Hey, numbers-driven marketing geeks: This one’s for you!
It’s often said that “what gets measured gets improved.” I say, however, that “what gets measured has a better chance at improvement.” Look. I can measure the hair on my head all the live-long day, but that doesn’t guarantee improvement; I’d still have to join that exclusive club to get that deal. But I digress.
Eight months ago, TFG launched our newly-designed website – and started the whole content marketing campaign last September. To gauge our new site’s effectiveness, I pulled the most-recent Google Analytics reports and looked at them alongside our old site’s previous eight-months (to compare trends and visitor behaviors). And here’s the nitty gritty results.
Rough data. Conclusions. And other “makes ya think” tidbits.
► Total visits up: From 3,804 to 5,048 → Purely organic SEO efforts are paying off
► “Bounce rate” dropped almost 10%: These are visitors who stay on the site for 0-10 second → Significant, especially considering that our overall traffic also increased
► Returning visitors doubled: From 745 to almost 1,500
• Average # of page views jumped: From 2.4 to almost 5 (per visitor)
• Return visitors lingered longer: Time spent reading jumped from >1.5 minutes to 4.5 minutes → Content marketing efforts paying off big-time
► Visitor engagement: Here’s where stuff gets even more interesting:
• 10-30 minute visits: 1st eight months: 107 (700 page views) … 2nd eight months: 300 (3,400 page views)
• 30+ minute visits: 1st eight months: 10 (134 page views) … 2nd eight months: 74 (1,500 page views)
• Repeat visitors @100-200 times: 1st eight months: 3 … 2nd eight months: 143
• Repeat visitors @200+ times: 1st eight months: 0 … 2nd eight months: 14 (wow!)
► Location specific: Being a Texas-based outfit, we haven’t hammered away at this one all that much – and what we do can easily span across state lines. While we tend to focus more on local B2B, we haven’t targeted our SEO or content marketing around it. That being said, here are the results:
• Texas visitors: Up nearly 30%
• California visitors: 300% boost (from 130 to 1,269)
► Relevance of searchers who find us: Several key phrases (that brought in little or no traffic during the first eight-month period) have yielded marked increases in the 2nd eight months. These include:
• fort worth marketing • graphic design fort worth tx
• seo fort worth • graphic design firms texas
• fort worth web design • drupal developers in dallas fort worth
So what are the bottom-line results?
Many (many!) more sales leads as a result of our steady content marketing efforts – leads that are both narrowed in focus and more relevant to our business. Our old website wasn’t a lead-generating tool… it was simply a website with a portfolio. Today’s website (the one you’re on right now) is working like gangbusters…even while our dedicated sales team is sawing logs at 3 a.m. Now that’s smart business.
