This article has been adapted and updated from chapter three of my book Secrets of Internet Marketing: Streamline, promote, communicate and sell more effectively on-line.
Tracking programs
As you know, it is imperative to track your advertising – whether it is website banner advertising, television or print. With the advent of social media, it is also good to know how much traffic is coming into your blog or website through Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube or other sites. You must know where your business is coming from. If you have a banner ad on a website that is costing you big money and your referring URLs from that site are low, you have choices. (More about URLs below.) You can pull the ad, change the ad, change the location of the ad on the site, or negotiate a better rate or location for your banner ad on their site.
Tracking programs or website statistics are excellent for monitoring visitor and customer behavior. With them, you can track where your customers come from, where bottlenecks occur in your site, which content, products or services visitors prefer, how you can improve your customer support, the best way to convert a visitor into a buyer and which advertising campaigns are working.
I use Google Analytics to track my blog traffic. The best part about it…it is free.
Hits
Hits, also called a page hit, are the retrieval of any item, like a page or a graphic, from a web server. For example, when a visitor calls up a web page with eight graphics, that's nine hits, one for the page and eight for the graphics. For this reason, hits often aren't a good indication of Web traffic. Anyone trying to sell you on-line advertising based on hits should be asked to get out of the ballpark.
Page Views
A page view is a web page that has been viewed by one visitor. Rather than hits, page views are a much more reliable measuring tool for evaluating where to place your online advertising and/or your website traffic. You'll see by this image below, how my page views skyrocketed when I added K. D. Lang to my site immediately following the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Search Engine Reports
See which keyword combinations people are entering in search engines to find your site by looking at keyword reports. Keyword reports tell you that you have content in your blog or your site around those keywords. However, if you want to bring visitors to your site or blog with other key words, and you are not getting traffic from them, you’ll know what kind of content you should add.
A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator. It is a very complicated way of saying ‘website address’. Referring URLs are the websites that refer, send, divert or direct business into your site.
By tracking your referring URLs, you can determine which websites (in addition to search engines) are sending you business. This is extremely valuable information because it allows you to determine where your advertising is, or isn’t, working.
As you can see by this image below, top referring sites to my blog are Twitter, Kelly Diels, Facebook and Hootsuite. (That goes to show the power of blogs and social media to generating traffic.)
Compare referring URLs to determine the percentage of traffic each URL brings. Track return on investment for each URL by assigning a dollar figure to the percentage and dividing it by the cost of your advertising. This method is used for comparison purposes. It doesn’t actually assign a real dollar value.
For example: let’s say you are a photographer and you have banner advertising on two sites:
Kodak.com
Gettyimages.com
Kodak is bringing you 50% of your visitors, but the ad cost you $500. Getty images is bringing you the other 50%, but the ad cost you $1000.
Return on investment (ROI) is calculated strictly for comparison purposes – the dollar figure means nothing in this case.
Your return on investment for Kodak 50/500 = 0.1
ROI for Getty is 50/1000 = .05 (half).
While they bring you the same amount of traffic, the traffic costs you twice as much with gettyimages.com.
Therefore, you may want to consider reducing your investment with gettyimages.com to see if you get the same amount of traffic for the same price, or negotiate with Getty to keep the same ad, but at half the cost based on your knowledge of Kodak’s results. As long as all other things remain equal, you may be in a very good negotiating position with Getty. Do you getty what I’m saying?
Most requested pages
Tracking programs also allow you to track the most requested pages on your website. The most requested page on your website is often your home page. But which page do your customers visit next? Is it your contact information, jobs, or what? This is useful information to know.
This is important if you are trying to convince a supplier or associate to buy advertising space on your website. You can indicate where the best place to advertise will be.
When I had a contract with a community Internet portal to sell banner advertising, we sold all of the advertising at the same rate – regardless of whether it was a busy page or a slow page. However, we quickly sold out the busy pages because we were able to prove to our customers that they could capture a portion of the traffic we were getting just by placing banner advertising on those busy pages. Interestingly, some of the busiest pages were bus route schedules on BC Transit, movie listings, and the ‘image of the day’ (a nice picture of the local scenery that the webmaster took each day). Accommodation was hugely popular in the tourism section and the news continually drew visitors to the site.
Tip: Movie listings are a great place to advertise on line if you are targeting teens. Facebook, is another. Ironically, Facebook is also great for advertising to grandmas!
The most requested pages are one of the first things you should ask if you are considering advertising on anybody else’s website. If it is a high traffic site, place your banner advertising on their most requested page, and you’ll see results!
Use your most requested pages as a place to put announcements and news, or move product. If you know it is a well-visited place on your site, use it to your advantage.
Average time spent on the site
“The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.”
-William Gibson
A good tracking program can provide you with the average amount of time that your visitors spend on your site. If your visitors are not spending much time on your site, maybe it is not very interesting, maybe your pages download too slowly or maybe your shopping cart package is not user-friendly. Tracking this information allows you to re-think your site layout and/or content. Increase the amount of time a user spends in your site and you will likely increase the amount of money that they spend with you.
Unique Visitors
Unique visitors are measured according to their unique IP addresses. IP addresses identify each computer or computer network that is connected to the Internet. IP addresses have a unique four digit number that identifies a particular network and a host on that network. Except in special cases, one IP address equals one unique visitor no matter how many times they visit the site within a given period. The only flaw in tracking unique visitors is that one IP address can be assigned to a network having 500 employees on it – so the unique visitor will be counted once while up to 500 employees may have actually visited your site.
Unique visitor statistics can be useful if tracked on a daily basis to tell if more people visit your site on a Monday or a Sunday, or in August than March. They will indicate when your traffic increases or drops.
It is also important to know what this term means when you are sourcing information from advertisers about their unique visitor traffic so that you can compare ‘apples to apples’. It is better to ask ‘how many unique visitors do you have’ than it is to ask ‘how many hits do you get’ as an indicator for their amount of traffic.
Path Reports
Statistics or tracking programs can monitor path reports. These indicate where visitors entered your site, which paths they took and where they exited. This is useful information for determining ‘jumping off’ points that may need to be re-designed. They will also tell you how people travel through your site which can arm you with information on how to improve your navigation.
Return frequency
See how many visitors have returned to view your site a second time, and how long they waited between the first and second visit. If visitors return to your site daily, you know you’ve got an interesting site. If they return monthly, you may need to reach out to your customers electronically more often with an e-newsletter, blog or special promotional deals by email.
*Tracking programs or website statistics can help you monitor customer behavior and traffic to your site
*Hits are a common, yet unreliable measuring tool
*Use page views to guide you in placing your advertising or to determine the most popular pages within your own site
*Keyword reports help you optimize your content
*Referring URL’s help you determine which websites (in addition to search engines) are directing traffic into your site
*Use referring URL’s as a measuring tool to determine your advertising return on investment
*Put your most important information or product offerings on your most requested pages
*Invest in advertising on other websites on their most requested pages
*Knowing the average amount of time that visitors spend on your site can help you provide better site layout or content
*Unique visitors are a better tool than hits for measuring traffic to a site
*Path reports tell you how people travel through your site and where they leave, giving you hints on how to improve your navigation
*If customers return to your site frequently, you have great Internet marketing. If they don’t, you need to reach out to your customers more often.
Tracking programs
As you know, it is imperative to track your advertising – whether it is website banner advertising, television or print. With the advent of social media, it is also good to know how much traffic is coming into your blog or website through Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube or other sites. You must know where your business is coming from. If you have a banner ad on a website that is costing you big money and your referring URLs from that site are low, you have choices. (More about URLs below.) You can pull the ad, change the ad, change the location of the ad on the site, or negotiate a better rate or location for your banner ad on their site.
Tracking programs or website statistics are excellent for monitoring visitor and customer behavior. With them, you can track where your customers come from, where bottlenecks occur in your site, which content, products or services visitors prefer, how you can improve your customer support, the best way to convert a visitor into a buyer and which advertising campaigns are working.
I use Google Analytics to track my blog traffic. The best part about it…it is free.
Hits
Hits, also called a page hit, are the retrieval of any item, like a page or a graphic, from a web server. For example, when a visitor calls up a web page with eight graphics, that's nine hits, one for the page and eight for the graphics. For this reason, hits often aren't a good indication of Web traffic. Anyone trying to sell you on-line advertising based on hits should be asked to get out of the ballpark.
Page Views
A page view is a web page that has been viewed by one visitor. Rather than hits, page views are a much more reliable measuring tool for evaluating where to place your online advertising and/or your website traffic. You'll see by this image below, how my page views skyrocketed when I added K. D. Lang to my site immediately following the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Search Engine Reports
Software (like Google Analytics) that provides search engine reports can tell you which search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) visitors are using to find your site. By knowing which search engines people are using to find you, you’ll be able to tell which search engines aren’t working for you. Then, you can attempt to fix your ranking in those search engines where you need improvement.
See which keyword combinations people are entering in search engines to find your site by looking at keyword reports. Keyword reports tell you that you have content in your blog or your site around those keywords. However, if you want to bring visitors to your site or blog with other key words, and you are not getting traffic from them, you’ll know what kind of content you should add.
Here is an example of my keyword report. Recently, I posted a YouTube video to my site and ever since then, my traffic has gone through the roof for K.D. Lang Olympic video searches.
A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator. It is a very complicated way of saying ‘website address’. Referring URLs are the websites that refer, send, divert or direct business into your site.
By tracking your referring URLs, you can determine which websites (in addition to search engines) are sending you business. This is extremely valuable information because it allows you to determine where your advertising is, or isn’t, working.
As you can see by this image below, top referring sites to my blog are Twitter, Kelly Diels, Facebook and Hootsuite. (That goes to show the power of blogs and social media to generating traffic.)
Compare referring URLs to determine the percentage of traffic each URL brings. Track return on investment for each URL by assigning a dollar figure to the percentage and dividing it by the cost of your advertising. This method is used for comparison purposes. It doesn’t actually assign a real dollar value.
For example: let’s say you are a photographer and you have banner advertising on two sites:
Kodak.com
Gettyimages.com
Kodak is bringing you 50% of your visitors, but the ad cost you $500. Getty images is bringing you the other 50%, but the ad cost you $1000.
Return on investment (ROI) is calculated strictly for comparison purposes – the dollar figure means nothing in this case.
Your return on investment for Kodak 50/500 = 0.1
ROI for Getty is 50/1000 = .05 (half).
While they bring you the same amount of traffic, the traffic costs you twice as much with gettyimages.com.
Therefore, you may want to consider reducing your investment with gettyimages.com to see if you get the same amount of traffic for the same price, or negotiate with Getty to keep the same ad, but at half the cost based on your knowledge of Kodak’s results. As long as all other things remain equal, you may be in a very good negotiating position with Getty. Do you getty what I’m saying?
Most requested pages
Tracking programs also allow you to track the most requested pages on your website. The most requested page on your website is often your home page. But which page do your customers visit next? Is it your contact information, jobs, or what? This is useful information to know.
This is important if you are trying to convince a supplier or associate to buy advertising space on your website. You can indicate where the best place to advertise will be.
When I had a contract with a community Internet portal to sell banner advertising, we sold all of the advertising at the same rate – regardless of whether it was a busy page or a slow page. However, we quickly sold out the busy pages because we were able to prove to our customers that they could capture a portion of the traffic we were getting just by placing banner advertising on those busy pages. Interestingly, some of the busiest pages were bus route schedules on BC Transit, movie listings, and the ‘image of the day’ (a nice picture of the local scenery that the webmaster took each day). Accommodation was hugely popular in the tourism section and the news continually drew visitors to the site.
Tip: Movie listings are a great place to advertise on line if you are targeting teens. Facebook, is another. Ironically, Facebook is also great for advertising to grandmas!
The most requested pages are one of the first things you should ask if you are considering advertising on anybody else’s website. If it is a high traffic site, place your banner advertising on their most requested page, and you’ll see results!
Use your most requested pages as a place to put announcements and news, or move product. If you know it is a well-visited place on your site, use it to your advantage.
Average time spent on the site
“The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.”
-William Gibson
A good tracking program can provide you with the average amount of time that your visitors spend on your site. If your visitors are not spending much time on your site, maybe it is not very interesting, maybe your pages download too slowly or maybe your shopping cart package is not user-friendly. Tracking this information allows you to re-think your site layout and/or content. Increase the amount of time a user spends in your site and you will likely increase the amount of money that they spend with you.
Unique Visitors
Unique visitors are measured according to their unique IP addresses. IP addresses identify each computer or computer network that is connected to the Internet. IP addresses have a unique four digit number that identifies a particular network and a host on that network. Except in special cases, one IP address equals one unique visitor no matter how many times they visit the site within a given period. The only flaw in tracking unique visitors is that one IP address can be assigned to a network having 500 employees on it – so the unique visitor will be counted once while up to 500 employees may have actually visited your site.
Unique visitor statistics can be useful if tracked on a daily basis to tell if more people visit your site on a Monday or a Sunday, or in August than March. They will indicate when your traffic increases or drops.
It is also important to know what this term means when you are sourcing information from advertisers about their unique visitor traffic so that you can compare ‘apples to apples’. It is better to ask ‘how many unique visitors do you have’ than it is to ask ‘how many hits do you get’ as an indicator for their amount of traffic.
Path Reports
Statistics or tracking programs can monitor path reports. These indicate where visitors entered your site, which paths they took and where they exited. This is useful information for determining ‘jumping off’ points that may need to be re-designed. They will also tell you how people travel through your site which can arm you with information on how to improve your navigation.
Return frequency
See how many visitors have returned to view your site a second time, and how long they waited between the first and second visit. If visitors return to your site daily, you know you’ve got an interesting site. If they return monthly, you may need to reach out to your customers electronically more often with an e-newsletter, blog or special promotional deals by email.
Other Items Which Can Be Tracked
Software can track everything from the most common monitor resolution settings used by your visitors to their language setting, country and operating system.Email Reports
Once you have set up Google Analytics, you can also set weekly or daily email reports to send to you in .pdf format.
Summary
*Tracking programs or website statistics can help you monitor customer behavior and traffic to your site
*Hits are a common, yet unreliable measuring tool
*Use page views to guide you in placing your advertising or to determine the most popular pages within your own site
*Keyword reports help you optimize your content
*Referring URL’s help you determine which websites (in addition to search engines) are directing traffic into your site
*Use referring URL’s as a measuring tool to determine your advertising return on investment
*Put your most important information or product offerings on your most requested pages
*Invest in advertising on other websites on their most requested pages
*Knowing the average amount of time that visitors spend on your site can help you provide better site layout or content
*Unique visitors are a better tool than hits for measuring traffic to a site
*Path reports tell you how people travel through your site and where they leave, giving you hints on how to improve your navigation
*If customers return to your site frequently, you have great Internet marketing. If they don’t, you need to reach out to your customers more often.
*Tracking programs can track just about everything. Focus on the tracking information that helps guide your Internet marketing the best.
More Information
If you would like coaching on how to set up and interpret Google Analytics to track your on-line marketing, please get in touch.
Thanks for reading!
Courtenay Pitcher, Google Analytics Cheerleader
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