Most organizations think about their websites like simple pieces of marketing – places where they can communicate information to potential and existing customers. Websites are certainly good for this, but they also offer something no other marketing tool can provide – instant, accurate tracking.
Most of us are familiar with tracking general website statistics. But wait, there's so much more. To truly take advantage of the powerful tracking capabilities of the web, your website needs to have a goal that you can measure. So answer these two questions:
- When someone visits your website, what do you want them to do?
- How will you know when they do it?
Here's an example. On our product websites, our goal is to get people to sign up for a free account. How do we know when someone does this? After they signup, they are redirected to a "thank you" page. This page contains a special code that works with our analytics program, Google Analytics. We like Google because it's free, but there are other tools out there. Anyway, every time someone creates an account, they land on the thank you page and Google is notified that another person met our "goal."
Now, Google is pretty sharp and can tell us not only how many people completed the goal, but how they got to our site in the first place. Did they come from another website? Did they search for us on the web? If so, what keywords did they search for? By putting all of this data together, we get valuable information that helps us shape our marketing and SEO efforts.
Hopefully, you can see the power here. Setting up trackable goals in combination with an analytics program can tell you alot about the effectiveness of your website. Whether it's completing a "contact us" form, signing up for a newsletter, creating an account, or any other action you can dream up and measure, every website should have a trackable goal. Does yours?
Posted on
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
by Tim Wall