Online marketing 101? Halp!

Discussions
#1

Hey guys,

I’m a developer. I can develop products (SaaS’s, plugins, apps whatever) and I can setup good looking landing pages. Problem is: If my landing page converts well, I won’t know why. If my landing page does not convert well, I won’t know why.

I need tools. Tools to get information about my landing pages, tools to build e-mail lists, tools to test my assumptions and tools to… You get it. I also need to know how to use these tools.

I can put a Google Analytics tracking code on my sites. And I do. But honestly, I don’t really know what to do after that. And honestly, I don’t really like Google Analytics and would prefer something simpler.

Anyways. All this stuff is a bit intimidating and I bet that some of you guys have some awesome resources that you can recommend for getting started with this stuff!

Please halp! :sweat:

#2

A few suggestions:

  1. Some sort of screen recording /heat-map software like CrazyEgg.com (there are lots and many provide 1,000 or so recordings per month)
  2. Put the bare minimum on the Landing page and then hide more info which is revealed by a Learn More button and track that with Analytics. This gives you micro-analytics. BTW, you MIGHT fine something like Mixpanel.com or KissMetrics to give you more of a “funnel oriented” results. For example, I tested a new landing page and it was MUCH better. Then I looked closely and found that the CAUSE seemed to be that the new page promoted our intro video more. And when I looked I found that people who watched the video converted at 50% higher (to free trial) and engaged about 400% higher. I was able to do that b/c of the excellent analytics of Mixpanel (which is free up to a certain limit which we have not yet hit)
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#3

I’m not sure you really need to worry about any of that stuff until you are getting a reasonable volume of traffic to your site. I would concentrate on trying to get targeted traffic to the site first. If you can’t do that, none of that other stuff really matters.

3 Likes
#4

Howdy. More important that the tool is knowing what you need to track to make better decisions.

In your case, knowing which marketing efforts/channels are driving conversions is likely Step 1.

To that end, GA is fine. It’s super flexible and customizable - but that obviously comes with a complexity cost in the UI.

UTM tag your marketing, set up a goal in GA and either use Acquisition > Campaigns to see goal conversion rate by source or (and this is better), set up segments for your most prevalent channels so you can dig into all the data around a conversion.

By far the biggest thing that’s helpful as far as web analytics goes is being curious and making the time to just tinker.

And if you don’t have the time to tinker, at least take five minutes a week to make sure everything’s still running.

Hope that helps, and feel free to shoot me a message or email if it gives you any gruff or if you have some specific questions.

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#5

This is great! Thanks a lot @chris_vannoy! Very actionable.

#6

You are probably right! Thanks for the answer! :slight_smile:

#7

Thanks for the suggestions! Great ideas. Will try it out when I have more traffic to analyze.