Data Shock! Google Might Not Provide Your Site's Most Valuable Visitor's Visitor Value Exposed

I had to get your attention in order to make a point. I know this is blasphemy to suggest such a notion, but this statement is true for certain product and service sites. Google may be providing the most traffic, but might not be providing the highest quality visitors to your site. The other big three (Yahoo!, MSN, Ask) may be paying your bills. Quality visitors can be defined as visitors likely to become customers or leads. In this post I will explain why Google might not be your best lead generator and show some real life examples. I will also explain what to do if Google isn’t your top business generating engine. Imagine If You could put a price on every visitor to your site. Then you would know that for X amount of traffic, you could expect, on average, to receive X amount of revenue based on your average sale. Site owners have always been able to do this, but it just got a lot easier and more defined with a specific tracking feature in Google Analytics. Since Google Analytics free release, many businesses, even fortune 500, and site owners use over 80 reports offered for analysis including executive briefs as well as in-depth details about their site's visitors. One of the most important features of Google Analytics is under utilized because of either lack of set up knowledge, or awareness in general. The process involves setting up defined goal pages and creating a funnel, or navigational path, that a site visitor might logically take in order to reach that goal. Before I explain what this feature does, I will explain the reasoning behind it. Since it is my job to keep up with these details. share the wealth. Literarily, this knowledge could make you more money by fishing where the fish are.Said more accurately, this info could make you more money by fishing where the big fish are and letting you know where to throw the most bait. How much is one site visitor worth to You? You might not know how much a visitor is worth to you, but you should. To find this number, you can start figuring out how much a lead or conversion is worth to you by calculating your average product or service sale per customer. Then calculate your closing rate. If you are offering a service, you will need to know that for every X amount of leads, X % turn into a sale. Conversion Explained Leads are one type of conversion. For the purposes of this article, these terms will be used interchangeablely, although you can have a conversion without it being considered a lead. There are many different ways of counting a lead in a brick and mortar business a phone call inquiry, two-for-one coupon use, or a passerby who picks up your numbered brochure. For a purely web-based business, most would consider an online form mail submission, an email received, or a phone call received, a lead. It is harder to count purely web spurred phone call conversions when a business utilizes varying types of on and off line media advertising. Every effort should be made to track the difference by having a unique 800 number on a specific contact page that identifies the call as coming from the web. If you know your closing rate, and your average sale, you can put a value on every submission. For example, if your average sale per customer is $1000, and it takes ten form submissions before one turns into a customer, you would have a closing rate of 10%. Every one of those submissions would be given a value worth $100 (dividing closing rate by average customer sale). Visitor Value Explained For a product based site, the actual retail price of the purchase would be considered its value. Since a user either buys or leaves you do not have to factor in closing rate, although it would be wise to factor in margins. For example, if you sell an item at $300 you bought wholesale for $100, you would consider its conversion value the actual profit of $200. Since the conversion literarily made you $200. When paying for online advertising such as Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing, the lower the profit margin, the closer one should keep tabs on their keyword values. This is different than keeping an eye on your reserve cost per click bid. That's a topic for another blog. Now, for what you have been waiting to see. Could Google really not be sending my site my best prospects. Yahoo for Yahoo! Not for this anonymous client. Notice the dollar figures in the last column ($/Visits). In this real life client example, every lead is worth $4,000. On a given time line the more visitors a refer sends, the less value each hold if the visitors are not converting to leads. As you can see, the figures on the chart don't show the actual $4k value because analytics averages in the non-converting visitors with a value of zero. In this example, Yahoo! received the highest visitor value based on contact form submissions. Although there was considerably less traffic, their conversion rate was better. Yahoo wins the prize for highest visitor value for this client during this given period of time. AOL is Swell After All In this anonymous client example, AOL beats out Yahoo!, Google, and MSN in visitor value. Shocking! You can drill these metrics down even further and see the visitor value on a keyword basis. Below is a keyword breakdown from Google's paid listings. Google's Content Network (Ads by Goooogle) ads are holding a strong second verses felony for this particular client. Paid Listings (PPC) Verses Organic Conversion Here is an interesting data-driven example to answer the popular debate "Which converts better, paid listings or organic?" The answer is: it depends on the site and how well the paid campaigns are optimized. For this particular site, ppc/cpc ads are providing slightly better conversions than organic/natural listings. How do you find out this information? Well, this article is getting too long. Stay tuned for my next post titled Moooove Over Google - How to Find your Search Engine Cash Cow. In my next post, I will reveal step-by-step-how to get the answers you need and how to benefit most if your data tells you Google is not providing your most valuable visitors.