The Marketing Conference Blog

Read Skip Lineberg’s bio here.

It’s all well and good having all the fancy creative fluff but how exactly do you measure its success in terms of your bottom line?

Skip is about to let you know….What’s this happy clapping stuff?

It’s like an American Life Insurance seminar.

A very nice little exercise in what we actually measure in relation to marketing efforts – which, to be fair, is what this session is about.

Everybody else goes devilishly specific whereas those in the so-called know go generic.

A very nice way for people to adapt and integrate their own businesses and tracking experiences into the session. Who mentioned charitable donations?

So, it comes to what’s working and can we do more of it. That’s probably it in a nutshell.

Seth Godin’s Blog Yes, the guy is a guru of sorts. Do give him a read.

I’ve never understand why we’ve settled for the direct marketing success percentage, Like 2% is really worth a carrot in this day and age. We’re eveb having email as 91% ineefective due to those nasty Nigerian oil scams.

So, in relation to this new generation of marketing.

Meet mountain man w/ shotgun as traditional media spraying his advertising/marketing pellets left, right and center.

How do we get more precise, and, to be more precise, why do you need to be. Blimey, he’s just chucked 75 cents at the presentation screen. I trust we all understand the metaphor, yes?

Commit to measurement – think about it – plan it – do it.

Reaching the right people at the right time with the right message.

“We cannot manage that we cannot measure” – Peter Drucker.

In terms of measurement tools use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. It’s still quite astonishing that these fellas are free.

As with all things worth doing it’s 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Add your own quote about having to work hard and smart. All of this conference is related to working real smart. Yes, there’s a difficulty and inherent learning curve but it isn’t unfathomable. After all, Skip, Justin and Jeff all drive their businesses and related efforts while continually learning and adapting as these concepts and tools do likewise.

But once you have the core issues you have a decent foundation. I suppose the devil is in the detail.

The key here is that everything and anything can be measured way beyond its component parts.

Why Google Analytics is an important piece of software is that it helps you look at your Web statistics in a very different way than pure eyeballs. It helps you work out what these eyeballs are actually doing and where these eyeballs are coming from. Web stats without meaningful analysis are pointless. Don’t try and impress anyone with dull tales of how many visitors per day. It’s a worthless metric. (ok, maybe a touch harsh, but in isolation it is.)

So we have search referral terms and what pages they’re click through to and the times spent on that page.

Why would one want a blog in relation to an increase in traffic?

I can concur with Skip that a blog can be the major traffic driver to an overall Web presence. It’s the engine room. Remember it does a lot of good work with your more long tail search phrases. Note that he isn’t saying that a blog should be used to drive traffic or for pure SEO purposes.

And even if he isn’t I am!

Has anybody noticed as yet how much of this stuff is free as in not costing anything? And remember tat with something like Google Analytic it’s the de facto search industry standard for Web traffic measurement.

Referrals as risking reputation.

Are you the King of all you survey in Google? Come on, now’s the time to come clean about your desperate vanity searching.

A nice free eyeball mapping tool for your own Website – Crazy Egg

Seriously, heat maps of cursors are really rather sexy.

I’d say finally that it’s worth incorporating some, if not all, of these tools even if you might not use them as effectively as you might as they’ll be collecting your data that you can always refer to at a later date.