If you wonder if your Online Marketing is working, review your analytics and traffic data. If you don’t follow the Russian proverb oft repeated by President Reagan, “Trust, but verify,” your program could be doing who knows what. Sure, you trust your agency or digital team. But you’d be a fool to not dive in to the numbers for yourself.
Tools for measurement are superb. On one level, they are typically easy to access and read. You should have direct access into your website’s analytics or traffic reporting system so you can verify the numbers given to you by your agency or staff. If you are not given access, demand it! If the system is outdated or provides minimal data, installing Google Analytics is easy and free.
You have to look at the numbers and understand them. Don’t let all the options overwhelm you. Ask your agency or staff to give you basic training on how to access the numbers and what they mean.
- What are total website visitors in a given timeframe? How much of the traffic came from search engines or referrals? Which websites are referring traffic to yours? Check and make sure the referring websites are reputable. If not, find out why.
- How do the numbers differ during different time periods? You should be able to change the date range for the data as you want to view. Tracking progress over time provides a deeper level of understanding in terms of what’s working and what needs improvement.
- What pages are visitors entering on? What pages do they leave your site from?
These are basics that should be at your fingertips.
Analytics can provide you so much more. How well is your content keeping people on your website? Are visitors taking the action steps you want? What are the chokepoints where visitors leave without taking the desired action? What is going on with those pages that you are losing them? What can you do to change that? How are the tests of those changes working out?
If you have an agency or in-house team not delivering the numbers to you, or not explaining them well enough, contact E-Power Marketing. We not only give you full access to your numbers, we make your numbers grow!
