Starfire Creative Web Design | Graphic Design | Web Hosting | Search Engine Optimization | Online Marketing

Save Your Small Business Marketing Budget With Google Analytics On Your Website

Google offers a free statistical tool to analyze your website visitors. It is called Google Analytics and it can save your small business marketing budget. It is very easy to use. Once you sign up with the service and add the URL of your website, you get a snippet of Java Script code that you add onto every web page you want to track (they tell you exactly where to copy and paste it, so it's simple enough for beginners even).

The key to this is that Google Analytics tracks visitors from all sources, including display ad campaigns, PPC (pay per click) campaigns, organic searches from search engines, email marketing, bookmarks, websites that have your inbound links, and other digital sources like URLs embedded in PDF files or Power Point slides.

Why would you want to do this, you might ask? If you know that the last local flyer campaign that cost $25 inspired 32 people to visit your website, and your postcard campaign which cost $125 inspired only 7 people to go to your website, you might make different decisions with your marketing budget, wouldn't you?

You want to know if your marketing campaign is going in the right direction or not. For example, if you are doing article marketing to drive traffic to your site, you want to know the article directories that are the most effective in sending visitors to your website.

You don't want to waste your time submitting articles to directories that are not sending you any traffic or a very low amount of traffic. You can write more articles and submit to only those directories that are sending you a good amount of traffic.

If you are using a pay per click (PPC) marketing campaign, you can use split testing to test the effectiveness of different ads. You want to know which ads are performing better than the others in terms of conversions. If you integrate Google Analytics with your AdWords PPC campaigns, you will be able to track the effectiveness of each ad you are using in your PPC campaigns.

Using data from Google Analytics, you will be able to find the pages that are getting the most traffic from search engines, bookmarks and inbound links. Knowing this information helps you spend time on optimizing only those pages that are getting the most traffic and, if necessary, change the navigation of the site so your most important pages get the number of visitors you would like.

You can work on providing improved user experience of your site on those high traffic pages. Make it easy to navigate those pages from anywhere in your site. Place a "What is new" about your site on those pages.

If you're selling ads on your site to advertisers directly, you need a visitors portfolio of your site. This portfolio contains information about the number of monthly unique visitors to your site, visitors' geographic locations, the number of page views per visitor, the bounce rate of visitors, etc.

Google Analytics will help you develop a visitors portfolio, or even help you flesh out the details of specific personas for your site. The more information about your visitors you have, the easier it is to make decisions about how to increase your business.

At Starfire Creative, we use Google Analytics on every new site we build to give us as much information as possible. After all, knowledge is power.

Even if you are not going to use the power of Google Analytics immediately, you can still sign up for Google Analytics and let the tool start collecting visitors data about your site. When you need the data, you will have it in your Google Analytics account.