Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published March 4, 2008 on the Tatum Marketing blog

If you are not currently actively tracking visitors to your website, stop everything else and start tracking the basics now. You can get all the information you need to make solid marketing decisions with any of dozens of web analytics applications, but Google Analytics is a fast, easy and free way to get started. In fact, it may well be all you’ll ever need.

With your website as the hub of your marketing program you have the opportunity to understand far more about your new customer prospects, their buying process and how well you are meeting their needs than marketers have ever known before. This is both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing part includes the ability to:

• Measure how well your traffic-building (or lead generation) activities are working.
• Measure conversion effectiveness.
• Evaluate the success of any changes you make in your program.
• Understand what your visitors are looking for and whether or not they are finding it.

Without web analytics, you’re flying blind – and that makes no sense.

But let’s not get carried away. With web analytics it’s easy to drown yourself in so much data you’re paralyzed. My recommendation is to start with the basics and stay there unless or until you need to know more.

Here’s what we usually recommend as a minimum starting point for our clients who are new to web tracking and don’t have the staff or time to analyze too much data:

• Number of unique visitors to your website(s) monthly.
• New visitors versus return visitors
• Bounce rate (percentage of visitors who quickly leave your site from the entry page)
  Number of actions taken. (This may be newsletter subscribers, downloads, trials, demo or webinar registrations, requests for a sales call – any actions that the visitor takes which brings them closer to a purchase decision).
• Number of purchases (for ecommerce sites).

With this information, you’ll be able to get a high level picture of how much traffic you are generating and how well you are converting that traffic to new customers or sales-ready opportunities. This helps you to understand where to focus your marketing efforts. It also gives you a basis for measuring overall results of any steps you take to improve your marketing program.

This is by no means all the web traffic data you will ever need in order to get the most mileage from your marketing efforts, but it’s a good start toward making marketing decisions based on the reality of what actions your prospects actually take.

Setting Up Google Analytics

Getting Google Analytics up and running is so easy I can even do it.  It’ll be a piece of cake for whoever manages your website. Just go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for an account. You’ll be given a piece of java script to copy and paste on your website pages. Depending on how your website is set up, this can probably be done globally and not page by page. But, be sure every page of the site you want to track – including landing pages – gets the code.That’s it. You’ll be getting traffic data in no time. The Google Analytics dashboard is very intuitive and Google provides a number of videos to get you started. Now, go do it.