Tracking online action
You’re drawing visitors to your website and providing answers to their questions in hopes that you’ll convince them to take the next step — the T in VSET, take action. But it doesn’t necessarily mean making a sale.
For Keats, it means a request for a quotation. Whatever your next step, provide tools for visitors to make the next move — like functions for contacting you, uploading CAD drawings or ordering online.
Those tools can get highly technical, but Rubin thinks they beckon offline tradition — and that’s the secret to converting traffic. In his strategy, the website doesn’t replace the sales cycle, but assists it.
“That’s where the old-fashioned stuff comes in,” he says. “The website has to be interactive. It has to have the ability to send e-mails. It has to have the ability to send RFQs. It has to have the ability to click a button and contact us. We wanted the website to give information, but then also have the ability to send a request for more information.”
Keep in mind, as your online strategy mimics your traditional sales cycle, it should closely reflect your overall business goals, as well.
“If a company sets up a website without going through the process of saying, ‘What are my business objectives, and how is my website going to support me in doing this?’ they will have missed the boat,” Rigano says. “My objective is not to make a killer website; my objective is to generate 5 percent more business in Korea and India this year. My objective is to increase my product sales. Then, you have to say, ‘How can my website help me do that?’”
Develop these goals at the onset of Web development so you can chart your online course and track progress along the way.
“You always want to build in: How do I know what success looks like? We don’t build a website without putting a tracking system in place so that you know how to evaluate what’s happening,” says Rigano, who recommends evaluating your tracking at least monthly. “Take all the key actions that you want somebody to do at your website — we call those conversion actions — and build in tracking so that you can look at those. You can look at how many people came into my site, how many people went past the homepage and searched for something, how many people clicked on ‘Download a CAD drawing,’ how many people clicked on e-commerce, how many people clicked on RFQ.”
But measuring results goes beyond in-page analytics. ThomasNet’s research shows that half of the time, online buyers still pick up the phone and call for more information, so make sure you include those callers in your tracking. Maxi has different 800 numbers for different ads on and offline, so Rubin can tell which ad drove the call by which number rings.
“If you don’t have a separate 800 number for your website, call your phone company tomorrow and get one installed,” Rigano says. “Then you know how many people are coming directly from your website. That’s the beauty of being online: The end measure is so definitive. It’s not like, ‘Gee, I had 10 percent impressions.’ It’s how many came in and how many bought. You know what success looks like.”
