Internet Marketing for Wealth CreationLesson 10: Monitoring and Tracking Your BusinessThe PurposeAssume that you own a shop. You are selling a product. You advertise using various methods to bring people to your shop. What is your ultimate goal? Obviously, the goal is to 'spend minimum and earn maximum'. So you need to closely monitor the return on investment (ROI) and improve the same. When we talk about ROI, we are not really concerned about the total investment in the business. We are mainly concerned about the amount spent on the specific method of marketing and the return on that particular expense (also known as return on marketing investment - ROMI). And we are also concerned about the effectiveness of each marketing method we implement to promote the website. You have learnt in the previous chapters, that various factors can affect your sales. So in order to improve the results and to optimize the return on your marketing expenses, you need to track all the possible activities, monitor and fine-tune them. Monitoring the Advertisements If you are using PPC programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, they will provide with extensive tools to analyze the performance of your ads. For example, you can pick the keywords or headlines that attract more number of clicks and drop the rest. You can also check the performance of the ads by varying the cost per click and get maximum results, so that you can get optimal results. Ideally start with highest possible bid and reduce the bid as long as there is no negative impact on the performance of your ads. In addition to these statistics, you must also observe the activities of the visitors who enter your website through a particular ad and check whether to continue or dicontinue or to change the ad. If you are using other advertising methods to promote your website, you need to observe your website's stastics and track the results of each advertisment. Monitoring the Website If most of the visitors who come to your site leave without purchase, there is some problem with your website. The problem may be with the sales copy or the order page or something else may be confusing your visitors. Understanding what your visitors do at your site is the most crucial part in online marketing. If you know the origin of your visitors, the page they enter (landing page), which all pages they move to and at which page they exit your website, you can easily identify the problem. Once you identify the problem, just by correcting it, you can double or triple the sale for the same number of visitors. On many occasions even by making a small change in the headline, you can drastically increase the sales figures. Though it is not compulsory, you may learn the basics of website design (i.e. html and ftp program). It will become easy for you to work with statistics. Most of the website hosting companies provide you the statistics. The way they provide depends on their server and the software they use. Remember to ask them all these details before you host your website. The hosting company must provide you access to the traffic logs of your site. They are normally in the form of a text file that can be downloaded to your hard disk. From this data, you will be able to know from where your visitors come from (the country, the search engine, the website link, etc.), the number of visitors per month, week, day or hour. The following are the most important of all the statistics you get:
If you have the number of page views same as the total number of visitors, it means that all your visitor enter your website and just leave without taking any action. It is dangerous to your business. Those who visited your website may not return again, as they did not like or understand your landing page. You have to drastically improve on your landing page. If the unique number of visitors is increasing day-by-day, it means that you are successfully bringing new visitors every day. If the number of page views is more than the total number of visitors, it is a good sign. Your visitors are browsing through other pages of your website. Still you need to check and improve on the conversion rate i.e. the numbers of visitors per sale (the percentage is = no. of sales x 100 / no. of visitors). Hope you understood how to analyze your website statistics and its importance. Your target is to increase the number of unique visitors, total number of visitors, total number of page views and ultimately the conversion rate. You will be able to improve your results by changing / adjusting your advertisement campaign to focus a specific country or the time slot and by focus more on the search engines that get you good number of visitors. And you can improve the results by testing different landing pages and comparing the statistics. Though you can analyze all the information from the log file, it will consume lots of your time when you start getting more visitors per day. So you must find a hosting company that will provide you complete (or at least the important) statistics on the screen itself and if required you should be able to export to a file or to print. Other Methods for Tracking If you find it difficult to understand or to analyze the statistics from your log file, there are many software programs available to make your job easy. Tracking the Visitors There are many software programs available that can be incorporated within your website. Using the statistics provided by these programs, you can exactly understand your visitors' activity at your website, their likes/dislikes and their habits. With these details, you can adjust your website and/or products and increase the sales. One such tool is Google Analytics, offered free-of-cost. Using this program, you can get statistics for selected pages and test your sales strategy. Based on the results, you can change the strategy to get maximum number of sales. Google provides another free tool for their advertisers called Google Site Optimizer. This is an advanced tool, used to spit test various web-pages of your website or part of a web-page. Based on the statistics you get from this tool, you can optimize your sales copies, opt-in pages and even content pages to get maximum output (of desired action). Tracking the Sales Tracking the origin of your visitors, landing pages & sales and improving your conversion rate (visitors to sales ratio) is the most important task in your business. You need to apply your innovative ideas to track your sales with all the statistics you get from your cPanel of your website and other tools. For example, stop all your advertisements and observe the statistics. Start one ad campaign at a time and check the statistics every time. Test each ad with different landing pages. If you are using Google Adwords, you will get reports from Google about the number of clicks, etc. Compare it with the statistics you got from your website. With this much information, you will be able to find out which type of marketing gives you good conversion rate. If you are using tracking software to run your own affiliate program, you will get most of your job done automatically by the software. If you are promoting affiliate products (reselling other company's products), the vendor will provide the statistics like how many people you have sent, the conversion rate, etc. You may also use this information (in addition to your own logs) to analyze the performance of your website. The Final Goal By using any or all the methods, you need to monitor the activities on your website to achieve the following goals:
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Previous Chapters Lesson 1: Introduction to Internet Marketing Lesson 2: Online Business v/s Conventional Business Lesson 3: Major ways of Earning Money On-line Lesson 4: Understanding Legal Aspects and Scam Lesson 5: Online Business to "Sell Products" Lesson 6: Online Business Automation Lesson 7: Affiliate Marketing Business Lesson 8: Online Advertising Business (Adsense) Lesson 9: Promoting your Website
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