One of the most attractive aspects of online marketing is that everything is trackable and therefore accountable, but how are you supposed to get at and interpret all that data?
Website statistics, or "Site Stats" are critical if you want to optimize your presence online. You have to know what's not working in order to know what to fix.
Among other things, a web stats package can tell you:
- Page Views / Visitor Numbers
- Geographic locations of website hits
- This is a good first step in determining your online audience.
- Visit source
- Are your website viewers coming from your Pay-Per-Click campaign, a specific search engine, a referral partner's site, direct? This helps determine your online marketing budget as well.
- Exit points
- Where are people leaving your site most often? I pay most of my attention to the second biggest exit point. The first will invariably be your home page. The question is, why are people leaving after reading your "About Us" page? That answer is more interesting.
- ... tons more.
As far as implementation, we recommend Google Analytics to our clients.
It's free and powerful enough to satisfy almost anyone's needs. Signup is fast and implementation is "cut and paste". Setup and optimization can be pretty tricky, so you may want to hire a firm to ensure that the information from the site stats are accurate and actionable.
The hard part here is not implementing the service on your site, but rather, interpreting the data so you can make an informed decision. This is where firms like JDM can help.
