Beginning Analytics
Analysis of the traffic on your website goes way beyond the simple counting of ‘hits’. Analytics gives you a real understanding of how people are using your website, what they’re doing once they arrive and where they came from. You can see conversion rates, work out what works and what doesn’t for your site and even work out the value of each visit.
A good analytics package will help you to give your customers what they want, improve your website, get more for your marketing spend and increase revenue because of the business insights it can deliver.
There are lots of great analytics packages available to you and by happy coincidence one of the best, Google Analytics, is free. Don’t be mislead by the word free, there are some very big businesses using Google Analytics every day. I have experience of using it on a site with an average of 750,000 visitors per month and I use it here on the Ursus Media website because it’s such a powerful tool. You should bear in mind that although a Google Analytics account is free your developers will charge you for the time required to set up the account and implement the code on your website.
The following video from Google gives a quick overview of interpreting and using the data from Google Analytics. Most packages deliver similar metrics so although this is Google specific it’s easy to relate to other tools.
Google Analytics is a superb tool and it never fails to surprise me that it’s free (although there are some exceptions -- see Google’s T&Cs). There are of course other tools available to you but but they all give you similar information and the insights for your business should not be underestimated. This is only the beginning.
Useful resources
You can definitely succeed with internet marketing, but different to what many people believe, success does not happen like magic overnight. You have to work your way to achieve it.
You’re absolutely right. A website in isolation is not going to do your marketing for you. It can however be made to work hard for you.
A holistic approach to marketing is always required and as with all things if you do it properly you will see returns. Cut corners though and you throw good money after bad.
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