Testing and tracking are vital components of successful internet marketing.
Think about how much time you spend writing content, posting ads, commenting on forum topics, and other forms of driving traffic. If you aren’t tracking your site’s traffic to see which methods are working and which aren’t, how will you ever know what you’re doing right and what needs improving?
How will you know which ads are making you money, and which ads are costing you money?
The simple answer is: You won’t.
You NEED to be tracking the visitors who come to your site. How did they get there? If they found you through a search engine, what keyword were they searching? What page did they land on? How long did they stay on your site? How many other pages did they look at?
These are all vital questions that need to be answered if you want an accurate picture of how effective your marketing is.
Fortunately, there is an easy and free way to gather all of this data, called Google Analytics. Analytics is an online tracking system that logs all of the traffic on your site, which you can then organize into reports and analyze, allowing you to improve your marketing and your results.
What are some of the different traffic aspects tracked by Analytics?
- Number of visits
- Number of page views
- Bounce Rate
- Average Time on Site
- Referring Websites
- Referring Keywords (both paid and organic)
- Goal Conversion
…just to name a few.
By gathering all of this data, you can effectively figure out what is working on your site, and what isn’t.
For example, what if a large number of visitors were landing on a specific page of your site after searching for a certain keyword, but none of them stayed long enough to read anything? That’s useful information. It tells you that your page is relevant enough in the eyes of the search engine, but not in the eyes of the visitor – so maybe testing a different headline will get them to stay.
That’s just one example, but here’s another, for those of you using Google Adwords. With Analytics, you can track all search traffic, or you can look at organic and paid traffic separately. What if you found a keyword that was bringing organic traffic to a specific page on your site, and getting a good response? Wouldn’t you want to start bidding on that keyword for that landing page in your Adwords campaigns? What if one of your Adgroups was failing miserably, but the keywords for that group were doing really well on a different page of your site for organic searches?
The amount of power that you gain by monitoring your site’s traffic is indescribable. Without a tool like Analytics, you’re left completely in the dark… posting ads and content and hoping for the best. Learning to track your website traffic and marketing efforts will allow you to focus on the money making activities and you will find that you become much more productive!