2. The Goal of a Website is…? 1. What’s the goal of having a website? Look pretty Have great animations To get more tenants
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5. Mario’s Storage A new storage company that just built a website! Needs clarity into how consumers are actually using his site. Wants to get more tenants.
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10. Basically anything you can think of:Number of visits Bounce Rates Traffic Source Time on site Page Metrics Specific Goals Pageviews & Much More
13. What’s the Goal? 1. mariosstorage.com 2. /size-10x10.html 3. /thank-you.html
14. Conversion Funnel 500 200 10 Step 1: Get to home page Step 2: Pick a unit (/size) 40% Step 3: Confirm (/thank-you) 5% 10 rentals total. What if each click cost $3.00?
26. Performance of Flyer 1000 flyers that cost $2.00 a piece 50 20 1 Step 1: Students page (/students) Step 2: Pick a unit (/size) 40% Step 3: Confirm (/thank-you) 5% Let’s also assume 3 calls that all turned into rentals. Is this good?
Me: Mario, one of the founders of a company called sparefoot.com. Complete internet nerd, run an online business used about 4000 facilities. I’ll never claim no anything about how to run a storage facility, but I’ve been on the internet since I can remember it’s what I live, eat, and breath everyday. I also love data crunching, because numbers don’t lie. I’m super excited to be here to day, because I’ve talked to hundreds if not thousands of owners over the past couple years and a common question I get asked is what can I do to improve my online activity. The answer is measuring your results, and that’s exactly what we’re going to go over today. We’re going to get the systems in place to make sure you know exactly with your websites performance. We dedicate time and resources to figuring all this out with our own site so I’m going to share with you the tools we use to measure and how it can be applied to your own site. Agenda: 1. Why tracking is important? Go through web analytics (ex: google analytics) and ways to use the data. 2. Go through call tracking (call fire) and how to use it. 3. How combine them to track all facets of your business (an example of both online and offline). 4. Touch on optimization. 4. Q/A.
Having a website is great, but don’t dump all that money into development costs just to have a static a page that looks pretty. Your website is tool that will help you get more tenants if you have a clear understanding its main purpose (to grow your business). Don’t make it flashy just for the sake of it being flashy and don’t have animations because they’re fun to stare it. Most of this is distracting and takes away from anyone actually making a reservation or calling your facility. Treat your website as an extension of your business with its ultimate goal to help grow your business. Engrain this in your mentality and it help you make better decisions about what information will and will not go on your website.
You might already have a website, you might not… regardless, you want to be able to track everyone who goes to your website. There are many different ways to get people to come visit your website, and there are a lot of companies that specialize in getting traffic for you. We can talk about those things offline later, but right now my goal is teach how to get the systems in place to measure your online activity. If you can effectively measure what marketing channels are giving you results, no matter what initiatives you’re taking (SEO, SEM, classifieds, directories, aggregators, etc…) you’ll be able to save money by cutting the unprofitable channels, and make more money by dedicated more time to the ones that are working. This is also going to eliminate any guess work you may have about whether or not you should continue to use a specific service because you’ll have the data right in front of you to tell you if it’s working. We’re going to focus today on web analytics tools, call tracking tools, and touch on optimizing your site. I’ll go through one of each and explain how to they can be applied to what you’re currently doing to market your facility both online & off.
How do internet users interact with you site? There’s really only a couple things they can do.They can call a number, and you’d want them to convert into a rental. Want to be able to track the number as well. This is looking the number of call, and having a way to figure out if they actually rented. They can fill out of a form. What information do you need? If you have a form, are you making it easy for the consumer to fill out. If they interact with the form and actually do something are you following up? Many people don’t do anything.. Don’t be upset with these users. But what can we provide them that would be compelling enough for them do something. Maybe they don’t interact on the site, but perhaps they will print out a coupon. Make it easy for them to get your facility (have your manager follow up with them later and ask). Retargeting – behavioral retargeting, let’s you display ads to consumers who have already been to your site. A bit more in depth, but it’s just another way to reach customers.
This is a story about a storage company that just built a website. Knows the internet is a great way to attract more tenants, but doesn’t know exactly what’s the best place way to allocate his marketing budget.
This my home page, it’s the first thing a consumer will see. Whenever I put a link out on the web, it will more than likely be directed to this page. It has information about my facility, a way for a consumer to call my facility, a nice promotion, and a way from the them reserve the unit online (nothing too fancy). Let’s say the pick a 10x10 *next slide.
Still more information about my facility. The same stuff as before, so consumer doesn’t need to go back. The goal of this page is to them to fill out the form so I don’t want them second guessing themselves. Also, notice the URL structure… /size-10x10. This is going to be important later because I can track individual pages. So let’s say a consumer decides this is the unit the want, so they type in their information and hit the “hold now” button. What happens next? *next slide
They get to a thank you page. More importantly is reiterates all the information they saw before and gives them another way to contact the facility if needed (manager@mariosstorage.com). It’s always nice to tell the person thank you for using your facility. Notice the URL structure again … this is the thank-you page. If I have a way to track individual pages, the main goal of my website would be to get consumers to the thank you page because that would tell me how many people actually make a reservation.
I really need a way to track my results. I need to know how many people are coming to my website, where are they coming from, how long are they staying, if they actually reserved a unit or if they’re calling me. Web analytics tools allow you to this. The one we use that’s use is called googleanlytics. It provides you with all the metrics you would think of and more. It’s powerful, easy and FREE.
These stats are over the past month. Go through Aug stats and explain later how you can compare to last month. Disclaimer: These numbers are not real
Where are people actually coming from? I’m just getting organic traffic, what about pay per click? What about my links on craigslist, what about direct traffic? This tells you all of it and breaks down the metrics for each source. Again, extremely powerful.
You can set goals up in google analytics that help you track each pages activities. If the goal is to rent more units than I want to know how many people are first going to my home page, moving to my units page, and actually filling out that form and making the reservation. Because if I’m spending money to get people to my site, I want to make sure they’re calling me or giving me a way to contact them.
You’re going to be hearing today about a lot of things that get people to your website. Pay per click advertising, Search engine optimization, local business listings, using classifieds and other online directories, etc….$3 a click spending $1,500 for 500 visits, and getting 10 rentals (2% conv. rate from total traffic)… average lifetime value is $1,000 = $10,000… so $150 per customer. if half move in, you spent $300 per customer. Let’s say you’re spending $5 a click converting.. AND THIS CAN ALL BE DONE THROUGH GOOGLE ANALYTICSNow, we’re getting smart about where we put our money.
What about calls? We can track in the information on what’s happening on your website, but what about tracking the calls? There are tools out there that let you create new numbers, track number of calls (even what’s happening to the call: busy, answered, transferred, etc..) Use any platform you’d like. This is one that’s easy and pretty cheap.
Choose from multiple local numbers of tool free numbers (tool free are a slightly more). I choose the number then set it forward to my facilities REAL number. Also label the number so you know which number belongs to which marketing channel. Depending on the size of the operator a toll free number might be wise for the home page of site that has multiple facilities and local number would make sense for the smaller onces.
Here are the metrics they give you. So in a given time frame you can see all the stats on how long each call was, the total number of calls, and what happened to the call. Check the recordings to see if they actually moved in.
Let’s go through where you can apply these two tools.
How many people have google local listing? Use call tracking to set up a specific number just for your google local listing so you can figure out how many people are calling from that source. Also, if you’re buying ads you can use google analytics to measure the number of people coming from your PPC efforts as well.
What about your offline efforts. Here’s a beautiful flyer I created as student campaign for mario’s storage (Disclaimer: I’m not the designed for SpareFoot). I can set up a specific webpage for students (doesn’t have to be very different, just one with a consistent message, and I have a tracked number, AND a coupon that I’m only offering to students. 3 different ways to track the one flyer. Someone might say this flyer isn’t good, but what if it gets me 100 rentals? Again, it doesn’t have to look good as long as it converts. Let’s say they go to the students page.
This is my students page. It’s what we call a landing page, because it’s where I want a specific market segment to land on. Many people create landing pages for the purpose of directing highly targeted messages to a certain group of consumers (this one is for students). If you sent out a flyer to people to recently moved to your area it might be /recent-movers with the some ad copy welcoming new residents to the area. This causes the page to be better converted because the marketing text to geared to that group (and it’s consistent with the flyer). By created the /students page I can now create a goal in google analytics that tells me how many people reserved a unit who started off at this page.
Now you can create a separate goal of the people who came to the students page how many made a reservation.Maybe the flyer was bad?
