MarketingSherpa recently asked its members for stories about significant marketing lessons learned in 2007. The results aren’t available yet, but I thought I’d share my own response with you.

The Power of Metrics
One of my goals at the beginning of the year was to increase Solo-E traffic, and thus subscribers. I’d noticed that many of my colleagues were focusing on search engine traffic; so, assuming this would also be a good strategy for me, I spent months learning and applying SEO tactics. The results were pretty successful — traffic increased 80% over a 6-month period.Then I figured out how to track conversions (visitors that actually subscribe) using Google Analytics. And I discovered that our conversion rate was abysmal! So I made some changes to the site that made it easier and more enticing to subscribe — and upped the conversion rate 400%.It was just a month ago that I looked more closely at the *source* of my conversions. I discovered that my conversion rate from traffic referred from *other sites* was five times the conversion rate from *search engine* traffic. Meaning that although my total search engine traffic was more than double my referral traffic — the latter was contributing twice as many subscribers!

So in the new year, I’ll be focusing on increasing referral traffic.I don’t regret the time and energy I spent on SEO. But I have learned a lesson about basing my strategy on conventional wisdom or what is the hot new “thing” (think YouTube, social networking, Twitter, etc.) From now on, I’ll be testing on a small scale and measuring results first, before committing a big chunk of my time and budget to a particular strategy!

Last 5 posts by Terri Zwierzynski

• 31 Time Management Tips - December 18th, 2008
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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Marketing Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.