MarketingSherpa Blog

We were recently asked if it’s better to use a subdirectory (also known as a subfolder) or a subdomain on a website.

If you’re unfamiliar with these two terms, you’ll know them right away when you see URL examples.

A subdirectory looks like this: marketingsherpa.com/freestuff.

A subdomain looks like this: sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com. Even www.marketingsherpa.com/ is technically a subdomain.

The difference may seem like an esoteric or gorpy concern that only developers and programmers care about. After all, why should the URL matter anyway? Most people are just clicking on links. And occasionally when they actually have to type one in (say, from a newspaper ad), you’re creating a vanity link that redirects to the actual URL anyway.

Well, search engines may care. A lot. Even if they claim they don’t. And the experts I asked said that subdirectories are almost always the better option.

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Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

There are two metrics to look at when you are analyzing the amount of traffic coming to your website — visits and unique visitors.

What’s the difference?

“Visits” refers to the number of times your website or webpage has been visited during a reporting period. It’s important to note that a single person can make multiple visits.

“Unique visitors” refers to the actual number of people (well, sort of, more on that in a bit) who have come to your website or webpage at least once during a reporting period — this number does not increase if a previous visitor returns to a page multiple times.

So, if you visit MarketingSherpa.com 10 times in a day, it is recorded as one unique visitor and 10 visits. If you even refresh a page 10 times, it is counted as 10 visits, one unique visitor.

But, how does Google Analytics (or Adobe Analytics, etc.)  know someone has visited previously? It’s measured with IP addresses and tracking cookies. So, to clarify, if you visit the same site using the same IP address 12 times, it is recorded as one unique visitor and 12 visits.

Does “unique visitors” really tell us the actual number of people visiting our site?

It is important to recognize that these numbers can get cloudy. Many people use different browsers, browse from multiple devices, use multiple IP addresses, or clear their cookies regularly while surfing the web. Additionally, most cookies expire within one month. So, someone navigating to a site through three different browsers will be counted as three unique visitors. Someone who scrolled through a product page on their phone but moved to desktop for purchasing is considered two unique visitors.

Source: Brooks Bell

The great thing about both of these metrics is that when you look at them together, you can roughly see how often people (aka prospective customers) are repeatedly coming to your website.

You can also see a rough average of how many visits each individual coming to your site has. All you have to do is divide the total number of visits by the total number of unique visitors.

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As a member of the famous MIT Blackjack Team and the inspiration for the main character in the book Bringing Down the House and the Kevin Spacey film 21, Jeff Ma knows a thing or two about gambling.

Scratch that — Jeff Ma isn’t a gambler. That’s because every move in blackjack has one correct decision. It’s just about understanding basic strategy, and implementing it. Remove human instincts, or “gut feelings,” and you will stack the odds in your favor.

Currently the senior director of analytics at Twitter (after selling his startup to the social network) and a former predictive analytics expert for ESPN, Jeff spoke to the MarketingSherpa Summit audience about how to use data and analytics to come out on top with customers.

By using data to overcome emotional biases, Ma said, not only can marketers win big with customers, but they’ll also build influence within their organizations.

Learning to make better decisions

It all begins with increasing your odds by using basic strategy.

“A lot of people don’t use basic strategy, which is why we’re so bad at making decisions as a people,” Jeff said. “Decisions are best when you have data behind them.”

One common mistake people fall prey to is omission bias. Basically, people don’t want to be perceived as the agent for harm to themselves — or their company. As Jeff put it, people would rather make a decision with a lower chance of success if the “dealer” or “fate” beats them, rather than going with a higher chance of success that, if it fails, will mean they’ve made a “bad” decision.

Or to put it in Vegas terms: big risk, big reward.

There are no bad decisions — only ones informed by data

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One of the great things about writing MarketingSherpa case studies is having the opportunity to interview your marketing peers who are doing, well, just cool stuff. Also, being able to highlight challenges that can help readers improve their marketing efforts is a big perk as well.

A frustrating part of the process is that during our interviews, we get a lot of incredible insights that end up on the cutting room floor in order to craft our case studies. Luckily for us, some days we can share those insights that didn’t survive the case study edit right here in the MarketingSherpa Blog.

Today is one of those times.

Setting the stage

A recent MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Newsletter article — Marketing Analytics: How a drip email campaign transformed National Instruments’ data management — detailed a marketing analytics challenge at National Instruments, a global B2B company with a customer base of 30,000 companies in 91 countries.

The data challenge was developed out of a drip email campaign, which centered around National Instruments’ signature product, after conversion dropped at each stage from the beta test, to the global rollout, and finally, to results calculated by a new analyst.

The drip email campaign tested several of National Instruments’ key markets, and after the beta test was completed, the program was rolled out globally.

The data issues that came up when the team looked into the conversion metrics were:

• The beta test converted at 8%
• The global rollout was at 5%
• The new analyst determined the conversion rate to be at 2%, which she determined after parsing the data set without any documentation as to how the 5% figure was calculated

Read the entire case study to find out how the team reacted to that marketing challenge to improve its entire data management process.

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You’ve determined if there is any true value in your marketing and you’ve taken the steps to craft your value proposition, when the one looming question hits you – what should I do next?

Turning theory into action was the key focus of Tony Doty, Senior Manager of Optimization, MECLABS, and Lauren Maki, Manager of Optimization, MECLABS, during the Industry Deep Dive session, “Value Proposition: How to turn that shiny, new value prop into a high-performing page,” here at MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013.

“We have a lot of great tools for developing value proposition, but often we find a lot of marketers asking us what to do next and that’s what this is all about,” Tony said.

Today’s MarketingSherpa blog post will feature four questions every marketer should ask themselves about what the next step should be for implementing value proposition development into marketing efforts.

Question #1: Who is my target audience?

Tony and Lauren explained before you think about where you will express your value prop statements, you need to first determine who your audience for that value proposition is and what their needs are.

“We should always craft a value proposition with a customer’s needs in mind,” Tony said.

Question #2: Do I know where my customers are coming from?

Tony also explained once you’ve identified the target audience for your value proposition, you need to understand the channels where your traffic comes from, and adapt your message as needed per channel.

Lauren brought up a good point that customers from different channels have different needs and motivations, so your value proposition placement should be strategic within each channel.

To do this, she explained you first need to identify not just who your target prospect group is, but also where that prospect group is coming from.

“There’s a lot more places than just your homepage for your value proposition,” Lauren explained. “Look at your data to determine if what you’re doing is effective once you’ve started putting your value propositions into place [in those different channels].”

Some of the channels Lauren highlighted in her example are:

• Targeted email campaigns
• PPC campaigns
• Display ads
• Referral sites
• Landing pages
• Product pages
• Informational pages
• Cart checkout
• Social media

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It’s no gigantic secret that marketing has taken a turn decidedly toward the more empathetic, conversationally oriented initiatives in the last decade. The days of corporate marketing czars sitting high atop the hill of commerce, and sipping Scotch while devising cleaver ways to manipulate consumers, have come and gone.

If you want to play the game in this new social marketing environment, you’ve got to learn how to engage people in meaningful conversations.

Given a Facebook page, the average marketer figures he or she is more social than a hipster with a smartphone. They’ve checked the social “box,” and now it’s time to return to the magical land of value propositions and conversion rates because, when measured within the context of the traditional marketing paradigm, there isn’t much return on the effort of being “social.”

Of course, we know social media marketing is valuable. For example, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Inbound Marketing Handbook, 85% of marketers surveyed said social media is increasing in importance as a lead source, while most marketers found tactics like telemarketing, direct mail and trade shows to be decreasing in importance over the last 12 months.

Social media metrics

The problem lies in the metrics we use to measure that value. The traditional “how many, how much” metrics of historical Web analytics simple won’t do. And, while the goal of any marketing program is ROI-based metrics that truly show impact on the bottom line, many social media marketers struggle with making the transaction all the way from a top-of-the-funnel activity, like social media marketing, to revenue recognition.

So, don’t overlook the touchy-feely metrics of the social sphere to help you understand where you are and what you can do to improve. Social media isn’t paid media advertising. It isn’t a one-way conversation. Here are three metrics to get you started evaluating if you’re taking advantage of the social nature of social media:

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You network with the most interesting people at a MarketingSherpa Summit, and Optimization Summit 2012 was no exception for me. I caught up with one of the top optimizers from Denmark and a nonprofit marketer heavily engaged in A/B testing, and I also met two professors in the increasingly popular Web analytics field.

With our next event, B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, just around the corner, I wanted to take a moment to look back at our last event in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post and share an interview with those professors, who can provide a unique viewpoint on Internet marketing.

With their experience teaching others in the classroom and having to convey overall marketing principles, they are a step removed from the average in-the-trenches, brand-side marketers, overly focused on the “putting out today’s fire” crises that sap so many marketers’ attention.

And, since they’re not vendors of platform providers, well, they’re not trying to sell you on their unique marketing buzzword approach that just happens to map very nicely to the products and services they are trying to sell.

Ray Lam and Victoria Harben are adjunct faculty and teach Web Analytics, a graduate-level course in University College at the University of Denver. During Optimization Summit 2012, they live-tweeted the event to their students from @COMM4324.

MarketingSherpa: What were the top lessons you learned at Optimization Summit that you think could be helpful to brand-side marketers?

Victoria: The main point that was reiterated throughout Optimization Summit was to always test; don’t rely on assumptions, intuition, guesstimations, or theory — rather, get out there and test it. It’s always best to back up a hunch with data, and that’s exactly what the Summit instilled in me: test, test, test! We’re teaching a Web Analytics class at DU through the New Media and Internet Marketing program, and this is the first thing we tell our students.

Ray:  The top lesson I learned was Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s conversion formula: C=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a. Where m=motivation, v=clarity of value proposition (why), i=incentive to take action, f=friction elements of the process, and a=anxiety about entering the process. This simple formula helps marketers think about the different elements that need to be considered when constructing a landing page.

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Yuchun Lee, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Marketing Management Group, IBM, understands analytics and metrics are, as he puts it, “a huge part of marketers’ lives.”

He says the question then becomes, “How much time and energy should marketers spend checking out metrics and worrying about the analytics of their efforts?”

Yuchun adds, “I think the market trend has been moving towards incorporating more and more data and analysis of customers.”

This includes learning what messaging is relevant to your customers.

“Being able to analyze the data to understand a customer becomes paramount for every business,” explains Yuchun.

This data analysis allows you to determine consumer sentiment, which in turn provides a framework for relevant communications. 

Read more…

At B2B Summit 2011, keynote Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert, discussed social media marketing myths. Here are a few excerpts…

Here are a few key takeaways from Jay’s keynote excerpt video embedded above:

0:30 – Myth #3: How B2C uses social media doesn’t apply

3:30 – The overemphasis on Facebook “likes” as a metric

5:06 – Focus on being social, not doing social

If you enjoyed these excerpts, you can watch Jay’s full one-hour B2B Summit 2011 keynote, for free, on MarketingSherpa.

Related Resources:

B2B Summit 2012, August 27-70, Orlando

B2B Summit 2011: 5 takeaways on social media, lead generation, building a customer-centric approach, and more

B2B Social Media: Jay Baer discusses social media ROI and Facebook likes [Video]

TEDxAtlanta – Sally Hogshead – How to Fascinate

Email Summit 2013, February 12-15, Las Vegas

Social Pros 6 – Instagram Lessons from a Giant B2B Company

For years, the debate on social media marketing centered on ROI. Marketers asked themselves “How can we measure the impact of social media?” “What’s the ROI on Twitter?” “How do we know if LinkedIn is worthwhile?”

Thankfully, those days are behind us. Data is available from tools both paid and free. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, not every marketer has taken advantage, as you can see in the chart below from Adobe and Econsultancy, which we pulled from The Social Media Data Stacks e-book.

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Five of the six metrics listed above have a greater number of marketers saying they’re important than the number of marketers tracking them. This is like saying it’s important to eat right and exercise while eating chili cheese fries and canceling your gym membership. It just doesn’t make sense.

But don’t worry — we have you covered. Here is a list of free tools you can use to start measuring each social media metric.

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