A crucial ingredient to any web marketing effort is measurement. We always prescribe and incorporate a website metrics package on our client’s website before launching a web marketing campaign. This allows us to automatically track criteria like website performance, campaign and sales activity, trends over time, and profitability.
We find some of the most valuable measurements include: website visitors, unique visitors, page views, transactions, sales, and conversion rates. Different companies require various other metrics, but at a minimum you should be able to see how many people are coming to your site, how many pages they're looking at, where they're coming from and what it is they're buying. This will give you visibility into your website performance and will help you make better business decisions to be more effective and become more profitable.
There are all sorts of web metrics packages available ranging in price from free to many thousands of dollars per month. A web metrics package we like to use is called Google Analytics. It’s free and lets us capture most of the important web metrics related to your website. With Google Analytics we can see how many people are coming to your website, where they came from and what they're considering to buy on your website. We capture this data in a spreadsheet and create reports and graphs for you that illustrate the performance of your website over time.
Setting up a web metrics package such as Google Analytics is usually pretty simple and can be done by a member of the Mission Web Marketing team in a just a few hours, or even less. This typically involves appending some tracking code to each page on your website and your order confirmation or Thank You page that passes order information such as the transaction ID, order amount and campaign source code back to the metrics engine for reporting. You can setup your own Google Analytics account for free and get the tracking code integrated throughout your website, or we can do this for you in just a couple of hours.
If you don't have a proper method of capturing website metrics, you need to start today so you can make better business decisions and make your website more profitable! Without some sort of web metrics package in place you're operating in the dark and wasting time and dollars on campaigns that don't work. If you need assistance or have questions about web metrics, contact us today to see how we can help.