In the
last post I discussed the first part of your online marketing tool-kit, namely
the tools of Twitter, Facebook and a website/blog as a minimum. There are of
course countless other social media tools such as LinkedIn, Google+ etc. How
many you use is a matter of personal choice, and time. But if we say the
purpose of all this activity, is to eventually sell more books, we need to know
what is, and what isn’t working.
Lord Lever
Hulme once remarked – ‘I know half of my advertising works . . . but I don’t
know which half it is.’ This is the biggest problem with marketing, most
especially those marketing activities which cost money. It is very easy to
spend money, and see absolutely no return for that investment. (I’ll cover the
cost versus return in another article)
With so
much sold online these days, and I’m thinking here specifically about e-books,
a web presence is essential, and a website/blog is one of the essential tools.
You can have a free blog such as Blogger, which won’t cost you anything for a
domain name or server hosting – or you can go to the other extreme and have a
bespoke site built and managed by a webmaster. Plus there are many options in
between. Regardless which you choose you’ll still need to measure what is going
on. Unless having a website is for vanity reasons, they need to work for you.
The best tool for measuring online activity is Google Analytics. Blogger, for
example, does have a certain amount of statistics, but Google Analytics is the
real powerhouse in terms of measuring website activity. These days, just
knowing the number of hits the website receives simply isn’t enough.
Google
Analytics is a supremely effective tool for measuring a website’s activity. And
even better news – it’s absolutely FREE!
So how
does it work? Well, the first thing you need to do is attach some very specific
“html” code to each page of your website (or just on the Master page, if you
have one). Again, the good news is that Google will have automatically written
the code for you when you sign up to use the service, and they’ll give you all
the instructions required to insert it. To access Google Analytics just click
here.
What
does Google Analytics tell me?
Once you
have set up your free account you can start analysing the data Analytics
generates for you. The data is updated every day and you will be taken to your
home page each time you log on. It is possible to manage several websites
simultaneously within Google Analytics. All the websites you manage will be
listed on the home page. By selecting “view reports” you will be taken to your
“dashboard”. I don’t have the scope within this article to cover all the
functionality of Google Analytics but I can provide a flavour of its power.
The Dashboard
The
dashboard is where you choose what you want to view immediately you select
“view reports”. The default provides the following information:
Audience Overview – A graph
shows you day by day the total number of hits the website has received. Below
the graph, there is other data, including – total number of pages viewed,
average number of pages viewed per visit, bounce rate (the percentage of people
who left the site from the same page they entered the site without visiting any
other pages), the average time each visitor spent on the site and the
percentage of people who visited the site for the first time. All that
information in itself is very powerful, but as you’ll discover there is a great
deal more to come.
Standard Reports
Real Time – This provides
data on what is happening right now on your website
Audience – This is
the default data, as described above. You can also drill down into areas such
as demographics, behaviour and technology.
Traffic Sources – This
element provides information on how your visitors arrived at your site. Was it
direct traffic (those that type your web address into the address bar), search
engines (and it tells you which ones) or from referring sites. This last one is
especially important. The more sites that are linked to your site the more
important Google considers your site. Think about all the sites that you have
visited that offer you a download as a PDF (portable document format) file.
Adobe are the creators of PDF files and as Adobe Acrobat Reader is used to read
these files many sites provide a link to Adobe’s website where the free Acrobat
Reader software can be downloaded. Adobe therefore have millions of referring
sites across the Internet, making them a very important site as far as Google
are concerned. Also within this section Analytics will tell you the keywords
used, by those visitors that used a search engine, to find your site. This is
invaluable data when trying to optimise your site for search engine visibility.
Content – This
section provides deeper analysis on which specific pages have been visited.
Look for the pages that have very high bounce rates and short periods of time
spent on them. This may suggest that the visitor is not finding the page of
interest – time for some action to help boost its ratings!
As we have
already seen the default dashboard is a gold mine of useful information about
what is happening on your website. However, other aspects of website activity
may be more important to you. As Google recognise this fact they have
structured Analytics to provide you with a dashboard that can be customised. I’ll
be doing more Google Analytics articles in the future to look at some features
in more detail.
So that is
a quick guide to some of the functionality of Google Analytics. It’s intuitive,
it’s powerful, it will add value to your web marketing initiatives and above
all else – it’s FREE!
One final
point – you should use Google Analytics to track how you your visitors get to
the site and use the site. Don’t corrupt your data with activity from internal
laptops and PCs. Make sure you use the Analytics filter to ensure that internal
visits to your website are not included in your data collection. Each computer
attached to the Internet has its own IP (Internet Protocol) address. If you
wish to know the IP address of each computer then log on to www.whatismyip.com and it will provide
you with the number, which is supplied in four blocks, such as: 123.45.67.255
You will
need to type the number into the Google Analytics filter. This process should
be done for each computer connected to the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment