How to Use Web Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing

In order to understand how your online marketing strategies are performing and what you can do to improve them, you need to regularly track and analyze metrics from those campaigns. These metrics point out areas of your website such as the blog or a specific landing page that are either performing well or that may need some tweaking.

Understanding metrics is an importing part of identifying big problems and preventing future problems. If you understand the basics you will save both time and money due to poorly executed campaigns. You just need to know the different kinds of metrics and how they affect your business.

So first thing's first; you need to have Google Analytics if you don't already have it. It's free and you will get a break down of how long people stayed on your site, where they came from and what search terms they used to get there. These are important analytics with cross channel insight. Go to the Google Analytics sign up page to create an account if you haven't already.

Now let's discuss the basic terms and components you'll need to know in order to successfully track, analyze and improve your online marketing strategy.

Google Adwords Metrics

  1. Bounce Rate - This is the percentage of bounced visits to your site and is calculated as a single-page view or a single event trigger in a visit. Example: When a user comes to your website, browses for a minute or two then immediately leaves. Simply put, the visitor came to a landing page, but didn't visit a second page.
  2. Conversion Rate - This is the proportion of visitors to your site that are just browsing to those who do something productive - like making a purchase or downloading a whitepaper. The purpose of driving traffic to your business online is to get customers. When you get a casual visitor to turn into a buyer you have conversion.
  3. Click Through Rate - The (CTR) is a ratio showing how often people who see your ad end up clicking it. This can be used to see how well your keywords and ads are performing. Each of your ads and keywords have their own CTRs that are listed in your account.
  4. Time on Site - The time users spend on your website is an important indicator of how useful and interesting your content is. Improving the time spent on site comes down to maintaining content that is valuable enough to keep the user on your site.
  5. Average Position - This is a statistic that describes how your ad ranks against other ads in search results. This rank then determines the order in which your ad will appear on the page.

Make sure you read our post on how to improve your landing page design & decrease bounce rates!

Website and Blog

Pay attention to the following in your website and blog analytics:

  1. Visitors - This is the number of unique individuals who have come to your site. It is an important metric but do not focus solely on this number.
  2. Leads - This refers to the number of prospects who filled out a form or downloaded an offer on your site.
  3. Keywords - Your site keywords will show you the terms people are searching for when they find your site in a search engine. Build content around successful keywords to further boost traffic to your site.
  4. Referring Traffic - Traffic to your site from another source other than a search engine (in other words, another website).
  5. Page Rank - a measurement of your websites traffic in a search engine.
  6. Number of Inbound Links - Links that direct to a specific page (such as a blog article) on your site.

Email Campaigns

The benefit of email marketing is that it delivers measurable metrics. When you understand these metrics you will be able to make improvements to your email marketing campaign and achieve better results. For email campaigns you'll want to continually assess these metrics:

  1. Open rate - This is probably the most important success metric that you'll need to monitor to optimize your email campaign. This is the number of people who received your email and opened it.
  2. Click through rate - This CTR differs only slightly than a website CTR. It is when people click through your email TO your website or landing page.
  3. Bounces - When an email is sent to an invalid address.
  4. Non-Responders - Those who didn't open the email.

The key to using these metrics begins with understanding them.  Armed with your new knowledge of key metrics, download a monthly marketing report and analyze the results. From there you can identify where your efforts are improving and where additional attention must be put!