Improving your online presence part 3:Track Your Results

If you do not sufficiently track your results, the odds are that you will waste money on marketing and advertising programs that do not work.

What should you track?

1. Conversions
   Gone are the days of tracking only site traffic. You need to be tracking the results of your Internet marketing and offline marketing efforts at the conversion level. This can mean conversion to a lead or conversion to a sale-BOTH should be tracked.
   For those of us selling products via a shopping cart on our websites and driving traffic via Pay Per Click marketing this can be as simple as placing the right code on our site. This will enable us to track which keyword search led to which sale so we can adjust our PPC campaign for optimal results.
   However, most businesses do not sell their products or services via a shopping cart on their website. Most businesses rely on offline customer interactions to secure sales, and some have sales cycles of up to 2 years.
   The more sophisticated your sales process, the more sophisticated your conversion tracking needs to be. This could be as simple as putting a tracking phone number on your website, or it could be much more involved. You may need to utilize multiple  tracking phone numbers, integrate your tracking system into your CRM or even invest in a sophisticated marketing automation software system. This can get more complicated when you are integrating your offline marketing (but still necessary).
   How much should you spend on tracking your conversions?
   If you spend $1,000 a month on marketing, you probably do not want to spend $1,000/month on tracking. However, you should probably spend $1-200.
   If you spend $10,000/month on your marketing and advertising campaigns, then it probably makes sense to spend $1-$2,000/month on conversion tracking.l
   In both cases, if you can improve your ROI or CPA by 10% or more this is a worthwhile investment. Many times a well integrated, monitored and professionally analyzed conversion tracking system can yield up to a 60% improvement in results. Well worth the investment.
2. Types of traffic
   Many business owners or marketing professionals receive many reports from Webtrends, Awstats, Webalizer or Google analytics, but they are not sure what they should be analyzing.
   You certainly should be looking at unique visitors vs. repeat visitors, bounce rates, time spent on site, the pages visited, the last page visited before exiting, etc. Most reporting tools will easily show you this data. You can also look at paid traffic vs. organic traffic, and branded vs. non-branded traffic. These require a little more sophisticated knowledge of utilizing, sorting and organizing the data. Nothing can completely replace human analysis by someone who knows your business and the goals of your marketing programs.
3. If you are utilizing SEO, you should track the external back links to your site and your rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
   If you are engaged in any type of Search Engine Optimization efforts, you should track your site with ranking reports and back link reports. Google webmaster tools will give you insight into this data for free, and there are some paid programs you can utilize that may be a bit more user friendly and provide some enhanced analysis capabilities.
   You also need to regularly perform keyword analysis, which is an art and science in and of itself.

I hope you found this information helpful.  
Do me a favor - if you see any typos in this post or have any questions please let me know via the comment section. Of course, for more detailed information on the topics discussed above you can follow the links to my Internet marketing website.and I am available via the phone for consulting.
In your initial call I will spend 15-30 minutes with you for free.
You can call me (Dan Stratford) anytime at 720-279-1876.