliness, content depth and quality, website speed and security, as well as certain signals related to the quality and context of inbound links. How can you get started capitalizing on these trends? Website Magazine has put together a few useful resources to help your brand accelerate its ‘Net success in this month’s Mastering Search column.

MOBILE FRIENDLINESS With an ever-increasing percentage of website traffic coming from mobile devices, sites that are not optimized for smartphones are simply destined to fail.

Google has been very active in recent months in its pursuit of providing its search engine users a better mobile experience, testing icons next to search result listings that indicate a website’s mobile friendliness and even introducing a newly updated mobile usability section in Google Webmaster’s support information to provide some guidance as to what really defines a mobile-friendly website. Website Magazine contributor Michael Ramirez of SearchRPM recently addressed what mobile-friendly factors will serve as ranking signals for Google moving forward at wsm.co/gmobranking.

CONTENT DEPTH & QUALITY Enterprises that focus their attention on content development and content marketing to execute

greater search visibility will be those positioned for long-term success. While many of the technical tactics of search marketing remain important, search engines – Google in particular – are rewarding those websites which consistently, thoroughly and in a high-quality manner, distribute content that their audience wants. Google has a long history of espousing the benefits of high-quality content but there is a great deal of speculation about how that works. Website Magazine has put together a guide (wsm.co/typescontent) to the various types of content that are being used in 2015 and has even assembled some useful suggestions (and actual templates) of content that is sure to resonate with any Web user.

WEBSITE SPEED Sites that seem to take forever to fully load are a problem for everyone in the digital ecosystem.

Search engine users expect to be able to access the information they seek quickly and if they can’t then the website is unable to ultimately convert a visitor to a customer. The faster the better and there’s no shortage of solutions available to help websites identify the bottlenecks and what’s preventing them from achieving their objectives. Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool provides as useful a solution as any on the market, identifying potential performance problems and providing suggestions on how to improve. Often, this information is confusing as it is so highly technical in nature. There are some easy tweaks however that can dramatically influence page speed and Internet professionals won’t need to break open their virtual piggy banks to get them implemented. See three quick hacks to speed up any website at wsm.co/designspeed.

NET SECURITY When the use of SSL was first revealed as a potential ranking signal, the development was met with both cheers and jeers. While there has not yet been any real evidence that a secure site (one that uses HTTPS instead of just HTTP) will outrank its competitors, Google has increased the volume of messages it is sending through Google Webmaster Tools to inform webmasters of security issues. This alone should indicate that if a website puts user security first, there are rewards. There are a variety of options for websites looking to make their digital presence more secure – discover some of the most popular at wsm.co/securetools.

There are of course many other trends influencing how search engines index, process and display websites on the results pages. For example, Google is increasingly (according to several reports) using social signals from Facebook and Twitter as a means to determine relevance and popularity. The Knowledge Graph is growing every day and SEOs are finding that the use of semantic search is driving users from the SERPs to their own websites. To keep your well-deserved space at the top of Google’s listings, staying ahead of the trends and knowing how to capitalize on the shifts will ensure you make the most of all your digital initiatives.

RECENT SEO UPDATES FOR WEB PROS Developments in the search engine optimization space are frequent and if you miss one, your digital initiatives may suffer. Stay up to date with all the important SEO news within Website Magazine’s Mastering Search channel at wsm.co/mastersearch. Here are three Google SEO-related items that recently captured the digital attention of the Website Magazine community: + Google is testing a new design for its local maps search results

(including logos in the result pack) when the search engine detects local intent in the query. + Revealing that websites penalized in the past don’t have to

work any harder in the future, Google indicated it ranks websites based not on their history, but rather their current state – or what Google knows about it at the time of crawling, indexing and after processing the hundreds of signals that are used to determine search result position. + The search engine notified the ‘Net community that it will soon

be launching a new ranking adjustment algorithm, which will negatively impact sites that employ doorway pages.

E-Commerce

EXPRESS

3-Step Approach for Acquiring More Product Reviews

By Allison Howen, Associate Editor

Ninety-five percent of consumers consult product reviews before making a purchase, yet less than half of consumers actually contribute to product reviews themselves (PowerReviews, 2014).

This is a problem for e-commerce merchants, as it means product reviews are difficult to come by despite them being valuable assets in converting customers.

What’s more, it means merchants must be strategic in their efforts to acquire more product reviews.

Consider the following three-step approach as a way to get more reviews - and provide your consumers with additional information on which to make their purchasing decisions.

Step 1: Provide Context

If All Else Fails Incentives are a valuable tool to encourage customers to leave reviews (good or bad).

Check out how top retailers use this tactic at

wsm.co/3givegets

Email is a popular way for businesses to request reviews from customers who have recently purchased a product online.

The challenge, however, is that the majority of consumers have very full inboxes, and a message asking for a review without telling the recipient why he or she should participate will quickly be deleted.

Director of Product Marketing for Trustpilot, Jonathan Hinz, notes that merchants can improve response rates by providing some context to consumers in emails.

For instance, merchants can reach out to explain why it’s important to them to verify the customer is satisfied with his or her shopping experience and recent purchase. Doing so fosters a more interactive and open relationship between a brand and its customers.

Step 2: Set a Timer When it comes to product reviews, timing is everything.

After all, if merchants ask customers to review a product too soon after purchase there is a good chance the customer hasn’t had a chance to truly experience it yet.

On the other hand, if the merchant waits too long, the customer may not be engaged enough anymore to take the time to review the product.

While the timing for requesting a review will vary by industry, Hinz says the typical time frame to send a product review request is between 7-14 days. In most cases, this gives consumers enough time to test and offer an honest opinion.

Step 3: Be Inclusive It is nearly impossible to predict which customers will take time to review a product, which means that merchants should not be selective about who they ask. “(Merchants) sometimes will selectively ask for product reviews, so they won’t ask all customers but they’ll ask some customers,” said Hinz. “Volume is extremely important so asking all of your customers for reviews is critical.”

Having a large collection of reviews is important because it comes off as more authentic and provides extra information to consumers making purchasing decisions.

In fact, recent data from PowerReviews reveals that 82 percent of consumers actually seek out negative reviews.

“Retailers should view negative reviews as a way to build brand credibility and trust – not as something to be afraid of,” said Danny Harris, VP of content operations at PowerReviews. “Consumers are smart. They know that a product can’t be all things to all people, and looking for negative reviews has become a part of the path-to-purchase for the majority of consumers. They look to negative reviews to verify the credibility of the information on a retailer’s site – a product with all glowing reviews is too good to be true.”

Good or bad, it is also important to note that product reviews can be indexed by search engines, which provide merchants with SEO benefits. Since search engines tend to give better rankings to fresh content, it serves in a retailer’s best interest to have new reviews coming in regardless of how many a product may already have.

Testing Time It will likely take a few attempts at acquiring more product reviews before the process is perfected.

However, by trying new ways to motivate consumers, testing the best times to reach out and being inclusive in who you ask for reviews, chances are you will begin seeing an uptick in product reviews (and conversions) soon.

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Design and

DEVELOPMENT

Optimizing Conversion:

Hands-On UX Analysis

By Kate Shaughnessy and Jennifer Malone, 3Q Digital

Improving conversion rate on a client’s site can be a challenge.

Finding a page with decent organic traffic, high conversion rate and low bounce rate is a proverbial diamond in the rough. Something in the user’s experience of that page resonates strongly with users – but what?

Thankfully, Web analytics allows us to see what is working and what isn’t.

In this article, we’ll analyze a site that is predominantly information-based, focused on getting users to register for the site and regularly purchase on-site content.

First-Page Data Image A is a top-converting landing page for a highvalue SEO term, with a high conversion rate. With a little work, one can see how users interact with this page. The circles reflect where users click and visit after landing – the size of the circle on that element reflects the number of users following that path (in the form of a percentage). Web professionals can obtain this information by taking a landing page report and layering in the second-page path, showing where users go after interacting with the page.

The area with 27.3 percent of clicks is the “Sign In” button. As we know this page converts well, we can conclude that its conversion rate is bolstered by attracting returning users. As such, on-site content should be tailored to speak to these users’ position lower in the conversion funnel.

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Additionally, we can see that users are not traveling far below the fold. Even when users do engage with mid-page content, only a couple of the hero images in the top row are receiving clicks, with a third hero in the second row performing well. This signals an opportunity to rearrange on-page content to better speak to user intent. We learned earlier that this page attracts returning users, signaling that they’re at least marginally sold on the site’s value proposition; by incorporating trust signals (such as satisfaction guarantees) into the hero images, we may be able to give engaged users the nudge they need to finally convert.

The text boxes immediately below the fold have low user interaction, and they’re worth revisiting. Replacing this low-interaction content with stickier content may reduce bounce rate or increase conversion rate.

Second-Page Data Image B provides an example of the same report, this time aggregating the second-page data for all users visiting any page with a similar template. A great example here would be for an e-commerce client looking at the second-page behavior of all users who, for example, landed on children’s apparel product pages.

Looking at this set of pages, we see that most user interactions are within the top navigation bar; some engagement occurs with above-the-fold content. Note that, in contrast to the previous example, there’s very little interaction with the upper right corner where the “Sign In” button is located. This page group attracts

A. An example of how a user interacts with the first Web page they visit on this site.

B. The same report as Image A, this image shows how users interact with the second page they visit on the site.

large numbers of new users who have never converted – their investment in the site is low and they may not be ready to convert.

This page group’s biggest problem is that there’s a lot of different information thrown at the user. From a busy navigation bar to as much content below the fold as the template can hold, it isn’t clear what users should do. There isn’t a clear call-to-action, but rather multiple calls, each of which speaks to a different level of commitment: newsletter sign-up, site registration and lead form fill. Ideally, there should be one call-to-action on the page, catered to the user’s likely place in the funnel; considering that users at this stage are new to the site and just looking around, prompting them to sign up for an email newsletter will likely convert better and keep them moving toward eventual conversion.

Lastly, a technical issue with this page group is that users navigate to deeper content through a JavaScript action, which most analytics platforms cannot recognize as distinct because of the # that appears in the URL. We’re able to see that users are interacting with sections of the page that utilize this element through CrazyEgg, a visualization software (see sidebar). However, as a result of this type of navigation, bounce rate may appear artificially high, and this data is otherwise invisible. We should either place event tracking on this action or change the navigation so we have a more accurate understanding of on-site behavior.

While the users who flock to this page are low value right now, they come in large enough quantities

to warrant thorough testing and analysis. Testing different page elements, such as the call-to-action or navigation, could improve the content of the page, increase engagement and, thus, lift conversion rate.

First-Hand Feedback In this way, UX analysis gives designers, developers and digital marketing professionals direct feedback on how users are interacting with their content. By better understanding what users want from a site, and how those goals are met (or not met) on each page, this analysis provides an opportunity to optimize for conversion and engagement behavior by page elements that matter.

Kate Shaughnessy is a senior SEO and analytics manager at 3Q Digital; Jennifer Malone is a client services manager at the same digital agency.

M A Y 2015

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Visualization Tools You Might Have Missed See your pages all marked up at

wsm.co/wdvisualize | 21

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THE AFFILIATE MARKETING FLOW Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Rich Quick

By Pete Prestipino, Editor-In-Chief

When the Web was in its digital infancy, few knew at the time how profoundly important it would be to global commerce in the years to come. Well, that’s not entirely true – many did and have made their mark on the ‘Net in a very big way.

While affiliate marketing is still very much alive, well and growing (affiliate marketing spend is expected to reach $4.5 billion annually in 2016 according to Forrester), advertisers are sometimes tentative to engage in an initiative of this digital variety due not just to its complexities, but also because of its poor (and often deserved) reputation.

Affiliate Ups & Downs Back in 2013, Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning both became multi-millionaires by exploiting eBay’s affiliate marketing program. The pair developed and subsequently dropped a cookie on a user’s computer, falsely crediting their affiliate accounts for whenever those users purchased something from eBay in the future. The tactic resulted in Hogan and Dunning amassing a whopping total of $28 million between 2005 and 2007. Eventually, however, the digital axe fell and both affiliates were sent to federal prison for their approach and tactics. For every Hogan and Dunning (which are, granted, at the extreme and exemplify why affiliate marketing is avoided by some advertisers), there are instances which illustrate how lucrative and effective these initiatives are for both advertisers and affiliates.

Membership-based online shopping club Jet.com, for example, ran a contest in late 2014 to get more users signed up for its “Insiders” program, which entitled them to free trials and perks – a common tactic today employed by startups and some savvy advertisers. To make the program appealing to

potential referrers (affiliates), the company offered 100,000 shares of Jet stock to the individual who could drive the most referrals to its Insider program. Affiliates joined in droves, including Eric Martin.

With just a few weeks from the close of the contest, Martin used his business savvy and his familiarity with the performance space (using reward-based advertising sites like Swagbucks and Gifthulk) to catapult his way to the top of the referrer leaderboard. Martin spent $18,000 promoting the offer and ended the contest with 8,167 referrals. If Jet manages to go public and capitalize on the pre-launch buzz it generated with the help of Martin and other “super-affiliates,” a few weeks of work for Martin could ultimately result in a hefty payday between $10 and $20 million.

+ Explore the rich history of performance market-

ing in Website Magazine’s Affiliate Timeline – wsm.co/waybackaffm, a visual, interactive exploration of this essential digital channel.

Those just getting started however – as well as those struggling to generate any revenue at all from their digital properties and broader ‘Net initiatives – desperately need a practical guide to making “get rich quick” actually happen. They will need insights into the most effective platforms for developing, managing and optimizing a Web experience and the available solutions for assisting consumers down the parallel paths of conversion and loyalty.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to know a little about the current state of the performance marketing ecosystem (the challenges and opportunities) or the actual tactics that are helping affiliates (and the advertisers/brands they represent) generate attention and activity and leave their own virtual mark on the Web. In this month’s edition of Website Magazine, you get both.

Follow along with the Affiliate Flow chart from Website Magazine, a practical guide designed to inform and inspire performance marketers to reach the greatest heights of ‘Net success.

In addition to the tips and tricks provided here, Website Magazine has also put together a special collection of tools to help any affiliate marketer get in in the flow at wsm.co/affiliateflow.

THE AFFILIATE FLOW Identify Your Topical Expertise It’s the first and probably most important step - knowing what you know so you can maximize digital endeavors. Whether it’s outdoor grilling, building tiny homes, interviewing celebrities or shopping online, following a passion and leveraging one’s own expertise, experiences and interests is a fast-track to success. In essence, the job pays more if you have credentials.

Profile the Audience If you know a lot about a particular subject matter, chances are excellent you’ll know exactly (or at least have a pretty good idea about) who the audience is - and that goes a long way to providing them with support through the conversion funnel. You know where they live and how much they earn, their preferences and affinities, and the hot button issues that will ensure their loyalty for years to come.

Mastering the Affiliate Flow (Every Day) What most fail to understand about the practice of affiliate marketing is that, in many ways, it’s really no different than digital marketing of any other sort.

Affiliate marketers contribute to a sale in much the same manner that in-house marketers do but it’s not a direct sale in many instances, rather an indirect one – and, of course, you are earning only a percentage of the sale price (typically a flatrate fee or a percentage-based commission) for the hard work being put in. The thing is, affiliate/performance marketing is vastly different than in years past – it’s faster, consumers are more demanding (having higher expectations in general) and

Industry Research While being a subject matter authority and understanding the audience segment that expresses interest in it are important, engaging in industry research and validating that there is potential in certain digital pursuits (and the methods used to capitalize on them) is equally worthy of a ‘Net professional’s time. Competitive industries will drive you to pursue more niche products while emerging industries will demand that you move quickly (and in some cases first). Just because there is immense demand, or no demand yet at all, doesn’t mean that it’s an opportunity you should avoid.

Establish the Digital Base There’s no more vital component to the success of any enterprise than the point at which they will come in digital contact with their audience. Establishing your digital base can mean building a website, developing an application, or structuring network profiles in a way that expresses expertise, caters to your audience, and can help position products in front of potential buyers on their path to conversion.

Develop Value-Added Products If you’ve failed in the past, chances are you failed because what you were offering the digital world didn’t provide its audience anything of value - no utility, no information, no entertainment. Affiliates that take their pursuit of success further are those which develop products, solutions and experiences that are completely and entirely differentiated from the competition, and more importantly, are their own. What this provides is ownership and if you’re going to get rich quick, it’s best to get rich quick slowly through ownership.

the models for earning are changing along with the expectations of advertisers (those that pay the digital bills). It’s almost enough to make affiliate marketing seem impossible.

In this month’s Website Magazine, however, readers are exposed to both a high-level overview of trends influencing and impacting the ‘Net today, in relation to the practice of affiliate marketing, and are provided with some practical tactics that can be used to turn a profit (and quickly).

Follow along with the Affiliate Flow chart from Website Magazine, a practical guide designed to inform and inspire performance marketers to reach the greatest heights of ‘Net success. In addition to the tips and tricks provided here, Website Magazine has also put together a special collection of tools to help any affiliate marketer get in in the flow at wsm.co/affiliateflow.

Know Your Audience Put yourself in the virtual shoes of today’s Web users and it might be surprising just how overwhelmed they may be as they are marketed to at every digital twist and turn of their online experience.

What ‘Net users today are increasingly demanding, however, is a meaningful conversation within a relevant journey to a met objective. Marketers (affiliate marketers in particular), however, often create prepackaged experiences – but that may not be the optimal approach. A better way may just be to foster collaboration, focus on developing closer relationships and encouraging influence over impressions. Affiliate marketers today must be able to integrate social data into their personalization capabilities and build individualized experiences. The availability of marketing automation solutions provides the best opportunity to do so currently.

While it might seem like an over-the-top approach for many traditional affiliates, marketing automation solutions provide the capability for affiliates (or any digital business) to develop a detailed history of their users, marketing and remarketing to them based on their particular needs and interests. If you are already using these incredibly powerful systems (many of which you can find in Website Magazine’s “Master List of Marketing Automation Tools” at wsm.co/matools) the time is now to take that initiative to the next level. Explore four “next-level” marketing automation techniques, as featured in a recent issue of Website Magazine, at wsm.co/nlma15 and you’ll be better prepared than ever to market to today’s consumer.

For affiliate marketers, getting ahead means changing with your audience – and today’s digital users are intolerant of anything that doesn’t meet their expectations. With marketing automation solutions in place, affiliates can focus in on selecting the offers that have the greatest likelihood of conversion on their audience, and the advertisers and networks that provided them.

Attribution is Evolving Affiliates most often promote offers with the highest commissions, but as any savvy performance marketer can tell you,

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there are other (some would argue more important) variables that should come in to play. Increasingly, it’s coming down to how affiliates are rewarded for their efforts (and what those efforts might be).

Advertisers are struggling (and have long struggled) to make sure they credit the right sources of conversion and they are turning to multi-touch attribution in droves to do so.

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) is essentially the practice of allocating a proportional amount of credit to promotional efforts, across channels, which lead to the desired customer action. MTA is, in many ways, still developing, and the approach will mature in the coming years (or, at least, start to gain popular acceptance). In order to take full advantage of this method, advertisers and affiliates need to understand that there are several different ways to attribute value to customer interactions, or “touches”:

Time Decay – Most credit is given to the individual touch that created the desired outcome (such as a sale), with declining credit for less recent interactions. This model is particularly useful for companies with very short sales cycles.

Even - A basic model where all touches receive credit equally.

This model is typically used when no one particular interaction is known to convert customers and the goal is ongoing marketing engagement.

The Web, however, changes in real-time. As a result, advertisers are turning to solutions that provide them with insights into the complexity of various networks and the activity that results from their own, and their affiliates’, participation.

Develop & Optimize Creative Today’s consumers demand information that is easily consumed - short, compelling, often dramatic snippets of stories, data and visuals that validate their own opinions, beliefs and interests. If the creative assets you use to drive awareness and ultimately conversion are irrelevant to your audience, your initiatives will be dead in the digital water.

Test, Test & Retest The most dangerous threat to conversion is ego. For this reason, it is important that regular testing be part of all of your digital processes; testing and retesting all of the website components, all of the assumptions made about audience interests and the motivation those consumers need to move down the affiliate’s conversion path.

Soft Launch With some empirical evidence that your digital initiative won’t totally implode, you can finally move forward, out of stealth mode and into the real world. One of the best ways to determine if your ‘Net choices were the right ones, is to beta test your product with a soft launch on an audience subset.

U-Shaped/Position – In this multi-touch attribution model, 40 percent credit is given to the first and last touches, with the remaining 20 percent divided among interactions in the middle. The U-shaped model is best for advertisers seeking to drive awareness and action and is ideal for those with longer sales cycles.

Custom - In this model, advertisers determine the credit to be given for each “touch,” dependent on product knowledge, customer base, and sales funnel based on factors such as cost, time or effort.

Tracking Everything, Everywhere Just as businesses have to cater to users’ evolving expectations and habits, so too do the affiliate networks that support advertisers and publishers, yet not all networks provide crossdevice tracking to reward publishers for transactions made on more than one device. In today’s mobile-obsessed world, that’s increasingly important and technology is developing in pace to solve the problem.

Affiliate Window, for example, announced in early 2015 that cross-device tracking capabilities were added to its offering, coming on the heels of its network traffic reaching 50 percent from mobile devices in Dec. 2014.

Last year, a small group of early adopters, including Shop Direct and The Hut Group, paved the way for this technology now at Affiliate Window.

“By being able to measure and optimize across device we make the right decisions and we give mobile the investment it deserves,” said Ryan Jones, affiliate manager at Shop Direct.

“This is particularly important in CPA channels, where if we cannot track cross-device influence we cannot reward our publishers for mobile influence, the new product developed

by Affiliate Window could be a game changer for the Shop Direct affiliate program.”

Affiliate Window’s cross-device tracking works by building profiles, which can be associated to devices. According to the network, the profiles allow it to understand when a user has interacted with an advertiser’s site via one of its links, and then purchased via another device within a pre-determined time window. If a sale has been driven by one of its publishers during the time window, it will be recorded. These sales still require the necessary validation that all current transactions have to ensure they were properly completed.

Advertisers and affiliate networks are thinking beyond the device alone, of course, and are increasingly considering tracking every aspect of the customer journey.

One of the most highly trafficked websites in the U.S., Instant Checkmate provides people finder, public record and criminal record information to users on a subscription basis. The Control Group, which markets its Instacheck service through a variety of digital channels (search, social, email) and affiliate publishing partners, selected CAKE for Advertisers, a solution from Accelerize, to track the performance of these efforts so that its team could optimize media spend and campaign decision-making in realtime, including performance marketers.

“CAKE’s real-time tracking is giving us tremendous visibility into all of our campaigns, which is crucial from a media buying standpoint,” said Alex Brown, director of media and marketing for The Control Group. “Getting immediate insight into performance was a challenge with our old system.

Now we can launch or pause campaigns, and optimize buys based on in-the-moment information.”

CAKE’s affiliate management and reporting features are also allowing The Control Group to provide performance updates for its publisher partners, who can log in to the platform to launch pixels and view their statistics at any time. These capabilities are freeing the company’s affiliate management team from having to manually create reports and provide them to publishers.

“Businesses using a multi-channel strategy to drive traffic to their sites need an accurate way to track what’s working and what’s not,” said Santi Pierini, CAKE president and chief operating officer of Accelerize.“CAKE helps advertisers like The Control Group identify both the best and least successful performers so that they can improve on directing spend to the sources that drive the most profitable results.”

Monetization Opportunities As app developers continue having a difficult time monetizing their user base, some interesting technologies are finally beginning to gain some traction.

Performance advertising network Adscend Media, for example, recently released an offer-wall solution that offers publishers an opportunity to provide users an ad-sponsored alternative to paying for virtual goods, services and perks, which is ideal for game developers but in effect could really be used for any digital initiative.

The rewards-based system, known as AdWall, allows users to complete advertiser offers in order to earn credits.

Each offer that a user completes also earns the publisher a commission. Earned credits can be redeemed for virtual goods from a publisher, such as in-app/in-game items, virtual currency, perks, account upgrades, games and other virtual rewards, according to the company. AdWall technology tracks user credit history and progress toward virtual rewards.

Often, completing offers in order to earn rewards requires no financial commitment from the user.

Hard Launch There comes a time in the digital life of affiliate marketers when the research is complete, the testing is done, and the momentum is moving in their direction. You have two choices at this point - give up (and waste the investment of time and money you’ve made) or start launching full tilt. The “hard-launch” is when you start promoting your product full force - with strategically placed content and advertising of your own, raising interest and generating awareness of your prospective audience. There is no shortage of opportunities to gain exposure, particularly if you’ve invested the necessary resources in creating a brand or product that demands the attention of users.

Pursue Engagement With website traffic finally arriving, there are a whole series of steps that marketers can take to drive engagement. The aim is not just conversion (the strongest indicator of engagement), of course, but also loyalty - how often they turn again toward your brand with the hope of satisfying their demands. The best way to establish loyalty today is to collaborate with users, establishing a community around those interests and passions. When users are more comfortable, in a digital setting they are familiar with, opportunities for soliciting a conversion increase dramatically.

Adscend Media CEO Fehzan Ali promises easy configuration and deployment of AdWall for publishers, thanks to one-click setup, a simple customization wizard and automatic geo-targeting - with support for desktop and mobile offers.

“We have seen user interaction with our high-engagement ads be a powerful force in generating strong leads in our previous content monetization products, and we expect AdWall to be able to quickly generate quality leads for our advertising partners as well,” stated Ali. There are, of course, numerous other offer-wall technology providers. Some of the most popular vendors on the market today include TapJoy, Everbadge, TrialPay, NativeX, SuperRewards and Fyber (formerly Sponsorpay).

Get Rich Quick Affiliate marketing is an important part of the digital ecosystem, and in many ways, the Web is a perfect environment for the practice. The art and science of performance marketing is changing, however, and you need a practical guide and industry insights to make “get rich quick” happen.

Email

EXPERIENCE Enterprise Email Marketing:

Make Powerful Waves with Your Ocean of Data

By EJ McGowan, General Manager of Campaigner

Time and again email marketing has proven to be the leading source of ROI among all outbound marketing outreach. It is the fastest and most effective way to reach the widest audience in a targeted manner.

BOOST YOUR OPEN & CLICKTHROUGH RATE Discover established and emerging tactics that leading digital marketers are leveraging to boost their open rates and click-through rates at

wsm.co/orctrboost

Enterprises, on the other hand, often have multiple lists consisting of millions of contacts (if not more), making the ability to establish personalization significantly harder.

For this reason, enterprise marketers tend to leverage email strategies for a consistent brand image across marketing channels. However, if enterprise email marketers can add even small aspects of personalization to their campaigns, they will reap the benefits of customer loyalty coupled with widespread outreach, ultimately increasing ROI. And, the good news is that enterprise marketers can do this by leveraging a lucrative asset that’s already in their arsenal: data.

The Data Advantage

Often, however, it is believed that email marketing best practices are designed predominantly for small and medium businesses (SMBs), when in fact they could be significant assets for enterprise marketers as well. The big difference lies within the “how” and “why.”

SMBs typically focus more on email marketing because it’s easy to manage, requiring low overhead and little expertise. Further, since SMBs tend to have smaller list sizes, they have a greater ability to personalize and target email strategies to yield better results. Among enterprises, contact lists can reach into the millions or even multi-millions, and the personalized, targeted approach becomes increasingly more difficult to achieve. Despite this personalization challenge, enterprise email marketers have the powerful advantage of data.

Data plays a central role in any email campaign by offering key insights to execute a targeted strategy. By providing a look into previous user behavior such as open times and email interaction, marketers can leverage data to tweak existing campaigns and meet personalized preferences.

This is where enterprise marketers can shine: as the list of contact targets increases, the amount of data automatically stored and available increases as well, meaning that enterprise marketers have a significantly large amount of data to leverage for targeted campaigns.

Small businesses typically analyze data around individual contacts in order to personalize messages. However, for an enterprise with millions of contacts, this task could be incredibly daunting. Instead, enterprise marketers should invest more time analyzing their data to identify user and industry trends. Are overall clicks increasing or declining? Are users generally opening more in the morning or afternoon? By monitoring the pulse of these trends, enterprise marketers can implement small improvements in open rates or click-through rates that truly affect their bottom lines.

The Personalization Challenge

Integrate for an Added Advantage

The key to any successful email campaign is for marketers to add an individual touch that entices contacts to open their brand’s email and click-through toward the path-to-purchase. Blanket emails using the “spray-andpray” method are not effective with modern consumers.

What is effective is proving value to contacts; knowing who they are, what they need, and moreover, what they want to see in their inbox. For corporate marketers, it’s important to personalize email content and subject lines in order to establish an intimate relationship with recipients and ultimately build brand and customer loyalty.

Personalization is where small businesses have the clear advantage. With a smaller set of contacts in their database, SMBs have closer access to each individual user so they’re able to hone in on preferences and execute personalized campaigns.

Enterprises are much more likely to have multiple systems that are fully integrated, which provides an opportunity to collect even more data and increase levels of personalization. By integrating email marketing with services like Magento, Salesforce, and other software or solutions, enterprise marketers can directly analyze data from website interaction, path-to-purchase and inventory patterns. This insight can then be used to better alter a campaign and encourage user interaction.

Enterprise-Level Results Email marketing can be a significant source of ROI for businesses of all sizes. Though email marketing best practices have often been associated with small business tactics, the tides are shifting. Enterprise marketers cannot afford to ignore the ocean of data at their disposal.

Conversion

CORNER

A Plan for Startups

A Conversion-First Approach for New Enterprises

By Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners

Startup businesses face countless challenges, with a huge percentage failing altogether in the first year.

There is one area, however, in which new businesses have a distinct advantage over their more established competitors, and that is in creating a highly effective website that is centered on conversion optimization from the get-go.

Without the shackles of “we’ve always done it this way” thinking, new businesses are free to approach the creation of their website with a conversion-first mentality. Here’s a checklist for creating a new business website that has conversion baked in from the start.

1. Have a company-wide commitment to conversion In order to create a conversion-centric website, the company itself must make continuous conversion optimization a priority. This means that from the top leadership down, there must be an understanding that the website supports business objectives, and making the website function more efficiently is job number one.

Having an organizational commitment to conversion means that the departmental structure, budgets and decision making all allow for a culture of testing and course

correction. Flexibility and collaboration are key. The website is put under the direct responsibility of marketing, but the IT department knows to prioritize website-related requests and works in partnership with marketing rather than as a separate silo. What’s more, management doesn’t try to force design or functionality decisions based on their personal style preferences. Everyone in the organization understands that they need to put their egos aside in order to be hyper-focused on their prospective website visitors (and eventual customers).

2. Build an infrastructure that supports conversion In addition to building a collaborative cross-functional Web team that isn’t divided by departmental barriers, one of the best things a new startup can do to ensure their website is conversion-centric is to build the site on a flexible content management system that will not only make it fast and easy to make changes, but will also allow for rapid deployment of tests, accurate and efficient data collection and continuous improvement (see sidebar).

Of course, the content management system is just the front-end of the website equation. Since conversion optimization involves an entire purchase journey, it’s critical to connect back-end systems like a customer relationship management tool or third-party shopping cart to the web-

site. Doing so will allow for much more meaningful data collection and tracking once the site is launched.

improvement because they have more reliable visibility into exactly what their visitors are doing.

3. Approach the website project from the perspective of the intended visitors

5. Segment visitors and personalize wherever possible

Everyone wants to start with the design, which is the exact wrong approach when creating a conversion-centric website. When companies start with design it is usually because someone in the organization has their mind set on adapting a trendy new design style -- regardless of what might be best for the intended website users -- to reflect how modern and hip the company is.

One of the biggest mistakes made by new startups is not aligning their website (and marketing in general) with the needs/wants/motivations of their prospective customers. Before any design work or even wireframes are started, exhaustive research should be done to understand the specific roles and goals of the people who will be visiting the site. What need or “pain” is motivating them to visit the site and seek out a solution?

How do they describe this? What sequence of events or circumstances generally precede or cause this pain?

Understanding their terminology and thought process is an important first step to ensuring that the site is designed to be completely intuitive.

Developing user scenarios is an excellent way to ensure that a site is designed to support visitors in accomplishing their goal (conversion). User scenarios look not just at what a visitor is trying to accomplish (the goal), but also at his or her motivations, abilities, desires and fears (his or her role). Knowing the roles and goals of intended visitors is critical to designing a website with a clear and obvious conversion funnel.

The key is to build the website to deliver a personalized experienced for every user, based on what is known about them. Even new visitors have some “data” attached to them, such as their geographic location and what device they’re using. Make some assumptions about what the goals and intentions of different segments of users will be, and customize the content and conversion path accordingly. Once the site is launched, other more meaningful segments may emerge (based on traffic source and other variables). Continuously look at how visitors are interacting with the site and attempt to understand the differences in traffic segments.

Segmenting different visitor groups will also be important when it comes to remarketing, as only a small fraction of new visitors will be ready to convert on their first visit. Especially for a startup, retargeting every visitor with a generic ad is likely to eat away a significant amount of budget. Rather, segmenting visitors based on what pages they viewed on the site or how far they got in the purchase process, and then placing a retargeting pixel according to these specific characteristics, will allow a company to be much more effective in both ad messaging and placement on ad distribution networks.

4. Measure everything from the beginning In order for optimization to be a priority, the right metrics need to be consistently and accurately tracked.

Don’t even think of going live until analytics have been installed, customized and tested.

Part of this process is setting up specific website goals that support companywide strategies. Ensure that every action that is considered part of the conversion path is measurable, so that when the site launches it is easy to track success toward those goals and make adjustments as necessary.

Companies that spend time setting up their analytics properly are able to see opportunities for optimization that might not otherwise be apparent. They might notice specific segments of people converting at a higher rate than others, identify a page or pages that seem to figure prominently in most visits that convert, or see nonsensical visit paths that highlight friction in the conversion path. The bottom line is, companies that measure everything have more opportunities for

6. Take a cross-device approach Perhaps one of the biggest advantages a startup has in building a new conversion-centric website from the ground up is its ability to take a cross-device approach from the beginning. While established companies are still trying to figure out the right solution for stripping down and streamlining their clunky desktop websites to suit the browsing needs of mobile visitors, startups have the enviable opportunity to take a multi-device approach from the start. This means they can create a design solution that is highly focused on usability and continuity for all visitors regardless of what screen size they are viewing the site from. Further, they can test the usability of their site pre-launch using high-fidelity mockups or even a beta site, ensuring that on all devices visitors find it easy and intuitive to navigate the site, find what they are looking for, complete forms and even submit an order.

This provides startups the ability to clean up functional problems, remove friction and begin the neverending process of optimization even before the first “real” visitor hits the site.

Tim Ash is the CEO of SiteTuners, Chair of Conversion Conference and bestselling author of “Landing Page Optimization.”

Choosing Your ConversionFirst CMS Evaluate five content management systems at

wsm.co/fivecms

Insights on

ANALYTICS

What’s Important in Website Analytics

By Amir Glatt, Duda Co-Founder & CTO

There’s no doubt that we live in the data era. Today, nearly everything we do online is trackable.

A. The Gladly’s website

data indicates the majority of its site visitors are new, proving the importance of its website in converting Web users to restaurant patrons.

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Even more importantly, new analytics tools appear every day to crunch this data and provide marketers and businesses with insights we simply didn’t have in the past.

In the business world, companies that base decisions on data are more successful than those that do not. The culture inside the most successful companies in the world, like Google and Amazon, is data driven, and decisions are usually made based on what the numbers say rather than what the most senior person in the room thinks.

With the enormous amount of data that is now collected and crunched comes a new type of problem for businesses: How do you determine what’s important and what’s not? Internet professionals can spend hours, days even, looking at different metrics and stats but what should savvy Web workers focus on?

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Although all data is relevant in certain ways, the most important data, the figures which should draw the most attention from marketers (and the like), is the data that they can take actions on. If they want to discover something about their websites, but can’t do anything about it, it’s probably not worth their time.

Let’s look at the website statistics of a typical small business to demonstrate the difference between actionable data and excess analytics.

The business we will use in this article is a Phoenix-based restaurant called “The Gladly.” As a restaurant, the main goal of its site is to drive new reservations, provide people with the information they need to make a dining decision and position the restaurant as a place people would like to visit again and again.

The Essentials Image A provides a glimpse of The Gladly’s actual website data as captured by Google Analytics. This kind of basic information is important for providing a general understanding of the website’s overall performance. How many potential customers interact with this website? How soon do they leave the website?

How many of them are new or previous visitors? Is the trend negative or positive? The most important insights we can gain from looking at this dashboard is the number of overall visits as it tells us whether or not the website, in its current form, is an important customer acquisition tool.

The bounce rate will tell us if people find what they’re looking for when visiting the site. If the

B.

With 47 percent of website visitors accessing its site on their mobile phones, The Gladly knows the importance of a devicecompatible website.

bounce rate is low, it’s a good sign. If it’s high, it means the website’s content (or the layout/structure) should be improved, since people who landed on the site tend to leave without taking any action. A 27 percent bounce rate is considered very good in most cases.

Device Details One of the most important insights Web professionals can gather is on the devices used by visitors in order to ensure they are provided with the best possible experience. In The Gladly’s case, 47 percent of site visitors are coming from a mobile device so it’s very important that the restaurants audience is not walking into a UX nightmare (see Image B).

Traffic Sources There is a great deal of actionable information a website can extract from the traffic sources reported in its analytics. For example, as illustrated in Image C, it appears that 47 percent of the website traffic is coming from Google search, which indicates the site’s SEO initiatives are effective and working well. Going down the list, we can also see 6 percent of visitors are coming from Yelp. Traffic coming from the local business review site generally indicates a high level of visitor interest in a business and there are a few ways The Gladly can take advantage of this information. For example, the restaurant could attempt to get more traffic from Yelp by buying a premium package or perhaps can convince (or incentivize) more people to write positive reviews on the platform to raise even more awareness and thus get more visits. Analyzing traffic sources can help enterprises better understand which channels are the most successful and determine where they need a greater investment in outbound marketing efforts.

Information Organization & Optimization Knowing which pages receive the most activity (visits, pageviews, etc.) is useful in optimizing the user

experience as it enables enterprises to prioritize information that is in demand. In Google Analytics, companies can see which pages get the most views (e.g. thegladly.com/dinner, thegladly.com/contact, etc.). It is important to consider if there is important information on lower traffic pages that should be made more accessible to users. For example, if a large percentage of traffic is going to the contact page, moving a business’s address to the homepage may benefit visitors, particularly those using mobile devices.

C. With 47 percent of its traffic coming from Google search, The Gladly can be confident its SEO initiatives are working.

Goals, Events & Actions Companies can use different techniques to track important actions taken on a website in order to discover the difference between first-time visitors and regular or repeat customers. For example, The Gladly sends events to Google Analytics when a visitor makes a reservation using OpenTable.

What is important about tracking this type of data is that it can help companies understand the actual dollar value of a website visitor, and further, determine an appropriate online marketing budget.

Sound complicated? It’s actually not. Let’s assume that someone who reserves a table is worth $30 in profit to the restaurant, and 1 percent of visitors reserve a table. In that case, a website visitor is worth $30 for every 100. Therefore, if we can advertise on different platforms, like Google, for less than $0.30, this acquisition activity would be a profitable one for this business.

Data that can help make decisions depends heavily on the business, the situation and the goals. Try to focus on 5-10 things that matter the most and concentrate on them since, as we already discussed, there’s just so much data and so little time.

Bounce Rate Too High?

Tip: Ask website visitors to answer a few questions when they leave to get a better understanding of why. See other ways to gather design feedback at

wsm.co/desfeedback15

Software

EVERYWHERE

Don’t Underestimate the Role Player An Evaluation of Screen Capture Tools for the Modern Web Professional

By Derek Schou, Associate Editor

Brands have numerous digital tools that they can leverage. While performing screen or video captures may not be the MVP of the collection, or even in the starting lineup, few technologies are as reliable or effective a role player as these solutions.

These tools enable users to take a screenshot (or record video in some instances) directly from their computer screens. Capturing digital content of this nature can be incredibly useful, providing Web design teams a powerful resource to review and collaborate on their work or marketers the ability to add context and support to their content.

Below is a list of six screen capturing tools, which Web pros can leverage for a variety of purposes.

Screenpresso ($0-$1,490) One of the most interesting features from Screenpresso is that brands are able to capture scrolling Web pages in images by creating a unique sequence by using the stitching feature. Another useful aspect of the tool is the ability to convert captured images into a universally viewable PDF. (Screenpresso screenshot)

Camtasia (PC $299, Mac $99)

(TinyTake Screenshot)

More than just a screen recording tool, Camtasia is also a powerful video editing platform. Brands that choose to leverage this tool will not only be able to record activities on their own computer screen, but they will also be able to import video from another source. One of the most interesting and useful features of Camtasia is its mobile app, which can be used to upload

videos that require editing. Once users are finished with their videos they can then share them on YouTube, Google Drive, Facebook and other popular outlets.

TinyTake (Free) With a variety of capabilities available for users to leverage, TinyTake is a full-featured image and video capturing software for Microsoft Windows. One of the most important and useful tools that TinyTake offers is the ability to annotate and mark up images that the user captured. Thanks to this feature, along with its shareability, users can utilize TinyTake as an integral tool in their review process.

Movavi Screen Capture Studio ($39.95-$99.95) One of many products in the Movavi suite of products, its Screen Capture Studio offers brands a variety of enhanced features, including the ability to record demonstrations. The screen capturing tool enables users to include the keyboard controls for every action they commit during the video and they can even highlight the cursor so viewers can easily follow their actions.

Voila ($29.99) Exclusively for Macs, Voila is a comprehensive image and screen recording tool which comes with a vast array of features. Among the features available are a collection of editing tools (spotlight, crop, skew, filter, blur, eraser, etc.) which users can leverage to make both small- and large-scale changes to their screen captures.

PicPick ($8.99-$21.99) A comprehensive image capturing tool, PicPick offers brands a wide variety of features with an easy-to-use layout. Through PicPick, Web pros can use a variety of screen capture features, including the ability to capture active and scrolling windows, as well as the ability to edit screen captures for things like brightness and saturation levels. Moreover, PicPick enables brands to share and store their screen captures on a variety of channels and platforms including Facebook, email, Box and Skype.

Take Your Shot While screen captures may never be the Michael Jordan of technologies, they are a valuable asset for any Web professional and can play a crucial role in a brand’s winning strategy.

WEBSITE MAGAZINE

IN YOUR INBOX Subscribe for our channel-focused weekly newsletters at wsm.co/email15 Sign up for one (or all) of our weekly newsletters, choose from e-commerce, search, social, design and dev, and our industry trends news. It’s as easy as entering your email address!

YEARS

Local

MATTERS

Local Listings:

Stop Overthinking It

By Kelly Meeneghan Peters, Manager at 1&1 Internet, Inc.

When consumers hear of a business but cannot recall the domain name or address, what do they do? Simple, they Google it.

Long gone are the days of those heavy phone books, which are now often better used as door stops and step stools. Google My Business (formally known as Google Places), Bing and the online YellowPages now rank among some of the most popular online channels leveraged by consumers to find local businesses. While many are aware of these outlets, taking steps to get listed and maintain an accurate representation is frequently neglected.

Often an unknown territory for many professionals, crossing the starting line and finding the time to dedicate to the activity presents a stressful situation, because they are overthinking how consumers access information and how that information needs to be presented. When, in reality, there are strategies, tools and steps that simplify the process. By staying focused and working efficiently, business owners are much less likely to be overwhelmed.

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Primary Evaluation While physical businesses, like retail stores and restaurants, may see a larger benefit to obtaining listings in online directories, the strategy contributes to increased online and offline traffic for all types of companies. To start simplifying their approach to local listings, brands should identify which platforms are best for their business to make the time and monetary investment worthwhile.

Responsible for 68 percent of U.S. search queries (according to comScore, 2014), Google should be the highest priority for all businesses. Strategically placed keywords alone are not enough to influence search rankings however; increased visibility can only be achieved by embracing all of Google’s services. By getting listed on Google Places, businesses can dramatically increase the likelihood their listing will be found by customers across Google’s properties, including Search, Google+ and Maps – whether at home or on-the-go.

Some other directories to consider include Bing, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, MapQuest, MerchantCircle, YellowPages.com and Yahoo. For a list of essential local directories, visit wsm.co/listlocally.

Data Collection Business owners should think about the various individual elements of a listing and compile them into one location or document. First, the primary avenues for contact should be identified: physical location, phone numbers (main office line, customer service and technical support), business hours and domain name.

Next, some directories (like Facebook) will allow for accompanying visuals. As one of the most powerful tools on the Internet, static images and videos should be leveraged whenever possible to better attract and engage consumers. Corporate logos or a photo of the facility are often common options for listings. If the directory allows for more than one image or a video, including a variety of images is a smart move.

If allowed, regularly contributing fresh and rich content can also improve the value of the listing (although social networks are likely the only ones that allow this). Mentions of current and upcoming promotions and sales can be integrated into the listing during a designated time period (when the offer starts and ends). Having all of these details assembled in one document will help speed up the entire submission process.

Inclusion and Consistency Each directory exercises a different process for getting listed. Some require an application verification process, while others allow details to be submitted and published immediately. With so many different options, it often requires quite a bit of time on a marketer’s or business owner’s part to ensure every listing is comprehensive and accurate.

To streamline the local listing process and safeguard against inconsistent information, there are tools available on the market that allow users to input business data once in a centralized location. These systems then distribute the information to various directories for publishing. By managing all listings from one single platform, users can update the listing once (for example new hours or promotions) and changes are simultaneously pushed out to every directory in the database.

Once submitted to the directory, the job is not complete. In fact, it is never complete. Often, free list-

“

“

With so many listings available through search engines, review sites, mapping services and social networks, it becomes a challenge to not only remember them all but also to ensure all content is consistent.

ings can be edited by the directories themselves or, worse, competitors. With so many listings available through search engines, review sites, mapping services and social networks, it becomes a challenge to not only remember them all but also to ensure all content is consistent. Management tools (see sidebar) can help businesses ensure all their company data is not only accurate, but also consistent across platform.

Response Management Word of mouth remains one of the biggest influencers of purchasing decisions. If a friend, colleague or even stranger speaks highly of an experience, the general consumer trusts his or her word over that of a company’s marketing message. Possessing so much impact, nearly every listing directory is now making reviews a part of their platform. While positive reviews are of great value to a business, it is important to remember that the public platform leaves the company vulnerable to negative comments. This potentially harmful feedback cannot be controlled or deleted by the business (on most platforms), but it can be defused if responded to immediately and correctly. Illustrating concern, making a sincere apology and taking initiative to resolve the issue will speak volumes to both the displeased customer as well as potential customers reading the comments and reviews. Ignoring the situation, on the other hand, can convey a lack of care for customers.

What’s more, search engines include local online listings within their search results. By being listed, the business can communicate that they are a real, genuine business – traits which search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo value in determining the best search results.

What Will They See? With the majority of mobile searches having local intent, it’s more important than ever for businesses of all sizes to ensure the information that is delivered to potential buyers is accurate and consistent. While it doesn’t need to be overwhelming, managing the basics of local listings can make a company seem more trustworthy and accessible to the average consumer.

Local Listing Management Tools Discover which platforms make updating local listings a breeze at

wsm.co/localgoto

Web

COMMENTARY

How & Where to Invest...

Your Time That Is

By Amberly Dressler, Managing Editor

Regardless of how one uses it or stretches it, each of us only gets 24 hours to spend a day. For those counting, that’s 1,440 minutes to get everything done, all the need-to and want-to items on our to-do lists. If we let them, our commitments could be in constant conflict.

STOP WASTING TIME! Make your minutes count by checking out this list of time management and time tracking tools at

wsm.co/bettertm

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The topic lends itself naturally to countless articles and studies (ranging from how to balance and/or separate “life” and “work” to the impact of stress on our mental and physical well-being). Regardless of the source, the premise is usually the same: being a professional (or grown-up for that matter) is tough. The good news is that you care enough to give it your best shot.

Managing where we spend our time – on projects, on learning, on relationships, on ourselves – is one of the most important decisions we make and lessons we learn (and likely re-learn). As someone in the somewhat (it’s all relative) early stages of understanding the difficulties of managing a (fortunately) full life, it’s becoming clear that compromises must be made and life hacks must be found.

Budgeting time is similar to robbing Peter to pay Paul – time has to be taken from one source to use it toward another. Time can be certainly be manipulated, but can never be created. In personal lives, this could mean when parents go out with friends, they are investing in important relationships (and their sanity), but also taking time away from the kids. They may make it up to their children with a special outing or something that then takes the parent away from the errands or chores that need to be completed. This example could be spun a million different ways to fit anyone’s situation (think of working on the weekends means neglecting housekeeping, etc.), as priorities must be constantly given and shifted.

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Everyone has their own priorities, compromises and even life hacks to manage it all, but when it comes to website management there are sources to help dictate where to invest one’s time.

In this month’s Insights on Analytics column (page 34), Duda Co-Founder and CTO Amir Glatt talks about the importance of spending time analyzing data that can be acted on, like traffic sources for instance. If a large percentage of website traffic is coming from a niche blog, let’s say, that’s a relationship that needs to be nourished – no doubt a valuable use of time. If only life had such telling metrics! Then again, the time still has to come from somewhere, which is when priorities must be given and shifted.

This could lead to a conversation about time management or tracking tools (see sidebar), but prioritizing is more personal than that. Prioritizing requires human intervention. Deadlines are certainly something that can be set, recorded and be automatically reminded of (simple calendars do that), but there are also different “human” expectations for projects.

Person A expects a quick response, while Person B trusts “its” coming or similarly, Person A prioritizes this project lower than Person B prioritizes theirs.

These expectations might not impact a company’s bottom line (so apps or software may prioritize them differently), but Web professionals have their hands in many pots, which means they alone need to assign value to each.

There isn’t an answer to it all, but rather a realization that while data helps, we must trust our hardworking peers and ourselves to prioritize – and that takes a significant amount of trial, error and, unfortunately, patience – that’s not to say, however, that training wheels don’t help (time trackers, deadlines, lists, weekly updates, etc.).

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