Knowing & Serving Your Website Visitors (w/ Gaetano DiNardi)

Gaetano DiNardi shares what many companies get wrong when they analyze website performance and traffic, and steps you can take to better know and serve your visitors.

How They Move The Needle

Gaetano is a growth advisor to top B2B companies like Gong, Cognism, Workvivo, Aura, Pipedrive, Nextiva. He has 8+ years of demand gen leadership for high-growth SaaS companies, with expertise in optimizing websites and scaling organic growth machines. He’s also a musician, writer, and entrepreneur and has been published on HBR, Fast Company, NASDAQ, HubSpot, and more.

In our conversation, he cited a chronic problem he feels is plaguing B2B: marketing leaders spend more time obsessing over data and analytics than they do understanding their customers, and ensuring they can find everything they need on your website in order to make an educated decision.

He’s mainly seen this manifest in companies trying to convert every visitor they can, regardless of intent. These companies feel just about every page on the website should be converting leads, and they obsess over tracking attribution in the middle of funnel more than they do bringing value to their website visitors.

Symptoms of this thinking might include:

• Trying to convert traffic on every area of the site (popups, chatbots, opt-in forms, running split tests with very low traffic, etc.)
• Feeling every metric should be improved, rather than serve as a signal (e.g. bounce rate) 
• Obsessing over-converting MQLs vs fostering the growth of high-intent intent visitors
• Spending more time looking at metrics and attribution than strategy on how to better know and serve their website visitors

The alternative to this, as Gaetano says, is having a relentless focus on understanding who your visitors are, what content they’d find valuable, and making it as easy to find that value as possible.

For example, you might write a high-ranking guide for Sales professionals that drives thousands of visitors. In Gaetano’s view, a high bounce rate on that post isn’t always a bad thing. If the average time users spend on that page is 12 minutes (a real example he shared), and they decide to leave, that means they’ve consumed the information, gotten the value and education they needed, and decided to leave. That’s a good thing. It means your brand is associated with educating and providing value to your target audience, and they just aren’t ready to buy at the moment.

Rather than getting bogged down in attribution analytics, marketing teams should spend most of their time figuring out, who is visiting our site? What is their intent when they come here? What do they want to learn in order to evaluate our product/service? And then determine how to provide that education and make it incredibly easy to access. This is why, in his view, marketing should really focus on leading metrics that indicate website visitors are finding what they need, and lagging indicators of high-intent sales (SQLs, pipeline, revenue, etc).

Many of the lessons Gaetano has learned come from his transition from B2B into B2C, where he scaled Aura, an identity theft protection company. For example, he noted that in B2C, there is a more linear conversion path and therefore less time arguing about attribution and more time spent doing great marketing. For example, using their content to produce “pain point topics” like “how to recover from identity theft.”

Links

• Gaetano’s LinkedIn
• Gaetano’s website