Social Media Specialist Joanne Burgess

Starting the Year on the Right ‘Track’!

As a Social Media Specialist, I always install Google Analytics as part of the profile setup on my clients’ blog sites but I also recommend that they have it or some other tracking device installed on their website as well. This is particularly important for clients who have e-commerce on their site/s.

While I keep track of what’s going on on these sites for my clients, we meet once quarterly (or more often if required), to go over these stats and ascertain what is working as a strategy and what isn’t. These are some of the factors to consider when analyzing your or your client’s’ data.

1.  Visitors:

• Benchmarking:    Choose the category that your business fits into and Google will run your stats against other businesses in that category of a similar size.  There is no point in measuring yourself against the whole world.  Compare apples to apples.
• New vs Returning:  It’s great that you have 1000 new visitors!  But how many of these visitors are returning to your site.?  The objective here is to build loyalty.  Your blog,  for an example, is an ideal place to build intimacy and trust with your prospects and clients.    When your returning numbers continue to rise, you are on the right track.
• Map Overlay:  The map overlay tells you where your audience is coming from geographically.  This may be of particular importance depending on your business.  You’ll want to know which locations are driving the most amount of traffic to your site and where you might need to focus more attention.  If your product were for example, woolen underwear, you would want to make sure that places like Alaska and the Territories were a good source of traffic for you.  Of course as a Canadian in the middle of winter, I’d be watching those Canadian numbers too! LOL

2.  Traffic Sources:

• It’s important to take a look at where your traffic is coming from.  If you have invested considerable time in your social media sites, you should find that profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., are great sources of traffic to your blog and to your website.  You might also find, if you are pushing your blog posts out to the social bookmark sites, that places like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon for example are also a source of traffic for you. You will be able to see pretty quickly which sites are the ones that are working best for you and it is here that you should devote a little more time and attention.
• It’s also important to keep track of the organic searches from places like Google or Yahoo.  If these organic searches are not sending considerable traffic to your sites, you may need to take a closer look at the keyword/tag choices on your blog or your website.
• For those of you involved in e-commerce, you’ll want to make sure that you have installed the proper Analytics code on the appropriate pages of your website or blog.  Google will provide that code and you or your website support person can install it.  You will be able to ascertain where in the buying cycle, people may be opting out.   You can then focus more attention on that page/s to encourage buyers to complete their purchase.  Of course if you are involved in e-commerce, you’ll want to make sure that you use the ‘Goal’ portion of GA to set some objectives and measure your success.
• If you have embarked on an Adword campaign with Google, you’ll want to carefully track the adwords and how they are working for you.  There are a myriad of ways to find the right kind of keywords to use to drive traffic to your site.  As an Internet Marketing/Social Media Specialist VA, I am able to do the kind of background work necessary to find the right ones.

3.  Content:

• While content isn’t a category on GA, it does directly correlate to your pages/visit and length of time on the site.  The key here is to remember that  CONTENT IS KING.  If you have great content on your blog or your website, then your readers will continue to return and spend more time there.  It doesn’t take rocket science to figure that one out.

The last thing that I’ll talk about here is the Bounce Rate.  Some people get all hung up on bounce rate.  There are many reasons why your bounce rate may be high.  You will want to visit GA and go to the help portion and key in Bounce Rate to find the reasons why your bounce rate might be high.    The goal of course, would be to try and get that bounce rate as low as possible but in some cases (like a brick and mortar business who only does business locally) where your bounce rate may be higher than average.

These are of course, deeper levels of Google Analytics for those who are so inclined. I have outlined the major categories that you should be evaluating on a regular basis.

How about you? Are you using Google Analytics or are you measuring your sites’ performance in some other way?  Tell me what you’re using.  For all you bloggers out there, you’ll love commentluv here on my blog. Leave a comment and you can leave a link back to your own blog.  But you don’t have to be a blogger to leave me your comments! I look forward to hearing from you.

While physically located in Newmarket Ontario where Joanne lives with her family, as a VA, she is virtually yours anywhere….

Joanne

Tags: Business, Google Analytics, Joanne Burgess, Marketing, Measurement, outsource, Social Media, Tracking, VA, Virtual Assistant