Transcript: What is the purpose of a website? How do I know if what I’m doing is working? And what key indicators should I be paying attention to? I’ll answer these questions and more coming up!Hi there I’m Greg Sargent and this is the Squarespace Guru show! On this show we talk about everything you need to know to create a profitable online presence. News, tips, tricks, but more importantly we talk about what to do with the tools Squarespace has created for us. It is Wednesday November 5th 2014, and I have a very good show lined up for you today. I hope everyone has taken their parent candy tax as well as survived the post Halloween toddler sugar tantrums. We’ve had a few throw-downs with my 2 year old, and it has not been fun. This was the first year my kids really got to go trick or treating, the past few years we’ve lived in areas that just didn’t do it for some reason. But here in Frisco Texas, this is a family paradise where nearly every household has a few kids. Lot’s of fun. I love this time of year, but the only thing I’m not so crazy about is getting sick. I apologize if I sound like Steve Urkel today, my sinuses hate me today.Just a reminder you can get new episodes of the Squarespace Guru show on Wednesdays afternoons usually by 4 o'clock central time. Just subscribe through iTunes or any podcast app of choice, and you can also listen to the show directly from the website. Just go to squarespace guru dot com and click the podcast tab at the top. Squarespace recently updated the audio block, which is what I use to upload the show to the site...and it allows you to now download the audio file! So if you are heading out for a trip and you’ll be without internet access, just download a few shows and kick back and listen. I try to keep the show very low key and relaxed without a lot of extreme personality. My wife listened to an episode recently and said that I sound like I’m falling asleep and that I should be more bubbly. Spouses they are always looking for opportunities to teach aren’t they? I really can’t stand the podcasts where the hosts are trying so hard to be cool and funny...but really just kind of end up being obnoxious. So I try hard not to do that.Alright Squarespace news, well the same handful of articles talking about version 7 are still making the rounds. Squarespace is still ramping up it’s tools to compete with Wordpress apparently. Which by the way I do not agree with, Squarespace is not competing with Wordpress. As far as the web design tools market, sure Squarespace and Wordpress want the same people, but the cool guys and gals up at Squarespace’s headquarters in New York aren’t sitting around a table saying “Oh we need to implement this new tool or feature so we can compete with Wordpress better.” No nobody is saying that. Instead they are saying “You know what, I think this feature is something businesses need, let’s build it.And as a result, we have an awesome platform to build our websites on. But what good does an awesome website that no one ever sees? Or that motivates no one to action?This is our topic today.By the end of this episode I hope you walk away with these three questions burned in that section of your brain devoted to thinking about your online presence.What is the purpose of the website?How do I know what I’m doing is working?What key indicators should I be paying attention to?Now, doing stuff to build your online presence should not be approached in the same way as say a direct response marketing campaign. When I worked with Chick-fil-A Marketing, I was reporting on some great numbers from the previous quarter and one of the local store operators condescendingly said “Well that’s great and all, but how many chicken sandwiches did we sell as a result?” Now if you hear that question and think it’s reasonable...you need to change they way you think and approach your website and overall online presence. Why? Because it doesn’t work that way.If you print those rectangular glossy mailers with some sort of coupon on it, and mail it out to everyone in your city...it’s super easy to measure the return on investment on that campaign. If the cost of designing, printing and mailing the mailers was $1,000, and as a result you had 200 customers come in to your business and use the coupon and spent $10, then the ROI is easy to measure. You turned a $1000 investment into a $2,000 return. It’s just math at that point.Building an online presence is not like an advertising campaign where you dump money into it and money comes flowing back in. Because the purpose of your online presence is to be discovered, and then to be trusted. Why are people so much more likely to buy Coke products than say a lesser known brand? Because Coke has built up an amazing amount of brand trust. And you can do the same thing without spending millions each year on advertising. The challenge is that it’s really easy for your audience to forget about you. So a consistent and appropriate level of infiltration is necessary. What do I mean by infiltration? Once you’ve identified where it is that your audience spends time online, you need to make sure you are there too. And do everything you can to ensure as many touches as possible can occur. Because just one touch or just one experience with a brand online typically is not enough to establish trust. You need to have multiple touches all the time. The cool thing about the internet is that you don’t necessarily have to be actively occupying the space your audience is hanging out in. You can create your content ahead of time, and do things to make sure your content is hanging out in that space.Going back to my Chick-fil-A story, most years during Thanksgiving and Black Friday, any given Chick-fil-A will sell tons of their party trays. And that particular location each year typically had around 10-15 catering orders over that weekend. After having implemented a digital marketing plan that I had set up, that location had 47 catering orders for that weekend.Now there wasn’t any mailer coupon that these orders were using, there wasn’t a promo code or anything indicating where these sales were coming from. Was it a fluke? Absolutely not, they had built up an audience online, and when it came time for that audience to buy, there was no question where they were going. Now this was not the only experience like that...and you can achieve the same type of results. But, and that’s a big but, you need to know if what you are doing is working or not.So the answer to the first question which was: What is the purpose of a website? And we answered that, which is to create an audience that trusts you. Now that’s a simplistic answer of course, you can’t build an audience with just a website, but following the digital marketing concepts we talk about you can.The next question is “How do I know what I’m doing is working?” There’s the obvious answer of lots of traffic and lots of sales...but it takes a little time before that level of success is achieved. So when you are first starting out, or when you first start implementing a digital marketing strategy, how do you know if you are on the right track?Well Squarespace has some great metrics that give you insights into how your website is performing, and while it’s not immediately obvious how to use these numbers or interpret them...I’ll break it down for you.When you first get into the metrics panel, click on traffic overview and notice the three biggest numbers. I say biggest, I don’t mean numerically I mean actual size-wise on the page. There are three large numbers just underneath the graph. These numbers are titled from left to right, Page Views, Visits and Audience Size. Now most people look at these and there eyes gloss over. Thinking in their heads ok I had 15 visits to my website today….great.”So let’s make this more meaningful for you: Audience size is the number of people who viewed your website that day or week or month however you have it sorted. So that one is very straight forward. The other aren’t as much.Visits is a little different. If someone came to your site, looked around and left, never to return...that counted as 1 visit. If someone came to your site, looked around, left and came back say an hour later or two hours later...that is counted as two visits. The same person visited two times during that day, so that is counted as two visits. This number is measured by every 30 minutes. so if someone visits, leaves and 15 minutes later visits again, it’s still only counted as 1 visit. So what you are looking for here is multiple visits from the same person.If you had an audience size of 1 and 3 visits, then you know that person has come back to your site 3 different times. When do you visit a site 3 different times without buying something or without assigning some trust to that site? So, the more visits the better.Now the third metric is pageviews. So if one visitor came to your site and looked at one page, you had one pageview. If that one visitor came to your site and looked at 10 pages, you had 10 pageviews. Here again, the more pageviews the better right? If someone looks at more than one page, you can assume you are building trust with that person. Else why would they continue to look at your site if they didn’t trust you?Two metrics Squarespace doesn’t give us is average page views per visitor and bounce rate. Two important things to know about your website as they give us an indication of the health of our website, or how valuable our audience perceives our site to be. So what I do to determine average pageviews per visitor, is I divide the number of pageviews, by the audience size and that will give you on average how many pages each person looks at. So if I had 11 thousand pageviews during a given month, and an audience size of 4 thousand, then on average each visitor looks at a little under 3 pages.Now the opposite metric is a bounce. This occurs when a visitor comes to your site and leaves without visiting another page. There’s actually a lot more to a bounce, but we won’t get into that discussion. Google views bounces as bad...they interpret a bounce to mean that the website isn’t very valuable to the visitor and doesn’t have content that visitor would want to spend time looking at. So if they look at a page, and leave without doing anything else, it’s a bounce. Squarespace doesn’t tell us our bounce rates, so we have to use Google Analytics to give us this figure. Keeping these bounce rates as low as possible will impact our ranking with Google, but in the context of this discussion the bounce rates will tell you how well your website is doing at converting a visitor to a lead or to a buyer.Now we shouldn’t expect every visitor to sign up for a newsletter, or buy something or drill down into the structure of the site every single time...but we would hope that a large percentage of visitors are doing something additional to the first initial visit.So what’s a good bounce rate? And what’s a bad bounce rate? As with many answers to digital marketing questions, it depends. But to give an answer, the average bounce rate for any given website is about 50%. A good bounce rate is 25-40% with a bad bounce rate being over 75%.So in simplistic terms, if your bounce rate is right around 40-60% your website is doing ok. And if your visitors are looking at 2-4 pages per visit, you aren’t immediately scaring them off, so this is good.Alright so we’ve answered all three questions and now you should be itching to go check out your metrics panel! I want to hear how you are doing! What are some of your numbers? What is your bounce rate? What is your average pages viewed per visit?One last thing for you, Squarespace doesn’t keep track of this stuff long term, and there’s no easy way to see just one month...so in my website planner I have a few pages just for tracking these figures. And there’s also a bunch of thought provoking questions on that planner too. Some things to get you thinking as you progress through the lifecycle of your website.Remember, an online presence is not like a traditional advertising campaign, but rather a long term effort to grow trust. So all your efforts should be geared toward increasing these handful of figures we’ve talked about.Alright that wraps up this weeks show! Thanks so much for listening, I hope I helped you get inspired to monitor those metrics and continue to grow your online presence.Don’t forget, if you want to submit a question for me to tackle during the show, send a voice message to greg@sqsp.guru using your apple device of choice. All you android peeps our there if you can fiddle with the settings enough to configure it, you can send me voice memo’s via a text message too to that address. Or just track down any iphone user and send me your question using their device.Ok, I hope you have a great rest of the week, and I’ll see you next Wednesday. I have a great episode lined up for next week. If you’ve been following the show you know that I haven’t had any guests up to this point, but next week I have a very special guest for ya. So see you then.
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