Discovering Web 2-Point-Oh 101: A Grey-beard’s Adventure in On-line Marketing

Analyse This!

One of the most exciting things for me about Web 2-point-Oh is the depth of the intelligence it allows you to gather about your own site (and others).

Statistics and analysis are important. The world really is a village and the web allows you to sell to niche markets in a way you never could before – to sell to the ‘long tail’ (the theory of the long tail is beautifully described in Chris Anderson’s blog. It’s fundamental reading if you want to understand how the web affects marketing today; and while I fear that many of the gurus lean towards selling products rather than services when they’re writing about web-based marketing, there’s much there that’s appropriate to the tourism industry – which is, after all, nothing more than a collection of businesses that provide services with appeal to almost every niche there is).

The significance of this, of course, is that if you work with your statistics you can continually tweak your site to make it more and more appealing to both the search engines and your guests and customers.

Here are some of the tools I’ve discovered:

Hubspot’s Website Grader – this is an awesome plaything. You enter your URL – and, if you like, the URLs of competing sites – and the Grader automatically analyses your site and provides the most amazing feedback. In about a minute, I learned that, in terms of its marketing effectiveness, my site – www.thistourismweek.co.za – scored higher than 66% of all the sites the company has ever graded.

I was mightily impressed.

But then I stared to read further – and discovered all sorts of nasty things about myself. Like the fact that the title of my home page is too long (recommended length is less than 68 characters, mine is currently 93 characters long); the page is missing a metadata description (“You should add a description to every web page, so that search engines know what the page is about. By not having a description, the site is missing out on an important search engine optimization [SEO] tactic”); and that the metadata on my home page doesn’t contain all of my selected keywords (“Missing keywords: business to business, tourism, tourism South Africa”)

(… Mom, Dad, I’m going out for a few hours, but the teacher says you can check my report card here).

Google Analytics – “Discover. Share. Act.” (says Google) “The new Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.”

I had to set up a g-mail account for this, but having done that, Google opened up a whole world of tools that I’ve only just begun to explore (have you ever gone to www.google.com – and clicked on the more / even more links? – you’ll find them on the top right of the Google home page. Or go here).

Google gave me some code which my geek put onto my sites – and now I can log onto my Google Analytics Dashboard whenever I like and learn who’s visited my site; where they came from (physically and via the web); how long they spent with me; what percentage of them came in and went straight out again – without visiting any other pages on the site (that’s called the bounce rate); how many came via search engines or referring sites – and how many came in directly (i.e. typed my URL into their browsers); and so on and so on…

I’d go so far as to say that Google Analytics is the most basic tool that every web site – and every marketing manager – needs to have. And – hey! – it’s free!

Google Alerts – here you ask Google to send you a once-a-day e-mail whenever it finds a reference to your choice of topics. For example: I’ve subscribed for alerts about the Outeniqua Choo Tjoe (currently running between George and Mossel Bay) – and the e-mails are worded like this:

Google News Alert for: Outeniqua Steam Train
Train spotters all aboard for the Yards http://www.theherald.co.za/herald/news/n13_07072008.htm
The Herald Eastern Cape – Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa
… last year that steam train tourism was an almost untapped market in South Africa. “Linking the Outeniqua Transport Museum in George with the Dias Museum …
See all stories on this topic

Google Alerts are vital for keeping track of what people are saying about you on the net. Your company should at least be tracking its name, your name and, perhaps, the names of some of your most important partners. I get alerts for each of my clients (and a word to the wise – you can direct your Alerts directly into a folder of their own in Outlook Express. So they don’t need to clog up your in-box. You just need to remember to go to the folder every day…).

WordPress Statistics – my sites are built on this wonderful bit of share-ware, and, of course, its statistics are just as powerful as Google’s. And that’s just the point – there must be thousands of tools available on the web. But I’m pretty sure if I could just get to properly using the three that I’ve mentioned here, I’d increase my grades by 15 or even 20 percent.

Imagine what THAT would do for my traffic – and what, if you did the same, it could do for yours!

Talk To Me – Martin Hatchuel – martin@thistourismweek.co.za or leave your comments below for everyone to see