There is a learning curve to the program and information overload can happen if you don’t know where to focus your attention. If you want to start with a general overview of what is happening on your website, I would recommend monitoring a few specific categories.

1. Unique Visitors: I often hear businesses discussing “hits” on their websites and using that for a gauge on how they website is performing. This number can highly overestimate the popularity of your website. A hit is registered whenever one of the many files on your website is loaded. For example, a single page in your site might have 10 images, as well as 2 script files within it’s code. This page could register 12 or more hits from one single visit to the  web page. For that reason, I monitor unique visitors. This number will provide a more accurate way of monitoring the number of people who come to your site, excluding multiple visits from the same computer.

2. Referring Sources – Having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing during my career, I consider the referral data on your statistics to be very important. The referring sources will be able to tell you who is sending you traffic. This can be very valuable if you are spending company time exposing your business to the social networking marketing mediums, or more importantly, paying for display and paid search marketing.

3. Conversion – This is the most important statistic that you are going to monitor, hands down. You can drive all of the traffic in the world to your site, but if they are not turning in to a customer, then you have some work to do. Google Analytics allows you to place some code on your site at what you consider to be the point of conversion. For most businesses, this is the order confirmation page, which thanks them for placing their order. However a business’s goal may be to drive an online information request lead or to drive a phone call. In these cases, placing the code on the contact form confirmation or on the contact page itself can give you an idea of the interest in your particular conversion. Either way, if you are getting the traffic without conversions, it is time to dig deeper in to your site to find out what is happening. In these cases, bounce rates and average time spent on the site by a visitor can get you pointed in the right direction.

For more information on conversion tracking on your website, contact Angie Commorato at blog@commorato.com. Angie is an Indianapolis based web consultant and owner of the online marketing company, a&g Digital Consulting, LLC.

1. Target Your Ads by Location – If you are located in Indianapolis, Indiana and sell new cars, you probably won’t want your ads showing in California. Only choose Indiana ad placement, or better yet, target the Indianapolis area only to further stretch your spend. Lets say that you offer residential moving service in the Midwest. You will want to target Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and any other states that you can serve, but you will want to deactivate all other states. Otherwise, you will be paying for customers to see your ads and you won’t be able to service them when they contact you.  I even advise customers who would like to sell within the entire United States to choose a few states to target, evaluate the results and then expand accordingly. Pay per click advertising can get very expensive and this will allow you to get better exposure for your money.

2. Adjust Your Ad Times – Google Adwords allows you to choose the days and times that your ads will display. If your customer typically want to speak to someone about your products or services, you might consider only running your ads during your business hours. I had a customer who had 90% of their website sales happen over the telephone. However, they only had phone sale staffing Monday-Friday from 10am-5pm. We were able to adjust their ads to show during the week, during those hours only. If you are a true ecommerce website which can take online orders 24/7, you can choose the days and times that you would like your ads to appear. I have seen trends within different industries to where certain days of the weeks will convert better than others. To determine which days are the best for your products, you will need to test your campaigns and adjust your targeting based on the results.

3. Have Analytics Available – It sounds so simple, but so many businesses don’t realize the importance of  being able to monitor the source of your website sales. To be able to gauge the effectiveness of your paid search ads, be sure to have some website statistics installed on your website. Google Analytics is a free statistics program that will help you analyze not only the traffic coming to your website but also the impact of your keyword ads. The analytics program will allow you to place a code throughout your website to track conversions at a keyword level. This will allow you to disable under-performing keywords and/or target more of your budget towards the better keywords.

4. Search Engine Optmization – You can always pay to be at the top of the search engines, but the ideal mix of search engine marketing lies in a little paid search and a whole lot of search engine optimization. Once your site is optimized and your website is appearing in the top results, your cost per aquisition will more than likely decrease significantly. It is important that you work with a company that has enough knowledge to get you top ten results for the major search engines. Once those results are achieved, maintain an on-going relationship with that business. Search Engine Optimization is a very reactive form of online marketing. Once you see your website sitting in a top slot in the search results, your competitors are going to take notice and do what they need to do to take back their position.

For more information regarding pay per click campaigns, contact Angie Commorato at blog@commorato.com.