Posts Tagged ‘google analytics’

Know Your Marketing Metrics!

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

I can’t stress enough that, if you are running online marketing campaigns, you have to track them for measuring success.  There is no excuse for any online marketer to not track their campaigns through either paid or free analytic software.  Google Analytics (/www.google.com/analytics)  is a free software that enables any marketer to see how well their Search campaign is going, as well as, other online campaigns.  What’s great about this software is that you can place a simple tracking code, provided by Google Analytics, on your website to see how specific campaigns are converting at your site, how users are interacting with the site, and if you have an e-commerce site, how well sales are converting.  Without knowing how new users and repeat users are interacting with your site, you won’t be able to know how to improve the user experience to increase registrant or sales conversions.

There is a down-side to Google Analytics, it has problems aggregating all of the traffic accurately for unique visitors and visits.  For example, if you are running a Facebook advertising campaign, Google statistically will show less traffic to your site, than what Facebook reports, but hey, what do you expect from a free software.

For a more robust analytic software, try WebTrends.  WebTrends can be customized to your needs and is very granular about its tracking. Keeping in mind, it is a paid software, but if you can afford it, I would highly recommend it. If you are running a Search campaign, you’ll be able to see, down to the keyword, if new registrants or sales can be accounted to those specific keywords.

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Posted in internet marketing, online marketing, Search | 1 Comment »

Measuring Website Performance with Analytics

Monday, June 16th, 2008

If you are new to marketing your site on the web, then one of the most important tools that you will need is an Analytics program to gauge traffic performance to your site. Without an Analytics program, you won’t be able to know where your traffic comes from, what advertising programs are really converting at your site, or how much much your campaigns are actually costing you.

You can choose from a range of existing products on the market or you can build the analytics internally. If you don’t have the resources or cash to build your Analytics program, a fair and free alternative is Google Analytics -www.google.com/analytics Yes, you read it correctly, it’s a free product from Google, but there are some minor issues that you should be aware of, if you decide to run advertising campaigns to drive traffic from the Advertising Networks. Google does not record every ‘Unique Visitor’ to a site due to its coding language, which will not pick up. Google will under report the amount of users. Make sure to place a pixel from the Advertising Network on your homepage so you can check the Advertising Network’s reports against Google’s Analytics.

Like any other free software tool that you find on the Web, you can’t completely customize Google Analytics the way that you need, if you have a complicated eCommerce site, but for those simple marketing informational sites, it does work well. To get started, all you have to do is place the ‘pixel’ code that is given to you by Google Analytics at the end of the sign-up process into the <head> tags of each page of the site, then you’re ready to go. It’s as simple as that. It takes approximately 24 hours before the reports are populated with data.

If you do have an eCommerce website that requires a lot of analytic customization, consider Web Trends. Web Trends is a great analytics tool, but can be costly.

No matter what you choose for your Analytics program, make sure to test it against your internal logs to make sure that the traffic numbers are true numbers.

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Posted in entrepreneurs, internet marketing, Media Buying, New marketers, online marketing, Search | No Comments »