Warning: You’re Losing Money By Not Investing In Online Marketing

How many sales can you attribute to your website? This can be a difficult question to answer if you’ve not got the right tracking and metrics in place. If you can’t measure what your website is contributing to your business, it could be costing you money thanks to hosting fees, domain fees, and time spent updating it.

With the right tracking set up on your site, you can measure exactly what your website is contributing to your firm’s bottom line, and discover exactly how to further your business through online marketing.

Google Analytics

The only tool you’ll need to use to measure your website’s performance is Google Analytics. This is a free piece of software by Google which can be plugged into your site, allowing you to track a variety of detailed metrics on how your site is performing and how it’s furthering your business.

Installing Google Analytics simply requires adding a piece of code to your site. Follow one of the guides linked to below, depending on which CMS (Content Management System) your site runs on:

WordPress

Drupal

Joomla!

If in doubt, your web developer will be able to help.

Monitoring Your Site’s Traffic

Once your Google Analytics code is set up, you’ll be able to login and start tracking your site. Once you open your site in Google Analytics, the first thing you’ll see is the Audience Overview page. Here, you’ll see basic information that will help you track how many people are visiting your site.

The most important metric here is unique visitors. These are the number of individual people visiting the site. Most likely, your visits figure is higher than unique visitors. That’s because if one person visited your site ten times, they would register ten times under ‘visits’ but only once under ‘unique visitors’.

Next, under the ‘acquisition’ menu on the left hand side, click on ‘channels’. Here, you can monitor how people are reaching your site, whether via ‘organic search’, which is through SEO, direct, which registers visitors who reach your site by typing in your URL, referral, which are people following a link from another site to yours, paid, which is PPC or Adwords traffic (if you have set up a PPC campaign) or email, which of cause is everyone who’s clicked through from one of your email marketing campaigns.

Tracking For Service Based Businesses

If your company is a service based business, your website should be generating leads, it it could be costing you money. In Google Analytics, it’s possible to track this via ‘goals’. Goals are a measurement that can help you understand how well your site achieves your objectives. For example, a goal could be for a user to reach your ‘contact us’ page. Or even better, your goal could be set up to register every time someone sent you an an enquiry about one of your services. Setting up a goal can be complex, and it’s important to set up the right goals to effectively measure your success, so it’s worth consulting an SEO company to work out what to do here.

Tracking Ecommerce

If your site is an Ecommerce site, Google Analytics can even track your sales and their value. Rather than leave this to your website backend, Analytics can offer valuable insights into who exactly is buying from you. At a glance you can see what products people buy, how many, and what revenue they’ve generated for you, as well as more in depth information, including measuring the number of days and sessions it takes to buy something.

Ecommerce tracking can give you valuable insights into your customers and your sales that may not be possible with your existing solution. For example, Google Analytics allows you to make predictions on your revenue, depending whether your sales change depending on the season or due to products being on sale. Additionally, you might see that users make a lot of visits to your site before buying anything. This could encourage you to change your site structure to lead people more efficiently to your top selling products, and increase your sales. Again, an SEO company can help you set up and track your progress.

Ensure Your Website Content Is Focussed On Generating Leads

If your website includes a blog but you’re not tracking what new business it’s generating, you could be losing money, as the time spent creating this content may not be generating anything. Once you have Google Analytics set up, it’s worth making sure your blog is optimised for conversions. This includes adding an email sign-up form so people can opt in to your mailing list, adding a contact form to your blog sidebar, including links to your most popular articles, and interlinking your articles together so readers stay longer on the site and read more content.

The next step is to ensure your content offers value to your readers. For example, you could write a series of articles on frequently asked questions that your customers usually have before buying from you. Alternatively, you could diagnose a problem that your customers may be facing, that could be solved with your product or service. Another idea would be to market to the people who are looking for your service, but are deciding which supplier to go with. A great piece of content for this purpose would be a case study on one of your existing clients, explaining the success they’ve had with your service.

Finally, it’s important your posts are SEO friendly, so that you can help your potential customers find you!