Regardless of the type or technique of Internet marketing you intend to deploy, you need to be able to measure results in order to be able to improve upon them with any accuracy. PPC naturally provides you with some figures such as the number of times an ad is viewed and how often viewers click through to your site. SEO also offers figures including how high up the results pages your site features. But it is only through web analytics that you can truly learn what these figures mean in real terms.
The Importance Of Targeted Traffic
You should be attempting to drive targeted traffic to your site. The more targeted a visitor is, the more likely they will be to make a purchase or enlist your services. Using a combination of data it is possible to determine how many visit your site from a particular link or keyword search. It is also possible to measure the number of those visitors that leave your site straight away. This is known as a bounce rate and typically identifies an ad campaign that is not accurately targeted enough.
Measuring The Responsiveness Of Visitors
Taking it a step further, you should also be able to determine exactly how responsive visitors are when they are acquired using a specific form of Internet marketing or through a specific advertising campaign. The more responsive they are the greater your return on investment and the more successful that campaign. A mass of traffic that doesn't convert is no better than no traffic. Except that you've invested time, effort, or money into generating traffic that, as yet, is unresponsive to your efforts.
Visitor Demographics
Analytics can help tell you the location of your visitors, as well as a number of other facts about your average visitor. These can be employed to help you target offers, increase your offering for a particular area, or determine whether there is scope for improvement on your geo-targeting.
Page Popularity And Performance
Analytics can also provide details of the most and least popular pages on your website. They can indicate the pages that would be considered hot spots for conversions, giving you the opportunity to determine why. Alternatively, if a particular page or link is leading to a lot of people exiting your site then you need to address this issue as well.
Why Internet Marketing Firms Devour Analytical Data
A professional Internet marketing firm will work very closely with your web analytics, server logs, and any other statistics they can get their hand on. This is because the information that these figures offer is truly invaluable to the creation and optimization processes of any ad campaign using any technique.
Your Website Marketing Needs An Analytics Package
Web analytics are vital to the success of online marketing but alarmingly few websites actually pay proper attention to those statistics and those vital figures that are produced. It is important to drive traffic in the first place, but that shouldn't be the ultimate goal of an advertising campaign. Once your visitors arrive on your pages they need to be wooed and they need to be converted into customers and sales.