How we became Google Analytics Specialists
In 1995, convinced that the internet was “the next big thing,” we made a small investment in an internet company. The business was the brainchild of a friend and we signed on as investors/advisors.
The business started as an online lead source for motorcycle dealers but quickly morphed into an ecommerce website, selling motorcycle parts and accessories online.
It was early days for online sales and it was exciting! If you could figure out how to get a website up, keep it running and get traffic to it – the results were amazing.
As the internet heated up – more and more competitors entered the motorcycle accessories space and the business started losing market share.
What is this thing called conversion?
From the sales and traffic numbers, it was clear that the business needed to get more sales from their traffic…but how?
The design of the website seemed good, the copy was well written and the product images were as large as the internet could handle at that point. But something wasn’t going right. Visitors came to the site and left – many times without looking at more than just the home page.
Everything in those days was about getting traffic to your website. There was very little written about what to do once visitors were on your site. Like everyone we turned to the internet to get answers and a lot of conversations and internet searches later we discovered that the skill we were looking for was called website conversion optimization.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) was still relatively unknown at this point, especially for small businesses. We contacted several Conversion Rate Optimization firms but their prices were beyond the budget of a small business like ours.
Becoming data driven
As the competition accelerated, we knew that the key was to turn more of our visitors into customers. Unfortunately, being the advisors and minority investors didn’t give us a lot of leverage and our suggestions were ignored.
However, we were not discouraged … Actually, it fired us up.
The truths we believed could be boiled down to two things:
- Working with small businesses on the internet would be our life’s work
- The growth of an online business is directly proportional to its ability to understand it’s data and use the data to convert visitors into clients or customers.
We found our passion – data driven decision making– and never looked back.
Why only small business owners?
Scuba, Marty, Carl and Truman
That one is easy.
Through the 80’s and 90’s we worked as stockbrokers first for Merrill Lynch and later for Smith Barney. Our mix of business included large corporate clients and small business owners.
Larger business mean bigger fees, but politics, dealing with committees and a slow decision-making process, was difficult and stressful.
Working with small business owners, by comparison, was fun and rewarding.
They made decisions in a reasonable amount of time. They understood risk. Most importantly for us, there was a complete absence of politics. We all worked together towards a shared goal.
Once we left the brokerage business and started our own consulting firm, there was never a question about who we were going to work with – we were going to work exclusively with small business owners.
Yes You Can
We believe that owning a small business website on the internet today, is closer to guerilla warfare than anything else. It’s not easy to take market share from larger, better-capitalized companies. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done – it can.
We are a two person -two dog operation. We have a Rolodex of people we trust who we collaborate with – but when you hire us – you get Carl and Marty Diamond.
Learn more about our services. . .
Just give Carl a call at 253-564-1139 or Contact Us