Do you track where your leads come from?

Tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is vital to making them work. Until you know which approach works best, you won’t know how to adapt and evolve your marketing properly. Find out from your leads by asking them, or better still, by sending them to your organisation via a filter of some kind:

• A different phone number
• A PO Box mailing address
• A 5% discount if they mention a promotional code

And of course online it’s even easier. Create different versions of the same page and use tools like Google Analytics to work out which page has the better reaction. Better still, with good tracking software you can find out where your visitors came from, how long they stayed on the page, and what they did next. Comparing two campaigns online is quick to do, and gives you instant results. Best of all – it’s free. No new line rental, no new PO Box service subscription, no reduction in profit in exchange for finding out how people found you. All it takes is a little thought and setup and you’ll have a brilliantly effective measurement tool at your disposal.

Ben

Google Analytics is an awesomely powerful tool. In this very brief guide, I’ll explain why you should have it, and then show you how to get it up and running (it really is simple).

What is Google Analytics?

It is a tool for logging and reporting on how visitors interact with your site. You can find out how visitors came to your site, and what they did when they arrived on your home page. For instance, you can find out what search phrases resulted in your website being found, and where your visitors are coming from geographically. You can then track the progression of visitors through your site, finding out which pages they found the most interesting, and if any pages caused them to give up in frustration – thus leaving the site.

Best of all, it’s free. And it’s quick to setup.

Getting started

If you are moderately comfortable with HTML, uploading files to your server and have a static website, then this guide is for you. For anyone else, Google have some excellent tutorials here. Here the process in 10 easy steps:

1. Go to www.google.com/analytics
2. Below the "Access Analytics" button, click "Sign Up Now". You can skip this step if you have a google account already (i.e. for Ad Words or Gmail).
3. Once you are logged in, click "Add Website Profile".
4. Enter your URL and hit submit.
5. This is the only technical step. You’ll be given a "tracking code", in a text box. Select it all and copy it to your clipboard.
6. Download your index.html file from your server. Make a backup (just in case), and then open it with Notepad.
7. Scroll down the very end and the last two lines should be</body> </html> You need to add a line just before these, paste the tracking code in and save the file.
8. Upload it to your server, and check it works.
9. Well done. Google Analytics is set up.
10. Now return to the Analytics site, and the status symbol should be a green tick.

Provided all that works, you are ready to go. You’ll have to wait a while to get any information, and once you have it you can click on View report to start seeing how your site works. After this, it’s all quite intuitive.

Understanding how your visitors interact with your website is essential to making your website work. It’s quick and easy to setup. A wealth of information awaits.

Ben