Promoting and Tracking: Attract and Understand Your Users

Everyone can relate to the problem of trying to get someone to do something. In one way or another, we have all tried to convince people to complete a certain action. How do you get your friends to come to your birthday party? How do you keep your employees from taking extra-long coffee breaks? For a tech startup, one pertinent issue is user acquisition. The success of many web applications, including MyAppoly, is often based on how many people actually start using the application. Imagine if Facebook only had two users, for example. It would be pretty ineffective, would it not? Users can learn about your website though a number of different ways, each one called a channel. One might be through a partner organization. For example, if MyAppoly partnered with Facebook, maybe new users might learn about and join MyAppoly because Facebook suggested it. Another channel could through referrals (jargon for word-of-mouth). Yet another could be through an email marketing campaign. As you can see, there are several ways to reach potential customers and convince them that it is worth their time to consider your website. Two channels of increasing importance owing to the rise of search engines are organic and paid search. Organic search refers to the results that pop up from standard search. When you Google something, you notice paid advertisements relevant to your search terms at the very top and along the right side of the search engine results page (SERP). Paid search refers to the presence of these ads.