For the last two weeks I’ve been talking about the importance of tracking leads and providing some inexpensive ways of doing that.
This week I want to focus on a free tracking tool – Google Analytics. Google provides free web tracking software that provides you good information regarding your web site activity. It tracks many statistics including:
- visitors
- unique visitors
- repeat visitors
- pages/visit
- time on your site
- referral sources
- key words
- geography
- navigation summary (how people navigate your site)
Using Google AdWords? Google Analytics will track their success by ad and by where your ad shows up in the sponsored search (rank).
If you have ecommerce on your site, you can track a visitor through to the sale along the same statistics.
Want to measure how certain online and even offline activities are working? Add Google Analytics to your site- if you already have tracking software beyond what your host may use to measure bandwidth, that will work as well – and benchmark your web activity.
All online activity will be easily tracked through the referral sources and offline activities can be monitored by any increases in activity measured against a television spot airing or a newspaper ad running.
Using tracking software is going to make you smarter on who you target, which media is working hardest for you and even what creative performs better.
For example, after two months of using paid search for a client, one version of creative was generating 75% of our web traffic yet getting only 50% of our budget. Needless to say we increased the budget for that ad to 100% and saw the click-through rate double.
Right now, you are hearing a lot of people telling you that the companies that continue to market will succeed when the market rebounds. I agree, but don’t just keep marketing. Make sure you market smarter.
Market Smarter 