Analytics

The most significant, foundational, and under-utilized area of Internet marketing is definitely analytics. Almost all Internet marketing done today is done in a slapdash way, that thinks only about gaining visibility and website traffic. While these numbers can be important, they are not the be-all and end-all. After all, shouldn’t the number one metric be: dollars in the bank? You can have incredibly large numbers of website visitors without gaining any dollars in the bank. If your goal is to attract leads and phone calls from visitors to your website, the numbers related to those events are important metrics.

If there were a Ten Commandments of Internet marketing, I believe that the first commandment would be “Thou shalt measure.” Without having a way to measure success, we are simply flying blind.

Here’s an example: if you spend $500 a month on Google advertising, and $500 a month on Facebook advertising, which investment is paying off more? Only proper analytics can give you the answer. Once you know the answer, you can adjust your investments accordingly. Analytics can give you a treasure trove of information to let you know what time and money is being well spent, and what isn’t.

With a proper implementation of analytics, you establish “goals” for your website visitors. For example, your goal might be to have visitors sign up to receive your newsletter. Or perhaps you want them to make a purchase on your site. Or perhaps you want them to be interested and engaged enough that they view at least five pages before leaving your site. There are many different types of goals and goal strategies can implement. But the key is to have at least one that indicates a positive interaction between your website and a visitor. Once you have at least one goal established, you can then compare the results that are achieved through segments. This allows you to answer these types of questions, and more:

• Am I more successful with visitors from Google or Facebook?
• Which specific Google or Facebook ad is leading to more goal completions?
• Are there certain days of the week, or times of the day when I most successful?
• Are there certain types of user devices that give me a higher success rate? (Such as Samsung mobile phones, or iPads, etc.)
• Are there certain locations that my website visitors come from that bring a higher success rate?
• Are there certain demographics that I achieve a higher success rate with— such as age brackets, or gender?
• Which webpages or blog articles have a higher success rate for leading to goal completions?

While the amount of website traffic can be important, it’s more important to be able to measure success by segment.

Here’s a good and simple way to maintain an understanding of analytics… Just remember: A-B-C.

A – Acquisition (where did this traffic come from?

B – Behavior (how many pages did they look at? Which pages that they look at?)

C – Conversion (did they take the action that I wanted them to take?)

Instead of taking the popular slapdash approach to Internet marketing, it’s infinitely better to take a scientific approach. Here is the Internet marketing pyramid that we believe should guide all Internet marketing efforts and investments:

Phone Call Tracking

Another way of measuring the effectiveness of certain Internet marketing approaches is to apply phone call tracking. This is another service we offer that can be extremely helpful in determining which areas and sources of advertising have the greatest success rate. Phone call tracking allows you to see data regarding the source of website traffic that leads to phone calls, and also provides a recording of the call conversation in order for the business to know who called, when, and why.