If you don’t MEASURE it you can’t MANAGE it… apparently!

Makes sense though doesn’t it? Knowing where you are now is one thing, knowing where you want to get to is another but if you don’t monitor your progress you’ll never be sure how close you are to your goal or even if you’re going in the right direction!

Of course this goes for your website too. In a previous post I asked you to think about your primary objective and now I’m going
to tell you about a great free tool you can use to track your progress towards your website goals.

Google Analytics is not only free but it’s also one of the best tools available for tracking visitors to your website. Many thousands of Internet Marketing specialists use it so you can be sure it will work for you too.

Go over to www.google.com/analytics and sign-up for a free analytics account. You’ll get a little snippet of code that you need to add to every page on your website. You may need to ask your website developer to do that for you.

For a brief overview of using Google Analytics watch this Google Analytics Interface Tutorial video.

Now just wait for 24 hours and go back and view the data that analytics has collected for you.

There’s just way too much stuff you can do with analytics to discuss it all here so I’ll write more about it as we go on! Here are a few highlights for now:

The DASHBOARD is a great place to put a link to your favourite reports so you can see at a glance how things are…

The VISITORS tab gives you dozens of statistics about your visitors but Absolute Unique Visitors is the one that tells you how many people are really coming to your site.

The TRAFFIC SOURCES tab tells you where your visitors are coming from, the KEYWORDS report tells you exactly what keyword they used to find your website.

The CONTENT tab gives you in-depth details about the performance of every page on your website, the Top Content report tells you which pages were most popular.

I’ll look forward to telling you more about using analytics in a later newsletter, for now I”ll leave you to the task of Installing Google Analytics on your website…

Get an Objective Quickly (for your website I mean!)

If you haven’t got a real, solid primary objective for your website I recommend that you get one quickly!  Your website needn’t be ‘just an online brochure’ that you send your clients to, it can be so much more, it can be a really powerful tool for your marketing armoury!

So what is it then? Your objective I mean?

Do you just want those anonymous visitors to pick up the telephone and call you?

Do you want them to click through to your contact page and email you?

Maybe you’ve got a newsletter sign-up on every page to entice those unknown visitors to reveal themselves in a name and email address?

Can You Measure It?

Whatever your objective is you can use it to measure how effective your website is. You can now make a good judgement about how much your website is worth in terms of new business.

Measuring the success of your website is a topic for another time, needless to say it’s all very possible and there are tools that you can use for free.

What Can You Measure?

1/ Telephone Calls.
Either ask every new caller where they got your number from or if you want to do it the easy and automatic way use a different phone number for your website and use one that you can easily track. Then you can keep an eye on how many calls your website generates each month.

2/ Contact Forms.
Use a contact form instead of just displaying an email address. This allows you to have a “Thank You” page that gets displayed each time someone fills in the contact form and you can use a tracking tool to measure how many times the “Thank You” page gets visited!

3/ Email Sign-ups.
If you’re really interested in how email marketing could work for you on your website then first take a look at my email newsletter sign-up to see how it’s done and if you want to know more then just drop me a line.

Here’s an offer you can’t refuse. Google will advertise your business for FREE on the very first page of the search results!

It’s called Google Local Business Results. If you haven’t listed your business there yet then get to it right away!

Here’s how it works:

1/ Open www.google.co.uk

2/ Search for “website promotion in stourbridge” without the quotes:

Do you see the map at the top of the search results?

Check whose listed to the right of the map, anyone you know?

3/ Now search for “family solicitor in stourbridge” without the quotes

Do you know Julia too?

Here’s what Google say about it in a short video:

Google Local Business Results video

And here’s how to do it in another short Google video:

How To Setup Local Business Results

Have a go and get your business listed there!

Then send me an email and let me know how you got on, tell me what search terms you get listed for!

Learning to correctly assemble your SCUBA gear is definitely a life-saving lesson. You need to be absolutely sure that your SCUBA is working correctly before you dive!
It’s all very well discovering a fault while diving in the relative safety of a swimming pool, you can safely and quickly surface, but discovering the same fault at [...]

Read the whole article on My SCUBA Diary

This was the world’s first Kilomathon, a 26.2 km road race from Nottingham to Derby, so everyone who finished got a personal best!
What a fantastic race this was. Pre-event information was regular and really informative, the organisation at the start was executed with military precision. During the race, marshalling, road closures and water stops were [...]

Click here to read the whole article at MyRunningDiary.com

A Description of First Aid Training

First aid training addresses the primary control of an illness or injury. The care is often administered by someone who is skilled in life saving methods and the care of injury and illness but isn’t a specialized medical practitioner. The care provided can save a …

Read the whole article on My SCUBA Diary

A Description of First Aid

First aid training addresses the primary tending of an illness or injury. The care is often administered by someone who is educated in life saving methods and the care of injury and illness but isn’t a expert medical practitioner. The care provided could save a life, …

Click here to read the whole article at MyRunningDiary.com

A SCUBA Diving fitness test? Well how hard could it be? I run miles every week, circuit train and even do a bit of Pilates now and again, this was going to be a doddle… I hoped!

Swim 12 lengths of the pool… 4 lengths breast stroke, 4 lengths front crawl, …

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I never did that. I mean, I never made a New Years Resolution to start running and get fit.

I can see why I didn’t too, it’s a rotten time of year to decide to change your life and get fit and exert yourself. Very short days, very little light, cold, …

Click here to read the whole article at MyRunningDiary.com

So I’ve chosen my club and got ready for my first SCUBA diving lessons.

It’s important that your learning environment holds as few challenges as possible, learning to dive in open water could present many unnecessary dangers and so most SCUBA diving lessons are carried …

Read the whole article on My SCUBA Diary