By Mark Drake, WebsiteService4All.com

You’re a business owner and you’ve spent some money on Web advertising this last year. You understand you have to advertise on the Internet to get your business in front of potential customers since clients turn to the Web to search for both products and services. But you don’t know what money was well spent and what wasn’t. In today’s guest post, Mark Drake, CEO of WebsiteService4All.com, a website design and marketing company, sheds some insight.

You put some money into online advertising, but you aren’t sure if you got any results. If you’re like most business owners, you probably don’t know if or how much online advertising is working for you. It’s a bit maddening isn’t it?

If this sounds like you, then read on because we’re about to give you some information that will help you better understand what is paying off and what doesn’t when it comes to your Web advertising.

Enter Analytics…

Don’t let the term scare you.  Just like the rest of your business, analytics apply to your Web advertising.  If you’re tracking your monthly expenses you can just as easily track your website results.

But what can you use to track, what can you track and how do you do it?

Today you can easily track what is going on with your Web advertising with Google Analytics.  If you’ve heard of Google Analytics, but haven’t used it, or you’ve tried to use or install it, but haven’t been able to, then pay close attention here.  Here’s what it takes:

Step 1.  Create a Google Analytics account.

Step 2.  Embed the code on your website.

Step 3.  Wait 24 hours and you will start to see all of the following information:

Here’s what you will start to find out:

  1. What advertisement visitors came from: This information is incredibly important since you need to know which advertising is actually sending traffic (visitors) to your site.
  2. How many visitors came to your website: You need to know the volume of people you’re getting in front of, and specifically, the volume of people per referring source.
  3. The most visited pages on your website: This helps you understand what information visitors are most interested in on your website so you know what they want or need.

OK, that’s the basics.  Is there more?  Yes.

There is a lot more you can do with analytics.  Here are some additional things you can set up Google analytics to track:

  1. Conversions: This is when someone does what we want them to on the website. For example, you can track what advertisement or referring source sent the visitor who:
    1. Filled out a request form
    2. Purchased a product
    3. Locations: You can track what geographic locations visitors came to your website from (down to the city)
    4. Website flow: You can track the path visitors took through the different pages of your website so you know how visitors flow through the content of your site.  This is important because ultimately you would like to steer them to what you want them to see or click on.

There is lots of information that is important to track for your online business.  You can track:

  1. Adword campaigns
  2. TV and/or radio ads: You can direct a TV consumer directly to a landing page and track the results of how many people visited you as a result of the TV ad as well as all of the other information listed above.
  3. Parts of the day you get most visitors: This can help you understand the best times of the day to run your ads.

Mark Drake is owner of WebsiteService4All.com, a website design and marketing company. If you’d like to achieve a better understanding of how your advertising is working, make sure to install analytics on your website (or take advantage of the free service provided by the San Diego Website Design company) and find out what your Web advertising is really doing for your business.

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