Posted Date: Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Is My Website Working?

Leveraging Website Analytics to Improve Your Website’s Effectiveness

During our time at the Vacation.com conference, I had the pleasure of speaking to hundreds of people regarding their Travel Agency, their website and how they were doing business. Here’s how about 95% of my conversations went:

Travel Agent: I have a website but I don’t think it’s very good and I don’t think it’s doing it’s job.

Me: Okay, well are you doing anything to promote it?

Travel Agent: No.

Me: Alright then, do you have an idea of how much traffic you currently get?

Travel Agent: No.

If we were to sit down and have a conversation about your website, would our conversation start similar to this?  Well then you’ve come to the right place.

Whether you are a home based business of 1, or a host agency with hundreds of affiliates, your website is your #1 marketing tool and any opportunity to make it more visible and effective should NOT be overlooked.  The question is “If you don’t know what your website is doing, how do you know what will make it better?”

What are Website Analytics?

Back when most people connected to the internet with their phone lines websites had things called hit counters.  Unfortunately the extent of their usefulness was telling you how many people visited the website before you.

Free Web Counter

As online technologies advanced and people began to realize the full potential of doing business on the web they started tracking individual page views, unique vs repeat visits and time on site.

Today, a number of corporations have been built and fortunes have been made simply through extending the accuracy and functionality of tracking the behaviour of each visitor that uses a website.  Comprehensive analytic packages such as Web Trends, Adobe Omniture and Google Analytics can teach you more about your websites effectiveness than you ever thought possible.

Configuring them properly can help you identify things like where your visitors are coming from (referrals), how many pages do they view before leaving? Which pages are they leaving your site the most on? Which pages do they find most engaging?  Even geographical regions your visitors are located!

 

Getting Started With Analytics

We are going to suggest you get started with Google Analytics.  Why? Because it’s quick and easy to install, will satisfy the needs of most small to medium sized businesses and it’s free.

It’s so easy to install in fact, your web designer or marketing agency may have already activated it behind the scenes. Most content management systems have built in functionality for integration with Google Analytics by default.  If that’s the case, you can skip ahead to the section on leveraging features.

Step 1: head to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for an account.

Step 2: paste the code generated in the sign up process into your website source, somewhere that will get loaded on every page view (a header or footer perhaps?)  You can even have Google Email you the instructions if you wish.

It’s that simple.

 

Interpreting the Information Supplied By Google Analytics

Let us start with a couple of ways your travel agency can benefit from Google Analytics shortly after you begin recording them.

First, make sure you set the date range you want to analyze the traffic for.  I would suggest narrowing it down to the day you started tracking this information to the current date.

Site Content Monitoring

In the navigation menu, navigate to Content -> Site Content -> Pages.  This will present you with a list of the most popular pages on your site. You can use these stats to learn what individual page within your site receives the most views as well as how much time people spend on it.

Use these stats to help you identify what pages people are exiting your site on. It may help you spot some issues with internal linking, site navigation or even incomplete or irrelevant content.

Referrals

Here we will use Google Analytics to help show you where your traffic is coming from.  Did they click your link out of an email? Did they see a friends post on Facebook? Did they do a Google search and happen upon your website?  Knowing who is referring your site will help you plan and execute future online marketing efforts.

On the menu, navigate to Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Referrals.  You should see a breakdown of other websites that referred traffic to your site.

Search Engine Referrals

On the menu featured on the left hand side, navigate to Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Search -> Overview

Immediately you’ll see the distinction between all visitors arriving at your site via search engines.  This section will break all visits down into two categories, organic and paid.

Organic traffic is search traffic delivered to you via search engines native functionality. Paid traffic would be traffic arriving via paid search marketing ads through Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter or Yahoo! Search.  The engagement stats such as pages/visit, average time on site and bounce rate will give you some insight as to how your paid search campaign is being targeted. Compare those stats with that of your organic search traffic to determine if your paid campaign is bringing in users that are more engaged or not.

Keywords

From here, click the “Keyword” link above.  This will give you some insight into which keywords bring you the most engaged traffic.  Use this knowledge to either optimize your websites content, optimize the targeting of your paid campaigns, or both!

Turning Keywords in Revenue

Using an Agency to Maximize Effectiveness and Start Seeing Results

Now that you’ve been introduced to some of the native functionality found in Google Analytics, you probably have an idea of how a qualified marketing agency can really help get your website working harder for you.  If you don’t have the time to spend becoming a Google Analytics expert, you can have a certified Google Partner optimize and manage your web site, Analytics and AdWords campaigns on your behalf.

Parcom’s list of extensive online services includes helping you analyze your websites current functionality. After identifying areas requiring improvement Parcom’s web services team can help you identify keywords, optimize your website content and structure increasing overall performance with regards to search engine optimization and general usability. These results will inevitably increase your agencies visibility to search engines and other websites.

If you have any questions or you would like to speak to a representative about a quote, feel free to drop us a line!

Kelly Cromwell
New Media Strategist
Parcom Marketing Inc.

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