Using Google Analytics to Track Your Progress

If it was your New Year’s resolution to improve the effectiveness of your marketing, how do you determine if it’s working? Since one of the benefits of 1:1 print marketing is the ability to drive traffic to your website, one of the ways to determine success is to use Google Analytics and similar tools to monitor your Web activity.

Online analytics tools are about more than the number of visitors to your site. They can tell you where these visitors are coming from, how long they stay, which sites or search engines are driving the most traffic, and more.

In addition to basic site traffic, let’s look at some of the metrics Google Analytics offers.

• Absolute unique visits. Number of individual visitors (as contrasted with people who might be visiting the site more than once).
• Page views / average page views. When people come to your site, how many pages do they click on before they leave?
• Time on site. Once people hit your site, how long do they stay? Are they taking the time to read the content? Or clicking out right away?
• Traffic sources. Where are your visitors coming from? Are they typing in your URL directly? Coming from referring sites? Search engines? If the latter, which ones? What keywords are they using?
• Page navigation. Did people land on each page directly? Or did they click through another page to get there? After viewing the content, did they click through to more pages? Or leave the site?

What can you learn from this type of information?

If you’re running a specific 1:1 printing campaign, for example, you can watch how effective it is for driving website traffic—how quickly traffic peaks and how high.

Once people land on your main URL, if they leave without clicking through to other pages, it might tell you that you need to improve the relevance of your index page or make the content more compelling.

If you know the keywords being used to drive the most traffic from search engines, you can use this information in your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts.

If you track which pages people are landing on or clicking through most often, you can add content or links to those pages to maximize your message.

You make a significant investment in 1:1 print marketing, so maximize every dollar you spend. Once you’ve driven people to your website, free metrics tools can help you sharpen your message and improve site relevance, navigation, and functionality. You will capture more site visitors, hold them, and ultimately drive more conversion to sales.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." ("The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs," 2001)