Apps in the Mornings

What do you do first in the morning? Take a shower, go for a jog or brew coffee? Chances are, you have your getting-ready ritual down to a science.

You wake up, you have a coffee, you turn to your smartphone to check emails, weather and Facebook updates. 84 percent of smartphone owners surveyed by app tester SOASTA admitted to using at least one app first thing in the morning.

This is why I'm Leaving You

So people are not really into what you're selling. And subsequently leaving you. Gone. Alone. But why? On the Internet people don't smell (yet), but people do smell when they are being served crap - and this is usually why users, customers, clients, and potentially new business leave websites. The Internet is cluttered with information, and if your website is not interesting enough or serving up the right info, the visitor is going to leave. This is your bounce rate.

So, what is a good bounce rate? Sadly, there isn’t a golden number for bounce rate or average time on page. Also, many factors can go into these metrics, such as what kind of traffic your site is attracting and the SEO that’s been done.

In general, a good bounce rate would be anything under 50%-60%. A large factor influencing bounce rate is what kind of page you’re looking at and what the content is on that page. If the page is largely informational on a topic without many links to other parts of your site, then a bounce rate above 60% wouldn’t be out of the norm. However, if the page is mainly a directory of links to, say, products you make or services you offer, than you should see a much lower bounce rate than 60%.

If your bounce rate is high, the first place to look is your site design. Make sure that links are easily identifiable, relevant, and intuitive on each page. Main site navigation links should be located on every page of your site, with the exception of landing pages. The aesthetics of your site should also be up-to-date since an ugly or out-of-date site can cause a user to turn away instantly. Unfortunately, your flashy confetti animations on the sidebars are not as attractive as they were last decade.

Finally, look at how long it takes to load pages on your site. If you have a ton of large, high-resolution images, pages may take too long to load. People are impatient and will most likely hop off your page and go onto the next one if the load time is excessive.

For more about bounce rates, check out this infograph from KissMetrics.

Pathways into Purchase

Consumers today continue to embrace all things digital to enhance their shopping experience. Digital channels and devices have enabled today’s consumers to be more discerning about how they buy, from where, and at what prices. This disrupted “path to purchase” has complicated the marketer’s job since they tries to reach their shopper with more timely and relevant offers, both online and off. Particularly at the start of the buying process, consumers are doing more research online than ever.

This also alters the behavior of how a costumer finally reaches a purchase. He may have researched a particular item or service all day using his laptop, but then decides to perform the actual purchase from his cellphone on the way home. If that product is not offered via the mobile system, then the retailer will not only have lost this one sale, but potentially the entire costumer, who at this point simply will log on to the competitors site and buy the product there.

Knowing the path to purchase is vital for knowing how, when, and where a costumer interacts with a company. This helpful infograph should be studied inside-out by anyone wanting to get into multichannel ales -- which today is know simply as "sales".

Facebook Engagement

Ever asked yourself; “Why is nobody visiting our Facebook page?”. You are not alone. One of the hardest marketing segments to understand for small businesses is social media, and but default so is Facebook. Honestly, most business do not understand Facebook at all.

The main concern seems to be the uncertainty of not knowing if the Facebook Page should perform better or not. Should we get more follower/likes, or have we reached the market we can reach through this channel? Is our online market segment already saturated? The answer to these questions is most likely; no, you can always increase your following base. The nice thing about online marketing is that is far much cheaper than regular marketing (should be a no brainer everyone by now), which gives you an enormous room for experimenting. And often just growing your online presence, increasing the frequency on your updates, will yield a tremendous return in fan-following – almost regardless the content!

This Infographic by Quintly shows a report of the average engagement pages get based on their number of Fans/Likes in April 2013. Look for the correct bracket to figure out if your Facebook-page is performing above or below average.

While this will definitely not determine what kind of engagement your page should be getting because of course, your case is unique and you could be way higher or lower, at least gives you an idea of what’s normal out there for pages with similar sizes.