Milwaukee Internet Marketing 101 is about how you determine ROI. Internet marketing strategy would be incomplete if you didn’t take advantage of its key difference from traditional marketing channels – the flexibility to change strategy on a dime. The information you gather from your website can help you determine which product offers are working and which are not, whether your affiliate marketing strategy is effective, and how well your keywords are working in the search engines.
Collecting and interpreting this data is known as web analytics and there are a number of basic metrics you can use to track your success. However, before you even implement your campaign – let alone measure it – it’s important to be clear on the goals for your site and have a solid understanding of your target audience. Your bottom line may be to drive sales and revenue, but your web site can also contribute to lead generation, building a community around your business or generating brand awareness and PR, and you can set up your site to track any interim goal.
Every month, Brew City Marketing emails your Website Analytics report. You can easily extract some common measures of site performance such as:
Hits
Each file downloaded from your site is known as a hit. Files can include images, scripts and anything else the web browser needs to allow a user to view the page. If, for example, your homepage contains four photos and an HTML file, five hits to your site will be recorded, even though only one user has visited your page. As a result, hits are not a reliable measure of visitors to your site.
Unique Visitors
You can get a more accurate measure of who is coming to your site by looking at the number of unique visitors.
Page Views
Each time a visitor comes to your site, you can find out how many pages are looked at – the number of page views. This is more a useful measure of activity that can tell you how deeply your visitors engage with the various areas of your site.
Referrers
The sites from which your visitors arrive. This is an easy way to measure the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing strategy. If you need more detailed analysis such as understanding the paths, or routes within your site that customers are taking before they make a purchase, a more active measurement, known as page tagging, may be appropriate.
Brew City Marketing helps you determine a balance between using website analytics as long-range check on the direction of your site and a day-to-day tactical tool.
