If you haven't read my last blog yet, I'd recommend taking a few minutes to
learn which kinds of changes you can make to your website this week so you
can take full advantage of the points I'm going to cover today.
What are web
analytics?
Web analytics: what are they? Most businesses
have a website in this day and age, but they aren't taking advantage of it to
its full ability. Web analytics are simply statistics about your website
traffic and users that lets you see where people are coming from, who they are,
and what they're doing on your website.
Analytics are easy to collect and view with
Google's free service. Google
Analytics is by far the most popular way that business owners and
marketers keep track of their website traffic. At DMI, this is a service we
install on every website we build and make it available to view at any time.
With
one click in the Google Analytics dashboard, you can see an organized pie-chart
showing you
where your website visitors are coming from.
where your website visitors are coming from.
How does it work?
Collecting web analytics isn't as
complicated as one would think. The way it works is quite simple: you put
a tracking code provided by Google into your website and
Google begins collecting the data and displaying it to you in your Google
Analytics dashboard. DMI understands that inserting tracking codes into your
website isn't always possible because you either didn't build your site
yourself or don't have access to the back-end of it, which is why we take care
of this step for the websites we build.
What kind of data is
useful to you?
This is one of the most common questions that
we get. The financial professionals that we build sites for love
being able to see analytics from their website, but they want to know what they
should do with that information. The answer to this question differs from
person to person. Some businesses want to know how many people are coming to
their site from search engines like Google or Bing. Others want to see the
impact social media has on their website visits or if their landing pages are
performing well during their radio show. From a web development perspective, I
like to look at certain metrics that will let me know how I can improve the
overall user experience of your website. The point is every business has
different goals/key performance indicators, and by analyzing web analytics we
can make adjustments in marketing strategy to support those goals. Being able
to back up these adjustments in strategy with hard data allows business
owners to move forward with much greater confidence.
Let me offer a real-life example of how
analytics can impact your business. While working with a $15 million annuity
producer, DMI discovered that his website visits increased by roughly 25%
during his radio show. Not only did visits increase, but we saw that
visitors were particularly interested in learning more about the
workshops that were being discussed on the radio show. To try to
capture some of these visitors and turn them into prospects, we created a radio
landing page that our client advertised directly on their radio show with a
custom URL. We built this landing page with information about upcoming
events and a simple form that allows someone to easily register for a workshop.
The next week, the producer saw a 15% increase in workshop registrations
which were linked directly to the landing page.
Analytics help you
direct your digital marketing compass
Your website acts a catchall for many of your
marketing efforts. Most business cards have your company URL on it, and
your traditional and digital advertising should include this
information as well. This is why knowing where your website visitors are coming
from and how they're behaving on your website is so important.
The bottom line is that web
analytics matter to your business and you can easily use them to direct your
marketing efforts better. They are best used in conjunction with an overall marketing strategy so you can actually
quantify your efforts and see what's working and what is
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