Ready To Advertise Your Website, Wait, Do This First.
Posted in Getting Your Feet Wet, Optimize And Monetize, WebMaster by DB
Your site is finally ready and you can’t wait to launch it. Before you go ahead and sign up to spend major advertising dollars it might be worthwhile to do a quick sticky check, especially if your revenue generation model is to sell ads. The big question is will your website cut it? Does it have a good enough design and content to keep a visitor hooked? This is especially true for blogs because a blog is all about content and less about features/functionality.
Asking friends or relatives for feedback is the first step but this alone is simply not good enough, your friends or relatives are too close to give you objective feedback. What you need is a complete stranger looking at your website in an as real as it can get atmosphere. What’s the best way to do this? Why, StumbleUpon ofcourse.
This is what you do.
First, sign up with a good website analytics provider. It is important that you find one that gives you real time statistics. Using Google Analytics, every webmaster’s favorite is not my preferred option. I’m a little wary about how much data I feed Google about my website statistics. Personally, I’m not a fan of their UI design for Google Analytics. Don’t get me wrong, the UI is clean and intuitive but not functionally efficient, way too many clicks to get to the information that I need.
My preferred choice of traffic analytic software or service currently in the market is Clicky Web Analytics. I have used all the popular tracking software from Mint to SiteMeter to StatCounter. Clicky simply has far more features and does a much better job of it. Clicky has a free option as well and for the first 21 days you have access to all the features of the paid version.
Next, sign up with Stumble Upon for an advertiser account. This process is simple and straight forward. Once you are signed in, proceed to “Create a Campaign”. Select the interest group that best defines your website and you are ready to go. You will need to wait till the campaign is approved which should be pretty quick (except if you do it over the weekend). In the meantime, load your account with money. (It costs 5 cents for every visitor to your site) and finally set the daily maximum to a 100 visitors.
Kick off your campaign and in the next 20 - 30 minutes you will see a deluge of visitors to your website. The Clicky “Spy” feature gives you an almost real time (delayed by one min) view of all actions performed on your site. It’s all Ajax, so there is no need to hit the refresh button. Just sit back and watch the action on the monitor, trust me it makes for good viewing.
I’m digressing, back to the statistics. What we are most interested in seeing is the “Bounce Rate” figures. If you have 100 visitors to your site and all of them leave without clicking on any other link, then the bounce rate is a 100%. Obviously the goal is to get that number to as low a number as possible. If your website provides a service, then you might be more interested in finding out the conversion rate. Is your landing page good enough? Do I need to rework my squeeze page? Your campaign will pause automatically once the daily maximum of 100 visitors is reached which should be in about 30 minutes.
What now? It’s back to the discussion room and time to go through the logs and analyze the data. Ask hard questions. Is the UI Design not good enough? Is the UI not intuitive enough? How do we reduce the bounce rate? Is my landing page too plain? Do I need to spice it up a little? Maybe include a video or pictures to make it more appealing. Why can’t I get more clicks? Is the content badly written? Is the page layout way off? Am I conveying the site intentions clearly?
Make subtle changes and run the campaign again for another 100 visitors. Were there any improvements? If not, make more subtle changes and repeat till you find the bounce rate or any other parameter that you are interested changing in your favor. Only when you see more conversions or a better response to your website in general is it time to start advertising. Take this approach and you will save many months of throwing your advertising budget down the drain before you catch on and optimize your site.
The combination of Clicky and StumbleUpon is a powerful combination and must be used to its fullest potential. Use it, learn from it and optimize your website for increased retention and conversion. It isn’t often that you get a chance to increase the ROI of your ad campaign even before you start it.
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