Digital Marketing

Every business has - or should have - marketing goals and a strategy for how to reach those goals. Digital marketing is no different.

The goals for your online presence usually include building your brand, generating new leads and sales, and strengthening your relationship with your current customers.

Many businesses already have invested heavily in digital marketing, from building a good websites to buying sponsored ads and everything in between. However, even after all that investment, they still aren't sure how to measure the success or failure of their digital marketing.

It's not that the data is unavailable. With just a snippet of code added to your website, your web analytics tool can access hundreds of pieces of data about how visitors interact with your business online over any given time period.

But, as with the proverbial dog that finally catches the car, the question becomes what to do with all the data once you have it.

Businesses new to web analytics can start with reviewing just a few of the key metrics available in a web analytics package. These tools, some free and some fee based, will provide critical information about how visitors are using your website.

Sources of Web Traffic

First, it's important to become familiar with the way visitors find your site. Most tools use similar terminology - organic, pay-per-click (PPC), direct traffic, referrals, email and social or the equivalent of those labels.

When you look at your traffic sources, consider what the numbers may mean in terms of reaching your goals. If you are getting a lot of traffic from pay-per-click ads but not much from organic search, you may be missing out on leads who aren't finding you through standard search queries on Google, Yahoo or other search engines.

Lack of organic traffic may mean you have some search engine optimization (SEO) work to do to improve your ranking on the search engines.

If you are getting a lot of referral traffic from third-party sites but little from social media, that may mean your social media activity requires a greater focus on engagement and driving traffic to your website. Or it may mean that social just isn't the right platform for your kind of business.

Behavior and Site Content

Attracting visitors to your website is just the beginning. It's also important to measure what they do on your website after they arrive.

A few metrics to look at in this area include:

l Page views

l Top landing pages

l Bounce rates (the percent of visitors who only visit one page on your site)

l Exit pages and rates (for specific pages, the percent of visitors who left the site after viewing that page).

Your website ideally should have a low bounce rate. If not, that may indicate that your website lacks strong content or that the content on your page is misaligned with the message that brought the visitor to your website.

These areas just scratch the surface of insights you can gather from a web analytics package - a starting point. There are plenty of resources available online to learn more once you are ready.

They key point is not to wait until you feel like an expert. Just start with a few metrics and you should be able get a reasonable idea of how well your strategies are working and where you may need to go from there.

l Comments: Regina Gilloon-Mayer, (319) 368-8530, regina@fusionfarm.com, is a contenting marketing specialist for Fusionfarm, a part of The Gazette. Twitter handle: @RegiiMary