Why You Need A Web Analytics Package
Posted by Marketing Man in Local SEO,Marketing for Accountants,Online Marketing,SEO,Website Design | August 8, 2012John Wanamaker, considered to be a pioneer of marketing and advertising, once said “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”. Mr Wanamaker died in 1922 but his saying is still relevant in today’s marketing environment.
Using Web Analytics To Track Your Marketing Efforts
These days every business has the tools available to track which of their online marketing efforts are working and which aren’t. The problem is only a small percentage of businesses have installed a web analytics package to track their traffic and an even smaller percentage of those businesses regularly analyse the data those packages generate.
A web analytics tool answers important questions like:
- How many people are visiting my website within a given time period?
- How many of those visits are unique, and not repeat visits?
- On average, how many pages does a visitor view before leaving the site?
- Which of my webpages is getting viewed most?
- Do first time visitors come back to my site for a second visit?
- Where is my traffic coming from?
- What keyword phrases are driving the most organic search traffic?
- What are my highest performing keywords (those that convert most often)?
And many, many more.
As you can see, a good web analytics package can provide you with absolutely vital information to ensure you are getting the best value for money from your online marketing activities.
If you are not currently tracking your web traffic you have absolutely no idea where you are getting traffic from, or whether that traffic converts so figuring out what is working and what isn’t working becomes near enough impossible.
Consider this scenario. You currently have both a Twitter account and a Facebook page for your business, you currently spend 70% of your time promoting your business through Twitter and the other 30% through Facebook. You assume that Twitter is better for your business but traffic analysis shows that traffic from Facebook has a much higher conversion rate than traffic from Twitter. Without analytics you would continue merrily spending the majority of your marketing time on your Twitter account, with analytics can see that re-focusing your efforts onto Facebook has a much higher chance of yielding new clients.
I recently consulted with an accountant who spent £5,000 last year on various internet advertisements. I was asked whether or not they should renew their advertising deals for another year. The only answer I had was a shrug of the shoulders and “I don’t know”. The reason being they had no website analytics set up to monitor their web traffic so there was absolutely no way of knowing which advertisements had sent traffic or if any of that traffic had converted into sales leads so determining whether their advertising budget was well spent was largely left to guesswork.
Do yourselves a favour and use an analytics package, we recommend (Google Analytics, it’s FREE), and start tracking the performance of your advertising campaigns.
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About the Author – Marketing Man
Marketing Man is a superhero marketer hell bent on a personal crusade to improve the websites and marketing of UK accountancy firms. Check him out on Google+
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