By Timothy Seward, President, ROI Revolution Your online marketing and website won’t just magically improve. In order to get better results, you have to know what is going on and take responsibility for making changes. When you do KNOW what’s going on, you can CHANGE it. There is an easy to use, robust, reporting tool that can make it all happen. It’s called Google Analytics.
But isn’t Google Analytics designed to track my pay per click spending and activity just in Google AdWords? NO! Google Analytics will track *any and all* marketing money you invest (see below for details) which drives target traffic to your website, and, the best news of all is that it won’t cost you a dime!
“What exactly is Google Analytics and why should I care?”
Google Analytics is a free website tracking system that can help you track any online and offline marketing efforts which drive website conversions—enabling you to determine exactly which marketing campaigns are working and which ones are failing—so you know where to spend more and where to spend less. “From now on, ye shall spend no dollar without tracking the ROI.” (Dan Kennedy).
Earlier this fall I took on a new client (Osborne Wood Products, Inc http://www.osbornewood.com/) located in Toccoa, GA, a small (population 9,323) town in the north Georgia mountains who really ‘gets it’. For the last 27 years they have manufactured a wide variety of unfinished wood turnings (table legs, kitchen island legs, sofa legs, etc).
You’d think that if anyone had an excuse not to use direct marketing strategies, they’d have every cop-out in the book (old school, industrial manufacturing business).
But they make no excuses. Instead they market their wares to both businesses (carpenters, craftsmen, cabinet makers) and direct to consumers (do-it-yourselfers)—and they do it all…by promoting the purchase of their products off of their ecommerce enabled website with a variety of marketing mediums.
For example they advertise in 10 national magazines, they publish and mail a comprehensive catalog, they’ve got a blog they’re posting to about both business (just had an Open House for the Chamber of Commerce…) and personal (birthday announcements, etc,), and recently they hired us to optimize and manage their pay-per-click search marketing campaign.
Here’s the really neat thing: they’re tracking all of their *print* advertising in Google Analytics by using a unique, easy-to-remember website address in each magazine ad (a trick we recently wrote about). This tracking technique gives them critical ROI (Return on Investment) reporting on steroids. Now they know which magazine ad produced which ROI, how much revenue they got from their pay-per-click advertising campaign, and how much business they get from their free listings in the major search engines.
