Creately is an easy to use Online Diagramming software - purpose built for team collaboration. Powerful features and an intuitive interface make Creately ideal for teams working together on everything from Business Diagrams, Strategy Maps, Flowcharts, Web Mockups to UML designs.
Here we share our experiences and lessons learnt building a web-company.
Finally time for the next post in this series. I know its been two months since the first one, and sorry for taking this long! Better late than never, and here we go! If you’ve missed the first one on Visitors Map Overlay, stop right here, and go read it.
We’ve mentioned the importance of Map Overlay in the first post, and this time its all about Goals in Google Analytics! Lets see what Goals are, why they’re important and how we set them.
What are Goals in Google Analytics?
Goals describe the completion of a desired task that you’d like your visitors to do!
By setting up Goals in Google Analytics, you can measure how often the desired tasks are completed, and this is called the conversion rate.
Before implementing Goals, identify what your website’s objectives are, and what visitor actions they correspond to. A goal can be anything from completing a contact form for generating leads to completing a purchase for driving revenue.
There are multiple ways to define goals, and here’s a great article written by Ian Spencer that gives more tips on Goals in Google Analytics.
And now, the Goal Funnel?
Accomplishing a Goal involves a sequence of steps. The sequence that leads up to the completion of a Goal make up the Goal Funnel. For each Goal, you will need to setup a Goal Funnel and like the Goal itself, each of these steps must correspond to a measurable action on a specific page.
For example, Creately visitors go through a sequence of steps before finally performing the desired Sign Up action. Assume that you land on the Creately UML Landing page (the first step towards the Goal), where you might choose to Try Creately Now without signing up, and then from the Creately application you could opt to Sign Up ‘cos you’re convinced.
This would direct you to the Plans & Pricing page, where you’d be expected to choose a preferred plan, then click on Sign Up to make the purchase. Once you complete the purchase, you’d be sent to the Thank you page (this marks the Goal). Now, this means the desired task is performed and the Goal is accomplished.
However, on the other hand if the website visitor only goes up to the plans page, and opts to leave without signing up. Then the Goal is not met and it’s considered to be abandoned! Thus, Goals and Conversion rates are important to measure the performance of a website.
We refer to the whole sequential process as a funnel - many people start at the top and fewer end up coming out to the bottom by accomplishing the Goal.
Check out the flowchart below to see the steps that correspond to a measurable action on different pages -
How to Set up Goals
Setting a goal is very simple. If you have administrative access, you can sign in to your Google Analytics. Then go to Analytics Settings and select a profile, click on edit, choose an unused goal ’slot’, and click on edit again.
You’ll need to then follow the steps and decide what your goal is and how you’ll be declaring a goal, then click to finish and you’ll start measuring the performance for your website.
Check out this video for more details on Setting Up Goals in Google Analytics
Today, I’m writing the first post in a series that will guide small business owners and entrepreneurs in understanding the important customer data that Google Analytics provides. We’ll look at where to find the data in Google Analytics and how this information can be useful to your business.
Google Analytics is a great tool for analyzing the traffic that shows up on your website. This will give you fantastic insights into who is coming to your web site, all the other related pages, and how they’re getting there. It displays so much useful information, and with just a little training, you too will be able to use Google Analytics for your business. We won’t go into the details of how to setup Google Analytics for your site - but here’s a great article on Mahalo that shows you how to set it up for free.
Today, we’ll start with the Visitors Map overlay. With the Visitor Map, you get a World Map graphic that captures website Visitor numbers by region, country and state. The Map Overlay can be accessed by clicking on the Visitors tab, and then the Map Overlay underneath it. You can also select different Detail Levels of the world map in City view, Country/Territory view and so on.
The Map Overlay displays Visits as the metric in the default view with the countries rendered in varying shades of green. Countries with the darkest shade of green indicates the greatest number of visitors in terms of website traffic. While some other countries have no shading at all, this indicates the site has never had a visitor.
The metric displayed on the map can be changed from Visits to Pages/Visit, avg. Time on Site, % New Visits, Bounce Rate, and Goal Conversion Rate. You can also drill down to see more detailed information within specific regions, either by clicking on individual countries on the map or selecting a different Detail Level. Look at the image below for an example of an Overlay Visitor Map drilled down to the Country/Territory detail of Brazil.
Are you wondering how Google knows which country a visitor comes from? Well, the answer is no rocket science, Google simply looks at the IP address of every visitor to determine from country/place in the world they are coming from. In the map of Brazil above, it tells us that Sao Paulo is the largest market in Brazil, followed by Rio de Janiero.
More interestingly, an Advanced Segmentation feature is now available in Google Analytics. This enables you to analyze subsets of your traffic. You can either choose from the pre-defined segments such as “Paid Traffic”, “Visits with Conversions”, “Referral Traffic” or create your own custom segments and then compare up to four segments develop a great understanding of your customer’s behaviour on the site.
With the Advanced Segmentation features you can also create new segments with the Segment Creator. Simply drag and drop dimensions and metrics into the boxes to create a visit segment. Then, you can apply one or more of these segments to data, and compare the segment performance. By setting up an advanced segment for just “Sign-up from Sao Paulo” for instance, you could drill down and analyse the behaviour of the users who signed-up from Sao Paulo.
Check out this video for more details on how the Advanced Segmentation works.
The geodata collected through Analytics helps to identify lucrative geographic markets and identify new locations for potential marketing campaigns. Targeting specific users geographically will undoubtedly increase the success of your business. I hope you’ve learnt the importance of the Map Overlay and how it can help you reach customers from around the world.
It’s been three happening weeks for us here at Creately! Ever wondered why? Yes, the addition of Creately to the Google Apps Marketplace. Creately has been doing really well with it and has helped many businesses around the world to improve their visual communication and collaboration. This has caught Google’s eye and yesterday we were mentioned on the Official Google Enterprise Blog.
This post highlighted the five best apps added to the Google Apps Marketplace that are helping small business owners run better businesses. Read what Google’s got to say here<.
We’d love to hear from all of you using Creately on Google Apps how we can make Google Apps Integration work better for you. If you haven’t still added Creately to your Google Apps account, add it now with a few simple steps. Here’s a short video on how to install Google Apps on your account.
And when you’ve started using Creately in your Google Apps setup, don’t forget to leave us a review on the Google Apps Marketplace.
Businesses both large and small are fighting to get involved in social media, the craze is spreading like wildfire. But just how much do you know about it? Social media is a new phenomenon known by many names - geeks call it web 2.0, marketers call it social marketing, and yet others may call it social communication. Social media is a broad term, the best way to understand it is by narrowing it down. Hopefully this post will help businesses to understand the concept of social media and the best social media sites for your business. Delicious, Digg, Facebook and Wikipedia are just some examples, but today there are literally hundreds of other social media sites that your business can leverage to improve your website traffic. Today we’ll share some of the services we’ve come to rely on and see how each one of these have helped us increase traffic and engagement with with our customers.
Social News Sites
Social News Sites are great for finding useful resources, articles, and information on the web. We submit our blog posts and any other news relating to Creately to many news sites. Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit and Propeller are a few of the best news sites which bring in the highest number of visitors. These sites offer the ability to actively participate in the discussion by leaving comments on popular news items. Once you submit links, you can vote up people’s submissions, as well as vote down stories that you don’t like. Interacting and connecting with people with similar interests cannot be any easier!
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social Bookmarking sites allow users to save their favorite sites with tags/keywords to manage and organize them easily for later use. Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are always the highest referring sites at creately.com. We save our blog posts, landing pages and other relevant articles. Bookmarking sites not only allow you to save and share your favorite websites, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. Thanks to Charan, I’ve gained immensely through Charan’s Del.icio.us bookmarks. Just type in any web or marketing keyword and I bet you’ll find loads of interesting and useful resources!
Social Networking Site
Social Networking sites have become increasingly popular these days. Twitter is a great networking platform we engage in for interacting with our customer, well-wishers and prospective users. Tweetdeck is a Twitter application that helps us organize, update and handle all your tweets and followers. The best part of this is the ease of managing conversations which interests you. Hootsuite is another web-based Twitter application we love. It’s best feature is the ability to schedule tweets for later delivery and it lets your whole team manage your Twitter presence. You can now sit back and relax while all your tweets are sent out at the scheduled times. Twitter has undoubtedly helped us gain users and so has Facebook. We continuously post our articles on our Creately’s Facebook profile – we have 200 fans currently and it’s still growing. We love it when our articles are re-posted, liked and commented by our fans from all over the world.
Photo and Video Sharing
Social Photo, Video and Multimedia Sharing Sites are great tools for sharing photos, videos and presentations. At Creately we don’t do a lot of photo sharing, but all our screencasts, demo videos and tutorial videos are broadcast via YouTube and numerous other video sharing services. YouTube has been a great medium to help us reach out to users to demonstrate Creately’s ease of use and great diagramming capabilities. In fact, we’re working on a new video for our homepage at the moment - so watch this space! We also make presentations and upload them on Slideshare. Our users have always liked our attempt in presenting our landing page contents in simple slides. We’re hoping to do at least one slidehsare presentation a month. Fingers crossed!
Wikis
Wikis are sites which allow people to freely create and edit any number of hyper linked web pages. These help people know about the Creately as online diagramming software, its use, benefits and features. Besides Wikipedia, there are a host of other niche wikis that may be useful to your business like - WikiHow, WikiSpaces & WikiAnswers. Social media plays a vital role in the marketing of Creately.com. These sites have contributed well in building traffic and will help any marketer promote his/her business. I’ve put together a quick diagram illustrating the 20 best social news sites that we engage in - so save it somewhere close and get working on your social media strategy!
So you’ve built a killer web application (lets call it “Killer App A”) and you’re ready to take over the world with it. Now what?
How exactly do you get the rest of this planet excited or even aware of your new whizz-bang Killer App A? How do you get it out there and build an audience for your product with a bootstrapped startup’s budget?
Just like conventional offline marketing, every startup marketer needs to understand the basic marketing tenets of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning if you’re to succeed. Once you’ve identified your target segment and customer - you’ll need to find the best way to reach these target customers.
Unfortunately, simply knowing who your target customer is - isn’t going to be good enough because you don’t have the budget to hire marketing suits to help you reach these customers. Fortunately for all of us, the Internet today offers a host of options to get Killer App A out to the people who matter - it just takes a little work and a healthy dose of creativity to succeed.
3 Questions to ask about your target Customers?
Once you’ve identified your target customer - you’ll need to know where to find your target customer, or more specifically, where on the Internet your potential customers are spending their time and attention - so you can get “Killer App A” in front of them.
Typically you need to be able to answer the following questions about your target customers: 1) Which websites or blogs does a typical customer visit?
2) Who are the influencers or mover and shakers that your target customers are paying attention to?
3) Are there online Communities, Forums or Social Networks that your customers congregate at?
Answering these basic questions will help you formulate the most cost effective strategy for customer acquisition - allowing you to channel your limited resources towards the most relevant customer sources.
Start Here… Google Alerts
The first thing I’d recommend for anyone trying to reach their customers is to create a set of Google Alerts. Google Alerts are a great way to keep up to date with the latest on any topic on the Internet, and thats exactly what you want to do for the keywords (topics) that matter to you and your customers. You can set it up to receive daily alerts and once you’ve found a site thats relevant - you’ll want to Engage, Engage, Engage.
Here at Creately.com - we’re interested in customers who draw technical and business diagrams - so we’ve set up Google Alerts which point us to sites, blogs and online conversations where these are being discussed.
Then we engage in the blogs and forums that discuss these topics - initially by offering to help and providing useful information and resources to gain credibility in the community. And finally introducing your product/service where appropriate (Note: Posting about your product without engagement can be counter-productive). This is a great way to reach out! Once you’re known within the community, you can also send out direct emails to bloggers requesting them to review your startup - this sure beats a standardized email from an unknown startup.
Where are your competitors reaching customers? Another nifty trick is to set up Google Alerts for you competitor’s product or brand. If someone’s talking about your competitor on a website or blog - that probably means there’s a keen interest from the Blog’s author and readers in your particular space or product. As long as your product can add value to the discussion, there is no reason why you shouldn’t engage with this blog/site to put forward Killer App A.
Start-up Blogs
Another great source for potential customers is getting featured on one of the leading Technology blogs like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb or Mashable. These sites can drive a lot of traffic to your website but simply relying on these tech blogs is not good enough to grow your startup’s web-presence (Read more about the Techcrunch bump here).
Besides these high traffic blogs there are a host of very useful niche blogs that may be relevant to your target customer base. But, how will you find these niche blogs? Marshall Kirkpatrick (from RWW fame) has a good post on finding the right sites on his blog.
Directories (Google Loves them)
Now, just as how review sites are paramount to any startup it is equally important to get listed in Directories. DMOZ is one such prestigious directory, and so is MakeUseOf.com, and KillerStartups.com. Bookmark these URLs and read these posts for useful tips for getting Killer App A listed on them:
Good backlinks from these reputable Tech Blogs and Directories help build your business’s reach and gain credibility in a very competitive startup environment. Besides being a great way of acquiring initial traffic, these listings improve your site’s Google Page Rank by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to your pages.
Content is King
Reviews and listings will drive good traffic, but to convert the traffic into customers there’s a lot more work to be done - we’ll discuss some strategies for conversion in another post. In the meantime, you need to be constantly engaging with the communities that will drive customers your way. Write blog posts that appeal to your target customer, always using appropriate titles to capture the attention of readers. The goals of your blog posts should be to educate, inform and to generate comments.
Social Media is your Friend
You’ve written your posts and published them - now its time to make sure you get the maximum leverage from your effort. Social media plays a key role here, so make sure you have profiles on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg and loads more. Submit your blog posts with a back link to your blog or site. Remember to make your interactions with members on social networks a 2-way dialogue by answering their questions and helping the community where possible.
And Yes, at Cinergix we do a lot of hardwork to create a buzz about Creately! We aim at having as many reviews, listings and social media presence as possible. These tips may not work all the time, but keep at it and I assure you it will pay off.
Here’s a simple diagram featuring Creately’s Reviews from 10 review sites.
We hope you’ve found this post useful for your own Killer App - we’d love to hear of other innovative things you do to get your product out to the world.
Goals describe the completion of a desired task that you’d like your visitors to do!
For example, Creately visitors go through a sequence of steps before finally performing the desired Sign Up action. Assume that you land on the Creately UML Landing page (the first step towards the Goal), where you might choose to Try Creately Now without signing up, and then from the Creately application you could opt to Sign Up ‘cos you’re convinced.
Today, we’ll start with the Visitors Map overlay. With the Visitor Map, you get a World Map graphic that captures website Visitor numbers by region, country and state. The Map Overlay can be accessed by clicking on the Visitors tab, and then the Map Overlay underneath it. You can also select different Detail Levels of the world map in City view, Country/Territory view and so on.
Businesses both large and small are fighting to get involved in social media, the craze is spreading like wildfire. But just how much do you know about it? Social media is a new phenomenon known by many names - geeks call it web 2.0, marketers call it social marketing, and yet others may call it social communication. Social media is a broad term, the best way to understand it is by narrowing it down. Hopefully this post will help businesses to understand the concept of social media and the best social media sites for your business. 
