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Build a better website and the customers will come - eventually. To speed the migration savvy SME website designers use search engine friendly design with text-rich content and update information on a regular basis.
Spending more of your marketing budget on Web promotion can mean a faster return on your website investment. You can run magazine ads that feature your website URL and buy text or image ads on targeted Web or blog pages. Ad placement by Google to the right of this page is a good example, as is a full product listing on Furniture Link Canada, VCR's companion website.
You'll want to quickly determine if your website marketing is paying off. Thanks to Analytics, a new software package from Internet-giant Google, that task is now a lot easier. Based on Urchin Stats, a recent Google acquisition, Analytics tracks and records visits to Web pages where a small Javascript has been inserted.
Launched at no charge to smaller sites in mid-November, the software was over-subscribed in a week and was suspended pending Google's increasing server capacity. VCR signed up before the "freeze" to provide readers with this guide to the package.
Chart length of visit, keyword effectiveness, bounce rates, website referrals and much, much more.
VCR's Guide to Google Analytics
About a year ago, Analytics was priced at $495 per month, so you are getting incredible value for free. There are a couple of negatives worth considering, though. One is that you will be providing Google with an enormous amount of data about your company's activities. The other is that the complexity of Analytics can be overwhelming - only super nerd SME designer/makers will be able to take full advantage of all it offers.
In the short time VCR has had to evaluate Analytics, four reports stand out as being most effective - length of visit, keyword effectiveness, bounce rates and website referrals.
These menu paths (shown in purple) lead to the four reports:
Gives the length of time in 10-second blocks that a visitor spends on each Web page.
Lists the top performing key words a visitor enters into organic (unpaid) search engine search fields to reach your page.
Lists the percentage of visitors to a page who leave without exploring further.
Lists domains of websites visited immediately prior to yours.
In addition to gleaning all this overview data, Analytics can track individual hits from specific online ad placements, which may be its strongest feature. For example, Analytics can track:
- Hits from ads you place on design blogs and websites
- Clicks from links in your emailed newsletters
- Most effective keywords used in Google Adword campaigns
- Number of downloads of your PDF product catalogue
Secure online-store (shopping cart) software automatically tracks the ROI data at the time of purchase. As with most SMEs, you probably haven't invested in this software, so some cross-referencing detective work is needed to determine which email or phone contact resulted in a particular sale. The multitude of reports generated by Analytics helps with this process, especially if you incorporate some of its advance features.
VCR has tracked its own Web traffic for almost ten years. We quickly learned that it's not important to track and evaluate daily the ROI of every contact generated by the website. It is sufficient to do this about four times a year (usually during the active months for furniture commerce - January to March and September to November) and then extrapolate the data for the year.
We hope by the time you read this guide, Google will have relaunched Analytics - it's one of the best ways to get into the flow of Web traffic.
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