When it comes to measuring effectiveness of a particular online marketing strategy, campaign or experimental implementation that you’re trying out on your website, it’s imperative that you are able to implement effective performance management in order to track exactly which tactics are doing what as far as your site’s performance goes.

We’ve all been to conferences, seminars and online marketing networking events where we meet new people and exchange ideas, theories and strategies that have worked on our websites and others. It is always useful to take note of these strategies and give them a go yourself to try and measure the effectiveness of each strategy on your own websites.

Google analytics implemented their annotations feature at the beginning of this year, and so far most of the feedback on the tool is extremely positive as it is a genuinely useful but simple tool. The problem is, however, that many people using Google Analytics simply don’t use annotations correctly. I tried have tried a few different ways of using annotations and come to the following ideas of DO’s and DON’Ts when using annotations…

1. DO: Noting any technical or structural changes to your site is important. If you’ve switched servers, hosting companies, added new H1 tags, changed URL structures or anything that could affect your sites performance, by tracking these changes in Google web analytics you will get a good idea whether these changes have had a positive or negative effect on your site’s indexing and traffic.

As an online professional who browses the web day in and day out, I’m not a massive fan of completing pop-up surveys. However; but if I’m approached in a non-evasive way such is the case with 4Q survey software, I tend to not mind doing it for certain websites. I recently managed to get one of my clients to implement a 4Q survey on their website and the results have been extremely insightful and have resulted in some large scale changes by the client.

The 4Q survey revolves around the four most important questions that should be addressed to all visitors of a website:

1. What are my visitors at my website to do?
2. Are they completing what they set out to do?
3. If not, why not?
4. How satisfied are my visitors?

Now, the answers to these 4Q survey questions might not always be what a website owner wants to hear, but remember that all feedback, positive or negative, can be used constructively.

Bizreport.com Yesterday released an article indicating that there has been a substantial increase in the percentage of budget that companies are investing in web analytics. Not only has their overall budget for web analytics increased, but they are now also spending more money on manpower to monitor analytics and cutting down on the budget for web analytics software.

Research carried out by Econsultancy/Lynchpin via survey-based research, revealed that companies are now only spending less than 30% of their budget on web analytics software, which is 8% less than last year. The financial cut on web analytics software expenditure seems to now be going towards investing more in people with web analytics tracking skills that are able to expertly utilize this software and manipulate it in order to get the desired results and reports. When it comes to finding the right person to run your web analytics, one also needs to decide whether to hire someone in-house to take care of web analytics or whether hiring an SEO Consultant would be a better idea.

I’ve read too many blogs already on the awesomeness of Google Analytics’ Site Overlay click tracking tool. Yes, it’s a great tool, there’s no doubt about that, and it’s free, but is it really as reliable and accurate as many people seem to think it is? I asked some search marketing specialists, did some research into Google’s click tracking software and then into some other specialist click tracking software and found a few interesting pros and cons of each.

Google Analytics Site Overlay

THE PROS:

The great thing about tracking clicks with Analytics’ site overlay is that if you have Analytics running on a site, you automatically have access to its click tracking software, there’s no need to pay for anything and EVERY page of your site is tracked automatically. You simply click on the “content” tab of your dashboard and you’ll be able to check out the hotspots for each page, as shown in the image below:

Continuing with the theme of conversion that we touched on in our previous blog post, this post focuses more on Website Optimization and how to get users to actually find, acknowledge and click on the calls to action that will result in maximum conversion for your site. Seeing as we’re focusing on getting visitors to do exactly what you want, I’m going to get straight to the point here as my objective for this blog post is to get you to

1. What do you want your customers to do again?

This is the VERY FIRST QUESTION you need to answer before going any further to optimize your website. You are creating a website for a purpose. Before you’ve even thought about any layouts or page wireframes or anything of the sort, you need to know exactly what you want from you site. Do you want visitors to buy something, register their details or maybe you just want them to call you? Don’t go any further until you have answered this question.

A large percentage of the online marketing companies out there are able to generate an increase in traffic to your website. The difference between a good online marketing agency and a great one is the ability to assist you in converting you visitors into paying customers. ROI is of course the primary objective when it comes to investing in an online marketing and this should be the joint goal of an online marketing manager and his client.

This (slightly lengthy) blog takes a look at some of the basics of conversion and how it can be monitored and optimized.

The definition of Web Conversion and Conversion rates:

New Google Analytics filters and methods pop up all the time from various sources. Sometimes the simplest of filters or tweaks within your analytics that are all that is needed to help you track your SEM more effectively and streamline your process. So, you have setup a large SEO campaign, traffic increases can be seen and all seems to be well, but are you refining your strategy effectively over time to ultimately show that much needed ROI figure?

Organic Search

Ranking reports are good and well, however, we all know that the SERPS change daily, even hourly and running ranking reports every day is simply a waste of time. If you are using Google Analytics, you are able to track your search phrase rankings (positions) in analytics that result in clicks and the traffic your site receives. This information will help you decide which search phrases and “pages” require additional work as well as fine tune your optimised pages for your “money” phrases.

In the past we’ve had moments where it has been easy for us to contact Google account managers to do the unlinking and linking for us, however we recently had to get this organised while our account manager had gone AWOL.

It’s been ages since I’ve worked on AdWords myself (hands on, besides the training I do), and I’ve spent the last few weeks getting back onto the bicycle and stuck in again. In most cases it is easier to work on a project from the beginning VS coming in at the end and having to figure out what the goal/strategy was for an account setup.

There are a number of reasons for starting a new fresh PPC/AdWords account for clients, such as:

• The number of deleted campaigns/ad groups that still appear in the account become a visual account management nightmare (it would be great if there was some overriding feature that would allow you to remove those deleted campaigns from the account completely, like a recycle bin function… “are you sure you wish to permanently delete these items?”)

This time of the month is always interesting, as our monthly reporting kicks in to evaluate how well we are doing for our clients. Pleased to say that by and large we’ve seen some great traffic growth and reduced cost per visit across the board with SEO once again outstripping PPC nicely. (Always enjoy the internal battle against the PPC department )

Anyway, lets get onto topic, while a lot of the sites we work with are experiencing great traffic growth a lot of them “dont have design budget right now” to aid in increasing conversions. Let me first clarify that we in no way want that design budget, far from it, but in my opinion it is one of the most overlooked areas of a website. Site owners are always obsessed with driving increased number of visitors to a website before adequately understanding what current visitors are doing once they get there. Conversion analysis is key!