Tip # 3.1 How do I know if my website advertising works?

In our previous post, Tip #3 How do I know if my advertising works? we explored some models for tracking results. We also identified that a big problem with the tracking is actually figuring out how people found you. Remember, they often don't know either. (If you didn't read Tip #3, you might want to review it before going forward here.)

If you have a web site, do you know if it works? If so, how well? Do you know how many actual people visit it each day? Do you know how they found your web site? Do you know how they move around on your site? Do you know what percentage of people hit the back button without going anywhere on your site? Should we keep asking rhetorical questions? No. Could we? Yes.

If you're not tracking these statistics, you simply might as well not have a web site. There are dozens of programs that will do this for you. You can use Webtrends, Google Analytics (formerly Urchin), Analog, or a dozen other tools. We personally recommend Analytics.

Let me give you an example. I can pull a report for any page on the Rominger Legal web site. I can see where people came from, what keywords they typed into the search engines, how long they stayed, and where they went on the site. So by way of example, from April 2 to 9, 2006, the front page alone, of the Rominger Legal Private Investigator Directory, was viewed 2,634 times.

Those 2,634 views were the result of 2,109 distinct visitors over those 7 days. (Some folks viewed the page more than once.) 66% of those visitors came from Google, the top 2 reported keyword phrases were (not surprisingly), "private investigator" and "private investigators". The number one domestic city of origin was Los Angeles, and the top foreign city was Lima. Over 1,400 visitors had DSL or Cable Modems, and over 300 were still on dial-up services. Almost all of the visitors had FLASH 7.0 or better installed.

I think you get the point. We can do this for each of over 70,000 pages. We know how people find our web site.

We also do the same for one of the sites we track, www.pennsylvaniaprocess.com. We know that more than 50% of that site's traffic comes from it's link in the Rominger Process Server Directory. What that means is that we can assume that about 50% of the new customers who tell Pennsylvania Professional Process Service (PPPS) that they found their web site, came as a result of their Rominger Ad. The remainder of the traffic for PPPS comes from the Google and Yahoo search engines. So we know that they are sending PPPS business too, from nonpayed, organic search results.

You can also take it a step further. Not only can we see where someone found one of our sites, we can also track what percentage sign our web forms. So we might for example know that 11% of the people sent to us from ask.com for the keyword, "advertise process server" sign up and ask how to advertise with us, but that only 3% sign up with the key phrase "advertise process serving". Where would you invest your future efforts?

So remember, if you advertise your business or web site on-line, and you don't track it with a good tool, you're not in a position to say whether your pay per click adverting, or your directory advertising is benefiting you. So, get a good program in place, like Analytics, and get to tracking. You won't be sorry.