Online marketing
Measuring your impact: website statistics and usage analysis
The ability to measure accurately your marketing campaign’s performance is one of the key advantages of online marketing. By tracking the number of click-throughs and responses, you can track the success of new calls-to-action on your website. You can see almost immediately the return on your expenditure on online marketing in terms of the number of clicks it generates.
To measure the success of your online presence and improve its performance, you will need information about your visitors. Such information is easy to collect and analyse with a good website statistics solution. Your hosting company may provide you with a basic website statistics tool, or alternatively there are a range of professional solutions available, either free or at a cost. Some websites that provide more information about these include:
In most cases, website statistics are generated by a small piece of purpose-built code incorporated into your website.
Once implemented, a good statistics tool will monitor your website traffic and provide you with detailed information including:
- the number of visitors to your website
- the geographical spread of visitors to your site
- what website they came from (known as the referring site)
- the landing page (i.e. the web page they enter your site on, which may or may not be your homepage)
- the number of pages viewed
- the time spent on your website
- the bounce rate, which tells you how many visitors reach your website and leave it again without clicking further into it.
With all this information at hand, you have a picture of your website’s performance and popularity. In particular, you can identify which pages and products are more popular than others and feed this back into your business and online plans.
By testing various features (for example, modifying the designs of calls to action) you can get an idea about what works and what does not.
Consider your website a work in progress and subject to continuous improvement. Use your findings to optimise your content and calls to action. Continue to test and modify. Over time, you will build knowledge and improve and target your activities to get the best results.
Be wary of using high traffic numbers as a single primary measure. You will see many websites boasting large visitor rates, but that does not necessarily mean that they convert visitors to customers, donors or supporters.
I am already online but want to get more out of it 