How do you fine tune an online marketing campaign?

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.