Many business owners and marketers spend thousands of dollars just to stumble upon something that actually works. Answering a few questions first will save time and money. Define and clarify your goals and make them SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound). What are your online marketing goals? Reaching your target audience is key to realizing real marketing value. Measuring the components of your online marketing by understanding the analytics will keep your marketing under-budget and effective.
To measure your online marketing, Google offers many tools to track and measure online traffic. Web Analytics programs, webmaster tools, Google My Business, Google Trends, Think with Google, Google Alerts, and Keyword Planner. These useful tools are free and offer valuable information including website traffic, website health, optimization suggestions, and other resources. If you have a web designer, ask for the numbers to track the success or determine how to improve your strategy.
One website metric used by the major search engines is called a ‘bounce rate.’ The bounce rate is a percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page. For example, a customer visits a page on your website but leaves the website without visiting another page. We call these ‘one-and-done’ website visits. A high bounce rate might indicate your website is irrelevant, confusing or has slow page load times. The bounce rate also can be reviewed per traffic source. Did they visit the website because of an email, social media or search engine? This information is imperative to investigate the issue and reduce the bounce rate. Your website’s landing pages may need to be optimized for conversions by improving the user experience or the design of your website so customers can find what they are looking for. How customers find your website is good information to fine-tune SEO or your social media campaign.
Marketing in the digital age, analytics can tell you how your business fits in and how to monitor the real results. A little investigation can show you how to attract customers and make them want to stick around with a clean professional design, easy messaging, clear conversion path, easy navigation, and amazing content.