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In Lesson 2 - Where Are My Visitors Coming From?
and Lesson 3 - Search Engines we talked a little bit
about using Goals to improve the effectiveness of referrers or search terms. Now
that you are familiar with the Goals concept and know how to use it, you can
apply it to finding qualified leads and improving the effectiveness of your
sources.
Improving Referrers
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Figure 7. The Referring Domains by Goal report
highlights referrers that send qualified traffic. |
Figure 7 shows a sample Referring Domains by Goal
report for widgetmanager.com. Assuming that the Goal has been
configured as the receipt or ‘thank you’ page for their online
store, you can see from the Goals column the most prolific referrer of visitors
who purchase at the store. We used this same example in Lesson 2, but to recap, notice how startrektrivia.co.uk
has a relatively large number of Hits, but only a few Goals. The
widgetmanager.com site is designed to look like the computer screens from Star
Trek, so it gets a good amount of traffic from the startrektrivia.co.uk site.
However, these visitors are just coming to look at the site, not to purchase,
and the Goal listing in the Referring Sites by Goal report makes this apparent.
Obviously, it is not important to sales to maintain the Star Trek look.
Notice the Goals % of Hits column shows that yahoo.com has a much higher
conversion rate than widgetsource.com, even if it refers fewer visitors. It
would be safe to assume that the Yahoo! listing the widgetmanager.com has is
well targeted to buyers. To improve the effectiveness of this listing, the
marketing manager might consider placing an advertisement or paid listing at
Yahoo! next to their listing. If she believes that Yahoo! in general will
generate more buyers, then she might choose to purchase a keyword listing for
searches too. To analyze the effects of these, she should do one at a time and
monitor the changes in Goals % of Visits for the period after the new listing or
advertisement is in place, to see if it improves or degrades the quality of the
leads.
Effective Search Terms
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Figure 8. Analyzing Search Phrases by Goal can
improve the effectiveness of search engine listings. |
Just as Goals can help qualify referrers, you can use them to determine which
search terms are getting you the most qualified visitors as well. Figure 8 shows
a sample Search Phrases by Goal report for the
widgetmanager.com web site. It is apparent (and not very surprising) that
visitors searching for “widget manager” and
“widgetmanager” rank highly by number of goals. Customers looking to
buy a widget manager or one of the widgetmanager.com products are likely to
search on those phrases. The second row, however, is interesting, because users
searching for “tool holder” are actually ranking high among
purchasers. Using this information, the site designer might choose to make
“tool holder” a more prominent key phrase in the meta-tags for pages
that relate to the widget manager product.
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Target Groups