Measuring your success in online marketing

Many people embarking on getting traffic to their website rarely stop to look at why people are visiting their site and what they’re doing when they get there. One of the most common frustrations for web masters is the bounce rate. After all spending time on search engine marketing and then having real feedback from your users that your content isn’t what they’re looking for can be the hardest obstacle to overcome.

Using an agency or learn in myself?

If you’re using an online marketing agency then it might be a good idea to either invest in some training from their analytics expert that may be able to suggest a number of solutions. Alternatively if you’re a small business and don’t have the budget to invest in costly training then you may want to pick up a decent book on Google Analytics such a s Avinash Kaushik – Web Analytics 2.0.

Pay per click campaign

If you’re using a pay per click agency to drive traffic to your landing pages then using Google’s website optimiser you can test what changes are resulting in a higher level of conversion, more time on site or whatever your conversion metric is.  Adding Google adwords conversion tracking also can tell you what keywords are converting if you have a specific goal set up in Google analytics.

Using natural traffic for driving traffic

If your users are visiting the site from a natural listing then it might be worth doing a quick analysis as to what other listings are on the same page. If you see that the search term references some kind of visual and you have no images but your competing website does then it may be why your user is bouncing off your site. Another reason might be the search closely resembles part of another word or has a double meaning, in this case there isn’t much you can do as a certain amount of users will be misguided.

Metrics to measure

Bounce rate is good metric as it can give you immediate feedback that you need to change something or that your website just isn’t relevant for that search term.  The time on site is another good metric to tell you how engaging your content is. Some ways to improve the length people look at your pages are splitting up paragraphs in to smaller chunks, along with sub headings to guide the user what the content is about. You can also put images at the top of page or even icons if this demonstrates what the paragraph is about. Along with your top entrance sources and exit sources, tell you what people are actually interest in when they visit your website. If you speak to your organic seo company they will be able to advise you what you should do to improve the way you measure your website success.