Once you launch your small business website, you might feel like you can finally relax.
You can sit back and wait for business to start flowing in.
People will read your awesome content. They’ll fill out your handy contact form, requesting a sales followup. They’ll subscribe to your blog or company newsletter. And best of all, you will see a noticeable increase in monthly sales.
That might sound too good to be true. But really, that’s the goal. You want to convert potential customers into healthy, long-term business relationships.
But for most small businesses, launching a website is merely the beginning. It’s an important step in your marketing effort. But just as you track your offline marketing efforts, you also need to track online marketing.
As you know, good marketing involves tracking results. After you create new content for your website and use social media and other strategies to send people to your website, it’s important to find out what’s working and what’s not.
Are potential customers finding the information they need and ignoring the information you’re giving them?
When you track online marketing, you’re not just seeing which of your great ideas works best. Ultimately, you track online marketing to discover what potential customers are really looking for. If you have what they’re looking for, they might decide to do business with you. If you don’t, they will go elsewhere.
Track online marketing with Google Analytics
One of the best tools to help track online marketing is Google Analytics. There are many excellent tools available for tracking visitor’s interaction with your website. However, most small business lack the time and resources to implement these tools. Google Analytics can quickly deliver a wealth of data that you can use to improve your website content.
Here are 5 simple ways you can use Google Analytics to track online marketing:
- Track the top 5 pages of your website that people visit. How does it change from month to month?
- Track the top keywords and referral sites that drive people to your website. Are you using these keywords in your website content? Are you connected to the websites that people come to your website from?
- Track how long visitors stay on your website. What pages do they linger on? What pages do they exit from?
- Track words or phrases visitors put into your website’s search feature. Does your website provide adequate answers to these queries?
- Track devices used to access your website. Are your customers mostly using desktop or mobile browsers? Make sure you cater to their browsing needs (especially customers using smartphones!).
Ready to start tracking your online marketing efforts? I suggest you start with Google Analytics. Once you are comfortable with these tools, consider one of the many analytics tools outlined in this article.
How has Google Analytics helped your online marketing?
Lighthouse Marketing
Lighthouse Marketing Inc. specializes in visually appealing, mobile friendly website design. We are an independently owned 18 year old Canadian company based in the Lower Mainland of BC, and are not affiliated with any company bearing a similar name in other areas of North America.
In addition to our existing website services, the past 3 years has seen dynamic growth in the area of SEO services, particularly with regard to local search. Our evolution to a full service SEO company means that we now offer complete online business solutions that involve Google local search as well as an effective social media strategy.
Lighthouse Marketing services the Surrey, Langley, Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam, White Rock, Delta, New Westminster, Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows, and Abbotsford areas, as well as other locations throughout the Lower Mainland and the Fraser Valley.