Last night I had a cleaning fluid Mr. pitchman hit me hard at the front door. Not literally hit me (I’d hit back) but came at me hard with his product pitch. For the line of work he was in he was great. It was like a little one-man informercial. His words were slick – he had rhymes for everything. He could have easily come up with a rap for what he was doing. He took out the product and had it sprayed on my window before I knew what had happened. He had answers for every objection. And he even had some guilt trips built-in every time I shook my head no.
The problem was with every word I was more and more annoyed. I said “No thanks” … and then again…. and then “You can stop now”… and then “Save your time” …. and then “Have a good night”. And he kept on going. I am in the online marketing business, and a picture-perfect example of someone who hates to be sold to but loves to buy.
After he left, I started thinking about why he kept going. Deep down inside he probably knew two of the many factors that he needed to close the deal:
How long he kept the door open (re: time on your website).
I am sure Mr. Pitchman knows the longer he can keep me at the front door the greater the chance of his success. In the online world this is measured as how much time visitors spends on your site. The longer you can retain somebody on a single page, or any number of pages affects the chances of them taking the action you want. If you don’t have analytics in place to measure the average page views per user, then get that fixed ASAP. Google Analytics has this built-in, but most of my new clients don’t know about it or why they should measure it. This is also a great reason to create finely tuned niche pages and blog posts (like this one). When people come to your site and find what they want instantly the Trust factor has already started. There is no better way to begin a long, wonderful relationship than with Trust. I have goals about time on-site for each visitor that I measure and rate. Anything over a minute is great. Anything over 2 minutes is awesome. And 5+ minutes is just amazing.
How much information he was able to share (re: pages per visitor).
Mr. Pitchman had a great story for everything, and a great comeback for every objection. He had a plethora of great content. In the online world this is measured as the average number of pages per viewer. This lines up pretty closely with the time spent on your website. Every visitor will view at least one page. So that is a “gimme”. But you need to have great content and a great structure to get someone to click on that 2nd, 3rd and 4th page. This is another area where I have goals set up in Google Analytics that I measure. This is also where I learned something important about my traffic: I get two extremes with very little in the middle. I have a lot of one-pagers, and I have a lot of visitors that hit 5-10 pages of content. So, I need convert those one-pages to two-pagers.
Start paying attention to these two factors in your analytics report today.
Humorous Follow-up: I tried to call my neighbor after the pitchman left to warn him of what was coming. People always hit my door first and then his door, so I try to give him a heads-up. I could not get a hold of him, but my neighbor had the best solution of all: He didn’t open the door. I need to take a hint from my neighbor more often. Dec 9, 2011.
Update: I think I found a video on YouTube that my blog post below talks about. Watch the video. I am fairly certain this is the Mr. pitchman.