Look through your Marketing Magnifying Glass to see Website Results

Posted by Jennifer on Oct 17th, 2012 home title

Look through your Marketing Magnifying Glass to see Website Results

[This article is about how to look at your website's Google Analytics program and analyse your online marketing].

I know, everyone wants great website results. Mainly though, website owners want to just get a lot of eyeballs to their website (let’s call these people S.E.O. centric). But savvy business owners or service providers know it’s more important to get the right kind of audience. Even savvier, they look regularly through their magnifying glass to see which avenues people are coming from, and whether they are staying around and hopping onto their list or contact me form.

{ Side note: please ensure your ‘contact me’ form works properly. There’s nothing worse than having the wheels fall off and new prospects unable to contact you via email. I have been found guilty; I realised my opt-in form did not work just recently }.

So, what is a magnifying glass? I just use Google Analytics, which uses a code in the back of your website to monitor visitors. Also handy is Google Analytics Dashboard (see image), a plugin for a WordPress site.

Perhaps you have no website. I spoke to a restaurant owner who has no website and they judge the results by their restaurant guide providers statistics/charge-per-booking (he was less than happy with the way Yellow Pages and Kiosk sells their advertising). Monitoring your marketing is important, so any way you can get the information accurately, you should really take it… and then analyse it.

A newbie client often asks me, “what can you tell from Analytics?” and “what does bounce rate mean?”

What I can tell is importantly… where visitors are coming from.

If you don’t know where your website traffic is coming from, how can you judge whether any marketing avenue is working well? If you write a blog article and post it to LinkedIn groups for instance, you should see a spike in traffic from LinkedIn on the day you shared. (You will find this info under “traffic sources”).

There is a nice easy pie chart to let you know how many visitors are coming from Google search (natural), Referrals from other sites, or directly (typing in your URL). Now you also want to know the visitor quality… are they 1-minute browsers, or are they real prospects for you?

Bouncing Around

The other thing you want to find out is how many visitors are clicking off straight away. If you are using paid Clicks, e.g. Google Adwords(TM) or suchlike, then your eyes should be riveted on how long THESE visitors stay. An example is: 0 – 30 seconds, bad… poor bounce rate. Over 1 minute, getting better… Two minutes or more, that’s a good interested visitor. The bounce rate is averaged out over all visitors, so an 80% bounce rate means 80% of all visitors are exiting your site within the first minute. If your bounce rate is 80% to 100%, I’d say you have a big problem with your website content.

Another interesting thing you can tell from Analytics is how many have taken the step of contacting you. Analytics call this Goals and Goal Conversion. You can set certain goals, commonly to see how many visitors are reaching the end point (e.g. the contact form’s confirmation page) – as a Percentage of all visitors. Remember, some people will just read and ring up, hence the need to look also at ‘time on site’ and if possible, ask new prospects on the phone if they found you from your website.

Measuring all Online Marketing

Some popular measurement tools (Cloud-based) for marketing online are:

Unbounce – Landing Page/Squeeze page platform – no designer needed (free or 19.95 per month)

Hubspot – inbound marketing software that lets you attract, interact with, and monitor all leads (all-in-one solution).

Hootsuite – interact with and measure social media, e.g. Facebook and Twitter.

Still, if you don’t have the time for all that website and marketing analysis as you have no marketing assistant, there is your friendly Brisbane Website Designer + Copywriter team. Getting needed results on a small business budget is our aim.

I can look at your Analytics monthly and let you know (via video) quite simply what it’s all about and what pages, keywords, and external sites are bringing you the best results. Then we could use that information to help create a more powerful website full of engaging content. Or, you can go back to worrying about backlinks and Google algorithms – up to you