Google Analytics Provides Important Marketing Metrics

Wouldn’t you like to know data about the people visiting your website? A lot of times websites offer freebies in exchange for receiving voluntary visitor info. This is a good idea – it gives you names and email addresses of possible future customers. But what about the people who don’t want to fill out a form or give up their names? You can’t violate your site visitors’ privacy, but you can learn a lot about them – like geographical location, how long they viewed the site, what specific pages they viewed, and how they arrived at your site. In general, this type of data is known as “web analytics.”

Google provides a great web analytics tool for free called Google Analytics. For example, on my music website, www.burkeingraffia.com, I was able to discover that between Jan. 12 and Feb 12, 2008, there were 396 visits from 218 Cities.

I know the content people saw and the way they navigated through the site. I can narrow the data down to the timeframe of a single day. This information will become invaluable if I ever decide to market more of my music.

As a business, you need to be able to measure your ROI, and your marketing budget can only be validated with some sort of quantitative analysis. With Google Analytics you can set up goals and how many “conversions” of those goals occurred – like how many people filled out a form or how many people purchased an item. You can also cordinate it with your Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign for even more useful detailed data..

Contact me for more help with Google Analytics. It will give you relevant, meaningful data and the confidence to either continue with your online marketing campaign or to abandon it for something more effective.