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mviSPY was developed to take web analytics to the next level by empowering individuals with tools and data not available elsewhere. Our web analytics solution supplies real-time data with drill down capabilities to assist you in improving the analysis of your website, marketing ROI, and ultimately increase your company’s performance. Google’s Analytic software is familiar to most internet professionals. This tool was developed by Google to enable their advertiser’s knowledge how to their pay per clicks ads were performing and it is a free service. Most internet professional realize that they can get more complete data from mviSPY. Our ability to collect an unprecedented amount of information about visitor’s behavior is enhanced by the tools that display results in teal-time, identify visitors by company name and address, track preferred trails, trigger emailed alerts, supply automatic forms insertion into off-line sales systems and create exportable custom reports. All of this is possible while confronting the technical challenge of displaying that data in easy-to-understand format. Google Analytics does not give the complete data that mviSPY offers. Nor does it provide the ability to drill down into the information to find the details you are seeking. mviSPY provides solutions for just those sort of issues. Our dynamic reports allow you to easily drill down and find the answers that will save you time and make you more efficient. mviSPY is the measurement of everything that happens on your site and it correlates that data quicker and easier than any other web analytics package.

As previously mentioned, the World Wide Web can be a powerful marketing tool and a goldmine of information for small business owners. Social media is, of course, one of the most well-known online marketing strategies and while most new business owners seem to be aware of social media, very few of them are informed on web analytics. Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics tool as its free, like other Google services, and is easy to use and understand once you have a firm grasp on what web analytics consist of. Unique visitors, traffic sources, referring keywords, top content and location all need to be measured and analyzed in order to improve the business and make the most out of an online marketing campaign. Unique visitors represents the number of individuals who browsed your website during a given time period. A low number of unique visitors obviously mean that the site might need more solid content or is having trouble coming up in search engines. In the same line of thought, traffic sources will allow you to know where the traffic is coming from. This will help you decide if you should improve your content or getting more visibility in search engines and also give you resources and information on where to promote your site. Referring keywords is a big part of any SEO Consulting campaign and is also an important aspect of web analytics. When an internet user types in a keyword or a sentence in the search engine, a list of results related to that keyword come up. Ideally, the keywords you are optimized for will be directly related to you business or service and will provide you with good and useful traffic. Then again, once you generate a good traffic, you can now analyze which pages get browsed the most [top content], which can greatly help you when building new pages or improving existing ones.Web analytics will also help you analyze the location of your visitors. For example, if you are a Jeweler located in Florida, you might want to impose a strong local presence. Knowing where your traffic is coming from in terms of geographical location is important if you want to improve your local presence. The most important part of an online marketing campaign is to assess all aspect and take action to improve your business. Web analytics are a good way to measure the data and know exactly what is going on with your business but will be completely useless if you are not using that data to improve your business and make the most out of your marketing campaign. Hiring an SEO Consulting firm to help you understand Google Analytics, for example, and give you hand to optimize your company on the web is surely the way to go. Analyzing all that data may look very time-consuming but will be very rewarding in the long-run. For more information, visit Seo5consulting.

Every business needs a website where current and potential clients can find more information about their business and service offering, but merely having a website is not enough. This is just the first step in reaching and converting your visitors into customers. A website provides another channel through which you can promote your business and increase leads and sales. In most cases, if a website doesn’t provide leads or new clients it is of little value to the business. This makes it important to continuously tweak and monitor your website to ensure that it offers relevant content and is user-friendly. Visitors are to a website like breathing is to human beings; and a website’s conversion rate is an important benchmark which is used to show a website’s effectiveness. Without visitors there can be no conversions. The most effective way to maximise conversions is by knowing what visitors do on your website so that you can improve the usability and overall functionality of the website and consequently increase ROI. To see how visitors are engaging with your website you can install Google Analytics, Google’s free analytics software. Google Analytics will highlight the areas on your website that are performing well as well as those that need improvement. Below are three of the main areas one can measure in Google Analytics.Where do your visitors come from?Did they type the URL directly into the browser, were they referred by another website or did they find your website through a search engine? If they came through a search engine, which keywords or key-phrases did they use to find the website? You can also track other marketing campaigns like PPC campaigns or special newsletter promotions by making use of uniquely tagged URLs.What did the visitors do on the website? Which and how many pages did they visit and how long did they stay on the website? Pages with a high exit rate may need tweaking or a complete content revamp. Thinking about what a visitor would want to derive from a particular page or section of your site is a good place to start when developing your content. Under the Content tab in Google Analytics one can select the Site Overlay option which will show the percentage of visitors that clicked on various links on your website in a visual way – this gives you an idea of where people are looking on your pages. Conversions The most important part of the visitor process – did the visitor convert? In essence this results to the visitor becoming a lead or a new client. As mentioned, conversion rate should play an important role in your web strategy, a high volume of traffic may look impressive but the conversion rate is the deal-breaker.Apart from the above, there are a number of other areas that can be measured and what you measure will depend on your type of business. To get you started, think about which actions you need visitors to perform in order to increase the website’s overall conversion rate. Should they fill in a contact form or request more information? Download your portfolio? Sign up to your newsletter? Once you have determined the goals for your website work on the various calls to action and include them in your copy. Maintaining a website requires a constant investment of time and effort and you should regard your website as a constant work in progress.

You’re ready to launch your website and have the world beat a path to your door. But how will you know if any visitors show up? Maybe you’ve been advertising your site but not getting many orders and wonder why. Or you just changed your homepage and aren’t sure of the impact. What can you do in each of these situations?

Answer: use your web analytics software to gain insight into what’s happening with your website. Simple enough… but wait… you’re using web analytics for your website right? Okay, so maybe you aren’t using web analytics software and don’t even understand what it is or why it’s important.

Let’s first explain what web analytics is with a simple analogy. Think how hard it would be to drive a car if you had no dashboad. That’s right. No speedometer, gas gauge, warning lights, etc. Sure you could still drive but… you get the idea!

So consider web analytics the dashboard for your website. And though the phrase “web analytics” sounds complicated it’s really not. I mean it can be if you have a complex website with thousands of pages. But that’s probably not the case here. Instead, just realize that web analytics represents a set of online reports (again, dashboard) which can help you understand the following:

This is important data if you want to get your arms around how your website is performing.Now let’s talk about where you can get web analytics for your site. If you do a search for “web analytics software” you’ll discover there are lots of choices. We’ll make it easy. Go with Google Analytics. It’s not only first class web analytics software but it’s also free of charge!Having said that, you still need to get Google Analytics installed on your website. This is fairly easy if you’re familiar with HTML. Otherwise, my advice is to have someone else do it for you. Usually the technical folks where you’re hosting your site can help. Google itself also lists authorized vendors who can lend a hand. And expect to pay a couple hundred dollars to get it going but it can cost more to set up if you want all the bells and whistles the software has to offer.In any case, you should be up and running (and reviewing charts) within a day or so. And once you start seeing the online reports… you’ll wonder how your website lived without them!

Come visit us at www.leadtail.com.

During the last decade, technology has emerged as an increasingly critical element of the marketing and business development tool set. Web technology advancements have revolutionized how organizations present themselves on the web, buy and sell products, services and supplies, and build relationships with customers.

Following the dot com bust in 2000, and the irrational exuberance that existed during the early days of the web, organizations began to take a serious look at leveraging the power of the web and utilizing proper business principles in evaluating the costs and benefits of this promising technology. Rather than settling for standalone web sites, organizations soon began to look at their web site as a complementary channel that could be leveraged into a key element of an effective multi-channel marketing mix.

Not surprisingly, we’ve witnessed an ever growing use of the web and online marketing by businesses and, as discussed in this column last month, recent data from a variety of industry sources show that growth in online marketing and digital media is expected to continue unabated in 2010 and beyond. As shown in the following chart from B2B Magazine’s recent 2010 Outlook: Marketing Priorities and Plans Survey, email, search, web sites, social media and to a lesser extent video are expected to see the greatest online marketing spending increases this year.

Driven by an increased focus on accountability and return on investment, and exacerbated by a sluggish economy and tighter budgets, marketers are being asked to do more with less and are shifting attention and spending towards more cost effective and efficient means of generating sales leads, acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones.

 

With growing maturity in the use of web-based marketing programs, we are witnessing a convergence of e-marketing initiatives with analytical tools. As marketers implement more cost effective and efficient web-based marketing programs to grow their businesses, they are at the same time seeking ways to better measure the effectiveness of their marketing spend.

Increasingly, web site development, search marketing, including search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click programs, among many others, are intentionally intertwined with analytical programs to validate the achievement of the targeted marketing objectives and the delivery of measurable ROI.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards and search engine optimization considerations, such as the use of search friendly URLs, meta/title tags, keyword weighting and back link analysis for example, are incorporated into web site development efforts to ensure compliance with industry standards and best practices so that the web sites achieve optimal search engine positioning results. As an example, the new Technology First website included extensive search engine optimization consideration from the very beginning of the development process. As a result, upon the site’s completion, the natural rankings of the targeted keywords and keyword phrases have now outpaced previous rankings.

In general, analytics have been used to prove that best results can often be achieved through a combination of search engine optimization techniques coupled with selective pay-per-click programs. Among other things, pay-per-click programs can be utilized to secure immediate first page sponsored positioning on the major search engines or top-of-page positioning for keywords that are unlikely to produce optimal organic or natural rankings through search engine optimization techniques alone. Analytical review and analysis in this example can be invaluable in measuring key search program validation elements that might include click-thru volume, length of time on the website, request for contact/quotation and of course, conversion to sale and the sales inquiry cost. One of the most useful as well as cost-effective web analytical tools available today is Google Analytics. Fortunately, Google allows anyone to use this tool at absolutely no cost and, it is easy to set up. There are however, many additional analytical programs available for a fee that provide more extensive, complex analysis capabilities if deemed necessary. The Technology First website uses the Google Analytics performance tracking program to analyze its site traffic, content effectiveness and the utilization of various site functions to name but a few of the elements being tracked and analyzed.

The use of web-based measurement tools and analytics to monitor and assess the performance of e-marketing campaigns has contributed to the explosive growth of these marketing tools. Ongoing assessment and monitoring of results aids in the recognition of “what works” and also provides the basis for identifying areas of improvement. Tracking and measurability are key benefits of web-based e-marketing programs and have proven their effectiveness. For marketers challenged to do more with less, leveraging a combination of web-based e-marketing programs and analytics can cost-effectively drive optimum business results.

For more information and other related articles, please visit www.tdh-marketing.com.