Measure Your Web Results to Find More Sales Opportunities

By Pam Foster, Certified SEO Copywriter

ContentClear Marketing

 

If you’re putting a lot of energy and money into promoting and optimizing your website, it’s important to monitor your online marketing results on a regular basis. You can use your results information to identify any tweaks you can make to generate even more traffic and profits.

There are several ways to measure the results of your website’s online promotions, including:

• Your own website data
  Each month, you can review a wealth of statistics that tell you how your site is performing. In the “traffic log report” provided online by your hosting company, you can view numbers and charts for the following:

• Page hits
  This is any request made on the web server. This includes page views, requests for images and requests for downloadable files. Caution: every single component of your pages (including individual images, charts and links) can be listed as a hit, so this is not the most realistic picture of how many unique individuals are actually visiting your site.

• Page visits
  This is the number that tells you how many unique visitors landed on your site.

• Search engine traffic
  This tells you which search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) are referring your site to the visitors.

• Browser traffic
  This report tells you which browsers your visitors are using (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape).

• Your viewers’ operating systems
  You can see which operating systems (Windows 98, Windows XP, Vista, Apple, etc.) your various visitors are using to view your website. This is critical so your web team can make sure your site is viewable by as many people as possible.

• Keywords entered
  This will help you track the actual keywords your visitors are using via search engines…showing all the referrals in a month, broken down by the keywords that were entered. This is valuable stuff because it can help you improve your positioning in the search engines. By adjusting your site’s coding and content to use the most common keywords showing up in your traffic log, you can improve the likelihood that more searches using these keywords will drive more of your target prospects to your site!

• General online advertising
  You can easily measure the results of your banner ads, directory listing ads, and other online advertising. You’ll see the responses in your IN box or shopping cart.

• Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns
  When you set up your ads in Google, you’ll use software called Google Adwords that automatically provides you with reports that help you weigh the campaign costs against the results.

• E-newsletters
  If you’re using an online e-newsletter company, such as Emma or Constant Contact, to help automate everything (which we strongly recommend), you’ll know how your recipients respond to each e-newsletter you send.

• Traditional sales reports
  As you launch your Web site, you’ll want to set up new entries in your sales tracking system to include leads and sales that come into your business as a result of your Website. You can do this by tracking inquiries that come to you via your site’s Contact Form and E-newsletter sign-up form, as well as actual sales that come to you via your shopping cart (if you offer e-commerce).

When you know how you’re doing, you’ll find opportunities to do more!

To learn more, you’ll want to check out the C-Clear™ Method for Web Search Optimization.

Or, contact us for help with your website.