What You Need to Know About Measuring Your Marketing Results

There’s not much point in working so hard to create a marketing process unless you intend to track and measure the results. Without measuring the results, you have no way of knowing what’s working, what needs improvement and what you need to do away with altogether. There are many different things you can measure and analyze about your site.

Here are a few things you should consider:

  • Who are your readers?
  • How many of your readers are unique?
  • How much time are they spending on your site?
  • Do they subscribe to your blog?
  • How many readers click through for more information?
  • How many repeat visitors do you have? Do they interact in any way?

Each of these areas can be measured and those figures will help you improve your blog or website. So how do you find this data? By measuring the web analytics and there are a couple different ways to do that.

Your hosting company probably tracks some of the analytics of your blog and can provide some useful information. You can get much better stats from other services, however. In order to have a service track the analytics of your web pages or blog posts, you need to add a tracking script with a bit of HTML code in your page code. This is usually found in the footer of your page. This tracking code will send information to your analytics service every time someone visits your page.

You can find several free analytics services available on the web, but you may get more detailed data if you opt for a paid version. Like many other incredible free web tools, Google provides free Analytics that will give you excellent data. With Google Analytics, you can find out everything you need to know about the people who visit your site. You can look at the statistics by the day, week or month. Google Analytics tells you how many visitors your site has, where they came from, how long they stayed on your site, how many pages are viewed on average and much more.

This information can help you in several ways. For example, if you learn most of your visitors come through your Twitter stream, then you know your time spent marketing on Twitter is having a positive effect and you should continue or even increase those efforts. Conversely, if you see that you have no visitors via search engine traffic, then you may decide the keywords you are using aren’t driving the traffic to your site.

Tracking unique visitors to your site tells you how many separate visits people make to your site. Don’t confuse unique visitors with new visitors, however. Unique visits can come from the same person at different times.

When you know how much time visitors spend on your site, you get another piece of information showing how interesting and effective your copy is. If people spend only a second or two on your site, the visit shows your copy didn’t compel them to stay. This is called your bounce rate- referring to your visitors bouncing right off the page. You want a nice low bounce rate- certainly under 50%.

By seeing how many visitors to your site click-through to see more information, you learn whether your content is doing its job by leading site visitors to explore your site and convert into buyers. You can even track things like email campaigns, banner ads and other types of advertising to get a complete picture of where your revenue is coming from.

Tracking the analytics of your blog or website is a vital operation if you want to create the best site you can have. By studying statistics about your site visitors, you can learn what to change on your site to improve the rates. The more traffic you can bring to the site and the longer you can keep people there, the better your chances of converting that traffic to sales.