It seems that whenever business or the economy slows it falls on marketing to increase sales and lead generation.  After all isn't that the function of marketing?  How do you know if all your marketing pieces are working?  How do you know which headline or offer or call to action will be most effective?  Traditionally the process would include developing your marketing pieces whether they be direct mail, print, TV or whatever medium.  Then you might launch an A/B test, if you have the budget?  The best part is what happened next - you would wait to see if the phone rings or try to somehow associate leads or sales to a specific campaign.  If you're lucky, you might find some indicators as to which campaign generated the best response, but for the most part it will be a WAG.

I recently read an article in which an executive of an international advertising agency said that 70% - 80% of their efforts for their clients will be digitally based by the end of the year.  Why this migration to digital marketing?  Basically it's because most consumers, whether B-to-B or B-to-C, start their brand interaction online.  Digital or interactive marketing, unlike most other mediums gives marketers the ability to track every visitor and their interactions. Even the smallest of companies can do many of the same things the big boys do to increase their marketing effectiveness.  That's the great thing about the Internet -no matter the size of your company you can use it to grow your business.  It is very effective and cost efficient!

It’s important to note, if you are not currently tracking your web traffic, I highly recommend you take the time to add it to your web site.  It doesn't cost a ton of money to add this to your site, in fact Google offers an analytics program called Google Analytics that's free.  Adding an analytics program to your web site can require adding a snippet of code to every page.  There are content management programs, like our CMS - FlipperSiteDeveloper, that can automate this process and add the code to every page for you. 

What is the basic information you should be looking at in your sites analytics report? 

• Pageviews:  Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed on your site and is a general measure of how much your site is used. This a good basic measurement of the traffic load on your site. 
• Average time on site:  This is what it sounds like, an estimate of how long an average visitor stayed on your web site.  This is a good way to estimate the quality of visitors you are getting. Remember, this is an estimate, not an exact measurement of time spent on your site.
• Traffic Source:  Where are your visitors coming from?  Did they find you through a search engine, a link from a referring site or type in your URL directly? If you run a marketing or ad campaign and you notice that your direct traffic increased on the day you launched your campaign, it was most likely as a direct result of your campaign.  Conversely, if you see no or a minimal increase then maybe your campaign is not very effective.
• Keywords:  This lists the keywords your visitors used in a search engine to find your web site.  This is very important because this gives you insight into what keywords and phrases your visitors use.  This will not only tell you which keywords are being used to find you, but it will also tell you which keywords you are not found with.  For example, if you want your site to rank for "mountain bikes" and you notice that "fix flat tire" is one of your top keywords, maybe you need to work on optimizing your site for your most important keywords.
• Top Content:  This describes the most commonly viewed pages on your web site.  You can use this information to see if visitors are going to the web pages you want them to go to.  If not, maybe you can place an ad on your high traffic pages that promote other products and services you offer.  Cross promoting your products and services throughout your web site is something everyone should do.
• Top landing pages:  Most companies focus on setting up their homepage as the main point of entry and it is, usually.  However, search engines index the entire site and serve up the pages they think are most relevant to the search request.  You would be surprised how many companies have internal pages that rank higher than their homepages, due to the content of the page.  Check to see which are your top landing pages and if those pages are receiving are a lot of direct views - it means these pages are ranking high in search engines which gives you more of an opportunity to sell. This is a good thing.

Analytics provides an enormous amount of information and it can be overwhelming at first.  I recommend you start by just tracking a few key statistics like the ones outlined above.  Don't forget to exclude your IP address(s) so it will not track internal traffic.  This will provide a truer sense of what your customers are interested in.

Once you have an understanding of how analytics work you can begin to use your web site as a true marketing tool to test messages, calls to action, offers and/or price points.