There’s nothing new about singing the praises of Google but...what the heck. Plexus has only been using the Google Analytics tool set for about a year and a half to evaluate traffic, customer trends, and sales figures for the sites we build. In that short time Google Analytics has undergone many vast improvements which has positioned it as the leading Web site traffic analysis tool if not for its wide array of reporting menus, then for its extremely cheap price – FREE!
Most companies extremely undervalue and underappreciate the knowledge they gain from properly analyzing their site traffic. Everytime I ask a potential client that already has a Web site but comes to us for help, what they know about their visitors and their site traffic, I get some variation of the following answer: "Yeah we have about xxx hits per month and xxx percent of our visitors are new each month." They smile, feeling proud they are armed with an answer to a seemingly simple question. Bravo to them for at leat knowing how to start to answer that question but...the question they can’t answer is “does your site produce results, and how do you know?” It’s as simple question to answer if you are using the right kind of statistics. Introducing Google Analytics.
Aside from the normal statistics you can get from any other Log Analysis software, Google Analytics takes special care in allowing you to answer the questions of “does your site produce results, and how do you know?” It does this with Goal Conversion Tracking. Every site should be equipped with some kind of lead generation tool whether it be a simple contact form, request a quote form, schedule an appointment form, or newsletter sign up form – som way to gather potential client contact information. Goal tracking allows you to create up to four goals. Just by having one block of Analytics code in your site and setting up your goals (takes about one minute), you can find out just how much of your traffic converts to a lead for your business.
For example, if you made a decision to purchase a Web link on the Yellow Pages Web site or, you were running banner ads on the local newspaper's Web site, and you wanted to know if that spending was brnging leads you could check the Goal Tracking report to find out. The Yellow Pages and Newspaper staff will be eager to tell you how many people clicked to your site through their ads, but don't trust this number to tell you anything besides the fact that someone actually made it to your homepage. You need to know how many of those people stayed on your site long enough to convert to a lead. Google Analytics Goal tracking does just that. It tells you how many leads your site generates, and where those viitors come from whether it be from the banner ad on your local newspaper site, your online yellow page ad, or some other source you may not have even known about!
If you have an e-commerce site where you actually make sales online, you can track every penny you make and find out what sources are sending the sales to you. E-commerce tracking is especially important for retail sites because most retail sites use different marketing methods to achieve sales goals. How can you make decisions about wich efforts are working if you can’t tie every marketing dollar to your sales? For instance, if you purchase a number of Google Adwords and you want to know which words perform and which words don’t, the e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics will show you which words bring in the most revenue.
Look at the following keyword report. This is a real report but we have replaced the real keywords to protect client information. Notice that for Keyword 1 (which is a paid keyword) the site received 1925 visits. It brought in over $1500 in revenue from that paid adword. The report also shows that the average sale for that keyword is $28.84. Now, you can compare that against what was paid for that keyword over the same period to find out if you are making money off that keyword. If you make a decision to discontinue that keyword, you are making that decision armed with knowedge instead of instinct. Many companies make the mistake of thinking if their sales aren’t strong during a particular quarter when they happen to be using Adwords, that their selected Adwords aren’t performing, so they suspend their campaigns. Then their sales really take a dive. If they had been using Google Analytics, they may have found their sales from other traffic sources were down and Google Adwords were the only thing that were producing. Armed with that knowledge they could have prevened losing more sales.
To sum up, if you are using any kind of traffic tracking software, kudos to you. But if you can’t answer the question “Does your site produce results and how do you know,” you might want to think about switching your preferred statistics tracking software to Google Analytics. Call Plexus if you would like help with getting it set up with your site and learning how to use it.
