Prusak.com

If you want to know how to use the Internet to market your web site, here is a short tutorial I’ve written based on my own experience doing Internet marketing. This tutorial is meant only to be a starting point to help people who don’t know where to get started. Also, this tutorial will not be covering any offline marketing or the basics of marketing in general. Even if you’re the top result on Google for the term “yellow tomatoes”, that won’t help you much if you’re selling green apples.

I work for a company called InterCure that manufactures a medical device called Resperate. Resperate is a medical device that lowers your blood pressure. For this tutorial, I’ll be using our web site http://www.resperate.com as an example.

I’d like to divide our marketing efforts in to two distinct goals

• Getting more people to come to our site
• Getting the people who come to our site to buy the product

Of course that’s a bit of an over simplification, but the general idea is accurate.

Getting more people to come to our site
This is also sometimes called getting more traffic to your site. There are two main ways to get more traffic to your site.

• Improved search engine listings and links to your site
• Paid advertising

The topic of getting improved search engine listing is world unto itself. There are plenty of books/services/sites on the subject. The two terms you should be familiar with are SEO – Search Engine Optimization and SEM – Search Engine Marketing. Both term are similar. SEM is a bit newer.

more to come later …

In response to my last post, I finally got an answer.
Their online document was wrong. It was wrong in 5 different places.
Basically, they said they’re sorry and that’s it.

* sigh *

I recently added email open rate tracking in Urchin for our email campaigns.
The problem is that I’m not seeing any of my email campaigns in Urchin. I sent an email and got this reply:

“I have escalated your question to our technical team. They’re currently investigating the situation, and we’ll contact you as soon as we’ve found a resolution. We thank you for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.”

That was over a week ago and still no update.

I’ll keep you posted.

Update
We’ve stopped using urchin (we were on a month to month contract). Their interface is SO nice and out of the box it’s a pretty decent solution. Unfortunately their service is horrendous.

We decided to go with NetTracker.
Their service is outstanding (I can talk to a technical person within a a few minutes via phone), and I feel like they really try to help me – not just get me off their back (like with Urchin). I just with their interface was better. The learning curve is much higher than Urchin, but once you know what you’re doing – you can can really answer just about any question about your traffic.

– Ophir

As per my previous post, we’re looking at our options for web analytics.
I know that Google recently bought Urchin.com , and I heard that Urchin just slashed their prices for their services so I figured I’d give em a try. We’re paying $300 a month ($200 for first 100,000 page views and $100 for each additional million)
The good:

• The reports look very nice.
• The reports provide me with most of the information I need.
• The site’s responce time is fine.

The bad:

• Service sucks. There is no telephone support and the emails are usually answered within 24 hours. Ocasionally the responses don’t really help much either.
• Not all of the web analytics I need is provided. For example, I’d like to be able to view my bounce rates per campaign.

The other option we’re checking is Net Tracker SMB.
List price is $7,500 but we’re upgrading so we’re getting a better deal.
The good:

• Service is excellent. I’m just evaluating and already I’m getting my questions answered on the phone within minutes.
• I can basically query any question I can come up with

The bad:

• Since we’re looking at an in-house solution, we’re gonna need to buy a high end maching to handle our queries.
• The reports don’t look as nice

Pretty soon we’re going to be re-evaluating our current solution for web analytics: NetTracker Professional.
At the time (a couple of years ago) it was the best solution for us because of it’s bang for the buck value.
Currently, we’re better funded and have more complex needs, so we’re also considering more expensive solutions.

I’ll write more about my findings here later.

We recently laucnhed a new shopping cart on our site, so I decided to check out how it’s doing. Most of the stats looked fine, but the visitor path report was showing almost impossible paths for the checkout process.
A normal path should look something like this:

1. Add to cart
2. Shipping info
3. Billing info
4. Confirm order
5. Thank you

What we were getting was this:

1. Add to cart
2. Shipping info
3. Home Page
4. Billing info
5. Confirm order
6. Thank you

I had a few theories about why this was happening, but none of them really made much sense. Upon further investigations, I found the culprit. Instead of a dedicated 404 page, we were simply redirecting to the homepage. This includes 404 errors for images.
What was happening is that there was a bad link to an image on the page, so the homepage was being requested.
Of course visitors didn’t know the difference, but it was really messing up the web analytics.

Case solved!