If you manage your own or other business websites, I imagine you are using Google Analytics or another data manager to explore the traffic to your website.

The beauty of using Google Analytics is that you have a baseline to judge your traffic against other similar websites. I know this because I manage over 100 Google Analytics accounts.

Generally, you measure how much traffic you get, how long people stay, and which pages or posts get the most traffic. Another key indicator is where the traffic is coming from. This includes organic search (Google searches), direct (typing or clicking a URL), referral (link from another website), organic social (multiple social media sites), and something called unassigned (catch-all for all others).

You can reassign that traffic through different methods, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.

What Really Matters

I have seen customers and clients who pay attention to numbers that have little to no connection to reality. What I mean is, how can you tell when a human is really getting to your website and spending quality time?

Google considers engagement as someone spending at least ten seconds on a page or post. Considering that is what most people need to read a headline, look at a picture, and decide if this is for them, that's a pretty low bar.

What mucks up the system is bots, crawlers, or anything and anyone who is not interested in your products or services. Their goal is to read text and images to build data, not buy something. They can spend zero seconds, to dozens of minutes.

So what really matters is how many REAL humans are showing up and consuming your website content. Even more important is how you are getting them to take some action. That may include watching a video, downloading an asset, or filling out a form.

Seconds (Time)

Tick-Tick-Tick… ( 3 seconds). That is what counts as a view of your video post. Blink? Your post is loaded and is counted as an impression. Although Google measures engagement as 10 seconds, when it comes to SEO and SEM the bar for success is much lower.

It takes at least 15-30 seconds for someone to read your headline, look at the graphics, read 1-2 paragraphs, and consider scrolling to read more. You are doing great if you can get 50% of people who get to your website content to scroll even a little bit, 10-15% of them to read the whole article, and 1-2% of them to take action.

That would lead you to believe that more eyes equal more action, but it's actually the opposite.

As I have stated before with B2b marketing, if you can only get 68 people to take action, you can increase sales by millions of dollars. Yet we tend to use e-commerce and consumer metrics to gauge success.

Although B2b companies equate to 1.6 times the amount of gross sales in dollars when compared to B2c companies, the number of B2c transactions (or consumer transactions) is 1.6 times the amount of B2b. In other words, B2b customers tend to spend more yet often buy less.

B2b sales take longer and are more relational than transactional. That means you have to move them beyond impressions and into conversations.

So how can you get the right eyes in front of your right content at the right time?

Seconds (Reposting)

Most content is posted once, and then forgotten. That assumes that it was only right for the audience who was following your business at the time it was posted.

What you have is an asset. That asset can be reposted to social media more often than once. It could be posted 10-15 times and seen by a different set of eyes each time.

That's what happens when I repost my Baconisms. I post the same 30+ image sayings every month. I see random comments and likes each month that I have not seen before.

That's because, in our mind our audience is consistent. In reality, our audience is what the social media algorithms choose for us. So reposting may have a few very engaged repeat viewers, but it has an even better chance to get in front of a new set of eyes.

What's more important is getting your ideas and thought leadership in front of a set of eyes that is in need at the time they see it. That is how you capture people ready to take action.

Seconds (Ads Up)

On LinkedIn, I have over 5,000 connections and only 300 followers on my business page. I have nearly 1300 subscribers to my newsletter on my profile and only 70+ subscribers to my newsletter on my business page. Can you guess what I do with content?

I take one post and share it from my blog to my two newsletters. That gets emails sent out to those subscribers. Then I post the blog to both feeds (personal and business). Then I create a podcast with the same content. Finally, I send an email to my almost 1300 email subscribers with a quick reminder of the content posted this week on my blog, podcasts, and social media. You may think that it is too much of the same, but I can see from email unsubscribes that it's not.

I have customers with similar numbers of subscribers and followers as mine (or more). We do the same cadence to get the content in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

Finally, that limited business page audience may be small, but it has a purpose. Posts to the business page can be given a second chance as an advertisement on LinkedIn.

We can take that same content and repurpose it as ads to an audience similar to those who are following our business page already. The cost is much more affordable than competing for Google ad eyeballs, and the audience is pre-defined and more targeted to potential buyers.

This kind of ad tends to get a higher click-through because the audience is more interested in the topics. They see this kind of content on LinkedIn all the time. Plus, it's visually more appealing than just the link that you get with most Google searches.

Final Thoughts

Giving your content a second chance to get more than 1-3 seconds of attention not only makes your content more valuable, but it also provides a better ROI on your investment to create.

It also easily creates more awareness of your business and your value propositions to a wider audience.

You may not be able to control who sees your content and when, but you certainly will increase the chance that someone who needs what you sell, sees your business at the exact time that they are starting to make buying decisions, and engaging with content to research solutions!

“Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.”
– Charles M. Schulz