Dance With Strangers

Have you heard? Your website is your brand! Oh wait, maybe it’s Google.

People love to argue this point, but forget that the simple fact remains that your corporate website is most certainly the online face of your company. It provides your prospects with the information they need to make a business decision. A search engine may provide them with the pathway and social media might be some added directions, but they always end up at the front door.

As a smart  marketer you already understand all of this information, creating a terrific website chock full of good content, fully optimized for your keywords and hopefully just a wee bit interactive.

Wait! Do you make real-time changes to your site based on real-time site analysis? If not, you should consider the practice. Here is how:

Using Real-time WebSite Monitoring to Make Real-Time Website Changes

You probably already use a tool for real-time site monitoring (or spying, if you want to use that dirty word). We (BreakingPoint) currently use GetClicky and I’ve just started to use Woopra. Both do a really nice job of providing real-time web analytics showing us who is currently on the site, what they are viewing, how they arrived, popular keywords, geography and much more. Additionally both are very inexpensive; GetClicky is $99 for the year and currently Woopra is absoutely free. Here is a screengrab taken from Woopra the other morning for this site (not much info because we just got going, but you can imagine how it can help):

Throughout the day I have this dashboard open on my desktop for BreakingPoint and it can trigger many different actions based on the data that you can watch. For example, we might see a certain keyword trigger a bunch of traffic to the site, which we did during the recent Twitter/Facebook DDoS attacks. At that moment it makes sense for us to place some of the resources we have for DDoS testing on the homepage so that visitors can find the information more quickly.

Another example might be a sudden rise in site actions, which is not always a good thing, in fact a sudden spike may mean that people are having a difficult time finding what they need. You can quickly discover what people are looking for and eliminate some of the hassle by offering it up in a different location, or perhaps crosslinking to the information. This happens quite a bit from older blog posts that are still relevant and coming up in search, but have not been updated with a link to resources developed after publishing the post.

Either way I would encourage you to start looking at real-time web analytics as an important tool in your B2B marketing.