4 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Website Experience
For business owners who have never used Google Analytics, the breadth of customer data available can seem overwhelming. However, Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. It allows marketers an in-depth perspective of how people are using a company’s website, which can lead to much broader implications for branding, SEO strategies, Google AdWords strategies and homepage insights. I recently had a client who was interested in a homepage redesign. From the outset, it was clear to me that his business’s marketing team didn’t fully understand the relationship between marketing and website development. After looking at his webpage analytics, I realized a homepage redesign would be crucial to his business’s success. His site was not optimized for mobile, even though 50% of his website visitors came from mobile devices. The site experience was very targeted for the male viewer, even though nearly half of his page viewers were female. And, perhaps most shockingly, his page loading speed was 12 seconds, far higher than the 2-3 seconds it should take to access a page for the first time. That offered a terrific insight as to why his page bounce rate was over 86 percent, in spite of the interesting, relevant content posted on a daily basis. Armed with this knowledge, we knew what steps to take in creating a website that would result in a better user experience. [quote]If you want to know whether your webpage is effective, Google Analytics is quite simply the best place to start.[/quote]While there are entire webinars dedicated to successfully using Google Analytics (I suggest checking out Google Analytics Academy), the team at our advertising agency in Orlando can suggest a few things to check immediately to help garner insights about your business’s performance. 1. Bounce Rate The bounce rate indicates any time a site visitor looks at only one page before leaving the site. If your business’s homepage is experiencing a high bounce rate, it’s important to try to figure out why. It might be that your site isn’t optimized for the mobile or tablet experience, or that you aren’t offering clear calls to action that would encourage people to continue exploring the site. A web tool called Optimizely allows businesses to quickly and easily test homepage elements to try to improve these metrics. 2. Average Visit Duration Again, if people are coming to your page but not staying on very long, there may be a problem with your landing page experience. However, it may also be that there is a mismatch between the content that is driving people to your site and audience’s actual interests. For example, a “clickbait”headline will succeed in getting more people to your site, but people will leave quickly if the headline isn’t supported by interesting content. 3. Conversion Rate Conversion rate metrics offer insight into the number people who visit your website, against the number of people who actually “convert.”Conversions typically apply to e-commerce purchases, but can also measure the number of people who sign up for your email blasts or the number of people who book a reservation using the website. If these numbers are low, you may wish to test the effectiveness of various calls to action, play with the visual imagery or experiment with different types of content marketing. 4. Behavior Flow Report The behavior flow report presents a visualization of how website users navigate from one page or event to the next. This report provides insights into the content on your site that’s driving engagement, and also helps identify potential content issues. Use the segment drop down to segment traffic and better understand how those segments flow through the site. You’ll see how search traffic (for example) flows differently through your site than mobile traffic. The dimensions drop down allows you to narrow results by referral source or medium, and even shows flow from specific keywords. This feature can help identify how visitors from a particular keyword engage with and convert on your site. Data geeks unite around the behavior flow report – it’s a gem. In need of some expert Google Analytics expertise to ensure both an increase in website traffic – and an overwhelmingly positive user experience? Contact us today for a consultation!
7 resort marketing tips to help your bookings skyrocket
In the era of the internet, it’s easy for the most amazing resort experiences to get lost in the endless stream of advertising and digital content. With so many resort options, resort marketers who truly want to break through the noise have a variety of tools in their arsenal to help them make the most of their advertising dollars by helping them recruit the customers — often times customers who become repeat visitors, coming back again and again, year after year. Here are seven resort advertising tips – courtesy of your friends at BIGEYE – to help your bookings skyrocket. 1. Invest in search engine optimization In a highly competitive space like the resort industry, it is important to ensure people can actually find your business in the midst of all the other websites out there. In this industry in particular, tailoring your website’s content to make sure your site appears in organic search is a great way to attract attention to your site. 2. Experiment with Google AdWords and Facebook advertising AdWords is a great way to give your business an extra boost in terms of search. Marketers can set their own rates and can also bid on keywords. By using such a service, marketers can experiment with images, call to actions and landing pages when testing on Google AdWords. This type of advertising can sometimes takes a little experimentation to get it just right, but, if it makes sense for your business to try it, AdWords users often experience excellent results. Similarly, Facebook Ads allows users to select keywords and set rates for their campaigns. Facebook also offers hyper-targeted approaches, offering ads targeted directly at users based on their interests (i.e., travel, leisure) and location. 3. Optimize your webpage If you’re still working with the website someone designed for you in 1996, chances are your page isn’t optimized for the web. In terms of optimization, there are numerous approaches. One is to design the site for SEO purposes, so that it appears highly-ranked in organic web searches, but sometimes this isn’t the most visually-pleasing approach, and may result in high bounce rates. Therefore, experimenting and testing items such as the placement of a call to action, the page aesthetic, and placement of keywords and phrases can help you nail down what works best for your site visitors. Also, be sure to optimize your site for mobile and tablet experiences using responsive design. In doing so, you can create an easy-to-use site that looks good no matter what platform. 4. Collect email addresses, front and center on your homepage Email marketing is here to stay, mainly because people who use it see results. They’ve found they’re able to reach their users directly in their inboxes, which is a great way to keep users up to date about deals and happenings at the resort. Implementing an easy email collection box is a great way to increase the number of people who see your email blasts. 5. Optimize your emails Optimizing your email experience will improve the number of people who click through the email to the site. Even factors such as the subject line and the time of day they receive the email can have a major effect on whether people take the time to look at them. Then, once they do open the email, what do they see? If the content isn’t optimized for mobile and tablet devices, users could decide not to view the email if it takes too long to load or looks garbled. 6. Invest in customer service In the digital age, customer service and marketing are inextricably linked. A happy customer is the best marketing tool your resort can have, as that customer is likely to share their experience with their friends or on social information sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Make it easy for the user to provide feedback and to talk to a real person when they have questions or suggestions for improvement. 7. Try ad retargeting Once a person does visit your page, they may be interested initially but could get distracted from the ultimate goal of purchase as they move on to other items. A relatively new technology called retargeting uses the viewer’s browsing habits to store information, allowing brands to position their ads in front of the user at a later date on a completely different website. The idea is that the person may be inspired at that later time to purchase the good or service they’d only thought about before. Resorts can capitalize on this, as it often takes people some time to decide they want to book a vacation, and retargeting can help put the experience right in front of them, over and over again. Taken together, these resort marketing factors can ensure more visitors come to your site and spend more time there, which will inevitably result in more bookings. The team at our Orlando marketing agency thinks that resort marketers that are already taking these steps to improve the booking experience are at a distinct advantage, as is reflected in higher booking numbers. Contact us today and we can help you implement a number of these helpful tips for your resort!
SEO: Search engine optimization, aka how to be #1 online
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, this is how you get your name to the top of the list. Not just any list, but the list, the one people rely on for quality solutions to their everyday problems. Now, who doesn’t want that? With search engines such as Google driving as much as 80% of todays Internet traffic, SEO is essential to setting your website within the view of potential visitors. But before we get into some details of SEO, let’s talk about search engines. Search Engines. Search engines perform two major functions. They crawl the Internet and provide answers. In the crawling, or mapping, process, the search engine explores billions, yes billions, of pages and creates references. Relevant content is stored within databases, patiently waiting to be recalled upon for future searches. When the search engine provides answers, results are displayed based upon relevance and importance. These dimensions are measured by complex algorithms, which ultimately determine the ranking of websites. Think popularity. Contrary to what most of us are taught, popularity, at least in this case, is everything. Popularity equates to importance. The search engine assumes that the more popular the website, the more valuable the information; a method that has proven to be quite successful. Design & Development There are several elements to keep in mind when optimizing a website. Primarily, there is content. Containing HTML text on the page enables search engines to read through and index the information. Want to see what the search engine sees? Google’s Cache, SEO-browser and MozBar are some helpful tools to let you do just that. Then there is the link structure. Search engines navigate pages through the most available pathway, often traveling through links. It’s important to remember to properly link the pages of your website. Otherwise, the search engine will not recognize any of the pages left out, regardless of its relevance and importance. Keywords are another element of SEO. The results of a search are based on the words entered within the search box, including their spelling, punctuation, and even capitalization. When a word is entered in the box, the search engine finds a relevant database, ranks the documents and then returns a list of results; a pretty big job for less than a second of work. One of the best ways to optimize pages is to include key words in the titles, text and meta data of a website. More specific key words increase the chance of ranking higher. This is due to the fact that more specific key words provide less competition. Search engine optimization can also be improved with the adjustment of other elements such as title tags, meta tags, URL structure, duplicate content and rich snippets. As a Florida advertising agency, BIGEYE practices and encourages SEO. Everyday, people are using search engines to navigate their way through the Internet. This an opportunity to make your website and your business more accessible to the visitor. When an individual types a query into their search box and the name of your business appears near the top of the first page, there is an intangible quality about it. There’s that comforting sense of reassurance that your business is the right one. For a more in depth look into search engine optimization, check out this informative tutorial provided by SEOmoz or learn how to build the perfectly optimized page. Ready to get in touch with a team of digital strategists to help you navigate the in’s and out’s of search engine optimization? Contact us today to get started!
