June 2007 Newsletter
**** The 4specs Perspective
Some marketing professionals I talk with receive a monthly report from their IT department or web consultant that summarizes their site activity and where their visitors come from. Others are in the dark and may be frustrated and unable to evaluate the cost effectiveness of their web advertising.
Google Analytics offers you an easy way to learn how people are getting to your home page - the most likely place your ads are sending people.
Signing up will take you only 10 minutes. Google will provide you with 6 lines of code which your web designer or IT department can add to your home page in about 10 minutes. Google Analytics is one of the top programs - and it is free.
https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
This is the Google Sign Up Page
[link moved - search for a better one]
You will begin to have access to your data within a day. Yes - it really is that simple.
Then, when you are ready, you can add the 6 lines of code to the rest of your site. Adding the code to the rest of the pages will give you get a better perspective of the total site performance.
Google is making some major improvements to their Analytics and the new reports are even more valuable. You will be able to learn how long visitors from each source stayed on your site and which key words were effective in bringing users that stayed on your site and visited multiple pages.
[Added to original newsletter - you can track outbound links and pdf's by adding code to each outbound or pdf link. Example:
<a href="http:/www.example.com/" onmousedown="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/pdf1');">Link</a> - Note there are 2 versions of Google Analytics and the code is different for the newer one]
Web Marketing Today had an excellent article on the same subject. Quoting from the complete article:
"Good to excellent web analytics tools are now available for small businesses for free or at low cost, so no one can say these days, 'I can't afford the software.' I'll add that you now can afford the time to install and review the web analytics reports."
Here is the complete article:
https://www.practicalecommerce.com/wilson-consulting-model
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Colin Gilboy
Publisher - 4specs
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