A professionally designed website is now a must-have not a nice-to-have for all businesses these days. And if you really want online marketing success, then you must understand the importance of successful marketing testing. It is as crucial for on-line as it is for traditional marketing methods – and actually easier to quantify in many ways.
Our experience at Snap as web design and digital marketing specialists, tells us that those businesses that are passionate about testing and measuring marketing effectiveness are always massively successful with both their offline and online strategies.
You wouldn’t buy a car that you didn’t know what speed it could achieve, or maybe its fuel economy figures, or its service intervals? Right? And you would check all this once you got the car. You spend good money on a car because you know what it’ll do for you (ie the value) against what it cost to buy and what it costs to run (the investment)
So when you spend good money on a website – the reality is that it should deliver more value than it cost you to set up and maintain. So how do you track and measure this – correctly
You need to know everything that is happening on your website, or not happening. You need to measure some key parameters and there is one really great tool you can use to do this – and its FREE! Its called Google Analytics.
Here are some of the tracking parameters you should be talking to your web designer about. In fact, if they aren’t talking to you about these things you should find another web designer – FACT.
Here’s my checklist of the key metrics you need to be tracking regularly:
• How many visitors are coming to the site?
• How many of the visitors aren’t real human visitors (i.e. crawlers from search engines)?
• How many visitors are new vs. old?
• How long each visitor stays on your site?
• What does each visitor look at on your – what does he click on?
• What sections – graphics, words, pictures generate the best responses?
• Which search engines get you the best prospects?
• Where are your customers coming from – links, referrals, newsletters etc?
• How many pages does the visitor look at?
• What is your website Page Rank?
• How much money you make from the average visitor?
• Who are your biggest revenue generating customers?
• If you use Google Adwords, is it paying for itself – and more?
• Which links are bringing your visitors and are they converting to customers?
If you are like most business owners you are thinking “there is no way I could do all of that” you would be right. Remember, that is why you need a specialist to be able to feed you real business-critical information so that you can drive the business and not worry about interpreting that data!
Author Matthew Simmons
