No Top 3 Country Visitor Stats for this Blog

Sorry, with WordPress.com at this time it can’t be done.

WordPress.com Is Great

Firstly let me say that I love WordPress.com.  It is now my platform of choice for introducing web sites with web content capabilities to small companies.  Many of my clients are Mom & Pop shops, small non-profits, or small for-profits with less then 50 employees and no IT staff to speak of.  They might already have a site, but haven’t updated it in years.  They don’t have the discipline in place to update their own sites on a regular basis, let alone a web development package to update their legacy site.

WordPress.com becomes a great inexpensive proof of concept tool.  I can show the staff how a web site should be updated, by the staff, as frequently as needed.  I can remain an admin to their site so I can fix any minor problems that occur or answer any questions on capabilities or limitations.  If the client sees results that prove valuable, I can then walk them through the analysis of moving to a hosted WordPress.org site or a custom built site from scratch.  (You can guess which one usually wins.)

I like WordPress so much I’m in discussions with the college I teach at to use WordPress.com and a WordPress.org installation for a CSS and Advance CSS class I want to teach.

Marketing Shortcoming – Stats

If there is one area that vexes me while I am navigating my clients through the proof of concept is the lack of decent stats.  WordPress.com provides the basics: Page Views, Referrers, Top Posts & Pages, Search Engine Terms, Clicks.

Items I would love to see:

• Geo specific information – to help identify where geo targeted PPC advertising might be most effective.
• Path Analysis – I want to understand if they stay for more then one page then where are they going.
• Entry / Exit Stats – which pages are the stickiest, which exit pages do I need to work on.
• Time Spent Stats – I love to understand what’s working and what’s not.  Outliers are the most fun!
• Time of Day Stats – When is  my site being visited the most, this might affect my PPC spending habits.

Possible Statistic Solutions

I’m sure WordPress staff have heard all this before but I want to add my two cents.  For anyone that uses some of the different log analyzing tools out there this is nothing new.  The following seem reasonable to me:

• Upgrade Existing Default Package – maybe there is a add-on which could be implemented for WordPress.com that would bring it up to modern marketing times
• Google Analytic Tool – possibly some hitch in ‘Tools’ or ‘Settings’ that allow someone to put their unique site id in a field and WordPress would fill in the blanks behind the scenes.
• Log Export Utility – either on demand or on a timed event the site logs would be sent to the admins so they can manually run the logs against their own log analyzer (webalizer, etc.)

Even with the stats shortcoming I still would use WordPress.com as a starter web site for smaller clients.  The ease of use and the fast indexing of content by Google make it a very strong tool to begin the processing of understanding exactly what your company needs.

Good Hunting.

PS.  I’ve gone round and round on changing the title of this post to be more gracious to WordPress.com but I got the idea from the DailyPost.WordPress.com so I wanted to keep the “List three countries you’d like to visit, and why you want to go.” question theme alive in my post by focusing on the 3 top countries that visit my blog.  Since I could not answer that question, this post was created.

Holiday On-Line Shopping Best Practices

We know the Holidays are just around the corner when Direct Marketing magazines start their year end tradition of telling the retailers how to improve their sites for the up-coming on-line shopping season. (Forget the fact that Christmas displays are going up, retailers need the magazines to tell them) I recently read a great article by Ken Burke in Target Marketing. He provides a great example (knowing or unknowingly I don’t know) of how the Direct Marketing crowds look at web sites versus how Internet Marketing Specialists look at web sites.

All kidding aside for the moment, this is a critical question or concern for many starting out in the ecommerce realm. It seems that every year we are asked by smaller companies venturing into on-line shopping what do do to capitalize on the opportunity. In the past we wrote about this in Favorable News in On-Line Spending and Be Proactive – React Now!

Five Best Practices for the Holidays

All of Mr Burke’s recommendations are dead on. I think he writes a compelling reason for each and provides language that matches his audience. Below are the five key points of his article. You can read the entire article at TargetMarketingMag.com

1. Improve Internal Site Search Performances
2. Improve Product Page Conversion
3. Reduce “One-and-Outs”
4. For the Holidays, Give Shipping and Delivery Center Stage
5. Promote Worry-Free Shopping

As I stated above, Mr Burke has sound advice. I like the Target Marketing magazine. It’s one of the few magazines I refuse to let me wife throw away before I get a chance to read it. (The USPS has a special truck just for magazine deliveries to my home office …. just kidding)

Think TAX Day (US April 15)

Now let’s assume I’m your tax accountant. Every small business in the US files quarterly, and the really lucky ones get to file monthly! (Sarcasm intended) Two months before our nation’s citizens begin to spend billions of dollars on tax services for that fateful day, I send you an email stating it’s time to start thinking about your taxes. I layout a well thought out plan of attack on what you need to do in the next two months to capitalize on the tax credits and new filling regulations for the April 15th deadline. So how long would I be your tax accountant?

Enhanced Advice

OK, let’s say we were to follow Mr. Burke’s advice ALL YEAR LONG! (Which is what I’m recommending you do!) Your organization could focus it attention on the true benefit of all your hard work ….. increase reach. With the knowledge you have a very well designed web site and a web site with great conversion potential, this is the time of year you should be kicking up the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. You would be finding email newsletters and purchasing ad space. Increase your spending in tower and banner ads. These items would increase the holiday profits for more.

Oh, and for those of you who find yourself in November and are beginning to ask these questions, do the best you can for this holiday season but really start thinking about 2009.

Good Hunting!