Got Analysis?
In the world of online marketing the buzz words blog, spend, viral, and social media abound but with few exceptions there is a very important word missing … analysis. What’s the point of developing online advertisement programs, publishing articles, optimizing your meta tags, and increasing your inbound links if you can’t accurately and intelligently track the effectiveness of all your efforts?
There’s no excuse! Since the late 90s packages have been readily available to track just about every aspect of a visit to your site, does anyone remember Webalizer? These days the systems are ridiculously intuitive, extremely cheap or even free, and far more sophisticated in their ability to gather and report data then their predecessors.
Get on track! There is one solution that seems to be a great fit regardless of your requirements (cost vs. feature set), Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html. The configuration is simple; sign up, enter the domain to track, and insert the analytics code (provided by Google) on each page you wish to analyze and Voila, you’ve got usable data in a few hours! Note: don’t forget to place this code on all campaign specific landing pages to track the results, this is easy to forget if you have several running at once.
As indicated earlier the systems these days are very sophisticated but there are some basic functions that will be immediately beneficial to you:
• Visitor loyalty – tracks how many times a visitor comes back
• Unique visitors – shows how many first time visitors you have
• Referring source – indicates where your visitors are coming from
• Returning visitors – depicts the percentage of total users who return
On the more advanced side Google Analytics features a very handy goal system which allows you to set a path which when followed triggers the goals completion. A simple example would be a visitor landing on your home page, then clicking on products, then clicking on buy now. You would then be able to view the percentage of visitors that were completing this goal, check to see where most visitors were abandoning and modify your site pages to help reduce the abandons.
With the cost of implementation gone there really is no excuse. If you are serious about the success of your online business then make sure you task someone with monitoring your sites performance metrics.
Happy analyzing and remember to avoid the Big Mistake for Small Business.
Technorati Tags: online marketing, marketing, seo
