We held our monthly webinar last week on web analytics. It just amazes me the range of information available from Internet marketing. It is one of the key differences from traditional marketing.
Take the example of one of my clients (www.Austin-All-Maids.com). I built their web site last year. Of course I installed Google Analytics throughout the site. From that I can tell them many things about the traffic on their site. We know how many visitors, how many repeat visitors and how many new visitors. We can tell what pages they came to originally (landing pages) and what pages they visited during their stay. We can tell which pages the most people 'bounced' off of and did not look at other pages. We can tell where the visitor came from geographically and where they came from referral-wise (not to mention the search terms they used to find the site.)
While that's all very helpful if analyzed properly and reacted to, there's even more. Through tracking phone numbers, we can tell how many people called because the found the website. We can tell how many called from the search engine advertising. We can even tell how many people called them from their Craig's List ad's.
Better yet, we can tell which search terms on which search engines resulted in phone calls, emails or form submissions. That let's us shift money around to take advantage of the best yielding advertising.
Finally, we automatically send a follow-up email to every price estimate requested. That email contains a coupon to encourage them to try the service out. We can tell how many people open those emails to gauge the success of that campaign.
All in all, we have a wealth of information about our Internet marketing program that allows us to intelligently improve it on an ongoing basis. Not to mention that the client feels good about the money they're spending because they can tie it to specific results. Don't you wish you could do that with all of the marketing dollars you spend?
