If you are not using Google Analytics to monitor the traffic on your website, you should be. It’s free and easy to use. It’s all transparent to those viewing your site, but provides you with a great deal of good information. After spending the money and resources to send potential customers to your website with various marcom tactics, measuring the effectiveness of those efforts is the next step in a strong campaign.

So, what information can you glean from Google Analytics?

Average Page Depth
There is a Content Optimization>Content Performance>Depth of Visit report that tells you the average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session. This report lets you see if your site architecture is working properly as well as if people are finding what they need and taking actions suggested by your content.

Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on a page and leave from that page without going to any other page. Seeing bounce rates on home pages of around 50% are typical in our experience. This can be (most likely) that the visitor is not looking for what you have (perhaps a wrong click or misinterpretation of a search engine listing) or the visitor found what he or she was looking for, like a phone number or address (you always put your phone number and address on each page of your website, don’t you?).

Hits
Many people misinterpret a hit as being a visitor. It’s not. A hit is a request by the visitor’s browser for a file – a file of any kind. If you have an older site that was built in “slices,” opening a single page could deliver dozens of hits. These files can be an HTML page, an image, a video, a script or many other file types. This is important information for those analyzing traffic data, but other reports, including page views, new visitors and unique visitors, might be more useful for general business purposes.

Read more…

Articles, Online Marketing Analytics, Marketing, Measuring ROI, Paid Search, terms, Web

The Groupies have been busy keeping in touch with our many friends (clients, reps, editors, vendors) from our infamous BBQ, to client dinners and our holiday card video shoot. To see some of our recent activities, including the Fabulous Fall BBQ 2009 edition, cross-country meetings, our new logo and more, go to Facebook.com and search for “The Simon Group.” Just click “Become A Fan” under our logo on the left.

Now you can also follow us on Twitter @TheSimonGroup86.

And don’t forget to check back after The Simon Group’s 24th Anniversary party on March 17th for more photos and updates!

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