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Shaun Ryan: Hi, I’m Shaun Ryan, for the eCommerce Podcast. Today, I’m talking to Mark Dirks, president of Beacon Tech. Hi, Mark.

Mark Dirks: Hey, how are you doing?

Shaun: Very good, thanks. Welcome to the eCommerce Podcast.

Mark: Glad to be here.

Shaun: Traditional first question: what’s the first thing you ever bought online?

Mark: You know, I really can’t remember. [Shaun laughs]

Mark: It’s been so long. I’ve been using the Internet for so long, now, that I just can’t remember. I’ve purchased so many things online over the years.

Shaun: How about the most recent thing? Can you remember what you last purchased?

Mark: Yes. I bought concert tickets and, probably Turbo Tax, for the tax year. But that was my last purchase, for sure was concert tickets.

Shaun: What was the concert?

Mark: You don’t want to know. [Shaun laughs]

Mark: I am an old guy. I’m a big AC/DC fan.

Shaun: I love AC/DC.

Mark: I purchased tickets to see them in Charlotte here, two weeks from today.

Shaun: I’m envious. I’d love to see them. Mark, can you give me some background on yourself?

Mark: Yes. I, believe it or not, was born in Las Vegas, Nevada and, over the years, have migrated over with my family, to North Carolina. I went to high school in North Carolina. Went to Wake Forest University for my undergrad, and Kansas State University for my graduate degree. I worked with RJ Reynolds industry, their world headquarters in Winston-Salem, for a while. And then worked for 15 years with AT&T, starting out as a programmer/developer, and worked my way to where, right before I left, I was the program director for AT&T’s global, corporate intranet. That was in the early ’90s, when intranets were not real popular, at that point.

We felt like, at AT&T, we were on the leading edge. It was for all 150, 000 employees, at that time, so it was a pretty big deal.

Shaun: It must have been. Was it browser-based, then?

Mark: Yeah. My team actually built the web-enabled PeopleSoft, before PeopleSoft had their web layer on there, and built all the security around it, across the world, really, for all the worldwide employees to use. It was really good. We had a lot of other companies interested in what we were doing. The web was taking off. Internet was still kind of new to a lot of people.

Eventually, I left the company and started Beacon Technologies, feeling like the demand was going to be there for Internet web development, e-commerce, and all the other pieces of the Internet, and been doing that ever since December of ‘97.

Shaun: So you’ve been around for a while. Can you tell me a little bit about Beacon Tech? What is it that you do?

Mark: You know what? Over the years, it’s been hard for me to say that, to explain all the different things we do, so we came up with a one-liner, and it’s what we do: we help companies automate, grow, and showcase their business on the web. Our goal is to help companies take full advantage of what the web offers. That means, when we talk about “automate, ” we’re talking about web development, web application development. A lot of e-commerce, 60 percent of our business is in that automate category.

Mark:We’re talking about web marketing, which just seems to continue to expand like crazy. We’re talking about organic. We’re talking about pay per click, shopping engines, email, social networks. We have a part of our business that does that. The showcase is the creative side, and the tools that are under it. We work closely with Hannon Hill’s content management software, as the underneath of our creative design, and also with companies like SLI, where the site-search component all falls in that showcase arena. That gives, I think, an easier way to follow what we do.

Shaun: Yeah, it’s a broad range of services. How many people do you have in the company?

Mark: We have about 40 people, at this point. It’s a good group of people. That’s what makes our company strong.

Shaun: There’s a lot of different areas in there that I’m sure our customers will be interested in. Just to pick on one of them for now, you mentioned social media. What types of social media are you working with, and how do you see your customers using that?

Mark: Well, to be honest, social media is really… We’re just now starting to touch that, with Facebook, and all the people that are out there, involved with Facebook, and LinkdIn, and all the different social areas out there. We do a lot of work with universities. A lot of the Cascade Server, this content management product, is in the universities. When you’re in the university arena, social networking is dominant.

Shaun: Yes, the kids live and breathe it, don’t they?

Mark: Yeah, they do, and it’s a whole other world. I’ve been in this world for a long time, with the Internet. It’s just amazing how much it changes, and how much you can learn by being involved in that vertical. Right now, we’re really exploring some of the tactics to reach people within the social media arena, but our strengths have always been with the organic optimization. One of the things I always like to brag about is, Beacon Technology is… If you go out and search Google today, and you look for website development, we’re number two in the world.

Shaun: Wow. That’s a testament, isn’t it, to your ECI abilities?

Mark: It’s a real testament to our team. It’s taken maybe two years for us to get to that point. A lot of research, a lot of work, to establish that. And the same with e-commerce development. I think we’re number four, now. I’m proud of that. Those are very difficult words, or phrases, to win on and we’ve done that.

We apply the same philosophy, the same tactics, to all of our clients in that organic arena, but also with our relationship with Google. We are one of about 18 companies in the country that are Google Analytics consultants, specifically picked by Google to provide the analytical side of what goes on with your web site.

When you marry all this stuff together, the many different channels of web marketing, and you have Google Analytics, and you’re capturing conversions, and you’re capturing conversion rates, and you’re really understanding what is going on with the visits and the activities on your site, it’s very powerful to our clients.

That’s what we’re hired for most of the time, now. To come in and say, “Hey, help me win bigger with my Internet presence.”

Shaun: Yeah. That’s definitely one of the things I hear through our clients about your services is the Google Analytics, and your skill with that is invaluable, because the analytics packages, they give you a lot of information, but it can be very difficult to analyze and act effectively on that information.

Mark: Well, I think that’s the most frustrating thing for businesses right now. They know there’s a lot of information under their website. They know people are coming to their website. They know that they’re visiting, they’re seeing their products and their services, but they don’t know what to do with it. They don’t know how to optimize it. It’s one thing to, in the old days–I like to tell a story. When it all started, everybody talked about hits. Remember that? Hits.

Shaun: Yeah.

Mark: “I had a million hits.” Well, that really didn’t mean anything, did it? [laughs] And then it became visits. And then it evolved to conversions. Now people are concerned about conversions: “I want to get people to either send me their name as a lead or buy something.” Well, now what it’s turned to, which I’m really excited about, is that it’s about optimizing conversions. Google Website Optimizer, we’re also an authorized consultant of that tool. It helps people make more of the visits that are coming to their website, through the Google Analytics tool and through testing and trying different things to help improve conversion rates.

That, to me, is the diamond. If I can keep the same amount of visitors coming to my website but improve my conversion rates by half a percent, that’s a lot. That could be millions of dollars to some people, to some businesses.

Shaun: Yeah. So, if you would have some advice for someone who’s using Google Analytics and may either be new to it or struggling, do you have some tips you could recommend for how people can get the most out of it?

Mark: Absolutely. The first thing that every business owner should ask that has a website is, “What do I want people to do when they come to my website?” I usually ask that question and then I sit back, because there’s a lot of people who haven’t even thought of that answer to that question.

Shaun: Yes. You get the silence.

Mark: Yeah. And so you say, “Well, what are you using your website for? Are you trying to get people to call you? Are you trying to get people to read information? Are you trying to get people to get leads to your sales team? Are you trying to sell specific products? What are you really trying to do?” Once they answer that question, then I say, “Well, how are you going to measure that?” “Well…” They have the blank stare. And I’ll say, “Well, Google Analytics, or any other analytics tool for that matter, will help you measure the success of that.” And if we establish a baseline and say, “Well, first month, this is what your lead generation was, ” now it becomes: “How do we grow that? How do we increase that? How do we get more leads into your sales team?”

And so, with Google Analytics, the very first thing you want to do is you want to focus on conversions, not necessarily on traffic. Have whoever’s in charge of your analytics program identify what you want to track and what you want to measure, and then religiously look at that report and see how you’re progressing, whether you’re going up or down. To me, that’s the biggest thing with analytics.

The other thing is to look at analytics as insights. Gain insights from it. Look at “Are more people converting who use site search than not using site search?” for example.

Shaun: Yep.

Mark: If you find that people are using site search and converting at a high rate for that, then you have to ask yourself: “Well, why am I not trying to get everybody into the site search tool so that I can get them to convert more?” So you look for insights. You’re not looking for a golden parachute. There’s tidbits of information that will direct you to the finish line, and that’s where you’ve got to look. There’s a lot of people who say, “Wow! This is all great information, but what does it mean?”

Shaun: Yep.

Mark: Start small. Pick little things, and then grow from there.

Shaun: Yeah. That sounds like great advice. It sounds like, with the experience you have across your customers, you’re able to draw from that experience and give people insights from the data.

Mark: Yeah. Definitely. When we started the search engine marketing team back in ‘99, we were content with giving people reports on, “Hey, you had 50, 000 visitors to your site this month, ” and they were thrilled. Nowadays you can’t get away with that. It’s got to be, if I said I delivered 50, 000 visitors to your website this month, they’d say “So what? What did they do?” Yeah. So I think the good thing about it is that people are finally starting to understand that they can make much better business decisions once they understand what’s happening on their website and they use that information to make those business decisions.

Shaun: So, when you engage with a customer, are you helping them set up their analytics and set up their program, or are you sort of giving ongoing advice to them as they continue to tweak and try new things on their website?

Mark: With regard to web marketing?

Shaun: Yeah. I suppose I’m specifically asking about the Google Analytics.

Mark: Yeah. Normally what happens with engagements on Google Analytics is there’s one of two paths. Either a business is using Google Analytics but they’ve gotten to the point where they’ve recognized that “This is all great, but I don’t know what I’m doing.” [laughs]

Shaun: [laughs]

Mark: “Can you help me pinpoint the best way to use this so that I can grow my business? Am I capturing the right information? Looking at a funnel report. What is going on? Why are so many people diving out of my checkout process? Can you help me identify reasons?” Then there’s the other people that come to us that typically don’t even know about analytics, and they’ve engaged us for search engine marketing.

Shaun: Yep.

Mark: And we have to have an analytics program of some kind underneath our search engine marketing program or we can’t provide any worthwhile statistics in terms of return on investment.

Shaun: Yes.

Mark: So we typically will hook them up to Google Analytics, and it’s just part of our program that Google Analytics comes with our search engine marketing.

Shaun: OK.

Mark: Now, if they require a lot of different reports or canned reports or special reports, then we’ll focus on configuring Google Analytics at a deeper level.

Shaun: Now, can we talk a little bit about search engine marketing? Because it’s such an important part of a lot of businesses. Do you have some basic tips? One thing that constantly amazes me is there are still a lot of sites out there that don’t seem to be following the basic search engine marketing, or search engine optimization 101. From your point of view, what are some of the basic things that people have to be doing for search engine optimization?

Mark: Well, there’s so much stuff running through my head right now of what I want to say. [laughs]

Shaun: [laughs]

Mark: But, to me, the most important thing is content. And I think, if you talk to any search engine marketing guru, they’re going to say, “It’s your content.” You want Google and Yahoo, from an organic standpoint, from natural rankings or organic rankings, you need to have your key phrases in your content. Like for Beacon, we’re going to use the words, “search engine marketing” and “search engine optimization, ” and “web site design, ” and “web site development, ” throughout our site, because those are the phrases we want to rank well for.

So the content is what – you can’t overdo it. If you stuff key phrases and use it a hundred times on a page, Google is going to say, “Hey, these guys are trying to cheat.” What I usually recommend is be “white hat.” There’s the white hat side and the black hat side. The black hat side is always trying to figure out a way to beat Google’s algorithm, to be white hat…

Shaun: Push the numbers.

Mark: Yeah, be white hat, because in the long run you are going to get caught if you are cheating.

Shaun: Yeah, it’s only going to give you short-term gains.

Mark: Yeah. If you think about it, Google is doing what for it’s customers? The customer is typing in a key phrase, and Google is going out to their database and trying to find the best match to that for that client, so they will continue to use Google for that person who’s typing, that searcher. So, they will continue to use Google because every time they search they get what they are looking for, right?

Shaun: Yes.

Mark: Well, put that on your website. Make sure you are using the phrases that you think people would be using to find you. Now, that’s a very small percentage of the battle. The other side of the coin is link building. I like to use a reference, or I like to put it this way to people. When you are reading a book, a lot of times they have references in the back, and you will see a footnote that says, or have an asterisk or something, and it will be a reference to another book, or a story, or an article, or something. The reason they reference those is because they are deemed authorities.

You know when you see a reference to something, you’re going, “Oh, that guy must know what he’s talking about, ” right? It’s the same with linking. If somebody links to you, they are linking to you because you are an authority.

Google likes inbound links and that’s why it uses links as part of it’s algorithm. The number of links and the quality of those links, because you’re being referred to by another site who thinks that you know what you’re talking about.

Now obviously, if I get a link from Google versus a company that’s not well known, that link from Google is very powerful, as a reference. So what I tell people is, “Have your partners link to you.” The bigger the partner the better, because that will raise your authority and Google will think much better of you, because you have those inbound links.

The last and third part of organic search is internal linking. You need to make sure that you’re using key phrases internally on your site and linking them to the pertinent data relative to that key phrase. Google likes to see that internal linking as well, so from an organic standpoint, I think those are the most important things for search engine optimization.

Shaun: Yeah, and obviously you also have to make sure that your site is crawlable as well. A lot of people have very heavy URL’s the search engines struggle with. I think you’ve covered…

Mark: That’s a great point.

Shaun: You’ve covered some key points and some good advice there. Another question I like to ask on this podcast is, do you have a site that you particularly admire, whether they are one of your customers or not?

Mark: I am going to plug my customers. [laughs]

Shaun: We know, [inaudible 19:42]

Mark: There’s two sites that come to mind. One of them is Basset Furniture, a very well known furniture company based out of Basset, Virginia. I like to talk about them for two reasons. Number one is I think their website and e-commerce model is fantastic. They have, in their search engine, they have slowly, well not slowly but quickly, become very dominant in the search engines with regard to their key phrases that they’re targeting. They have well over 130 stores nationwide and it’s a great model because here is a company that has been traditionally – you go into a showroom, you look at furniture, and then you buy it.

This company is being very aggressive in marketing their products online and they’re actually tying all of this into their brick and mortar stores. So part of our search engine marketing and Google analytics effort has been not just web-based. It’s been measuring the results of marketing online that has led to in-store sales.

Through Google Analytics and through working with the stores in the processes, the interfaces that they have between their stores in a centralized conversion database, we’re able to get a lot of very good information to help with business decisions.

The other side of that too, is that with all these stores around the country, there is a large effort around local marketing, using Yahoo local, Google local, and targeting, or geo-targeting, phrases that we have jumped into.

To me, that is where we have been all driving to over the years, since we started this in ‘99, or the search engine marketing team came together, that is the ability to go full circle now, to the brick and mortars, is just very cool stuff.

Shaun: Yeah, sorry, just to touch on that. I think that offline conversions are obviously very difficult to track. I was wondering how Basset Furniture does that?

Mark: Well, I really don’t want to comment on that, because a lot of that is a proprietary nature to my client, but I will tell you that the basis of that is a close collaboration between our search engine team and marketing team, and analytics team, with our client’s marketing team, so that the processes work end to end. Some of it’s done with promotions and all that, but there’s a lot of behind the scenes work that happens within the databases so that they all roll up into one, and then connect the information with sales, catalog requests online, online purchases, store purchases, all of that comes together in one database.

It’s exciting to me because I think that’s what we all, everybody’s been trying to get to, and I see it finally happening with a very large firm. I think it’s going to be the standard going forward.

Shaun: Yeah, that’s great. I’m sorry, who is the other customer that you admire?

Mark: We did a strictly Google Analytics consulting and optimization for Princeton Review, which is huge. They obviously have a ton of visitors visiting that site and a lot of revenue going through their site. What I like about that site is that we didn’t design it, we didn’t create it, but we certainly have a big impact in helping people find the site and more importantly, reporting what’s happening on that site. They had a lot of requirements on specific reporting, specific conversions, specific areas of the site that they wanted to keep track of, and it was extremely complicated. My staff here spent a lot of time configuring Google Analytics to meet their requirements, very specific reporting requirements.

That led into some optimization work with them, to help them even be more dominant then they are on the web, in the major search engines. That’s a case where I am… When you go look at the site, it’s nothing we did there, but what is impressive to me, is what’s going on behind the scenes that nobody can see.

Shaun: Fantastic. There is obviously a bit of an economic crisis happening at the moment. How do you see that impacting your customers and your business itself?

Mark: Well knock on wood, this last quarter has been probably one of our best quarters in several years.

Shaun: Congratulations.

Mark: Well you know, I hold my breath when I say that because I am hopeful the bottom doesn’t fall out at some point. I believe a lot of it has to do… I was out at a conference with Google two weeks ago and they were in agreement with me. People are trying to make their dollar go further, and traditional marketing is one of those things where you put out a TV ad or a print ad and you really can’t measure the results from it.

Shaun: It’s very difficult.

Mark: You really don’t know whether it provided any RLI at all. People are trying to figure out how to make their dollar go further. Well, they’re turning to their websites. They’re turning to tracking tools and squeezing the dollars and making sure they are returning on their investment. Because we have been very successful at that, I think people, there’s a trust level in our services. Whether it’s the search engine marketing, whether it’s the analytic side, even if it’s e-commerce development, or website design and development, people trust that what we’re putting out there is going to benefit their business from a marketing stand point.

I think that is one of the reasons whey we haven’t really felt a pinch yet.

Shaun: You may not, like I said.

Mark: And we may not. I am hopeful but I would be foolish to not be concerned that it could happen. I think the driving force of that is people are tired of just throwing their money at traditional marketing and they want to make sure that every dollar is working for them.

Shaun: That’s fantastic. Well Mark, you have obviously got a lot of experience and some fantastic knowledge. Just to wrap up, is there anything else you would like to say about your company to anyone that is considering using your services mainly around Google Analytics with marketing, and all things else, to do with the web?

Mark: No, I think that every business that wants to stay alive, better think hard about investing in search engine marketing and Google Analytics. There are a lot of companies out there are saying, “Hey, I can do this and I can do that and throw me a couple hundred dollars and I’ll do this for you.” To be successful you are going to have to make a smart investment, and it’s not going to be… I think a lot of people think that they can get high rankings for real cheap and they will always stay there, and that is just not true. Spend your time. Do the homework. Find a company that has demonstrated success. Check their references and collaborate with them. We do best with companies that have a marketing team that is involved. They’re not just saying, “Here, go do this for me.” Get involved and it will happen. The effort there will return a nice investment.

The other thing that I want to say real quick, is probably eight years ago… I learn every year, you know Shaun, in this business you learn something new every single day, and you learn that some of the things that you said in the past probably wasn’t a smart thing to say. I was, and this has a lot to do with the SLI search, I was totally against site searches on websites. Totally! I thought that, “Hey if you do a good job designing your site, why should somebody want to search?”

Shaun: I’ve heard that before.

Mark: What I’ve learned is that that was really a dumb thing for me to say. It’s one of the things when I’m giving talks to different groups about web design, and it’s why it’s a category under our design and hosting part on our website. Site search to me is critical. I’m not just saying that because you are on the line here. It tells so much information about what people are doing on your website, that Google Analytics isn’t going to be able to help you with. It is outside of Google Analytics. It is outside of the search engines. People are coming to your site and they’re looking for things.

What they’re not finding is probably more important then what they are finding. We have seen companies – they are searching a particular item and they don’t sell it, and then they start selling that item because they can see that there is a demand for it.

I also think, once we hooked, what we liked about SLI was it hooked directly into Google Analytic, we were able to make it hook in nicely. We watched the traffic, watched what’s happening on those site searches and how it relates to conversions, and it is definitely an advantage, and it’s an important part of every – every website should have it. Like I said, eight years ago I was saying, “You don’t need that.”

[laughter]

Mark: Now it’s just one of those things, that if you don’t have a site search, you really don’t get it, in my opinion.

Shaun: Well you are preaching to a converted here. I mean I know. I think one of the important things about site search, is it gives people an opportunity to say, “This is exactly what I want.” And it gives you an opportunity to show them a page that is tailored to those keywords that they have typed in. That can convert so much better then any other page on the site because it’s being tailored to exactly what that person wants, then.

Mark: The cool thing about it, in my opinion, is that, yeah you are giving them the page that they want, but you are almost introducing another navigational scheme on top of your basic web navigation scheme. You are basically saying, “This is a searching, this is a customer who likes to search, and because he likes to search, he probably wants to see the data or the results in a different way than your standard website. So I am going to present it to him that way and then give him options off of that search.”

It’s extremely powerful because you can… You know, Shaun, that conversion rates are much, much higher when people go through a site search.

Shaun: Yes.

Mark: It’s proven. It’s hard for me to go to a customer and recommend that they not do it.

Shaun: Yes. I love hearing that.

Mark: Well it’s true. I’m not just… Being a Google Analytics guy and a math guy, I’ve got the metrics to support that, too.

Shaun: Yeah, that’s great. Well Mark, thank you very much for your time today. I think you have given us some really valuable information for our listeners, and just thanks very much for coming on. I appreciate it. [background music]

Mark: Oh, you’re very much welcome.

Shaun: So that was Mark Dirks, President of Beacon Technologies. I’m Shaun Ryan for the E-Commerce Podcast.