Archive for the ‘Paid Search’ Category
Making an Analytics Choice
There is a saying that you cannot improve what you don’t measure. This tome is the foundation for online marketing analytics. If you don’t really know how your work is performing, do you really expect those efforts to do more for you?
Over the next few weeks, I am going to be writing about how to use analytics to help you measure and improve your online marketing efforts. From choosing an analytics tool, to setting goals and understanding how to make improvements, there are a lot of different aspects of analytics.
Let’s start from the beginning – the analytics tool. If you are not measuring, start now. If you are measuring, make sure you can get enough detail to make decisions. There are several analytics packages available with multitude of price ranges and complexities. Avanish Kaushik, the current Google Analytics Evangalist, put together a great web analytics tool comparison.
If you are just starting out, I would recommend Google Analytics as a solution. Google does not charge you for an account, you only need to have an gmail account to sign up.
One of the benefits of the Google Analytics platform is that is gives you a good view of basic information out of the box, but it allows you to build a high level of complexity as you want to get deeper into the data of your online marketing campaigns.
Contrary to popular thinking, analytics is not only for your website. It can be attached to any of your online marketing in order to measure campaign effectiveness. For example, you can add parameters to the end of the URLS in your email, online display or paid search ads.
In my next post, I am going to cover how to set up Google Analytics on your website and configuring your profile. It isn’t a huge task, but it is one you want to do correctly.
Until then . . . keep measuring!