Marketing Solutions - You Can't Improve What You Don't Measure

Imagine trying to play darts blind folded. That is precisely what you do when you are looking for marketing solutions and you don't measure and track your results.

Information is an essential element to make use of smart marketing solutions. Without information, you are effectively taking a shot in the dark.

However, by using analytic tools, you'll know who has visited your website, how long they stay, where they came from, and what they are reading on your site. You'll also have a full range of marketing metrics to help you understand your business marketing return on investment (ROI).

Here are some elements that you should be monitoring on your website:

• Site Traffic – keep an eye on your web traffic, trying to increase the number of new and repeat visits, and watching out for trends
• Traffic Source – an important thing to watch is your traffic source, so that you can you can relate your marketing efforts to traffic trends. Some of the traffic sources you should track are
  • organic search traffic (via search engines, like Google and Bing)
  • direct traffic (that’s when people find you by typing your domain name)
  • referral traffic (these are visits via click-through from other websites)
  • pay-per-click traffic, generated by pay-per-click advertising, like Google AdWords an
  • social media traffic, which is site traffic generated by social media channels like Facebook and Twitter
• Search Engine Ranking Performance – Do you know what the top keywords are that people are typing into the search boxes when they are trying to find a business like yours? It’s important that your website comes up for those keywords, because people don’t scan past the first page of the Google search results.

Make a list of at least 15 targeted keywords, and keep a monthly check on your search engine ranking performance for those targeted keywords. Check the page and position for each keyword – this will give you a good insight into your web presence and let you know where you need to adjust your SEO. Don’t be surprised by fluctuations you see. These often reflect SEO adjustments that your competitors have made.

• Landing pages are the lead work horses of your website, and so it’s important to keep an eye on their performance. Landing page conversion ratios can reach as high as 60%. Their performance varies based on the strength of the copy and design and overall appeal of the offer. Identify your best performing landing pages and analyze what makes them so effective. Then replicate the formula
• Tracking social media – social media is a powerful online marketing tool. It’s important to track not only your site traffic generated by social media, but also track your reach – like, the number of Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest followers you have. How many connections on these social media sites do you communicate with each week? By tracking your reach, you can see how you’re building your communication network
• Track your blog subscribers and the number of views of your blog articles. You may be surprised to see how much your blog traffic snowballs.

I know this looks like a daunting task and frankly it is a lot to keep track of but it's well worth the trouble.