Optimising for profit
Further to my introduction I had a great time in Chicago at the Search Engine Strategies conference.
Conference attendees included companies like ours from around North America as well as a large number of Site owners and / or managers for medium to large US corporations who were looking to improve their understanding of how to optimise their sites for profit.
Not every site being optimised has something to sell directly but everyone should have a measure of what profit means for their site.
How do you optimise for profit?
One of the terms used a lot in Search Engine Marketing and Stratgey sessions for web site development is ‘conversions’. A conversion is whereby you ‘convert’ a site visitor into someone who does something on your site you would like them to do. eg. purchase a product, make an online inquiry - or even phone you.
Like the analysis of any sales process this leads to discussions about the metrics of conversion - how many leads to a conversion.
Or in web speak how many unique visitors as a ratio to inquiries or sales. And from this comes a ratio for seeing how conversions improve or decline over time. Further to this is how we review Search Engine Marketing activities and the resulting traffic and conversions.
So if we are running a ‘Pay Per Click’ campaign for your site there are a number of measurements involved in seeing how successful this campaign is. The exciting thing about online marketing is that the measurements are in real time and mean something very real. We know the traffic and we know how many bought or converted. No more ‘Smoke and Mirrors’!
So working on improving conversions, means first determining what your conversions are, how they should occur, all things working correctly, and then improving them over time. Is it that simple? Well yes it is to a large degree. Of course to get it right requires time and some knowledge.
Of all the interesting thoughts about Search Engine Optimising and Marketing the whole process of analysing and managing the site’s performance is something more and more businesses are prepared to pay for as this is how they differentiate themselves online versus competitors. There were at least 5 sessions on Analytics in some form or another during the week.
Maturity in the business community about online performance helps. Marketing managers now are not just looking for impressions or click through improvement, they are now realising that quality is as important as quantity and are looking for help in how best to get improvements in click quality as well as conversions.
In 2007 ireckon will be offering a broader range of services in this area in a way that allows you to easily understand the differences between the supposed ‘black magic’ of search engines and optimisation.
We have been optimising sites since before Google even existed and the overall strategies have not completely changed, now there is just a lot more to it and a much bigger market of potential customers on the web. Additionally PPC campaigns did not even really exist way back then, and now they are an integral part of serious business promotion.
It really now is not why should I be online, but how can I optimise my site for more profit!
Watch this space!
[dk]