(Editor’s note: This is a second in a series of articles I’ve written for my local Chamber of Commerce publication on the leveraging the Internet and analytical data, and making more effective use of your Website. I have shortened it for TWII.)
And the hits just keep on coming. But what exactly does that mean and what is the most effective way of measuring data about your Website?
Before we go any further we and you might not want to use the word “hits”.
“Hits is an old-school term that people don’t use anymore because it’s too broad,” says Lisa Snyder, director of Elle Eye Design, a Ewing-based company focused on global e-mail marketing and Web design. “It doesn’t really mean anything it’s really about the details.”
And the details my friend is blowing in the way one analyzes the data through a tool like Google Analytics for example.
“I’m a big fan of Google Analytics,” says Snyder. “It’s a great, free online analytics tool that tracks pretty much everything happening on your Website.”
She’s particularly enamored with its charts and graphs that paint a picture of what’s happening and also provide you with numbers. The devil is indeed the details and it’s important to analyze those details to find out what’s working and what’s not. Before you go there, however, make sure you understand what terms like visits, unique visitors, new visits, page views, and bounce rate mean.
Another element of analytics that’s important is location. “The most important thing to me as a person who does SEO is where are these people coming from?” says Snyder. “That can help you figure out what’s working and what’s not working.”
You can tell a lot by simply looking at the traffic coming into your site. The analytics also allow you to make comparisons, going back in time to see where and who the traffic was months or a year ago compared to today. All you need to get started with Google Analytics is a Google account, which then provides you with a code to place on your Website. And once the numbers start crunching, you can start analyzing.
Snyder offers some words of caution. “Don’t try to analyze everything all at once. Take your time and figure it out. If you’re spending money on advertising and throwing money around and crossing your fingers versus knowing where your money is being spent and knowing if it’s working, it’s worth spending 10 minutes to put the code on your site, then just be patient and see what happens.”
An e-mail marketing campaign is probably the easiest method to track interest because not only can one track how many people opened the e-mail versus how many e-mails bounced, but how many people clicked through and visited a customer’s Website on that specific topic.
“That starts to define levels of interest within that marketplace,” notes Chris Casarona, principal strategist with Creative Counsel, a Princeton Junction-based marketing firm.. “Then what happens is once they read that e-mail and respond you’ve got them as an interested customer at some level of interest number one, and number two, you can switch over to Google Analytics now and find out what they did when they went to the Website.”
Then you can learn whether or not they took any further action once you drove them to a specific page as well as how much time they spent on the page and if they looked at other things your company is doing.
Another strategy is setting up events through Google. For example, if you create content and drive people to it through advertising, banner ads, e-mail marketing, telemarketing, direct mail, you’re still driving people to the site. “What we can then find out is did they do something once they got there?” asks Casarona. “That’s a metric.”
When it comes to measuring the success, there’s no substitute for analytics. “Put those in there and a strategy in place,” says Brian Hasenkamp with Askenka International. “You’ll learn a lot, more than you think you will. It’s probably the most measurable form of marketing you can do.”
He suggests looking for specific user events on your site and flagging them. “If somebody watches this video, that’s good and means they’re interested. If somebody clicks on the free quote, that’s great. I try to build in, but if you’re not into the development part of it, be sure to find actions on your Website that you would associate some value in the visitor beyond an average visitor to your Website.”
Hasenkamp’s company does that for clients at the start when they build a site. It comes down to thinking about what you want people to do on each and every page. “Once you’ve allocated that you begin to track those actions,” he says. “In some cases it’s just a page that loads, in other cases it’s an event you want them to click on that page. That’s what you’re trying to do on a larger scale, identify what actions are going to be most valuable and you track those as goals.”
This is all done through Google Analytics. “It allows you to set up some goals for those actions so when you begin to look at your traffic you’re not saying I had 1,700 visits last month, you’re saying 3 percent of my visits were good visits,” states Hasenkamp.
Once you can track it by goals then you can see more of your data because then you know which traffic is considered good traffic. “Then it opens up a whole other pool of information because once you have that found set of good traffic you can start to see where it’s coming from,” says Hasenkamp. “What key words are bringing that traffic? What sites are bringing that traffic? And then you can learn what’s driving the good traffic versus what’s driving the most traffic. That’s the real differentiator because most people when they look at analytics look at what’s driving the most traffic. Oftentimes, the most traffic is not the highest quality traffic.”
