#15 Online Marketing a Closer Look at Tracking Your Traffic

Learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. Google Analytics is free to everyone, whether you are an advertiser, publisher, or site owner.

W6M: I recently added Google Analytics to help track visitors to my site. I am not really the HTML coding expert, but I did a quick Google search how to track traffic and I was able to find easy to follow instructions.

Once the code is added, you can track the number of visitors, what sites link to you, what keywords were used to find you site and even what city the visitors came from. You can also see how long people spent on your site and what pages they visited. With this data you can see what content people are reading and what content they are ignoring. This will be a useful tool for you to use when deciding what content to update. If anyone ever reads this blog I will make sure to pass along an update.

For your online marketing campaigns, you can also track the success of your campaign. Specifically, Pay Per Click and Banner Ad campaigns allow you to track impressions, clicks and conversions. I talked about this in an earlier post, but online conversion numbers may only be part of the story. That banner ad impression may have led to the in-store purchase, which does not get accounted for in your online conversion numbers. Any influence your online campaign ad may have had on the instroe purchase is ignored in your online conversion results.

Knowing the data and being able to understand it is important to being able to sell this offering to your client.

#13 Online Marketing a Closer Look at Pay Per Click (PPC)

Online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying click-throughs. In a PPC agreement, the advertiser only pays for qualifying clicks to the destination site based on a prearranged per-click rate. Popular PPC advertising options include per-click advertising networks, search engines, and affiliate programs.

W6M: Most marketers think no one clicks on the paid listings, this is not true. Most people prefer the natural organic listings, but data shows that people do click on paid links. Since getting ranked in the top organic results is often difficult, PPC is an easy way to get your site listed at the top of the search results right away.

If you look at "car insurance" and similar related insurance products/terms, Progressive always Ranks at the top. They have an army of employees and an endless budget. For certain terms they may spend $5, $10, and maybe $25 per word. If you are competing in this market, keep in mind that being 2nd, 3rd or 4th position will still get you a substantial amount of traffic. You might only pay a fraction of what the top bid is. Keep in mind that if they are spending $10 per bid and they have a $1,000 daily spend, their budget will run out quickly and you will move up in the rankings.

Also, know when and where your customers are buying. If you only sell products from 5 pm - 8 pm, then you should day part your campaign to only run during those hours. If your customers typically work all week and shop on the weekend, then only run your campaign on the weekend.

If you know where your customers are you can also GeoTarget with PPC. If you are a "Cleveland Pizza" place, PPC allows you to geographically target people close to your location.

#11 Online Marketing

Online Marketing is defined as using the interactive technologies available via the Internet to further create a dialog with potential customers by connecting with them with good educational content about your company's products or service offerings.

W6M: Online Marketing includes using Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Banner Advertising, Facebook, YouTube, Banner Ads and more. I will get into more details with the following posts on SEO, PPC and Social Media, but I just wanted to be clear that Online Marketing is basically the umbrella for all these efforts. The following posts have high level explanations, so the average marketer can understand what they will need to know to sell online marketing to their client.