I received a question via email about my introduction to website performance tracking. It was a great question and I thought it was worth covering in an additional post.

The question was “You talked about using Google Analytics to help fine tune my online marketing campaign – can you give me an idea of the types of things I should be fine tuning?”

Thanks for the question Jenny. The answer in a nutshell is that pretty much any part of your campaign can probably use some tuning and improvement.

But let’s be practical and focus on the things that will give you most leverage. Below are 3 key metrics that you should keep your eye on – and some fine tuning options for each.

Number of Unique Visitors

This is the big picture metric for the results of your attraction strategies. It answers the question: How many people are visiting my website and how this number is trending over time? Fine tuning and improving this metric is a very broad topic and depends on the attraction strategies you are using.

You’ll typically need to dig a little deeper in Google Analytics to understand more about your visitors and where they are coming from in order to find out which of your attraction strategies are working well and which could do with some improvement.

Bounce Rate and Average Time on Site

These metrics give you an indication of how well your website is engaging your visitors.

Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after only viewing the page they arrive on – and Average Time on Site is self explanatory.

To fine tune these metrics you can test alternative content, navigation, graphical elements etc. But remember – keeping visitors on your website for longer may not always translate into real business results.

An example of when Bounce Rate is an important metric is when you are using Pay Per Click advertising (e.g. Google Adwords). You may find the Bounce Rate for certain keyphrases is higher than the average for your overall PPC campaign. One interpretation of this discovery is that visitors searching on this keyphrase aren’t actually interested in what you offer – and you may be wasting your money by advertising to them.

Conversion Goals

Conversion goals are where the real money is for your business. Google Analytics will allow you to track the specific goals and calls to action you have designed for your website.

You can monitor general metrics such as how many conversion goals have been achieved in any given period – through to sophisticated metrics such as understanding where your converting visitors came from and their behaviours on your website prior to completing the goal.

You can fine tune this metric by testing alternative copy, changing your offer and also testing alternative calls to action.

This is a very brief overview of some of the key metrics you’ll find in Google Analytics and some of the ways to interpret and fine tune your results.

How do you fine tune an online marketing campaign? is a post from: Sharp Dart

One of the reasons why the Internet is such a great marketing tool is measurability.

There are more metrics available through free website tracking tools than even the most marketing savvy business owner will ever need. Here are just a few things you can measure:

• How many people visited your website.
• Which visitors were new and which have been to your site before.
• Where your visitors came from.
• Which pages they visited.
• How long they spent browsing your site.

Perhaps even more importantly you can also collect and analyse specific data on the goals you have defined for your web pages. (You have defined goals for your web pages, right?)

Ok – right now I can see your eyes starting to glaze over. You’re probably thinking what could you possibly do with all this information? How will it help you to improve your bottom line?

It’s what you do with it that counts

If you’re like most business owners you’ll be painfully aware of how much it can cost to acquire a new lead or to make a sale. And if you’ve experimented with an online strategy such as Pay Per Click you’ll be even more conscious of your marketing spend.

Whatever incremental improvements and adjustments you can make to get more bang for your marketing buck will reflect well on your sales volume and profit margins.

And that, in a nutshell, is where website performance tracking (commonly called analytics) can help. It will give you a very clear, easy to understand view of the performance of your current online marketing campaign. And from this baseline you’ll be able to monitor the results of the fine tuning that you do over time.

The tool of choice for analytics

To make things very simple – there is only one analytics tool I recommend to business owners – and that is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a powerful, easy to use package that is available at a very good price – FREE!

I think you will be blown away by what this tool will do for your business.

An introduction to website performance tracking is a post from: Sharp Dart