The Silent Assassins
Posted On: 2007-11-26
Here in Australia we had an election on the weekend to elect a new federal parliament. As everyone expected, the political party that had held power for the last 11 years got a thumping and the leader of the party even managed to lose his own seat in the process.
Now that's something that's very rare here in Australia ... in fact the last time a Prime Minister lost his own seat was way back in 1929 when one of the major issues of the election was employment and industrial relations. Guess what one of the major issues was at this election?
You guessed it ... employment and industrial relations. Of course the remaining members of the defeated party are claiming that the opposition parties managed to convince the public that the industrial relations changes that had been introduced were much worse than they really were ... and there's no doubt that the opposition did run a campaign that was very critical of those changes.
But the fact is that the changes that the old governing party had introduced were changes that ordinary Australians didn't want because they were seen as being un-Australian and that unleashed the silent assassins.
That's the term a newspaper seems to have coined for a phenomena that campaign workers saw for the first time when the voting booths opened on election day. They saw hundreds of people across the country arrive early at many of the booths; they declined to accept how-to-vote cards. They barely smiled and rarely spoke as they queued for anything up to an hour to get into the booth to register their vote to toss out an unwanted Government who refused to listen to them.
That made me wonder whether or not we here in this industry have our own version of the silent assassins. If we do then they come to our sites, they tell us very little about themselves and they don't stop long enough to be influenced by our marketing message. And then they vote with their feet as they go on to other sites.
The fact is that if we don't 'listen' to those people then we're going to be just as much out of business as last week's Prime Minister of Australia is. We might be bright and cocky and think that those people don't really matter ... and in many ways that was the way our PM seemed to be thinking last week ... but if we don't 'listen' to them then we're going to be just as miserable and destroyed as our ex-PM is today.
So how do we listen to people?
We start by making sure that we have some good tracking installed on our sites so that we can spot where our visitors are coming from. It's vital to know where our traffic comes from because that gives us some vital information about who the people are that are visiting our sites.
We also need to know how which pages our visitors are arriving on. Are they hitting our index page or are they arriving on some other page that we didn't consider to be all that important? What will they see when they hit that page? Is it something that is relevant to the search that brought them to our sites or has Google picked up an obscure phrase on the page and brought them to a site that really isn't relevant for them?
When they do arrive on our sites how long do they stay? How many pages do they look at and can we see a logical progression through those pages? What page do they leave from and where do they go after the leave our site?
When you have the answers to those questions you can then begin to get some vague idea of whether or not your website met their needs and you can begin to look at ways that you might have been able to better meet their needs.
In many areas the longer you can keep a surfer on your website the more chance you have of selling something to him. The more interest you can generate in the surfer for the information you have on your site the more you can engage him or her and encourage them to go where you want them to go and to buy the products that you want them to buy.
Over the last year or two here in Australia the political party that was in power didn't listen to the people. Instead it just went its own merry way doing what it thought was right for everyone and somewhere along the way it lost the people and they couldn't wait for election day to roll around so they could have their say.
The lesson here for you is to never stop listening to the people who visit your sites. The moment you stop listening to them is the moment you lose them and they'll vote with their feet and go on to some other site that does listen to them and does give them what they want.