Measuring Traffic to Your Website

Why is TRACKING marketing important?

How can you measure the success of a campaign or media spend if you can’t track the activity to your website or response it is generating?

How do you know if your use of marketing dollars is being optimized to reach your end goals unless you can see the behavior of the leads and traffic coming to your website?

How can you accurately determine the best way to optimize your use of dollars without data to provide you a glimpse of what IS and what is NOT working?

The Power of

Google Analytics is a free tool provided by Google that provides an easy to use application showing the breakdown of traffic behavior to your website – how visitors found your site and what they do when they get there.

Analytics is applied to a site with an easy to generate Javascript code that you add to all pages to track user behavior.

You can track all online sources including search engine referrals, paid search terms, email blasts, paid banners and more.

Dashboard

In the Analytics visitor overview you can see the total visits to the site, as well as the number of unique visitors. You can also see the average time on site and average number of pages that each visited.

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Of the visitors to the site, Analytics will show you who came from directly entering the URL, who came from organic search (by search engine) and what sites or online advertising sent referrals to your site. You can also track time on site here to see the effectiveness of each medium.

Geographic breakdown of your visitors provide great insight to your best target markets and highest brand awareness.

Referring sites can be a powerful resource for visits. Analytics shows the current top referral sites over the past month.

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Thinking about doing advertising or email blast? What time of day that users come to your site can also be found. These hours can help you to optimize your spend and maximize your budget to hit your target audience when they are looking.

Visitor Loyalty shows you how many new visitors came to the site in the designated time frame for the report. You can also view if you have repeat visitors and how often they visit in the given time frame.

Analytics can show you the average visit length which give you a good idea of the amount of qualified traffic coming to your site.

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Various specials and offers, email blasts that send traffic to the site can also be evaluated for effectiveness. A bounce means visitors did not go to more than one page of your site. If visitors can’t do everything you want them to do in one page, this needs to be watched.

What pages on your site are getting the most traffic? What products are most popular? What is getting the best organic traffic?

And what is the path users find when navigating around your website?

Using Analytics you can track your goals on your website – this can be leads, sales, or particular URLS tracked within your site.

You can have up to 40 goals per account and can be based on a page, time one site or number of pages viewed.

With more extensive Analytics set up you can also track sales on an E-commerce site.

This involves more programming , but can show you number of sales, source of sale, value of sale and overall conversion rate from visit to sale.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Setting up Google Analytics

Tutorial on how to install Analytics can be found at:

http://64.233.179.110/analytics/tour/index_en-US.html

Log in to Google Analytics to view your data http://www.google.com/analytics/indexu.html

So I have all of this data…now what?

Data and What To Do With It

Think conversions - map your objectives – measure, analyze, report and optimize your dollars

Be selective in what data you use and be consistent in what you report month to month so you can view how changes are effecting your bottom line.

Test, learn, optimize, repeat – Unlock ROI

Use data for decisions and measuring profitability for investments that relate to your website or drive traffic through online channels. If it isn’t working, change it or don’t do it.