If you’re not tracking progress, you’re in the dark on what to do next.
You’re probably heard of Google Analytics, but do you use it? Most companies do, but very few use it well.
If you don’t track your progress…
- You don’t know what to do next
- You can’t separate one customer segment from another
- You don’t know what pages to improve
- You don’t know if your website is navigable
- You can’t see where your customers are coming from
- And, overall, you don’t know how to improve your website for conversion
Tracking gives you direction.
Ever feel like you don’t know what to improve first? Tracking gives you that.
Tracking tells you who your customer is.
We all know that there are a few ‘archetypes’ of people that buy from you. Tracking allows you to track each type of customer and how they use your website. It also shows you where those specific customer types come from, because there’s a pretty good chance that the search differently, use different social sites, and land on different pages.
Tracking helps you improve your pages.
You can look at things like bounce rate and time on page, basically the disfunctional ‘bottlenecks’ of your website that lead to leaving. If you know what pages are the worst violators, then you know that to fix, next.
Tracking leads to better navigation on your website.
Tracking uncovers navigation problems. You think your website is easy to navigate because YOU can navigate it easily. But you’ve visited your website before – a first-time visitor is not so lucky – and downright frustrated at the smallest of things. All this ‘piles up’ to decrease user engagement, and increases bounce rate.
Tracking tells you where your customer is coming from.
People ask us regularly where they should spend their marketing dollars. We tend to say, “where are they coming from?” which usually is followed by blank stares. Analytics can easily tell you where your customers are coming from, and therefore where to spend your marketing dollars. What’s more, it will often tell you what type of customer is coming from what traffic channel, so you can write better ads for each channel.
How do you do it?
In other strategies, we can tell you where to focus your energies. But tracking requires some pretty complex analytics programs (like Google Analytics) and has to be demonstrated. If you have Google Analytics installed, please contact us for Free Consultation of how to uncover your great opportunities! 10 minutes with us might make you thousands of dollars by the end of the year.
Primary Tactics
- Website Tracking: Programs like Google Analytics give you a leg up on what’s going on. Basically, GA can give you insight on visitor behavior on your website – and if you setup goals and funnels, can give you an ROI (return on investment) to calculate from. That means you can track across channels, and know where to put your money.
- Social Tracking: Tracking social sites and online authority values are different that your average goal setup in Google Analytics. There are programs out there that can track social engagement and click-through. Some are stand-alone cloud programs, some even integrate into Google Analytics.
Secondary Tactics
- PPC: Pay-per-click programs like Google AdWords can track internally the success of certain keywords that are used to find your website. AdWords also integrates into Google Analytics seamlessly.
- Content Building: You can create specific content, then optimize that content through SEO to attract a specific type of customer that’s looking for a specific keyword (or “keyphrase”). By doing this, you’re adding a very specific stream of visitor traffic, one that can be evaluated for ROI.
