Sticky Eyeballs as a Marketing Goal

Sticky eyeballs as a marketing goal? Yes! The idea behind "sticky eyeballs" is that the longer you keep your visitors eyeballs pealed to your pages the better your chance to sell them something, the more ads they'll see, and the stronger will be your brand identity. Even if you aren't selling anything, sticky eyeballs remains a reasonable marketing goal because the longer your visitors stay the more successfully you are entertaining or informing them.

Keeping your visitors longer can be an elusive marketing goal. With just a click a visitor can leave your site - and they might never return. Their sticky eyeballs weren't sticky enough. The same technology that makes your site so accessible, makes it even easier to leave it. There are millions of websites all beckoning your visitors to surf on in for potentially more useful, entertaining, insightful, or interesting content than your site appears to them, at that fateful moment, to provide. Sorry, but that is the reality all website creators must face. The reality is the same for the biggest portals as it is for a basic homepage. In some ways us little guys are much better off than the big guys. Getting sticky eyeballs is a primary marketing goal for them. They live and die by their "metrics" - the statistics of who there visitors are, what they click, and how long they linger. In some cases there are billions of dollars in stock valuations absolutely dependent upon maintaining growth in those metrics. They face incredible, and sometimes impossible, expectations from the investors, analysts, and the media. Indeed, it must be very stressful at the top. They work very hard at achieving their marketing goals - they have to.

As for us little web guys and web gurls, at least most of us can sleep at night without worrying about our metrics. Nevertheless they are important and we can do alot to improve the stickiness of our websites. That "stickiness" goes hand in hand with marketing and promoting your site to get new visitors to check out what your site has to offer. For those who do come, it would be nice if they'd stay long enough to really experience the site. Likewise, it is usually desirable that visitors also see reason to return at a later date. When they do it is another chance for your site to achieve what you've designed it accomplish. Repeat visitors are your friends. They are your satisfied customers. Make getting them one of your fundamental marketing goals.

One way to make your site more sticky is to focus on what a typical visitor experiences at your site. What is it that your site offers the visitor? What are they expecting? Are you meeting those expectations successfully? These are tough questions that are difficult to answer satisfactorily because it is hard to get inside the heads of visitors who are largely anonymous. You have to do your best. You can create "profiles" of who you think your typical visitors are. Think about how your site can best serve those visitors. Think about meeting all their needs and exceeding their expectations. If you believe your typical visitors are not who you want to target your site to, then think about focusing more marketing and promotion at your target market. Do everything you can to better understand who your visitors are. Ask them to contact you via email and give you some feedback. You could create a guestbook page for the same purpose. You could develop a questionnaire that can provide you information you can use to tune your site and your marketing and promotion efforts. Obtain more sticky eyeballs through site modifications as necessary, and through better targeting of your promotional efforts to people who'll truly appreciate your site.

You can learn more about your visitors by carefully looking at your site statistics. Look for the patterns in their behavior, look at which links they seem to prefer and which they shun. Maybe the stuff they shun needs to be incorporated better into the site, refocused, or dropped. What you'll learn from this exercise will also help you to better market and promote your site.

When you feel you have a strong grasp on who your visitors are, focus on exceeding their expectations. Wow them and you'll have an army of enthusiastic cheerleaders. Build on your content giving them reasons to come back. Provide new content if you can. At the very least you should commit yourself to keeping your information timely. Tweak and redesign; reposition portions of your site - shifting focus from one area to another. If you do, watch carefully to see how your visitors respond. It's one more way you can learn more about them. Keep track of how successfully your site facilitates sticky eyeballs.

Seek visitor participation and you'll find they'll help you with content in the form of submissions, guestbook or message board entries, testimonials, or chat room participation. The more successful you are in engaging dialogue with your visitors, the more you will be building a "community". The big portals have been focusing on community building because the recognize the loyalty visitors have to sites that allow their participation. For them loyalty translates into better advertising revenue. For the portals community building goes hand in hand with sticky eyeballs as a marketing goal.

Your site's ability to "stick" visitors will largely depend on how much content you provide them and how well it is organized. As you can tell from this page I'm not an advocate of providing just a couple of sentences of information per page! If providing information is relevant to your site's content, then please don't hesitate - provide some. I believe it is a common misconception that web surfers have incredibly short attention spans. This idea seems to translate into two lines of text and a significant download of accompanying graphics. It is no surprise to me that visitors click away so quickly. Please don't respond to their clicking away by making it just one line of text. Instead recognize that most web surfers are information junkies. They crave the information that interests them and will gobble it up.

I find it incredible that many sites trying to sell things seem to think providing a little picture and a brief description is enough to develop a sale. Part of the web's potential is that scads of information can be provided efficiently. I can't understand why, next to those little pictures and the brief descriptions, aren't there links to information as comprehensive as can reasonably be provided. If I'm at all interested in a particular product I will read as much as I can about it prior to hitting any buy button. I want to make informed purchase decisions and I believe the majority of buyers are like me. If you are selling toasters, your visitors shouldn't have to look beyond your site for the information they need to be comfortable in purchasing it from you. If they have to leave seeking more information, there is a good chance they won't be back. Stick them to your site by giving them the information they need. It should be more than a marketing goal, it is common sense.

In conclusion I'd like to suggest it is very possible for any of us to develop a site that is world class in terms of satisfying our visitors' needs. We need to try to understand who uses our sites, what they are looking for, and what are their expectations. Achieving that level of understanding requires we take a few steps back, put our fat egos on hold, and try to experience our sites as our visitors do. Translate what you learn into a better website plus appropriate marketing goals and you'll have a product you can market and promote easily and effectively. You'll get stickier sticky eyeballs!

Sorry I'm so long winded. I'd really appreciate any feedback on the ideas expressed here. Please .