What You Should Be Tracking To Help You Improve Your Business Online

Posted by Jason Kienbaum on Jun 28, 2011 in Small Business Marketing, Web marketing for small business | 1 comment

There is nowhere to hide on the internet and everything is becoming more and more trackable. For the most part everything is measurable now so you can easily see what is working for you online and what isn’t – allowing you to make valuable changes. Even the old argument about social media not having any ROI is starting to die slowly. If you are going to actively be using the internet here are the top four items you are going to want to track. (I’m not going to mention sales because that should be a given.)

Bounce rate

If nobody is spending time on your website then there is really no point in having one so you are going to want to consistently track the overall time your visitors spend at your website. Your bounce rate increases if someone arrives on your website and then leaves your website without viewing any other pages. If your bounce rate is high, which seems to vary for everyone (I say anything over 60% is too high), then it’s time to start looking at why people are not sticking around. Here are a few of the main reasons I find that many visitors will bounce from a website.

• A bad web design
• Poor navigations of the website
• The content is not good enough
• Your keywords do not match your website
• Too much advertisement

Traffic sources

Along with tracking your bounce rate comes knowing where your traffic is coming from because you cannot rely on just one web source or even worse not have any traffic sources at all. The easiest way to start getting traffic is to begin with social media or do a pay per click campaign through search engines. If your using Google analytics to track your bounce rate you can also use it to see where most of your traffic is coming from. This way you can see if your search engine optimization strategies are working to your liking and what websites are sending you traffic. A great way to increase traffic from referral websites is to do a guest post if it is allowed. Many bloggers look for guest bloggers and in return you get exposure to a new audience that will become aware of your website.

Brand image

Word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool for any business and on the internet word of mouth is amplified a hundred times more to become word of mouth on steroids. Now we can influence thousands of people with just one click, making the customer service part of your business the most important part. A lot of your brand monitoring can be done without spending any money. Using a Google tool called Google alerts is the best place to start. By using Google alerts you’ll receive emails whenever someone uses your brand name on the web. This allows you to react to what was said about your company whether it is good or bad.

Audience engagement

The web is a social space, not at all like traditional marketing where everything is a one-way communication only. What you want is to have people talking about your brand and spreading your content. If someone takes the time to leave a comment on your blog, share your content anywhere online or engage with you on a social media site, you need to actively be responding back to those valuable individuals who clearly have an interest in your brand. These are the individuals that could possibly become customers or brand activists.

Your thoughts:

What do you think is important to track online?

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