November 15th is National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day. Wait – before you think this is a trivial made-up holiday, let us tell you why we’re writing about it.
If they can commemorate throwing away expired yogurt and questionable leftovers, then we can write about throwing away parts of your company’s digital life to help your business make more money.
Three Things to Clean Out of Your Digital Marketing
- Un-used Plug-ins – This is common garbage that dramatically slows down the average WordPress website. A fast website load time = better potential to rank on Google = more business for you.
This week, confirm with your website manager that the removal of all unused plug-ins on your website is complete. Keep your Google rankings afloat and remove your bloat!
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- Google Analytics Spam – Bad guys are trying to do harmful things to your website nearly every day through advanced software that can generate dozens of visits in seconds. Fortunately, most of the time, they don’t succeed at what they are trying to do. But what it does indirectly is dilute your data.
In this sample from a Google Analytics account like yours, you see traffic from a bot (a piece of software) that consumed just one page per visit and stayed less than 1 second, artificially raising the number of website visits.
Why should you care?
Because your website performance data is being inaccurately measured.
When you add a hundred visits to your website from software that can’t buy your product or service to visits from people genuinely interested, you don’t get a true understanding of how your website is performing.
If you rely on your Google Analytics data to tell you which parts of your website should be changed (and you should) or which digital marketing tactics are working for you, then you are getting a distorted view of your website’s effectiveness since these visits don’t behave like real prospects or customers. So parts of your website look inherently less effective.
Ask your webmaster or digital agency if they are filtering out spam data in Google Analytics. If not, tell them they need to. Better data means better decisions. Better decisions mean better digital marketing.
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- Inactive People on Your Email List – What’s the harm in continuing to email someone who doesn’t opt-out or report you as SPAM, but never engages with your email?
It is preventing some of your emails from getting to your recipients’ inboxes.
MBP’s (Mail Box Providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) examine what people do with the email you send. If they detect you send a lot of emails to people that never open it or click on a link within, it hurts your reputation as a sender, and more of your emails end up in the junk folder.
Inactive subscribers are often the reason your marketing emails end up in people’s junk folders, even when you’ve followed all the rules.
Delete subscribers off your list who have not engaged with your last six marketing emails.
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Cleaning out your digital marketing “refrigerator” is an effective way to increase your website’s success. While we’re not talking about tossing expired milk or hard-to-identify items found in the far reaches of your actual refrigerator, we’re talking about clearing out anything that may be standing in the way of your website’s performance data. Both are good for your health – your health and the health of your website.