Using Google Analytics
(www.google.com/analytics)

Google Analytics is a free service that produces statistics about the visitors to a website. It can track visitors from which search engine or website they were referred by, email marketing, online PDF documents, and pay-per-click networks.

 

 

1. Understanding Traffic Building Behaviors through Statistics

If you know which online campaigns, keywords, and adwords are working and which ones are not, you can focus on the tactics that have been proven successful and change the ones that are not producing sales.

2. How to Build Meaningful Reports

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) help you track what matters. Every industry is different, therefore goals are different. The best way to track KPI’s is to come up the ones that are useful in reaching your goal.

Here are some examples of formulas used with these goals in mind:

Have more people visit the website: Visitors > Visitor Trending > Absolute Unique Visitors

Ensure there’s a return on marketing efforts: Traffic Sources > AdWords > AdWords Campaigns

Have more people buy products and/or services from the website: E-commerce > Conversion Rate

Have more people register to be a user on the site: Goals > Conversion Rate

Determine your newsletters’ effectiveness: Goals > Conversion Rate

Increase the percentage of returning visitors: Visitors > New Vs Returning

Increase the number of “branded visits”: Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits

3. Establish KPI’s that measure ROI

Albert Einstein brilliantly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result”. The same concept applies to your online marketing efforts. How much return on your investments are you actually getting from your online marketing strategies?

You need to determine what matters most to you (your conversion matrix) in order to decide what to track. Here are some examples:

For Brand awareness, things to track include:

• traffic

• new visitors

• time on site

For Building leads, things to track include:

• landing page success rates

• website signups

• newsletter click throughs

For Sales, things to track include:

• conversions to sales

• abandoned cart percent

4. What is your Return On Investment for each web initiative?

• How much is email list acquisition?

• How much did the newsletter cost to design?

• How much did it cost to send out?

Written by: Jeremy LaDuque

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Article, Online Marketing, Tips & Tricks, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.