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UT System Seminar Takeaways

Posted by  on Monday, March 8th 2010     

Carmella Magnes (@luvROI) works with the wonderful team at St. Ed’s and spoke about the shift to left brained, or more quantitative, marketing.

Are you right or left brained? Take this test to find out.

  • it’s not how creative you can be, it’s how you can help my business
  • from ‘how to spend X?’ to ‘how little can I spend?’
  • moving segments through a cycle to an action
  • from parallel efforts to complimentary synergies
  • the Web has become an ala cart buffet (that give heartburn)
  • better to have a gourmet selection
  • effective strategies require
    • a 30K ft view
    • channel blindness
    • segmentation
  • we’re not good at marketing marketers
  • define KPIs! The KPI funnel:
    • leads
    • qualified leads
    • prospects
    • yield
  • the new left brained tactics: SEO, SEM, SMM
  • alt tags: honey to Google’s bees
    • not just for accessibility
    • tag every photo and graphic
    • avoid being too literal
    • use your keywords
    • write as sales message

St. Ed’s crafted a social media policy in 18 mos. with a comitte of 8-12 which had to address

  • personal v professional distinctions
  • ‘outside site’ surfing hr policies updated

She highly recommends the book The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Her synopsis.

  1. Always have at least one measurable
  2. Translate to business results
  3. Project results forward
  4. Seek champions
  5. (I didn’t write it down, doh!)
category: Development, Policy, Social Media, Strategies, Tips and Tricks, Tracking

What Are Bounces?

Posted by  on Monday, February 16th 2009     

Basically, bounces are visitors who don’t do anything except go to your page and leave, or ‘bounce’ somewhere else. They may scroll up and down, look at all you pictures and read every word you post, but they don’t click on anything or otherwise leave any digital trace of having been engaged.

A key concept that Google ties into the analytics interface is that of ‘conversions.’ The idea is that Web pages are meant to ‘convert’ the user to take some action, ie. click on a link, sign-up, log-in, buy, etc. This is an extremely helpful concept we would all do well to employ to make our pages usable and interactive, but in the case of a long news/blog page where our current goal is just to have people read it, we should not necessarily interpret ‘bounces’ as failures…yet. It just means they looked and left; and that we should have more concrete goals and directions for engaging our audiences. When we do, we can track these ‘conversions’ to our goals using analytics.

Here’s how Google thinks of it: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2007/06/tip-evaluate-your-sources-and-your-site.html

Here is a list of basic analytics terms and what they refer to (reposted from http://www.flyte.biz/resources/newsletters/08/08-google-analytics.php).

  • Visits: The number of visits to your site during a given time period.
  • Pageviews: The number of pages these visitors viewed.
  • Pages/Visit: The average visit in terms of page views.
  • Bounce Rate: The percentage of people who only visited one page on your site before they “bounced” somewhere else. (This can often seem deceptively high, but many people will get to your site and realize that it wasn’t what they were looking for, or you may have a popular image indexed by Google’s Image Search that generates a lot of “drive-by” traffic and skews your numbers. Alternatively, it may represent that your site is difficult to navigate or understand for new visitors.)
  • Avg. Time on Site: The average amount of time a visitor spends at your site.
  • % of New Visits: The percentage of new visitors to your site as compared to all visitors. Some businesses might want lots of new traffic, while others might want generate repeat visits, driving down this percentage.

Did this clear up what ‘bounce rate’ refers to? What other questions do you have about analytics? Please leave a comment or question.

category: Blogs, Tracking