Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [268]
By developing a holistic view of all the elements that create and drive a website to the goals of the business, you will develop a better understanding of the necessary improvements and how they relate to each other. Many factors will affect other elements of the site and the strategy, but by understanding how everything works together, both the management and the troubleshooting become easier to perform and more effective in their execution.
As you dig into the analytics, you will begin to find those trends and opportunities that will enable you to grow. Some changes will provide immediate results, and some will take time to materialize. This is where I always recommend marketers use the annotation function in Google Analytics.
Your memory is not the best mechanism for associating events that may lead to high rankings, better conversion rates, or happier customers. Keep a record so that you always know when you made that design change or navigation option, changed the graphic and the call to action, or even got a link from another website. These are important events in the life of your website, and everything works together to create success. You can’t simply make changes and not know when or what was done and expect to learn and gain experience in this business.
The annotation feature is a valuable tool, because it provides perspective to the business. Any changes to the website, content, code, pages, optimization strategy, rankings, or any external factors can be noted in the annotations (see Figure 21-16). Simply click on the data point for that day in the graph, and the annotation feature will appear.
Figure 21-16: The annotation feature in Google Analytics
The purpose of this function is clear. When looking for a causal factor in new visitors, improved conversions, or any other factor on the site, having a record of changes made immediately accessible makes the connection clear. Don’t miss making the connection because you can’t remember the date that you made a significant change to the website!
Review and Hands-On
So many marketers and business owners tell me that the most difficult part of managing a site is knowing where to start. Do you start with design? Maybe changing the navigation? Or is it the copywriting? Maybe the SEO?
This is why I see analytics as more than the capstone to the online marketing process. For me, it is the central part of marketing your website because it provides the only clear measurement of your efforts. Everything you need to evaluate your site is contained in this book, and analytics helps you see the results of those efforts. Some days I wish I could teach analytics first, because it is so central to setting up the measurement correctly, but you also have to understand what you are looking at and how it all relates.
I always recommend starting with analytics and seeing whether your performance lines up with your marketing goals. I then like to compare the search performance in the analytics compared to the search campaign goals. Start simple, start with the big picture, and look at the goals of your business and the website to see whether you are performing well by your own standards.
The best evaluation is not based on industry averages but on comparing the segments within your own website. This is the best information you will get about your audience and how it views your website. Industry averages are made up of very, very bad sites and very good ones; it is really not a good measure for comparison and, even still, not a practical measure because the comparison does not provide you with a specific direction.
Comparing your own segments provides direction, because it exposes those searchers and trends within your website that need attention. Segmenting shows opportunities and creates knowledge because it provides a significantly new way to